in my brain that could have been called a thought. At first I was tempted to say, ‘I’m thinking of you,’ but it seemed too banal.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘You’re thinking that maybe your king sat on these steps, that maybe he looked out at the sea just as we’re doing now, and that you are perhaps the only Albanian to have come here since he did.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said.
‘Yes, you are!’ she insisted.
‘I really am not!’
‘You don’t want to admit it, out of pride.’
‘Frankly, no,’ I said once more, wearily. ‘It makes no difference to me whether or not he sat on these steps. Far from stirring my imagination, as you think it does, the very idea—’
‘Then you must be completely devoid of imagination!’
‘Perhaps I am.’
‘Please forgive me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’
We said nothing for several minutes. Now and again I could feel her icy hair on my cheek. The arm I had round her shoulder had gone numb. It was like one of those heavy, damp branches blown down by the wind during the night that you find lying outside the house in the morning.
So we’ll have to talk about the ex-king, I thought. From the moment the old interloper had been mentioned that evening I’d avoided saying anything about him, but I knew that I could put it off no longer.
I took a deep breath, feeling tired even before I began. I intended to tell her about Albania and especially its former poverty, which we’d learned about at school, where the monarch was discussed even less positively than the sultans, Nero or the tsars. I told her more or less that the Albanians who had given birth to those magnificent legends (I must have told her about the man walled into the bridge by then) were so poor that although most of them lived near the sea they had never seen it when that man (I waved at the iron railings) had been buying himself lavish properties abroad and running around with tarts on foreign beaches. I went on to tell her that Albanians were then so destitute that in some parts of the country the highlanders owned no more than a single piece of cloth they bound around their heads, like a turban; it was a shroud that they carried with them at all times so that if they happened to be killed on the road a passer-by could give them a proper burial.
I felt her fingers running up the back of my neck, as if she was searching for a shroud, and shivered.
‘Had you ever heard that before?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I knew that Albania was a land of exquisite beauty but what you’ve just told me is so sad.’
She carried on running her fingers through my hair, above the nape of my neck, and after a pause she added: ‘You know what? Maybe you’re right where kings are concerned, but you still have to let your imagination roam sometimes . . . Indulge in a bit of fantasy. Most books nowadays are so boring, with their permanently smiling and always rugged heroes. Don’t you think?’
I didn’t know what to say. She was quite possibly right, but all the same I tried to remonstrate with her, saying that the Revolution had had its own beauty, such as the three Latvian Guards we’d met a couple of hours earlier, or Lenin, who had made all the kings, tsars, khans, emirs, emperors, sultans, caliphs and popes look like pygmies, like . . .
I’d let myself get carried away by the tidal wave of Lenin-worship. Encomia of that sort were common. A fellow student had told me that it was the safest way yet found to take Stalin down a notch. The two were portrayed as radically different, almost as if they had been enemies; there were even hints that Lenin had been persecuted by his successor, but that everything would be brought into the open at the right time . . .
‘Yes, sure, OK,’ she acknowledged, sounding tired, ’but most contemporary books about the Revolution and about Lenin are so dry and . . . I can’t find the right word.’
I realised it would not be easy to contradict her.
‘Perhaps it’s because Shakespeare wrote about kings,’ I blurted out, without thinking. Indeed, I pondered, Shakespeare wrote about kings, but the people who write about the Revolution . . . In my mind I saw in the long procession of all those mediocre writers, eyes lit with envy (some were still jealous of Mayakovsky), who had made fools of themselves in the view of the younger generation by writing so badly about the Revolution. I could see the crimson face of Vladimir Yermilov, whom I found odious because I knew he was one of those responsible for Mayakovsky’s suicide. Every time I saw him, with his ugly snout, having lunch in the dining room at the writers’ retreat I was astounded that the assembled company didn’t charge at him, beat him up, lynch him, drag him out to the road, then to the dunes and all the way to the dolphin fountain. Once in a while I said to myself that the absence of an event of that sort must mean that something was out of kilter in the house, completely out of true.
‘So I’m not entirely wrong, am I?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ I was startled. My mind was in a muddle, and I didn’t grasp in what sense my companion could claim to be right. Our conversation turned back to the ex-king of Albania, and it troubled me that she could cling to any illusions about him. I intended to describe the squalor of his court, with all its princes and princesses, the highnesses’ aunts and uncles, and the cohorts of courtiers, whose grotesque portraits I had so often seen in old magazines when I was doing research for my dissertation in the National Library. But it was too late to start a conversation of that kind, so I said nothing.
Maybe it was my not saying anything, or the way my arm round her shoulders stiffened, that made me think she’d read my thoughts, because she suddenly whispered: ‘Perhaps it’s not his villa anyway.’
‘Could be.’ I gave a deep sigh. I was worn out by this Pyrrhic victory, because I was angry with the ex-king – very angry, in fact – for having loomed up out of the past to spoil my night out. Then it occurred to me that no evening is ever entirely safe, and you can never know in advance from which forgotten depths the attack will come. But then I thought that it was perhaps no coincidence that the ex-king’s ghost had cropped up when I’d been depressed, and in this place, on deserted dunes where the dead and the living team up in pairs to ride on the horses of legend.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked, after a protracted silence.
I told her, and she leaned forward to trace my initials with her finger on the smooth wet sand.
I don’t know why but my mind turned to the initials of the fat woman, and then to the length of the evening that had now become a whole night, just as a girl turns into a woman. In a minute we would stand up and leave to walk in the darkness alongside the rail tracks so we wouldn’t get lost. Then I imagined I would walk her back to her villa, that I would kiss her and that she would slip away without even saying goodnight, and that I wouldn’t take offence since I knew that was what local girls usually did after the first kiss. Tomorrow she’d come back to where we would be playing ping-pong and still be arguing over the score, and then we would go for a walk at sunset, along the waterline, exactly when the shutter-fiends would be focusing their cameras to catch it. We would slowly turn into black-and-white silhouettes and the shallow water would bounce our image back, like a catapult, to annoy people looking in frozen solitude at the far horizon. Then, like most of the silhouettes that sauntered along the shore in the evening, we would enter a dark space inside unknown cameras, and, later, when the films came to be developed, we would re-emerge from the
