attention.
After dinner, in the late-night bar, she mentioned her tattoos, and the tattooist’s question of why she wanted them: as a memento of somebody, a promise or for some other reason.
This time, unlike on previous occasions, he did not want to hear anything more about the other man who had touched her body. He seemed to be thinking about their conversation in the restaurant.
Rovena found it difficult to talk about anything else until she had unburdened her mind. She thought about the photographs and the macabre contest, and she asked why, if he did not feel guilty, he still seemed to have something on his conscience.
He gave a chill smile.
“Because I am a citizen, meaning that everything to do with the
Rovena did not understand what he meant, but did not say so.
As if aware of this, he went on to explain gently that quite apart from what he had said about the Albanian children he also felt grief over the Serbian children. But unfortunately that’s not what happens in the Balkans. In the restaurant, she had asked why they had come here to The Hague in secret, like two criminals. She should realise that he had not been served any summons, except once or twice in his dreams. And even if he were summoned, he would not obey the court order, but only his own conscience. Every person should come to The Hague, as though it were an agency of Hades. Each for the sake of his own soul. In silence and semi-secretly.
Rovena thought of the Austrian’s beard and his dull eyes, as he sat in the cafe among its Albanian customers.
As he spoke, Besfort looked round for the waiter, to order his second and final whisky.
It was after midnight, in bed before they made love, that he remembered the tattooist. Was he polite, handsome, a lecher? A little bit of all those things, she replied. And he made the mistake every man makes these days: as soon as he discovered that the tattoo was for a lover, he interpreted the woman’s yielding as if it was to himself.
As so often, Rovena’s story was left incomplete. While she was in the bathroom, he switched on the television and surfed the channels. Most were in Dutch. On one, he thought he heard Albania mentioned. He found the news in English.
“The queen has died,” he said to Rovena, as she returned to the bedroom.
She lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “But that was months ago, don’t you remember? We were in that motel, in Durres.”
“Of course I remember. But this is another queen. The king’s wife, not his mother.”
“I see, how extraordinary,” she said.
On the screen, the black motorcade slowly approached the cathedral in Tirana.
Covering her bare shoulders, Besfort also expressed surprise. “How very… For a small country, once Stalinist, to have two queens die… In such a short time.”
Trembling, she held him tightly.
Chapter Thirteen
It was hard to tell if either of them felt any foreboding one week before the accident.
Rovena, taking shelter from the torrential rain in a cafe, thought about her lover’s arrival. At precisely that moment, one thousand kilometres away, Besfort’s thoughts, as he watched the television news, wandered to Rovena’s white belly and the possibility that she might be pregnant. On the screen, Pope John Paul II looked feebler than ever, but nobody could hope for any concession from him on sexual relations between men and women. Everything would have to be the same as a thousand, four thousand, forty thousand years ago. Besfort counted the remaining days until he would see Rovena, and they seemed to him too many. In the cafe, Rovena dialled the code for Switzerland, but suddenly recalled that phone calls cost more at peak hours, and decided to talk to her friend later.
The rain grew heavier. Passers-by caught in the downpour ran terrified for shelter. One of them seemed continually to be changing shape as his cape was blown by the wind. After the pope, Arab terrorists appeared on the screen, threatening a kneeling European hostage. Besfort closed his eyes so as not to see the blow. Rovena unthinkingly dialled Switzerland again, but remembered the peak rate. The pedestrian with the billowing cape passed by menacingly, almost clinging to the cafe window. He appeared spreadeagled against it, until he detached himself and flew away as if whirled by some black tornado. Perhaps that is what Plato’s androgynes would look like, she thought. Besfort had mentioned them in their last phone call. She had been amused at first.
“Awesome,” she said laughing, “a man and a woman in one body. No more she-loves-me, she-loves-me- not.”
“And that was why the gods envied them,” Besfort said, “and out of jealousy divided them. And since that time, says Plato, the two halves have been searching for each other.”
“How sad,” she said. The song about the two lives with the same love flashed into her mind in a garbled form, just as she had once heard it sung by a drunk in the doorway of a bar in Tirana:
If I could live my life anew
I’d never give myself to you.
Rovena nervously dialled the code for Switzerland a third time. A thousand kilometres away, Besfort turned off the television in disgust. The news was all so crazy.
The storm eased slightly, only to grow wilder again, although now there were only dry gusts without rain. Rovena barely managed to reach the entrance to her block. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, closed the window and stood stock still behind the double glazing. The wind howled threateningly and then whined in lamentation, as if begging for mercy. A part of the view lay in darkness, and the rest was bathed in a sickly light in which sheets of cardboard, tar paper and garbage of all kinds were blown in every direction. You could find anything out there, she thought. Empty forms, whose essences had evaporated long ago, spun round in eddies. And she thought of her tattoos, now faded, and perhaps their two halves, his half and hers, so pitilessly divided, looking for each other.
In the evening, on the television news, among the scenes of storm devastation, there was a report on an old provincial theatre whose props had been carried away by the gales. Two particularly valuable capes for
He went to bed just after midnight as usual. Towards morning, he was woken by a dream.
A kind of languid desire he had never experienced before totally sapped his strength. It included grief mixed with despair to such an impossible degree as to create a limitless, immeasurable sweetness.
It was the kind of dream that lingers in the mind. There was a plateau bathed in pale light from an unknown source. In the middle was a structure of plaster and marble, a kind of mausoleum that was also a motel, towards which he was calmly walking.
He was seeing it for the first time, although the structure was not unfamiliar to him. He stood in front of what were not so much its door and windows as the places where they had once been, now covered with oily paint resembling plaster, and barely visible.
He felt that he knew why he was there. He even knew what was locked inside, because he called a name out loud. It was a woman’s name, which, although he uttered it himself, he could not hear or even identify. It emerged falteringly, despairingly from his throat. He was aware merely that the name had three or four syllables. Something like Ix-et-in-a…
He remembered the strange continuation of the dream, and his weakness and longing became unendurable.
He turned on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch. It was half past four. It occurred to him that even dreams that seem unforgettable can later fade away.
First thing in the morning he would phone Rovena and tell her about this. He must.
This thought reassured him, and he fell asleep at once.
