Besfort turned his head to the window, as if Rovena’s voice on the telephone two years ago, racked by sobs, now came to him from outside.
The crowd of demonstrators was now close to the prime minister’s office, and their shouts were clearly audible.
“It’s not about property, or Çamëria,” said the waiter, also looking out of the window.
The placards were mainly pink.
“I think they’re the ‘alternatives’,” said someone at the next table. “That’s what the gays and lesbians are called now.”
Rovena’s voice on the phone was no longer recognisable. Taken aback, he was stuck for words. He interrupted her, “Calm down, listen to me.” But she snapped back, “No, I won’t calm down, I won’t listen to you.”
He hung up in fury, but she called back at once.
“Don’t hang up like you always do. You’re no longer…”
“That’s enough,” he shouted back. “You’re not in your right mind.”
“Really?” she said. “Is that how you think of me? Now listen. Get ready to hear something very serious.”
You aren’t what you were to me any more. I love someone else. Amidst the deafening crackles and abrupt silences of the telephone line, those were the words he expected. But amazingly, something else came down the wire.
“You’ve ruined my sex life.”
“What?”
The thought that her mental health was not good suddenly took priority over everything else. Everything she had said, her insults, even her possible infidelities meant nothing. He tried to handle her gently. “Rovena, my dear, calm down. It must be my fault, no doubt about it, my fault, only mine, are you listening?”
“No, I’m not listening. And I don’t want to. And don’t think that you’re as frightening as you seem.”
“Of course I’m not, and I don’t want to seem frightening.”
“Really?”
“You think I’m trying to scare you? You think I’m like an American Indian, tattooing my face to look fierce?”
Amazingly, she laughed. He even thought he caught the word “darling” smothered by her laughter, as so often when she liked one of his jokes. But she was quiet only for a moment. Her voice rose stridently again, and he thought, oh God, she’s really not well.
The next day she seemed more relaxed on the phone, if a bit tired. She had been to the doctor, who had asked some tactful questions. She explained that she had quarrelled with her lover. The doctor had given her tranquillisers and some advice: most importantly to break off all contact with the source of the trouble, in other words with him. A long silence followed.
“Are you going to ask the same old question, is there anybody between us?”
“No, I’m not,” he answered.
“You say not, but you’re thinking it. Because you still don’t understand that I’m no longer your slave.”
He let her say her piece. She said he had enslaved her. He had closed every door that opened for her, and not allowed her the slightest freedom. He wanted her entirely for himself, like every tyrant. He had made her seek therapy. He had crippled her, he had ruined her sex life.
He butted in to say that the opposite was true, that he, or rather both of them, as she had said time and again, had refined their sex life to a degree that few others had achieved. But that, she protested, is precisely what should not have happened. He had violated her nature… her psyche.
“Is that the twaddle your German doctor talks?” he interrupted.
“Precisely that,” came her answer.
He imagined her breasts, and the insult and pain he felt at the prospect of never seeing them again made his response unexpectedly quiet. He would leave her in peace, but she should understand one thing, that her description of him was unfair. He had been her liberator, but this was not the first time in history that a liberator had been taken for a tyrant, just as many a tyrant had been taken for a liberator.
That was more or less all he said. Her next telephone call three weeks later came to him as if from a great distance. Her voice was different. Neither of them mentioned the quarrel. She said that she’d been in London with the rest of her course group. That she had taken up sport, mainly swimming. It was as if nothing had happened. Only when she asked, “Are we going to see each other?” a silence fell.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Her reply was unexpected: “I don’t know.”
He almost shouted, “Then what the hell are you calling for? Why ask if we are going to see each other?”
“Listen,” she went on. “I want us to meet, like before, but I don’t want to lie to you… Something has happened…”
So that was it. In the long silence that followed, she seemed to be waiting for the question whose time had finally come. Is there somebody else? But he said nothing. He had asked this question at the wrong time, and now that its hour had struck he kept his silence. Slut, he said to himself. NGO whore. International scholarship tart. But aloud he said, “I don’t want to know.”
Her own reply was also slow in coming. Perhaps she expected something else, or took his answer as a sign he didn’t care. “Really? So you don’t want to know? OK, I’ll give you the whole bitter truth: you are no longer what you were. I belong to someone else.”
“I realise that. I’ve known for some time…”
She wanted to reply: “But you pretend not to care. That’s how you usually behave. You hit back at someone else when you’re on the ropes yourself.” But she did not utter this final retort out loud. Her unspoken words flew round her brain like lost birds that could not find their way out. He listened to her laboured breathing, until finally she said, “If that’s the case, then come here…”
The flight was tiring. The plane listed perpetually to one side, or so it seemed to him. It was literally a lame journey. Drowsily he imagined her in front of the mirror, getting ready for another man. Choosing lingerie. Her armpits, between her legs. An unnatural faintness, at the same time a burning and a weakness, slowed his heartbeat. If it was another man who had caused this estrangement, why should she be so angry with him? The anger should be on his side.
The flight was like a journey in a dream, in which arrival is indefinitely deferred.
He saw her from a distance, waiting in the same place as always. Her paleness made her even more beautiful. She had changed her hairstyle, and lowered her head in a different way as she walked.
They embraced hesitantly in the taxi, as if through glass. She was the same and not the same. Words beginning with “re”- recognition, resurrection – sprung to mind. They would haunt him for days. He had thought that he would never arrive, but now the prospect of going to bed with her seemed even more remote.
She had booked the hotel. He would try to get his bearings from its layout – the entrance, the lobby and of course the room with its big double bed, or two single beds, like the two graves of former lovers he had once seen in a Japanese cemetery in Kyoto, with a marble headstone on which was carved the couple’s sad tale.
As the bellboy opened the door to the room, his heartbeat slowed again. The room was flooded with tranquil light, and he saw the large bed with its counterpane decorated with drooping chrysanthemums, again like on Japanese vases. She seemed to belong to this kind of world as she padded softly back and forth, unpacking her bag in silence, as if she were painted on a vase. “Will you wait a bit for me?” she said with bowed head as she entered the bathroom, without her playful look that usually augured happiness.
Here was the mystery that had lured him for so long, he thought, as she closed the bathroom door. It seemed impossible that she would ever come out again in the way she used to.
He sat on the corner of the bed, as if in that Kyoto graveyard, waiting for his bride, or like in 1913, or God knew when – a man of the Balkans with the pent-up lust of years of betrothal. Or worse, like a madman who believes his lost bride, abducted by someone else, or by destiny itself, will return to him.