“I couldn’t,” she said. “Somebody arrived unexpectedly from Albania. There’s been a coup there.”
“Oh, so that’s what’s on your mind,” he continued.
“Of course.”
He shrugged his shoulders. Since he had left, he hadn’t given a thought to Slovakia. He never wanted to hear the place mentioned again.
She knew this. A lot of Albanians talked like this.
An hour later, as she almost ran to the hotel, the March wind did all it could to draw out her tears. The two receptionists gave her a strange look. One of them handed her a small envelope.
“My darling, I’ve had to leave suddenly. You can imagine why. xxx B.”
The tears finally poured from her.
With a sudden movement, as if finding the lever to stem the flow of her memories, Rovena turned off the shower.
The silence was worse. She was sure that he had still not come back to the room. To fill the emptiness she picked up the hairdryer. A wild blast of air replaced the rush of the shower, a suitable accompaniment to her fury.
You’re finally going to tell me what it is that isn’t the same as before, she thought angrily.
They had been together so many years and yet she had never said those words to him. Not during the nightmare of The Hague, on the threshold of the great trial. Not even during the worst storms at the time of her relationship with Lulu.
Throughout that winter, the cold eyes of the psychiatrist had looked at her, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left of the mirror. “This sort of crisis is not common, but it is well documented. You are making a passage, undergoing a transition. Because this experience is over, you think you have accomplished it painlessly. You forget that even moving house is a form of stress, let alone what you’re going through now. It’s like being transported to another planet.”
After leaving the doctor, she vented half her anger on the phone, right there in the street. “I’ve changed now, understand? You’re no longer what you were to me. You aren’t my master any more, understand? Nor as frightening as I used to think, not any more.”
Nothing was the same as before… She had once said to Besfort these same words that now, from him, wounded her so deeply. Perhaps it was now his turn.
Take your revenge then. What are you waiting for? The deafening noise did not allow her to calm down. But the thought occurred to her that he was not the sort of person to take revenge by giving as good as he got.
As long as he has not made the same switch, she thought. The Council of Europe was said to be swarming with gays.
The silence after she switched off the hairdryer was twice as deep as after the shower.
Just… as long as he… has not… meanwhile… made the same switch.
Her final words fell slowly like the last leaves after a storm has abated.
In the silence she felt defenceless again. Her eyes darted to her cosmetics, spread out below the mirror. First she reached for her lipstick. She lifted it to her mouth, but in her nervous haste allowed the tube to slip to one side. The red smudge goaded her into daubing herself even more crudely, instead of taking proper care.
I can be a murderer too, she said to herself… Like you, my lord and master.
The noise of the door brought her up short. He’s back, she cried to herself, and half her rage evaporated instantly.
Hurriedly, as if destroying the evidence, she wiped the lipstick from her face.
She grew calmer as she started on her eyelashes. The ritual of make-up always cleared her mind more than anything else.
She thought she could muster a smile, but her face still did not obey.
She felt safe with the idea that the more beautiful she made herself, the more easily she could extract his secret. A mask always gives you an advantage over an opponent.
Chapter Four
The same day. Both together.
Just as she had expected, he looked admiringly when he saw her.
“Now I know why you’re so late.”
“Have you been waiting a long time?”
He looked at his watch. “About twenty minutes.”
“Really?”
He had drunk a coffee downstairs and returned while she was in the shower.
“It’s beautiful out on the balcony. But what’s the matter?”
She raised her hands to her cheeks. “I don’t know, but I felt… I remembered for some reason that old gypsy woman. Do you remember her? I told you about her. She was interned because of us.”
“Of course I remember her. Perhaps it was my fault. I promised to do something for her. There were compensation schemes and special pensions for these cases. Give me her name and address. I won’t forget this time.”
“If she’s still alive,” she said. “She was called Zara Zyberi.” She knew the name of her street, Him Kolli, but not the number. She remembered only a persimmon tree in the yard.
She watched his hand writing this down and could barely hold back her tears.
After breakfast they went out for a walk, following their daily routine. Finding a suitable café was so much easier in Vienna than anywhere else.
Outside the cathedral, the old-fashioned carriages waited for passing tourists. Seven years before, they too had taken one. It had been midwinter. Under the dusting of snow the statues had seemed to make tentative signs of welcome. She thought she had never seen so many hotels and streets with “prince” or “crown” in their names. It was her last hope that he would think of marriage, but instead he started talking about the overthrow of the Habsburgs, the only dynasty to fall without bloodshed.
In the café, they watched each other’s hand movements and fell silent. The small ruby of her ring sparkled like frost.
For some reason he recalled the posters of the last city elections in Tirana, and the Piazza restaurant where an Italian- Albanian priest had suddenly struck up the song “There by the village stream, the last Jorgo fell”.
He wanted to tell her about the extraordinary insults the candidates had thrown at one another, and especially about that unknown villager Jorgo, who was mentioned in the song as if he belonged to some dynasty, as Jorgo III or XIV. But at that moment any connection between the memories of the posters and the drunk priest evaporated, the warm glow had vanished from her face and a veil of sadness had descended. Also, he had not had time to tell her the dream about Stalin.
She did not hide her sudden change of mood. After nine years together, and all she had given to this man, he had no grounds to upbraid her over such things. Nor did he have any right to torment her with ambiguous remarks.
He knew that this was a most inadvisable time to say, “What’s the matter with you?” But the words burst out of him.
She smiled wanly. “You should ask yourself that.” He had said that nothing was the same as before, and she had a right to know what this meant. She had waited a whole night to find out.
He bit his lower lip. Rovena stared at him.
“You’re right,” he said. “But believe me, it’s not easy for me to say.”
The chill descended again at once.
Then don’t say it, she wanted to cry, but her lips did not obey her.
“Is there someone else?” she blurted out.
Oh God, came the lacerating thought through his mind. This old phrase, rising from the grave. It wasn’t Rovena who had used it long ago, but himself.
He remembered the scene. As vividly as the election posters, the dilapidated telephone box outside the post office, the filthy rain and her silence down the phone.
“What’s the matter with you?” he had asked, and Rovena had said nothing. And then he had almost shrieked, “Is there someone else?”
They were still using the same words, as if they had no right to any others. “Is there someone else? I’m giving you an answer. There isn’t.”
The tension suddenly eased, and she closed her eyes. She wanted to rest her head on his shoulder. His words came to her as if through a soothing mist. There was no other woman. It was something else. She translated this into German as if to grasp its meaning better. Es ist anders.