Ismaíl Kadaré - The Accident

He wanted to tell her about the extraordinary insults the candidates had thrown at one another, and especially about that unknown villager Jorgo, who was mentioned in the song as if he belonged to some dynasty, as Jorgo III or XIV. But at that moment any connection between the memories of the posters and the drunk priest evaporated, the warm glow had vanished from her face and a veil of sadness had descended. Also, he had not had time to tell her the dream about Stalin.

She did not hide her sudden change of mood. After nine years together, and all she had given to this man, he had no grounds to upbraid her over such things. Nor did he have any right to torment her with ambiguous remarks.

He knew that this was a most inadvisable time to say, “What’s the matter with you?” But the words burst out of him.

She smiled wanly. “You should ask yourself that.” He had said that nothing was the same as before, and she had a right to know what this meant. She had waited a whole night to find out.

He bit his lower lip. Rovena stared at him.

“You’re right,” he said. “But believe me, it’s not easy for me to say.”

The chill descended again at once.

Then don’t say it, she wanted to cry, but her lips did not obey her.

“Is there someone else?” she blurted out.

Oh God, came the lacerating thought through his mind. This old phrase, rising from the grave. It wasn’t Rovena who had used it long ago, but himself.

He remembered the scene. As vividly as the election posters, the dilapidated telephone box outside the post office, the filthy rain and her silence down the phone.

“What’s the matter with you?” he had asked, and Rovena had said nothing. And then he had almost shrieked, “Is there someone else?”

They were still using the same words, as if they had no right to any others. “Is there someone else? I’m giving you an answer. There isn’t.”

The tension suddenly eased, and she closed her eyes. She wanted to rest her head on his shoulder. His words came to her as if through a soothing mist. There was no other woman. It was something else. She translated this into German as if to grasp its meaning better. Es ist anders .

Let it be anything, she thought, but not that.

“It’s more complicated,” he went on.

“You don’t love me in the way you used to? You’re tired of me?”

It’s not about me. It’s to do with both of us. It’s about the freedom that she often complained about… He had decided to tell her, but now he found he couldn’t. Something was missing. A lot of things. Next time he would manage it. If not, he would try to put it in a letter.

“Perhaps it’s not true? Perhaps it only seems that way to you? Just as it seemed to me?”

“What did it seem to you?”

“Well, that things aren’t the same as before. I mean that there is something that isn’t like it was, and so it seems to you that everything has changed.”

“That’s not it,” he replied.

His voice seemed to echo as if from a church belfry.

She thought that she had grasped his meaning, but it evaporated in an instant. Was it that he felt tied, in the same way as she had, and wanted to break free? She had once shouted at him: “Tyrant, slave-owner!” All this time, had he too been chafing in silence at the enslaving chains?

As always, she felt that she was too late.

He felt tired. His head ached. On the street, the illuminated signs above the hotels and shops glittered menacingly.

He recollected not the lunch with Stalin, but her first letter. Icy, sub-zero Tirana finally seemed to be getting serious. That’s what she wrote. And as for the place below her belly, since he asked for news of it, it was horribly dark down there.

He remembered other parts of her letter, in which she wrote about her waiting, about her coffee with the gypsy woman, who had said some things that she could not put on paper, and again about the sub-zero temperatures in which all these things were taking place.

Smiling wanly like the winter sun, they both recollected almost the entire letter. In his reply from Brussels he had written that this was without doubt the most beautiful letter to have reached the north that year, from the remotest part of the continent – the Western Balkans, which was so keen to join Europe.

Later, when they met, he was eager to hear what the gypsy woman had said. There was another form of desire, he said, which came from a mysterious, remote epoch.

She wanted to weep. Remembering old love letters was not a good sign.

He had wanted her to tell him about the gypsy woman when they were in bed, before they made love. She told him in a low voice, as if whispering a prayer. He wanted to know if the gypsy woman had asked to see between her legs, and she replied that she hadn’t needed to because she had opened them herself, she could not tell why, she just did it, like the other time… oh no, she didn’t seem lesbian. Or rather, in the fug of that house, lesbianism might be mixed with other things… you really are psychic…

After lunch, they both wanted to rest. When they went out again, dusk had fallen. The royal crowns above the hotel entrances, which in other countries had all been effaced, still wearily clung on in their niches.

They found themselves outside St. Stephen’s Cathedral again, at the end of the boulevard. In the dusk, its windows cast assorted reflections, as if trying on different masks. They looked like the dead, sometimes coming back to life, and sometimes vanishing again.

Bending over her shoulder, he whispered loving words which now sounded incredible to her ears, so rare had they become. First he had stopped saying them. Then she had given up too.

Like forgotten music, they returned, but they seemed somehow unreal. We have lost our feeling for each other, he said in an even sweeter voice. Astonishingly, these words did not sound frightening to her, although they should have done. Nor did the word “marriage” when he uttered it. It seemed untrue, like in a dream. They had been in Vienna seven years before, and she had waited for that word in vain. Now it had arrived after so long, but in an unexpected form.

“Will you agree to be my ex-wife?”

She wanted to cut him short. Was he crazy? But she thought it was better to wait. This was not the first time that he had been obscure. During one of their arguments on the phone, she had said to him: “You tell me to look for a therapist, but you need one more than I do.”

“Your ex-wife?” she finally interrupted. “Is that what you said, or did I mishear you?”

Gently he kissed her and told her not to take it the wrong way. It had to do with their conversation a while ago.

Aha, so we’re back on that subject.

His voice sank to a low murmur, like before their first kiss. She should try to understand him. Their time of love, if not over, was approaching its end. Most misunderstandings and dramas happened because people did not want to accept this end. They could easily tell day from night or summer from winter, but they were blind to the end of love. And so they could not face up to it.

“Do you want us to separate? Why not just say so?”

He said that she was using the world’s usual standards. Just like the rabble do. All the world’s ordinary opinions, which unfortunately are the most widespread and claim the authority of laws, come from the rabble. He wanted to get away from that sort of thing, to find some chink through which they could escape.

Rovena made no further effort to understand him. Perhaps it helps him to talk like this, she thought. He said that the two of them were going through a period of transition. Later, the last glimmer of their love, like the final rays of the sun, would fade. Then a different, negative time would begin. This time was ruled by different laws, of a kind that people rebelled against. They fought against them, suffered, hit out at each other, until one day they realised to their horror that their love had turned to ashes.