murder were testimonies to each other, and if there was proof of their love there were no grounds to doubt the murder.
The interrogator’s incredulous smile was enough to make Lulu Blumb lose her way.
Breaking a final silence, the longest of all, she admitted that it was natural for a researcher like himself to misinterpret her insistence that Rovena St. and Besfort Y. had not been together on that fatal taxi ride on the morning of 17 May. He might see it as a final attempt on the part of the pianist, who had tried to separate them in life, to divide them in death. He had every right to think this way, but she would be honest with him to the end. To convince him that there had been a murder, she would tell him her greatest secret, something that she had never confessed to anybody and had been sure she would carry with her to the grave. She too, Liza Blumberg, had plotted to murder Rovena…
Her terrible plan involved the remote chapel by the Ionian Sea. She knew of the atrocities that took place there, the women thrown into the sea while the insane boatmen howled with laughter. But she had not been afraid. Until the very end, she had dreamed of a journey from which neither she nor Rovena would ever return. If the boatmen did not throw her into the sea, she herself would have thrown her arms around her lover’s neck and dragged her down into the deep… But apparently what should have happened at sea was fated to happen on land, in a taxi. As always, Lulu Blumb was too late. After this confession, she was sure that her interrogator would understand that her anger at Besfort Y., like any anger against a fellow murderer, could only be of the feeblest sort. She hoped that when the time came for her soul to seek rest, she would pray for him with the same tenderness as for herself.
5
The researcher was sure that Lulu Blumb would never talk to him again after her shocking confession. There had been something conclusive about her story, like the closing of a door, that dashed any hopes of a sequel.
The researcher was stabbed by remorse at not having delved deeper into certain dark episodes in her story. He had noticed that whenever Lulu Blumb said that she would not elaborate on certain aspects of her tale, it was precisely these points that were most important, and to which his mind kept reverting.
For instance, he had not properly asked about the second dream. He kicked himself for this, and in self- punishment he mentally replayed this dream again and again, just as he had heard it from the Albanian woman in Switzerland.
She had described Besfort Y. walking across the wasteland towards the funereal building. He stands in front of the mausoleum that is also a motel, with doors that are at the same time not doors. He knows why he is there, and he also doesn’t know. A cold light emanates from the plaster and the marble. He calls out the name of a woman, but without even hearing what name his lips utter. This woman is evidently within the marble, because he calls to her again, but his voice emerges so feebly that he can hardly hear it. A gleam of light that he had not noticed until then comes from inside and he knocks on the painted glass. He hears a slight sound as a door opens, where he thought there was none. The night porter of the motel, or the temple guard, appears. “There’s no such woman here,” he says, and closes the door again.
Meanwhile, a woman indeed appears, descending the winding external stairway which leads perhaps from a terrace. Her tight skirt makes her appear taller. Her face is unfamiliar. Stepping off the final stair, she comes up to him and throws her arm round his neck. He feels an infinite tenderness and sweetness, but he cannot catch her name, which she utters in the faintest of voices. She says something else. Perhaps it is about her long wait inside, or how much she has missed him. But he cannot understand anything of what she says. He realises only that something is missing.
The woman lowers her head to tell him her name, or just to kiss him, but still something is missing and he wakes up.
Over time, this dream expanded in his mind, as if leavened by memory.
It was easy to interpret this as a murderer’s dream. The dreamer comes to a place in which he has been happy, and so the building resembles a motel. But it also resembles a tomb, which shows that at the place where he was happy, he has also killed.
Lulu Blumb insisted on this explanation. The researcher did not dare contradict her, but still looked for another one. Besfort Y. goes to that tract of wasteland looking for whoever is inside the building, frozen or immured. He calls out, summoning her, to thaw her. But it is not easy for her either.
But that’s almost the same, Lulu Blumb would say. There’s no doubt that it is Rovena inside, under all that plaster or marble. Buried, in every sense of the word.
The researcher continued his imaginary dialogue with Lulu Blumb, with a premonition that they would meet again.
Which they did. Her phone call gave him a boyish thrill.
They tried to postpone the subject as long as they could, but the conversation soon came round to their common obsession. Clearly Lulu too had been mentally rehearsing her questions, answers and objections. Try as they might to keep their heads clear, the moment came when each of them confused the other, although they knew very well that they shouldn’t allow themselves to be ensnared by the dream of a third person, reported by a fourth, if not a fifth.
Lulu was the first to dispel the mist. She returned doggedly to the morning of 17 May, when the taxi waited in the rain in front of the hotel. The temperature was 7° Celsius, the wind variable and the rain incessant.
The researcher listened hard, but could not forget the dream. What was Besfort looking for behind that marble, inside that desolate building, after midnight? Rovena, of course, but which one? Rovena murdered, spoiled? And why did she not come out to him where he expected, but by way of the winding stairway? Repentance was there, of course. But who repented? Besfort? Rovena? Both? And for what? He wanted to ask Lulu Blumb, but she was a long way away.
6
Her voice was very determined. To her credit, she had been the only person not to rest content with the explanations given for the very long interval between the couple’s departure from the hotel and the moment of the accident. She had collected astonishingly precise evidence relating to the morning of 17 May, newspaper articles, weather bulletins and the traffic reports provided by the police for the radio. This precision struck everybody as at least giving her the right to a hearing. Her evidence also recreated with appalling vividness the atmosphere in the lobby of the Miramax Hotel that morning: the chandeliers, whose light grew pale as day dawned, the sleepy night porter, Besfort Y. going to the desk to settle his bill and order a taxi, then returning to the lift, going up to the room and coming back with his girlfriend, whom he held tight as he led her from the door of the lift to the waiting cab. The porter, interrogated dozens of times, always said the same thing: after a sleepless night, twenty minutes before the end of his shift, neither he nor anybody else would be able to clearly recognise a woman, most of whose face was hidden by the raised collar of her raincoat, by her hat and the shoulder of the man to whom she seemed almost bound. Still less could the waiting driver see anything but two vague silhouettes approaching his car through the pelting rain and the wind that changed direction at every moment.
Liza Blumberg insisted that the young woman who entered the taxi was not… the normal Rovena. Asked what she meant by this, she replied that the young woman, even if she were Rovena, could only have been her shape, her replica.
At this point she produced the photos taken immediately after the accident, none of which showed the woman’s face. Besfort’s face was clearly visible, with his eyes immobile and a trickle of blood, as if drawn by a pen, on his right temple. But of the young woman who had fallen on her stomach alongside him, only her chestnut hair and her right arm stretched across his body were visible.
The pianist had repeated this story several times to earlier interviewers. To Lulu’s annoyance, they had listened with more sympathy than attention. Her anger forced them to enter into a discussion with her, but they proceeded without enthusiasm. Let us concede the possibility that the murder took place earlier. How would she then explain
