“What?” he exclaimed.
“The X-ray,” she said. “What will happen when it comes back from China?”
Victor shrugged and smiled.
“How should I know? They’ll certainly attach the Chinese doctors’ reading of it. Unless they ask for another X-ray altogether, I’ve no experience of that sort of thing.”
“What a nasty business!” she exclaimed.
She could feel him looking at her.
“The X-ray of a Chinaman’s foot flying from one country to another!” he said. “Macabre, isn’t it?”
She looked up involuntarily. For a moment, the fate of the man walking along beside her seemed linked to a vast expanse of sky being crossed by the long-awaited image of a foot. This brought back to her mind the X-ray her father had had to have a couple of years ago: the hazy white bones on the cloudy background…The future of the man beside her depended on a similar image.
She couldn’t help sighing. A Chinaman’s foot, she mused. The shop windows on either side of the street, the passers-by, all seemed to withdraw, giving way to that macabre image flying between the. continents, a combination of Asian and European myth. Any man who was hand in glove with that phantom foot must certainly be out of the ordinary.
“Oh, this is where I live!” she heard him say. But his voice sounded far away.
He’d stopped, and was pointing to the third or fourth floor of a block of Eats. Linda looked up, but absent-mindedly: she still felt strangely languid.
“Shall we go up for a minute?” he asked rather hesitantly. “It’s too soon just to go home, don’t you think?”
The afternoon seemed to be dragging on for ever. Linda’s mind refused to take anything in. She gazed idly at the little garden in front of the flats: the grass was starting to wither; there was a sketchily painted red seesaw.
“It’s so pleasant, talking to you. So peaceful,” he said, “Couldn’t we stay together a little while longer?”
Linda’s mind still dwelt on that still life with sky and the X-ray of a foot. In such a context, his suggestion seemed quite natural After all, why not? she thought. He’s so unhappy!
“Why not?” she murmured. And head bowed, without looking at him, she began to walk in the direction of the flats.
What am I doing? she asked herself several times as they went along. She’d agreed to go up to the apartment of a man she hardly knew before this afternoon. She asked herself the same question yet again. Bet she felt as if she’d been snatched up into some vast space in which she would soon dissolve.
Linda left Victor an hour later. It was dark by now, and she looked into the shop windows, which for some reason were not lit, to see if her hair was dishevelled. In fact, as she well knew, her hair was as tidy as ever. If there was any disorder, it lay elsewhere. Looking back on what had just happened, beginning with the sudden embrace which struck her as more insane with every minute that passed, quite apart from the fact that it had probably surprised her companion as much as herself, she wondered what sort of girl he must have taken her for.
“Goodnight,” she said suddenly when they came to an intersection, “I’m almost home.”
He made as if to say something, but then just murmured goodnight, almost as if to himself.
I never ought to have read any Russian literature, Linda thought as she covered the short distance to her own place, hurrying as if for dear life. It was all because of her owe damned soft-heartedness, she thought, patting her hair again as if the misunderstanding — she was now convinced that this was all it was — lay there, like a burr she was trying in vain to disentangle.
Victor was woken up by the telephone. It sounded unnaturally long and loud (ever since he’d been suspended from his job, Victor had felt that even the ringing of the phone sounded scornful and cold). He was wanted at the factory. What? Why? he asked. Would it be good news or bad? Come and find out, said the head of personnel.
As he dressed he wondered, almost aloud, “Why am I so calm?” Then, as if a load had fallen from him, he remembered the afternoon with Linda, their walk, and then, in his fiat, the amazing way she’d instantly put her arms around him. He’d thought about it over and over again, lying on his bed till midnight lighting one cigarette after another, as if trying to shroud in smoke something which was anyhow nebulous, inexplicable and vague as a dream. Curiously enough, what he remembered most clearly, better than all that had followed, was that first impulsive gesture of Linda’s. Sometimes he saw it as sisterly, sometimes as something quite different. He remembered learning at school than in the old Albanian ballads men called their sweethearts “sister”, and wondered whether it wasn’t his unhappiness that had made him so sentimental I’d never have had such tender feelings about an incident like this in the past, he thought. But then, in the past, it would never have happened. That soft hair on his cheek, the gentle touch of her lips, and above all those arms round his neck — it was all as fragile and fleeting as a rainbow: one vulgar word or gesture might destroy it. And even though that which people call vulgar had happened, the original rainbow remained intact…
He felt the only way he could keep the memory safe was to disappear. That was what he must do. He wouldn’t phone Linda; he would set their moment apart from reality, let it be sublimated by oblivion. Even if he happened to meet her by chance in the street, he’d pretend not to remember anything, perhaps not even to know her.
As he walked to the bus stop he thought now of the events of the previous afternoon, now about the reason for his being summoned to the factory. The man at the gate gave him a cheerful wink.
“Back again, are you, lad? Good!”
“I don’t know about that, Jani It depends what they tell me in personnel.”
“Go ahead,” said the old man. “There aren’t any Chinks in the corridors. They’re all on the factory floor.”
Victor smiled sadly. How had things got to the point where he had to enter his workplace almost surreptitiously? In his last days at the factory, before he was suspended, his friends had kidded him about what had happened, suggesting he should come to the factory in a theatrical wig and a false moustache so that the Chinese wouldn’t recognize him.
When he came out of the personnel office, Victor couldn’t decide whether he ought to lament or rejoice. They’d told him he was to Seave straight away for a new job at the steelworks in Elbasae. “In other words, I’ve got to leave Tirana just to please that swine?” he’d exclaimed, surprising even himself by his sudden rage. “Watch what you say, comrade,” the head of personnel had answered sternly. “Hundreds of comrades and Party members consider it an honour to work at Elbasan, And don’t forget you’re in the wrong. The Party told us not to react to any provocation on their part, and you had to go and…”
“What a fool I am,” Victor thought then. “I ought just to be glad the matter’s being wound up without more ado…You’re right, comrade,” he told the head of personnel, who was still scowling at him disapprovingly.
But, once out in the corridor, he felt suddenly empty. He was going to have to leave here for good. No matter how much he told himself it mightn’t really be for ever, that the Chinese might eventually go themselves and he be able to come back — you never knew — it didn’t make him feel any better. He walked across the yard not bothering to avoid attracting the Chinamen’s attention. His case was settled now; he had no reason to skulk. He’d even have liked to meet them and say right to their faces: “Well, I’m going. Satisfied?”