In the evening, on the television news, among the scenes of storm devastation, there was a report on an old provincial theatre whose props had been carried away by the gales. Two particularly valuable capes for Hamlet, one from a production of 1759 and the other from a century later, had been lost, and the theatre promised a reward for their recovery. What a ridiculous news item, thought Besfort as he switched off the television again.
He went to bed just after midnight as usual. Towards morning, he was woken by a dream.
A kind of languid desire he had never experienced before totally sapped his strength. It included grief mixed with despair to such an impossible degree as to create a limitless, immeasurable sweetness.
It was the kind of dream that lingers in the mind. There was a plateau bathed in pale light from an unknown source. In the middle was a structure of plaster and marble, a kind of mausoleum that was also a motel, towards which he was calmly walking.
He was seeing it for the first time, although the structure was not unfamiliar to him. He stood in front of what were not so much its door and windows as the places where they had once been, now covered with oily paint resembling plaster, and barely visible.
He felt that he knew why he was there. He even knew what was locked inside, because he called a name out loud. It was a woman’s name, which, although he uttered it himself, he could not hear or even identify. It emerged falteringly, despairingly from his throat. He was aware merely that the name had three or four syllables. Something like Ix-et-in-a…
He remembered the strange continuation of the dream, and his weakness and longing became unendurable.
He turned on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch. It was half past four. It occurred to him that even dreams that seem unforgettable can later fade away.
First thing in the morning he would phone Rovena and tell her about this. He must.
This thought reassured him, and he fell asleep at once.
Part Three
1
With these two storm-battered capes, the life stories of Besfort Y. and Rovena St. were strangely cut short a week before they actually ended. In an explanatory note, the researcher had repeated his position that, being unable to reproduce the couple’s story in full on the basis of the results of the inquiry, he had concentrated on the last forty weeks of their lives. The ending of the story with the two Hamlet costumes carried away by the gale was accidental, and therefore probably could not be taken as a symbolic closure. Still less could Besfort Y.’s pre-dawn dream, which he related to Rovena on the phone a few hours later, be considered in the same light. But there may have been another reason why, in spite of all promises, the final week – usually the most keenly anticipated in a story of this kind – was omitted.
The more closely the researcher examined this last week, which was at first sight so straightforward, the more significant it became. But he was always thrown back on the problem of its incompleteness. The three last days had detached themselves entirely from the chain of events which death had brought to an end. These were the three days for which Besfort Y. had requested leave from his office at the Council of Europe. Apart from his application for leave, made orally in his final telephone call, there was no tangible evidence of these last three days anywhere. The testimony of the bartenders and receptionists was vaguer than ever. There was no record of any phone calls from their hotel room and both their mobiles were switched off. It was as if these three days were not their own, but were unclaimed stretches of time of the kind that may wander around the universe unattached to any human life, trying to find some temporary lodging. So they floated adrift, bound to nobody, and not understood by anyone, least of all by those in whose lives they took refuge.
In another note, the researcher strove to explain what he called the strange “crabwise” progress of the days and weeks. Mourning customs everywhere mark seven days and forty days after a death, but here were periods of seven and forty days calculated before their deaths. These in his view were intended to convey an impression of the reverse order of time experienced by the two lovers, if that is what they could be called.
As he approached the zero hour, which in this looking-glass world could have been the end, the beginning or both, or neither of these, the researcher probably felt a rising panic. Finally, confronted with a knot he could not unravel, he stood to one side at the most unexpected moment.
It was obvious from the file containing the relevant evidence that this dereliction of duty when faced with the final week caused the researcher great pain. Here, totally jumbled and impossibly crammed together, were fragmentary statements and testimonies, documents, protocols; a twice-repeated request for an autopsy of Rovena’s body rejected out of hand by her parents; an application for Besfort’s exhumation in Tirana, which had been granted; an allegation made by Liza Blumberg that Rovena was murdered not by intelligence agencies but by Besfort Y. on the night before 17 May; a photocopy of the weather report for the fateful morning from the newspaper Kurier, which was relevant to this allegation; and finally the permission for three days’ leave, issued in response to Besfort’s last request in this life.
The researcher kept coming back to this document in the hope that it might yield more information. He could not forget what a colleague had said a long time ago, when he had first mentioned the inquiry to him. In such cases of law, the English refer to remote history, Muslims to the Qur’an and emergent African states to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but in the Balkans they find every precedent with little effort in their ballads. Three days’ leave to carry out a duty, normally something left undone? There will certainly be a well-known paradigm for this.
It was in fact a cliché. Half the ballads of the Balkans included such requests. Every character seemed eager to negotiate an extended deadline. Some bargained with death; others at a later date in history, and thus on a less epic scale, asked for leave from prison. And so on until the present day, when Besfort Y. had asked for leave from his office at the Council of Europe. The cases were very different, but in essence they all shared something in common: a secret contract, from which there was no escape.
The researcher was dumbfounded. According to the experts, Besfort had asked for three days’ leave from the Crisis Department in Brussels, just like Ago Ymeri had done from a medieval prison.
The researcher imagined Ago Ymeri on horseback, galloping to the church where his betrothed was about to marry another man… He had never heard such an inconsistent story: why had he been given leave, and why, after its expiry, was he bound to return to prison? The meaning must be encoded.
The researcher felt a sickening pang in the pit of his stomach. What help were all these shadows and shapes that so resembled each other? He thought about the taxi driver and his rear-view mirror, in which the mystery had surely been revealed, if only for an instant of time.
Latterly his researches had focused entirely on this question. “What did you see in this mirror? What was that fatal shock? Have you ever lost someone you can’t ever forget? Who is so lost to you that they won’t come back, even in your dreams?”
So began one of their many conversations, all so similar to each other.
“Who won’t come back, even in my dreams? I don’t know what to say,” the man replied.
“You have a daughter of about the same age as that unknown young woman who got into your taxi. Have you ever had problems with her? For any private reason of the sort you would never reveal to a soul? That will go with you to the grave? I think you will have heard this expression, but probably without thinking hard about it. Imagine what it means to be in the grave, in this narrow chamber not just for a few days or weeks or years but for centuries, millennia, hundreds and thousands of millennia. Just you two, you and the grave. The grave and you. Narrator and audience. The stories we tell on earth are mere fragments, crumbs of the great narrative of the dead. For thousands of years, in hundreds of languages, the dead have been weaving their story. But it will remain in the grave for ever and ever. For all eternity, never heard by a living soul. Your final confidence, between you and the grave. Between the grave and you. Think of yourself there, with no advocate, no witness, afraid of nothing, because you yourself are nothing. Think of yourself like that and give me the tiniest hint, a smidgen of what you will tell to the grave. This is what I am asking you to do as a human being, a taxi driver. Do me this honour. Think of me for a moment as your brother. As your grave.”