Good Lord, what a stupid ditty! Mark thought. He had to listen for a while to make out the rest of it:
The boy is dying of love
Stand up straight, pretty girl, stand up straight!
It would have been hard to find a tune better fitted to this desolate provincial Sunday afternoon. Mark hurried on so as not to hear the song, but just as the unknown singer had faded into the distance, Mark found himself repeating the refrain:
Stand up straight, pretty girl, stand up straight!
It occurred to him that that was precisely how provincial dull-wittedness spreads from person to person. But that didn’t stop him from inwardly regurgitating those pointless words, in spite of himself, all the way back to the studio.
The locksmith had indeed finished the job. He had even stuck up a piece of paper next to the new door with the warning “Take Care! Wet Paint!”
Mark took his new key from his pocket, opened his new door, and then walked around his studio as if checking that nothing else had been changed inside it. The craftsman had told him that anyone, but especially an artist, feels different once he has an armored door.
He stopped for a moment in front of his unfinished nude, then, as his eye wandered toward the El Greco copy, his mind returned once again to the image of Philip II sinking slowly toward death at the Escorial. Like any king, he, too, must have wondered how best to make his doors protect him from intrusion.
To his considerable surprise, however, Mark did not feel safer; quite the opposite. In any case, he was ready to drop. The fitting of the new door had only made him tired. He lay down, back to the bay window, to shade his eyes from the light. Evening was coming on quite fast. It was a strange kind of dusk, for unlike an ordinary sundown, the heavenly orb was still shining at full strength…. At first he barely heard the knocking on the door, but soon the noise made by the messengers of Death grew ever more perceptible. Mark reached around himself with fevered movements to find the talisman of immortality, but he just could not remember where he had put it away. The hammering on the other side of the door got more and more violent. Only when Mark shouted “Enough!” did silence return.
It was the shout that woke him up. He looked at the bay window, then at the door. All his thinking about the door must have set off the nightmare, he decided.
“You won’t be getting any visitors now!” the locksmith had told him. “Your art’s quite safe till kingdom come.” Mark smiled to himself without bothering to explain out loud that he’d heard “your heart’s quite safe”; that is, he had become more or less immortal The cards had gotten shuffled in his poor head: immortals get burgled, whereas mediocre and mortal folk never have their things stolen….
His eyes alighted once again on the bay window. The watery light of the dying day was slowly fading away in a kind of haughty despair. He stood up and paced the studio floor once again.
Night had fallen when he went out. Before going to have dinner at the restaurant, he wandered past the block where Zef lived. The windows of his third-floor apartment were still dark.
“Where are you, Zef?” he cried out silently.
He continued on, trying to think of nothing at all. What peace! he said to himself as he stopped to light a cigarette. Was that a distant lowing he could hear? He went on his way, but stopped again immediately, since the distant noise sounded out a second time. It couldn’t be confused with the howling of the wind or with an echo from the mountain valleys. It was a rumbling that seemed to arise from an unimaginable depth and an impossible distance. Like the unending aftershock of the big bang rolling on eternally throughout the universe. And maybe that’s what it really is! Mark decided.
CHAPTER 4
IT TOOK NO MORE THAN A COUPLE of customers talking loudly at one of the five tables of the Town Café to make it seem like there was something going on. That morning, there was heated conversation at two of the said tables, and at both of them the discussion was so lively that a stranger coming into the room and wanting to get into the thick of things would have had a hard time deciding which table to sit at.
Mark hesitated himself as he stood in the door, but not for the same reason. When he could see that neither table was likely to calm down, he went up to the bar and stood alongside Cuf Kertolla, sitting by himself, as usual, with a glass in front of him. They can say what they like! thought Mark. He knew that the bar crowd took him for a standoffish and unsociable fellow, a stuck-up from the capital, or even a has-been, but he didn’t give a damn,
“They’ve got problems,” Cuf muttered as he nodded toward the noisy customers at the tables.
Mark pretended not to have heard and ordered a coffee. But however hard you tried to keep out of it, you couldn’t help picking up the main topic of conversation. At one of the tables, they were debating whether the new head of state was more afraid of his predecessor, the man whose place he had taken, than that predecessor had been of the terrifying leader he had replaced and who was, thank God, no longer of this world. At the other table, the drinkers were talking of some Judas or other who was expected to arrive from the capital, or who had maybe already arrived in discreet disguise. He was supposed to have denounced some prominent writers back in Tirana, and God only knew why he was now traipsing around in the provinces.
“They’ve really got problems!” Cuf Kertolla said again, but speaking directly to Mark this time. “They talk big, these Albanians! Always going on about heads of state, the UN, or Bible stories. But they don’t mention the holes in their own underpants! Say, do you know if they’re going to make us pay taxes?”
Cuf showed how proud he was of the relevance of his question by raising his eyebrows.
“No, I have no idea,” Mark answered.
“Apparently, we Albanians, after having suffered from all kinds of divisions and splits — Communists and bourgeois, northerners and southerners, Catholics and Muslims, and the devil knows how many other factions — we Albanians, I was saying, are giving it all up so as to form two new grand parties: the Tails and the Smalls. Have you already heard about that?”
“No,” said Mark, “I haven’t.”
“Well, it’s like I said. The leader of the Talis is the king, of course; he’s nearly seven feet. As for the Smalls, they’re under the whip of a fat little man from the South. It’s going to be a hoot!”
This time Mark said nothing. He drained his cup, paid, and left.
Outside he could feel the first whiff of autumn weather. The trees had already lost some of their leaves, and they looked foreign and menacing. Most of them seemed to have been designed as gallows, in any case.
Mark frowned and shook his head, as he did every time he wanted to get a disagreeable thought out of his head. Listening to a conversation about Judas first thing in the morning was not the best way to put him in a good mood.
As he drew close to the City Arts Center, he heard the sound of running right behind him. He turned around and saw the head of the music section coming up.
“I went to look for you at the studio,” he said, panting for breath. “The boss sent me to get you. We’re expecting a delegation this afternoon.”
“Really? I’d just stopped to have a coffee” Mark laughed. “Have you heard of the two new parties — the Tails and the Smalls?”
“No” the musician replied. “But that wouldn’t be so surprising.”
“There are reports of an old spy turning up here, too. They even came up with his name, Judas, which did surprise me a bit. I didn’t think anyone in this backwater would know any names.”