Spring Flowers, Spring Frost Read online

  He was tempted to smile at the thought that it was barely a few years since his graduation from the School of Fine Arts and his appointment to this northern town, where, in the eyes of all the local girls, he had been the very embodiment of modernity Because in some incomprehensible way the tables had suddenly been turned. Nowadays, between two embraces, his girlfriend would tell him, You know, there’s a new fashion in this or that. He didn’t feel mortally offended, no, he had almost come to savor the process of being aged, even though he was not yet thirty. To begin with, without really realizing what he was doing, he’d encouraged her to take on this new role as his guide; eventually, he grasped that what he really wanted was for her to become his Beatrice, to lead him through purgatory.

  He had become so inured to this feeling that he reckoned that when the day came, she would say to him. Come on, it’s time go out to the café, and he would trust her command, blindly, almost superstitiously, and would follow her without the slightest hesitation.

  Without moving his head, he rolled his eyes upward, as he sometimes did, to look at her portrait. From this obtuse angle, she looked quite different, especially the top of her face. The slant of her eyes, which now seemed to suggest some elegant deception, matched and complemented the change he had noticed under her arms. But like everything else late that Sunday afternoon, that suspicion was devoid of pain.

  He thought of the table waiting for him in that dingy little restaurant, and then of his walk home through the town, when, despite all the excitement aroused by the holdup of the bank, lights would go out in the apartments and houses, one after the other, at exactly the same time as on any other Sunday.

  As people went back to work and offices reopened, Mondays would bring their own corrections to Sunday’s gossip about every little weekend scandal and event. In the old days, the phenomenon was easily accounted for. In fear of the State, people altered their opinions to fit what they heard from official sources. By the same token, their own explanations were often quite divergent. A suicide for thwarted love? It was reckoned that something deeper was involved. Or conversely, that such and such a quarrel had no political motive at all, but was just a spat between sisters-in-law.

  In the early days of the new era, people no longer gave a penny for official opinion, as they became free, from one day to the next, to adopt the opposite point of view. But to their great surprise, no significant change occurred. As in the past, once they got home from work, they would hear about events in such a mangled way that the stories were often completely distorted. Gradually, it became clear that, as for many other things, such distortions of the truth had nothing to do with politics. Apparently, for reasons still not understood, rumor, vivified over the weekend by the smells of good food and Grandmas burps, had a hard time when it first encountered the atmosphere of the office, the clacking of typewriters, the secretaries’ lipstick, and, last but not least, the stern gaze of the boss.

  Even if you could never say that the office had won out completely (as soon as people got home, they had to negotiate the mule-like persistence of grandmas, often reinforced by the children just back from school), even if, in this constant ebb and flow of home and office, office and home, rumor was never quite exempt from further shaping before it settled down into its definitive form, the first major impact on it, what might be called “the Monday spin,” was always the principal determining factor.

  That was all going through Mark’s head as he walked toward the City Arts Center, where he worked. The music section head’s office door, next to his own, was ajar, and voices could be heard from within. He opened it wider, and even before he was actually inside, the words “safe” and “gangsters” reached his ears.

  “Morning,” he said. “Have the robbers been caught?”

  “No, not yet,” the head of music answered. “The director was just telling us about a bank holdup that took place in Madrid while he was there.”

  “Oh, sorry to interrupt.”

  “No, not at all, you’re not interrupting us, Mark,” the director said.

  He was still wearing a white shirt with a “Boss” logo on the front, and his sky blue tie made his smile even more radiant.

  He’s not finished boring the whole place with tales of his trip to Spain, Mark said to himself.

  Even so, he didn’t dislike the man. Quite the opposite, in fact. There was something touching about the way his face expressed sheer joy at the memory of the jaunt that had, apparently, turned his life upside down. The sunny feelings that he had experienced over there suited him to a tee, just like his saying “No problem!” It was the most common expression these days in the whole ex-Communist empire, and it seemed to have been coined especially for him.

  The director looked at his watch.

  “Okay, you guys, let’s go into my office for a moment to get this concert straight.”

  This was surely one of the most exhilarating moments of the day for the director: moving down the corridor with his posse of underlings, as straight-backed as any rising executive, casting words of greeting and cheer to left and right.

  On this occasion things took their habitual course, except that the director refrained from saying “Okay.” His office was littered with souvenirs from Spain, but Mark was convinced — he would have sworn to it — that not a soul felt any resentment or even the slightest condescension toward the director. Professionally inclined toward harmony, Mark had long thought that there was a perfect match between the director’s harmless vanity and pet expressions, on the one hand, and the elegance of his wife, who dressed as carefully as he did, and who had opened the first ladies’ hairdressing salon in B——, and the way the couple complemented each other so well had quite extinguished any animosity he might have felt toward his boss.

  Sometimes Mark seemed to read in the director’s eyes a silent question: So why don’t you share my enthusiasm? A. new era has begun, what’s stopping you from enjoying it?

  So what is stopping us? Mark wondered when he got back to his own office. Obviously he didn’t know, or rather, he didn’t want to know.

  He puttered around for a while between his desk and his window, picked up the telephone to make sure the line was connected, then went out.

  “If anyone wants to get hold of me, tell them I’ve gone back to the studio,” he told his secretary.

  Once he got outside, he did not follow the avenue of lindens that led to his studio, but instead turned left. All the shops were open. He stopped in front of a low shack. There was a sign outside: “Kol Koleci — Keys and Locks.”

  “I thought I’d be seeing you,” said the craftsman.

  “Oh, did you? And why so?”

  The shopkeeper gave a vulgar laugh.

  “How, why? As soon as people have got two pennies to rub together, they beat a path to my door. And you …”

  “Really, so why me? You know I don’t have any money.”

  “Yes, I know you haven’t got a dollar to your name. But you’re a painter. And there’s no one who knows better than you how much your Mona Lisas are worth. That’s what you call valuable paintings, isn’t it?”

  “Ho, ho!” Mark burst out laughing. “You think I could be burgled?”

  “In the old days, no. But nowadays, yes,” the locksmith replied. “In the old days, they didn’t even bother to rob banks!”

  “By the way, have you heard anything more about that? Have they nabbed the robbers?”

  “Not yet,” the locksmith replied. “Not yet,” he repeated a moment later. “There’s a heap of unanswered questions. How did they manage to smash the outer gate without the caretaker hearing? How did they manage to tie him up? Not to mention how they managed to penetrate the safe, and the essential question: Where is their hideout? But let’s come back to what brings you here. I guess it’s for your studio?”

  Mark nodded. He tried to explain what was wrong with his door, but the locksmith interrupted him: “I’d better go see for myself.”

  He looked fo
r a pencil, scrawled “Back in half an hour” on a piece of paper, and pinned it to his door. Then he followed Mark on his way.

  During the walk, the locksmith kept coming back to his suspicions about the bank heist. Where did these crooks in balaclavas come from? Up in these mountains, no one had ever worn masks.

  Mark was tempted to reply that maybe the robbers came from somewhere far away, but his eyes had wandered to the window of a new shop, and he stopped to look.

  “Well, well,” he said as he almost read aloud the words on the shopfront: “SILVANA SALON DE COIFFURE. Shampoo — Coloring — Permanent Wave. It’s the wife of the director of the Arts Center.”

  “Really?” the locksmith said. “You didn’t know she had opened her shop?”

  “I’d been told. Of course, I had heard, but…”

  The locksmith nodded his head and smiled.

  “He comes to collect his wife here almost every evening after work. When you see him, all dressed up and looking so pleased with himself, it’s hard to remember he’s a local lad, a mountain boy. He looks like he comes straight from the capital. Oh, you’re frowning, I know what you’re going to answer, that there are plenty of ragamuffins in Tirana as well. I know that as well as you, but for us, all the same, the capital means something! And anyway, our mountain areas are going to be modernized as well, aren’t they? They’ll also get civilized, like people say these days, and that’s a fact!”

  “Sure,” Mark replied. “No doubt about it, Kol.”

  They were now quite close to the studio, and slowed their pace.

  As they went up the stairs, Mark felt that the locksmith’s expression had changed. His eyes had become alternately intense and haughty. They lit up as soon as he saw a door, and went dull whenever they were directed toward anything else. The eye of a true craftsman, Mark thought. He didn’t even bother to turn the nude portrait of his girlfriend to the wall, as he usually did when he had visitors in the studio.

  The locksmith hurried about the studio, huffing and puffing, from one corner to another, as if he were trying to find cover from a potential threat.

  Mark could not take his eyes off him. He sought but could not find on the locksmith’s face some reading of the extent of the danger, for he was sure that in the craftsman’s mind the danger was proportionate to the value of the paintings. As he tracked the man’s stops and starts, and the sporadic glints in his eye, Mark felt as though he were awaiting a sentence. Did the locksmith believe, or did he not, that the studio was at risk of being burgled?

  Talking more to himself than to his client, in one spot the locksmith mumbled, “This lock’ll have to be changed,” and at another, “Well, these door panels need strengthening, for sure,” “You’ll need a vertical bolt right here,” “Both sides of the jamb need metal catches….”

  The inspection went on. At one point, Mark tried to interrupt with additional information, but what he got by way of response was silent fury. The locksmith’s eyes, divided by a deep vertical furrow right down his forehead, suddenly turned threatening.

  “Look, do you want to be safe … or be burgled?”

  Mark blushed to the nape of his neck, something that did not happen to him often.

  “Sorcerer!” he muttered to himself. How had the man managed to see into the depths of his soul?

  He took comfort in the thought that the locksmith’s state of overexcitement meant that the man would have forgotten the exchange entirely in a few days’ time.

  The scene was brought to an end, so it seemed, by a deep sigh from the craftsman. He suddenly went limp; in an instant, his eyes lost their sparkle and also the look of contempt with which they had been filled. He cast about for something to sit on.

  “Would you like a drink?” asked Mark.

  The locksmith had turned back into an ordinary human, and his breathing had resumed a normal rhythm.

  “Theft can explain how the whole world goes round,” he said as he lit a cigarette. “You can tell a man by his looks, people say. I have a very different opinion.”

  He was talking once again in his natural voice, with his customary jocular intonation. It wasn’t the way someone behaved, or spoke, or wrote or drew, according to him, that best defined what sort of a person he or she was — especially as far as amorous relations were concerned — but above all the way he or she forced a lock. It was a surer mark of a rapist than any sample of blood or sperm. And the same thing went for sodomists.

  Mark began to laugh out loud. His eye caught the canvas of the nude, but now it was too late to turn it to the wall. Anyway, as the girl’s face was still unfinished, she remained quite unidentifiable.

  “That’s how burglars and burgled alike give themselves away,” the locksmith continued. “Thieves, as I said, can be identified by the way they break locks, and their victims can be recognized by their choice of locks. You could sum up a whole epoch by its locks and bolts — or rather, by its styles of breaking and entering.”

  He got off his chair and wandered around the studio. Mark thought he was now looking at the paintings with another kind of eye.

  “This one, I don’t know, it looks different from the others. Is it by you?”

  Mark smiled.

  “It’s a copy of a painting by a great Spanish master, a painter called El Greco. I did it as a learning exercise, at college.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  On his return from Spain, the director had told him about Philip If’s retreat to the Escorial, and ever since then, Mark could not look at his old exercise without imagining the sick man’s gloomy chamber, where few people stayed very long, apart from his sisters, because of the stink.

  “There used to be quite extraordinary heists,” the locksmith said. “My father — may his soul rest in peace — taught me my trade, and told me a whole mess of good stories.” He chuckled under his breath, as if hesitating to say out loud what had just come into his mind. “Did you ever imagine anyone could steal a coffin?”

  “No, I’ve heard stories about corpses being stolen, but never about a stolen coffin.”

  “Well, then. One of our neighbors got his wife’s coffin pinched! In those days, I suppose you remember, it was the custom to have coffins delivered well ahead of the funeral, and to stand them up, empty, like they were on show, by the front door of the bereaved. Well, then. It got pinched. The poor old husband seemed to have lost his wits. Then his despair suddenly turned into joy. He reckoned it was a good omen. He got so taken up with the idea that he convinced himself his wife wasn’t dead, and he started shaking her like she was an apple tree, to make her come to!”

  “Unbelievable!” the painter exclaimed politely.

  “At one time there were bandits aplenty on the Shkodër road,” the locksmith said after a pause. “As well as up the Te-pelen Gorge, and farther on, all the way to Janina.”

  He talked about thieving as others would talk of a drought, of an especially heavy snowfall, or of an unusually bountiful harvest.

  “Under the dictatorship, robberies, like everything else, shrank to nothing. But it’s getting late.”

  He stood up, and then rattled off in two minutes the list of all the equipment he needed and the time it would take to complete the job, not forgetting, of course, his estimate of the charge.

  Mark walked him back to the shop and then returned to the studio to look at the items that the locksmith said needed strengthening. Then he walked up and down, as he always did when he felt preoccupied. As he came up to the Greco copy, he thought that he too would like to be looked after by his sisters. As for his girlfriend, he would certainly like her by his bedside, but … only if he were injured!

  He wondered how such an idea had lodged itself in his head. He stared for a moment at the corner of the bay window. He didn’t know why, but he vaguely imagined that that was where the bullet meant for him would come from.

  Maybe he ought to take that picture down? At least until his boss had got tired of talking about his trip to Spain.

/>   He couldn’t get his mind off what the locksmith had just told him about robberies. It was as if in the locksmith’s mind that was the principal approach to understanding world history. Just as some people had tried to explain history exclusively in terms of the role of women.

  Banditry flourished from the very start of the monarchy, he thought in a daze, going over the locksmith’s account. All the same his eye kept going back to that spot on the windowpane through which, he imagined, a bullet could get him. The fantasy grew so powerful that he ended up imagining the lead slug fluttering around the studio like a trapped bird.

  The Voskopoja painters, he dreamed, would perhaps be the first to paint his portrait…. Painting a wound is easier than almost anything else. But what a lot of nonsense! he thought. He’d better have a little rest. Talking to that locksmith had left him completely drained, so it seemed. All that great sea of thieving … So much murderous criminality, he wanted to say.

  Two or three times he wondered why he had found the subject so affecting. But his brain was drawn toward evil, so to speak, and was rushing headlong in the wrong direction. He wasn’t often given to such mental ramblings; maybe he was having a bout of fever. He was aware that if that was so, the best thing was to offer no resistance…. He should just let himself go until he was exhausted, let himself sink to the bottom of the sea of dreams….

  Nonetheless he felt a shiver, just as he had done a few days previously. His recently rediscovered fascination with police work was an ill wind…. All this cop stuff… He recalled once again that awful afternoon with his father, when they had quarreled over his choice of career. That look in his father’s eye. That lonely look in a police officer’s face… Mark, said his instructor, what is this peculiar drawing? It’s nothing, sir, nothing at all, I don’t know what came over me….

  Mark’s father had given way in the end, but the afternoon of their quarrel had left deep scars. Or rather, it had implanted a kind of hidden virus that flared up in a bout of fever every now and again. After the Fourth Artists’ Plenum, just before the arrest of Gentian, he repented the choice he had made. The other choice, working for the police, however humiliating it might have been, was the only other path he had ever considered following. And for that reason it was the only career he ever thought of as his unrealized potential.