Ismaíl Kadaré - The Accident

He nodded, “I don’t think I’m wrong.”

“In the old days that would have been called treason,” she said. “They talked about nothing else at school.”

“I know.”

She stroked his hair. “Don’t worry, darling. It’s past two o’clock.”

In the bar they were now surely wishing one another goodnight. They would guess at all kinds of reasons for her absence, but never imagine that she was in bed with a man who had been talking on the phone about things that would hit the front pages of the papers tomorrow.

Tomorrow she too might find it hard to believe. It was easy to say that she had exchanged poverty with its pizzas for a life of luxury. But it was something else. He had made her more complicated. He had turned her into a beautiful, mysterious woman, the kind she had dreamed about as a schoolgirl.

An unfamiliar kind of lassitude clung to her body. She embraced him gently, murmuring loving words into his ear. Don’t think about what’s going on down there. She had a feeling everything would be all right. Nobody would call it an invasion. She was ready to die for him. Come, darling.

Afterwards, in that lightning-scorched clarity of mind that only follows sexual release, she was stabbed by an unaccustomed pang of regret that he was not her husband. As she fell asleep, the cavernous sense of irreversible loss abated, and it seemed natural to think that, quite apart from what the law stated, he was in truth her husband.

After breakfast she told him that she would go to her seminar, to put in an appearance, and come back as soon as possible.

It was more annoying than she expected to be pestered by questions about where she had spent the previous evening.

“We looked for you everywhere, we expected you. You might have let me know,” said the Slovak.

“I couldn’t,” she said. “Somebody arrived unexpectedly from Albania. There’s been a coup there.”

“Oh, so that’s what’s on your mind,” he continued.

“Of course.”

He shrugged his shoulders. Since he had left, he hadn’t given a thought to Slovakia. He never wanted to hear the place mentioned again.

She knew this. A lot of Albanians talked like this.

An hour later, as she almost ran to the hotel, the March wind did all it could to draw out her tears. The two receptionists gave her a strange look. One of them handed her a small envelope.

“My darling, I’ve had to leave suddenly. You can imagine why. xxx B.”

The tears finally poured from her.

With a sudden movement, as if finding the lever to stem the flow of her memories, Rovena turned off the shower.

The silence was worse. She was sure that he had still not come back to the room. To fill the emptiness she picked up the hairdryer. A wild blast of air replaced the rush of the shower, a suitable accompaniment to her fury.

You’re finally going to tell me what it is that isn’t the same as before, she thought angrily.

They had been together so many years and yet she had never said those words to him. Not during the nightmare of The Hague, on the threshold of the great trial. Not even during the worst storms at the time of her relationship with Lulu.

Throughout that winter, the cold eyes of the psychiatrist had looked at her, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left of the mirror. “This sort of crisis is not common, but it is well documented. You are making a passage, undergoing a transition. Because this experience is over, you think you have accomplished it painlessly. You forget that even moving house is a form of stress, let alone what you’re going through now. It’s like being transported to another planet.”

After leaving the doctor, she vented half her anger on the phone, right there in the street. “I’ve changed now, understand? You’re no longer what you were to me. You aren’t my master any more, understand? Nor as frightening as I used to think, not any more.”

Nothing was the same as before… She had once said to Besfort these same words that now, from him, wounded her so deeply. Perhaps it was now his turn.

Take your revenge then. What are you waiting for? The deafening noise did not allow her to calm down. But the thought occurred to her that he was not the sort of person to take revenge by giving as good as he got.

As long as he has not made the same switch, she thought. The Council of Europe was said to be swarming with gays.

The silence after she switched off the hairdryer was twice as deep as after the shower.

Just… as long as he… has not… meanwhile… made the same switch.

Her final words fell slowly like the last leaves after a storm has abated.

In the silence she felt defenceless again. Her eyes darted to her cosmetics, spread out below the mirror. First she reached for her lipstick. She lifted it to her mouth, but in her nervous haste allowed the tube to slip to one side. The red smudge goaded her into daubing herself even more crudely, instead of taking proper care.

I can be a murderer too, she said to herself… Like you, my lord and master.

The noise of the door brought her up short. He’s back, she cried to herself, and half her rage evaporated instantly.

Hurriedly, as if destroying the evidence, she wiped the lipstick from her face.

She grew calmer as she started on her eyelashes. The ritual of make-up always cleared her mind more than anything else.

She thought she could muster a smile, but her face still did not obey.

She felt safe with the idea that the more beautiful she made herself, the more easily she could extract his secret. A mask always gives you an advantage over an opponent.

The same day. Both together.

Just as she had expected, he looked admiringly when he saw her.

“Now I know why you’re so late.”

“Have you been waiting a long time?”

He looked at his watch. “About twenty minutes.”

“Really?”

He had drunk a coffee downstairs and returned while she was in the shower.

“It’s beautiful out on the balcony. But what’s the matter?”

She raised her hands to her cheeks. “I don’t know, but I felt… I remembered for some reason that old gypsy woman. Do you remember her? I told you about her. She was interned because of us.”

“Of course I remember her. Perhaps it was my fault. I promised to do something for her. There were compensation schemes and special pensions for these cases. Give me her name and address. I won’t forget this time.”

“If she’s still alive,” she said. “She was called Zara Zyberi.” She knew the name of her street, Him Kolli, but not the number. She remembered only a persimmon tree in the yard.

She watched his hand writing this down and could barely hold back her tears.

After breakfast they went out for a walk, following their daily routine. Finding a suitable café was so much easier in Vienna than anywhere else.

Outside the cathedral, the old-fashioned carriages waited for passing tourists. Seven years before, they too had taken one. It had been midwinter. Under the dusting of snow the statues had seemed to make tentative signs of welcome. She thought she had never seen so many hotels and streets with “prince” or “crown” in their names. It was her last hope that he would think of marriage, but instead he started talking about the overthrow of the Habsburgs, the only dynasty to fall without bloodshed.

In the café, they watched each other’s hand movements and fell silent. The small ruby of her ring sparkled like frost.

For some reason he recalled the posters of the last city elections in Tirana, and the Piazza restaurant where an Italian- Albanian priest had suddenly struck up the song “There by the village stream, the last Jorgo fell”.