Ismail Kadare - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

It was said that the ground around the site was a honeycomb of pits and tunnels, but that was perhaps only the fruit of journalists’ unbridled imaginations. In any case, no one could recall such an invasion of visitors since the time when new chrome ore deposits had been discovered in the area, a moment when, to its great surprise, Albania found itself the world’s third-largest producer. The national daily reported on the excitement gripping the little northern town of B— by recalling the old diggers’ rush with a pun on the word chrome. Under the headline “Chrome Diggers Become Crime Diggers” the paper pointed out that the ex- ploration fever that had now seized the little town for the second time was spreading to other parts of Albania, more specifically to those other areas where there were reasons for supposing that the Secret. Archives might be tucked away. The article ended with a question: Had there really been a deep storage depot at B—? Was it located some- where else? Did it really exist at all?

Mark was highlighting the last sentence in the paper when he heard a child’s stifled scream coming from behind his chair:

“Sir! Sir!”

He turned around and saw a Gypsy boy, of the kind who regularly came to beg in the café. The lad asked for some small change, which Mark gave him. But the beggar boy didn’t go away. He kept trying to say something with his hands.

“Get lost!” Mark ordered. “Enough’s enough!”

The ragamuffin put his mouth to Mark’s ear and whispered a few words. Mark could make out only a few, and those with some difficulty: a girl… on the corner … looking at the poster …

Mark raised his open hand.

“Are you going to get lost, or do you want this across your face?”

Mark was astounded that the Romany didn’t give the slightest sign of being scared.

“Dont be angry, sir, I’m not a pimp. It’s your girlfriend who’s sent me. She’s waiting for you on the corner.”

Mark jumped up, paid for his coffee, strode across the room, and as soon as he was outside, began to run.

He could see the girl from a long way off. She was indeed waiting at the corner, pretending to look at the film posters.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said before he could get a word in. “I’ve been looking for you all over.”

“What’s happening? Tell me quickly!”

“Nothing of what you might think. Only I really need you now. It’s urgent; I just had to see you right away.”

“So tell me!”

“I can’t speak here. I’ll come to your studio this evening.”

“This evening? In other words, tonight?” Mark said, not without surprise.

They had never spent a night together, even though Mark had often dreamed of it.

She nodded.

“Yes, this evening, and until late, as late as possible.”

Mark couldn’t believe his ears.

“So you’ll spend the night with me?”

She sighed deeply.

“I beg you, please, don’t ask for details!”

She seemed to be finding it hard to express herself. Mark said:

“Okay, okay, I won’t ask any more.”

“Good. Wait for me in the studio until late, maybe even after midnight.”

He could barely stop himself from asking her what this was all about, but he had never seen her looking so forlorn.

They started walking side by side without a word. The street was littered with autumn leaves; oddly enough, the leaves seemed to assuage their fears.

“Now I have to go,” she said. She took two steps, and then turned around. “My darling, believe me, I can’t tell you anything else…. When we meet again, you’ll see I’m right.”

He forced a smile, then watched her as she walked away with a gait that, it seemed to Mark, disguised some guilty secret.

“When we meet again, you’ll see I was right,” he muttered to himself, repeating her words over and over.

He expected to be lost in speculation about the nature of the mystery, but to his great surprise his mind — which usually raced off in excitement at the slightest provocation — found itself utterly calm. For the time being, he was even surprised that the scene that had just taken place had not happened much earlier. There had been so many circumstances that could have led her to say, I am in terrible trouble, wait for me on the stroke of midnight!

In his mind, several different scenarios jostled each other clumsily: she was running away from home; her brother had threatened suicide; she was pregnant; her fearsome uncle had returned; she wanted him involved in negotiations to patch up the quarrel; she was trying to get hold of a visa (rather than just making an application) so that her brother could seek refuge in Switzerland…. Mark proceeded slowly along the icy street. The sight of the bare poplars was as restful to his eyes as the dead leaves on the ground, if not even more relaxing.

How ghastly! Mark sighed as he stood in front of the bay window of his studio. He’d never before seen time slowing down in the shape of a fat and dawdling mammoth. He’d used all the regular tricks to make time flee faster — walking around town, puttering about with odd jobs he’d been putting off for ages, painting, rolling his own cigarettes, dropping off for a snooze…. Not only did they have no effect on the mammoth, they appeared, for the most part, to produce the opposite result.

When evening came, he made a kind of discovery: daytime waiting was different from waiting at dusk, which in turn was distinct from a nighttime vigil. He still had to experience the most acute form of the latter state, when all his waiting would condense as at the leading edge of a comet: waiting after midnight.

Since he had prepared himself for it, the last stage of waiting turned out to be less dreary than he had imagined. Sheer fatigue numbed his senses somewhat, so that the first minutes after midnight seem to pass quite quickly.

When he heard her coming up the stairs, the first thing that occurred to him was that his girlfriend was not alone. But his brain was in no state to process it, and only when he opened the door and saw the figure standing behind the girl did he almost exclaim, I thought as much!

“My brother Angelin,” she said.

Now he was sure he had guessed correctly. The boy’s thin, badly shaven face matched in every particular the visage he had often imagined. Yes, of course, he had guessed! Just as he had intuited that his girlfriend, like most Albanian women, more than a wife or a mistress, was first and foremost a sister.

His first thought after closing the door was to go and take down the nude for which she had sat. Though the face was still only sketched in, he felt that the other man would also be able to identify her by her sexual organs. He must be familiar with them. He must have seen his sister. Maybe he had even touched her, some summer afternoon…. That pill she had taken at an unexpected time, when she was in distress about her brother … My God, maybe it wasn’t so much the fear of getting pregnant as the unconscious terror of consanguinity that had pushed her toward the pill?

“Sit down, please,” Mark said to the two of them, thinking inwardly, What a mess we’re in! Then: “You must excuse me, if I seem distracted, but you can understand that…”

“Of course,” the young woman said. “We are too. Angelin and I wanted first of all to ask you to forgive us for disturbing you at such a late —”

“No matter,” said Mark.

He would have liked to add that he thought it quite natural that they should turn to him, but he immediately saw-that if the young man was unaware of their relationship, then there was no reason for Angelin to find it natural

He remembered the bottle of schnapps. It was like a life buoy, and he busied himself for a moment with getting it and some glasses out of the cupboard.