the journalists’ speculations seemed more credible: the owners of the first four storeys of the Sky Tower, including the cafe where Besfort was sitting, were fighting a court case with the state. At the foot of the tower were the foundations of another skyscraper, whose builders were in conflict with the landowners, the city council and the Swiss Embassy, on whose land they were accused of encroaching. A little further on was a statue, also a subject of dispute, involving historical symbols and, indeed, indirectly, the clash of civilisations and the attack on the twin towers in New York.
Besfort Y. could not suppress a sigh. Then he heard a mixture of Albanian and German from the next table.
“Albania wears you down,” a friend of his had said, after leaving for Belgium in 1990. “She drives you to despair and sends you round the bend, but there’s no escaping her.”
They both thought the same. The more you insult the place, the more it tightens its grip on you. It’s like the love of a whore, said his friend.
Rovena was back in Graz. She had managed to extend her stay for the third time. “For your sake,” she said on the phone.
He looked out of the corner of his eye at the next table. One of the foreigners might be the “bi”. Besfort stared at his chin and the reddish curls at his temples, considering if this man had really slept with Rovena. My darling, he said to himself. How had she put up with all of that?
A wave of longing gently enveloped him. He must get down to writing that letter he had promised her when they last met.
There was movement at the next table, and heads turned towards the window. Besfort looked in the same direction. The columns of traffic in both directions had been halted on the main boulevard. Someone pointed out a crowd that formed a dark mass on Mother Teresa Square.
“Another demonstration,” said the waiter, removing the ashtray. “They want their property back.”
The placards bobbed white but illegible above the crowd. In front of the prime minister’s office, a second row of helmeted policemen quickly lined up.
Besfort ordered a second coffee.
He had better write that letter soon, he thought. A letter and two or three phone calls would discharge most of the tension. Liza’s name, mentioned so often in Vienna, was a suitable peg on which to hang the broken thread of their dialogue.
“No, it’s not former property owners,” said the waiter, setting down the coffee cup. “They’re Cameria Albanians, angry at the government.”
“Which government?” asked Besfort. “The Albanian or the Greek one?”
The waiter shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps both. Whenever the two reach an agreement, these people take to the streets.”
The demonstration was still too far away to read the placards.
Liza was more than a pretext, he thought. She was perhaps the key to understanding what was happening. It was no coincidence that they had both remembered her again in Vienna, after forgetting about her for so long.
Two years before, after their big quarrel, he had experienced for the first time the taste that comes from making love to a woman you have discovered a second time. It was a mixture of the recollection of the start of the love affair, which was at that moment ending, with the beginning of something else. It was her taste, and yet not hers at all. She was his, but not his. She was a stranger, yet familiar in every nuance. Actual and ineffable. Faithful and elusive.
Ever since their last meeting, his mind had harked back continually to everything to do with that feeling. His dream of resurrection certainly had something to do with it. As a student at the university, he had studied Albanian folklore, with its motifs of rediscovery. Now for the first time he wondered at their mysteriousness. The bridegroom in his marriage bed who recognises by a birthmark that his bride is his sister. Or conversely, the bride who recognises her brother. The father who returns from exile and takes his son for his enemy, or his enemy for his son, and so forth, all these stories of incest which were thought to be fiction, but very probably were not. All these violations of taboos, obscure desires within the tribe, which out of shame or horror were passed on as legends, floated to the surface of his memory.
“You’re no longer my master. I won’t stand your tyranny any longer. I’ve had enough.”
Besfort turned his head to the window, as if Rovena’s voice on the telephone two years ago, racked by sobs, now came to him from outside.
The crowd of demonstrators was now close to the prime minister’s office, and their shouts were clearly audible.
“It’s not about property, or Cameria,” said the waiter, also looking out of the window.
The placards were mainly pink.
“I think they’re the ‘alternatives’,” said someone at the next table. “That’s what the gays and lesbians are called now.”
Rovena’s voice on the phone was no longer recognisable. Taken aback, he was stuck for words. He interrupted her, “Calm down, listen to me.” But she snapped back, “No, I won’t calm down, I won’t listen to you.”
He hung up in fury, but she called back at once.
“Don’t hang up like you always do. You’re no longer…”
“That’s enough,” he shouted back. “You’re not in your right mind.”
“Really?” she said. “Is that how you think of me? Now listen. Get ready to hear something very serious.”
You aren’t what you were to me any more. I love someone else. Amidst the deafening crackles and abrupt silences of the telephone line, those were the words he expected. But amazingly, something else came down the wire.
“You’ve ruined my sex life.”
“What?”
The thought that her mental health was not good suddenly took priority over everything else. Everything she had said, her insults, even her possible infidelities meant nothing. He tried to handle her gently. “Rovena, my dear, calm down. It must be my fault, no doubt about it, my fault, only mine, are you listening?”
“No, I’m not listening. And I don’t want to. And don’t think that you’re as frightening as you seem.”
“Of course I’m not, and I don’t want to seem frightening.”
“Really?”
“You think I’m trying to scare you? You think I’m like an American Indian, tattooing my face to look fierce?”
Amazingly, she laughed. He even thought he caught the word “darling” smothered by her laughter, as so often when she liked one of his jokes. But she was quiet only for a moment. Her voice rose stridently again, and he thought, oh God, she’s really not well.
The next day she seemed more relaxed on the phone, if a bit tired. She had been to the doctor, who had asked some tactful questions. She explained that she had quarrelled with her lover. The doctor had given her tranquillisers and some advice: most importantly to break off all contact with the source of the trouble, in other words with him. A long silence followed.
“Are you going to ask the same old question, is there anybody between us?”
“No, I’m not,” he answered.
“You say not, but you’re thinking it. Because you still don’t understand that I’m no longer your slave.”
He let her say her piece. She said he had enslaved her. He had closed every door that opened for her, and not allowed her the slightest freedom. He wanted her entirely for himself, like every tyrant. He had made her seek therapy. He had crippled her, he had ruined her sex life.
He butted in to say that the opposite was true, that he, or rather both of them, as she had said time and again, had refined their sex life to a degree that few others had achieved. But that, she protested, is precisely what should not have happened. He had violated her nature… her psyche.
“Is that the twaddle your German doctor talks?” he interrupted.
“Precisely that,” came her answer.
He imagined her breasts, and the insult and pain he felt at the prospect of never seeing them again made his response unexpectedly quiet. He would leave her in peace, but she should understand one thing, that her description of him was unfair. He had been her liberator, but this was not the first time in history that a liberator
