You’ve no right to call me that. Yes, you’ve turned me into a high-class whore, but once you were my husband.
These words went unspoken, but she caught her breath in shock.
She was frightened as always, but less of him than of the truth.
He thought carefully before replying. “Yes, those were photographs of murdered children. But not what you might have imagined. They were Serbian children, victims of the NATO bombing.”
Rovena listened, nonplussed. She bit her lips and repeated twice or three times, “I’m sorry.”
She had nothing to apologise for. It would be terrible to find photographs like that in any bag. She had every right to think what she liked. She could even suspect that he, Besfort, was a murderer of children. In fact, the photographs had been sent to him for that very purpose, to mark him as a murderer.
Fearfully, she clasped his hand. His fingers looked longer and thinner. He talked as if she were not there. What was happening was difficult to describe. It was a macabre photograph competition: pictures of Serbian children torn apart by bombs and of Albanian children ripped open by knives were distributed by each side to departments, commissions and committees. Grotesque slanging matches followed. Was there or was there not a scale of horror in death? Some insisted that every child’s death was a tragedy that could not be compared to any other, and they could not be ranked in order. Others took a different view: the death of a child in a road accident was not the same as the death of a child in an air raid, and both were quite different from the murder of a baby, slit open by a knife wielded by a human hand. Eight hundred Albanian infants butchered like lambs, often before their mothers’ eyes. It could drive you insane. It was apocalyptic.
The candles on the table danced gently in the breath of his speech. She hoped they would distract his attention.
After dinner, in the late-night bar, she mentioned her tattoos, and the tattooist’s question of why she wanted them: as a memento of somebody, a promise or for some other reason.
This time, unlike on previous occasions, he did not want to hear anything more about the other man who had touched her body. He seemed to be thinking about their conversation in the restaurant.
Rovena found it difficult to talk about anything else until she had unburdened her mind. She thought about the photographs and the macabre contest, and she asked why, if he did not feel guilty, he still seemed to have something on his conscience.
He gave a chill smile.
“Because I am a citizen, meaning that everything to do with the civitas affects me.”
Rovena did not understand what he meant, but did not say so.
As if aware of this, he went on to explain gently that quite apart from what he had said about the Albanian children he also felt grief over the Serbian children. But unfortunately that’s not what happens in the Balkans. In the restaurant, she had asked why they had come here to The Hague in secret, like two criminals. She should realise that he had not been served any summons, except once or twice in his dreams. And even if he were summoned, he would not obey the court order, but only his own conscience. Every person should come to The Hague, as though it were an agency of Hades. Each for the sake of his own soul. In silence and semi-secretly.
Rovena thought of the Austrian’s beard and his dull eyes, as he sat in the café among its Albanian customers.
As he spoke, Besfort looked round for the waiter, to order his second and final whisky.
It was after midnight, in bed before they made love, that he remembered the tattooist. Was he polite, handsome, a lecher? A little bit of all those things, she replied. And he made the mistake every man makes these days: as soon as he discovered that the tattoo was for a lover, he interpreted the woman’s yielding as if it was to himself.
As so often, Rovena’s story was left incomplete. While she was in the bathroom, he switched on the television and surfed the channels. Most were in Dutch. On one, he thought he heard Albania mentioned. He found the news in English.
“The queen has died,” he said to Rovena, as she returned to the bedroom.
She lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “But that was months ago, don’t you remember? We were in that motel, in Durrës.”
“Of course I remember. But this is another queen. The king’s wife, not his mother.”
“I see, how extraordinary,” she said.
On the screen, the black motorcade slowly approached the cathedral in Tirana.
Covering her bare shoulders, Besfort also expressed surprise. “How very… For a small country, once Stalinist, to have two queens die… In such a short time.”
Trembling, she held him tightly.
Chapter Thirteen
The last seven days.
It was hard to tell if either of them felt any foreboding one week before the accident.
Rovena, taking shelter from the torrential rain in a café, thought about her lover’s arrival. At precisely that moment, one thousand kilometres away, Besfort’s thoughts, as he watched the television news, wandered to Rovena’s white belly and the possibility that she might be pregnant. On the screen, Pope John Paul II looked feebler than ever, but nobody could hope for any concession from him on sexual relations between men and women. Everything would have to be the same as a thousand, four thousand, forty thousand years ago. Besfort counted the remaining days until he would see Rovena, and they seemed to him too many. In the café, Rovena dialled the code for Switzerland, but suddenly recalled that phone calls cost more at peak hours, and decided to talk to her friend later.
The rain grew heavier. Passers-by caught in the downpour ran terrified for shelter. One of them seemed continually to be changing shape as his cape was blown by the wind. After the pope, Arab terrorists appeared on the screen, threatening a kneeling European hostage. Besfort closed his eyes so as not to see the blow. Rovena unthinkingly dialled Switzerland again, but remembered the peak rate. The pedestrian with the billowing cape passed by menacingly, almost clinging to the café window. He appeared spreadeagled against it, until he detached himself and flew away as if whirled by some black tornado. Perhaps that is what Plato’s androgynes would look like, she thought. Besfort had mentioned them in their last phone call. She had been amused at first.
“Awesome,” she said laughing, “a man and a woman in one body. No more she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not.”
“And that was why the gods envied them,” Besfort said, “and out of jealousy divided them. And since that time, says Plato, the two halves have been searching for each other.”
“How sad,” she said. The song about the two lives with the same love flashed into her mind in a garbled form, just as she had once heard it sung by a drunk in the doorway of a bar in Tirana:
If I could live my life anew
I’d never give myself to you.
Rovena nervously dialled the code for Switzerland a third time. A thousand kilometres away, Besfort turned off the television in disgust. The news was all so crazy.
The storm eased slightly, only to grow wilder again, although now there were only dry gusts without rain. Rovena barely managed to reach the entrance to her block. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, closed the window and stood stock still behind the double glazing. The wind howled threateningly and then whined in lamentation, as if begging for mercy. A part of the view lay in darkness, and the rest was bathed in a sickly light in which sheets of cardboard, tar paper and garbage of all kinds were blown in every direction. You could find anything out there, she thought. Empty forms, whose essences had evaporated long ago, spun round in eddies. And she thought of her tattoos, now faded, and perhaps their two halves, his half and hers, so pitilessly divided, looking for each other.