Let it be anything, she thought, but not that.
“It’s more complicated,” he went on.
“You don’t love me in the way you used to? You’re tired of me?”
It’s not about me. It’s to do with both of us. It’s about the freedom that she often complained about… He had decided to tell her, but now he found he couldn’t. Something was missing. A lot of things. Next time he would manage it. If not, he would try to put it in a letter.
“Perhaps it’s not true? Perhaps it only seems that way to you? Just as it seemed to me?”
“What did it seem to you?”
“Well, that things aren’t the same as before. I mean that there is something that isn’t like it was, and so it seems to you that everything has changed.”
“That’s not it,” he replied.
His voice seemed to echo as if from a church belfry.
She thought that she had grasped his meaning, but it evaporated in an instant. Was it that he felt tied, in the same way as she had, and wanted to break free? She had once shouted at him: “Tyrant, slave-owner!” All this time, had he too been chafing in silence at the enslaving chains?
As always, she felt that she was too late.
He felt tired. His head ached. On the street, the illuminated signs above the hotels and shops glittered menacingly.
He recollected not the lunch with Stalin, but her first letter. Icy, sub-zero Tirana finally seemed to be getting serious. That’s what she wrote. And as for the place below her belly, since he asked for news of it, it was horribly dark down there.
He remembered other parts of her letter, in which she wrote about her waiting, about her coffee with the gypsy woman, who had said some things that she could not put on paper, and again about the sub-zero temperatures in which all these things were taking place.
Smiling wanly like the winter sun, they both recollected almost the entire letter. In his reply from Brussels he had written that this was without doubt the most beautiful letter to have reached the north that year, from the remotest part of the continent – the Western Balkans, which was so keen to join Europe.
Later, when they met, he was eager to hear what the gypsy woman had said. There was another form of desire, he said, which came from a mysterious, remote epoch.
She wanted to weep. Remembering old love letters was not a good sign.
He had wanted her to tell him about the gypsy woman when they were in bed, before they made love. She told him in a low voice, as if whispering a prayer. He wanted to know if the gypsy woman had asked to see between her legs, and she replied that she hadn’t needed to because she had opened them herself, she could not tell why, she just did it, like the other time… oh no, she didn’t seem lesbian. Or rather, in the fug of that house, lesbianism might be mixed with other things… you really are psychic…
After lunch, they both wanted to rest. When they went out again, dusk had fallen. The royal crowns above the hotel entrances, which in other countries had all been effaced, still wearily clung on in their niches.
They found themselves outside St. Stephen’s Cathedral again, at the end of the boulevard. In the dusk, its windows cast assorted reflections, as if trying on different masks. They looked like the dead, sometimes coming back to life, and sometimes vanishing again.
Bending over her shoulder, he whispered loving words which now sounded incredible to her ears, so rare had they become. First he had stopped saying them. Then she had given up too.
Like forgotten music, they returned, but they seemed somehow unreal. We have lost our feeling for each other, he said in an even sweeter voice. Astonishingly, these words did not sound frightening to her, although they should have done. Nor did the word “marriage” when he uttered it. It seemed untrue, like in a dream. They had been in Vienna seven years before, and she had waited for that word in vain. Now it had arrived after so long, but in an unexpected form.
“Will you agree to be my ex-wife?”
She wanted to cut him short. Was he crazy? But she thought it was better to wait. This was not the first time that he had been obscure. During one of their arguments on the phone, she had said to him: “You tell me to look for a therapist, but you need one more than I do.”
“Your ex-wife?” she finally interrupted. “Is that what you said, or did I mishear you?”
Gently he kissed her and told her not to take it the wrong way. It had to do with their conversation a while ago.
Aha, so we’re back on that subject.
His voice sank to a low murmur, like before their first kiss. She should try to understand him. Their time of love, if not over, was approaching its end. Most misunderstandings and dramas happened because people did not want to accept this end. They could easily tell day from night or summer from winter, but they were blind to the end of love. And so they could not face up to it.
“Do you want us to separate? Why not just say so?”
He said that she was using the world’s usual standards. Just like the rabble do. All the world’s ordinary opinions, which unfortunately are the most widespread and claim the authority of laws, come from the rabble. He wanted to get away from that sort of thing, to find some chink through which they could escape.
Rovena made no further effort to understand him. Perhaps it helps him to talk like this, she thought. He said that the two of them were going through a period of transition. Later, the last glimmer of their love, like the final rays of the sun, would fade. Then a different, negative time would begin. This time was ruled by different laws, of a kind that people rebelled against. They fought against them, suffered, hit out at each other, until one day they realised to their horror that their love had turned to ashes.
Go on, she thought. Don’t lose your thread.
Of course, it was already late for them. But he particularly wanted to avoid this kind of end. He did not want to enter that twilit world. He wanted to find another path, while there was still light. Perhaps we should interpret the descent of Orpheus into hell to bring back Eurydice in a different way. It was not Eurydice that died, but their love. And Orpheus, trying to bring her back, made a mistake. He was in too much of a hurry, and he lost her again.
It was you who told me that love is problematic in itself, she thought. A long time ago he had said: “There are two things in the world that are in doubt: love and God. There is a third thing, death, which we can only know through seeing it happen to other people.”
Two years before, at the height of her affair with Lulu, he had forgiven all her harsh words, because she had seemed to him insane. Now she would do the same for him. He seemed exhausted, and of course his nerves were in a bad way.
In the hotel, after dinner, he had eyed the receptionist suspiciously as he asked, “Is there any message for me?”
“Who are you expecting a message from?” she asked.
He smiled. “I’m expecting a summons. A court summons.”
“Really?” she said, trying to maintain the same tone of mockery.
“I’m not joking. I really do expect a summons. To the Last Judgement, perhaps…”
He avoided her eyes in the elevator mirror.
“They’ll find me in the end,” he said softly.
“You’re tired, Besfort,” she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “You need to rest, darling.”
In bed she tried to be as loving as she could. She whispered words of endearment, some of them laden with the double meanings that he enjoyed so much before lovemaking, and then, after he sank exhausted beside her, she asked in a very quiet voice: “What was it you said… your ex-wife?”
His reply came in the same breath as his final sigh.