Mark’s first sketches showed the uncle’s lonely walk down the mountain, the naked body of the girl at the heart of the tragedy, the distraught features of the brother chosen to carry out the execution. But he put these aside and transferred all the human features of the story to the iceberg. He saw it as a bull, the leader of a herd, with ice-calves in its train alongside the female floes of the clan. The long trek to the North Atlantic, a fruitless drifting that would bring it face-to-face with an immense floating palace of light and music. Blindly, it locked its horns on the ship. When the deed was done, nobody gave a further thought to the old bull. It was still there, standing erect in the water whence the frozen corpses were fished up, but it occurred to nobody to mark it in any way — with a branding iron, for example, as criminals were marked in the Middle Ages, or if not by such a weal, then at least with some other sign, like a half-raised flag, a black sheet, or just a cross.
The iceberg went the way it had come: namelessly, just a bull in a herd of cattle, with nothing more to say about it. Perhaps it drifted northward again with a great gash in its side, like a war wound from its one single adventure in the world of human beings. The rest of its life among fellow bergs must have been as dull and colorless as it had been before the southern excursion, just like everything else that you could say about it. In old age it would have begun to shrink, and in the end it would have merged with the ice cap, to universal indifference, while some of its younger clansmen would be setting off for far horizons, toward the very place where it had once brought death and destruction.
Mark thought someone had knocked at his door. It was his girlfriend, but he had been so buried in his painting that, for the first time in his life, he hadn’t heard her footsteps coming up the stairs.
He kissed her ebulliently; she responded in kind. They had not seen each other for three weeks. He whispered sweet nothings in her ear, but couldn’t stop himself from confessing what he had resolved not to say to her at alclass="underline" that after all that had happened, he had been afraid that she would never come back to him. Then, since she asked him what he had been doing, he tried to explain it all as best he could. So, my brother looks like an iceberg? she said, trying to make it sound like a joke. No, not your brother, but your uncle, and actually, less your real uncle than the Kanun itself, or to be more precise, the essence of the Kanun, which is really ineffable … He realized that the more he tried to explain what he was doing, the less sense it made.
“I just can’t explain it!” he burst out in the end, with a laugh. “To do that, I would have to be as logical as ice…. But hang on, it’s getting rather chilly in here. I’ll just light the stove.”
When the stove was roaring nicely, Mark opened the lid and moved the bed over toward it.
He had imagined that the whole highland folk story would have bored her, but in fact it produced the opposite effect. Color came to her cheeks, she couldn’t hide her desire to hear more about it. He stroked her breasts, then, burning with desire, he looked at her hairless underarm. As he got a condom out of the drawer in the bedside cabinet, she held his hand and whispered in his ear, as if it was a great secret:
“There’s no need. I’m on the pill.”
* * *
As usual, after lovemaking they began to talk about what they should properly have discussed beforehand, but which desire had set aside or made seem unimportant. Her brother had been in hiding since the day of the shooting. A kind of muffled calm had descended on her family. The contraceptive pills, well, they’d come from a cousin of hers, who’d got them from Tirana…. Strange to say, the unprecedented circumstances at home had not dulled her sexual desire but had sharpened it. I guess you noticed that, she said, kissing him on the nape of his neck. He let her know he agreed and was ready to have another go…. This time was really sublime, she said. She took the cigarette from Mark’s fingers, drew deeply on it twice, and then realized she needed to wash up.
She went home before dusk. From the bay window, Mark watched her walking away. He wondered whether a woman’s bearing was different after she’d made love, but found no answer to the question. Without you, he thought a moment later, I have no answer to anything. He tried to imagine her sexual parts changing shape in time with her step. How many times — especially when he was suffering the pangs of desire — had he attempted to draw those private parts, without ever quite being satisfied with his drawings? There was always something missing. And as soon as he tried to get it down on paper, he invariably left out some other trait. He knew it wasn’t a great discovery of his own, but he was convinced that the reason for this was that the invisible part of a woman’s sex — like the unseen part of an iceberg — was the most important. Obviously it was the hidden part that gave it all its value. A street poet whose couplets were circulated by word of mouth had called a woman’s genitalia “a wolf howling in winter under thickly falling snow.”
Mark shivered with cold as he strode toward the Town Café. He’d noticed there was a special atmosphere in it whenever the chief of police came to have a drink there. On this occasion, he was with the recently appointed prosecutor, and as a result, gossip about the imminent arrest of the bank robbers, as well as more intense recent hopes of capturing Marian Shkreli’s assassin, flew around the barroom from table to table. But though they had these two things very much in their minds, the customers were laughing about something else.
Mark ordered his coffee and tried to stop himself from smiling. That was something he often had to do in this café, when, upon entering, he became aware of inspiring a kind of awe that he thought inappropriate. Sometimes he even felt guilty about coming in and freezing what had been a jolly and relaxed atmosphere in the café. The faces of all these good folk, who till then had been speaking quite freely — telling each other scabrous jokes about parliamentary debates or female buttocks — suddenly stiffened, as if they had been caught in the act. Good God, they imagine I’ve got huge ideas going round in my head, Mark said to himself. Whereas in fact there are only puny little thoughts between my ears, and not even very logical ones…. If his mind ever pulled itself together, it was only thanks to these people.
As he took small, slow sips of his coffee, he tried but in the end failed to stop his mind from wandering back to his young girlfriend’s body. The outer appearance of the slit between her legs gave no hint of the wild beast screaming in its hidden folds — like a plain-faced and simpleminded guard stationed at the entrance of the treasury. It was even reminiscent of the approach to the deep storage depot (if that was what Mark had seen), with thick bushes hiding the entrance. In any case, what happens inside is inexplicable, Mark thought, and it’s not by chance that Oedipus got lost in that inner darkness.
“What’s really a priority,” someone at the next table said, “is for people to get their teeth seen to! You may smile, but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time!”
Mark smiled too, but the speaker continued with his thoughts. “If you want to give a short but serious snapshot of the Communist world as a whole, you couldn’t do better than likening it to a gathering of thousands and thousands of people with bad teeth.”
“Ah, so you think I should know how to put it all right? Some say start by reestablishing public order, others say stick to the rules laid down by the World Bank, or else start by repairing the roads — but you, you say that the real priority is people’s teeth! Boy, you’ve got some great ideas!”