Brikena, slender and tall for her age, appeared in the doorway.
“It’s all ready! There’s nothing more for you to do!”
“Thank you. Come and have a rest.”
Brikena sat down opposite her mother.
“I wonder where Father is now!” she said.
Silva shrugged.
“Up in the sky over some desert, I expect! Or else in an airport waiting for another plane.”
Brikena was going to ask another question, but her mother, lying with her head against the back of her chair, looked as if she needed some peace after her harassing day. So Brikena went and got a photograph album from the bookshelves, then sat down again and started leafing through it.
Silva could hear the rustle of the pages, and although she was trying to make her mind a blank she couldn’t help imagining the photographs her daughter might be looking at. A montage of years and seasons — especially summers — rose up in her memory. Her family had always been fond of taking snaps, and Silva enjoyed spending a quiet afternoon sitting on the sofa as Brikena was sitting now, looking through one of their many albums.
The sound of pages turning stopped. Silva could guess which snap her daughter’s eyes were resting on.
“Which picture are you looking at?” she asked, her own eyes still closed.
“The one of Aunt Ana.”
So she’d been right — she’d been almost sure of it even as she asked. She went cold inside, transfixed by the fierce pain she still felt whenever her sister was mentioned, although it was eleven years now since she died.
At last the pages began to turn again, and Silva took a deep breath, perhaps to free herself from the vice in which her daughter had unknowingly caught her.
The doorbell rang again. This time it really was some visitors. First came Suva’s mother, followed by her brother and sister-in-law. Her mother, never very talkative, had scarcely spoken at all since Ana died. She might be at a family dinner or some other such gathering for hours without uttering a word, though she never inflicted her grief on anyone else. And unlike most people’s vehement mourning, hers seemed so muted and so evenly spread over the whole of her life as to be quite bearable. Silva often thought this was the way Ana ought to be mourned.
Suva’s mother kissed Brikena and handed her a parcel Then she embraced Silva, went silently into the living room, and sat down in her usual chair.
“Is there anything I can do to help, Silva?” asked her sister-in-law.
“No, thank you, Brikena and I have seen to everything.”
The sister-in-law and her husband settled down on the sofa. Silva sat on a chair facing them.
“It’s freezing cold out,” said her sister-in-law.
“Is it?” said Silva, getting up to put a log in the tiled stove.
Then there was a silence, during which Silva, surreptitiously studying her brother’s handsome face, thought she detected signs of anxiety. Sensing that he’d noticed her looking at him, she turned away, but a little while later, seeing that he wore the same expression as before, she wondered why he had always passed so unnoticed among their small circle of friends. Had any but herself remarked his present worried look? He was a graduate of the military academy and at present an officer in a tank regiment; but people were always surprised to hear that Silva had a brother at all. This state of affairs had been even more marked when Ana was alive: Silva and Ana, universally known as the Krasniqi sisters, had seemed to monopolize everyone’s attention, to the exclusion of the rest of the family. Whenever the girls mentioned their brother in conversation, people would stare and say, “Have you really got a brother? A real one, I mean, born of the same mother as both of you?” “Yes, of course!” they would answer, greatly amused.
Even now that Ana was dead, many people still thought of the two sisters together, just as they had done in the early sixties, when they were nearly always together, despite the fact that Ana was already married then and Silva still single. But everyone persisted in regarding their brother as practically non-existent.
“When did Gjergj leave?” he asked Silva, in the hope of cutting short her scrutiny.
“Four days ago.”
“How inconvenient!” said his wife, referring to Brikena’s birthday.
Silva knew that all her guests except her mother would make the same remark.
“It couldn’t be helped,” she said.
There was another ring at the door: two of Brikena’s teachers and their children, bearing gift-wrapped parcels. As they took their coats off in the hall they too asked about Gjergj’s trip, and they were just exclaiming “How inconvenient!” when the bell rang once more. Timidly this time.
““Who is it, Brikena?” Silva called out, not hearing any sound from the hall.
“Veriana,” her daughter called back.
Silva jumped up. By the front door, struggling out of her raincoat,her cheeks red from the cold, stood her only niece. A frail figure — the very image of Ana.
Silva went over and kissed her fondly.
“Father says he’s very sorry, Aunt Silva — something cropped up and he couldn’t manage it.”
“What a pity! But did you come all on your own?”
“Yes. On the bus.”
Silva took her niece’s hand and led her towards the living room. Silva herself just stood in the doorway.
“Good evening!” said the girl to everyone in general.
They all looked back at her with a mixture of curiosity and pity.
“Isn’t she like her poor mother!” whispered one of the women.
Veriana went straight over to her grandmother, who made room for her on her chair and began stroking her hair affectionately.
“Beseik’s been unexpectedly detained and can’t come,” said Silva from the door, answering her guests’ unspoken question.
Silva thought she heard someone say “What a pity!” Unless, thinking the same herself, she’d only imagined it. She drew back into the hall for a moment.
She really was sorry Besnik wasn’t there. It was because of him she hadn’t invited Skënder Bermema. She liked them both equally, but always made sure they didn’t both come to see her together. Besnik Straga, her brother-in-law, who hadn’t remarried after Ana’s death, was naturally closer to her, but Skënder Bermema was closely linked to the memory of their youth, the rapturous years the two sisters had shared before Ana’s divorce from her first husband. Moreover, before Ana met and married Besnik, there’d been a friendship between her and Skënder which even after all these years was still something of a mystery to everyone, including Silva.
An ideal time for going over all these memories, Silva had thought an hour ago. On autumn afternoons like this, just before some festivity, she liked to sit on the windowsill and, as darkness came down like a theatre curtain, forget present preoccupations and conjure up the past: the scandal of Ana and _ Frederic’s divorce; the endless conjectures about the reasons for it; the mysterious attitude of Skënder Bermema, whose name had been closely linked to the whole business even in the courtroom, which people had likened to a literary jury. For at the husband’s request — though it had only made him seem even more ridiculous — the judge had pored for days over certain pages of Bermema’s books which Frédéric insisted were dedicated to Ana. Then came the unexpected twist when it turned out that Ana’s decision to get a divorce had nothing to do with Bermema, whose owe marriage was going through a difficult patch, but was really due to her relationship with Straga, and to their suddee decision to get married as soon as possible. No one ever knew whether, in view of the fact his jealousy had been concentrated for years on Bermema, this lessened Frederic’s fury, or whether his anger at being betrayed was increased by the entrance on the scene of a third man.