fingers, and that’s how we will always be. We’ll ascend to the divine. We’ll climb to that seventh heaven that so many talk about but only a handful of the chosen ever reach. Expert as she was, she uttered the word “marriage” or rather exhaled it at the instant of climax, to associate it with this moment, just as they say sadomasochists do.
Later that afternoon, in the drained and febrile state that you like to call “rainbowed”, I went home. I had indeed almost crossed the rainbow and realised my vague adolescent dream, but this time in a different, tangible, purposeful way: I was marrying a woman.
My emotion was mixed with a similarly vague anger towards you, as well as grief and bitterness, because you had never made that proposal to me.
The bridal veil, the wedding guests, everything appeared to me in surreal fantasy, as if from another world. I told myself that this was nothing less than the truth: I would be married on another planet.
Liza and I were going to go to Greece, where, for the last few years, on an island with an abandoned chapel, women had been marrying in semi-secrecy. This would all change soon. The Council of Europe was drafting new legislation and we would no longer have to conceal our relationship on the street, in cafes and at concerts where we could not keep our eyes off each other, she on the stage and me in the audience.
This is what I thought, but meanwhile my pangs of conscience over you gave me no rest. I consoled myself with the idea that I was sacrificing myself for you. Like a bride who marries in another city to prevent her wedding causing pain to her jilted lover, I was marrying into another world, that of women. Or so I liked to think. It was less a joy in itself than a way of sidestepping you, while at the same time avoiding any insult to that other wedding ring, yours, which did not exist.
How I had longed for your proposal during that unforgettable winter trip to Vienna. All the street lights, neon signs and billboards advertised it, shrieked for it. The church bells clamoured for it. You alone were deaf.
I was still in the street, caught between my morbid intoxication, pain at parting from something, fear of what was to come, anger at you and a peculiar hollowness in whose depths lay that illegal chapel, when all of a sudden you phoned.
From the first moment, that phone call struck me as strange and ill-timed. Your voice too. No doubt I replied frostily, which made you say, “What does this tone of voice mean?” Then everything spiralled downwards. The harshness in your voice was only half of it. There was a note of mockery. You ridiculed everything, my emotional state, the bridal veil, the marriage vows, the surreal chapel. Pitiless, destructive, as you are at your worst, you tore all these things apart like rags. Of course I lost control. In the heat of that rage I said those words that wounded you so much, about ruining my sex life. Of course they came from Liza. She insisted that when the memory of men’s brutal penetration faded from my violated body I would be ready for a higher plane of love.
To cap it all, two hours later, while I was sitting in despair after my quarrel with you, Liza phoned. She spoke more lovingly than ever and she expected me to reply in kind. My confusion first astonished and then offended her. So you’re having second thoughts? You’ve changed your mind? I couldn’t think clearly. She grew angrier. My vacillation disappointed her. She had thought her proposal had made me happy. She had never in her life made such an offer, and now I was being coquettish. “Wait, let me explain,” I said, but she was no longer listening. Then she called me unfaithful. I said she didn’t know what she was saying, and then she started reviling you. “Go on, go back to that terrorist,” she said. “That warmonger will end up on trial at The Hague. And you’ll be there with him.”
Amazingly, her fury brought me a kind of calm. Especially her parting shot. She had been a pacifist, and therefore opposed to the bombing of Serbia, and when she found out from me the sort of work you did she became all the more pro-Yugoslav out of spite.
At midnight I was still torn by my dilemma. Should I phone you or her? Or rip the phone out of its socket? Tormented by insomnia and a racing pulse, I could hardly wait for morning, to go to the doctor.
True, those were the words I used: “I’ve quarrelled with my lover.” Psychic as you are, later you wanted to know which gender I had used. There’s barely a difference in German between
You changed totally when you heard the word “doctor” that day on the phone. You softened and kept asking for forgiveness. I felt I had become an object of pity. I sobbed and lashed out at you once more. At that moment I realised I had lost the battle. All my words of abuse – tyrant, egotist, brute and more of the same borrowed from Liza – fell like snow on armour plate. Not only did you not notice them, but you even went on begging for forgiveness.
The desolation that descended on me later was terrifying. The doctor told me that I should keep away from the source of the trouble. A total break. But strangely, I only associated this break with you. Liza was angry with me, but you terrified me.
You had banished me to a desert region, whose silence tortured me more than the uproar of our quarrels. It was a murky area, a sticky mixture of truth and lies. Your notion of forgiveness was also unclear, and founded on ignorance. My unfaithfulness was both true and untrue. So was my marriage to Liza, and everything else.
Now you tell me that nothing between us is the same as before. At the very moment when I was telling myself that after all these upheavals we were, thank God, at peace again, you uttered those words. You asked that frightening question, “Will you be my ex-wife?” and said other mysterious things.
You didn’t talk like this when we met after the catastrophe, when I was still numb, as if I had just woken from a dream to find myself lying beside you in our bed of love. In these miraculous twelve years with you, this was without doubt our most fabulous night. You said it was as if I had come from the moon. You said that perhaps this is what it will be like in the future when couples meet, one of them returning from some journey or mission to another planet.
Not even then did you tell me that nothing was the same as before. But now you not only say it, but mean it.
There is something floating in the wind. I can feel it. Just as I feel that I always act too late. You always strike the first blow.
Strike. Do what you have to do. Just do not leave me alone. This is not a matter of love. It is beyond love. You have invaded me in a way perhaps forbidden by nature’s secret laws. They say that between lovers unnatural exchanges often take place across mucous membranes, in a kind of reverse incest, in which the blood of the family and alien blood perversely change places.
If that is so, you must obey other laws. You may be my ex-husband, and you may declare me to be your ex- wife. But if I have mistakenly become your little sister in the meantime, you cannot abandon me here in this world, a blind swallow with broken wings.
You mustn’t do that. You can’t.
Chapter Seven
The snow battered the train window with redoubled fury. The thought of that other train, on which Rovena was travelling, not only failed to snap Besfort Y. out of his inertia but also plunged him deeper into his stupor, as if he were dulled by some sedative.
He had done what was necessary. Shortly after midnight, bending over the pillow, above the tangle of her hair. After the final gasp, and almost scared that he had really choked her to death, he had whispered, “Rovena, are you all right?”
She had not answered. He touched her cheeks and whispered words of endearment, which she perhaps took to be the last she would hear from him, because her cheeks slowly dampened with tears. From her whisper, Besfort could only grasp the word “tomorrow”. They would leave by different trains the next day, but unlike at other times they would be free of the anguish of separation. Tomorrow, darling, you will feel for the first time what that other zone is like.
For the whole time, almost fifty hours, that they had spent together in Luxembourg they had talked of nothing else. As she listened her eyes became ever sadder. Her objections grew weaker from exhaustion. The dead are also always together. He said no, a thousand times no. They would be free like at the creation of the world. Free, meaning no longer separable. Free to meet if they wanted. To get tired of each other. To forget each other and find
