With a kind of passionate intensity that had recently become almost normal for him, Mark Gurabardhi ran through the entire range of suppositions that must have surfaced after that night of January 17. It was almost as if he had himself taken part in the interrogation that the bride, her parents, and her neighbors were put through.
First hypothesis: the snake had been put to death. Had the young woman thrown the snake — not just the skin, but the reptile itself — into the fire? Unaided? Or with the help of her parents? Isn’t that how they had sought to expunge the stain that had been visited on them in full public knowledge, even if it involved taking a risk? (Isn’t it true that many people, in like manner, overcome by despair, rip the signs of humiliation from their clothes or from their doors?)
Second issue: the girl’s seeming delight on the morning after her wedding night. It could be accounted for if she had been given an assurance (by a parent or clansman) that the abomination would not last long.
Next: the loss of her virginity. There were so many ways to lose it in the overcrowded intimacy of large families, where brothers, sisters, and cousins of both sexes all lived under the same roof.
The only element that was incompatible with this version of the story lay in the visible and profound decline of the bride after the disappearance of the snake. It was a real and apparently unremitting affliction. And this awkward fact obliged everybody to try to develop an alternative hypothesis.
Was it a dream? Had the girl had a hallucination? That could not be ruled out. Everybody had seen the snake, whereas nobody had seen the young man. It was thus perfectly possible that, putting aside any attempt to escape the public humiliation, the whole development of the story — the young man’s good looks, his irrepressible passion, etc. — had been the mere imaginings of a young bride under unbearable stress.
Mark’s hands reached for a pack of cigarettes in one pocket as quickly as he would have reached for his revolver if he had had to defend himself against a mugger.
And what if neither explanation was right? A drama usually exists less in reality than in the fertile mind of its inventor. In those days, disappointment on a wedding night was just about the commonest, most everyday tragedy you could imagine: the partner might have been horribly ugly, or infirm, or impotent…. It was an ancient tragedy, one that went back to the times when people in the millions accepted marriage without ever having set eyes upon their spouse. That world was being reinvented now, by the Internet.
Mark smiled inwardly. Then he felt his smile vanish. How can I explain the fear I feel? he wondered.
He was afraid, and he was cold. He tried to banish all these old questions from his mind, but nothing could have been more difficult….
To take things one step further, if you made an effort to think from inside the legend, it told of an encounter between man and beast at a special moment when they were facing each other in a place where they should not have been together. Both had overstepped the boundary and ended up merged into a single body, in a temporal order that belonged to neither one nor the other. Yes, that’s how they managed to kill each other so brutally.
So that’s how things really happened, Mark surmised, and again he felt pierced by the cold. All the time I’ve wasted these last months constructing crazy hypotheses about snakes! …
He suddenly thought back, with what he considered to be amazing clarity, to that summer’s afternoon when, in their drab Tirana apartment, his stern-faced father had tried to persuade him to enroll at the Police Academy instead of the School of Fine Arts.
His father stared at him hard with his one good eye, projecting a flood of grumpy bitterness. He had long been aware that his father’s one eye (the other had been lost in a shoot-out with bandits) could express joy and sorrow in alternation. You’re refusing to do the only thing I’ve ever asked of you! was what the reproachful one-eyed gaze seemed to be saying. You couldn’t tell whether his father’s main reason was his belief in law and order or his desire to avenge the loss of his eye.
“You’ll wear a police uniform, just like me, just like your grandfather, who was murdered by brigands under the monarchy.”
“No, Father. I won’t be wearing that uniform….” Mark’s mind resumed its drift: uniform … suit… snakeskin…. Whereupon he cried out loud: “I must stop this!”
CHAPTER 2
THE ONLY SUBJECT OF CONVERSATION all over town that Sunday afternoon was the holdup at the bank. A rumor spread that the outlaws had been captured at Mountain Springs, but it turned out to be unfounded. The caretaker, though, who had been found with his hands and wrists tied up, provided some information about the robbers: there were three of them, they’d worn masks, and they were armed. It still wasn’t known by what means they had managed to force the safe. Nor how much they had gotten away with.
Mark Gurabardhi looked for Zef high and low, to get more of the story out of him, but the man was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t at home or in the pool hall. As Mark watched the lights go out in the windows one by one, he realized with some surprise that he was fascinated by the incident, as was the whole town, but maybe even more than anyone else. As a rule, he was usually much less interested than other people in local events like football matches or political meetings. He didn’t really know whether his relative indifference was to his advantage or not. But if up to now he had been vaguely proud of not being like most ordinary folk, should he not now feel diminished by being part of the common herd?
He shook his head as if to rid it of this idiotic worry Whether he was ashamed of it or not, he was a human being like any other, as curious as the next man about what happens on Earth: about how banks can be robbed, about how turtles make love, about how sick kings in the Middle Ages were cleaned after they had relieved themselves. (Ever since the director of the City Arts Center had gotten back from Spain two weeks before and had told him about the sad end of Philip II at the Escorial Palace, Mark could not get that last image out of his mind.)
As he went back into his apartment, he stopped at the door to look at it carefully, especially the lock, and then closed it carelessly behind him. There was nothing to steal here. Except, perhaps, the portrait of his young mistress, which he had hung on the wall over the head of the bed. He stretched out, folded his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, hoping that this would help to empty his mind completely.
Sundown, on a Sunday, in the back of beyond … he soon began to dream. Doubly desolate, after making love.
He would gladly have swapped one of his lovemaking sessions (even the second orgasm, which had been the better) for an hour with his girlfriend in the café, in the evening.
He hoped that new ways and manners would quickly take hold in his little town of B—. After all, B— was in Albania, too! Everything’s connected! he often thought. He could not understand how, in other towns, white slavers sending girls to work as prostitutes in Italy were uncovered every day, whereas here in B— girls didn’t even dare spend an hour in the café with their boyfriends.
But he had not lost hope, and that was one of the reasons why he had not tried very hard to get transferred to Tirana when the dictatorship had taken its first major battering.
He was tempted to smile at the thought that it was barely a few years since his graduation from the School of Fine Arts and his appointment to this northern town, where, in the eyes of all the local girls, he had been the very embodiment of modernity Because in some incomprehensible way the tables had suddenly been turned. Nowadays, between two embraces, his girlfriend would tell him, You know, there’s a new fashion in this or that. He didn’t feel mortally offended, no, he had almost come to savor the process of being aged, even though he was not yet thirty. To begin with, without really realizing what he was doing, he’d encouraged her to take on this new role as his guide; eventually, he grasped that what he really wanted was for her to become his Beatrice, to lead him through purgatory.