Amazingly, her fury brought me a kind of calm. Especially her parting shot. She had been a pacifist, and therefore opposed to the bombing of Serbia, and when she found out from me the sort of work you did she became all the more pro-Yugoslav out of spite.
At midnight I was still torn by my dilemma. Should I phone you or her? Or rip the phone out of its socket? Tormented by insomnia and a racing pulse, I could hardly wait for morning, to go to the doctor.
True, those were the words I used: “I’ve quarrelled with my lover.” Psychic as you are, later you wanted to know which gender I had used. There’s barely a difference in German between Geliebter and Geliebte. As usual, your question preyed on my mind. I had been honest, and at the same time I had not. I had said Geliebter, in the masculine, but in fact the word covered both genders. Liza, more than my Geliebte, was also my Geliebter.
You changed totally when you heard the word “doctor” that day on the phone. You softened and kept asking for forgiveness. I felt I had become an object of pity. I sobbed and lashed out at you once more. At that moment I realised I had lost the battle. All my words of abuse – tyrant, egotist, brute and more of the same borrowed from Liza – fell like snow on armour plate. Not only did you not notice them, but you even went on begging for forgiveness.
The desolation that descended on me later was terrifying. The doctor told me that I should keep away from the source of the trouble. A total break. But strangely, I only associated this break with you. Liza was angry with me, but you terrified me.
You had banished me to a desert region, whose silence tortured me more than the uproar of our quarrels. It was a murky area, a sticky mixture of truth and lies. Your notion of forgiveness was also unclear, and founded on ignorance. My unfaithfulness was both true and untrue. So was my marriage to Liza, and everything else.
Now you tell me that nothing between us is the same as before. At the very moment when I was telling myself that after all these upheavals we were, thank God, at peace again, you uttered those words. You asked that frightening question, “Will you be my ex-wife?” and said other mysterious things.
You didn’t talk like this when we met after the catastrophe, when I was still numb, as if I had just woken from a dream to find myself lying beside you in our bed of love. In these miraculous twelve years with you, this was without doubt our most fabulous night. You said it was as if I had come from the moon. You said that perhaps this is what it will be like in the future when couples meet, one of them returning from some journey or mission to another planet.
Not even then did you tell me that nothing was the same as before. But now you not only say it, but mean it.
There is something floating in the wind. I can feel it. Just as I feel that I always act too late. You always strike the first blow.
Strike. Do what you have to do. Just do not leave me alone. This is not a matter of love. It is beyond love. You have invaded me in a way perhaps forbidden by nature’s secret laws. They say that between lovers unnatural exchanges often take place across mucous membranes, in a kind of reverse incest, in which the blood of the family and alien blood perversely change places.
If that is so, you must obey other laws. You may be my ex-husband, and you may declare me to be your ex-wife. But if I have mistakenly become your little sister in the meantime, you cannot abandon me here in this world, a blind swallow with broken wings.
You mustn’t do that. You can’t.
Chapter Seven
Twenty-one weeks before. Snowstorm.
The snow battered the train window with redoubled fury. The thought of that other train, on which Rovena was travelling, not only failed to snap Besfort Y. out of his inertia but also plunged him deeper into his stupor, as if he were dulled by some sedative.
He had done what was necessary. Shortly after midnight, bending over the pillow, above the tangle of her hair. After the final gasp, and almost scared that he had really choked her to death, he had whispered, “Rovena, are you all right?”
She had not answered. He touched her cheeks and whispered words of endearment, which she perhaps took to be the last she would hear from him, because her cheeks slowly dampened with tears. From her whisper, Besfort could only grasp the word “tomorrow”. They would leave by different trains the next day, but unlike at other times they would be free of the anguish of separation. Tomorrow, darling, you will feel for the first time what that other zone is like.
For the whole time, almost fifty hours, that they had spent together in Luxembourg they had talked of nothing else. As she listened her eyes became ever sadder. Her objections grew weaker from exhaustion. The dead are also always together. He said no, a thousand times no. They would be free like at the creation of the world. Free, meaning no longer separable. Free to meet if they wanted. To get tired of each other. To forget each other and find each other again. They would experience the revival of desire as no one had ever done before. Whenever they saw each other, they would be strangers, but familiar, as if they had seen each other in dreams. More or less like the time after the episode with Liza, but with a thousand times more power. She should trust him and not harbour dark thoughts as she had done the night before, when she suspected that he was treating her like a call girl or high-class hooker in order to humiliate her, and so, when the time came, to get rid of her more easily. No, he swore he had always wanted the very opposite, to turn her into an icon.
As he talked, her gaze gradually grew pained, insistent, as if she were trying to ask him, Darling, who infected you with this sickness?
Outside, after a lull, the blizzard raged again. A passenger entered the compartment, lurching drunkenly, and glared at Besfort. Unable to contain himself any longer, he said something.
“I don’t understand German,” Besfort replied.
“Aha,” said the man. “So that’s what it is.” He muttered to himself for a while, and then raised his voice. “But you don’t need to know German to know that Luxembourg is a crap place. It pretends to be a little country to excuse its crapness. All the mileage on the road signs is wrong. The banks open their back doors at night to let in reformed paedophiles.”
Besfort stood up and went to the buffet car for a coffee.
Perhaps Rovena’s train was now out of the storm. He longed to press her head against him. It was like this, with her head leaning against him, that they had fallen asleep after midnight. At about two o’clock, she had woken in fright. “Besfort, Besfort,” she had said in a low voice, rousing him. “I want to know – what about our conversations, what will happen to them?”
“What?” he asked, as if caught red-handed in some crime.
“Our conversations, late at night, after we make love.”
“Oh yes, of course, our endless conversations,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. They’ll be the same as before.”
“Do you mean that, or are you just saying it to keep me happy?”
“Of course I mean it, darling. Everyone knows about conversations between call girls and clients. Geishas too. They produced half the literature of Japan.”