He was too tired to relate how years ago, at high school, he had been taken to an exhibition of modern art. The students had laughed at pictures of people with three eyes or displaced breasts, or giraffes in the form of bookcases, in flames. Don’t laugh, somebody had told them. One day you’ll understand that the world is more complicated than it appears.
The researcher calmed down again, and his eyes even recovered their earlier tenderness.
“There are other truths, besides those which we think we see,” he said softly. “We don’t know, don’t want to, or can’t know, or perhaps mustn’t…” His unfortunate friend was saying that something impossible had happened in his taxi. This was perhaps the essence. Nobody knows the rest. “What happened in your taxi was something different from what you saw. They had been together on the back seat, innocent and guilty, a man and perhaps a woman who had been murdered, dolls, replicas, shapes and spirits, sometimes together and sometimes apart, like those flaming giraffes. What you saw and what I imagined are evidently very far from the truth. It was not for nothing that the ancients suspected the gods of denying us human beings their superior knowledge and wisdom. That is why our human eyes were blind, as usual, to what happened.”
The investigator felt drained, as if after an epileptic convulsion.
The entire incident could have been something else. He would not now be surprised if they were to tell him that his inquiry was as far from the truth as a biography of the pope, a file on a bank loan or the life story of a trafficked woman from the former East, recorded in desolate police offices near airports.
“I will ask one more question,” he said gently. “Let it be the last. I want to know if, as you drove towards the airport, you heard a strange noise, which you might at first have taken to be an engine fault, but was in fact something else. A noise quite unexpected on a motorway, like a galloping horse chasing you all.”
He stood up without waiting for the answer.
9
The researcher now felt relief rather than despair at having abandoned any attempt to describe the final week.
His conclusion was that not only the final moments in the taxi but the entire last week were impossible to describe. He felt no guilt at cutting his story short. On the contrary, he felt it would have been wrong to continue.
From every great secret, hints occasionally leak out. It is probably once in seven, ten or seventy millennia that something escapes from that appalling repository where the gods store their superior knowledge that is forbidden to humankind. And in that moment, something that would normally take centuries to be discovered is suddenly revealed to the unseeing human eye, as when the wind accidentally lifts a veil.
In that moment of time, these four, that is, the two passengers, the driver and the mirror, apparently found themselves in an impossible conjunction.
Something impossible happened, the driver had said. In other words, something that was beyond their understanding. It was like a story of souls whose bodies are absent. It was this dissociation of body and soul that evidently led to their sense of disorientation and intoxicating liberation, the uncoupling of form and essence.
The file of the inquiry showed that Rovena and Besfort had mentioned this dissociation several times. They had also probably come to regret it.
He recalled now those few ideas, like rare diamonds, that he had exchanged with the pianist about Besfort’s final dream.
What was Besfort looking for in the tomb-motel? They agreed that he was looking for Rovena. Murdered, according to Lulu Blumb; disfigured, according to himself. Or perhaps something similar, which millions of men search for: the second nature of the woman they love.
For hours he imagined Besfort in front of this plaster structure, waiting for the original Rovena, then in the taxi, beside her fugitive form, experiencing something impossible for anybody in this world.
10
It was a silent Sunday noon when Liza Blumberg phoned again after a long interval. Unlike on previous occasions, her voice was warm and somnolent.
“I’m calling to tell you that I withdraw my suggestion that Besfort murdered my friend Rovena.”
“Why?” he replied. “You were so certain…”
“And now I am certain of the opposite.”
“I see,” he said after a silence.
He waited for Lulu to say something more, or to hang up.
“Rovena is alive,” she went on. “Only she’s changed her hair colour and now she’s called Anevor.”
Late that afternoon, Lulu Blumb arrived to recount what had happened the night before.
She had been playing the piano in the late-night bar, the very place where the two women had first met years before. It was the same bar and the same time, just before midnight, and she was feeling sick at heart, when Rovena appeared before her. Lulu sensed her presence as soon as she came through the door, but an indistinct fear that she might change her mind and turn back would not allow her to lift her head from the piano keyboard.
The woman who had entered made her way slowly among the chairs and sat down in the same place as on that fateful evening long ago. She had dyed her hair blonde, to preserve her anonymity, as Lulu realised later. But she walked in the same way, and her eyes, which once you had seen you could never forget, had not changed.
Then they stared at each other, as they had done that first time, but some invisible impediment made Lulu respect the newcomer’s wish not to be recognised.
Meanwhile, her fingers, which had played so naturally on the body of the woman she loved, conveyed to the keyboard all her grief at Rovena’s absence, her emotion at finding her again, her desire and its impediment.
As she finished, exhausted, her head bent, she listened to the whispers of “Bravo!” and waited for her to join her admirers by the piano as she had done before.
She did come, last in line, pale with emotion.
Rovena, my darling, Liza Blumberg cried to herself. But the other woman uttered a different name.
But still she repeated what she had said long ago, and, shortly before the bar closed, the couple found themselves once more in the pianist’s car.
They kissed for a long time in silence. But each time Liza whispered the name Rovena, she failed to respond. They went on kissing and tears moistened the cheeks of both, but it was only in bed after midnight when they were on the verge of sleep that Liza finally said, “You are Rovena. Why are you hiding it?” And the other woman replied, “You’re confusing me with someone else.” After a silence she said it again, “You’re confusing me with someone else,” and added, “but what does it matter?”
Really, what does it matter? thought Lulu Blumb. It was the same love, only in a different shape.
“Did you say a name?” the young woman said. “Did you say the name Rovena?” If she liked it so much, she could use an anagram, as people liked to do these days: Anevor.
Anevor, repeated Lulu Blumb to herself. Like the name of a witch in ancient times. You can dye your hair, change your passport and try a thousand tricks, but nothing in the world will persuade me that you are not Rovena.
As she stroked her chest, she found the scar left by the bullet of his revolver in that scary Albanian motel. She kissed it gently without saying a word.
She had so many questions. How had she managed to escape Besfort? How had she duped him?
With this thought she fell asleep. When she woke next morning Rovena had gone. Lulu would have taken her visit for a dream, but for the note left on the piano:
“I didn’t want to wake you. Thank you for this miracle. Your Anevor.”
“And that was all,” said Liza in a tired voice, after a silence, before she stood up to leave.
As so often before, the investigator’s gaze was caught by the last photograph, which showed Rovena’s dark hair and her delicate arm extended across Besfort’s chest, stretching towards the knot of his tie, as if trying to undo it at the last moment and help release his troubled spirit.