Ismaíl Kadaré - The Accident

Beautiful women did not resort to stratagems of this kind, because they did not need to. Rovena was losing her special characteristics. This was why he could invite her on the trip so casually and shamelessly.

In the hotel, he was relieved rather than disappointed when he saw her young girl’s breasts. This deficiency seemed sent by the gods to protect him. Pale, delicate, defenceless, she looked less like a dangerous woman than a little martyr.

But this respite was short-lived. A few weeks later, as her breasts bloomed, she had regained everything: the invisible dividing line, the playfulness in her eyes, her mystery. She waited impatiently for him to show his pleasure, but instead he froze. Finally, he produced the word “heavenly”, but he knew that he had wanted to use the word for something else, not her swelling breasts.

There was something back to front about this story.

Moreover, Rovena whispered into his ear that these breasts were because of him. This terrified him. He would have found it a thousand times easier to cope with a pregnancy. But this relationship of a different kind, which seemed to involve the female blood line, what Albanian customary law called “the milk line”, awoke in him only horror.

Now he was the defenceless one, like after that dinner long ago. And just as when on the sofa she had looked like a bird targeted by a weapon, he heard now an inner voice warning him against this relationship.

Of several dreams that he had had, there was one he particularly did not like to think about. Rovena was trying to peer sidelong at a scar that descended from her throat to her white breasts, a lesion that sometimes resembled the sign of the cross and sometimes a mark of strangulation.

Lulled by the familiar sound of the trains as he crisscrossed Europe on his wearisome journeys, he thought of leaving her dozens of times. Next time, he said to himself. Next time would be the last. The Balkans, meanwhile, were in flames, and so he put it off.

“Did you think about our separating even then? Before you told me that nothing was the same as before? Tell me, please. While we went from one hotel to another, and I thought you were happy, were you getting ready to say this?”

It was hard to answer, impossible.

Who in this world knows what he is getting ready for? You set off in one direction and you know it’s wrong, but you pretend to believe you’re on the right path.

He had persuaded himself, and later Rovena, that they had gone to the Loreley to rekindle their passion, but deep down they knew it was for another reason. He had wanted to settle accounts in advance – with jealousy, with the pain of separation, with infidelity. Like a boxer in training to take punches without getting badly hurt, he would grit his teeth and prepare to see her in the arms of another man, before his very eyes.

Once he had outfaced all these lesser fiends, Rovena herself, when the time came, would pose no danger to him.

He knew it was wrong of him to take the side of this evil pack that included self-interest, duplicity and perfidy, and which could one day be used against him. But this did not frighten him.

His best hope, but the worst for Rovena, was to turn her into a call girl. This was the only way to dethrone the woman he loved. Otherwise, wearing her crown, and in her natural shape, as she had appeared to him one hundred years before, on the sofa after dinner in Tirana, Rovena was impossible to deal with. The years had not diminished her but only made her more dangerous.

This new mask, tawdry as it was, was his last hope, and behind it there remained only… only… What was it that lay behind the mask and its tawdriness? Perhaps a loss of lustre, a wiping away of steam from the face of the mirror, like an erasure, which itself was a form of escape, and so on, until one reached the bare and brutal thought of something… that resembled murder. He was astonished at the appearance of this temptation. It arrived suddenly, quietly, hovering as if above some barren plateau in his mind. There it took shape, inert and motionless, unconnected to measurable time. He thought less of the murder itself than of the ease of committing it. A murder was not difficult in Europe, and was easier in Albania than anywhere else. Everywhere there were little motels, which no one ever noticed, where every trace could be obliterated for two thousand euros.

Besfort Y. shook his head, as when he wanted to shake off a nasty thought.

It couldn’t be true, he said to himself. These thoughts were like the images of sleep that came and went for no cause or reason.

He imagined Rovena dozing, her knees drawn up on the seat in her train carriage, which could as well be the sofa that evening in Tirana, and he longed for her.

The drunk had followed him. Besfort felt his breath before he heard his voice. “These signs with the wrong mileage, and the wrong directions, you don’t need to speak the language to understand them.”

Besfort turned his back to him.

He felt tired and numbed by the noise of the train. The turning wheels beat out Rovena’s pitilessly repeated question: why was he doing this? What was he looking for? He was surely looking for something impossible. Just like him… the dictator… He was looking for the love of traitors.

The monster, he thought. How could he infect us with this disease?

Chapter Eight

Twelve weeks before. The other zone.

Three chapters from Don Quixote.

He was the first to call it “the other zone”. Then they both used the phrase as naturally as if it were the eurozone or the Schengen area.

He sent her the plane ticket to come to Albania with a brief note. “This time you’ll see your family. I think this will suit. I really am curious. B.”

He looked lingeringly at the word “curious”, as if it were of archaeological interest, like a stone inscription. Under it lay another stratum, with his earlier phrase, “I really am… missing you” now cruelly buried.

She replied in the same style. “Thanks for the ticket. I’m very curious too. R.”

Let happen what may. Just let me see her.

Of course both were curious. For the first time they were in that other region, where everything was different, starting with the way they talked.

In one of their few phone calls before their arrival, she had said, “How amazing that we’ll do this in Tirana.”

The other surprise came when he said to her that they would meet in a motel. Without giving her time to speak, he told her not to worry. This is normal in Albania nowadays.

Late in the afternoon, he collected her in his car from the street outside her house. From a distance he made out her elegant figure on the pavement and groaned inwardly, “Oh God.”

As they sped along the Durrës motorway he looked at her profile out of the corner of his eye. She was white, just as he had expected. Alien, with the frozen expression of a doll, or of Japanese make-up. He had never desired her so much.

The car left the motorway to follow the road beside the beach. The lights of restaurants and hotels shone on both sides. She became animated for the first time as she read their names out loud: Hotel Monte Carlo, Bar Café Vienna, The Z Motel, The Discreet, The New Jersey, The Queen Mother’s Hotel.

“This is unreal,” she said. “When were all these built?”

Their hotel was set back from the road, almost in darkness among pine trees. They registered with false names. The proprietor showed them to their room. The restaurant was on the first floor. If they wished, supper could be brought to them.

The room was warm, with a burgundy carpet and provocative pictures on the walls. In the bathroom, by the side of the tub, was a bas-relief with three naked female figures.