Linda had a bath and then started to wander aimlessly around her apartment. Ever since breaking off the affair she’d had with a government television engineer the previous year, she’d found the afternoons terribly long. Now and again she would pick up a half-read book from the settee, but she soon threw it down again. Finding herself in the hall, she stopped and looked in the glass. Still undecided as to whether to go to the dressmaker’s for a fitting or call on one of her workmates at the Makina Import office, she started to do her hair.
For some reason or other she couldn’t get out of her mind a poem she’d read a few days ago, waiting at the hairdresser’s:
Ever since you left
I can feel myself gradually forgetting you,
Feel your eyes dying in me,
And your hair, and all
She took out a hairpin and adjusted a couple of small combs. Forgetting someone’s hair, she thought as she fiddled with one of the combs. “I can never forget you,” he’d said in his last letter, his last attempt to revive their affair.- “I can never erase anything about you from my memory — your words, your eyes, your hair…” And yet, writing in that magazine, there was someone strong enough to say he could forget. “Feel your eyes dying in me…and your hair.”
People said that when you died it was your hair that died last, Linda smiled, in spite of the comb she was now holding in her mouth. Then she dropped it, put on her raincoat and opened the door, still not knowing where she was going.
The late afternoon was still warm beneath the dull autumn sky, as if ignoring the seasons. Several times Linda almost went into a shop to buy some material, but each time she changed her mind. She felt relaxed and at ease with herself. For no particular reason, Suva’s words came back to her: “I got married during the blockade.” As a matter of fact, her thoughts had lately been turning more and more often to Silva and things connected with her. The surge of happiness she’d felt when she first met her, eight months ago, kept recurring. She now rejoiced in her good luck at working in the same office as Silva, and shuddered at the thought that one of them might be moved. Every so often she found herself adopting one of Suva’s expressions or gestures, and while she did her best to avoid copying the older woman, she didn’t feel guilty about it. She liked everything about Silva — her face, her way of dressing and doing her hair, the way she spoke on the telephone, the atmosphere around her and the relations she created with everyone, from her fellow secretaries to her superiors. Linda also admired Suva’s relationship with her husband, and had even, on the basis of just a few glimpses, taken a liking to the husband himself, with his stern-looking and yet not forbidding face, and the deeply etched lines on his forehead that seemed signs of youth rather than age.
“‘I got married during the blockade,’“ she repeated, smiling. Would she herself get married during this second blockade? She turned towards a shop window so that no one would see her smiling to herself. She certainly liked doing as Silva did, even at the risk of seeming like a pale imitation of her friend. Anyhow, mightn’t anything happen during a blockade? Hadn’t Silva got married, while her late sister got divorced in order to marry Besnik Struga, and Struga himself, a person still shrouded in mystery for Linda, had broken off his engagement? She’d met Struga, Suva’s former brother-in-law, only once, by chance, in the corridor, when he’d come to the ministry to see Silva. But — perhaps because Linda had heard so much about him — he’d made a strong impression on her. Most of the people Silva knew were somehow out of the ordinary: her brother, the tank officer, who’d come to see her two days ago, looking distraught; Skënder Bermema, the writer, an old family friend who’d had a rather enigmatic relationship with Suva’s sister; and other cousins and acquaintances whom Linda had met or whose voices she’d heard when they’d called in at or rung up the office to speak to her friend. All were interesting; almost all had something in their lives — some phase, some act or some episode — that was connected with the Soviet blockade. Linda was growing more and more fascinated by that period, and by anyone who’d been directly involved in it.
And why shouldn’t I too get married during a blockade? she joked to herself as she made for the Makina Import building. Bet thee she’d have to find someone to marry. And furthermore, was this really a genuine blockade? By all accounts the other one had weighed down on everyone like lead: a period harsh in itself had been slashed through as by an icy abyss. But it was still hard to say how serious the present crisis might prove. You needed to be a code-cruncher to deduce anything from the articles in the press. But things might not turn out so badly as that: there mightn’t be a blockade at all. And detecting a tinge of regret in this thought, as if she could only get married if there was a blockade, she smiled at her own absurdity.
“If anyone suspected the idiotic notions that go through my mind!” she thought. It was a good thing Tirana was big enough for one to daydream as one walked along without bumping into people one knew. Then, paradoxically, she had a feeling someone was watching her. She turned, and thought she recognized a face. The man just nodded vaguely. Where have I seen that ravaged face before, she wondered. And then she remembered. It was in the cafeteria at the ministry.
Linda smiled at him. They both walked on a little way. Then he spoke.
“You’re Suva’s friend, aren’t you? We’ve met before, if you remember.”
“Yes, indeed!” Linda exclaimed. But he didn’t take the hand she’d half extended.
“How did that business about the X-ray turn out?” she asked, laughing.
But he remained serious.
“No developments,” he said. “Nothing.”
“Really?”
She gave him a sidelong look, and her own smile faded. If she’d met anyone else in the street like this, she would have walked on without more ado, but there was something about his downcast expression that made him seem different from other people.
“Perhaps things will sort themselves out faster than you think.”
Victor Hila shrugged, as if to say it was better not to talk about it. They’d been walking along together for some time now, and it seemed to make both of them uncomfortable. Linda had noticed before how disagreeable it is being overtaken in the street by someone you know, rather than just meeting them coming towards you and passing by. Although the man looked even gloomier than he had the other day at the ministry, she resolved to give him the slip at the next shop they came to. Then he, as if reading her thoughts, asked her point-blank:
“Are you in a hurry?”
“Yes,” said Linda, though she spoke rather uncertainly. “I'm on my way to see a friend.”
He looked at her closely for a moment.
“Would you mind if I asked you something?”
“Not at all,” answered Linda, staring straight ahead.
“Please don’t misunderstand me,” he said, “but I feel so depressed this afternoon that you really would be doing me a kindness if you’d have a drink with me.”
Linda stood still for a moment, hesitating. The man’s expectancy was almost tangible.
“All right,” she said, surprised at how faint her voice was.
“It’s very kind of you,’ he murmured. “Thanks.”
Linda didn’t know what to say. They went across a square to a little café. “But I was right to say I’d come,” she thought as they went in, “He really did look down in the dumps.”
There weren’t many other people in the café.
“What will you have?” he asked.
“A coffee, please,” said Linda.