The Accident Read online

  Also by Ismail Kadare

  The General of the Dead Army

  The Wedding

  Broken April

  The Concert

  The Palace of Dreams

  The Three-Arched Bridge

  The Pyramid

  The File on H

  Albanian Spring: Anatomy of Tyranny

  Elegy for Kosovo

  Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

  The Successor

  Chronicle in Stone

  Agamemnon’s Daughter

  The Siege

  The Ghost Rider

  Copyright © 2008 Ismail Kadare

  English translation copyright © 2010 John Hodgson

  Bond Street Books edition published 2011

  First published in Albanian in 2008 as Aksidenti by Onufri Publishing, Tirana, Albania.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  The Bond Street Books colophon is a trademark of Random House of Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kadare, Ismail

  The accident / Ismail Kadare; translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson.

  Translation of: Aksidenti.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67086-9

  I. Hodgson, John, 1951- II. Title.

  PG9621.K3A6513 2011 891′.9913 C2010-905492-X

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in Canada by Bond Street Books,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part One

  1

  It seemed the most ordinary kind of incident. A taxi had veered off the airport autobahn at kilometre marker 17. Its two passengers were killed outright, and the driver, seriously injured, was taken to hospital unconscious.

  The police recorded the usual facts in such cases: the names of the victims (a man and a young woman, both Albanian citizens), the registration number of the cab, the name of the Austrian driver and the circumstances, or rather their total ignorance of the circumstances, in which the accident had occurred. There were no signs that the taxi had braked or been hit from any direction. The moving car had slid to the side of the road and somersaulted into a gully, as if the driver had suddenly lost his sight.

  A Dutch couple whose car was behind the taxi reported that for no obvious reason the car had suddenly left the carriageway and struck the crash barrier. The terrified pair, if they were not mistaken, had seen the taxi’s back doors open as it spun through the air, throwing out the two passengers, a man and a woman.

  Another witness, the driver of a Euromobil truck, said more or less the same thing.

  A second report, compiled one week later in the hospital after the driver had regained consciousness, only confused the story further. The driver admitted that nothing unusual had happened just before the accident, except that perhaps … in the rear-view mirror … maybe something had distracted him … At this point the policeman lost his patience.

  What had he seen in the mirror? The driver could give no answer to the policeman’s persistent questioning. The doctor warned him not to tire his patient, but he pressed his point. What was it that he had seen in the mirror above the steering wheel? In other words, what strange thing had happened on the back seat of his cab? Had there been a fight between the two passengers? Or was it the opposite, maybe, a particularly passionate embrace?

  The injured driver shook his head. No.

  “Then what?” The policeman almost shrieked. “What made you lose your head? What the hell did you see?”

  The doctor was about to step in again when the patient resumed his feeble drawl. His reply seemed interminable, and when he finished, the policeman and the doctor stared at each other. The injured driver said that the two passengers on the back seat had done nothing … nothing but … only … they had tried … to kiss.

  2

  The driver’s evidence was not believed. He was considered to have suffered psychological trauma, and the file on the accident at kilometre marker 17 was closed. The reason for this was simple: whatever the driver’s explanation for what he saw or thought he saw in the mirror, it did not change the crux of the matter, that the taxi had overturned as a consequence of something that had happened in his brain, an absence of mind, hallucination or blackout, which it was difficult to believe had had anything to do with his passengers.

  As usual, other information surfaced when their names were disclosed. The man, an analyst working for the Council of Europe on western Balkan affairs; the beautiful young woman, an intern at the Archaeological Institute of Vienna. Clearly lovers. The cab had been ordered from the reception of the Miramax Hotel, where the two had stayed for the whole weekend. A technical inspection of the vehicle reported no signs of tampering.

  The policeman, in a last effort to flush out any contradictions in the taxi driver’s story, asked a trick question. “What happened to the passengers when the car hit the ground?” The driver’s reply, that he alone had hit the ground in the car and that the couple were already separated from him in mid-air, showed he was not lying about what he had seen, or thought he had seen.

  Although initially routine, the case, because of the taxi driver’s strange testimony, was filed away as an “unclassifiable accident”.

  This was why, several months later, a copy of the file reached the European Road Safety Institute and was passed to the fourth section, which dealt with unusual accidents.

  Although the description “unusual” implied that only a handful of such accidents occurred, compared to the common sort caused by bad weather, speeding, exhaustion, drink, drugs and so forth, there was still an astonishing variety of “unclassifiable accidents”. The files recorded the most extraordinary incidents, from murderous assaults or vandalised brakes to sudden apparitions that blinded the driver.

  Some of them, the most mysterious of all, involved the inside rear-view mirror. These formed a sub-section of their own. Seen in a mirror, only something especially hair-raising could cause an accident. In the case of taxis, the m
ost frequent examples involved passengers threatening the driver with a weapon. There were also many cases of sudden illness: strokes, explosive vomiting of blood, insane fits accompanied by screaming. Sudden fights between passengers, and even knife attacks, were hardly exceptional, but they sometimes distracted inexperienced drivers. Less common were incidents in which one passenger, usually a woman who had climbed into the taxi a few minutes earlier clinging devotedly to her lover, suddenly screamed that she was being abducted and attempted to grab the door handle to leap out. There were even some instances, although they could be counted on the fingers of one hand, in which the driver recognised a passenger as his first love or a wife who had left him.

  Explanations were found for most of these initially mysterious cases, but this did not at all mean that everything reflected in rear-view mirrors could be accounted for.

  Besides hallucinations, there were cases involving something similar: drivers who were hypnotised by their passenger’s eyes, suddenly intoxicated by an enticing glance from a beautiful woman on the back seat or, again the opposite, shaken by a stare from a void that devoured them like a black hole.

  What the taxi driver testified to following the accident at kilometre marker 17 on the airport road, although too ordinary to be called a mirage or hallucination, defied all logical explanation. His two passengers’ attempt to kiss, which the driver said had caused his confusion and, as a result, both their deaths, was a mystery that deepened the more one struggled to understand it.

  The analysts dealing with the accident shook their heads, frowned, smiled cynically and then grew irritated as they went back to the beginning again.

  “What does it mean? ‘They were trying to kiss.’ ” It was an unnatural way of putting it, in fact illogical. You could imagine that one of them wanted to kiss the other, while the other refused, or that one of them was nervous, or both were nervous, or that both were scared of a third person, and so on. But it made no sense that two people in a taxi, with only the driver present, were “trying to kiss”. Sie versuchten gerade, sich zu küssen, as the police report stated. Obvious questions arose. They had just left a hotel where they had spent the night, so why were they “trying to kiss”? In other words, if they wanted to kiss, why didn’t they just do it, instead of prevaricating? What was stopping them?

  The more you tried to unravel it, the more inextricable it became. Supposing there had been some obstacle between the two passengers which prevented them from coming close – why had this so distracted the driver? Hadn’t he carried plenty of passengers who had kissed, or even made love, right there on the back seat? And how had he noticed such a subtle nuance as this attempt to kiss, or rather a desire to kiss, accompanied by an unseen impediment that prevented it?

  The frustrated analysts recalled the saying that a fool may throw a stone into a well which a hundred wise men cannot pull out, and noted in the margin that unless it was the old excuse of a driver recognising a passenger as his former wife or lover, which young taxi drivers often produced, having heard it passed down by older colleagues, this must be a genuinely psychotic case and not worth the trouble of dealing with.

  Meanwhile, any connection between the driver and the woman in his cab, an Albanian citizen, was ruled out, and a medical report described his psychological condition as entirely normal.

  3

  Three months later, the archivist could not hide his astonishment when the governments of two Balkan countries, one after another, asked to inspect the file on the accident at kilometre marker 17. How could the states of this quarrelsome peninsula, after committing every possible abomination known to this world – murdering, bombing, setting entire populations at each other’s throats and then deporting them – find the time, now that the madness was over, instead of making reparations, to enter into such minor matters as unusual car accidents?

  There was no way of knowing why the state of Serbia and Montenegro should take an interest in the accident, but it soon became clear that this country had kept the two victims under surveillance for a long time.

  The discovery of this connection was enough to spark the Albanian secret service into action too. Suspicions of a political murder, the kind of allegation fashionable to ridicule, since the fall of communism, as a typical symptom of communist paranoia, suddenly revived in grim earnest.

  As usual, the Albanian intelligence officers took a long time to reach a position which the others had already abandoned. However, through contacts with their compatriots in the Albanian communities abroad, they managed to assemble a good deal of material relating to the victims. There were parts of letters, photographs, airline tickets, hotel addresses and bills, which, although only the first fruits of their harvest, provided a mass of information about the couple. The photographs, taken mainly in hotels, at pavement cafés, and a few in a bath, out of which the young woman, naked, stared at the camera with more elation than shame, left the nature of their relationship in no doubt. The hotel bills were clear evidence that they had met in different European cities, where this woman’s friend had happened to go for his work: Strasbourg, Vienna, Rome, Luxembourg.

  The photographs confirmed the locations, and the cities were also mentioned in letters, mainly written by the young woman, who liked deciding in which of them she had felt happiest.

  The intelligence officers placed their main hope of solving the riddle in these letters, but after reading them they were at first disappointed, then disoriented and finally totally bewildered.

  The blatant contradictions led them to interrupt their investigations to interview hotel receptionists, chambermaids, waiters in late-night bars, a girlfriend of the woman, called Shpresa, an Albanian living in Switzerland who the letters stated “knew the truth” and, finally, the taxi driver.

  Their testimonies more or less coincided: usually when they met, the couple seemed cheerful, but on occasion the woman had appeared despondent, and once had been seen silently weeping while he had gone out to make a phone call. He too had sometimes looked sad, and then she would try to comfort him, stroking and kissing his hand.

  The interviewers put the question: was something on their minds … a decision they had to take but couldn’t, some regret, uncertainty, threat? The waiters could not answer this. To their eyes it all seemed normal. Most couples in late-night bars passed from ebullience to silence, and sometimes dejection, and then suddenly brightened up again.

  The woman became very beautiful at these times. Her eyes, which until then had idly followed her cigarette smoke, lit up with emotion. Her cheeks too. She acquired an alarming, devastating charm.

  Devastating? What could that mean?

  “I don’t know how to explain it. I was trying to say the kind of beauty that knocks you flat, as people say. The man also seemed to revive, and would order another whisky. Then they would talk again in their own language until after midnight, and stand up to go upstairs to their room.

  “From the way she rose to her feet with a sidelong glance and walked in front with her head slightly bowed, an old-fashioned picture of a beautiful, transgressing woman, you could tell that they were going to make love. These things provide late-night barmen with entertainment, especially at the end of their long hotel shifts.”

  4

  None of the other information, gathered in various places, helped the intelligence officers to pin down the facts at all. In the wake of the waiters’ evidence, the dead couple’s letters seemed even less coherent. Sometimes they read like the ordinary correspondence of lovers, even when she complained of his behaviour. Yet sometimes their tone was entirely different, and the terse notes between them suggested that this was a purely routine relationship between a call girl and her client.

  The officers could hardly believe their eyes when they read phrases of hers such as “Whatever happens, I will love you all my life,” followed by notes from him on later dates, giving his hotel address and adding, “Everything OK on the same terms as last time?”

  This could b
e interpreted in two ways. He could be referring to the length of their stay – one, two or more nights – but it rather hinted at remuneration. Moreover, now and then the expression “call girl” appeared, and he seemed eager to use it, whether accurately or not.

  In her earlier letters she would quote phrases of his that implied he had once written quite normally – about how he had missed her, was impatient to see her, and so forth. The change apparently took place during the final phase of their long association.

  Careful calculation revealed that their relationship had lasted some twelve years, and that their estrangement had occurred only in the last fifty-two weeks. The expression “call girl”, like some boundary marker, appeared forty weeks before their deaths.

  “I admit that you have given me boundless happiness,” she had written in one of her letters, “but just as often your cruel irritability has made my life a misery.”

  She had continually complained of this, and in a letter dated 2000 told him that the only time she had felt totally happy with him had been during the year of the Kosovo War, when he seemed to discharge his nervous tension in an entirely different direction.

  “After Serbia was defeated you didn’t seem to know what to do with yourself and you turned on me again.”

  This final phrase led the Albanian intelligence officers to believe that they had solved one of the mysteries: the reason for Besfort Y.’s surveillance by the Serbian and Montenegrin secret service. With his many contacts in Strasbourg and Brussels, and inside most of the international human rights organisations, Besfort Y. was naturally the kind of person to be a thorn in the side of Yugoslavia, and might in a way be deemed responsible for its bombing.

  It was easy to deduce why this surveillance began at such a late stage, after the war was over. Just at this time, a kind of remorse at the punishment and dismemberment of Yugoslavia led to attempts to revise the facts. Thousands of people were either elated or thrown into despair at the prospect of the bombing being called a mistake.