It was a silent Sunday noon when Liza Blumberg phoned again after a long interval. Unlike on previous occasions, her voice was warm and somnolent.
“I’m calling to tell you that I withdraw my suggestion that Besfort murdered my friend Rovena.”
“Why?” he replied. “You were so certain…”
“And now I am certain of the opposite.”
“I see,” he said after a silence.
He waited for Lulu to say something more, or to hang up.
“Rovena is alive,” she went on. “Only she’s changed her hair colour and now she’s called Anevor.”
Late that afternoon, Lulu Blumb arrived to recount what had happened the night before.
She had been playing the piano in the late-night bar, the very place where the two women had first met years before. It was the same bar and the same time, just before midnight, and she was feeling sick at heart, when Rovena appeared before her. Lulu sensed her presence as soon as she came through the door, but an indistinct fear that she might change her mind and turn back would not allow her to lift her head from the piano keyboard.
The woman who had entered made her way slowly among the chairs and sat down in the same place as on that fateful evening long ago. She had dyed her hair blonde, to preserve her anonymity, as Lulu realised later. But she walked in the same way, and her eyes, which once you had seen you could never forget, had not changed.
Then they stared at each other, as they had done that first time, but some invisible impediment made Lulu respect the newcomer’s wish not to be recognised.
Meanwhile, her fingers, which had played so naturally on the body of the woman she loved, conveyed to the keyboard all her grief at Rovena’s absence, her emotion at finding her again, her desire and its impediment.
As she finished, exhausted, her head bent, she listened to the whispers of “Bravo!” and waited for her to join her admirers by the piano as she had done before.
She did come, last in line, pale with emotion.
Rovena, my darling, Liza Blumberg cried to herself. But the other woman uttered a different name.
But still she repeated what she had said long ago, and, shortly before the bar closed, the couple found themselves once more in the pianist’s car.
They kissed for a long time in silence. But each time Liza whispered the name Rovena, she failed to respond. They went on kissing and tears moistened the cheeks of both, but it was only in bed after midnight when they were on the verge of sleep that Liza finally said, “You are Rovena. Why are you hiding it?” And the other woman replied, “You’re confusing me with someone else.” After a silence she said it again, “You’re confusing me with someone else,” and added, “but what does it matter?”
Really, what does it matter? thought Lulu Blumb. It was the same love, only in a different shape.
“Did you say a name?” the young woman said. “Did you say the name Rovena?” If she liked it so much, she could use an anagram, as people liked to do these days: Anevor.
Anevor, repeated Lulu Blumb to herself. Like the name of a witch in ancient times. You can dye your hair, change your passport and try a thousand tricks, but nothing in the world will persuade me that you are not Rovena.
As she stroked her chest, she found the scar left by the bullet of his revolver in that scary Albanian motel. She kissed it gently without saying a word.
She had so many questions. How had she managed to escape Besfort? How had she duped him?
With this thought she fell asleep. When she woke next morning Rovena had gone. Lulu would have taken her visit for a dream, but for the note left on the piano:
“I didn’t want to wake you. Thank you for this miracle. Your Anevor.”
“And that was all,” said Liza in a tired voice, after a silence, before she stood up to leave.
As so often before, the investigator’s gaze was caught by the last photograph, which showed Rovena’s dark hair and her delicate arm extended across Besfort’s chest, stretching towards the knot of his tie, as if trying to undo it at the last moment and help release his troubled spirit.
From the window, the researcher watched the woman reach the other side of the crossroads. A distant peal of thunder made him shake his head, but he could not say why, or to whom this negative was directed.
So Lulu Blumb was gone too. She had let him go quietly, as she had done with so many things in this world, and perhaps that distant reverberation was her kind of farewell.
Now he would be left by himself as before, alone with the riddle of the two strangers that nobody had asked him to solve.
11
The researcher had imagined it before, and would do so hundreds of times before his life’s end: the painful progress of the taxi through the traffic on that blustery morning of 17 May, the rain beating against the windows, the long stationary lines, the names of firms and distant cities written on trucks in all the languages of Europe. Dortmund, Euromobil, Hannover, Elsinore, Paradise Travel, The Hague. These names, and their low voices, “What’s this doomsday scenario, we’re going to miss the plane.” – all these things added to their anxiety.
Of course it is late. They want to turn back, even if they do not say so. On both sides, the trap is closing.
“Let’s go back, darling.”
“We can’t.”
They talk in low voices, not knowing if the other can hear. There’s absolutely no way back. The rear-view mirror reflects the eyes of one and then the other. The traffic moves a little. Later it stalls again. Perhaps they’ll hold the plane. Frankfurt Intercontinental, Vienna, Monaco-Hermitage, Kronprinz. Her mind reels. But we’ve stayed in these hotels. (Where we were happy, she whispers fearfully.) Why have they suddenly turned against us? Loreley, Schlosshotel-Lerbach, Excelsior Ernst, Biarritz. He tries to hold her tight.
“Don’t be scared, darling. I think the traffic’s easing. Perhaps the plane will wait.” He puts his arm around her, but the gesture seems distant, as if long-forgotten.
“What are those black oxen?” she says. “That’s all we need.”
He makes no reply, but mutters something about prison doors. He hopes they’ll find them still open, before the sun sets. She is scared again. She wants to ask: where did we go wrong? He tries to draw her close.
“What are you doing? You’re strangling me.”
The taxi speeds forward. The driver’s eyes, as if already caught by something, freeze on the glass of the mirror. Light pours in from both sides, but it is too bright, pitiless. She lays her head against his shoulder. The taxi begins to shake. There is an alien presence inside, prepotent, heedless, with its own powers and menacing laws. What’s happening? Where are we going wrong?
Their lips come still closer. We mustn’t. We can’t. There are prohibitive powers and orders everywhere. He says something inaudible. From the movement of his lips, it is a name, but someone else’s, not hers. He repeats it, but again, as in his plaster dream, it cannot be heard. He pleads for the return of the woman he has killed with his own hands. Please come back, be again what you were. But she cannot. No way. Whole minutes, years, centuries pass until there is a great crack, and from out of the encasing plaster the name finally resounds: Eurydice. The tremors suddenly cease. As if the taxi has left the earth. The doors spring open and seem to give the car wings. And so transformed, it flies through the sky, unless it never was a taxi, but something else, and they had failed to notice. But it is too late now. There is no remedy.
Rovena and Besfort Y. are no longer… Anevor…
Dlrow siht ni regnol on era Y. trofseB dna anevoR…
12
More and more often he fell into a drowsy state, from which only the prospect of writing his own will could rouse him. Before drafting it he waited for a final answer from the European Road Safety Institute. Its reply came
