A Girl in Exile Page 2

  For the second time, he shook his head to indicate he remembered nothing.

  He decided then and there that he would no longer tell the truth, and was surprised how calm this decision made him feel. Nobody deserved it, he thought. Especially not these two at the end of the table. But not just them. Nobody. Starting with his girlfriend. None of them, not even this mysterious girl in internment.

  He would behave like they did. This, he thought, would be his salvation. He would become invulnerable and would not communicate with anybody. Let them knock on his door, beg him, curse him, and scream that he had no soul. You do what you want. I’ll do what I want. I’ll become a sphinx.

  Fury took hold of him again, but this time it was different. He thought about Migena. She might have been more honest. She knew her friend was interned and had asked for a book for her. After she had left him, he had gone to his bookshelves to pick up the fallen books and had felt ashamed of what he had done. He was surprised at the depth of his anger. The actual contents of these books, not just their names, seemed to have scattered where they fell, like in an earthquake. Especially one book: Toponyms. The names of places, streams, footpaths tumbled on all sides. Cuckoo Hill. The Ambush of the Three Wells. Zeka’s Trap, the Pit, the Raven, the Bad Foothills . . . all these grim place names, he thought. There was nothing in this world whose identity, or CV as they now called it, was so repulsive as the land itself. Snares, treachery everywhere . . .

  How long had he been in this office of the Party, which he had entered with such unconcern? His eyes wandered to the wall clock that dated back to the friendship with the Chinese. The clock said twenty-seven minutes past ten. Incredible. He thought he had been there for hours. The Path of the Sprites. The Rough Pass. Wolves. Had they questioned Migena? he wondered. Even if they hadn’t, how could these people who knew everything fail to know who this interned girl’s friend was?

  He felt ashamed of his suspicion, although this did not prevent him from imagining Migena sitting in front of a similar table. What books did this writer have on his shelves? I think you’ll remember some of the authors at least. Do you mean the ones that fell when he tried to bash my head against the bookshelves? Not just those. You mean the others too? The books in general. You were there several times and of course you saw them. It’s true, I remember some of the names but I didn’t know most of the authors. I remember, for instance, Picasso, next to a Heidegger, if I’m not mistaken. The others were new to me.

  Speak up. What’s the matter?

  He thought back to his own questions. Oh God, those questions he’d asked her at their last meeting, like an interrogator.

  Something is on your mind. We’ve talked about it so often. Tell me, what’s the matter? I can’t bear your tears. Nor those enigmatic phrases of yours: I don’t know who you are, my prince or someone else’s.

  Now it was his turn to ask these questions, he thought. Who do you belong to? Are you my princess or . . . the Party’s?

  Yet remorse still wormed its way inside him. Perhaps he was being unfair. Perhaps she was suffering too. Perhaps they had interrogated her at night and there was an explanation for all those sighs and tears: she was in two minds, to betray him or not.

  A faint cough came like a distant roll of thunder from another age, no doubt a sign for him to break his long silence. They had allowed this silence as a sign of the respect for him that they had mentioned at the start, but he couldn’t continue it for ever.

  It was possible that it was the other girl, the girl in exile, who had betrayed them. ‘You’re always going to Tirana, find a book of his, I need one . . .’ Or maybe it was neither of them, but a third person.

  As if waking up, he raised his head. There was a glint of malice in his interrogators’ eyes, like in those place names. The evil eye. In that book of names that fell first after Fitzgerald.

  What did it matter to him who was watching him? It wasn’t his problem, as people said nowadays. They might find a book signed by him in the bag of some criminal . . . It wasn’t the first time that they had harassed him. If they wanted a pretext to condemn his play, let them do what they wanted, just not torture him like this.

  As had happened before, he spoke less than half of these words aloud. But they were enough for the second secretary to frown again. This time his frown looked different.

  ‘That is not the problem,’ the secretary said quietly. ‘It’s more complicated than it seems.’ He fell silent, then added, ‘As I said at the beginning, the Party trusts you just as before. The problem is that the girl we are talking about killed herself.’

  Rudian Stefa bit his lower lip, suddenly remembering how they had spoken of her in mixed tenses, sometimes the living present and sometimes the dead past.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘What a sad story.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ said the second secretary. ‘I think you know that we take a different view of suicide, especially now.’

  In a tired, monotonous voice he explained that since the prime minister’s suicide – which, as Rudian well knew, had unravelled the greatest conspiracy in Albanian history – there was a tendency to look for a hidden meaning in every suicide, however apparently straightforward.

  ‘You know’, he continued, ‘that suicides are intended to give signals and convey messages. Think of Jan Palach in Czechoslovakia, or Stefan Zweig . . . You will know better than I do. We are not ruling out this possibility—’

  ‘Especially because the girl came from a former bourgeois family,’ the investigator interrupted. ‘Close to the old royal court. Some of the family is in Albania and some abroad. So the investigation will take time.’

  The playwright didn’t know what to say.

  ‘It’s not just a question of the book,’ the second secretary said. ‘The girl often mentioned your name in her diary.’

  ‘I see,’ the playwright replied uncertainly.

  ‘That’s the reason why we brought you in,’ the secretary said. ‘If you think of anything, or remember something that might be useful to the investigation, phone me. Or drop in whenever you like. The Party’s door is open.’

  ‘I understand,’ the playwright said. ‘Of course.’

  He was about to stretch out his hand but instead he looked from one man to the other, wondering to whom he should put his last question.

  ‘May I know how long ago this happened?’

  The investigator thought for a while.

  ‘Four days ago,’ he said. ‘Today is day five.’

  3

  FOUR DAYS AGO. Today is day five, he repeated to himself as he walked along the edge of the Park of Youth. He was unable to tell how many days had passed since his last meeting with Migena, on the evening of their quarrel.

  Sometimes he counted four, making today day five, but sometimes the result was totally different.

  He found himself on the main boulevard opposite the Dajti Hotel. Drinking coffee there among foreigners seemed even more unwise than ever. Don’t pretend life’s still the same, he told himself. It was Llukan Herri who had invented what their circle of close friends called ‘the Dajti test’. When you’re not sure you feel totally safe in your own skin, pass in front of the Dajti Hotel. If your feet hesitate even for an instant before entering, forget it. Admit that you’re no longer safe, to put it mildly.

  The National Gallery next door to the hotel was closed. The Writers’ Club on the other side of the street offered a test of a different kind. By a strange coincidence, everybody who was marked for prison visited the bar more frequently before fate struck.

  It was eleven o’clock and he was standing by the entrance to the theatre. The old posters had been torn down and not replaced. Tirana had never looked so forlorn.

  It seemed incredible to him that three months ago he had signed that book in the midst of the cheerful first-night hubbub.

  Migena had phoned him a week later. ‘Hello. I’m an art student. I’m sorry to bother you, but it was me who asked you fo
r an autograph for her friend. Perhaps you remember?’

  He had said that he remembered her very well, and the tone of the girl’s low voice at the end of the phone brightened. Her friend had been delighted with the book. He couldn’t imagine how happy it had made her. She herself too, of course.

  They met two days later, and again her first words were about her friend, but when he said that next time the two girls might come together if they liked, her eyes momentarily froze. Of course her friend would be thrilled, really thrilled, but right now . . . she couldn’t. ‘I understand,’ he had said, although he hadn’t understood anything at all. Was something stopping this girl coming to the capital?

  He felt someone’s presence behind him and a stranger’s voice asked, ‘No performances this week?’ ‘See for yourself,’ he replied, without turning his head.

  Despite his resistance, his feet then turned him back towards the Writers’ Club. Let happen what may, he thought.

  At first he assumed the main room of the club was empty, but as he sat down he noticed the familiar face of a writer in the far corner. He wanted to say hello, but the writer did not see him, or pretended not to. If you don’t want to speak, don’t bother, he thought, and sat down, turning his back to the writer. People had a point when they said of this man that he directed most of his anger at the wrong targets. Especially since he had published that ill-fated book, The Winter of Bitter Winds.

  Rudian tried not to think about him. He would have liked merely to tell the man that he had no reason to look so gloomy, especially in his presence. Two or three times, Rudian had almost got into trouble for things this writer had said, such as the business about cells in the front of the brain being damaged or dead.

  It was enough to drive you crazy. Llukan Herri had asked him one day: ‘Was it you talking about the cells in the front of the brain, the ones that should invent new things in art?’ When Rudian shook his head, Llukan had gone on to say that it must have been that other writer, who goes on about rain and the wind, with whom they’d been confusing him recently.

  He groaned to himself, finally turning his mind back to the girl.

  Migena’s icy expression became even more inexplicable on reflection, as happened to most things in the Writers’ Club. How could he have taken her look so lightly? All his concentration and haste had been focused less on what she said than on the beautiful shape of her lips and his impatience to kiss them. But that coldness had reappeared after his kisses, and even after her kisses, which were the sweetest of all. He had wanted to ask her what was troubling her, but gently, without creating alarm, as one might ask a naive lover worried about a broken promise.

  Looking back, he was astonished not at her but at his own naivety. Particularly when, a few days after, the iciness in her eyes could be felt in her breath and seen in her shoulders. In the moments before she undressed, it had been so obvious that he had wondered if she might be a virgin.

  The girl had answered vaguely, neither yes nor no, with conditional verbs: even if I were, it wouldn’t be a problem. But her transfixed expression remained the same. After making love, instead of calming down, she grew worse. She lay for a while with her face deep in the pillow and he would have thought she was asleep but for her shoulders, which trembled with increasingly strong emotion. He tried to draw her to him, at least to see her face, but the girl gripped the pillow with her naked arms.

  He asked her again what was worrying her, but less cautiously than before. It wasn’t about being a virgin, that was now clear. So what was it? Had she promised to be faithful to some boy, or was it some other nonsense? Well?

  A faint rustle of her hair indicated no, and she said haltingly that it wasn’t a question of fidelity or any other nonsense, but something else.

  I see, so she’s starting to play games, he thought.

  ‘What is it then?’ he asked coldly.

  Her reply was unexpected. It was better if he didn’t know.

  ‘I see,’ Rudian said, this time aloud.

  Immediately his thoughts turned to the anxiety of the last few days over the new postponement of his play. He wanted to say to her: Do you remember that premiere where we met, with all the excitement in the foyer? And now this is the second time a play of mine has been postponed at the last moment. And you go on complaining about who knows what silliness.

  Propped up on his elbow, he studied her bare shoulders with a certain indifferent ease that he believed came from being known to the public. He hadn’t felt suspicious, especially because their conversation about that other unknown girl had been in passing, in a bantering tone, and with no sense of drama.

  ‘When are you going to introduce me to that friend of yours?’ ‘I don’t know. Do you really want to meet her?’ ‘Why not? You haven’t mentioned her in a while.’ ‘Perhaps because I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t, except that . . .’ ‘Except what?’ ‘Except that . . . she’s prettier than me.’ ‘Aha . . .’

  The coffee tasted bitter. Migena’s anxiety did not diminish, and became even more mysterious.

  ‘Is this coffee different from usual?’ he asked the waiter.

  The waiter shrugged his shoulders.

  He had said to her quite coolly that if their meetings were going to end in floods of tears it would be better not to see each other anymore. Her eyes sank even deeper into misery. Just don’t ever say that again, she had whispered. Never, do you hear me? Never.

  ‘It’s the same coffee,’ the waiter said, taking the cup. ‘Vietnamese.’

  Rudian was sure that Migena’s unhappiness was about something unrelated to him, which he would never discover, just as he would never see this other wretched girl.

  ‘Shall I bring you another coffee?’ the waiter asked. ‘Not heated for so long. It’ll taste different.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Rudian replied. ‘I have to go.’

  As he stood up, the writer watched Rudian from his seat in the corner, as if about to greet him. Rudian pretended to take no notice.

  Still there was no poster by the theatre entrance. Better not to know. This phrase presented itself in his mind, unconnected to anything specific. Not to know what? The things they would say or had already said at the Artistic Board, and which he hadn’t yet heard? Of course, he thought, but then he recalled that it was someone else who had first uttered these words to him.

  What was he better off not knowing about? he wondered. He was now angrier at himself than at the girl. He had heard these words and accepted them meekly. He should have responded in totally the opposite way. The bed where they made love was a more suitable place for a confession than any other.

  What the hell was it that he shouldn’t know? That they were asking her about him at the Investigator’s Office? About the next play he intended to write? About his battles with his conscience over betraying her? All that?

  Above his head, the city-centre clock struck noon. However hard you try to elude me, I will track you down, he said to himself.

  Wherever you hide, he added.

  Fleeing the tones of the bell, he turned back towards the entrance to the Dajti Hotel, where he hesitated only briefly. He climbed the steps and passed disdainfully through the silent lobby, watched by the receptionists. Beyond the door to the bar, the counter loomed up in front of him.

  He sat down and noticed that the bar was half empty.

  You and your enigmas, he thought drowsily. And suddenly, waking up, he made a discovery. The name ‘Migena’ and the word ‘enigma’ fluttered through his mind, attempting to come together. They were anagrams. Migena, enigma. To make sure, he wrote the words on the menu, next to the words ‘espresso coffee’. Yes, they really were anagrams. Yes: shuffle the letters of ‘Migena’ and you got ‘enigma’.

  4

  SEVEN DAYS. THIS is day eight, he thought, sipping coffee a few days later at the same table in the Dajti. To his right, the director of the theatre, who was sitting with the members of the Cuban cultural delegation recently arrived in
Tirana, craned his neck as if to make sure that the man quietly drinking coffee three tables away really was Rudian Stefa, the playwright with one premiere temporarily postponed and another play waiting approval.

  If you want to turn half of the state institutions in Albania upside down, his friend Llukan Herri used to say, drink your coffee in the Dajti at the very time you don’t feel safe. According to Llukan, each state agency would think that another one knew why the dramatist R.S. had drunk coffee in the Dajti for several days in a row without batting an eyelid. For instance, the director of the theatre, instead of concentrating on the recent instructions delivered by Fidel Castro in a six-hour speech to the actors of Havana, would rack his brains for an explanation for Rudian Stefa’s boldness, and might suspect that the criticisms of Stefa’s most recent play that the director intended to put before the Artistic Board were too harsh.

  Rudian stifled a sigh of such force that it seemed to kick against his ribs, unleashing an unpleasant wave of dizziness.

  Why should I care about all this? he thought. Let them think what they want, I have no business with them. Nor did he need the mean-spirited pleasure that he had enjoyed five minutes ago, speculating about the qualms of the theatre director as he listened to the pearls from Castro’s speech. Let them do what they want, so long as they don’t touch my play . . . and . . . also . . . don’t keep Migena from me.

  The realisation that they could keep Migena from him flashed through his mind. But it was followed immediately by the thought that nobody was keeping her away. She had left him of her own accord.

  A great weariness, like some mist from far away, seemed to have settled between them. It was a long time since he had fallen in love, although he wondered if this were not love but something else that had donned love’s familiar mask to deceive him.

  She was avoiding him and soon she would become almost a stranger to him, the perfect stranger who would never be forgotten. He strove to recall her palpable form but already this was not easy. He could not even remember her body below the waist. Had she ever let him see it? At first he had interpreted this as her provincial shyness, but later he suspected something else.