The Accident (16 page)
With these two storm-battered capes, the life stories of Besfort Y. and Rovena St. were strangely cut short a week before they actually ended. In an explanatory note, the researcher had repeated his position that, being unable to reproduce the couple’s story in full on the basis of the results of the inquiry, he had concentrated on the last forty weeks of their lives. The ending of the story with the two
Hamlet
costumes carried away by the gale was accidental, and therefore probably could not be taken as a symbolic closure. Still less could Besfort Y.’s pre-dawn dream, which he related to Rovena on the phone a few hours later, be considered in the same light. But there may have been another reason why, in spite of all promises, the final week – usually the most keenly anticipated in a story of this kind – was omitted.
The more closely the researcher examined this last week, which was at first sight so straightforward, the more significant it became. But he was always thrown back on the problem of its incompleteness. The three last days had detached themselves entirely from the chain of events which death had brought to an end. These were the three days for which Besfort Y. had requested leave from his office at the Council of Europe. Apart from his application for leave, made orally in his final telephone call, there was no tangible evidence of these last three days anywhere. The testimony of the bartenders and receptionists was vaguer than ever. There was no record of any phone calls from their hotel room and both their mobiles were switched off. It was as if these three days were not their own, but were unclaimed stretches of time of the kind that may wander around the universe unattached to any human life, trying to find some temporary lodging. So they floated adrift, bound to nobody, and not understood by anyone, least of all by those in whose lives they took refuge.
In another note, the researcher strove to explain what he called the strange “crabwise” progress of the days and weeks. Mourning customs everywhere mark seven days and forty days after a death, but here were periods of seven and forty days calculated before their deaths. These in his view were intended to convey an impression of the reverse order of time experienced by the two lovers, if that is what they could be called.
As he approached the zero hour, which in this looking-glass world could have been the end, the beginning or both, or neither of these, the researcher probably felt a rising panic. Finally, confronted with a knot he could not unravel, he stood to one side at the most unexpected moment.
It was obvious from the file containing the relevant evidence that this dereliction of duty when faced with the final week caused the researcher great pain. Here, totally jumbled and impossibly crammed together, were fragmentary statements and testimonies, documents, protocols; a twice-repeated request for an autopsy of Rovena’s body rejected out of hand by her parents; an application for Besfort’s exhumation in Tirana, which had been granted; an allegation made by Liza Blumberg that Rovena was murdered not by intelligence agencies but by Besfort Y. on the night before 17 May; a photocopy of the weather report for the fateful morning from the newspaper
Kurier
, which was relevant to this allegation; and finally the permission for three days’ leave, issued in response to Besfort’s last request in this life.
The researcher kept coming back to this document in the hope that it might yield more information. He could not forget what a colleague had said a long time ago, when he had first mentioned the inquiry to him. In such cases of law, the English refer to remote history, Muslims to the
Qur’an
and emergent African states to the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, but in the Balkans they find every precedent with little effort in their ballads. Three days’ leave to carry out a duty, normally something left undone? There will certainly be a well-known paradigm for this.
It was in fact a cliché. Half the ballads of the Balkans included such requests. Every character seemed eager to negotiate an extended deadline. Some bargained with death; others at a later date in history, and thus on a less epic scale, asked for leave from prison. And so on until the present day, when Besfort Y. had asked for leave from his office at the Council of Europe. The cases were very different, but in essence they all shared something in common: a secret contract, from which there was no escape.
The researcher was dumbfounded. According to the experts, Besfort had asked for three days’ leave from the Crisis Department in Brussels, just like Ago Ymeri had done from a medieval prison.
The researcher imagined Ago Ymeri on horseback, galloping to the church where his betrothed was about to marry another man . . . He had never heard such an inconsistent story: why had he been given leave, and why, after its expiry, was he bound to return to prison? The meaning must be encoded.
The researcher felt a sickening pang in the pit of his stomach. What help were all these shadows and shapes that so resembled each other? He thought about the taxi driver and his rear-view mirror, in which the mystery had surely been revealed, if only for an instant of time.
Latterly his researches had focused entirely on this question. “What did you see in this mirror? What was that fatal shock? Have you ever lost someone you can’t ever forget? Who is so lost to you that they won’t come back, even in your dreams?”
So began one of their many conversations, all so similar to each other.
“Who won’t come back, even in my dreams? I don’t know what to say,” the man replied.
“You have a daughter of about the same age as that unknown young woman who got into your taxi. Have you ever had problems with her? For any private reason of the sort you would never reveal to a soul? That will go with you to the grave? I think you will have heard this expression, but probably without thinking hard about it. Imagine what it means to be in the grave, in this narrow chamber not just for a few days or weeks or years but for centuries, millennia, hundreds and thousands of millennia. Just you two, you and the grave. The grave and you. Narrator and audience. The stories we tell on earth are mere fragments, crumbs of the great narrative of the dead. For thousands of years, in hundreds of languages, the dead have been weaving their story. But it will remain in the grave for ever and ever. For all eternity, never heard by a living soul. Your final confidence, between you and the grave. Between the grave and you. Think of yourself there, with no advocate, no witness, afraid of nothing, because you yourself are nothing. Think of yourself like that and give me the tiniest hint, a smidgen of what you will tell to the grave. This is what I am asking you to do as a human being, a taxi driver. Do me this honour. Think of me for a moment as your brother. As your grave.”
“I don’t understand you. I’m tired. I’m so tired. I don’t know what you want.”
“Have you ever thought of impossible things? Taboos, we call them in this world. Who knows what they call them in the next. It’s a tough question, but I won’t apologise. The grave does not apologise.”
“I’m tired. Leave me in peace. The doctor says these long sessions aren’t good for me.”
“You’re right. Calm down. Let me ask you just two simple questions about the last moments before the accident. How did her face look? And his?”
“They were both cold. Or that’s how they looked to me. Like wax, as one might say.”
“Was it this that scared you, I mean confused you?”
“Perhaps.”
“What else? What else happened?”
“Nothing. It went silent, like in church. Except that from outside there was a sort of dazzling light. I think that’s why I couldn’t see the road. The taxi seemed propelled through the air.”
“You said that at that moment they were trying to kiss. I’m sorry for asking the same question as everybody else. Did this really startle you? Even scare you?”
“It seemed . . . but they seemed scared themselves. At least I saw that in the woman’s eyes. In the mirror, I saw fear.”
“You saw their fear in the mirror . . . But your own fear, where did you see that?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Your own fear,” I said. “The fear that your thought was theirs, wasn’t it really your own? Have you yourself ever wanted to break a taboo of that kind? And did they remind you of this. Is that why you lost control and crashed?”
“I don’t understand. Stop tiring me.”
“Calm down . . . and then? What happened next? Did they manage to kiss?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. That was the moment of impact. Everything was smashed to pieces in the gully. The light was blinding. Devastating.”
Each time the researcher left the taxi driver, he had a feeling that something had been left unsaid. He could hardly wait to return, to try again. Next time, he thought, he would make no mistake. The driver held the answer. He would have to give up all his philosophical speculations about two sorts of love, the old one, dating back millions of years, which operated within the tribe, and the new rebellious one that had broken out of that prison. Let others deal with the rivalry or alliance between these two sorts of love and the hopes each of them nourished of treacherously supplanting the other, when the time came. This was a mystery involving the old devices of the world, which from one millennium to the next, in semi-darkness, had shaped the savagery of tigers and the soul’s lusts, pity, shame or hours of peace. He had nothing to do with these things, or with ballads, ancient or modern. His business was with the driver, who perhaps imagined that he had got off scot-free and was out of his clutches. And he had every right to think this as long as the researcher had still not put the fatal question: was he an accessory to murder or not?
That question will come. It will come, my precious. As soon as he had settled various side issues. Then he could forget all those ballads. Or so he imagined, until a moment came when he was compelled to ask himself why he was so fixated on them.
He could easily imagine the horseman with his bride behind him, and the conversation between the two.
“Where are we going? To . . . the prison?”
“Of course to the prison, where else?”
“But what will I do there? And does the law allow this?”
“I never thought of that.”
“But why? What did you agree to? Why did they let you go?
What did you promise them?”
Drumming hooves filled the silence. Then words again.
“Why do you have to go back? Let’s run away, both of us.
We are free.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? What’s holding you back?”
Silence again, and the hooves raising dust.
“Can’t we rest a bit?”
“No, we’re late. This is my third day of leave. The prison gate closes at nightfall.”
“What is that river there? It looks like the one where we first met by the bridge, remember? Why has it turned against us?”
“We have to hurry. Hold on to me tight.”
“But what are those sheep? Those black oxen? Why all this traffic?”
“We’ve got to hurry. Hold tight.”
“Ago, what are you doing? You’re strangling me . . .”
“Perhaps we’ll arrive before the gate closes. Airports are strict nowadays. Boarding gates are closing earlier all the time.”
With half-closed eyes the researcher shook his head. He could not believe this. A hunch told him that, before his next meeting with the driver, he should visit Lulu Blumb.
Unlike the first time, at these later meetings with the researcher, Lulu Blumb was extremely careful to advance the suspicion that Besfort Y. was a murderer only at a late stage in the interview and after the utmost deliberation.
This was evidently why Lulu Blumb, before coming to the essential point of her story, which later featured most prominently in the conclusion to the inquiry, carefully explained various profound and subtle issues of the kind that she was better placed to know than anyone else. For instance, apologising to the researcher for putting it bluntly, she said with a good deal of pride that many men may have slept with Rovena, but none of them could claim to know the intimate parts of her body better than she did. The researcher expected a comparison with the piano, which she indeed mentioned in passing, before dwelling on the idea that her fingers had transposed the music of Mozart and Ravel, against whose background they had met and later made love, from the keyboard of the nightclub piano to her body. With a sardonic smile, she added that she did not believe that the tedious and often barbarous statements of the Council of Europe about military intervention, terrorism, bombing and other horrors, which were Besfort’s stock in trade, went very well with lovemaking.
Always along the same lines, and evidently wishing to postpone as long as possible the moment when she pointed the finger of blame, Liza Blumberg dispelled some of the mystery surrounding an aspect of the crime that had baffled many. She was as much tortured by pangs of conscience at not having rescued Rovena from Besfort as by grief at her death.
She kept saying this was the first time she had ever been defeated by a man.
During endless days and nights, Lulu Blumb vainly racked her brains. How had Besfort kept the woman he loved so enchained? How had he so terrorised her? How had he made her so sick?
Usually men behaved like complete fools when they discovered that their rival was a woman. They sniggered or felt relieved that it was not another man that had ousted them. Some were devoured by curiosity, and others hoped to beguile their rival. Later, when they knew the truth, they would beat their heads with their fists and curse the day they had grinned like apes instead of howling in dismay.
Lulu Blumb had waited impatiently for that moment. She waited until it dawned on her that it would never come. Besfort would never grow jealous of her. She would be jealous of him. This was the difference between them, which handed the victory to him instead of to her.
The two rivals knew about each other, but in different ways. When Rovena once mentioned a new experience with Besfort, the pianist had cut her off, saying she did not want to know. Rovena retorted that Besfort was quite the opposite and wanted to know everything. At this moment Lulu Blumb went pale.
“What do you mean, the opposite?”
It was too late for Rovena to put together a soothing reply . . . The opposite meant that not only did he not stand in the way of her seeing Lulu, but he even liked to hear . . . meaning he enjoyed . . . and he even encouraged her, whenever she quarrelled with Lulu, to make up.
“You slut,” Liza shouted. Rovena, she said, had used their love to excite that bastard’s lust. She had marketed it like some porno film. Like an idiot, she had allowed herself to be used like a doll. Do you understand what I mean? Do you understand German? Do you know what “doll” means? A dummy! That’s how he used you. Like those pimps from your country who put their fiancées on the street. You’ve read the news -papers and heard the radio. But you didn’t stop there. You dragged me into this game. And his lordship, this generous scumbag, gives his permission for you to come to me. In other words, he throws me charity in the shape of yourself. Because that’s what you’ve been reduced to, a dummy. And that’s what I’ve become, a beggar at the church door.
Rovena listened in bewilderment to Liza’s sobbing, which was so much harder to endure than her rage. Besfort wasn’t jealous, because she counted for nothing. To his Balkan male mentality, she, Lulu Blumb, was an object of ridicule, a plaything, a soap bubble, a distraction for Rovena while she remained enslaved to him. She apologised for the word “slut”, and all the other things. She admitted that she could not compete with that monster. She accepted defeat. Perhaps it would be better if they did not meet any more. She had nothing more to say except: God help you!
Rovena wept too. She also begged forgiveness. She told Lulu that she shouldn’t take all these things so much to heart. In the end, he was her husband.
“Husband?” she wailed through her sobs. This was the first she had heard of it . . . In fact, it was true . . . They were keeping it secret . . . At least it was true for Rovena . . . “But you were ready to come with me to that little Greek church in the middle of the Ionian Sea to be married . . .”
“That’s true, but it didn’t really change anything . . . He was my husband in another sense, I mean, in another dim ension . . .”
