“The others who saw us whispering together probably thought – thank God they’ve sorted themselves out.”
A few days later, Janek’s diary entry read: “I’ve made a discovery. To my shame. This shame, strangely, does not bother me. Shame is my meat and drink.”
The Slovak’s extraordinary realisation was that the mysterious visitor, who he thought had robbed him of Rovena, was in fact now bringing her closer to him.
He had acquiesced in what many would call a serious humiliation. He was going out with a woman on condition that he talked about another man!
This condition was of course never made explicit, but he was aware of it. Rovena was obviously impatient as they skimmed through other topics in order to reach “him”. She admitted candidly that they had been together for years. She described their trips together, their hotels, beaches in winter. She never said that they were now facing a crisis, but this too was apparent.
“It’s incredible what has happened! We slept together again,” he wrote in his diary.
Even more incredibly, this changed nothing. In fact, now that she had yielded to him again, it seemed entirely natural that she should claim her due from him without any ill feeling.
“There is no hope now,” he wrote two days later.
He really did not hope for any improvement. Her body would lie next to him, but not the woman herself. Her mind would be elsewhere, just as before, and he would be obliged to pay her price, hour after hour. Willingly or not, he would keep his side of the bargain and listen to her talking about this absent man whom he had every reason to detest.
He hoped that when the crisis passed she would no longer feel the need to unburden herself. He could imagine what would happen next: their pact would break down, and their relationship with it.
And that is what happened. Their meetings grew less frequent and then ceased. He tried to reconcile himself to the situation. Now they were just friends.
“Are you back together again?” he asked her one day.
She nodded yes. He was sustained by the hope that she would go through another crisis which he, to his shame, could turn to his benefit.
Somewhat more relaxed, yet with the bitterness that this new situation brought him, he turned the conversation to the news reports about Albanian gangsters. There had been more of them recently. Rovena shrugged her shoulders dismissively.
Much later, on the terrace of a café, she mentioned Besfort, and the Slovak suddenly asked why he was scared of The Hague.
She had laughed. “Scared of The Hague? I don’t think he is.”
“I meant to say, scared of a journey to The Hague.”
She shook her head. “I would say the opposite. We were going to go there together for pleasure. To visit Holland and see the tulip fields…”
“But The Hague isn’t just a flower garden. More than anything else, it’s a court. It preys on the mind of anyone with an uneasy conscience,” he said.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” she said, frankly showing her irritation. “But I told you, we were going there for pleasure, for the tulips.”
“No, you listen to me,” he said. “He saw a court summons in that dream, not tulip adverts.”
They stared angrily at each other, speechless.
“What do you know about it?” she said icily.
Instead of answering, he held his head in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said amid sobs. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
When he took his hands away, she saw that he had really been crying. “I’m disgusting,” he went on in a broken voice. “I’m mad with jealousy. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
She waited for him to calm down and took his hand in hers, asking gently, “How do you know what he saw in his dream?”
After he had wiped away his tears, his eyes looked larger, defenceless.
“You told me yourself… when you wanted to show me how complicated he…”
She remained silent, biting her lower lip, while to herself she said, oh God.
Several years later Janek B.’s notes enabled Rovena’s friend in Switzerland to recall in a new light the short phone conversation she had had with her during her northward journey. A detail that had seemed a slip of the tongue had unlocked the whole mystery of The Hague.
“Hallo, darling. Is that you? So pleased you called. Where are you calling from?”
“Can you imagine? From Denmark, from a train.”
“Really?”
“I’m going to see Besfort.”
“Wonderful!”
“I can see windmills, tulip fields.”
“Tulip fields?”
“I mean… some flowers a bit like tulips… I don’t know their names.”
“Never mind. So it means you’re back together again…
Hello? I can’t hear very well. Bye for now, darling.”
“Bye.”
What an idiot I am, Rovena thought, putting down the phone. I can’t even keep a simple promise. “Don’t tell anybody about this trip to The Hague,” Besfort had said. Lightly, she had asked why not, and he had answered just as airily: “No reason, let’s just make it a secret trip. Everybody should make a secret journey at least once in their lives.” And she had cheerfully agreed.
In a second phone call, he explained that in such little subterfuges the best way not to get caught out when people ask you where you’re going is to substitute another destination, for example, Denmark instead of Holland. “Let’s say a trip to Denmark to see the places where the story of Hamlet really happened. While we’re on the subject, do you have a pen? Write down Jutland, that’s the province, and Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote its first history. With an ‘x’ and double ‘m’. That’s enough. No need to get mixed up with all that endless ‘to be or not to be’, OK?”
What an idiot, thought Rovena again. She tried to forget her blunder. She had prepared herself so carefully for this journey that it was silly to worry about something so trivial. She had a surprise ready, besides her new lingerie: two little tattoos, one between her navel and her breasts and the other on her rear. So they would be visible in whatever position they made love. She also had a stock of sweet nothings to whisper, although she couldn’t be sure if she was still entitled to use them or not.
The monotonous sound of the train lulled her to sleep. You’ve exhausted me, she thought, thinking of Besfort waiting for her.
The words of a song, probably one she had never heard but had dreamt up in her imagination, kept coming back to her:
If I could live my life anew
I’d give myself again to you.
A second life, she thought. Easy to say, but so far nobody had ever been given a second life, still less the chance to go on loving someone in this other life. Yet people would never give up the hope of it, and neither would she and Besfort. They had a kind of faint, extremely faint, conception of this forbidden life. In their fear of it, the fear especially of reaching too far and thus bringing down the wrath of heaven, they were pretending they did not love each other at all.
She woke up smiling after her short sleep. As a small girl she had enjoyed this kind of self-deception, arranging facts to suit herself.
Such secrecy, she thought. Janek’s imagination would run riot. Any one of Besfort’s instructions would chill the blood of a woman going to meet her lover… “Not a word to a soul about this trip. Destroy the train tickets and every shred of evidence. I’ll tell you the reason later.”
Words came over the loudspeaker in Dutch, then in English. They were arriving at The Hague. She phoned his mobile a third time, but still there was no reply.
She found a taxi easily, and then the hotel. A Dutch name, with no crown.