Once he had outfaced all these lesser fiends, Rovena herself, when the time came, would pose no danger to him.
He knew it was wrong of him to take the side of this evil pack that included self-interest, duplicity and perfidy, and which could one day be used against him. But this did not frighten him.
His best hope, but the worst for Rovena, was to turn her into a call girl. This was the only way to dethrone the woman he loved. Otherwise, wearing her crown, and in her natural shape, as she had appeared to him one hundred years before, on the sofa after dinner in Tirana, Rovena was impossible to deal with. The years had not diminished her but only made her more dangerous.
This new mask, tawdry as it was, was his last hope, and behind it there remained only… only… What was it that lay behind the mask and its tawdriness? Perhaps a loss of lustre, a wiping away of steam from the face of the mirror, like an erasure, which itself was a form of escape, and so on, until one reached the bare and brutal thought of something… that resembled murder. He was astonished at the appearance of this temptation. It arrived suddenly, quietly, hovering as if above some barren plateau in his mind. There it took shape, inert and motionless, unconnected to measurable time. He thought less of the murder itself than of the ease of committing it. A murder was not difficult in Europe, and was easier in Albania than anywhere else. Everywhere there were little motels, which no one ever noticed, where every trace could be obliterated for two thousand euros.
Besfort Y. shook his head, as when he wanted to shake off a nasty thought.
It couldn’t be true, he said to himself. These thoughts were like the images of sleep that came and went for no cause or reason.
He imagined Rovena dozing, her knees drawn up on the seat in her train carriage, which could as well be the sofa that evening in Tirana, and he longed for her.
The drunk had followed him. Besfort felt his breath before he heard his voice. “These signs with the wrong mileage, and the wrong directions, you don’t need to speak the language to understand them.”
Besfort turned his back to him.
He felt tired and numbed by the noise of the train. The turning wheels beat out Rovena’s pitilessly repeated question: why was he doing this? What was he looking for? He was surely looking for something impossible. Just like him… the dictator… He was looking for the love of traitors.
The monster, he thought. How could he infect us with this disease?
Chapter Eight
Twelve weeks before. The other zone.
Three chapters from Don Quixote.
He was the first to call it “the other zone”. Then they both used the phrase as naturally as if it were the eurozone or the Schengen area.
He sent her the plane ticket to come to Albania with a brief note. “This time you’ll see your family. I think this will suit. I really am curious. B.”
He looked lingeringly at the word “curious”, as if it were of archaeological interest, like a stone inscription. Under it lay another stratum, with his earlier phrase, “I really am… missing you” now cruelly buried.
She replied in the same style. “Thanks for the ticket. I’m very curious too. R.”
Let happen what may. Just let me see her.
Of course both were curious. For the first time they were in that other region, where everything was different, starting with the way they talked.
In one of their few phone calls before their arrival, she had said, “How amazing that we’ll do this in Tirana.”
The other surprise came when he said to her that they would meet in a motel. Without giving her time to speak, he told her not to worry. This is normal in Albania nowadays.
Late in the afternoon, he collected her in his car from the street outside her house. From a distance he made out her elegant figure on the pavement and groaned inwardly, “Oh God.”
As they sped along the Durrës motorway he looked at her profile out of the corner of his eye. She was white, just as he had expected. Alien, with the frozen expression of a doll, or of Japanese make-up. He had never desired her so much.
The car left the motorway to follow the road beside the beach. The lights of restaurants and hotels shone on both sides. She became animated for the first time as she read their names out loud: Hotel Monte Carlo, Bar Café Vienna, The Z Motel, The Discreet, The New Jersey, The Queen Mother’s Hotel.
“This is unreal,” she said. “When were all these built?”
Their hotel was set back from the road, almost in darkness among pine trees. They registered with false names. The proprietor showed them to their room. The restaurant was on the first floor. If they wished, supper could be brought to them.
The room was warm, with a burgundy carpet and provocative pictures on the walls. In the bathroom, by the side of the tub, was a bas-relief with three naked female figures.
“How amazing…” She said no more as she opened the curtains to look at the pine trees and the sea behind them, now dim in the dusk. He leant against the bedhead watching her wander about the room like a shadow.
“Shall I get ready?”
He nodded. He felt a compression in his chest, as he lay in a trance of happiness. How would she “get ready” this time? Differently from before, he was sure… The lamps glowed softly. His heartbeat slowed as he imagined her undressing. Of course it would be different from before, and she would take longer to prepare herself.
He thought that she would never come out. How long she’s taking, he thought. He could no longer hear the slight noises to which his ears had been accustomed for years.
He got up from the bed and slowly moved to the bathroom, as if sleepwalking. The door was half open. He pushed it and entered. “Rovena,” he said aloud. She was not there.
Her toiletries, comb, perfume bottle, lipstick were all there, beneath the mirror. A pair of silk panties lay beside the bath, delicate, pale blue, as if part of the porcelain decoration. “Rovena,” he said again, faintly now. How could she have vanished like this? Unnoticed, without even a creak of the door.
He looked at her things again in the mirror, and at his own face, now grown unfamiliar. She was yours and you lost her, he said to himself reproachfully. You let her slip though your fingers.
He turned abruptly, thinking she had suddenly appeared. But it was not Rovena herself. It was her image. One of the figures on the bas-relief strangely resembled her. How had he failed to notice this? So there’s the plaster you wanted, he said to himself. It was no mere simulacrum. This was Rovena herself. Apparently, she had found her form and taken shelter in it. That was her very neck, her breasts, her marble belly, all distant, on the other side, just as in his folly he had dreamed. Crazy, he said to himself. Lunatic.
He sat on the side of the bath and held his head in his hands. He wanted to weep. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He thought he would sit there for ever, until he felt a hand touch his hair. He didn’t open his eyes, terrified of seeing the marble arm stretching out from the bas-relief and stroking him. He heard her voice, “Besfort, are you asleep?” and he shivered.
She was standing beside the bed, with the white hotel bathrobe half open about her.
“I don’t know what happened to me,” he said. “I dozed off.”
Here were the same breasts, the same marble waist that he had seen a few moments ago as he slept.
He drew her to him hurriedly and eagerly, as if to prove that this was warm flesh and blood, and she responded. Her neck and armpits were warm and soft, but her lips were still imprisoned in the marble. Fiercely, like a storm accompanied by claps of thunder, their lips brushed against each other, but without daring to violate the eternal pact between a whore and her client: no kissing.