Ismaíl Kadaré - The Accident

“No, it’s not former property owners,” said the waiter, setting down the coffee cup. “They’re Çamëria Albanians, angry at the government.”

“Which government?” asked Besfort. “The Albanian or the Greek one?”

The waiter shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps both. Whenever the two reach an agreement, these people take to the streets.”

The demonstration was still too far away to read the placards.

Liza was more than a pretext, he thought. She was perhaps the key to understanding what was happening. It was no coincidence that they had both remembered her again in Vienna, after forgetting about her for so long.

Two years before, after their big quarrel, he had experienced for the first time the taste that comes from making love to a woman you have discovered a second time. It was a mixture of the recollection of the start of the love affair, which was at that moment ending, with the beginning of something else. It was her taste, and yet not hers at all. She was his, but not his. She was a stranger, yet familiar in every nuance. Actual and ineffable. Faithful and elusive.

Ever since their last meeting, his mind had harked back continually to everything to do with that feeling. His dream of resurrection certainly had something to do with it. As a student at the university, he had studied Albanian folklore, with its motifs of rediscovery. Now for the first time he wondered at their mysteriousness. The bridegroom in his marriage bed who recognises by a birthmark that his bride is his sister. Or conversely, the bride who recognises her brother. The father who returns from exile and takes his son for his enemy, or his enemy for his son, and so forth, all these stories of incest which were thought to be fiction, but very probably were not. All these violations of taboos, obscure desires within the tribe, which out of shame or horror were passed on as legends, floated to the surface of his memory.

“You’re no longer my master. I won’t stand your tyranny any longer. I’ve had enough.”

Besfort turned his head to the window, as if Rovena’s voice on the telephone two years ago, racked by sobs, now came to him from outside.

The crowd of demonstrators was now close to the prime minister’s office, and their shouts were clearly audible.

“It’s not about property, or Çamëria,” said the waiter, also looking out of the window.

The placards were mainly pink.

“I think they’re the ‘alternatives’,” said someone at the next table. “That’s what the gays and lesbians are called now.”

Rovena’s voice on the phone was no longer recognisable. Taken aback, he was stuck for words. He interrupted her, “Calm down, listen to me.” But she snapped back, “No, I won’t calm down, I won’t listen to you.”

He hung up in fury, but she called back at once.

“Don’t hang up like you always do. You’re no longer…”

“That’s enough,” he shouted back. “You’re not in your right mind.”

“Really?” she said. “Is that how you think of me? Now listen. Get ready to hear something very serious.”

You aren’t what you were to me any more. I love someone else. Amidst the deafening crackles and abrupt silences of the telephone line, those were the words he expected. But amazingly, something else came down the wire.

“You’ve ruined my sex life.”

“What?”

The thought that her mental health was not good suddenly took priority over everything else. Everything she had said, her insults, even her possible infidelities meant nothing. He tried to handle her gently. “Rovena, my dear, calm down. It must be my fault, no doubt about it, my fault, only mine, are you listening?”

“No, I’m not listening. And I don’t want to. And don’t think that you’re as frightening as you seem.”

“Of course I’m not, and I don’t want to seem frightening.”

“Really?”

“You think I’m trying to scare you? You think I’m like an American Indian, tattooing my face to look fierce?”

Amazingly, she laughed. He even thought he caught the word “darling” smothered by her laughter, as so often when she liked one of his jokes. But she was quiet only for a moment. Her voice rose stridently again, and he thought, oh God, she’s really not well.

The next day she seemed more relaxed on the phone, if a bit tired. She had been to the doctor, who had asked some tactful questions. She explained that she had quarrelled with her lover. The doctor had given her tranquillisers and some advice: most importantly to break off all contact with the source of the trouble, in other words with him. A long silence followed.

“Are you going to ask the same old question, is there anybody between us?”

“No, I’m not,” he answered.

“You say not, but you’re thinking it. Because you still don’t understand that I’m no longer your slave.”

He let her say her piece. She said he had enslaved her. He had closed every door that opened for her, and not allowed her the slightest freedom. He wanted her entirely for himself, like every tyrant. He had made her seek therapy. He had crippled her, he had ruined her sex life.

He butted in to say that the opposite was true, that he, or rather both of them, as she had said time and again, had refined their sex life to a degree that few others had achieved. But that, she protested, is precisely what should not have happened. He had violated her nature… her psyche.

“Is that the twaddle your German doctor talks?” he interrupted.

“Precisely that,” came her answer.

He imagined her breasts, and the insult and pain he felt at the prospect of never seeing them again made his response unexpectedly quiet. He would leave her in peace, but she should understand one thing, that her description of him was unfair. He had been her liberator, but this was not the first time in history that a liberator had been taken for a tyrant, just as many a tyrant had been taken for a liberator.

That was more or less all he said. Her next telephone call three weeks later came to him as if from a great distance. Her voice was different. Neither of them mentioned the quarrel. She said that she’d been in London with the rest of her course group. That she had taken up sport, mainly swimming. It was as if nothing had happened. Only when she asked, “Are we going to see each other?” a silence fell.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Her reply was unexpected: “I don’t know.”

He almost shouted, “Then what the hell are you calling for? Why ask if we are going to see each other?”

“Listen,” she went on. “I want us to meet, like before, but I don’t want to lie to you… Something has happened…”

So that was it. In the long silence that followed, she seemed to be waiting for the question whose time had finally come. Is there somebody else? But he said nothing. He had asked this question at the wrong time, and now that its hour had struck he kept his silence. Slut, he said to himself. NGO whore. International scholarship tart. But aloud he said, “I don’t want to know.”

Her own reply was also slow in coming. Perhaps she expected something else, or took his answer as a sign he didn’t care. “Really? So you don’t want to know? OK, I’ll give you the whole bitter truth: you are no longer what you were. I belong to someone else.”

“I realise that. I’ve known for some time…”

She wanted to reply: “But you pretend not to care. That’s how you usually behave. You hit back at someone else when you’re on the ropes yourself.” But she did not utter this final retort out loud. Her unspoken words flew round her brain like lost birds that could not find their way out. He listened to her laboured breathing, until finally she said, “If that’s the case, then come here…”