“Yes, sir.”
“Did you ever hear of some strange, not to say horrible, photographs in the files stored down in the Bat Room?”
“No, sir.”
“Keep your eyes on mine! … Did you ever hear tell of a snapshot of the Politburo, standing over the corpse of one of their present or former colleagues, with guns in their hands, delivering the coup de grâce? Answer!”
“No, sir”
“Did you ever see a photograph of the new head of state firing a gun at the lifeless body of a former member of the Politburo?”
“Oh, no, sir!”
“And you did not see the selfsame president looking for that photograph in particular, on that night in April, down in the Secret Archives? This is your last chance. Answer!”
“Oh, God, I would have done far better to drown in the Adriatic!”
… Mark held his forehead in the palms of his hands. This inquiry was wearing him out like no other inquiry ever had. He looked at the clock. It was 3:00 A.M. There was still some time to go.
The whole business was like an infinite set of cogs: files within files within files, with no end to it. He stayed for a long while with his head in his hands, without moving. Then, like a diver who fills his lungs before jumping in, he took a deep breath and plunged back into the paperwork on his desk.
The forgers of the Book of the Blood … The only real exhibit that had been found so far was a copy of a memorandum of agreement with a group of Germans (the very same people were suspected of having manufactured Hitler’s diaries). The Germans, for their part, clung unwaveringly to the explicit content of the memorandum, which was, they said, an understanding about a pipeline project. An inexperienced eye could indeed believe such a story, since the memorandum did seem to refer to the construction of an aqueduct.
But what was the real meaning of Clause 7, which stipulated that “the Albanian side is responsible for drawing up the text, while the German side takes responsibility for technical aspects”? What text?
“The text” was the wording that was supposed to be put on the commemorative plaques that they planned to erect in places where murders had been committed in disputes over water rights. “You are not unaware, we assume, that water has often given rise to violent conflicts.”
“Are you a pipeline construction enterprise, or historians of rural life?”
“Assistant Commissar, sir, aqueducts are often the focus of painful memories.”
“And Appendix Two? ‘Draft Text, p. 714. The Ballideme family has a blood to claim from the Kryezeze. The Frangaj family has a blood debt to the Hoti. The Prejlocaj family owe an injury to the Shkreli. Gjon Pal Marku has a blood debt. The Berisha and the Nano families have no claim on each other. The Krasniqi clan has blood to claim from the Gurazi…,’ and so on and so forth! How do you account for all that? Do you have the gall to claim that all this is just wording for commemorative plaques?”
“That is exactly what it is, Deputy Commissioner, sir.”
“Stop all this rubbish! And tell me honestly what the purpose of this so-called Book of the Blood really is. Who commissioned it from you? To what end? To have the whole of Albania descend into chaos and mayhem? Tell me!”
… but nobody’s going to speak out, Mark thought. The twenty-six painters who’d helped put Gentian in jail refused to talk, and so had the politicians who were linked to the outlawed gangs, and so had the travelers who’d talked to the Sphinx at the gates of Thebes. Did you see it all with your own eyes, or did fear and terror cause you to see nothing at all? What went on in your mind to turn the political tension that was perceptible all around — that well-known foreboding that is always the prelude to a dictatorship — to turn that tension, in your mind, into a Sphinx? Or perhaps you belonged to a faction eager to put Thebes under a rule of iron? And to favor this plan, were you not yourself involved in provoking the fear and anxiety that in the end created the Sphinx?
Those are supertough cases to solve, thought Mark. They’ll never be cracked. It would be easier to get to the bottom of the iceberg that sank the Titanic, or of NATO’s C-in-C, or of an avalanche that feels bruised by the cadaver it carries down the mountainside within it.
“But you at least don’t need to wear me out!” he said in his own mind to his girlfriend, even while asking her for a confession.
“I don’t understand why you suddenly want to question me on a subject that never seemed to interest you very much — how I lost my virginity, and to whom. Was it our gym teacher, the first man to see us in underwear, when we were twelve or thirteen? Or was it one of my cousins, on some long hot summer afternoon, when we were all lying on the grass, pretending to sleep, but with all our senses on fire? Why are you so anxious to know the answer, Mark? It was one or the other, or maybe both….”
“What sort of an answer is that? Why so vague? Why?”
“Because it’s better that way, Mark. Believe me, my darling, it’s better that way.”
The gym teacher, or a cousin during a heat wave … Incest seemed to be the latest thing!
A shudder like the one that had awakened him made him look toward the window. His nostrils flared, as if he had smelled something intoxicating. No more time! he could hear himself screaming, silently.
He slammed shut the file in front of him, threw on his overcoat, and ran down the stairs just as fast as he had come up.
In the pale light of dawn, the city seemed quite foreign. He was only walking, but he panted as if he had been racing along. Suddenly his house rose before him, as quickly as if he had run there. He glided up the stairs, opened the door, and fell onto his bed fully dressed, as if he had been felled by lightning. He had just enough lucidity to think that epileptics must crumple like that after they’ve had an attack, and then he fell into a deep, deep sleep.
CHAPTER 6
MARK SPENT ALL OF SUNDAY MORNING at his easel. He couldn’t recall another occasion when he had taken such pains to mix a color. He paused to look at the stains his oils had made on his hands and sleeves, and all over his smock as well. What he was trying to get was a particular shade of white, as cold and transparent as possible. Without that white he would never be able to represent the sunken part of the iceberg on a canvas. In one corner he had inscribed, “A History of the Void,” and beneath it, “Eight Views of the Iceberg that Sank the Titanic”
He looked once more at the paint stains on his smock. They seemed so cold that he imagined he was covered in sleet, and shivered at the thought of it. That was a good sign. But even so, he wasn’t really satisfied.
To figure the submerged part, the part of the iceberg that had to look blurred and immaterial, like a waking dream, but which was also the most tragic and sinister part: that was what he found desperately difficult to do.
He couldn’t say on what day or at what time he’d had the idea of painting the curriculum vitae, so to speak, of the nameless iceberg that had caused so much sorrow, through eight different views of it. What had intrigued him about the tragedy of Marian Shkreli, or so it seemed, had been its well-spring, its root cause. In his mind, as if in a hall of mirrors, it had appeared first as a shroud of fog; then as black propaganda; then as a cause that was not what it seemed; then as age-old nonsense and stupidity; then, finally, as pure contingency, which, like a tiny snowball, had been quite enough to set off an avalanche. His mind easily made the jump from avalanche to iceberg: both came from far away — from the high peaks or from the Arctic wilderness; both required subzero temperatures; both were never named; both brought random death (an avalanche can bury a village, an iceberg can sink a liner); and, to clinch the equivalence, both disappeared without leaving a trace, save for human pain and fear.