had been taken for a tyrant, just as many a tyrant had been taken for a liberator.
That was more or less all he said. Her next telephone call three weeks later came to him as if from a great distance. Her voice was different. Neither of them mentioned the quarrel. She said that she’d been in London with the rest of her course group. That she had taken up sport, mainly swimming. It was as if nothing had happened. Only when she asked, “Are we going to see each other?” a silence fell.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Her reply was unexpected: “I don’t know.”
He almost shouted, “Then what the hell are you calling for? Why ask if we are going to see each other?”
“Listen,” she went on. “I want us to meet, like before, but I don’t want to lie to you… Something has happened…”
So that was it. In the long silence that followed, she seemed to be waiting for the question whose time had finally come. Is there somebody else? But he said nothing. He had asked this question at the wrong time, and now that its hour had struck he kept his silence. Slut, he said to himself. NGO whore. International scholarship tart. But aloud he said, “I don’t want to know.”
Her own reply was also slow in coming. Perhaps she expected something else, or took his answer as a sign he didn’t care. “Really? So you don’t want to know? OK, I’ll give you the whole bitter truth: you are no longer what you were. I belong to someone else.”
“I realise that. I’ve known for some time…”
She wanted to reply: “But you pretend not to care. That’s how you usually behave. You hit back at someone else when you’re on the ropes yourself.” But she did not utter this final retort out loud. Her unspoken words flew round her brain like lost birds that could not find their way out. He listened to her laboured breathing, until finally she said, “If that’s the case, then come here…”
The flight was tiring. The plane listed perpetually to one side, or so it seemed to him. It was literally a lame journey. Drowsily he imagined her in front of the mirror, getting ready for another man. Choosing lingerie. Her armpits, between her legs. An unnatural faintness, at the same time a burning and a weakness, slowed his heartbeat. If it was another man who had caused this estrangement, why should she be so angry with him? The anger should be on his side.
The flight was like a journey in a dream, in which arrival is indefinitely deferred.
He saw her from a distance, waiting in the same place as always. Her paleness made her even more beautiful. She had changed her hairstyle, and lowered her head in a different way as she walked.
They embraced hesitantly in the taxi, as if through glass. She was the same and not the same. Words beginning with “re”- recognition, resurrection – sprung to mind. They would haunt him for days. He had thought that he would never arrive, but now the prospect of going to bed with her seemed even more remote.
She had booked the hotel. He would try to get his bearings from its layout – the entrance, the lobby and of course the room with its big double bed, or two single beds, like the two graves of former lovers he had once seen in a Japanese cemetery in Kyoto, with a marble headstone on which was carved the couple’s sad tale.
As the bellboy opened the door to the room, his heartbeat slowed again. The room was flooded with tranquil light, and he saw the large bed with its counterpane decorated with drooping chrysanthemums, again like on Japanese vases. She seemed to belong to this kind of world as she padded softly back and forth, unpacking her bag in silence, as if she were painted on a vase. “Will you wait a bit for me?” she said with bowed head as she entered the bathroom, without her playful look that usually augured happiness.
Here was the mystery that had lured him for so long, he thought, as she closed the bathroom door. It seemed impossible that she would ever come out again in the way she used to.
He sat on the corner of the bed, as if in that Kyoto graveyard, waiting for his bride, or like in 1913, or God knew when – a man of the Balkans with the pent-up lust of years of betrothal. Or worse, like a madman who believes his lost bride, abducted by someone else, or by destiny itself, will return to him.
Finally she emerged. Oh heaven, a total stranger, as pale as plaster, just like a real bride under traditional law. With head bowed, she approached the bed and lay down stiffly beside him. It seemed to him that they had forgotten entirely how to move. He bent down over her face. Her lips, like her eyes, looked alien, and he did not kiss them but whispered, “Has anybody else touched these?”
She said yes with a motion of her eyes.
The open bathrobe revealed her breasts, which were perhaps even more complicit in the conspiracy than her lips. He asked his question again, and her reply was the same.
He was not sure his body could withstand the swoon, in which misery was mixed inextricably with desire. And who was the lucky man, he thought.
He caressed her belly, and then below. When he asked his question again, she made the same motion of her eyes. So you’ve gone all the way, he thought, but what he said was, “Which means…?
Rovena did not answer. She stifled a groan, in a way she had never done before, as if sucking it inside, and he said to himself: of course.
Instead of music, a distant police siren accompanied their last moments of lovemaking.
A siren from nearby suddenly interrupted Besfort’s thoughts. It was almost the same sound as on that night in Luxembourg. He smiled, remembering that the Albanian police had been supplied with new cars from the West: their sirens had brought the first hint of Europe to Tirana. He turned to the window to look. Skirmishes had broken out on the main boulevard. They’re throwing tear gas, said someone who had been close by. People could be seen lifting their hands to their eyes, as if scared of shadows. The bi-diplomat’s curly hair looked as if it had caught fire. He remembered that redheads were sexually insatiable. My poor darling, he said to himself, who knows what you put up with from him.
That was more or less what had passed through his mind when, after their lovemaking, he collapsed exhausted alongside her.
Her words on the phone, mixed with others that were the product of his imagination, came back confusedly to his mind, with altered syntax, like a ritual formula. My sex life has been ruined by you.
Other men have abused you and you blame me, he thought. After their lovemaking, he had repeated his unanswered question. Had she gone the whole way? She hesitated again, before saying, “It depends what you mean.”
In a soft voice, so as not to disturb their stillness, he had said that this made no sense. The other man, if he had kissed and caressed her everywhere, had certainly gone the whole way… as they say.
She gave the same answer. “It depends what you mean.”
“How?” he asked. “Was he impotent?”
“No,” Rovena replied after a long silence. “It was a woman.”
He poured his entire being into a long release of breath. So this was the truth. He experienced a few moments of total perplexity, and then he thought he had found the answer that explained everything. Questions rushed pell- mell to his mind.
If it had been a woman that had tempted her, why had this infatuation, this new-found desire engendered such fury against himself? And why all this suffering and shouting, that visit to the psychiatrist?
She listened in astonishment. “What do you mean, why? It was only natural that this should happen. I wanted to break away from you and you wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t double-crossing you, do you understand? That’s all.”
It all became clear to him. As if her confession had been some opiate, his head fell back onto the pillow. She too wanted to sleep. They were both exhausted, and two hours later they woke up as if in a different era. It was as if he was discovering her again. But still he was not sure. It was like an image on the surface of water, which the slightest ripple could destroy.
Cautiously he took up the conversation where they had left off. He heard Liza’s name for the first time, and about the circumstances of their meeting. The nightclub where she played the piano on Saturdays. Their interlocked stares. The phone call. Their first kiss in the car.
Then? Then we know the rest.
“I don’t know anything,” he had said with childish curiosity.
“Tell me everything… Tell me how you did it.”
