The Accident

1

With these two storm-battered capes, the life stories of Besfort Y. and Rovena St. were strangely cut short a week before they actually ended. In an explanatory note, the researcher had repeated his position that, being unable to reproduce the couple’s story in full on the basis of the results of the inquiry, he had concentrated on the last forty weeks of their lives. The ending of the story with the two Hamlet costumes carried away by the gale was accidental, and therefore probably could not be taken as a symbolic closure. Still less could Besfort Y.’s pre-dawn dream, which he related to Rovena on the phone a few hours later, be considered in the same light. But there may have been another reason why, in spite of all promises, the final week – usually the most keenly anticipated in a story of this kind – was omitted.

The more closely the researcher examined this last week, which was at first sight so straightforward, the more significant it became. But he was always thrown back on the problem of its incompleteness. The three last days had detached themselves entirely from the chain of events which death had brought to an end. These were the three days for which Besfort Y. had requested leave from his office at the Council of Europe. Apart from his application for leave, made orally in his final telephone call, there was no tangible evidence of these last three days anywhere. The testimony of the bartenders and receptionists was vaguer than ever. There was no record of any phone calls from their hotel room and both their mobiles were switched off. It was as if these three days were not their own, but were unclaimed stretches of time of the kind that may wander around the universe unattached to any human life, trying to find some temporary lodging. So they floated adrift, bound to nobody, and not understood by anyone, least of all by those in whose lives they took refuge.

In another note, the researcher strove to explain what he called the strange “crabwise” progress of the days and weeks. Mourning customs everywhere mark seven days and forty days after a death, but here were periods of seven and forty days calculated before their deaths. These in his view were intended to convey an impression of the reverse order of time experienced by the two lovers, if that is what they could be called.

As he approached the zero hour, which in this looking-glass world could have been the end, the beginning or both, or neither of these, the researcher probably felt a rising panic. Finally, confronted with a knot he could not unravel, he stood to one side at the most unexpected moment.

It was obvious from the file containing the relevant evidence that this dereliction of duty when faced with the final week caused the researcher great pain. Here, totally jumbled and impossibly crammed together, were fragmentary statements and testimonies, documents, protocols; a twice-repeated request for an autopsy of Rovena’s body rejected out of hand by her parents; an application for Besfort’s exhumation in Tirana, which had been granted; an allegation made by Liza Blumberg that Rovena was murdered not by intelligence agencies but by Besfort Y. on the night before 17 May; a photocopy of the weather report for the fateful morning from the newspaper Kurier, which was relevant to this allegation; and finally the permission for three days’ leave, issued in response to Besfort’s last request in this life.

The researcher kept coming back to this document in the hope that it might yield more information. He could not forget what a colleague had said a long time ago, when he had first mentioned the inquiry to him. In such cases of law, the English refer to remote history, Muslims to the Qur’an and emergent African states to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but in the Balkans they find every precedent with little effort in their ballads. Three days’ leave to carry out a duty, normally something left undone? There will certainly be a well-known paradigm for this.

It was in fact a cliché. Half the ballads of the Balkans included such requests. Every character seemed eager to negotiate an extended deadline. Some bargained with death; others at a later date in history, and thus on a less epic scale, asked for leave from prison. And so on until the present day, when Besfort Y. had asked for leave from his office at the Council of Europe. The cases were very different, but in essence they all shared something in common: a secret contract, from which there was no escape.

The researcher was dumbfounded. According to the experts, Besfort had asked for three days’ leave from the Crisis Department in Brussels, just like Ago Ymeri had done from a medieval prison.

The researcher imagined Ago Ymeri on horseback, galloping to the church where his betrothed was about to marry another man… He had never heard such an inconsistent story: why had he been given leave, and why, after its expiry, was he bound to return to prison? The meaning must be encoded.

The researcher felt a sickening pang in the pit of his stomach. What help were all these shadows and shapes that so resembled each other? He thought about the taxi driver and his rear-view mirror, in which the mystery had surely been revealed, if only for an instant of time.

Latterly his researches had focused entirely on this question. “What did you see in this mirror? What was that fatal shock? Have you ever lost someone you can’t ever forget? Who is so lost to you that they won’t come back, even in your dreams?”

So began one of their many conversations, all so similar to each other.

“Who won’t come back, even in my dreams? I don’t know what to say,” the man replied.

“You have a daughter of about the same age as that unknown young woman who got into your taxi. Have you ever had problems with her? For any private reason of the sort you would never reveal to a soul? That will go with you to the grave? I think you will have heard this expression, but probably without thinking hard about it. Imagine what it means to be in the grave, in this narrow chamber not just for a few days or weeks or years but for centuries, millennia, hundreds and thousands of millennia. Just you two, you and the grave. The grave and you. Narrator and audience. The stories we tell on earth are mere fragments, crumbs of the great narrative of the dead. For thousands of years, in hundreds of languages, the dead have been weaving their story. But it will remain in the grave for ever and ever. For all eternity, never heard by a living soul. Your final confidence, between you and the grave. Between the grave and you. Think of yourself there, with no advocate, no witness, afraid of nothing, because you yourself are nothing. Think of yourself like that and give me the tiniest hint, a smidgen of what you will tell to the grave. This is what I am asking you to do as a human being, a taxi driver. Do me this honour. Think of me for a moment as your brother. As your grave.”

“I don’t understand you. I’m tired. I’m so tired. I don’t know what you want.”

“Have you ever thought of impossible things? Taboos, we call them in this world. Who knows what they call them in the next. It’s a tough question, but I won’t apologise. The grave does not apologise.”

“I’m tired. Leave me in peace. The doctor says these long sessions aren’t good for me.”

“You’re right. Calm down. Let me ask you just two simple questions about the last moments before the accident. How did her face look? And his?”

“They were both cold. Or that’s how they looked to me. Like wax, as one might say.”

“Was it this that scared you, I mean confused you?”

“Perhaps.”

“What else? What else happened?”

“Nothing. It went silent, like in church. Except that from outside there was a sort of dazzling light. I think that’s why I couldn’t see the road. The taxi seemed propelled through the air.”

“You said that at that moment they were trying to kiss. I’m sorry for asking the same question as everybody else. Did this really startle you? Even scare you?”

“It seemed… but they seemed scared themselves. At least I saw that in the woman’s eyes. In the mirror, I saw fear.”

“You saw their fear in the mirror… But your own fear, where did you see that?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Your own fear,” I said. “The fear that your thought was theirs, wasn’t it really your own? Have you yourself ever wanted to break a taboo of that kind? And did they remind you of this. Is that why you lost control and crashed?”

“I don’t understand. Stop tiring me.”

“Calm down… and then? What happened next? Did they manage to kiss?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. That was the moment of impact. Everything was smashed to pieces in the gully. The light was blinding. Devastating.”

2

Each time the researcher left the taxi driver, he had a feeling that something had been left unsaid. He could hardly wait to return, to try again. Next time, he thought, he would make no mistake. The driver held the answer. He would have to give up all his philosophical speculations about two sorts of love, the old one, dating back millions of years, which operated within the tribe, and the new rebellious one that had broken out of that prison. Let others deal with the rivalry or alliance between these two sorts of love and the hopes each of them nourished of treacherously supplanting the other, when the time came. This was a mystery involving the old devices of the world, which from one millennium to the next, in semi-darkness, had shaped the savagery of tigers and the soul’s lusts, pity, shame or hours of peace. He had nothing to do with these things, or with ballads, ancient or modern. His business was with the driver, who perhaps imagined that he had got off scot-free and was out of his clutches. And he had every right to think this as long as the researcher had still not put the fatal question: was he an accessory to murder or not?

That question will come. It will come, my precious. As soon as he had settled various side issues. Then he could forget all those ballads. Or so he imagined, until a moment came when he was compelled to ask himself why he was so fixated on them.

He could easily imagine the horseman with his bride behind him, and the conversation between the two.

“Where are we going? To… the prison?”

“Of course to the prison, where else?”

“But what will I do there? And does the law allow this?”

“I never thought of that.”

“But why? What did you agree to? Why did they let you go?

What did you promise them?”

Drumming hooves filled the silence. Then words again.

“Why do you have to go back? Let’s run away, both of us.

We are free.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? What’s holding you back?”

Silence again, and the hooves raising dust.

“Can’t we rest a bit?”

“No, we’re late. This is my third day of leave. The prison gate closes at nightfall.”

“What is that river there? It looks like the one where we first met by the bridge, remember? Why has it turned against us?”

“We have to hurry. Hold on to me tight.”

“But what are those sheep? Those black oxen? Why all this traffic?”

“We’ve got to hurry. Hold tight.”

“Ago, what are you doing? You’re strangling me…”

“Perhaps we’ll arrive before the gate closes. Airports are strict nowadays. Boarding gates are closing earlier all the time.”

With half-closed eyes the researcher shook his head. He could not believe this. A hunch told him that, before his next meeting with the driver, he should visit Lulu Blumb.

Unlike the first time, at these later meetings with the researcher, Lulu Blumb was extremely careful to advance the suspicion that Besfort Y. was a murderer only at a late stage in the interview and after the utmost deliberation.

This was evidently why Lulu Blumb, before coming to the essential point of her story, which later featured most prominently in the conclusion to the inquiry, carefully explained various profound and subtle issues of the kind that she was better placed to know than anyone else. For instance, apologising to the researcher for putting it bluntly, she said with a good deal of pride that many men may have slept with Rovena, but none of them could claim to know the intimate parts of her body better than she did. The researcher expected a comparison with the piano, which she indeed mentioned in passing, before dwelling on the idea that her fingers had transposed the music of Mozart and Ravel, against whose background they had met and later made love, from the keyboard of the nightclub piano to her body. With a sardonic smile, she added that she did not believe that the tedious and often barbarous statements of the Council of Europe about military intervention, terrorism, bombing and other horrors, which were Besfort’s stock in trade, went very well with lovemaking.

Always along the same lines, and evidently wishing to postpone as long as possible the moment when she pointed the finger of blame, Liza Blumberg dispelled some of the mystery surrounding an aspect of the crime that had baffled many. She was as much tortured by pangs of conscience at not having rescued Rovena from Besfort as by grief at her death.

She kept saying this was the first time she had ever been defeated by a man.

During endless days and nights, Lulu Blumb vainly racked her brains. How had Besfort kept the woman he loved so enchained? How had he so terrorised her? How had he made her so sick?

Usually men behaved like complete fools when they discovered that their rival was a woman. They sniggered or felt relieved that it was not another man that had ousted them. Some were devoured by curiosity, and others hoped to beguile their rival. Later, when they knew the truth, they would beat their heads with their fists and curse the day they had grinned like apes instead of howling in dismay.

Lulu Blumb had waited impatiently for that moment. She waited until it dawned on her that it would never come. Besfort would never grow jealous of her. She would be jealous of him. This was the difference between them, which handed the victory to him instead of to her.

The two rivals knew about each other, but in different ways. When Rovena once mentioned a new experience with Besfort, the pianist had cut her off, saying she did not want to know. Rovena retorted that Besfort was quite the opposite and wanted to know everything. At this moment Lulu Blumb went pale.

“What do you mean, the opposite?”

It was too late for Rovena to put together a soothing reply… The opposite meant that not only did he not stand in the way of her seeing Lulu, but he even liked to hear… meaning he enjoyed… and he even encouraged her, whenever she quarrelled with Lulu, to make up.

“You slut,” Liza shouted. Rovena, she said, had used their love to excite that bastard’s lust. She had marketed it like some porno film. Like an idiot, she had allowed herself to be used like a doll. Do you understand what I mean? Do you understand German? Do you know what “doll” means? A dummy! That’s how he used you. Like those pimps from your country who put their fiancées on the street. You’ve read the news -papers and heard the radio. But you didn’t stop there. You dragged me into this game. And his lordship, this generous scumbag, gives his permission for you to come to me. In other words, he throws me charity in the shape of yourself. Because that’s what you’ve been reduced to, a dummy. And that’s what I’ve become, a beggar at the church door.

Rovena listened in bewilderment to Liza’s sobbing, which was so much harder to endure than her rage. Besfort wasn’t jealous, because she counted for nothing. To his Balkan male mentality, she, Lulu Blumb, was an object of ridicule, a plaything, a soap bubble, a distraction for Rovena while she remained enslaved to him. She apologised for the word “slut”, and all the other things. She admitted that she could not compete with that monster. She accepted defeat. Perhaps it would be better if they did not meet any more. She had nothing more to say except: God help you!

Rovena wept too. She also begged forgiveness. She told Lulu that she shouldn’t take all these things so much to heart. In the end, he was her husband.

“Husband?” she wailed through her sobs. This was the first she had heard of it… In fact, it was true… They were keeping it secret… At least it was true for Rovena… “But you were ready to come with me to that little Greek church in the middle of the Ionian Sea to be married…”

“That’s true, but it didn’t really change anything… He was my husband in another sense, I mean, in another dim ension…”

3

A secret husband, another dimension. Lulu Blumb said that he alone gave Rovena these ideas. She was totally defenceless against his malign influence. Of course it wasn’t easy. To her horror, even Lulu found herself affected. Her hatred for him gave her no protection.

Her proposal of marriage was the first occasion on which she felt she had successfully challenged him. Rovena’s misery as she walked with Besfort among the churches of Vienna, without entering any of them to be married, gave Lulu the idea that these churches were not theirs and that she herself could take her to a different shrine dedicated to another kind of love.

Was there really some remote chapel somewhere between Greece and Albania where lesbians married, or was all this mere fantasy?

There had been rumours of such a place for a long time, but nobody could pin down the location. There were no pointers to any travel agency or marriage bureau, not a trace on the internet. Of course there were suspicions that trafficking was involved. There was talk of a secret network that procured young women and offered a wedding for three thousand euros, plus three days of bliss with the partner of your heart’s desire, in a fabulous little hotel. The rest was easy to imagine. Greek and Albanian boat owners, who once ferried clandestine migrants, now disembarked these protesting women on deserted coasts, pretending they had lost their way in the storm. There they raped them, put them back on the boat, carried them round in circles and abandoned them again on some remote beach, or worse, drowned them. Or, driven by some incomprehensible fury, the boat owners threw themselves into the sea and perished with the shrieking women.

Rovena knew nothing about this. Lulu Blumb, though terrified by the rumours, still could not give up the idea of this journey.

Sometimes this project seemed to her nothing less than a temptation generated by the vicious imagination of her rival. Besfort Y. was also probably in search of an alternative church for Rovena and himself. A different sort of church, for their extraordinary relationship.

Perhaps he was frightened by the reality of this world and felt estranged from it. This could be why he was in search of another dimension. And, as usual, he had managed to infect Rovena with the same obsession.

A short time before her death, one morning before dawn, Rovena had woken in tears and related to Lulu a dream that she had just had: she had been asking for a ticket at an airport desk, but there had been no room on the plane. She had pleaded and entreated. She needed to go home to Albania, where two queens had died one after another – she was the third one, but she was still abroad. The member of staff had said, “Madam, you’re on the waiting list as an ordinary passenger, not as a queen.” But Rovena insisted that she was a genuine queen. She was expected at the cathedral in Tirana and she had two changes of clothes, because she did not know why she was going there, for her wedding or for her funeral…

Evidently, like so many young women in this world, she was sometimes a slave and sometimes a queen, and could not find her natural place.

The pianist was unable to give clear answers to the researcher’s many questions about the new kind of love that the couple were apparently looking for.

At least that is how she understood it until one day she began to suspect something else. It occurred to Lulu Blumb that these two, in their quest for a still unimagined form of love, were like voluntary patients who agree to test the effects of new and dangerous medicines.

As she had once explained, Besfort, like every difficult personality, felt isolated in the world. Perhaps his quest for a new form of love was connected to this. It was a love that excluded infidelity, yet he also understood that no passionate relationship between a woman and a man can be cemented without the risk of loss. This was evidently the reason why he had willingly exposed their love to this danger, and had divided it into two phases: the first, secure in the past, as if sealed in a bottle, and the second, in which Rovena was no longer his beloved, but simply a call girl.

The researcher himself had told her that they had used the expression post mortem for this second phase. Both had used the phrase, but in fact she was post mortem while he was not. With the introduction of this phrase, she began to die. The project of her murder was contained in essence, if unconsciously, inside it.

It was natural that Besfort should come to this idea. Tyrannical natures prefer radical solutions. He had used every means to accustom himself to the idea of her infidelity. When he saw that none of them preserved him from the anguish of loss, he decided to do what thousands of people in this world do: get rid of his beloved.

Lulu Blumb had detected his inclination to murder before the intelligence agencies started talking about it. His terror of a summons by The Hague Tribunal, the photos of the murdered children in his bag, and Rovena’s tattoos, which were only reflections of his own desires – all these things were sure indications. His passion for destruction was obvious whenever anything stood in his way: an idea, a state, such as Yugoslavia, a cause, a religion, a woman and maybe even his own people.

Rovena had come up against him when she was only twenty-three, and he could not fail to kill her.

They racked their brains to understand why he had virtually turned her into a prostitute. They thought they had found the reason, and pretended as much, but they hadn’t. Gangsters and pimps who whored out their fiancées for dollars were easier to understand than Besfort. Lulu herself had produced some very complicated rationalisations. What if it was very simple, and turning her into a call girl was merely a prelude to murder? After all, in this world, when women are killed, prostitution is the first thing you think of.

She did not want to expand it any further. She was not going to analyse the famous dream with the plaster mausoleum, which was quite obviously a typical murderer’s dream.

If the researcher, for his own or professional reasons, was averse to psychological subtleties, he could forget everything she had said so far and listen only to one thing, the basic explanation which she had given long ago, that Besfort Y. murdered his girlfriend because she had found out his secret depths…

4

The pianist drew a deep breath. She knew that moment at concerts when, after a long silence, the listeners simultaneously breathe again.

These secrets were spine-chilling, she continued. They involved NATO, and internal rifts that could have divided the entire West. If the investigators were scared, what about herself, a defenceless musician?

She talked about this fear, but her interrogator interrupted her gently. Miss Blumb, he said, you have mentioned two quite distinct motives for murder. You called the first psychotic, and this one might be considered political. May I ask you, which one do you believe yourself?

The pianist carefully considered her reply: she believed both of them, but the psychotic motive was probably decisive. The second was a pretext found by Besfort to justify the murder to himself.

Liza lowered her voice, but he kept listening. He had to steer his mind away from the trap into which all the other investigators had fallen. If Rovena St. was no longer alive on the morning of 17 May, another woman must have been beside Besfort in the taxi going to the airport.

You said that the murder took place earlier, he whispered. But what about the body? Why wasn’t it found?

According to her, it was up to the police to find the body. They themselves were talking about a quite different matter. It was vital that he should believe her. She pleaded with him. He must believe that she had been murdered. She almost fell to her knees. Don’t insult her memory by refusing to believe this… She had been murdered, for sure, but she could not say exactly where…

He could barely follow her. Finally, he grasped the thread of her argument, but it was so thin and frail. If he did not believe in the murder, it meant he did not believe in their love. Because, as they now knew, their love and the murder were testimonies to each other, and if there was proof of their love there were no grounds to doubt the murder.

The interrogator’s incredulous smile was enough to make Lulu Blumb lose her way.

Breaking a final silence, the longest of all, she admitted that it was natural for a researcher like himself to misinterpret her insistence that Rovena St. and Besfort Y. had not been together on that fatal taxi ride on the morning of 17 May. He might see it as a final attempt on the part of the pianist, who had tried to separate them in life, to divide them in death. He had every right to think this way, but she would be honest with him to the end. To convince him that there had been a murder, she would tell him her greatest secret, something that she had never confessed to anybody and had been sure she would carry with her to the grave. She too, Liza Blumberg, had plotted to murder Rovena…

Her terrible plan involved the remote chapel by the Ionian Sea. She knew of the atrocities that took place there, the women thrown into the sea while the insane boatmen howled with laughter. But she had not been afraid. Until the very end, she had dreamed of a journey from which neither she nor Rovena would ever return. If the boatmen did not throw her into the sea, she herself would have thrown her arms around her lover’s neck and dragged her down into the deep… But apparently what should have happened at sea was fated to happen on land, in a taxi. As always, Lulu Blumb was too late. After this confession, she was sure that her interrogator would understand that her anger at Besfort Y., like any anger against a fellow murderer, could only be of the feeblest sort. She hoped that when the time came for her soul to seek rest, she would pray for him with the same tenderness as for herself.

5

The researcher was sure that Lulu Blumb would never talk to him again after her shocking confession. There had been something conclusive about her story, like the closing of a door, that dashed any hopes of a sequel.

The researcher was stabbed by remorse at not having delved deeper into certain dark episodes in her story. He had noticed that whenever Lulu Blumb said that she would not elaborate on certain aspects of her tale, it was precisely these points that were most important, and to which his mind kept reverting.

For instance, he had not properly asked about the second dream. He kicked himself for this, and in self-punishment he mentally replayed this dream again and again, just as he had heard it from the Albanian woman in Switzerland.

She had described Besfort Y. walking across the wasteland towards the funereal building. He stands in front of the mausoleum that is also a motel, with doors that are at the same time not doors. He knows why he is there, and he also doesn’t know. A cold light emanates from the plaster and the marble. He calls out the name of a woman, but without even hearing what name his lips utter. This woman is evidently within the marble, because he calls to her again, but his voice emerges so feebly that he can hardly hear it. A gleam of light that he had not noticed until then comes from inside and he knocks on the painted glass. He hears a slight sound as a door opens, where he thought there was none. The night porter of the motel, or the temple guard, appears. “There’s no such woman here,” he says, and closes the door again.

Meanwhile, a woman indeed appears, descending the winding external stairway which leads perhaps from a terrace. Her tight skirt makes her appear taller. Her face is unfamiliar. Stepping off the final stair, she comes up to him and throws her arm round his neck. He feels an infinite tenderness and sweetness, but he cannot catch her name, which she utters in the faintest of voices. She says something else. Perhaps it is about her long wait inside, or how much she has missed him. But he cannot understand anything of what she says. He realises only that something is missing.

The woman lowers her head to tell him her name, or just to kiss him, but still something is missing and he wakes up.

Over time, this dream expanded in his mind, as if leavened by memory.

It was easy to interpret this as a murderer’s dream. The dreamer comes to a place in which he has been happy, and so the building resembles a motel. But it also resembles a tomb, which shows that at the place where he was happy, he has also killed.

Lulu Blumb insisted on this explanation. The researcher did not dare contradict her, but still looked for another one. Besfort Y. goes to that tract of wasteland looking for whoever is inside the building, frozen or immured. He calls out, summoning her, to thaw her. But it is not easy for her either.

But that’s almost the same, Lulu Blumb would say. There’s no doubt that it is Rovena inside, under all that plaster or marble. Buried, in every sense of the word.

The researcher continued his imaginary dialogue with Lulu Blumb, with a premonition that they would meet again.

Which they did. Her phone call gave him a boyish thrill.

They tried to postpone the subject as long as they could, but the conversation soon came round to their common obsession. Clearly Lulu too had been mentally rehearsing her questions, answers and objections. Try as they might to keep their heads clear, the moment came when each of them confused the other, although they knew very well that they shouldn’t allow themselves to be ensnared by the dream of a third person, reported by a fourth, if not a fifth.

Lulu was the first to dispel the mist. She returned doggedly to the morning of 17 May, when the taxi waited in the rain in front of the hotel. The temperature was 7° Celsius, the wind variable and the rain incessant.

The researcher listened hard, but could not forget the dream. What was Besfort looking for behind that marble, inside that desolate building, after midnight? Rovena, of course, but which one? Rovena murdered, spoiled? And why did she not come out to him where he expected, but by way of the winding stairway? Repentance was there, of course. But who repented? Besfort? Rovena? Both? And for what? He wanted to ask Lulu Blumb, but she was a long way away.

6

Her voice was very determined. To her credit, she had been the only person not to rest content with the explanations given for the very long interval between the couple’s departure from the hotel and the moment of the accident. She had collected astonishingly precise evidence relating to the morning of 17 May, newspaper articles, weather bulletins and the traffic reports provided by the police for the radio. This precision struck everybody as at least giving her the right to a hearing. Her evidence also recreated with appalling vividness the atmosphere in the lobby of the Miramax Hotel that morning: the chandeliers, whose light grew pale as day dawned, the sleepy night porter, Besfort Y. going to the desk to settle his bill and order a taxi, then returning to the lift, going up to the room and coming back with his girlfriend, whom he held tight as he led her from the door of the lift to the waiting cab. The porter, interrogated dozens of times, always said the same thing: after a sleepless night, twenty minutes before the end of his shift, neither he nor anybody else would be able to clearly recognise a woman, most of whose face was hidden by the raised collar of her raincoat, by her hat and the shoulder of the man to whom she seemed almost bound. Still less could the waiting driver see anything but two vague silhouettes approaching his car through the pelting rain and the wind that changed direction at every moment.

Liza Blumberg insisted that the young woman who entered the taxi was not… the normal Rovena. Asked what she meant by this, she replied that the young woman, even if she were Rovena, could only have been her shape, her replica.

At this point she produced the photos taken immediately after the accident, none of which showed the woman’s face. Besfort’s face was clearly visible, with his eyes immobile and a trickle of blood, as if drawn by a pen, on his right temple. But of the young woman who had fallen on her stomach alongside him, only her chestnut hair and her right arm stretched across his body were visible.

The pianist had repeated this story several times to earlier interviewers. To Lulu’s annoyance, they had listened with more sympathy than attention. Her anger forced them to enter into a discussion with her, but they proceeded without enthusiasm. Let us concede the possibility that the murder took place earlier. How would she then explain Besfort’s behaviour afterwards? Why would he drag a stiffened corpse, or a replica, into a taxi? Where would he take it and how would he get rid of it, with or without the driver’s help?

This took Lulu aback, but only for a moment. Of course the driver might have been involved. But this was a secondary matter. The important thing was to find out what happened to Rovena. Liza Blumberg believed that Rovena was murdered away from the hotel, and that Besfort Y., whether with assistance or not, had disposed of the body. But he needed that body, or something in the shape of Rovena, at the moment of leaving the hotel. They had stayed there two nights, so when the time came to search for the vanished woman, the first person to ask would be her lover or partner, call him what you like. His reply was easy to imagine: he and his girlfriend had both left the hotel early in the morning. She had accompanied him to the airport as usual, and had then disappeared on the way back. Everything would be simple and convincing, except that he needed something: a body, a shape.

Under her interviewers’ increasingly despondent gaze, Lulu Blumb elaborated her theory. Besfort Y. needed a shape or simulacrum of Rovena, the woman whom he had destroyed, body and soul.

He must have brooded for a long time over his alibi. And who or what would be a suitable substitute for the dead woman? What at first seemed frightening or impossible was simpler on close examination. He could easily find a more or less similar woman, at least of the same height, and bring her to the hotel. Or, if not a woman, something mute, without memory, and so without danger, such as a dummy, of the kind sold in every sex shop. Before dawn, in the gloom of the hotel lobby, it would be hard for a drowsy porter to notice that the woman emerging from the lift, in the close embrace of her lover, was different…

The interviewers grew weary and began to show their impatience. This happened with the first interviewer, the second and the fourth. Liza came to expect this, and so at her first meeting with the researcher, when the time came to talk about this day (the morning with its rain and wind that gave the hotel lobby an even more desolate air as Besfort Y. carried the simulacrum of his girlfriend to the taxi), she gave a guilty smile and spoke quickly, trying in vain to avoid uttering the word “dummy” and mumbling it under her breath.

This word changed everything. The researcher was visibly shaken.

“You mentioned an imitation, a dummy, if I am not mistaken.”

The guilty smile on Lulu’s face froze into a grin. “If you don’t like the word, forget it. I meant something in Rovena’s place, something artificial, sort of contrived.”

“Miss Blumberg, there is no reason why you should dodge the issue. Did you say the word ‘dummy’ or not. The word you used was ein Mannequin.”

Liza Blumb wanted to apologise for her German, but the researcher had grabbed hold of her hand. She was scared. She expected to hear insults from him, of the kind the others had thought but left unsaid. Instead, to her amazement, without releasing her hand, he said softly, “My dear lady.”

It was her turn to wonder if he had really said these words, or if her ears were deceiving her.

His eyes looked hollow, as if their gaze were turned back into his skull.

7

In fact, the researcher’s mind was thrown into total disarray. Here was the solution to the riddle he had been pursuing for so long. He wanted to say: “Miss Blumberg, you have given me the key to the mystery,” but he lacked the energy to speak.

The secret appeared suddenly out of the surrounding mist. What the driver had seen in the rear-view mirror had been nothing but an imitation. His human passenger had tried to kiss a replica. Or the replica, the person.

This was the crux. The other questions – where Rovena had been killed, if there had really been a murder, and why (the NATO secrets, the most likely motive), where they had dumped her or her body and what was done later with the dummy – these were all secondary considerations.

“Oh God,” he said aloud. Now he remembered that somewhere in his inquiry there really had been mention of a doll. A female doll torn apart by dogs.

That was where the explanation lay, nowhere else. This was the secret that had baffled them all. And those disconcerting words, as if coming from a universe made of plastic: Sie versuchten gerade, sich zu küssen. They were trying to kiss.

A doll had been behind everything, a soulless object that would serve to get Besfort out of the hotel. Then the story would continue on the autobahn to the airport. “Stop at this service area so I can throw this thing away.” Or: “Take these euros and get rid of it for me.”

Neither of these things happened, because of the kiss. It was this incident that startled the driver and brought the story to an abrupt close. Instead of throwing out the doll, they had all of them overturned.

He banged his fists on his temples. But what about the police? The first transcript had mentioned this very thing, the dummy, found alongside Besfort Y.’s body.

The researcher was in no hurry to call himself an idiot. The truth was still incomplete, but in essence he had found it. Of course, some details did not fit. There were discrepancies: the living bodies and the plastic did not match. There were differences of interpretation, and confusions of past and future. But these were temporary. It was like a group portrait: a pair of lovers, a doll, an impossible kiss and a murder. These ingredients would not assemble themselves into one picture. This was understandable: such mismatches between the conception of a murder and its enactment were familiar. Sometimes a murder and its victim would not come together, as if they had confused their schedules, until eventually they found each other.

The researcher strove to reduce what had happened to its simplest elements, as if it were an after-dinner story. Shortly after the taxi had left the hotel, the driver noticed that his passenger, muffled in her overcoat and scarf, seemed more like a doll than a living woman. After his initial surprise, mixed with a kind of superstitious fear, he pulled himself together. Weren’t there plenty of crazy people who travelled with broken violoncellos, brandy stills or tortoises, all painstakingly wrapped? So he was not unnerved at all, and even remained calm when the plastic creature appeared to show signs of life. This was an illusion, produced by the bends in the road, or because he was tired. Only when his passenger tried to kiss the doll did the taxi driver snap.

The researcher imagined different scenarios, as he was accustomed to doing for every crime. In the first, the driver was paid in advance to throw a doll into the road. In the next, more serious scenario, it was not a doll but a corpse that was to be thrown out, of course for a larger sum of money. In both versions, the strange passenger tried to kiss the figure beside him, a doll or a corpse, and that was when disaster struck.

The final and gravest version involved the taxi driver’s complicity in the murder. On the way to the airport, he and Besfort were to turn off into a waste clearing, to bury the body. It was Besfort’s attempt at a farewell kiss that caused the catastrophe.

8

It was early Sunday morning when, to the sound of Easter bells, he set off sleepily for the taxi driver’s apartment. The city was ashen after winter. There’s no hope, he thought, without being able to say of what.

The woman who opened the door glowered at him, but the taxi driver said he had been expecting him. He was now much readier to talk than before.

Everybody wants to unburden themselves, the researcher said to himself. But they passed all their burdens to him.

“I will only ask you one thing,” he said in a low voice. “Please be even more precise than before.”

The driver sighed. He listened to the researcher, his eyes steady. Then he hung his head for a long time. “Was it a living woman or a doll?”

He repeated what the researcher said in a low voice, as if talking to himself. “Your questions get more difficult all the time.”

The researcher looked at him gratefully. He had not shouted, what’s all this crazy stuff, what the hell are you driving at? He had simply said that the question was a difficult one.

Slowly, as before, he described that grim morning with its incessant sleet, the taxi engine running as he waited for his two customers. Finally they emerged from the hotel door. Clutching one another, with coat collars upturned, they hurried to the taxi. Without waiting for the driver to get out, the man opened the car’s left-hand door for his girlfriend, and went round to the other side to sit down in the opposite corner, from where he ordered Flughafen! in a foreign accent.

As the driver had said so often, the traffic had never been so congested as that day. It crawled forward through the semidarkness of dawn, stopped, started, came to a complete standstill. There were refrigerated trucks, lorries, buses, all drenched in the rain, with the names of firms, shipping agencies, mobile phone numbers, reappearing to the left or right as they filtered through, as if in some nightmare. During his time in the hospital, those inscriptions in strange and frightening languages had haunted him. Words in French, Spanish, Dutch. Half of united Europe and all the Tower of Babel was there.

The researcher’s eyes lost their earlier despondency. You can’t spin the story out indefinitely, he thought. Whether you want to or not, at some stage you will have to answer my question.

He waited as long as he could before repeating it. The driver took a moment of silence to think.

“Yes, that business of the dummy. Whether that woman resembled a doll or not… Of course she did. Especially now that you remind me. Sometimes she looked like a dummy, and sometimes he did. As everybody does. Behind car windows with condensation, that’s how most people look, distant, remote, made of wax.”

The researcher felt his temper rise.

“I asked you not to dodge the question,” he suddenly cried, “at least not this one. I begged you, I pleaded on my knees.”

Oh God, he’s started again, thought the man.

The researcher’s voice was hoarse. He almost gasped.

“I gave you a last chance to tell the truth, to get all that fear gnawing you inside out of your system. Tell me, what was that thing that terrified you so much? A man trying to kiss a dummy? Or a doll trying to kiss a man? Or was something missing that made such a thing impossible for either of them? Tell me!”

“I don’t know what to say. I’m not in a position to say. I can’t.”

“Tell me your secret.”

“I can’t. I don’t know.”

“You don’t want to because you’re under suspicion too. Tell me. How were you going to dispose of the body, after the murder? Where were you going to throw the dummy? Don’t try and wriggle out of it! You know everything. You were keeping track of everything. In your mirror. Like a sniffer dog.”

The researcher’s voice subsided again. He had been so excited when he arrived at the apartment, hoping to please the driver too with his discovery. But he hadn’t wanted to know. Mentally, he addressed the doll itself. Nobody wants you, he said to it. Nobody can even see you but me.

Silently he drew from his briefcase the photos of the two victims. Would the gentleman take another look. Notice that the dead woman’s face is not visible anywhere.

The man averted his eyes. He stammered in terror. Why were they pressing only him for this secret? If this victim wasn’t a woman but a doll, why hadn’t the police said anything?

Psychic, the researcher said to himself. This was the same first question that he had put to Liza Blumberg, after which his mind had strangely clouded over. He hadn’t heard her reply.

The driver spoke haltingly. Something inexplicable had happened in his taxi. Something impossible… but why were they asking only him to explain?

The researcher interrupted. “You’re the last person who should complain. I’ve asked you a thousand times why you crashed the taxi after seeing a kiss and you won’t give me an answer.”

They both sat in silence, stupefied with exhaustion. You might just as well ask me why I believed Liza Blumb’s story, and I wouldn’t know how to reply, the researcher reflected. We could all ask questions of each other. What right have we got in this pitch-black night to ask about things that are beyond our powers to see?

He was too tired to relate how years ago, at high school, he had been taken to an exhibition of modern art. The students had laughed at pictures of people with three eyes or displaced breasts, or giraffes in the form of bookcases, in flames. Don’t laugh, somebody had told them. One day you’ll understand that the world is more complicated than it appears.

The researcher calmed down again, and his eyes even recovered their earlier tenderness.

“There are other truths, besides those which we think we see,” he said softly. “We don’t know, don’t want to, or can’t know, or perhaps mustn’t…” His unfortunate friend was saying that something impossible had happened in his taxi. This was perhaps the essence. Nobody knows the rest. “What happened in your taxi was something different from what you saw. They had been together on the back seat, innocent and guilty, a man and perhaps a woman who had been murdered, dolls, replicas, shapes and spirits, sometimes together and sometimes apart, like those flaming giraffes. What you saw and what I imagined are evidently very far from the truth. It was not for nothing that the ancients suspected the gods of denying us human beings their superior knowledge and wisdom. That is why our human eyes were blind, as usual, to what happened.”

The investigator felt drained, as if after an epileptic convulsion.

The entire incident could have been something else. He would not now be surprised if they were to tell him that his inquiry was as far from the truth as a biography of the pope, a file on a bank loan or the life story of a trafficked woman from the former East, recorded in desolate police offices near airports.

“I will ask one more question,” he said gently. “Let it be the last. I want to know if, as you drove towards the airport, you heard a strange noise, which you might at first have taken to be an engine fault, but was in fact something else. A noise quite unexpected on a motorway, like a galloping horse chasing you all.”

He stood up without waiting for the answer.

9

The researcher now felt relief rather than despair at having abandoned any attempt to describe the final week.

His conclusion was that not only the final moments in the taxi but the entire last week were impossible to describe. He felt no guilt at cutting his story short. On the contrary, he felt it would have been wrong to continue.

From every great secret, hints occasionally leak out. It is probably once in seven, ten or seventy millennia that something escapes from that appalling repository where the gods store their superior knowledge that is forbidden to humankind. And in that moment, something that would normally take centuries to be discovered is suddenly revealed to the unseeing human eye, as when the wind accidentally lifts a veil.

In that moment of time, these four, that is, the two passengers, the driver and the mirror, apparently found themselves in an impossible conjunction.

Something impossible happened, the driver had said. In other words, something that was beyond their understanding. It was like a story of souls whose bodies are absent. It was this dissociation of body and soul that evidently led to their sense of disorientation and intoxicating liberation, the uncoupling of form and essence.

The file of the inquiry showed that Rovena and Besfort had mentioned this dissociation several times. They had also probably come to regret it.

He recalled now those few ideas, like rare diamonds, that he had exchanged with the pianist about Besfort’s final dream.

What was Besfort looking for in the tomb-motel? They agreed that he was looking for Rovena. Murdered, according to Lulu Blumb; disfigured, according to himself. Or perhaps something similar, which millions of men search for: the second nature of the woman they love.

For hours he imagined Besfort in front of this plaster structure, waiting for the original Rovena, then in the taxi, beside her fugitive form, experiencing something impossible for anybody in this world.

10

It was a silent Sunday noon when Liza Blumberg phoned again after a long interval. Unlike on previous occasions, her voice was warm and somnolent.

“I’m calling to tell you that I withdraw my suggestion that Besfort murdered my friend Rovena.”

“Why?” he replied. “You were so certain…”

“And now I am certain of the opposite.”

“I see,” he said after a silence.

He waited for Lulu to say something more, or to hang up.

“Rovena is alive,” she went on. “Only she’s changed her hair colour and now she’s called Anevor.”

Late that afternoon, Lulu Blumb arrived to recount what had happened the night before.

She had been playing the piano in the late-night bar, the very place where the two women had first met years before. It was the same bar and the same time, just before midnight, and she was feeling sick at heart, when Rovena appeared before her. Lulu sensed her presence as soon as she came through the door, but an indistinct fear that she might change her mind and turn back would not allow her to lift her head from the piano keyboard.

The woman who had entered made her way slowly among the chairs and sat down in the same place as on that fateful evening long ago. She had dyed her hair blonde, to preserve her anonymity, as Lulu realised later. But she walked in the same way, and her eyes, which once you had seen you could never forget, had not changed.

Then they stared at each other, as they had done that first time, but some invisible impediment made Lulu respect the newcomer’s wish not to be recognised.

Meanwhile, her fingers, which had played so naturally on the body of the woman she loved, conveyed to the keyboard all her grief at Rovena’s absence, her emotion at finding her again, her desire and its impediment.

As she finished, exhausted, her head bent, she listened to the whispers of “Bravo!” and waited for her to join her admirers by the piano as she had done before.

She did come, last in line, pale with emotion.

Rovena, my darling, Liza Blumberg cried to herself. But the other woman uttered a different name.

But still she repeated what she had said long ago, and, shortly before the bar closed, the couple found themselves once more in the pianist’s car.

They kissed for a long time in silence. But each time Liza whispered the name Rovena, she failed to respond. They went on kissing and tears moistened the cheeks of both, but it was only in bed after midnight when they were on the verge of sleep that Liza finally said, “You are Rovena. Why are you hiding it?” And the other woman replied, “You’re confusing me with someone else.” After a silence she said it again, “You’re confusing me with someone else,” and added, “but what does it matter?”

Really, what does it matter? thought Lulu Blumb. It was the same love, only in a different shape.

“Did you say a name?” the young woman said. “Did you say the name Rovena?” If she liked it so much, she could use an anagram, as people liked to do these days: Anevor.

Anevor, repeated Lulu Blumb to herself. Like the name of a witch in ancient times. You can dye your hair, change your passport and try a thousand tricks, but nothing in the world will persuade me that you are not Rovena.

As she stroked her chest, she found the scar left by the bullet of his revolver in that scary Albanian motel. She kissed it gently without saying a word.

She had so many questions. How had she managed to escape Besfort? How had she duped him?

With this thought she fell asleep. When she woke next morning Rovena had gone. Lulu would have taken her visit for a dream, but for the note left on the piano:

“I didn’t want to wake you. Thank you for this miracle. Your Anevor.”

“And that was all,” said Liza in a tired voice, after a silence, before she stood up to leave.

As so often before, the investigator’s gaze was caught by the last photograph, which showed Rovena’s dark hair and her delicate arm extended across Besfort’s chest, stretching towards the knot of his tie, as if trying to undo it at the last moment and help release his troubled spirit.

From the window, the researcher watched the woman reach the other side of the crossroads. A distant peal of thunder made him shake his head, but he could not say why, or to whom this negative was directed.

So Lulu Blumb was gone too. She had let him go quietly, as she had done with so many things in this world, and perhaps that distant reverberation was her kind of farewell.

Now he would be left by himself as before, alone with the riddle of the two strangers that nobody had asked him to solve.

11

The researcher had imagined it before, and would do so hundreds of times before his life’s end: the painful progress of the taxi through the traffic on that blustery morning of 17 May, the rain beating against the windows, the long stationary lines, the names of firms and distant cities written on trucks in all the languages of Europe. Dortmund, Euromobil, Hannover, Elsinore, Paradise Travel, The Hague. These names, and their low voices, “What’s this doomsday scenario, we’re going to miss the plane.” – all these things added to their anxiety.

Of course it is late. They want to turn back, even if they do not say so. On both sides, the trap is closing.

“Let’s go back, darling.”

“We can’t.”

They talk in low voices, not knowing if the other can hear. There’s absolutely no way back. The rear-view mirror reflects the eyes of one and then the other. The traffic moves a little. Later it stalls again. Perhaps they’ll hold the plane. Frankfurt Intercontinental, Vienna, Monaco-Hermitage, Kronprinz. Her mind reels. But we’ve stayed in these hotels. (Where we were happy, she whispers fearfully.) Why have they suddenly turned against us? Loreley, Schlosshotel-Lerbach, Excelsior Ernst, Biarritz. He tries to hold her tight.

“Don’t be scared, darling. I think the traffic’s easing. Perhaps the plane will wait.” He puts his arm around her, but the gesture seems distant, as if long-forgotten.

“What are those black oxen?” she says. “That’s all we need.”

He makes no reply, but mutters something about prison doors. He hopes they’ll find them still open, before the sun sets. She is scared again. She wants to ask: where did we go wrong? He tries to draw her close.

“What are you doing? You’re strangling me.”

The taxi speeds forward. The driver’s eyes, as if already caught by something, freeze on the glass of the mirror. Light pours in from both sides, but it is too bright, pitiless. She lays her head against his shoulder. The taxi begins to shake. There is an alien presence inside, prepotent, heedless, with its own powers and menacing laws. What’s happening? Where are we going wrong?

Their lips come still closer. We mustn’t. We can’t. There are prohibitive powers and orders everywhere. He says something inaudible. From the movement of his lips, it is a name, but someone else’s, not hers. He repeats it, but again, as in his plaster dream, it cannot be heard. He pleads for the return of the woman he has killed with his own hands. Please come back, be again what you were. But she cannot. No way. Whole minutes, years, centuries pass until there is a great crack, and from out of the encasing plaster the name finally resounds: Eurydice. The tremors suddenly cease. As if the taxi has left the earth. The doors spring open and seem to give the car wings. And so transformed, it flies through the sky, unless it never was a taxi, but something else, and they had failed to notice. But it is too late now. There is no remedy.

Rovena and Besfort Y. are no longer… Anevor…

Dlrow siht ni regnol on era Y. trofseB dna anevoR…

12

More and more often he fell into a drowsy state, from which only the prospect of writing his own will could rouse him. Before drafting it he waited for a final answer from the European Road Safety Institute. Its reply came after a long delay. The Institute accepted his condition. He would deliver to them the results of his inquiry in exchange for the taxi’s rear-view mirror.

In the offices which he visited, they looked at him in surprise, and even with a kind of pity, as if he were sick. At the waste disposal site, he met with a similar reception. It took a long time to find the mirror; he could hardly believe his eyes when at last they handed it to him.

It was not easy to prepare his will. In the course of writing it, he discovered that there was an infinite universe of testaments. Down the ages, history had recorded the most diverse kinds. Testaments had been left in the form of poisons, antique tragedies, storks’ nests, appeals by national minorities or metro projects. The material attachments appended to them were no less surprising, ranging from revolvers and condoms, to oil pipes and the devil knew what. The taxi’s rear-view mirror, buried with the man who had been so preoccupied with it in life, was the first such object of its kind.

He handed over the text of his will for translation into Latin and then into the principal languages of the European Union. He spent weeks sending it to every possible institution he could find on the internet: archaeological institutes, psycho-mystical research units, university departments of geochemistry. A huge and deadly bunker in the United States. Finally, the World Probate Institute.

While dealing with all this, he heard vague pieces of news, some about the long-standing question of whether Besfort Y. had murdered his girlfriend or not. Opinions were as divided as ever. Now there was a third view, that Besfort had indeed committed a murder, but it was impossible to ascertain at what time. In this case the allegation of murder had to be withdrawn, unless it could be shown to have been committed in another dimension in which actions do not take place in time, because time does not exist.

As expected, there were also rumours that Rovena St. (as time passed, some interpreted St. as an abbreviation of “Saint”) was still alive. It was said that Besfort Y. too had been seen, hurrying across a road junction with the collar of his overcoat raised in order not to be recognised. He was even sighted in Tirana, sitting on a sofa after dinner, persuading a young woman to take a trip with him round Europe.

Absorbed in his will, he tried to forget all these things. He returned to the text every day. He would correct words here and there, or remove and replace them, but without altering the essential content.

His will essentially provided for the reopening of his grave, in which, inside his lead coffin, the famous mirror would be buried beside his body.

First, he set a date for his exhumation thirty years hence. Later, he changed this to one hundred, only to erase this and write one thousand years.

He spent what life remained to him imagining what the diggers would find when they opened his grave. He firmly believed that mirrors, into which women looked as they beautified themselves before they were kissed, or murdered, absorbed something of the images they reflected. But nobody in this scornful world had thought of taking an interest in any of this.

He hoped that what happened in the taxi carrying two lovers to an airport, one thousand years ago, would leave some trace, however slight, on the surface of the glass.

There were days when he thought he discerned the outline of this mystery, as if through mist, but there were others when it seemed that the mirror, even after lying for a thousand years next to his skull, opaquely reflected nothing but the infinite void.

Tirana, Mali i Robit, Paris

Winter, 2003-2004