for his two customers. Finally they emerged from the hotel door. Clutching one another, with coat collars upturned, they hurried to the taxi. Without waiting for the driver to get out, the man opened the car’s left-hand door for his girlfriend, and went round to the other side to sit down in the opposite corner, from where he ordered
As the driver had said so often, the traffic had never been so congested as that day. It crawled forward through the semidarkness of dawn, stopped, started, came to a complete standstill. There were refrigerated trucks, lorries, buses, all drenched in the rain, with the names of firms, shipping agencies, mobile phone numbers, reappearing to the left or right as they filtered through, as if in some nightmare. During his time in the hospital, those inscriptions in strange and frightening languages had haunted him. Words in French, Spanish, Dutch. Half of united Europe and all the Tower of Babel was there.
The researcher’s eyes lost their earlier despondency. You can’t spin the story out indefinitely, he thought. Whether you want to or not, at some stage you will have to answer my question.
He waited as long as he could before repeating it. The driver took a moment of silence to think.
“Yes, that business of the dummy. Whether that woman resembled a doll or not… Of course she did. Especially now that you remind me. Sometimes she looked like a dummy, and sometimes he did. As everybody does. Behind car windows with condensation, that’s how most people look, distant, remote, made of wax.”
The researcher felt his temper rise.
“I asked you not to dodge the question,” he suddenly cried, “at least not this one. I begged you, I pleaded on my knees.”
Oh God, he’s started again, thought the man.
The researcher’s voice was hoarse. He almost gasped.
“I gave you a last chance to tell the truth, to get all that fear gnawing you inside out of your system. Tell me, what was that thing that terrified you so much? A man trying to kiss a dummy? Or a doll trying to kiss a man? Or was something missing that made such a thing impossible for either of them? Tell me!”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m not in a position to say. I can’t.”
“Tell me your secret.”
“I can’t. I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to because you’re under suspicion too. Tell me. How were you going to dispose of the body, after the murder? Where were you going to throw the dummy? Don’t try and wriggle out of it! You know everything. You were keeping track of everything. In your mirror. Like a sniffer dog.”
The researcher’s voice subsided again. He had been so excited when he arrived at the apartment, hoping to please the driver too with his discovery. But he hadn’t wanted to know. Mentally, he addressed the doll itself. Nobody wants you, he said to it. Nobody can even see you but me.
Silently he drew from his briefcase the photos of the two victims. Would the gentleman take another look. Notice that the dead woman’s face is not visible anywhere.
The man averted his eyes. He stammered in terror. Why were they pressing only him for this secret? If this victim wasn’t a woman but a doll, why hadn’t the police said anything?
Psychic, the researcher said to himself. This was the same first question that he had put to Liza Blumberg, after which his mind had strangely clouded over. He hadn’t heard her reply.
The driver spoke haltingly. Something inexplicable had happened in his taxi. Something impossible… but why were they asking only him to explain?
The researcher interrupted. “You’re the last person who should complain. I’ve asked you a thousand times why you crashed the taxi after seeing a kiss and you won’t give me an answer.”
They both sat in silence, stupefied with exhaustion. You might just as well ask me why I believed Liza Blumb’s story, and I wouldn’t know how to reply, the researcher reflected. We could all ask questions of each other. What right have we got in this pitch-black night to ask about things that are beyond our powers to see?
He was too tired to relate how years ago, at high school, he had been taken to an exhibition of modern art. The students had laughed at pictures of people with three eyes or displaced breasts, or giraffes in the form of bookcases, in flames. Don’t laugh, somebody had told them. One day you’ll understand that the world is more complicated than it appears.
The researcher calmed down again, and his eyes even recovered their earlier tenderness.
“There are other truths, besides those which we think we see,” he said softly. “We don’t know, don’t want to, or can’t know, or perhaps mustn’t…” His unfortunate friend was saying that something impossible had happened in his taxi. This was perhaps the essence. Nobody knows the rest. “What happened in your taxi was something different from what you saw. They had been together on the back seat, innocent and guilty, a man and perhaps a woman who had been murdered, dolls, replicas, shapes and spirits, sometimes together and sometimes apart, like those flaming giraffes. What you saw and what I imagined are evidently very far from the truth. It was not for nothing that the ancients suspected the gods of denying us human beings their superior knowledge and wisdom. That is why our human eyes were blind, as usual, to what happened.”
The investigator felt drained, as if after an epileptic convulsion.
The entire incident could have been something else. He would not now be surprised if they were to tell him that his inquiry was as far from the truth as a biography of the pope, a file on a bank loan or the life story of a trafficked woman from the former East, recorded in desolate police offices near airports.
“I will ask one more question,” he said gently. “Let it be the last. I want to know if, as you drove towards the airport, you heard a strange noise, which you might at first have taken to be an engine fault, but was in fact something else. A noise quite unexpected on a motorway, like a galloping horse chasing you all.”
He stood up without waiting for the answer.
9
The researcher now felt relief rather than despair at having abandoned any attempt to describe the final week.
His conclusion was that not only the final moments in the taxi but the entire last week were impossible to describe. He felt no guilt at cutting his story short. On the contrary, he felt it would have been wrong to continue.
From every great secret, hints occasionally leak out. It is probably once in seven, ten or seventy millennia that something escapes from that appalling repository where the gods store their superior knowledge that is forbidden to humankind. And in that moment, something that would normally take centuries to be discovered is suddenly revealed to the unseeing human eye, as when the wind accidentally lifts a veil.
In that moment of time, these four, that is, the two passengers, the driver and the mirror, apparently found themselves in an impossible conjunction.
Something impossible happened, the driver had said. In other words, something that was beyond their understanding. It was like a story of souls whose bodies are absent. It was this dissociation of body and soul that evidently led to their sense of disorientation and intoxicating liberation, the uncoupling of form and essence.
The file of the inquiry showed that Rovena and Besfort had mentioned this dissociation several times. They had also probably come to regret it.
He recalled now those few ideas, like rare diamonds, that he had exchanged with the pianist about Besfort’s final dream.
What was Besfort looking for in the tomb-motel? They agreed that he was looking for Rovena. Murdered, according to Lulu Blumb; disfigured, according to himself. Or perhaps something similar, which millions of men search for: the second nature of the woman they love.
For hours he imagined Besfort in front of this plaster structure, waiting for the original Rovena, then in the taxi, beside her fugitive form, experiencing something impossible for anybody in this world.
10
