knotty passages that apparently contradicted each other. He remembered again Thanas Rexha, who had given up high school after twice failing the history exam about the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact on the eve of World War II.
What a crazy dream, he thought. It had continued, but he could not remember how. His eyes wandered from the curtains back to Rovena’s face. Her eyelids were still closed in sleep, but fluttered slightly like a swallow in distress. Normally he got up before her, and whenever he studied her sleeping face, he thought that a woman who is loved opens her eyes in a different way to others.
But Rovena did not wake, and he got up and went to the window in the anteroom, a long way from the bed. He drew aside the curtain slightly and looked stonily at the street, where yellow leaves were falling.
Abstractedly, he listed the names of hotels where they had slept: Plaza, Intercontinental, Palace, Don Pepe, Sacher, Marriott. Their lights glittered palely, blue, orange, crimson. Why was he calling these hotels to mind as if looking for help? And why did they hurry past?
He felt a chill round his shoulders and turned to enter the bathroom. That same soft light glowed below the mirror. It came from her toiletries, her perfume, comb, creams, which had no doubt acquired something special over the years from contact with her face.
Among their sweetest moments had been the times when she had sat on the little white throne next to the bath and washed herself. Under the surface of the water, the patch of her bush would continually change shape, grow fuzzy, ambiguous.
“What are you thinking about?” she would ask him, lifting her eyes from her own body to look at him. “Will you go out for a bit while I get ready?”
He would lie on the bed waiting, and listen as she sang familiar tunes softly to herself.
The night before, they had repeated this ritual almost exactly. But this had not prevented him from thinking again what he had said to her on the street: “Something is not the same as before.”
Rovena was still asleep when he emerged from the shower, without even that clear expression on her face that generally preceded her awakening. Her cheeks and forehead were dull. He remembered when she first arrived, years before. She had sat down, after a sleepless night, as she explained to him later, with the glitter that was fashionable at the time clinging to her cheeks, like the crumbs of dreams. She had looked him straight in the eye to tell him what she had been thinking about on the way: the words of a French song,
He had never heard such a natural and direct declaration of love.
I will love you all my life. Yours desperately. He had attached words to that first meeting, like the glitter on her cheeks, that he knew had not been spoken or written until later.
Again, as if looking for help, he thought of the late-night bars with their tiny lights and resonant names: Kempinski, Kronprinz, Negresco. “Oh God, how happy I am with you,” she had said. “Only you bring me this happiness.” He thought he had never properly appreciated these words of hers, but reassured himself with the thought that this was what always seemed to happen in this world.
A fresh gust of wind sent the leaves scurrying round the steel lamp posts. Not just something, but nothing is the same as before, he said to himself.
He had said these words to her as they approached the hotel, and her eyes had quivered, as if she had been found out. “Well…” she said. Then suddenly she collected herself. “That’s not true for me,” she hastily replied. “Not at all.”
She repeated what she had said, but her words, instead of reassuring him, pierced his flesh like nails. “Not in my case. Maybe in yours.”
“Not for either of us,” he replied.
He thought she was awake and he turned his head abruptly, suddenly remembering how his dream about Stalin had continued.
There were just the two of them again, this time at the Novodevichy Convent. It was barely possible to walk through the tightly packed cemetery. Stalin held some flowers in his hand, and seemed to have spent a long time searching for his wife’s grave.
He thought, just wait till he orders me, “You lay the flowers. My hand is stiff.” But Stalin was angry. His eyes were icy. At least don’t let me be there when he overturns the headstone and screams, “Traitor, why did you do this to me?”
He could almost read Stalin’s mind. So you complained about my crimes? If you had been truthful, you wouldn’t have left me alone. To create havoc. Alone on these steppes. In this horror.
Chapter Two
This was the first time that I had pretended to be asleep. Why? I do not know. It just happened that way, like in childhood, when I thought that keeping my eyes shut might give me an advantage over people who were awake.
I felt him touch my hair, and then move the sheet to see my belly. It was just at this moment, instead of saying to him “Awake, darling?” that I did the opposite: I squeezed my eyelids tighter. And like in childhood, when I secretly eavesdropped on my parents to find out if they were still angry over my bad behaviour of the day before, I studied not so much him as his back. Everything about him conveyed anger, but I had the impression that his irritation had settled especially on his back.
In fact I had first got to know him through his back. I might say that it wasn’t his eyes, his voice or the way he walked that first made an impression on me, as usually happens, but his back.
Anyone hearing this would call me crazy, or a poseur, the sort of person who always wants to seem original. But I am not like that at all.
“You see that person heading for the main gate? That’s Besfort Y. – the one they were talking about yesterday. The one who had that quarrel over Israel? That’s him, and they’ll probably throw him out of the university over it, if not worse.”
I was curious to see him, but he passed through the gate without turning his head, so that only the dark oblong of his back remained in my mind. It seemed to me to be carrying a burden, almost theatrically. I sometimes think that my peculiar attraction towards men with problems started on that day.
Now, so many years later, in front of the hotel window, his back was just as blank and uncomprehending. His hurtful words about nothing being the same as before, which even in the restaurant cut her to the quick, were now, coming from his back, ten times worse.
Rovena slowly stirred in bed. But from her new position she could learn nothing more. His back was the same as before, but darker, because of the light from the window. It was as if their entire story had returned to the beginning.
When Rovena had been upset before, she had tried to think of his endearments and their times of pleasure. But now, strangely, she could only think of their quarrels, which had mainly happened on the phone. These, when Rovena told Shpresa about them, became encrusted with things she had never managed to say but only thought. He rejected her continual complaints about his masterful nature. (“You have made me a slave. You found me when I was young. You treat me as you please.”)
“He says that vain men secretly like to hear this – but he finds it depressing. Making a slave of someone is nothing to boast about. It’s what all the mustachioed men of the Balkans and the East do. It’s so hard to quarrel with him. Sometimes in the middle of a fight you want to embrace him.”
At such moments, try as she might, Rovena could not cope with the tide of her emotion. She kept thinking: he has me in chains. He calls me a princess, but in fact he knows very well that he is the prince and I am only a slave. “I keep telling myself this, but it changes nothing. Do you understand?” Her friend from Berne replied that it was hard to know what she meant.
“I understand you when you say that together you get on wonderfully and then you quarrel on the phone, although, in my case, with the man I have, the opposite happens – we say sweet nothings on the phone and as soon as we see each other we’re at each other’s throats. I understand that bit, darling, but the other things, about
