Instead of music, a distant police siren accompanied their last moments of lovemaking.
* * *
A siren from nearby suddenly interrupted Besfort’s thoughts. It was almost the same sound as on that night in Luxembourg. He smiled, remembering that the Albanian police had been supplied with new cars from the West: their sirens had brought the first hint of Europe to Tirana. He turned to the window to look. Skirmishes had broken out on the main boulevard. They’re throwing tear gas, said someone who had been close by. People could be seen lifting their hands to their eyes, as if scared of shadows. The bi-diplomat’s curly hair looked as if it had caught fire. He remembered that redheads were sexually insatiable. My poor darling, he said to himself, who knows what you put up with from him.
That was more or less what had passed through his mind when, after their lovemaking, he collapsed exhausted alongside her.
Her words on the phone, mixed with others that were the product of his imagination, came back confusedly to his mind, with altered syntax, like a ritual formula. My sex life has been ruined by you.
Other men have abused you and you blame me, he thought. After their lovemaking, he had repeated his unanswered question. Had she gone the whole way? She hesitated again, before saying, “It depends what you mean.”
In a soft voice, so as not to disturb their stillness, he had said that this made no sense. The other man, if he had kissed and caressed her everywhere, had certainly gone the whole way . . . as they say.
She gave the same answer. “It depends what you mean.”
“How?” he asked. “Was he impotent?”
“No,” Rovena replied after a long silence. “It was a woman.”
He poured his entire being into a long release of breath. So this was the truth. He experienced a few moments of total perplexity, and then he thought he had found the answer that explained everything. Questions rushed pell-mell to his mind.
If it had been a woman that had tempted her, why had this infatuation, this new-found desire engendered such fury against himself? And why all this suffering and shouting, that visit to the psychiatrist?
She listened in astonishment. “What do you mean, why? It was only natural that this should happen. I wanted to break away from you and you wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t double-crossing you, do you understand? That’s all.”
It all became clear to him. As if her confession had been some opiate, his head fell back onto the pillow. She too wanted to sleep. They were both exhausted, and two hours later they woke up as if in a different era. It was as if he was discovering her again. But still he was not sure. It was like an image on the surface of water, which the slightest ripple could destroy.
Cautiously he took up the conversation where they had left off. He heard Liza’s name for the first time, and about the circumstances of their meeting. The nightclub where she played the piano on Saturdays. Their interlocked stares. The phone call. Their first kiss in the car.
Then? Then we know the rest.
“I don’t know anything,” he had said with childish curiosity.
“Tell me everything . . . Tell me how you did it.”
“How we did it? . . . In fact I didn’t do anything. She was the one who . . . I just let her . . .”
Rovena went on talking. Her description was earthier than anything he had ever heard. Did she get these words from the gypsy woman?
“Tell me again,” he had said, almost pleading. “Tell me everything.”
She told him about how as a schoolgirl she would get excited in gym class when the girls undressed. Apparently she had the instinct at that time, but not in any special way, only like many girls. She wasn’t lesbian, as he might think. It was more an escape from her fear of men, caused by anxiety over her breasts, which she thought were smaller than they should be. With Liza, she had become even more of a woman.
More of a woman, he thought. How much further could she go?
For the first time, she kissed him on the neck, but coldly. “After all, everything I have done, everything so far has been for you.”
He went back to what he had said just after their lovemaking. Still panting fast, he had said that she blamed him for everything that had happened to her. If she was attracted by a woman, discovered a new experience or melted in a rapture of desire, it was his fault. In the middle of this upheaval she had gone to a psychiatrist, for reasons that remained obscure, and this too was supposed to be on his conscience. She expected him to repent and ask forgiveness.
He had expressed to her only a part of all this, vaguely and incompletely. She had listened in silence, and then with the same gentleness had said: “That is the truth. It was for you.”
Besfort could not get angry. But his voice was still cold.
“Tell me something. But clearly and accurately. When you told the psychiatrist why you were upset, and that you had quarrelled with your lover, what form did you use, masculine or feminine? I think they are different in German.”
She sighed. She didn’t deny that there had been friction with Liza. But it was always over him. He had captured her like a songbird and would not let her go. She was trying to escape from his cage, but couldn’t. So she quarrelled with her girlfriend . . . Flailed. Injured her wings. Screamed.
All their conversations about Liza were disjointed like this. It wasn’t just Rovena. He too was in no hurry, almost as if he was scared of the fog clearing. It took a long time for him to reclaim Rovena, and he was not sure which he preferred, the first Rovena, so lucid, or this second one, so awkward, with her plaster mask and a double life.
Whenever she came close to him again, within reach and laughing as before, he felt, alongside the delight of rediscovery, a regret as the mask melted away. How could he bring back that otherworldly taste that came from alien, infinite regions?
One evening, as he stared at a sex doll in the window of a sex shop in Luxembourg, she had taunted him: “Go on, buy it, if you fancy it so much.”
“I will buy it,” he had answered earnestly. “But on one condition, that it’s just like you.”
Rovena had scowled, not knowing how to take this.
He could not totally explain it either. He did not want to disturb that veil of mystery that had fallen over her since the episode with Liza. Yet he knew that it was impossible not to do so. The weeks passed and they grew as close as before. It was a miracle, he repeated to himself, but deep down he felt that it was not so much a miracle as a kind of calm.
“You’re fed up with me,” she said, “so you want the company of a mask. Why don’t you find one of those Japanese actresses caked with plaster of Paris, a mystery within a mystery, like sleeping with a bride who has risen from her coffin. Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”
He had come to the conclusion that he could not experience this dream-like sensation except with a person who had once been close to him but was now distant. He would make Rovena a stranger again, like two years before. He would lose her in order to win her again.
He was aware that these were crazy ideas, contradictory notions.
Perhaps he should take tranquillisers to keep this kind of excitement under control. And not drink so much coffee.
The temptation to play a game with Rovena, like Russian roulette, perhaps really came from another dimension. But her obsession with freedom, where did that come from? These things were somehow connected to each other, and so was his question: does love exist?
He thought with a smile that there were cases in which freedom could also be granted by force. He ordered a third coffee, but dared not touch it.
On the boulevard, the street sweepers were clearing away rubbish and placards that had been trampled underfoot in the fray. This short eruption of anger had subsided and its traces were being removed, leaving behind the old, familiar rancour of court cases and disputes over ancient wills, some of them in dead languages and with Ottoman seals.
The end of the same week. Rovena.
All week she had been worrying and trying to ease her mind by phoning regularly. But these frequent calls only increased her distress. The opposite tactic of not phoning at all only made things worse.
We shouldn’t have talked so much about Liza, she thought. Neither of them had given her a thought for almost two years, and suddenly, like a baleful ghost, she had come back to haunt them when they met in Vienna.
Sometimes I think that you purposely never wanted to hear all about her. You wanted to torture me with unasked questions, with suspicions that I might think you still harboured secretly.
I have started so many letters about this and torn them up. I have worn myself out brooding over it in solitude. I tried to explain when we were together, but you were always impatient to reach the climax, the only part that interested you. You tried to look as if you were listening but you were not. Your eyes were always glazed when I described the nightclub where I met Liza, and how she kept her beer glass beside the piano.
My inner confusion, her look, my answering stare, then the kiss in the car, her hand on my thigh, the memory of the school lavatory, and my hand taking hers to lead it between my legs, then her groan and my opening the zip so she could find what she was looking for . . .
Feverishly, you kept asking the same questions, and only those: “When you opened the zip, did you know what she wanted?” Then you would keep talking without listening to my reply. “Tell me, when she had you in her hands, I don’t know if you would put it that way, I mean when she had taken you completely, as you might say . . .”
After I finished describing our lovemaking, you lost interest, so I could never explain that I went with Liza not because of that instinct of so long ago, but because I wanted to loosen myself a little from you. Subconsciously I wanted a woman more than a man. I did it for my own sake, perhaps because it was an easier way out. It was easier that way, perhaps because there couldn’t be any comparison between you. But, believe me, it was more for your sake than mine. So as not to injure you with a rival. But the devil got into you and you started phoning more often at the very time when I needed a little rest and distance from you. You called every day, which you had never done before. These were the first weeks with Liza, and we had our first quarrel over you. She became jealous of you, and spent hours spinning her theory that you were not merely an obstacle in my life but had distorted my real sexuality. I argued back as hard as I could and told her that you had made me twice, three times the woman I was. She ridiculed what she called my naivety and ignorance of the world. She would caress me and murmur in my ear that I was one of the few women with the natural gift to reach the heights of ecstasy that only the gods can imagine, if only I could get rid of that hindrance in my path, meaning you. You, meanwhile, instead of helping me resist this, did the opposite. The more irritated you were on the phone, the sweeter she murmured in my ear, until the day when something incredible happened, the only thing that I have never told you and I’m not sure I should: she proposed marriage.
It happened after an ordinary quarrel in a café, a jealous tiff, initiated by me when I thought she was angling after someone else. To get my own back I pretended to be attracted to someone else too. Both angry at each other, we ended up at her place, and then in bed, where she used all her skill to excite me as never before. We were born for each other, she whispered as she stroked me. I am the pianist, you are the instrument under my fingers, and that’s how we will always be. We’ll ascend to the divine. We’ll climb to that seventh heaven that so many talk about but only a handful of the chosen ever reach. Expert as she was, she uttered the word “marriage” or rather exhaled it at the instant of climax, to associate it with this moment, just as they say sadomasochists do.
Later that afternoon, in the drained and febrile state that you like to call “rainbowed”, I went home. I had indeed almost crossed the rainbow and realised my vague adolescent dream, but this time in a different, tangible, purposeful way: I was marrying a woman.
My emotion was mixed with a similarly vague anger towards you, as well as grief and bitterness, because you had never made that proposal to me.
The bridal veil, the wedding guests, everything appeared to me in surreal fantasy, as if from another world. I told myself that this was nothing less than the truth: I would be married on another planet.
Liza and I were going to go to Greece, where, for the last few years, on an island with an abandoned chapel, women had been marrying in semi-secrecy. This would all change soon. The Council of Europe was drafting new legislation and we would no longer have to conceal our relationship on the street, in cafés and at concerts where we could not keep our eyes off each other, she on the stage and me in the audience.
This is what I thought, but meanwhile my pangs of conscience over you gave me no rest. I consoled myself with the idea that I was sacrificing myself for you. Like a bride who marries in another city to prevent her wedding causing pain to her jilted lover, I was marrying into another world, that of women. Or so I liked to think. It was less a joy in itself than a way of sidestepping you, while at the same time avoiding any insult to that other wedding ring, yours, which did not exist.
How I had longed for your proposal during that unforgettable winter trip to Vienna. All the street lights, neon signs and billboards advertised it, shrieked for it. The church bells clamoured for it. You alone were deaf.
I was still in the street, caught between my morbid intoxication, pain at parting from something, fear of what was to come, anger at you and a peculiar hollowness in whose depths lay that illegal chapel, when all of a sudden you phoned.
From the first moment, that phone call struck me as strange and ill-timed. Your voice too. No doubt I replied frostily, which made you say, “What does this tone of voice mean?” Then everything spiralled downwards. The harshness in your voice was only half of it. There was a note of mockery. You ridiculed everything, my emotional state, the bridal veil, the marriage vows, the surreal chapel. Pitiless, destructive, as you are at your worst, you tore all these things apart like rags. Of course I lost control. In the heat of that rage I said those words that wounded you so much, about ruining my sex life. Of course they came from Liza. She insisted that when the memory of men’s brutal penetration faded from my violated body I would be ready for a higher plane of love.
To cap it all, two hours later, while I was sitting in despair after my quarrel with you, Liza phoned. She spoke more lovingly than ever and she expected me to reply in kind. My confusion first astonished and then offended her. So you’re having second thoughts? You’ve changed your mind? I couldn’t think clearly. She grew angrier. My vacillation disappointed her. She had thought her proposal had made me happy. She had never in her life made such an offer, and now I was being coquettish. “Wait, let me explain,” I said, but she was no longer listening. Then she called me unfaithful. I said she didn’t know what she was saying, and then she started reviling you. “Go on, go back to that terrorist,” she said. “That warmonger will end up on trial at The Hague. And you’ll be there with him.”
Amazingly, her fury brought me a kind of calm. Especially her parting shot. She had been a pacifist, and therefore opposed to the bombing of Serbia, and when she found out from me the sort of work you did she became all the more pro-Yugoslav out of spite.
At midnight I was still torn by my dilemma. Should I phone you or her? Or rip the phone out of its socket? Tormented by insomnia and a racing pulse, I could hardly wait for morning, to go to the doctor.
True, those were the words I used: “I’ve quarrelled with my lover.” Psychic as you are, later you wanted to know which gender I had used. There’s barely a difference in German between
Geliebter
and
Geliebte
. As usual, your question preyed on my mind. I had been honest, and at the same time I had not. I had said
Geliebter
, in the masculine, but in fact the word covered both genders. Liza, more than my
Geliebte
, was also my
Geliebter
.
You changed totally when you heard the word “doctor” that day on the phone. You softened and kept asking for forgiveness. I felt I had become an object of pity. I sobbed and lashed out at you once more. At that moment I realised I had lost the battle. All my words of abuse – tyrant, egotist, brute and more of the same borrowed from Liza – fell like snow on armour plate. Not only did you not notice them, but you even went on begging for forgiveness.
The desolation that descended on me later was terrifying. The doctor told me that I should keep away from the source of the trouble. A total break. But strangely, I only associated this break with you. Liza was angry with me, but you terrified me.
You had banished me to a desert region, whose silence tortured me more than the uproar of our quarrels. It was a murky area, a sticky mixture of truth and lies. Your notion of forgiveness was also unclear, and founded on ignorance. My unfaithfulness was both true and untrue. So was my marriage to Liza, and everything else.
Now you tell me that nothing between us is the same as before. At the very moment when I was telling myself that after all these upheavals we were, thank God, at peace again, you uttered those words. You asked that frightening question, “Will you be my ex-wife?” and said other mysterious things.
You didn’t talk like this when we met after the catastrophe, when I was still numb, as if I had just woken from a dream to find myself lying beside you in our bed of love. In these miraculous twelve years with you, this was without doubt our most fabulous night. You said it was as if I had come from the moon. You said that perhaps this is what it will be like in the future when couples meet, one of them returning from some journey or mission to another planet.
Not even then did you tell me that nothing was the same as before. But now you not only say it, but mean it.
There is something floating in the wind. I can feel it. Just as I feel that I always act too late. You always strike the first blow.
Strike. Do what you have to do. Just do not leave me alone. This is not a matter of love. It is beyond love. You have invaded me in a way perhaps forbidden by nature’s secret laws. They say that between lovers unnatural exchanges often take place across mucous membranes, in a kind of reverse incest, in which the blood of the family and alien blood perversely change places.
If that is so, you must obey other laws. You may be my ex-husband, and you may declare me to be your ex-wife. But if I have mistakenly become your little sister in the meantime, you cannot abandon me here in this world, a blind swallow with broken wings.
You mustn’t do that. You can’t.