It was only later, after I had returned to Albania, that fear gripped me. He had accompanied me to the airport before continuing his own journey to Brussels, where he was to stay two weeks for his work.
There was no word from him for a long time. I was obsessed with all the usual speculations of a woman who gives herself to a man for the first time and wants at all costs to be appreciated. Had it been wonderful for him, as they say, or did I disappoint him, even slightly? Were those sweet words of his sincere? Was his initial inhibition the usual kind of tension experienced by modern men, no longer the shame it once was, but even rather chic, or was it a sign of disenchantment?
The thought that the journey had been a mistake stabbed at me incessantly. I would have given anything not to have made that trip.
I felt a pain in my chest, slight at first, but later more noticeable, sometimes on the side of the heart and sometimes on the opposite side, and I liked to think of this as a sign from him. I was not naïve enough to think that love could really cause pain in my breasts. But I preferred to believe that I was in love rather than pregnant, although this was also a thought that occurred to me, but without distress, as if it were happening to a different body.
* * *
The window frame was still empty, without his silhouette. She thought of getting up, taking a shower, putting on her makeup and, made beautiful for the new day, waiting for him on the settee. She rehearsed the procedures in her mind, but, still hungry for sleep, turned her body over to the other side. Instead of sleep there came to her a kind of by-product, a drowsy vision of the lane alongside her school, where, just past the slogan, “The People Do What the Party Says; The Party Does What the People Want”, clumsily written on a wall, stood the low house of Zara the gypsy woman, with a persimmon tree in the yard. During the long holiday afternoons, like many other girls, she had entered the gypsy woman’s dilapidated door without anybody much noticing. The whole atmosphere was different there: the smell of ashes in the hearth, the photos on the wall and especially the conversation, which was like nothing else. With faces crimson from shame, the girls asked all kinds of questions about love, or what the gypsy woman called “fun”. She would answer calmly, never showing annoyance, in terms that made your entire body tremble. “Breasts and buttocks? Of course we know what makes them swell – fun. And if you think you are skinny, listen to Zara. Men who appreciate these things go crazy for thighs like yours.” Rovena thought her knees would give way. “Don’t be stingy with it,” she heard the woman say, pointing below her stomach. “Be generous. We’ll all be in the grave one day.”
These words turned all the films she had ever seen and all the books they had studied at school on their head. A few weeks later, with a new confidence in her movements, she bent down to embrace her and whispered in her ear, “I’ve done it . . .” The woman closed her eyes in happiness. Then she motioned to her to come close again. She seemed to want Rovena to tell her what had happened but in different words. And Rovena did so. Bluntly, in words considered dirty, and which she had never used before, she said, “I’ve . . .”
“You’re a real star,” said the gypsy woman softly, and her tired eyes and wrinkled face glowed.
That was two months before the December day when the gypsy woman was interned. A purge was under way against vice. Women suspected of loose morals, homosexuals, gamblers and people who encouraged degeneracy were also carted off. Zara belonged to the last category. Criminal investigators in beige suits cropped up on school premises. In panic, Rovena accepted a proposal from a student she barely knew. She thought that this was the best form of safety. I’m not a virgin, she whispered in his ear on the first afternoon when they had gone to bed. He pretended not to hear her.
When the regime fell, she was engaged. Every day, long-forgotten things reappeared out of the mists. Words like “lady”, “miss”, “your grace”, forms of baptism and prayer.
But the word “engagement” was one of those that slipped out of use. “Engaged?” asked her girlfriends at the university, with undisguised amazement. To her, the word seemed like a worn-out garment. She used it less and less, and then not at all.
And now you say that nothing is like it was before, she said to herself. That was true then. Everything changed completely, but now . . . Oh God, what about now? Was everything now the same?
In fact, her meeting with Besfort at that reception turned her life upside-down even more than the fall of the regime. He was frank in his admiration for her, and invited her to one of those dinners that were so common in the frenetic Tirana of the time.
When they met face to face again, their conversation turned once more to beautiful women. He made it no secret that he was talking about her, and nor did she pretend not to notice it. She had known for a long time that she was beautiful.
Enthralled, I heard him say that beautiful women, as distinct from pretty ones, were very rare. According to him, they were different in every respect. They thought differently, loved differently and even suffered in a way that was absolutely different.
I could not take my eyes away from him, until, after a prolonged stare in my direction, which was not his usual style, he said to me, “You know how to suffer.”
Psychic, I thought. How did he know?
I must have frozen, because he hastened to add, “Does that offend you?”
In fact it had seemed to me a kind of insult, I replied. I was beautiful, and there did not appear to be any reason why I should know suffering. Suffering was for others.
Reading my mind, and doubly psychic, he said that nobody should be ashamed of suffering. Then in a voice that struck me as cold he added that what he had said was intended as flattery, because he was sure there were no beautiful women who did not know how to suffer.
I blushed for what I had said, which now seemed to me idiotic. Attempting to make amends, I added a further idiocy: I did not think that I was that sort of person.
He smiled to himself and shook his head several times, like someone faced with a misunderstanding too radical to be explained.
After a silence, as if suddenly remembering that I was still very young and entirely without experience compared to himself, he added, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.” Then, without the slightest sarcasm, he said that the ability to endure suffering was a gift, especially the high-class suffering of beautiful women.
Grateful for this respite, I smiled at him and said, “Are you encouraging me to suffer?” And, looking him knowingly in the eye, I added, “Perhaps you don’t have to . . .”
I need no encouragement. I will suffer for you. That’s what I wanted to say, but I lapsed into silence.
He kept his eyes lowered, and I sensed that he had taken these words for what they were: an open declaration of love.
Before we parted, in a relaxed and almost boisterous tone, he said that if I were willing he could take me on a three-day trip to a Central European city. Half in fun and half in earnest, we played for a while with this idea, which would have been lunacy even a short a time ago in Albania, but now, after the fall of communism, was perfectly realistic. As we parted, he looked me in the eye for a long time before saying, “I’m serious. Just don’t say no in a hurry.”
I said nothing. I lowered my eyes in shame, and the night and the whole world misted over.
Two weeks later, what had seemed the most impossible thing in the world became reality.
On that day heavy with mist and rain, the Tirana–Vienna flight seemed barely able to move forward. Rovena felt totally numb . . . The journey seemed endless . . . At one point she wanted to leave her seat and sit next to him, so that they would at least be together before they crashed . . .
That is how she told the story later. But in fact she had been alone on that aircraft – not with Besfort at all. The truth was that during the flight she had longed to be with him so much that her mind had gradually performed the necessary changes, to make credible to herself, and later to others, the altered account of the journey.
Its essence remained unchanged. She was going to meet Besfort Y. in Vienna, and during the flight, as the aircraft lurched, she often imagined herself with her head resting on his shoulder. Next to her sat not Besfort Y. but a woman, an activist in the same NGO where Rovena worked. The truth was that she had not hurried to the Café Europa to collect the ticket from him, and he had not suggested they travel together. On the contrary, she herself, after learning of his business in Brussels, had said that she too was going on a trip, to Vienna. “Really? Vienna?” He often passed through Vienna. They might meet. And so, casually, as if playing a game, they had exchanged phone numbers.
In Vienna, after they arrived at the hotel, her travelling companion’s eyes had widened when she announced quite calmly, “I have a lover here. He’s coming to fetch me in an hour.”
And in front of the woman’s very eyes, quite unconcernedly, she started to apply her make-up.
The same morning. Rovena again.
She shivered, as if a stranger had entered the room. Then she calmed down. It was no one, and Besfort was still not back. The pressure on her temples told her how tired that pretence of sleep had made her.
He is mad, she thought.
Moving towards the bathroom, she did not know why she had thought this. It was something they said to each other so often that it had come to sound like affection.
Under the jet of the shower, the phrase “nothing is the same as before” glittered like a false diamond. It seemed to hang there, as if rinsed by the water.
She was losing the grip on her thoughts of a few minutes before. They were vague at the edges, and even pretending to be asleep had given everything a certain haziness.
The handle of the shower seemed stuck. She thought of what had happened after she came back from Vienna. She was sure that her body had changed, as if her pallor had been absorbed deep beneath her skin and her small breasts, smoothed by desire, no longer belonged to this world. She had felt sure that they had grown since she had first met him. Her feeling of a miracle having happened was mixed with the anxiety that he would not phone and they would part without him seeing them. She imagined him phoning on one of those March afternoons, and then her hurrying to meet him, quickly undressing. Then his admiration, his asking if she had been taking hormones, and her answer that it was nothing like that. “It is you and you alone.”
Under his incredulous gaze her words would cover every fault line of fear like mist. It is you and you alone. My fear of you. My crazy, inhuman desire to please you. A mute entreaty. A prayer, as if before an altar.
Perhaps he would remain unmoved, not be as thrilled as he should be, and for all his fine words about marble and the divine, he might still seem to be elsewhere.
She did not want to come down to earth, and so found excuses for him. You have set me free. Other thoughts swarmed or froze in her mind. Would anybody else notice the change? Of course, and very soon. Starting with her fiancé. She had not slept with him since she came back from abroad. She made every kind of excuse. Finally, she met him.
“Do you think I have changed?” she asked.
He looked at her in wonder, touching her fearfully.
She added carelessly, “You don’t think I’ve had plastic surgery!”
“Why not? It’s the fashion now. I don’t know what else to make of your trip abroad. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw your breasts.”
“How can you be so simple? Don’t you see there’s no scar! Couldn’t you think of any other reason? For instance that I might have fallen in love?”
He stared at her in shock, as if hearing something very unusual.
It seemed that nobody believed in love any longer. There were three or four men who still drifted through her memory like shadows. The gypsy woman’s advice long ago had been, “Men are different from one another, and what one man’s tool won’t do, another man’s will!”, and so she had gone with these men once or twice. Now, as she brought them to mind, she wondered if she would want to show this change to any of them. The first, who had taken her virginity, had gone off on a boat to Italy. The next was apparently in prison, and the third had ended up a deputy minister. The last had been a foreign diplomat.
Besfort was still in Strasbourg. The afternoons were harder to endure than the evenings. Staring fixedly at the windowpanes, she would ask why. Why did she want to do this at any cost? Was she still spurred on by what Zara had said, “Be generous. We’ll all be in the grave one day,” or was there some other reason? Sometimes she seemed to be saying farewell to the world before shutting herself away in a convent.
The pitiless afternoons dragged on. On one of them, she went for a coffee in the Rogner Hotel with the foreign diplomat. His conversation, which she used to listen to with such interest, was boring. He mentioned the only time they had met in his apartment. “How wonderful that was,” he said. He said it again, but these words saddened rather than excited her. They brought no thrill. In the end, with a serious look, he admitted that he was “bi”. Fortunately Albania was changing and it was nothing awful now to be “bi”. At this point she thought she dimly understood something. When they parted, he said that he hoped they would meet again. He looked serious again and said something about “new experiences” and “wonderful”. She nodded in agreement, but thought to herself, no way.
Walking home, she remembered that the gypsy woman’s house must be nearby. There were all kinds of new buildings in the neighbourhood, but she recognised the dilapidated door from the persimmon in the yard.
With an anxious heart, she pushed open the gate. Had the gypsy returned from her internment? Did she bear a grudge? As she was about to push open the house door, she noticed the familiar smell of long ago, a kind of sourness of straw mixed with smoke.
The gypsy woman was there. The same close eyes among the wrinkles looked her up and down.
“Zara, it’s Rovena. Do you remember me?”
The wrinkles moved slowly. “Rovena . . . of course I remember you. I remember all of you little angels, my only joy.”
Rovena had expected her to say: “You little whores, who betrayed me.” But the woman had said nothing of the sort.
Rovena could not find the right words. Did you suffer a lot, where they sent you? Did you blame us? Perhaps nobody had betrayed her. Maybe the harm had been done in all innocence.
Zara’s eyes softened a little.
“You are the first one to visit . . .” That was all she said, but her words suggested she had been waiting. “I knew you would. I put my hopes in you. More than in the others.”
Rovena wanted to fall to her knees, to beg forgiveness.
The wrinkles slowly melted away, leaving the eyes clear, like long ago. Oh God, thought Rovena, she’s turning back into the woman she was . . .
“Where I went, they were all . . .” she said in a low voice. “But what about you, here? What have you been up to, girl . . . Have you had fun?”
Rovena nodded. “Yes, Zara, a lot . . . And now I have fallen in love.”
The woman stared at her for so long that Rovena thought she had not heard her.
“I’ve fallen in
love
,” she repeated.
“It’s the same thing,” the woman said, in the same soft voice.
Rovena felt that they were getting close to her secret. During one of their sleepless nights, Besfort had talked about the millions of years when love had only been lust.
Apparently this was why the way she talked was so mysteriously attractive. The gypsy was carrying her back to her own distant era.
Covered in confusion, and under the woman’s now haggard gaze, Rovena took off her pullover, stiffly, as if carrying out a ritual. Then she lowered her underwear, showing the woman her pubic hair. Poker-straight, as if waiting for a jury to pronounce her guilt or innocence, she stood there a long time.
Walking home as dusk fell, it seemed to her that she had undressed for reasons that were as inevitable as they were inexplicable. She had done it naturally, as if obeying a mystical instruction: show your allegiance!
Obscurely, she struggled to understand something that still eluded her grasp. It apparently had to do with the female’s different outlook, which had descended from the world of the gypsies, that epoch millions of years ago, as Besfort had put it, and which the
gadji
had forgotten. Indomitable, a superior power attached to a woman’s body by a secret pact, it stubbornly guarded its independence. Thousands of decrees had been issued against it. Cathedrals, internment camps, entire bodies of doctrine. In the last few days, Rovena had felt that this power could rise from its lair and overwhelm her.
Reaching home, her feet carried her to the sofa. She wearily calculated the days until Besfort’s return.
Meeting him was different from how she had imagined it. He seemed distracted, gloomy, as if he had brought with him the cloud cover of the continent.
A vague fear stalked her. This man who she liked to think had brought her freedom might unthinkingly take it from her again.
You’re dangerous, she thought, as she whispered into his ear tender words about missing him, about her visit to the gypsy woman’s house and of course her coffee with the man she now called the “bi-diplomat”. Some good had come out of that cup of coffee. She had heard about an Austrian scholarship to go to Graz, and the “bi” had said she could apply.
“It would be easier for us to meet in hotels in Europe, wouldn’t it, where you might have things to do, and I could come . . . aren’t you pleased?”
“Of course I’m pleased. Who said I wasn’t?”
“You don’t look pleased.”
“Perhaps because while you were talking I was thinking . . . sort of . . . about how girls today think nothing of going to bed with someone for a visa or a scholarship . . .”
She broke off, lost for words. He touched her cheeks, as if tears lay on them.
“How beautiful your eyes are when you have things on your mind.”
“Really?” she said, not thinking.
“I was asking you seriously,” he went on. “Shall we do it?”
Oh God, she thought. “I don’t think so,” she blurted out.
He did not take his eyes off her, and she added, “I don’t know . . .”
Tenderly, he kissed her hair.
“You were going to say something, Besfort, weren’t you?”
He nodded. “But I don’t know if we should always say everything we think of.”
“Why not?” said Rovena. “Perhaps it’s not a good idea generally, but we are, kind of . . . in love . . .”
He laughed out loud. “A moment ago, when you were so honest, I thought of how honesty makes a woman look beautiful. But sometimes, unfortunately, an unfaithful woman can look just as beautiful.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t scowl. I wanted to say that treachery generally makes someone look ugly. That expression, the evil eye, has some truth behind it. But an unfaithful woman can look wonderfully attractive. We’re in love, aren’t we? You said yourself that everything is different . . . in love.”
His voice was carefree, unlike an hour before, but still dangerous, she said to herself. He behaves like someone not afraid of going to the edge. Why is it he feels safe and I don’t? The thought made her irritable. She wanted to ask, in annoyance: “What makes you feel so secure? Why do you think I belong to you?”
She knew that she didn’t dare ask. She lived in fear and he did not, that was the difference between them, and as long as this did not change she would feel defeated.
She murmured softly as he stroked her chest, and he asked her to tell him again what the gypsy had said.
“I can see you like to make fun of her.”
“Not at all,” he retorted. “If anybody treats the gypsies and the Roma with respect at last, it is us at the Council of Europe.”
As if frightened of silence, she went on talking as she combed her hair at the mirror. He stood by the door, studying her now familiar movements.
Putting on her lipstick, she turned her head to say something, her tone suddenly altered, about her fiancé. Her internship in Austria would inevitably take her away from him and they would separate.
She looked at him closely to see what he was thinking. He was careful to say nothing, but took two steps towards her and kissed her on the neck. “We’ll be happy together,” she whispered.
Later, she regretted saying this. He should have been the one to say it. As always, she rushed in too fast.
What did she need all this for, she groaned to herself. She thought she had left qualms of this sort behind, but they were still there, especially during the last moments of every meeting: things that shouldn’t have happened so abruptly, things there was no time to put right. He put it down to anxiety before they parted. She could not work out whether it was better to say as little as possible to avoid misunderstanding, or the opposite, to gabble nervously to fill up the frightening void. She now knew that just before they said goodbye there would come a fatal moment that would decide what shape her suffering would take until they met again.
All these misgivings belonged to the past, but they still insistently fired their darts from a distance. She wanted to say to them: “All right, I’ve remembered you now. Leave me in peace.”
She arrived in Graz in midwinter, soaked by the rain that poured from the February clouds. The fog banks watched her like hyenas. The house where Lasgush Poradeci had lived was gone. She had thought that Graz would make an impression on her, at least as strong as that left by Besfort Y. But the opposite happened. Her breasts grew smoother.
His phone call rescued her from the barren winter. He was not far away. He would expect her at the hotel on Saturday. She should take a taxi from the station and not worry about the expense.
They spent two nights together, and she repeated endlessly, “How happy I am with you.” Then she travelled back to winter and the tedium of her hall of residence.
She stood motionless for a moment, holding the shower head above her hair. The water splashed either scalding or icy and gave her no pleasure. It was the first time a shower had failed to calm her. Then she understood why: the shower head reminded her of the telephone.
That was where the friction usually started. The first and most serious incident had been in spring. Everything had changed in Graz. For the first time, she hankered after liberty. She grew irritated for no reason. She thought that Besfort stood in her way.
These were her first cross words on the phone. “You’re preventing me from living.”
“What?” he replied coolly. “I’m getting in your way?”
“Precisely. You said that you tried to phone me twice yesterday evening.”
“So what?” he said.
She heard the unconcern in his voice, but instead of kicking herself for her blunder, she cried, “You’re holding me hostage.”
“Aha,” he said.
“What’s that ‘aha’? You think that I have to sit waiting in until it occurs to his lordship to phone?”