The Accident (15 page)

She opened the wardrobe doors. He had the habit of hanging up his shirts as soon as he checked in, but none of them were there. She looked at the two suitcases again, and automatically opened the catch of one. Before she saw any of the contents, a large envelope slipped out and fell on the bed. She was about to put it back when a bundle of photographs slid out of it. With trembling hands she bent down to collect them, and screamed. One photo showed a blood-spattered child. So did the others. What should she do? Was this the room of a serial killer? Should she shout for help, run outside to call the police?

Nobody must know that you are coming to The Hague . . . She bent down to look at the envelope again. It was addressed to “Besfort Y. Council of Europe. Crisis Department. Strasbourg.”

It was for him.

Oh God. But alongside her horror there was a kind of relief. At least he really was at the Council of Europe. The address on the envelope proved this, and also that someone had sent the photos to him, perhaps as blackmail, or to remind him of something.

The ringing of the phone made her jump. She cleared her throat before lifting the receiver. It was him. She could barely grasp half of what he said. He was sorry but he would be late.

“Something has happened,” she said.

“Really?”

“I can’t talk about it on the phone.”

“I can tell that from your voice. Why don’t you take a short walk? It’s a nice city. I’ll be there at five o’clock.”

She did what he said. Outside, her fears eased and seemed less plausible. Her feet carried her down an attractive street. All her earlier suspicions seemed crazy. Her nerves must be shattered. For the second time she thought she heard someone talking Albanian. She had heard that nervous breakdowns often started like this, with imaginary voices.

Standing in front of a shop window, she heard the voices again. She stood rooted to the spot as the voices moved away. Only then did she turn her head to look. A small group of men were moving away, talking noisily. She had never imagined that there could be so many Albanians in The Hague. Perhaps this was why Besfort so insisted on secrecy.

She entered the first café she saw. From behind the window, the street looked even prettier. She was no longer surprised at hearing Albanians talking, in loud voices as usual. They were smoking. She heard the words “today’s session”, the insult “arsehole” and then the name of Milošević. Everything was clear. The great courtroom building must be nearby.

She sipped her coffee without turning her head. Suddenly she recognised a familiar face. The man was sitting alone at his table, listening to the foreigners’ noisy conversation with unconcealed curiosity. Surely she had seen this man before. Then she remembered. He was a distinguished writer. At any other time it would have been natural to strike up a conversation with him. She was studying in Austria, which was the writer’s own country, but she remembered his pro-Serbian views and the desire to speak to him melted away.

Besfort was no doubt at the Tribunal. This explained the nightmare about the summons, the shouting in his sleep and the secrecy.

She imagined him lost in the labyrinthine corridors of the court building. Time passed slowly. More noisy customers sat down at the table next to the Austrian, who had ordered a second coffee and seemed to be paying particular attention to what his neighbours were talking about.

Rovena preferred to think about the hotel bed. Like in the train, she felt the tattoos on her body move as if they were living creatures. In the train, the thought of the tattoo on her rear had momentarily made her head reel. She was sure he would like it, especially as they did not often make love in that position.

In a stupor of desire she ordered another tea. The photos of the children were now far from her mind. The clock hands hurried forward, as if shaken from sleep. She had a feeling she was late.

In bed in the hotel one hour later, the same feeling persisted. They had made love, without saying any of the things she had imagined.

“You told me that something had happened.”

“That’s right. But it’s hard to talk about it.”

“I understand. A lot of things are hard to talk about at first. Then . . .”

“What then?”

“There is nothing in the world that can’t be talked about.”

“I think there is.”

“Perhaps that’s because you are a woman.”

“Maybe.”

“What have you been doing all this time?”

“You mean since we last saw each other?” She wanted to scream: “What have I been doing? Nothing, I mean everything.” But all she said was, “Why do you want to know?”

“Then don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” he said calmly. “We put all this behind us a long time ago.”

Quickly, and secretly hoping that he might understand only half of what she said, she told him how frightened she had been when, after arriving at the hotel, she thought she had been given the wrong room, because his bags had looked unfamiliar, though the aftershave was the same.

She lowered her voice and explained that, to make sure that it was really him by recognising at least one of his possessions, she had for the first time ever opened one of his suitcases.

She had the impression that he was not paying any attention. So much the better, she thought. But she did not dare say anything more.

“Shall we sleep a bit?” he said. “I’ve had a very tiring day. So have you, I think.”

After his breathing settled into sleep, she was able to think clearly again. Mentally, she told him about what happened after she opened the bag, the macabre photographs, her terror. She calmly asked him if he was really frightened of a summons of the kind that he saw in his dreams. What connected him to these murdered children? And why had they come to The Hague secretly, skulking like criminals?

Slightly relieved, she managed to doze for a few moments. She tried to imagine how he would reply. In the worst case, his face would cloud over and his gaze become stony. Who are you to ask questions like that? You’re just a call girl, a classy hooker and no more than that.

Before they went down to dinner, she sat in front of the mirror longer than usual.

He stared at her with amazement over the restaurant table. “You’ve become more beautiful,” he said softly.

Rovena could not keep her eyes off him.

“You say that with a certain regret, I think.”

“Regret? Why?”

Rovena became flustered.

“Well . . . now . . . now that we’re different . . . In fact, I wanted to say . . . Do you want me ugly now . . .?”

“No, no. I would ask for anything but that.”

“In fact, that’s not exactly what I wanted to say . . . what I really wanted to ask was . . . In the hotel, when you fell asleep, I couldn’t put these questions out of my mind . . .”

Hurriedly, as if fearful that her courage would desert her, she blurted out all of her suspicions. He looked stern, and she thought her worst fears were realised. Who are you to interrogate me like this? You’re a call girl, that’s all.

You’ve no right to call me that. Yes, you’ve turned me into a high-class whore, but once you were my husband.

These words went unspoken, but she caught her breath in shock.

She was frightened as always, but less of him than of the truth.

He thought carefully before replying. “Yes, those were photographs of murdered children. But not what you might have imagined. They were Serbian children, victims of the NATO bombing.”

Rovena listened, nonplussed. She bit her lips and repeated twice or three times, “I’m sorry.”

She had nothing to apologise for. It would be terrible to find photographs like that in any bag. She had every right to think what she liked. She could even suspect that he, Besfort, was a murderer of children. In fact, the photographs had been sent to him for that very purpose, to mark him as a murderer.

Fearfully, she clasped his hand. His fingers looked longer and thinner. He talked as if she were not there. What was happening was difficult to describe. It was a macabre photograph competition: pictures of Serbian children torn apart by bombs and of Albanian children ripped open by knives were distributed by each side to departments, commissions and committees. Grotesque slanging matches followed. Was there or was there not a scale of horror in death? Some insisted that every child’s death was a tragedy that could not be compared to any other, and they could not be ranked in order. Others took a different view: the death of a child in a road accident was not the same as the death of a child in an air raid, and both were quite different from the murder of a baby, slit open by a knife wielded by a human hand. Eight hundred Albanian infants butchered like lambs, often before their mothers’ eyes. It could drive you insane. It was apocalyptic.

The candles on the table danced gently in the breath of his speech. She hoped they would distract his attention.

After dinner, in the late-night bar, she mentioned her tattoos, and the tattooist’s question of why she wanted them: as a memento of somebody, a promise or for some other reason.

This time, unlike on previous occasions, he did not want to hear anything more about the other man who had touched her body. He seemed to be thinking about their conversation in the restaurant.

Rovena found it difficult to talk about anything else until she had unburdened her mind. She thought about the photographs and the macabre contest, and she asked why, if he did not feel guilty, he still seemed to have something on his conscience.

He gave a chill smile.

“Because I am a citizen, meaning that everything to do with the
civitas
affects me.”

Rovena did not understand what he meant, but did not say so.

As if aware of this, he went on to explain gently that quite apart from what he had said about the Albanian children he also felt grief over the Serbian children. But unfortunately that’s not what happens in the Balkans. In the restaurant, she had asked why they had come here to The Hague in secret, like two criminals. She should realise that he had not been served any summons, except once or twice in his dreams. And even if he were summoned, he would not obey the court order, but only his own conscience. Every person should come to The Hague, as though it were an agency of Hades. Each for the sake of his own soul. In silence and semi-secretly.

Rovena thought of the Austrian’s beard and his dull eyes, as he sat in the café among its Albanian customers.

As he spoke, Besfort looked round for the waiter, to order his second and final whisky.

It was after midnight, in bed before they made love, that he remembered the tattooist. Was he polite, handsome, a lecher? A little bit of all those things, she replied. And he made the mistake every man makes these days: as soon as he discovered that the tattoo was for a lover, he interpreted the woman’s yielding as if it was to himself.

As so often, Rovena’s story was left incomplete. While she was in the bathroom, he switched on the television and surfed the channels. Most were in Dutch. On one, he thought he heard Albania mentioned. He found the news in English.

“The queen has died,” he said to Rovena, as she returned to the bedroom.

She lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “But that was months ago, don’t you remember? We were in that motel, in Durrës.”

“Of course I remember. But this is another queen. The king’s wife, not his mother.”

“I see, how extraordinary,” she said.

On the screen, the black motorcade slowly approached the cathedral in Tirana.

Covering her bare shoulders, Besfort also expressed surprise. “How very . . . For a small country, once Stalinist, to have two queens die . . . In such a short time.”

Trembling, she held him tightly.

Chapter Thirteen

The last seven days.

It was hard to tell if either of them felt any foreboding one week before the accident.

Rovena, taking shelter from the torrential rain in a café, thought about her lover’s arrival. At precisely that moment, one thousand kilometres away, Besfort’s thoughts, as he watched the television news, wandered to Rovena’s white belly and the possibility that she might be pregnant. On the screen, Pope John Paul II looked feebler than ever, but nobody could hope for any concession from him on sexual relations between men and women. Everything would have to be the same as a thousand, four thousand, forty thousand years ago. Besfort counted the remaining days until he would see Rovena, and they seemed to him too many. In the café, Rovena dialled the code for Switzerland, but suddenly recalled that phone calls cost more at peak hours, and decided to talk to her friend later.

The rain grew heavier. Passers-by caught in the downpour ran terrified for shelter. One of them seemed continually to be changing shape as his cape was blown by the wind. After the pope, Arab terrorists appeared on the screen, threatening a kneeling European hostage. Besfort closed his eyes so as not to see the blow. Rovena unthinkingly dialled Switzerland again, but remembered the peak rate. The pedestrian with the billowing cape passed by menacingly, almost clinging to the café window. He appeared spreadeagled against it, until he detached himself and flew away as if whirled by some black tornado. Perhaps that is what Plato’s androgynes would look like, she thought. Besfort had mentioned them in their last phone call. She had been amused at first.

“Awesome,” she said laughing, “a man and a woman in one body. No more she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not.”

“And that was why the gods envied them,” Besfort said, “and out of jealousy divided them. And since that time, says Plato, the two halves have been searching for each other.”

“How sad,” she said. The song about the two lives with the same love flashed into her mind in a garbled form, just as she had once heard it sung by a drunk in the doorway of a bar in Tirana:

If I could live my life anew

I’d never give myself to you.

Rovena nervously dialled the code for Switzerland a third time. A thousand kilometres away, Besfort turned off the television in disgust. The news was all so crazy.

The storm eased slightly, only to grow wilder again, although now there were only dry gusts without rain. Rovena barely managed to reach the entrance to her block. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, closed the window and stood stock still behind the double glazing. The wind howled threateningly and then whined in lamentation, as if begging for mercy. A part of the view lay in darkness, and the rest was bathed in a sickly light in which sheets of cardboard, tar paper and garbage of all kinds were blown in every direction. You could find anything out there, she thought. Empty forms, whose essences had evaporated long ago, spun round in eddies. And she thought of her tattoos, now faded, and perhaps their two halves, his half and hers, so pitilessly divided, looking for each other.

In the evening, on the television news, among the scenes of storm devastation, there was a report on an old provincial theatre whose props had been carried away by the gales. Two particularly valuable capes for
Hamlet
, one from a production of 1759 and the other from a century later, had been lost, and the theatre promised a reward for their recovery. What a ridiculous news item, thought Besfort as he switched off the television again.

He went to bed just after midnight as usual. Towards morning, he was woken by a dream.

A kind of languid desire he had never experienced before totally sapped his strength. It included grief mixed with despair to such an impossible degree as to create a limitless, immeasurable sweetness.

It was the kind of dream that lingers in the mind. There was a plateau bathed in pale light from an unknown source. In the middle was a structure of plaster and marble, a kind of mausoleum that was also a motel, towards which he was calmly walking.

He was seeing it for the first time, although the structure was not unfamiliar to him. He stood in front of what were not so much its door and windows as the places where they had once been, now covered with oily paint resembling plaster, and barely visible.

He felt that he knew why he was there. He even knew what was locked inside, because he called a name out loud. It was a woman’s name, which, although he uttered it himself, he could not hear or even identify. It emerged falteringly, despairingly from his throat. He was aware merely that the name had three or four syllables. Something like Ix-et-in-a . . .

He remembered the strange continuation of the dream, and his weakness and longing became unendurable.

He turned on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch. It was half past four. It occurred to him that even dreams that seem unforgettable can later fade away.

First thing in the morning he would phone Rovena and tell her about this. He must.

This thought reassured him, and he fell asleep at once.