Lulu Blumb had waited impatiently for that moment. She waited until it dawned on her that it would never come. Besfort would never grow jealous of her. She would be jealous of him. This was the difference between them, which handed the victory to him instead of to her.
The two rivals knew about each other, but in different ways. When Rovena once mentioned a new experience with Besfort, the pianist had cut her off, saying she did not want to know. Rovena retorted that Besfort was quite the opposite and wanted to know everything. At this moment Lulu Blumb went pale.
“What do you mean, the opposite?”
It was too late for Rovena to put together a soothing reply… The opposite meant that not only did he not stand in the way of her seeing Lulu, but he even liked to hear… meaning he enjoyed… and he even encouraged her, whenever she quarrelled with Lulu, to make up.
“You slut,” Liza shouted. Rovena, she said, had used their love to excite that bastard’s lust. She had marketed it like some porno film. Like an idiot, she had allowed herself to be used like a doll. Do you understand what I mean? Do you understand German? Do you know what “doll” means? A dummy! That’s how he used you. Like those pimps from your country who put their fiancées on the street. You’ve read the news -papers and heard the radio. But you didn’t stop there. You dragged me into this game. And his lordship, this generous scumbag, gives his permission for you to come to me. In other words, he throws me charity in the shape of yourself. Because that’s what you’ve been reduced to, a dummy. And that’s what I’ve become, a beggar at the church door.
Rovena listened in bewilderment to Liza’s sobbing, which was so much harder to endure than her rage. Besfort wasn’t jealous, because she counted for nothing. To his Balkan male mentality, she, Lulu Blumb, was an object of ridicule, a plaything, a soap bubble, a distraction for Rovena while she remained enslaved to him. She apologised for the word “slut”, and all the other things. She admitted that she could not compete with that monster. She accepted defeat. Perhaps it would be better if they did not meet any more. She had nothing more to say except: God help you!
Rovena wept too. She also begged forgiveness. She told Lulu that she shouldn’t take all these things so much to heart. In the end, he was her husband.
“Husband?” she wailed through her sobs. This was the first she had heard of it… In fact, it was true… They were keeping it secret… At least it was true for Rovena… “But you were ready to come with me to that little Greek church in the middle of the Ionian Sea to be married…”
“That’s true, but it didn’t really change anything… He was my husband in another sense, I mean, in another dim ension…”
3
A secret husband, another dimension. Lulu Blumb said that he alone gave Rovena these ideas. She was totally defenceless against his malign influence. Of course it wasn’t easy. To her horror, even Lulu found herself affected. Her hatred for him gave her no protection.
Her proposal of marriage was the first occasion on which she felt she had successfully challenged him. Rovena’s misery as she walked with Besfort among the churches of Vienna, without entering any of them to be married, gave Lulu the idea that these churches were not theirs and that she herself could take her to a different shrine dedicated to another kind of love.
Was there really some remote chapel somewhere between Greece and Albania where lesbians married, or was all this mere fantasy?
There had been rumours of such a place for a long time, but nobody could pin down the location. There were no pointers to any travel agency or marriage bureau, not a trace on the internet. Of course there were suspicions that trafficking was involved. There was talk of a secret network that procured young women and offered a wedding for three thousand euros, plus three days of bliss with the partner of your heart’s desire, in a fabulous little hotel. The rest was easy to imagine. Greek and Albanian boat owners, who once ferried clandestine migrants, now disembarked these protesting women on deserted coasts, pretending they had lost their way in the storm. There they raped them, put them back on the boat, carried them round in circles and abandoned them again on some remote beach, or worse, drowned them. Or, driven by some incomprehensible fury, the boat owners threw themselves into the sea and perished with the shrieking women.
Rovena knew nothing about this. Lulu Blumb, though terrified by the rumours, still could not give up the idea of this journey.
Sometimes this project seemed to her nothing less than a temptation generated by the vicious imagination of her rival. Besfort Y. was also probably in search of an alternative church for Rovena and himself. A different sort of church, for their extraordinary relationship.
Perhaps he was frightened by the reality of this world and felt estranged from it. This could be why he was in search of another dimension. And, as usual, he had managed to infect Rovena with the same obsession.
A short time before her death, one morning before dawn, Rovena had woken in tears and related to Lulu a dream that she had just had: she had been asking for a ticket at an airport desk, but there had been no room on the plane. She had pleaded and entreated. She needed to go home to Albania, where two queens had died one after another – she was the third one, but she was still abroad. The member of staff had said, “Madam, you’re on the waiting list as an ordinary passenger, not as a queen.” But Rovena insisted that she was a genuine queen. She was expected at the cathedral in Tirana and she had two changes of clothes, because she did not know why she was going there, for her wedding or for her funeral…
Evidently, like so many young women in this world, she was sometimes a slave and sometimes a queen, and could not find her natural place.
The pianist was unable to give clear answers to the researcher’s many questions about the new kind of love that the couple were apparently looking for.
At least that is how she understood it until one day she began to suspect something else. It occurred to Lulu Blumb that these two, in their quest for a still unimagined form of love, were like voluntary patients who agree to test the effects of new and dangerous medicines.
As she had once explained, Besfort, like every difficult personality, felt isolated in the world. Perhaps his quest for a new form of love was connected to this. It was a love that excluded infidelity, yet he also understood that no passionate relationship between a woman and a man can be cemented without the risk of loss. This was evidently the reason why he had willingly exposed their love to this danger, and had divided it into two phases: the first, secure in the past, as if sealed in a bottle, and the second, in which Rovena was no longer his beloved, but simply a call girl.
The researcher himself had told her that they had used the expression post mortem for this second phase. Both had used the phrase, but in fact she was post mortem while he was not. With the introduction of this phrase, she began to die. The project of her murder was contained in essence, if unconsciously, inside it.
It was natural that Besfort should come to this idea. Tyrannical natures prefer radical solutions. He had used every means to accustom himself to the idea of her infidelity. When he saw that none of them preserved him from the anguish of loss, he decided to do what thousands of people in this world do: get rid of his beloved.
Lulu Blumb had detected his inclination to murder before the intelligence agencies started talking about it. His terror of a summons by The Hague Tribunal, the photos of the murdered children in his bag, and Rovena’s tattoos, which were only reflections of his own desires – all these things were sure indications. His passion for destruction was obvious whenever anything stood in his way: an idea, a state, such as Yugoslavia, a cause, a religion, a woman and maybe even his own people.