him. But the drunk would not let him. “Are you going to listen to me? I’ve got something to say. Then Christianity will try to take over Europe, like two thousand years ago, but it will be too late. Understand? Too late! There will be muezzins calling to prayer from the tops of skyscrapers. Too late. Do you understand me? You don’t need to understand English to realise what a disaster that would be.”
Besfort went in search of another window seat. The last flakes of snow, as if torn from a bridal veil, darted away from him in panic.
Why was he doing this? He had come back to this question so often during those two days with Rovena. At times all his explanations turned to a blur and were meaningless, even to himself. So he tried to think of others. Of course, they would be free. Not just Rovena, but himself too. Both of them. Free from suspicions and pointless jibes. Free from routine, the pressure of rituals, jealousies, the futile irritation of long silences on the phone. Free, finally, from that gorgon, the grim hag of separation. Rovena was trying to follow his thread. Like this, won’t you find it easier to leave me? He pretended to laugh. It was not a question of finding it easy or not. They were abolishing separation itself. A call girl and her client, even if they want to, cannot separate. They are already through the looking glass, beyond the reach of so many vanities of this world.
She tried to argue with him, but wearily and without enthusiasm. Was he just trying to rekindle the flame of their desire? So that whenever they met she would be a stranger, more remote and physically more attractive?
He did not know how to respond. He couldn’t deny it. In fact, the possibility, even talking about it, was exciting. She said, “No, no,” in a plaintive voice that sounded less like an objection than an agony of temptation. From then on he was teased by the suspicion that she too subconsciously liked the idea.
Rovena had asked her question again, and still he could not reply.
“You scare me to death,” she had said. “Aren’t you afraid, Besfort? You ask for impossible things…”
He did not know if he was scared or not. He knew it was too late to turn back.
Why was he doing this? It was easy for him to say he didn’t know himself. In fact he did know, but was pretending not to. He had always known. He was trying to hide from the reason. But try to avoid it as he might, it was always there.
They had talked about a lot of things, but had left much unsaid and only partially revealed. Of course there was fear. But not of something impossible. There was his fear of her, and hers of him. The fear in both of them.
He had felt this from the first, when she had lightly walked up to him and sat down on the settee at that unforgettable after-dinner meeting. You are more than I can bear, his entire being had cried.
Rovena was too much for him. He felt beyond the law. What law, he could not identify, but he knew he was beyond some kind of law.
She had said something and he had replied, but his words had no connection with what he was thinking, that no man can ever cope with more than three or four beautiful women in his life. He had already had his share. It was dangerous to hunger after more.
The enigma of beautiful women had fascinated him for years. What were the characteristics which made beautiful women different from pretty ones? Was there a distinction, if only an unstable one, a dividing line like the meniscus on water, or where the two layers of a mirror adhere, which defined their evanescent nature? Whether loyal or unfaithful, they were all the same, always in the clutches of something, someone, caught by some celestial barb of which they themselves were unaware.
In their presence, something still seemed missing. They threw their arms round your neck, spoke loving words, gave themselves to you, but your thirst remained unslaked. He told himself that nothing was missing. He was asking for more than he should. And yet something still percolated across the dividing line, the caresses, the voluptuous tears.
Even when you thought they were defeated by suffering and that they had become like the rest, it was not true. Some protective avatar came to their aid. You thought that she had really been with you, her moans were still in your ears and her tears damp on your cheeks, but meanwhile she had consigned her true self, her indestructible original, to some distant place. And against this you were powerless. And if this drove you to fury, if her lovely neck, her lips, breasts, hips, and the sex which she gave you, were not enough and you sought to extend your dominion over her invisible self, then the only way to do this was through murder.
When he first saw Rovena perched as casually and lightly as a swallow on the sofa, that is how he had pictured her in some dark region of his imagination, like a small bird targeted by a weapon.
Without doubt, she was “one of those”. This expression is usually used of whores. But her case was different. She had all the marks of beautiful women, that elusive dividing line, and everything else, in an astral conjunction. To himself he said, no. He had never been the kind to chase women, still less now, and he was not going to resort to pitiful cliches about his heart still being young although his youth was over. He thought that the opposite was true of some men: not the body, but the heart aged first. He was one of them.
When he thought back to that after-dinner meeting, he could never remember the turning point at which he allowed himself to be lured.
The pounding of the train’s wheels seemed right for long memories. These events called for that sort of rhythm.
The plain lay half-covered in snow. Which country was he in? The blanket of snow had created a united Europe before the statesmen could shade it on their maps.
The train thrummed monotonously. His cheap little game with Rovena, of the sort played billions of times in this world, lasted much longer than he expected. The young woman suddenly became difficult. In any other case, this resistance would have increased her value, but this time it had the opposite effect. This was how ordinary girls behaved, not “that sort”.
Beautiful women did not resort to stratagems of this kind, because they did not need to. Rovena was losing her special characteristics. This was why he could invite her on the trip so casually and shamelessly.
In the hotel, he was relieved rather than disappointed when he saw her young girl’s breasts. This deficiency seemed sent by the gods to protect him. Pale, delicate, defenceless, she looked less like a dangerous woman than a little martyr.
But this respite was short-lived. A few weeks later, as her breasts bloomed, she had regained everything: the invisible dividing line, the playfulness in her eyes, her mystery. She waited impatiently for him to show his pleasure, but instead he froze. Finally, he produced the word “heavenly”, but he knew that he had wanted to use the word for something else, not her swelling breasts.
There was something back to front about this story.
Moreover, Rovena whispered into his ear that these breasts were because of him. This terrified him. He would have found it a thousand times easier to cope with a pregnancy. But this relationship of a different kind, which seemed to involve the female blood line, what Albanian customary law called “the milk line”, awoke in him only horror.
Now he was the defenceless one, like after that dinner long ago. And just as when on the sofa she had looked like a bird targeted by a weapon, he heard now an inner voice warning him against this relationship.
Of several dreams that he had had, there was one he particularly did not like to think about. Rovena was trying to peer sidelong at a scar that descended from her throat to her white breasts, a lesion that sometimes resembled the sign of the cross and sometimes a mark of strangulation.
Lulled by the familiar sound of the trains as he crisscrossed Europe on his wearisome journeys, he thought of leaving her dozens of times. Next time, he said to himself. Next time would be the last. The Balkans, meanwhile, were in flames, and so he put it off.
“Did you think about our separating even then? Before you told me that nothing was the same as before? Tell me, please. While we went from one hotel to another, and I thought you were happy, were you getting ready to say this?”
It was hard to answer, impossible.
Who in this world knows what he is getting ready for? You set off in one direction and you know it’s wrong, but you pretend to believe you’re on the right path.
He had persuaded himself, and later Rovena, that they had gone to the Loreley to rekindle their passion, but deep down they knew it was for another reason. He had wanted to settle accounts in advance – with jealousy, with the pain of separation, with infidelity. Like a boxer in training to take punches without getting badly hurt, he would grit his teeth and prepare to see her in the arms of another man, before his very eyes.
