A Girl in Exile Page 13

  ‘Aha!’ exclaimed the Leader.

  The secretary instinctively gathered his breath before saying the name of Rudian Stefa. The playwright was showing the first signs of madness.

  The Leader had not looked so surprised for some time. The psychiatrist provided detailed explanations, as if he had long foreseen such a thing. Rudian Stefa’s first symptom of mental derangement was his question, a while ago, of whether any country permitted engagement (meaning, in fact, marriage) with a dead person.

  ‘Just listen to that!’ the Leader said. ‘How disgraceful!’

  ‘There have been no symptoms of necrophilia,’ the secretary continued. ‘It’s something else.’

  ‘Something else,’ the Leader murmured. ‘That’s easy to say, but just find that something else in a madman’s mind. Go on, but skip those Latin medical terms.’

  The secretary continued, but the Leader butted in again. ‘Doesn’t he say anything about what happened in Gramsh? As far as I remember, this playwright was mixed up in the affair. That girl who killed herself, an inscribed book, and I don’t know what else.’

  ‘No,’ the secretary said. ‘The doctor doesn’t mention those things.’

  ‘I see. He’s a clever man. That’s why I like him. He’s impartial. He doesn’t get mixed up in other people’s business. If our boys in the Security Service knew this they’d have a field day. Writer looking for dead bride. Decadence in Gramsh. Agitation and propaganda to allow the living to marry the dead. The doctor doesn’t comment on those things. That’s all I know, he says, you deal with the rest. By the way, have they started a file on that writer?’

  The secretary leafed through his documents.

  ‘It seems they did initially, in the first flurry of the investigation. Then, for the reasons we know, they closed it.

  ‘I see. Did anything come out of it?’ the Leader asked. ‘I mean, from that first flurry, as you put it?’

  The secretary no longer felt on sure ground. ‘Some conversations,’ he said. ‘Not very clear. More like gibberish. It seems the recordings were not very good.’

  ‘Read out the transcript,’ the Leader said. ‘I like to hear them just as they are.’

  ‘Maybe . . .’

  ‘No maybes. Read them to me.’

  The secretary obeyed. He had seldom felt more awkward. ‘The seals are somewhere else noise from the street seven hundred years of solitude oh car horn don’t say it Dante’s farewell ball ah she loved you.’

  The secretary looked up to see if he should continue. The Leader’s expression seemed unconcerned.

  ‘This raw data goes on,’ he said. The Leader gave no sign of whether he wanted to hear more or not.

  ‘They’re talking about Dante’s solitude,’ he said quietly. ‘Who knows who else’s. I don’t know what they are saying about mine.’

  The secretary lost the thread completely.

  He continued after this silence, hoping that at long last he would be told to stop. ‘Courier of death.’ The text became more macabre. ‘The ghost no longer obeys me. I can’t find the reason.’

  Instead of telling him to stop, the Leader said, ‘What is this ball, that’s turned up for the second time?’ The secretary felt a wave of self-pity.

  There was no end to this horror. In fact, the gibberish unexpectedly petered out, but he still felt sorry for himself. There was an accompanying document from the Interior Ministry, asking permission to recruit as an informer Rudian S.’s girlfriend – and apparently wife-to-be, now on an internship in Austria – for the purpose, according to the Leader’s well-known principle, of protecting the playwright.

  Halfway through this long document, he raised his eyes to seek instructions, but the Leader’s expression told him he was not listening. He wore the same look of surprise as when he had first heard the playwright’s name, but it was now accompanied by a sad smile.

  ‘We live and learn,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I remember that in Gjirokastra they used to tell a lot of stories about searching for brides.’

  Recently he had been thinking more and more often about the city of his birth. ‘All sorts of stories,’ he repeated, as if talking to himself. ‘But never like this.’

  He stood up slowly. It was time for lunch. The secretary escorted him to the anteroom, where the guards were expecting him, and returned to the office.

  THE SAME MORNING. IN THE OFFICE, WITHOUT THE LEADER

  As always after the Leader had left, the office looked different and empty. From the files piled on the desk, the secretary opened the one on Gramsh and leafed through it for a while, without any clear idea of what he was searching for. Then he realised that the part about the gym teacher had a furtive attraction for him. The material was not fully organised and there were a lot of question marks and guesses, but perhaps here lay its appeal. Clearly the teacher had abused several students, and finally ‘the girl’. That was how the file referred to her throughout, without giving her name. The investigation hadn’t so far found any connection to the playwright Rudian Stefa, and still less to circles of royalist émigrés. There were unproven suspicions that the gym teacher had helped her to kill herself, and had found the poison for her, or had killed her himself to conceal something.

  A second, more detailed investigation had concentrated on two questions: first, why the girl had given herself to him, and second, why he had gone to her burial. Part of the interrogation transcript was attached to the file. ‘You admitted yourself that the girl was indifferent to you. Why did she suddenly change her mind? What did you promise her?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘How did you threaten her?’ ‘I didn’t.’ The questions had continued almost until dawn. ‘What did she expect from you? What did she ask for in return? Why?’ He replied, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything.’

  The part about the funeral was equally obscure. ‘Why did you go to the burial? Moral support for a family convicted of political crimes? Opposition to the Party line on the class struggle?’ ‘No, no, not at all. Nothing of the sort occurred to me.’ ‘Then why? Explain everything again. From the start, not forgetting anything.’

  Again he had explained the events, the same story as before except that now a few words were garbled because some of his teeth had been broken during the interrogation. ‘As a teacher of the socialist young generation, how could you be tempted by a girl from a former bourgeois family?’ Vague answer. ‘Students’ changing room. Next to the volleyball court. It was perhaps the way she looked at me, which I took as a sign.’ Nothing else, no explanation. ‘Of her own free will, of course. She was a virgin.’

  The questions that followed were almost the same. ‘Why then? You said yourself that after what happened the girl became indifferent again as before. Why was that? Which of you didn’t keep a promise? Tell us the truth. Why did she give herself to you? What did she expect from you? Why did she become cold again?’

  ‘I don’t know. I understood nothing. Perhaps that’s why I went to the funeral. To find out. Her hair fluttered in the wind. I understood nothing. I was crying.’

  The transcript ended here. Below it someone had written a note: Idiot! Let him rot in prison. Another note had been added in a different hand: Not in prison – in the mine at Memaliaj. At the end was the word ‘clown’.

  The secretary took a deep breath and leafed through the file to find the place describing the girl’s surrender.

  As he read he imagined, like in a slow-motion film, the changing room in the gym next to the volleyball court, the girl turning her head to look at the gym teacher. His apprehensive approach, and her arm drawing him to her.

  Something resembling an electrical shock shot through the core of his body. He closed the file, put it back where it had been next to the half-Albanian, half-Latin ramblings of Rudian Stefa, and stood dumbstruck.

  A pang that he had not experienced for thirty years suddenly hit him, searing, disabling him without pity. Twice he reached out his hand, but it would not obey him, until at the third attempt he drew out the f
ile. He opened it at the same place, at the girl’s playful invitation, and again stood dazed.

  That character was only an ordinary gym teacher; how could he himself fall into this trap?

  He put the file back in its place, as if it had burned his fingers, but it was too late.

  Thirty years in his service and this incredible thing had happened.

  He knew where this train of thought would lead. They had overthrown this class for all eternity, cast these people into the abyss with all their jewels, their memories and their love affairs. They had been reduced to dusty mummies, or worse, mere scaly residues, and yet now, when least expected, a girl from this class, out of the depths, de profundis, had struck a fiery spark.

  It was all right for a moonstruck playwright or an idiot of a teacher. But he had been here thirty years, drinking from the clear spring. How could that spark have set him aflame?

  An old song from his birthplace stirred below the surface of his mind. It was sung about someone who instead of dying honourably in battle, came to a shameful death among the womenfolk.

  EVENING OF THE SAME DAY. COFFEE CORNER IN THE PARTY’S SOCIAL CLUB IN THE LEADERSHIP BLOCK

  The Leader and his wife arrived unannounced. Present were two members of the Politburo, the half-blind parliamentary speaker and his wife, three or four ministers, and the newly appointed chief of the army’s general staff with his young bride.

  The Leader raised his fedora in greeting and took his usual seat by the large fireplace. ‘Tell the comrades to come closer, if they like,’ he said to his wife. ‘Let’s have a little chat.’

  ‘Are you here for the first time?’ the grey-headed wife of the parliamentary speaker asked the wife of the chief of staff.

  The young woman nodded.

  The Leader, talking to her husband, smiled and glanced at her.

  ‘What a strange look he has,’ the young woman whispered.

  ‘Everything about him is like that – different,’ the other wife replied. ‘He was eyeing you with great curiosity, I could see.’

  The young woman blushed.

  The conversation by the fireplace grew livelier, and the two women could whisper more easily.

  ‘When he enters, the whole room lights up,’ the old woman said. ‘With my husband it’s the opposite. When he comes in, a cloud forms. That’s what I tell him sometimes.’

  The two women, scared of bursting into laughter, put their hands to their mouths.

  ‘He’s in a good mood this evening,’ said the old woman, looking towards the fireplace. ‘You can tell.’

  The Leader trained his eyes on those who were not talking. His glance fell again on the wife of the chief of staff.

  ‘Beautiful women don’t often come here,’ the other woman whispered into her right ear.

  The young woman blushed again.

  ‘Now you look even more beautiful.’

  Silence had fallen by the fireplace, and the Leader’s voice could be heard clearly.

  ‘He’s talking about the intellectuals. There have been some problems recently, have you heard?’

  The young woman shook her head.

  ‘Well, these writers . . .’ the parliamentary speaker said.

  ‘It’s in their nature,’ the Leader replied. ‘We do so much for them, but they’re never satisfied. They’re always so persnickety.’

  ‘What’s that dreadful word?’ whispered the young woman. ‘I’ve never heard it.’

  ‘You’re right. Nobody uses it anymore. Where we come from, it means fussy.’

  ‘These words are scary,’ the young woman whispered.

  ‘They behave like this because you’re too soft,’ the parliamentary speaker interrupted. ‘If it were up to me, they’d soon see what I’d do to them.’

  ‘Hear that?’ the old woman said. ‘Didn’t I tell you he’s crazy?’

  The Leader pretended not to be listening. The silence was now absolute and even his breathing was audible. His next words rang out:

  ‘They’ve always been like that. Never content. One says his frontal brain cells have been damaged, another complains that a ghost won’t obey him.’

  General laughter drowned his last words.

  ‘Perhaps they’re waiting for me to quit the stage,’ he said slowly when calm returned. ‘They think they’ll have an easier time . . .’

  The parliamentary speaker’s dim eyes sparkled behind his black spectacles.

  ‘Don’t even think of such a thing,’ the old woman called from where she sat.

  The Leader gestured for silence, and then spoke.

  ‘One who has turned up recently – I won’t say his name, because I respect him – do you know what he wants? You’ll never guess in a hundred years . . . dead brides.’

  He paused and watched their eyes widen.

  ‘You heard right. That’s precisely what he wants, dead brides. Sponsa mortua, they would be in Latin.’

  The company’s ill-concealed mirth broke out at last and he had to gesture again for silence.

  ‘What can I do for him, you may ask. I can’t bring him a bride from the next world. All I can do is send him to his bride.’

  The parliamentary speaker, growing agitated in his seat, was making signs with his trigger finger, and the Leader saw him. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Let’s kit him out for his wedding and send him to his bride. But no,’ he said, furiously shaking his head. ‘No, no, no. I stand up for writers, crazy as they are.’

  ‘Who’s that angel over there?’ the grey-haired wife said.

  The Leader’s right eye, visible from where the two women were sitting, seemed larger, velvety, with the glint of a tear.

  ‘Who’s that angel?’ the woman said again. ‘It’s a meleq.’

  ‘What does that word mean?’ the young wife asked in a weak voice. ‘You scared me.’

  ‘It’s an old Turkish word that nobody uses anymore . . . Meleq. The chief of angels . . .’

  THE SAME EVENING. IN THE EMPTY THEATRE

  The building was dark, as it was every evening, but Rudian Stefa thought he detected a faint light inside. He went through the yard to the porter’s lodge by the stage door, and discerned the gleam of a cigarette and then the familiar silhouette of the caretaker.

  He said good evening and asked if there was anybody in the theatre, or if his eyes had deceived him.

  The porter replied that the plumbers were making repairs but he could go in if he liked. The side door was open.

  Rudian was pleased that the staff remembered his old habit of sitting alone in the empty theatre on evenings when there was no performance.

  He thanked the porter and went in. He sat as usual in the middle of the stalls between rows nine and thirteen, looking towards the stage. This had first been his whim, then a mania, and latterly the sign of a creative block, although nobody mentioned that. He himself offered no explanation. It just felt good. He could imagine the cherry-coloured curtain as the dress of an outraged woman, but offended by whom or what he could not tell.

  The seats were the same cherry colour, as was the velvet in the boxes, including the state box.

  He had not written many plays, but before setting them down on paper he had conceived them here as he sat in the empty auditorium, looking towards the stage.

  There was a flight of steps on either side of the stage, less well lit than the stage itself. Usually they went unnoticed, but when illuminated by the pale lights at the sides, the audience knew that the actors would enter by them. These actors generally played the negative characters that populated the vast tracts of socialist realism from Berlin to Shanghai. They crept apprehensively out of cellars, air-raid shelters, debauched nightclubs, or hell itself. Suspicious plumbers, NATO spies, conspirators exposed at the Eighth Plenum, the Eleventh, or even the Second Plenum, which many people were convinced had never taken place at all, made their wretched appearances. They were followed shortly by Catholic priests, hoodlums with their molls, even the anxious shade of King Zog.
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br />   Rudian thought that these steps would serve him better than the stage. If destiny were still with him, of course.

  The spot-lit pools wavered as if stirred by an invisible breath. ‘Come, blessed spirit,’ he murmured to himself, for some reason in archaic Albanian.

  A shadow climbed the steps, visible before the figure itself emerged, the very character whom Rudian had been expecting. He carried an antique lyre with two new strings clearly distinguishable as a later addition.

  Rudian held his breath, watching for what would happen. Would his beloved appear after him, or would there be no Eurydice?

  We contrive our own great losses, he thought. But at that moment, a few paces behind the man with the modified lyre, the girl appeared. She stepped aside to avoid the body of the sleeping Cerberus, and then followed Orpheus with her head lowered, in the manner of Balkan brides.

  Don’t! Rudian cried inside. It was a famous ‘don’t’, heard billions of times in human history. Don’t turn your head, or you’ll lose her.

  ‘Orpheus,’ the girl pleaded in a faint voice.

  Rudian Stefa closed his eyes so as not to see what happened.

  FIVE YEARS LATER. DAYTIME. THE OVERTHROW OF THE STATUE

  The roar from Skanderbeg Square came in waves. He opened a window but still couldn’t tell in which direction they were dragging the statue.

  The view of the square on the television screen remained the same. Amidst the confusion, you could see the truck on which the toppled bronze had been tied, but not the path they were trying to open up for its passage. The announcer was totally intoxicated and incapable of providing coherent commentary. He mentioned the theatre – ‘It’s heading towards the theatre’ – but then cried, ‘No, they can’t get through that way. Oh God, this is incredible. The Leader, the dictator, trampled under the feet of the crowd.’

  A change in the crowd’s roaring made Rudian open the window again. The truck had turned into Dibra Street, as he had hoped. You could see people running alongside it on both pavements but not those who had climbed on top, who were visible only on the television screen.