Spring Flowers, Spring Frost Read online

  She continued to wait. Two or three times, she glanced at the snake, and it looked back at her. Snake’s eyes, as the saying goes: even the candlelight could not brighten them. Do I please you? she wondered sadly and half ironically, feeling rancor toward the snake, toward her parents, and toward the offense that she was supposed to redeem.

  In her dizzy state she imagined more than once that she had dropped off to sleep. As for the snake, he remained where he was, and seemed to be sleeping as well.

  In the gap between two bouts of dozing, she thought she heard something rustle. She shivered and opened her eyes. The snake was no longer where it had been. The time had come! Holy Mother of God! Make my nightmare less hard to bear! she prayed.

  She saw the snake rising ever upward at the end of the bed, swaying this way and that. Holy Virgin! she burst out in prayer once again, but at the same instant, she heard these words: “Be not afraid, I am a man.”

  The speckled snakeskin inflated as if by the force of an internal hurricane, and all of a sudden fell to the ground like a cloak, revealing what was indeed a man.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said again. “I am your husband.”

  “Have pity on me,” she groaned.

  “It’s you, my wife, who should have pity on me.”

  He came slowly toward her, put one knee on the bed, and said soothing words to her. He was a handsome young man, with fair hair cut in the fashion of the times.

  “I have been sentenced to spending three-quarters of my life in the form of a snake” he explained. “I can live as a man for only one-quarter of the time.”

  The bride was bursting with questions. When was this pact made? Who had decided it? Why did you not ask for more?

  Even before she had managed to put these questions into words, the man answered her:

  “Nobody can know when or with whom he makes a pact. It’s probably with himself.”

  “Do you also have an offense to atone for?”

  “I have to presume I do.”

  She was tempted to tell him that he was even more handsome that any dream-husband she had ever imagined.

  “I have only a little time left, dear soul,” he said. “My hours are numbered. I have to go back to my other shape before dawn.”

  He drew closer to her, stroked her hair softly; then, since she wanted to smell the nape of his neck to be sure he had the smell of a human being, he let her have her way. He began to caress her breasts, kissed her on the lips, ran his mouth over her belly, telling her all the while that he had been dazzled by her beauty the very first time he had caught sight of her.

  She would have liked to ask him if he thought as a human even when he was in the form of a snake, but everything suggested that it was indeed so.

  He became bolder with his caresses, kissed her belly again, and then, lower down, her other lips. Now he added to his tender words stronger ones, whispering in her ear the kind of vulgarities that the village boys use on their way home from Sunday church. It was those words that won her and made her give in to him entirely.

  He lay dozing at her side, in a state of exhaustion, while she stroked his blond hair. Then she too yielded to fitful sleep, but each time she came to, she glanced sideways at the snakeskin lying on the floor. What is this happiness that I feel? she wondered, fearfully.

  As dawn approached, he woke up in a start. He sniffed the air and smelled sunrise coming. He declared that the time had come.

  “Do not be sad. Tomorrow, at the same hour, you will have me here once again.”

  He threw his snakeskin over his shoulder, and in a trice he turned back into a serpent and curled himself up into a coil at the end of the bed.

  She began to cry softly. But she felt so weary that she dropped off at last into a deep, deep sleep.

  When she woke up, the snake was where she had last seen it. She was sure she had been dreaming. It was only when she felt the sperm in her groin and saw the bloodstains on the bed linen that she accepted that what had been, had been.

  Never in her life had she looked forward to anything with as much impatience and anxiety as she felt while waiting for the next day to turn into evening and the evening to night. Now and again, as her eyes met those of the snake, her heart sank. Then she recalled the last words she had said to him together with his reply:

  “You really will come, you won’t let me down?”

  “I shall come, I promise. Wait for me”

  The word of a snake! she thought, then repented having had such a thought.

  He did indeed reappear in his human shape, around midnight. And so, day after day, night after night, all through the autumn, the onset of winter, and through to the darkest days of the bad season, she lived such an undreamed-of, double life. A life in which time itself was cleft in two — the rarest of all wonders. She was henceforth obliged to live in two different kinds of time — human time and reptilian time. Because of this, every point of view was distorted, like the view in a broken mirror. People pitied her, thought she was at her wits’ end, whereas she had never been so happy in her life. She had heard it said that it was very hard to mask one’s own suffering, but she found that hiding her happiness was no less burdensome. She tried as hard as she could, but she did not succeed.

  People assumed she had gone mad. Anyway, it seemed almost reasonable for a woman to lose her wits after a shock like that. That did not bother her. What pained her most of all was that she could not walk out on her husband’s arm, as all young brides did, during his human time. It was forbidden: the pact prevented him from doing it. He was only allowed out with her during his snake time.

  That was how the pact had been drawn up. Snake time ruled for three-quarters of his existence. Human time was restricted to the remainder, and moreover was not allowed to be shown. But that was only natural, as it was a matter of redeeming a human offense in this strange way.

  She knew all that, of course, but her knowledge did not stop her dreaming of the opposite: going out with him, arm in arm, to the village square, walking with him to church for Sunday service. And her desire for these things was sometimes so overpowering that she found herself on the point of going out with the snake, forgetting entirely that people were likely to take fright when they saw them and flee.

  One day she asked him if he would like to go out with her in his snake shape, for a walk along some deserted path, but he shrugged his shoulders. As a human he knew nothing of the part of the day when he was a snake. In addition he had no right to know anything about it, just as his other self could not intervene in his life as a man. He and I, he told her, are separate in every sense.

  These thoughts troubled her constantly, but on that fateful night of January 17, her irritation at having to keep a secret, her weariness at leading a double life, and her desire to have her young husband for herself and for all of the time condensed in her mind like steam turning into water.

  It is past midnight. As usual, the couple have made love, and he is dozing with his head on her shoulder. In the light of the glowing embers in the fireplace, she is looking at his hair and at the fine contour of his cheek. Then her eyes wander toward the thin skin left lying on the floor, its scales seeming to shine with a special light. It seems to her that the snakeskin is laughing at her, with malice.

  She keeps staring at the outer coil. That is the real obstacle, she thinks. That is where separation, cleavage, and the forbidden frontier all lie. It is as thin as the coat of blacking that turns glass into a mirror, it is just as fragile and just as cruel.

  And what if it was all a misunderstanding? What if the young man had been caught in a pact without reason?

  She must free him from his trap, from the snare that consumes him a little more every day. If she can only manage to smash the bewitching mirror, then the young man won’t be able to get away, whether he wants to or not. He’ll stay on this side, and be hers entirely.

  You brought me all this woe, and now you have the cheek to laugh at me? she says to the snakeski
n. You’ve got another think coming!

  So as not to wake her sleeping lover, she gets out of bed slowly and carefully, and for the first time in her life feels the touch of the snakeskin. It seems to her unbelievably light, lighter even than silk; there’s good reason, she thinks, to put snakeskin alongside gauze.

  Suddenly her eyes narrow in anger. You have no right! she screams inwardly. “You” means the whole world — her parents, the pact, those who drew up the pact, all the other mysterious forces, and fate itself.

  With a swift movement of her arm, she throws the snakeskin into the hearth. She has never seen anything devoured so hungrily by fire. The merest instant suffices. The tiniest fragment of time.

  She sneaks back to bed as quietly and discreetly as possible. He is still asleep. She feels relieved and burdened at the same time, as if she had just lifted a rock.

  And so she waits for daybreak. Dawn comes. The young man stretches his limbs and sniffs the morning air. She is about to say, Sleep on a little, now that you belong to the other time. But she cannot.

  He says what he usually does: “Farewell, until tomorrow. Do not be downcast, dear soul.”

  He gets out of bed and starts looking this way and that.

  “Where is my suit?”

  The bride does not answer.

  “Have you hidden it? Please don’t play games!”

  He searches for it everywhere, anxiously looking into every nook and cranny, under the blankets, everywhere.

  “I am in a hurry. Give me back my snake suit.”

  “I cannot,” she replies.

  He keeps on searching like a man possessed. “Mercy!” he mumbles now and again.

  She pretends to be angry. “Don’t you want to stay with me? Are you in such a hurry to go?” But in fact, it is not anger but fear that she feels.

  “Stay!” she cries out, but her voice sticks in her throat. “Calm down! Stay on this side….”

  “I cannot. I no longer have a shape…. I have no right….”

  His voice gets weaker. He strains for breath between each word.

  “I beg you, give me back my suit.”

  “I cannot, I have burned it.”

  “What did you do?” he yells, but his yell now sounds as though it comes from far away. “You have killed me, by your own hand!”

  “I did it for you. And for both of us.”

  “You have destroyed me….”

  It is his last gasp. Like breath that has misted on a mirror, the young man fades away before his bride’s eyes, and then vanishes entirely, and forever.

  With a kind of passionate intensity that had recently become almost normal for him, Mark Gurabardhi ran through the entire range of suppositions that must have surfaced after that night of January 17. It was almost as if he had himself taken part in the interrogation that the bride, her parents, and her neighbors were put through.

  First hypothesis: the snake had been put to death. Had the young woman thrown the snake — not just the skin, but the reptile itself — into the fire? Unaided? Or with the help of her parents? Isn’t that how they had sought to expunge the stain that had been visited on them in full public knowledge, even if it involved taking a risk? (Isn’t it true that many people, in like manner, overcome by despair, rip the signs of humiliation from their clothes or from their doors?)

  Second issue: the girl’s seeming delight on the morning after her wedding night. It could be accounted for if she had been given an assurance (by a parent or clansman) that the abomination would not last long.

  Next: the loss of her virginity. There were so many ways to lose it in the overcrowded intimacy of large families, where brothers, sisters, and cousins of both sexes all lived under the same roof.

  The only element that was incompatible with this version of the story lay in the visible and profound decline of the bride after the disappearance of the snake. It was a real and apparently unremitting affliction. And this awkward fact obliged everybody to try to develop an alternative hypothesis.

  Was it a dream? Had the girl had a hallucination? That could not be ruled out. Everybody had seen the snake, whereas nobody had seen the young man. It was thus perfectly possible that, putting aside any attempt to escape the public humiliation, the whole development of the story — the young man’s good looks, his irrepressible passion, etc. — had been the mere imaginings of a young bride under unbearable stress.

  Mark’s hands reached for a pack of cigarettes in one pocket as quickly as he would have reached for his revolver if he had had to defend himself against a mugger.

  And what if neither explanation was right? A drama usually exists less in reality than in the fertile mind of its inventor. In those days, disappointment on a wedding night was just about the commonest, most everyday tragedy you could imagine: the partner might have been horribly ugly, or infirm, or impotent…. It was an ancient tragedy, one that went back to the times when people in the millions accepted marriage without ever having set eyes upon their spouse. That world was being reinvented now, by the Internet.

  Mark smiled inwardly. Then he felt his smile vanish. How can I explain the fear I feel? he wondered.

  He was afraid, and he was cold. He tried to banish all these old questions from his mind, but nothing could have been more difficult….

  To take things one step further, if you made an effort to think from inside the legend, it told of an encounter between man and beast at a special moment when they were facing each other in a place where they should not have been together. Both had overstepped the boundary and ended up merged into a single body, in a temporal order that belonged to neither one nor the other. Yes, that’s how they managed to kill each other so brutally.

  So that’s how things really happened, Mark surmised, and again he felt pierced by the cold. All the time I’ve wasted these last months constructing crazy hypotheses about snakes! …

  He suddenly thought back, with what he considered to be amazing clarity, to that summer’s afternoon when, in their drab Tirana apartment, his stern-faced father had tried to persuade him to enroll at the Police Academy instead of the School of Fine Arts.

  His father stared at him hard with his one good eye, projecting a flood of grumpy bitterness. He had long been aware that his father’s one eye (the other had been lost in a shoot-out with bandits) could express joy and sorrow in alternation. You’re refusing to do the only thing I’ve ever asked of you! was what the reproachful one-eyed gaze seemed to be saying. You couldn’t tell whether his father’s main reason was his belief in law and order or his desire to avenge the loss of his eye.

  “You’ll wear a police uniform, just like me, just like your grandfather, who was murdered by brigands under the monarchy.”

  “No, Father. I won’t be wearing that uniform….” Mark’s mind resumed its drift: uniform … suit… snakeskin…. Whereupon he cried out loud: “I must stop this!”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE ONLY SUBJECT OF CONVERSATION all over town that Sunday afternoon was the holdup at the bank. A rumor spread that the outlaws had been captured at Mountain Springs, but it turned out to be unfounded. The caretaker, though, who had been found with his hands and wrists tied up, provided some information about the robbers: there were three of them, they’d worn masks, and they were armed. It still wasn’t known by what means they had managed to force the safe. Nor how much they had gotten away with.

  Mark Gurabardhi looked for Zef high and low, to get more of the story out of him, but the man was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t at home or in the pool hall. As Mark watched the lights go out in the windows one by one, he realized with some surprise that he was fascinated by the incident, as was the whole town, but maybe even more than anyone else. As a rule, he was usually much less interested than other people in local events like football matches or political meetings. He didn’t really know whether his relative indifference was to his advantage or not. But if up to now he had been vaguely proud of not being like most ordinary folk, should he not now feel di
minished by being part of the common herd?

  He shook his head as if to rid it of this idiotic worry Whether he was ashamed of it or not, he was a human being like any other, as curious as the next man about what happens on Earth: about how banks can be robbed, about how turtles make love, about how sick kings in the Middle Ages were cleaned after they had relieved themselves. (Ever since the director of the City Arts Center had gotten back from Spain two weeks before and had told him about the sad end of Philip II at the Escorial Palace, Mark could not get that last image out of his mind.)

  As he went back into his apartment, he stopped at the door to look at it carefully, especially the lock, and then closed it carelessly behind him. There was nothing to steal here. Except, perhaps, the portrait of his young mistress, which he had hung on the wall over the head of the bed. He stretched out, folded his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, hoping that this would help to empty his mind completely.

  Sundown, on a Sunday, in the back of beyond … he soon began to dream. Doubly desolate, after making love.

  He would gladly have swapped one of his lovemaking sessions (even the second orgasm, which had been the better) for an hour with his girlfriend in the café, in the evening.

  He hoped that new ways and manners would quickly take hold in his little town of B——. After all, B—— was in Albania, too! Everything’s connected! he often thought. He could not understand how, in other towns, white slavers sending girls to work as prostitutes in Italy were uncovered every day, whereas here in B—— girls didn’t even dare spend an hour in the café with their boyfriends.

  But he had not lost hope, and that was one of the reasons why he had not tried very hard to get transferred to Tirana when the dictatorship had taken its first major battering.