The Accident (14 page)
The next day. Morning.
He had no right to behave like this. She spent most of her mornings alone, and he should have been beside her on this one. Even before she opened her eyes, her bare arm groped for him, but he wasn’t there. Drowsily, she stretched her arm further, to the edge of the bed. Beyond lay Austria and the plains of Europe. The names of great cities glowed palely like on old wireless sets, fraught with terror. He shouldn’t do this. Inevitably he would be the first to go, leaving her alone in this world for many long years. So he shouldn’t be in a hurry now.
Finally she opened her eyes. The waking world was in order. It was simple and obvious: he had gone for a walk through the pine trees while waiting for her to wake up. Scraps of daylight filtered awkwardly through the shutters. The little burgundy Cervantes lay there inert, weary of its old secret.
She heard steps and the door handle turned. He bent down to kiss her temple. He was carrying the morning papers. Over breakfast, he glanced through the headlines.
“The queen is ill,” Rovena said.
He said nothing.
She set aside her coffee cup and phoned home. “Mother, I’m in Durrës with my girlfriends. Don’t be worried.”
The coffee struck Besfort as particularly good. How sweet this world could be, with queens ill and women telling white lies.
“Look at this,” Rovena said, handing him a newspaper.
Besfort laughed, and read aloud, “‘Baroness Fatime Gurthi, spokesperson of the Tirana Water Board, attempted to justify the water shortage.’ Buying titles is the latest fashion. A thousand dollars, and you wake up a count or a marquis.”
“I thought it was a joke, but even in jest it makes no sense.”
Besfort replied that it was no joke. There were international agencies that trafficked titles. Everybody in the former East was crazy about them.
“That’s all we need,” said Rovena.
Besfort was sure he had the business card of a certain Viscount Shabë Dulaku (Reinforced Doors and Windows Made To Order) from the suburb of Lapraka. He’d heard of a duke in the traffic police and a countess who had written a booklet entitled
Albanian Irregular Verbs
.
After breakfast they went out for a walk along the shore. A fierce wind blew, and it seemed an alien, indifferent kind of day. Clinging tightly to his arm, Rovena felt her hair strike Besfort’s face.
She did not know whether she was still supposed to tell him everything that was on her mind or not. She had the impression that the eyes of both of them had become as hard as glass in the wind. Even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t be able to admit everything, not even to herself.
Behind iron railings, the swimming pools were frozen. Films of ice like cataracts spread over the surface of the water.
They found a restaurant for lunch and then spent the whole afternoon locked in their room. In bed, before they made love, he caressed her and whispered something about Liza. He had forgotten all the little details, or pretended to have done. She replied to him in the same whisper. He told her that nobody understood men like she did. Rovena flattered him in the same way.
As dusk fell Rovena spoke to her mother again on the phone while Besfort switched on the television to see if there was news of the Queen. “It’s lovely here, Mother. We’re going to stay tonight too.”
As she spoke, he stroked her belly, tracing circles around her navel.
Evening deepened fast. As midnight approached, the roaring of the sea sounded increasingly plangent. In the morning they left the hotel in a hurry, not knowing themselves why they felt so flustered. As they drove towards Tirana, the traffic grew heavier. There seemed to be more florists than ever at the crossroads leading to the western cemetery. We all get flowers sooner or later, thought Rovena. She remembered scraps of their conversation about the bogus conspirators. Some of them must be buried here. They would have flowers like everybody else.
At the entrance to Tirana the line of vehicles was barely moving. A traffic policeman walked past their car and Besfort asked him if there had been an accident. The policeman glanced at their licence plate out of the corner of his eye before he answered.
“The queen is dead,” he said.
Besfort switched on the radio and they heard the queen mentioned. But the voices were raised in anger. They were arguing. By the time they reached Kavaja Street it became clear what it was all about: the funeral ceremony and also the site of her grave. The government, as always, was caught on the wrong foot.
“Just wait, they’ll appeal to some commission in Brussels next,” said Rovena.
Near Skenderbeg Square they heard a statement from the Royal Court. A requiem for the queen would be sung at St. Paul’s Cathedral at three o’clock that afternoon. No word about the burial site. The government had still not issued a ruling about the restitution of the king’s property, including the family graves, in the south-east of the capital.
They had almost reached Rovena’s house when the radio broadcast a second statement from the court. The place of burial was still undecided.
“This is scandalous,” Rovena said, opening the car door.
On his way back, Besfort wanted to take the street past the cathedral, but it was cordoned off. After an announcement that the parliament would convene for an emergency session early in the afternoon, the radio carried interviews with ordinary passers-by. “This is a disgrace, a total disgrace,” said one anonymous citizen. “To begrudge a patch of land for the queen’s grave, it’s crazy.” – “And you, sir?” – “I don’t know much about these things. I think we should follow the law. The law should hold good for the wife of the king or the president as for everybody else.” – “Are you alluding to the dictator’s widow?” – “What? No, no. Don’t get me mixed up in that sort of thing. I was talking about the queen and other serious issues, not about that old witch.”
The radio interrupted the interviews to announce that a third statement from the Royal Court was imminent.
The Hague. The last forty days.
For a long time there was no evidence that Besfort Y., and still less both of them, had been in The Hague forty days before the end of the story. In fact, indications that they were in Denmark on that day seemed to eliminate the slightest suspicion of such a thing. Rovena’s friend in Switzerland, usually cautious in her testimony, was certain of it: Rovena had phoned from the train just after crossing the Danish border. Jottings in Rovena’s notebook, made four days before, supplied further evidence of her intended journey. “Jutland. Saxo Grammaticus. Villages where the events of
Hamlet
(Amleth) took place . . . Two-day visit.”
In fact, suspicions regarding The Hague had taken root immediately after the reported exclamation “I’ll see you both in The Hague”, uttered by Rovena’s intimate friend Liza.
There was no supporting evidence for a visit to The Hague from travel tickets or hotel registrations. The convincing alibi of Denmark also nearly banished this suspicion as quickly as it had arisen. This trip was like one of those imaginary journeys that take place in the minds of would-be travellers, or, in the case of The Hague, in the minds of those who are keen to see someone in the dock. However, a few lines in the diary of Janek B., Rovena’s Slovak classmate and casual lover, mentioned again the fateful destination of The Hague. In this diary was a brief and obscure description of a nightmare in which the dreamer saw pieces of white paper announcing apartments for sale stuck on telephone poles, but from a distance looking like a summons to the Hague Tribunal.
The discovery of another diary notebook put an end to the confusion by making sense of the writer’s style and casting light on both the relationship between the Slovak and the beautiful Albanian and the matter of the nightmare, which was not the Slovak student’s, but Besfort’s.
“After that unexpectedly generous night, R. changed,” wrote Janek B. In a few terse words he described his pain, although he avoided using the word “pain” itself, and particularly that other word, “suffering”.
His notes were vague, with phrases often left incomplete, but they still conveyed the distress he had felt the following evening when Rovena had failed to keep her appointment at the bar.
He drank. He tried not to show how he felt in front of others. A few days previously he had said half-jokingly, “We from the East have had our share of suffering. Let us not suffer in love too. Now it’s the turn of you Westerners.”
He thought he saw the retort in the eyes of one of his friends, “My dear Janek, there is suffering under any regime.”
Rovena was different when she came to the university the next day. She explained that someone had arrived from her own country, Albania. Her face was pale, and in her nervous haste she could not concentrate. A mafia type? A trafficker in women? A lover? Janek B. made three guesses about this mysterious visitor. Which was most likely? The newspapers were full of reports of Albanian gangsters. They arrived from their distant country, made threats and then vanished, leaving emptiness and terror behind them.
Janek B. had tactfully broached the subject with Rovena, but she had blinked and failed to understand him. When she had grasped what he was on about, she said no, he had nothing to do with things like that, not with . . . trafficking . . . threats . . .
He wanted to shake her by the shoulders and ask: “What the hell is the matter with you?” But something stopped him. “R. in the bar this evening again. But it’s no go now.” They sat next to each other as before, under the curious gaze of the other students from the East. They were hard people to figure out. Who knows what the dictatorships did to them.
Rovena’s eyes would sparkle cheerfully, only to grow dull and cloud over as she became pensive again. Did she remember that they had slept together? This question haunted Janek. He did not know how to remind her without causing offence. “Yesterday I managed to say to her: ‘Do you remember that beautiful night, when we danced together for the first time and when later . . .’”
The blood froze in his veins as he waited for her response. Her eyelashes hung long and heavy. She finally looked up to say, “Yes, it was beautiful.” Her voice was soft, neither cold nor tender. She could have been talking about a painting. He mentioned her visitor from far away. Who knows where the subject will lead, he thought. Rovena lowered her eyes, but the question did not seem to annoy her. Emboldened, he pressed on. “Are you always thinking about him?”
He spoke gently, almost in a whisper. When she raised her eyes, not only did she not show any trace of irritation, but her expression was full of gratitude. “How stupid of me not to realise that she didn’t want to talk about anyone else,” wrote Janek.
“I like complicated men,” she said later, after a long silence.
“Complicated in what way?” he asked.
“In every way.”
His earlier suspicions returned. Was this man mixed up in some shady business? Was he dangerous? Plenty of women fell in love with criminals. It had been quite the fashion recently.
Rovena toyed with the ends of her hair like a high-school girl in love. “He is complicated,” she went on, as if talking to herself. Janek was cut to the heart to see her eyes damp with tears. “One night he cried out in his sleep because of a nightmare,” she went on. Janek thought that if shouting in his sleep was the way to improve his standing in the eyes of women, he could shout to bring the house down, but he did not dare say this. He tried to look interested while Rovena told him about this man’s nightmare, the famous one about the summons to The Hague stuck to telegraph poles, bus stops and trees.
“The others who saw us whispering together probably thought – thank God they’ve sorted themselves out.”
A few days later, Janek’s diary entry read: “I’ve made a discovery. To my shame. This shame, strangely, does not bother me. Shame is my meat and drink.”
The Slovak’s extraordinary realisation was that the mysterious visitor, who he thought had robbed him of Rovena, was in fact now bringing her closer to him.
He had acquiesced in what many would call a serious humiliation. He was going out with a woman on condition that he talked about another man!
This condition was of course never made explicit, but he was aware of it. Rovena was obviously impatient as they skimmed through other topics in order to reach “him”. She admitted candidly that they had been together for years. She described their trips together, their hotels, beaches in winter. She never said that they were now facing a crisis, but this too was apparent.
“It’s incredible what has happened! We slept together again,” he wrote in his diary.
Even more incredibly, this changed nothing. In fact, now that she had yielded to him again, it seemed entirely natural that she should claim her due from him without any ill feeling.
“There is no hope now,” he wrote two days later.
He really did not hope for any improvement. Her body would lie next to him, but not the woman herself. Her mind would be elsewhere, just as before, and he would be obliged to pay her price, hour after hour. Willingly or not, he would keep his side of the bargain and listen to her talking about this absent man whom he had every reason to detest.
He hoped that when the crisis passed she would no longer feel the need to unburden herself. He could imagine what would happen next: their pact would break down, and their relationship with it.
And that is what happened. Their meetings grew less frequent and then ceased. He tried to reconcile himself to the situation. Now they were just friends.
“Are you back together again?” he asked her one day.
She nodded yes. He was sustained by the hope that she would go through another crisis which he, to his shame, could turn to his benefit.
Somewhat more relaxed, yet with the bitterness that this new situation brought him, he turned the conversation to the news reports about Albanian gangsters. There had been more of them recently. Rovena shrugged her shoulders dismissively.
Much later, on the terrace of a café, she mentioned Besfort, and the Slovak suddenly asked why he was scared of The Hague.
She had laughed. “Scared of The Hague? I don’t think he is.”
“I meant to say, scared of a journey to The Hague.”
She shook her head. “I would say the opposite. We were going to go there together for pleasure. To visit Holland and see the tulip fields . . .”
“But The Hague isn’t just a flower garden. More than anything else, it’s a court. It preys on the mind of anyone with an uneasy conscience,” he said.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” she said, frankly showing her irritation. “But I told you, we were going there for pleasure, for the tulips.”
“No, you listen to me,” he said. “He saw a court summons in that dream, not tulip adverts.”
They stared angrily at each other, speechless.
“What do you know about it?” she said icily.
Instead of answering, he held his head in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said amid sobs. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
When he took his hands away, she saw that he had really been crying. “I’m disgusting,” he went on in a broken voice. “I’m mad with jealousy. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
She waited for him to calm down and took his hand in hers, asking gently, “How do you know what he saw in his dream?”
After he had wiped away his tears, his eyes looked larger, defenceless.
“You told me yourself . . . when you wanted to show me how complicated he . . .”
She remained silent, biting her lower lip, while to herself she said, oh God.
Several years later Janek B.’s notes enabled Rovena’s friend in Switzerland to recall in a new light the short phone conversation she had had with her during her northward journey. A detail that had seemed a slip of the tongue had unlocked the whole mystery of The Hague.
“Hallo, darling. Is that you? So pleased you called. Where are you calling from?”
“Can you imagine? From Denmark, from a train.”
“Really?”
“I’m going to see Besfort.”
“Wonderful!”
“I can see windmills, tulip fields.”
“Tulip fields?”
“I mean . . . some flowers a bit like tulips . . . I don’t know their names.”
“Never mind. So it means you’re back together again . . .
Hello? I can’t hear very well. Bye for now, darling.”
“Bye.”
What an idiot I am, Rovena thought, putting down the phone. I can’t even keep a simple promise. “Don’t tell anybody about this trip to The Hague,” Besfort had said. Lightly, she had asked why not, and he had answered just as airily: “No reason, let’s just make it a secret trip. Everybody should make a secret journey at least once in their lives.” And she had cheerfully agreed.
In a second phone call, he explained that in such little subterfuges the best way not to get caught out when people ask you where you’re going is to substitute another destination, for example, Denmark instead of Holland. “Let’s say a trip to Denmark to see the places where the story of
Hamlet
really happened. While we’re on the subject, do you have a pen? Write down Jutland, that’s the province, and Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote its first history. With an ‘x’ and double ‘m’. That’s enough. No need to get mixed up with all that endless ‘to be or not to be’, OK?”
What an idiot, thought Rovena again. She tried to forget her blunder. She had prepared herself so carefully for this journey that it was silly to worry about something so trivial. She had a surprise ready, besides her new lingerie: two little tattoos, one between her navel and her breasts and the other on her rear. So they would be visible in whatever position they made love. She also had a stock of sweet nothings to whisper, although she couldn’t be sure if she was still entitled to use them or not.
The monotonous sound of the train lulled her to sleep. You’ve exhausted me, she thought, thinking of Besfort waiting for her.
The words of a song, probably one she had never heard but had dreamt up in her imagination, kept coming back to her:
If I could live my life anew
I’d give myself again to you.
A second life, she thought. Easy to say, but so far nobody had ever been given a second life, still less the chance to go on loving someone in this other life. Yet people would never give up the hope of it, and neither would she and Besfort. They had a kind of faint, extremely faint, conception of this forbidden life. In their fear of it, the fear especially of reaching too far and thus bringing down the wrath of heaven, they were pretending they did not love each other at all.
She woke up smiling after her short sleep. As a small girl she had enjoyed this kind of self-deception, arranging facts to suit herself.
Such secrecy, she thought. Janek’s imagination would run riot. Any one of Besfort’s instructions would chill the blood of a woman going to meet her lover . . . “Not a word to a soul about this trip. Destroy the train tickets and every shred of evidence. I’ll tell you the reason later.”
Words came over the loudspeaker in Dutch, then in English. They were arriving at The Hague. She phoned his mobile a third time, but still there was no reply.
She found a taxi easily, and then the hotel. A Dutch name, with no crown.
There was no message for her at reception, apart from an instruction to show her to Besfort Y.’s room. He himself was not there.
She looked round the spacious room. His two suitcases were there. His razor and his familiar aftershave were in the bathroom. On a small table was a bouquet of flowers and a card of welcome in English from the hotel manager. No message from him.
She sank into an armchair and sat there for a moment, totally drained. Saxo Grammaticus. Jutland . . . He might have left some sort of sign. I will be there at such and such a time. Or simply, wait for me in the room.
Her gaze wandered involuntarily to the telephone. She stood up to call again, and one of the suitcases suddenly struck her as unfamiliar. The second one too. With a cold stab, the idea struck her that she had been given the wrong room. She rushed into the bathroom to settle her doubts, and all her sense of security evaporated. Didn’t lots of men use that aftershave?
