the Serbs will pay.
If you miss getting laid
Give it to Belgrade …
Now the researcher himself, always detached and impartial, suddenly seemed to be in a hurry to set aside this epic conclusion of events, and to follow an entirely different track.
8
The inquiry now resembled a plane which, after flying across a clear sky, re-enters a patch of turbulence. Dark surmises, grave suspicions, ambiguous phrases, obscure scraps of dialogue drawn from half-remembered phone conversations loomed out of the fog and vanished again. Besfort had written: “In your last letter you mentioned defeating me. Did you really dream of such a thing, even for a moment? Don’t you realise that I might be more dangerous in defeat?” Her reply: “Believe me, this misunderstanding between us has worn me down.” His answer: “Don’t worry about a thing like that. This sort of anxiety comes from the body, not the soul.”
Then Rovena talked to her friend Shpresa.
“He told me yesterday that I should keep to the pact between us.”
“What pact? This is the first time you’ve mentioned such a thing.”
“Really?”
“If I’m really your friend, you must be more honest.”
“I know, but do you think this is easy for me?”
“This story just gets more obscure.”
“Have you heard of Empedocles?”
“Hm, I think I’ve heard the name, but I’m not sure.”
“He was new to me too. He’s an ancient philosopher. Out of curiosity to see what no human eye had seen before, he threw himself into the crater of Etna.”
“So? What’s he got to do with you?”
“Not me, the two of us.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Well, one day he said to me that we would try something totally unfamiliar, and he mentioned this famous man Empedocles.”
“Rovena, I don’t understand you. Are you going to throw yourself off a cliff because some crazy character did so five thousand years ago?”
“Slow down. I’m not as far gone as that. It was just a comparison. What we were taught at school to call a metaphor. But still, just imagining it makes me scared.”
“Of course it’s scary. Just your talking about it makes my skin crawl. Someone jumping into the lava out of curiosity … a funny sort of curiosity!”
“Is that how you imagined the crater? Active?”
“What?”
“I was asking if you imagined the crater with molten lava or not?”
“Is that important? When you mentioned a volcano, I thought of lava.”
“But I imagined it extinct, black, desolate. And like that it’s twice as frightening. Wait, he said that this was what falling into a black hole would be like, coming out into another dimension …”
“Listen, Rova, and don’t misunderstand me. It would be good if you came here as soon as you can. Take a few days’ rest. This Alpine air will do you good. We’ll have a good time together, like in the old days. We’ll remember all those jokes from university. Remember that doggerel by the guy from Durrës in the other seminar group?
Rova is an antibiotic
Short for Rovamycin
But Rovena is hypnotic
Elegant and enticing.
The researcher used the young woman’s words “I’m scared”, repeated over and over again, as the starting point for his questioning of the taxi driver.
“She said, ‘I’m scared, but I don’t know why. I pretend not to be frightened of him. He also pretends not to frighten me any more. But none of this is true.’ Why were you so shaken by what you saw, or thought you saw, in the mirror?”
This question, although lifted from the written record, had lost none of its ominous weight.
“Did it remind you of anything? Even dimly, or indirectly? Some kind of obstacle, a taboo, something that should never happen?”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yes.”
Everybody in this story was scared, with or without reason. They were scared of one other, of themselves or of someone, no one could tell who.
Some part of this fear had been conveyed through the mirror in the taxi. But where had the rest come from?
The researcher finally succeeded in meeting Lulu Blumb, getting her to talk and ensuring her continued cooperation. Her suspicion of murder was difficult to dismiss, but also hard to confirm.
She almost exploded with rage. “Are you blind, or just pretending? You could tell a mile off that he was the murderous kind. That dream of his, or rather his nightmare, about the Hague Tribunal showed that.”
The researcher wanted to butt in to say that these days a lot of people were scared of The Hague – Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Montenegrins. You might say that the whole Balkans went in fear and trembling. But he restrained himself.
Lulu Blumb went on to say that neither the dream about the court summons nor the second one, which people generally called inexplicable, enigmatic and so forth, held any mystery for her. She said that the researcher no doubt knew about the funereal building, a cross between a mausoleum and a motel, at which a person knocks and looks for someone, who later turns out to be a young woman who is locked inside, turned to stone or murdered by some means.
The inquiry stated that Besfort Y. had had this dream one week before his death. Logically, he should have had this dream later, after killing Rovena. But as the researcher might be aware (and might well know better than she did) such displacements are quite common in dreams. The dream showed most of all that Besfort had already resolved to kill Rovena.
The researcher listened to the pianist with the same calm curiosity, both when he believed her and when he didn’t. This woman had a special talent, perhaps granted to her by music, for evoking the atmosphere of events, especially imagined events. For instance, whenever she described the final dream, she never forgot to mention the building’s midnight glow, which was a reflection of the plaster, or perhaps of despair.
Her description of the other incident on the morning of 17 May caused in the researcher’s mind an intoxicating frisson, whenever she mentioned it, that he could never shake off.
Dozens, hundreds of times, he imagined Besfort Y. walking through the rain and mist, holding the shape of a woman tight against himself – whether real or not, nobody knew.
As
