From the window, the researcher watched the woman reach the other side of the crossroads. A distant peal of thunder made him shake his head, but he could not say why, or to whom this negative was directed.
So Lulu Blumb was gone too. She had let him go quietly, as she had done with so many things in this world, and perhaps that distant reverberation was her kind of farewell.
Now he would be left by himself as before, alone with the riddle of the two strangers that nobody had asked him to solve.
11
The researcher had imagined it before, and would do so hundreds of times before his life’s end: the painful progress of the taxi through the traffic on that blustery morning of 17 May, the rain beating against the windows, the long stationary lines, the names of firms and distant cities written on trucks in all the languages of Europe. Dortmund, Euromobil, Hannover, Elsinore, Paradise Travel, The Hague. These names, and their low voices, “What’s this doomsday scenario, we’re going to miss the plane.” – all these things added to their anxiety.
Of course it is late. They want to turn back, even if they do not say so. On both sides, the trap is closing.
“Let’s go back, darling.”
“We can’t.”
They talk in low voices, not knowing if the other can hear. There’s absolutely no way back. The rear-view mirror reflects the eyes of one and then the other. The traffic moves a little. Later it stalls again. Perhaps they’ll hold the plane. Frankfurt Intercontinental, Vienna, Monaco-Hermitage, Kronprinz. Her mind reels. But we’ve stayed in these hotels. (Where we were happy, she whispers fearfully.) Why have they suddenly turned against us? Loreley, Schlosshotel-Lerbach, Excelsior Ernst, Biarritz. He tries to hold her tight.
“Don’t be scared, darling. I think the traffic’s easing. Perhaps the plane will wait.” He puts his arm around her, but the gesture seems distant, as if long-forgotten.
“What are those black oxen?” she says. “That’s all we need.”
He makes no reply, but mutters something about prison doors. He hopes they’ll find them still open, before the sun sets. She is scared again. She wants to ask: where did we go wrong? He tries to draw her close.
“What are you doing? You’re strangling me.”
The taxi speeds forward. The driver’s eyes, as if already caught by something, freeze on the glass of the mirror. Light pours in from both sides, but it is too bright, pitiless. She lays her head against his shoulder. The taxi begins to shake. There is an alien presence inside, prepotent, heedless, with its own powers and menacing laws. What’s happening? Where are we going wrong?
Their lips come still closer. We mustn’t. We can’t. There are prohibitive powers and orders everywhere. He says something inaudible. From the movement of his lips, it is a name, but someone else’s, not hers. He repeats it, but again, as in his plaster dream, it cannot be heard. He pleads for the return of the woman he has killed with his own hands. Please come back, be again what you were. But she cannot. No way. Whole minutes, years, centuries pass until there is a great crack, and from out of the encasing plaster the name finally resounds: Eurydice. The tremors suddenly cease. As if the taxi has left the earth. The doors spring open and seem to give the car wings. And so transformed, it flies through the sky, unless it never was a taxi, but something else, and they had failed to notice. But it is too late now. There is no remedy.
Rovena and Besfort Y. are no longer… Anevor…
Dlrow siht ni regnol on era Y. trofseB dna anevoR…
12
More and more often he fell into a drowsy state, from which only the prospect of writing his own will could rouse him. Before drafting it he waited for a final answer from the European Road Safety Institute. Its reply came after a long delay. The Institute accepted his condition. He would deliver to them the results of his inquiry in exchange for the taxi’s rear-view mirror.
In the offices which he visited, they looked at him in surprise, and even with a kind of pity, as if he were sick. At the waste disposal site, he met with a similar reception. It took a long time to find the mirror; he could hardly believe his eyes when at last they handed it to him.
It was not easy to prepare his will. In the course of writing it, he discovered that there was an infinite universe of testaments. Down the ages, history had recorded the most diverse kinds. Testaments had been left in the form of poisons, antique tragedies, storks’ nests, appeals by national minorities or metro projects. The material attachments appended to them were no less surprising, ranging from revolvers and condoms, to oil pipes and the devil knew what. The taxi’s rear-view mirror, buried with the man who had been so preoccupied with it in life, was the first such object of its kind.
He handed over the text of his will for translation into Latin and then into the principal languages of the European Union. He spent weeks sending it to every possible institution he could find on the internet: archaeological institutes, psycho-mystical research units, university departments of geochemistry. A huge and deadly bunker in the United States. Finally, the World Probate Institute.
While dealing with all this, he heard vague pieces of news, some about the long-standing question of whether Besfort Y. had murdered his girlfriend or not. Opinions were as divided as ever. Now there was a third view, that Besfort had indeed committed a murder, but it was impossible to ascertain at what time. In this case the allegation of murder had to be withdrawn, unless it could be shown to have been committed in another dimension in which actions do not take place in time, because time does not exist.
As expected, there were also rumours that Rovena St. (as time passed, some interpreted St. as an abbreviation of “Saint”) was still alive. It was said that Besfort Y. too had been seen, hurrying across a road junction with the collar of his overcoat raised in order not to be recognised. He was even sighted in Tirana, sitting on a sofa after dinner, persuading a young woman to take a trip with him round Europe.
Absorbed in his will, he tried to forget all these things. He returned to the text every day. He would correct words here and there, or remove and replace them, but without altering the essential content.
His will essentially provided for the reopening of his grave, in which, inside his lead coffin, the famous mirror would be buried beside his body.
First, he set a date for his exhumation thirty years hence. Later, he changed this to one hundred, only to erase this and write one thousand years.
He spent what life remained to him imagining what the diggers would find when they opened his grave. He firmly believed that mirrors, into which women looked as they beautified themselves before they were kissed, or murdered, absorbed something of the images they reflected. But nobody in this scornful world had thought of taking an interest in any of this.
He hoped that what happened in the taxi carrying two lovers to an airport, one thousand years ago, would leave some trace, however slight, on the surface of the glass.
There were days when he thought he discerned the outline of this mystery, as if through mist, but there were others when it seemed that the mirror, even after lying for a thousand years next to his skull, opaquely reflected nothing but the infinite void.
Tirana, Mali i Robit, Paris
Winter, 2003-2004
Ismaíl Kadaré
Born in 1936, Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best-known poet and novelist. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. In 2005 he was awarded the first Man Booker International Prize for ‘a body of work written by an author who has had a truly global impact.’ He is the recipient of the highly prestigious 2009 Principe de Asturias de las Letras in Spain.