Days go by, but things don’t calm down: they get harsher. The rumors decrease in number and variety, but that’s because a poster denouncing all of them has been put up on walls. Hades’ memoirs are banned; by the same order, his wife’s newspaper is closed down for being too freethinking. Even uttering the pentasyllable immortality is now against the law. One of Zeus’s advisers opines that in such circumstances it would be more appropriate not to ban use of the word but to empty it of all content. After some hesitations, this opinion prevails. Persons previously considered merely illustrious — poets, sculptors, war leaders, even great courtesans — will be designated henceforth as “immortals.”
News of this new yardstick spreads in no time at all. It is a gift of the gods to the mortals on earth, and they are grateful. Each time the gods now skim through news from mortal humanity, they can barely control their anger and contempt. You really thought you’d become immortal, you little insects? But there are major reasons why they have to hide their resentment. Anything that helps keep the greatest mystery of the universe hidden has to be accepted. They may have the minds of gods, but their brains go cloudy when they try to fathom where Death’s exit door might be found. There is no such way out, the older gods declare. So put the temptation to the side. Even after torture and endless cross-examinations, Tantalus himself never lets out anything comprehensible on that subject. Maybe he acted like a sleepwalker, under the influence of an alien idea that had come to him from some other world? An alien idea that had perhaps been lost along the way, an idea that landed here by chance, before taking fright and fleeing in search of its own home?
More than a hundred thousand years later — maybe two hundred or five hundred thousand years later — Mark Gurabardhi lay with his hands clasped in the nape of his neck, trying to figure out all these questions. Maybe they were like the questions that would soon be put to the robbers who had held up the National Bank — even if the crime of distant Olympus was unlike any other.
He could picture the sinister two-story police barracks, and his face twisted into a scowl. All the same, he knew what the questions would be when they got the holdup men inside: Did anyone give you information about access to the bank? What means did you use to force the safe? Did you know what was inside it? Where have you hidden the money… the jewels … the crumbs of immortality?
CHAPTER 3
SHE HAD HAD HER HAIR DONE differently once again, but the style she had chosen really didn’t match the vaguely absent expression on her face. Any other time, she would have lit up the whole room with her smile, posing with her hips and arms like a runway model, and then teased him with a “Now, do you like me like this?”
But this time she didn’t behave that way at all, as if she’d forgotten what she’d had done to her hair. As soon as she got into the studio she went over to the walls, inspecting them with what seemed to Mark a falsely interested eye, looking for the signs of the work that the locksmith had done.
“Are you having the doors reinforced as well?” she asked, with her back still turned.
Mark grunted “yes” in response. He was tempted to ask what the matter was, but he feared that in touchy circumstances such as these, which often arose without any obvious cause, asking a question like that would only make things worse.
“You have a new hairdo?” he said at last. “It suits you very well.”
“You think so? Thanks.”
He brushed her cheek with his lips and could smell the perfume on her neck.
“They’ve just opened a modern hair salon,” she said. “Have you seen it?”
He thought she looked a little pale in the face, as well as distracted, and the hollows above her cheekbones suggested she’d had a sleepless night. He gave her another cuddle. She didn’t reject the overture, but she did nothing to encourage him either. As she lifted her arms to put them around his neck, Mark noticed the down that had begun to grow again under her armpits.
Mark realized with a glum foreboding that all her preening had just been for her stay in Tirana.
He slipped his hands down her back to her hips, and the feeling of her filmy underwear beneath the fabric of her dress made him bolder.
She stiffened and pushed him away. “No,” she said, almost in a whisper.
No: that’s how relations between a man and a woman begin to go cold, Mark thought.
“Is there anything wrong?” he inquired.
“No,” she said again as she drew his hand away from her shoulder.
He could feel her awkwardness and stress.
“I don’t understand,” he protested grumpily. “If there’s anything that’s not right between us, then be frank and tell me.”
She sighed deeply. “I don’t know if I should … tell you.”
Mark instantly regretted having spoken before thinking. He was also sorry he had pushed the discussion as if to the edge of a cliff. He was on the verge of shouting, I don’t want to know! I am fed up enough as it is, but it was too late.
He guessed he knew what she had to tell him: I didn’t want to bring it up, but since you insist, I won’t hide anything….
“As soon as you got back from your trip, I knew something had happened,” he mumbled with his eyes turned away from her. “Up there, in Tirana, apparently.”
“No, not in Tirana. Right here!”
Well, that takes the cake! Mark said to himself. The new hairstyle — he saw it now — was meant for the other man…. But to hell with it: every affair comes to an end! Such instantly invented self-consolation was hardly convincing.
“All the same, I think I have a right to know what this is about”
He was amazed to hear himself saying the exact opposite of what was actually in his mind. In truth, he would rather not ever know anything about it.
“Of course,” she said. “However painful it may be, fll try to explain….”
Okay, go on and hit me! he thought. Cut me into little pieces!
He staggered, as if drunk, toward the low table and grasped a bottle of schnapps. Both the bottle and the glass into which he poured a shot were blotched with yellow and blue fingerprints. He offered her the glass, but as she declined with a shake of her head, he downed it himself, in one go.
She had begun to talk, but he didn’t look at her. He kept on staring at the big windowpane as if, by averting his gaze, he could delay the emergence of the truth. And that is more or less what happened. Her words were virtually incomprehensible. She was talking about the gloomy atmosphere in her family home, as if a frost had begun to take hold of everything and was growing harsher by the day. You would have thought she was talking about the frost coming down from the high peaks as winter sets in. At one point, Mark gave a deep sigh, as if he’d begun to grasp at least something of what she was going on about. As he heard her talk about “the old ways,” he first thought it was about an arranged marriage; in other words, that she had to get engaged — but she shook her head vigorously and quickly set him straight. No, no, it was something much more serious, and therefore, of course, much more sinister. Nonetheless, it was still all utterly confused. Even she couldn’t figure it out, because things were apparently being kept from her. But now her family was expecting the arrival of an aged uncle….
He was on the verge of muttering, What’s your old uncle have to do with all this? Which stone did he crawl out from under? Why are you all so anxious to see him? But she didn’t give Mark time to grumble.