A Girl in Exile Read online

  COMMISSION MEMBER 1: And then? Why did you both set off for the city?

  GHOST: That’s what had been decided. We were told we were on a mission and that we would be briefed later.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 1: Who gave the order for you to leave?

  GHOST: The deputy commissar.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 2: I see . . . Did he give you any final instructions?

  GHOST: As far as I remember, he said something half-jokingly about reconciliation. Something about this mission bringing us closer together.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 2: I see.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 1: Did you talk along the way? Did you become closer, as the deputy commissar suggested, or did you have more serious disagreements?

  GHOST: Neither of those things. We spent most of our journey in silence.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 2: And then?

  GHOST (nodding towards the edge of the marsh): Then we reached this spot. Dusk was falling. You could see the city lights in the distance. I hadn’t seen them for such a long time. I stopped dead, and I felt terrible . . . homesickness. For him, apparently, they had the opposite effect. As I was standing there, he shot me in the back of the neck with his revolver.

  (The commission members talk among themselves and ask the DEFENDANT to go outside. The GHOST also moves back to the edge of the marsh.)

  COMMISSION MEMBER 1 (leafing through the file): Nothing new. This is the third time his file has been reviewed and we’re still at square one.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 2: Of course, whenever this case was reopened before, orders came immediately to close it again. Now we have firm instructions. Because it involves the Yugoslavs, there’s no going back. Stalin’s orders.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 1: I don’t believe it. The murderer still feels strong. He has his supporters and defenders.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 2: You think?

  COMMISSION MEMBER 1: I found in the file the letter he sent to the Central Committee two years ago. He says that the Party expelled him, but he remains as loyal to it as ever.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 2: I know. Because of this letter, a young playwright wrote a hopelessly naive drama called The Party’s Faithful Dog. And who do you think was punished for it? The dog? No way. The playwright. Eighteen years in prison.

  COMMISSION MEMBER 1: That’s what I expected.

  (They summon the DEFENDANT again.)

  COMMISSION MEMBER 1: I’m asking you for the last time . . .

  (The GHOST steps forward once more, this time blue.)

  GHOST: You hope you’ll be let off this time too. It looks like they will sort it out for you. You’re one of us, they will say. We look after each other.

  DEFENDANT: Of course not.

  GHOST: Do what you like, it’s up to you. I just want to know, for the last time, why did you kill me?

  DEFENDANT: I told you already: it’s better if you don’t know.

  GHOST: I don’t want to keep hearing that.

  DEFENDANT: Is that a threat? I’ve seen so many like you. You’re nothing. Nothing will come of nothing. Nothing ever—

  GHOST: Answer my question. I’m asking you as a . . . I’m asking you as a . . . I’m not a man so I can’t say as a man. But I’m asking you as a spirit, the soul of—

  DEFENDANT: It’s no use. I know how you suffer, and the grave won’t hold you, so you keep appearing in different colours, but it’s no use. You won’t achieve anything. Each time, you just make your suffering worse.

  GHOST: Who knows? One day you’ll listen to me.

  DEFENDANT: Ha ha, Get it into your head once and for all: even if one day I’m convicted, and it’s proved that I killed you behind your back, one thing will never be revealed, the precise thing you are asking – the reason why.

  GHOST: It will come out one day.

  DEFENDANT: Never. Men cover up their business, like cats. Books, doctrines, nonsense about how leftism is an infantile disorder, and how you become right wing as you grow old . . . all these things cover up the truth.

  GHOST: That’s not so.

  (A frightening fork of lightning runs through the GHOST’S blue.)

  DEFENDANT: What was that?

  GHOST: You shot me when you saw the lights of the city. Shortly beforehand, you were softening, but when you saw them, you went crazy.

  DEFENDANT (muttering, in agitation): How do you know that?

  GHOST: Death gives us our own venom. (Another, even more frightening fork of lightning.) Those lights revived all your old anger, which I noticed as soon as I arrived at the unit. From your very first words, when you said, Hey, high school boy, let’s see how you turn out.

  DEFENDANT: See, this is an important clue for us.

  (A third fork of lightning.)

  GHOST: No, it runs deeper than that. No girls ever looked sweetly at you. That’s why you and all your sort were against love.

  DEFENDANT: We had taken to the hills to fight, not for love.

  GHOST: You did not like love, because love did not care for you. And you blamed me. Years have passed, and the war ended long ago, but still you have never felt the gentle touch of a woman.

  DEFENDANT: Shut your mouth, corpse!

  GHOST: You can make a new career. They might proclaim you a hero or a dissident. But still no woman will want to bring her neck close to yours. And still you will blame me for it.

  DEFENDANT: Thing of darkness, go back to where you came from!

  GHOST: That is the reason. Neither Marx nor Bakunin nor Plutarch discovered it. Nor Adam Smith, nor Berdyaev. That is the dark heart of the matter, as they say in Albanian. Envy.

  DEFENDANT: Nonsense – empty words, just as you don’t exist. I won. In the end, I shot you in the head.

  The GHOST remains silent. Accepting defeat, the GHOST lowers his head and performs the ritual motions of surrender, re-entering the body on the edge of the marsh.

  He had been looking at the written pages for a long time, almost in surprise, as if they were not his own. He was so tired he could barely distinguish the letters. Only the black lines through the parts to be cut were still clear. A great zigzag ‘Z’ resembled the symbol for electricity on a warning sign: Danger!

  He couldn’t take his eyes off it. This zigzag had less to do with the ghost than with himself. Instead of suggesting continuity, it represented the opposite, a fracture.

  Even before, when he had thought of this scene, he had sensed there would be a snag. He had hoped that, as at other times, the knot would loosen itself, but this had not happened. He faced a barrier of mist, thicker than any curtain.

  He had sat for hours on end in front of his plans for the scene. His notes, phrases, words, sketches, and the symbols that only he understood, became more and more complicated and he could not see past them.

  Here was the precipice. A miracle or a disaster. What wings, what helicopter would carry him to the other side?

  Sometimes, especially while he slept at night and everything became gentler and blurred, it seemed to him that the intangible was within his grasp. It was so close to him, and he only needed a moment to reach out and touch it, but then, at this very point, at the zigzag warning sign, his mind would seize up, as if in plaster. Stalled, and in a panic at the cost an attempt to break through would entail, he found he could only free himself by opening his eyes.

  This had happened to him at the end of the ghost’s scene. The zigzag sign had suggested a way out. Unconsciously, he had scrawled only a ‘Z’, like a road sign before dangerous bends. But unlike the ghost’s two colours, this zigzag had proved a stubborn obstacle. A chill message from other worlds perhaps, alien to all forms of human understanding.

  ‘This is impossible,’ he confessed in a quiet voice; he could not tell to whom: a woman, a priest, or some sort of crowd consciousness.

  The organs of the state were mysterious enough. Yet even beyond them, thick fog surrounded him on all sides. He could not tell from where he had to seek permission, if permission were necessary for every discovery or innovation in art.
r />   His mind automatically returned to the parallel kingdom of sleep. Throughout those past two days he had kept thinking of the story of Orpheus, as if this old myth had collided with the planet and sprinkled everything with its glittering dust. Only one person was able to put to sleep Cerberus, the most famous of dogs, which guarded the gate of hell.

  And it was not hard to imagine the rotor blades of the helicopters that were meant to spread sleep over Tehran, in order to free the hostages held there, not in the time of King Xerxes but in 1980. The helicopters with the US markings on their tails could make no headway through the sandstorm. The pilots gulped. It was impossible to go on. The rescue mission was failing. Of course it was going to fail, muttered the colonels who had opposed it. How could the idea for a twentieth-century military operation be drawn from an ancient myth?

  The metal crates with their cargo of sleep scraped against each other as the helicopters swayed above the Iranian desert. Nobody knew what form this sedative substance took, whether powder, frozen granules resembling hailstones, or simply bullets.

  Legend does not suggest that any other means apart from song enabled Orpheus to pacify the terrifying dog of hell. Still less is known about how this great city of Tehran, with its ayatollahs and mosques, was to be put to sleep. One could imagine that the training period must have been long.

  And could something similar be done over the lowland plains of Albania? Putting to sleep the railways, cotton fields, farms, police stations, the barbed wire, the guards with their dogs? Orpheus too had prepared himself in utmost secrecy. Nothing was known about his training, apart from an adjustment he made to his lyre, increasing the number of strings from seven to nine. At first this was seen as a simple matter, but later it came to be seen as the greatest innovation for centuries.

  Rudian Stefa, as so often when everyday events carried him into higher spheres, imagined the rumour spreading around Olympus. This musician had been extremely famous, so it was likely that the news of his recent invention was recorded in Olympian history. We all love Orpheus, Zeus had supposedly said, but still we can’t permit him things we don’t allow anybody else. Especially as he hasn’t made clear why he needs those two extra strings. Perhaps I have old-fashioned tastes, but I think all our ears are accustomed to the old seven-stringed lyre.

  To his left, Prometheus sat indifferent. He could not be expected to do anything but approve every gesture of rebellion. Surprisingly, it was the usually moderate Apollo who came out in the artist’s defence, and with such passion that he not only supported the innovation but went further and asked that the number of muses be increased from seven to nine, to match.

  The already-fraught debate became increasingly bitter. Artists’ whims, said the anti-Orpheans. They want two more strings today, and who knows what half-baked ideas they’ll come up with next. They should at least explain themselves, the god of war interrupted. It’s perfectly clear when we look at new kinds of weapons. Do we want spears two inches or twelve inches longer, to get a better stab at the enemy? We don’t go in for sophistry.

  There were shouts for and against. Leave the artists to their work. No, if we do that it will be a disaster, like in the last century.

  Zeus, inclined to vacillate on that day, postponed any decision. He was apparently aware of something the others were not.

  As always, Rudian Stefa said to himself. Every tyrant has special knowledge.

  He looked at the calendar on the wall. Three days had passed since his meeting with the investigator in the Café Flora. Today was the fourth. Migena had still not appeared.

  Three days, today is the fourth, he repeated to himself. He was surprised not to feel any impatience.

  9

  SHE PHONED AT last the next day, late in the afternoon. Her voice was the same as before, soft, wreathed in breath. ‘It’s me.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. He wanted to say something different, but the words had swirled round his mind as if carried by a great gust of wind, and had come out in the little frozen lump of this ‘yes’. After a pause the girl said, ‘I’d like to come over. May I?’

  A muffled calm settled on his entire being. Of course, he thought instantly, convinced that the girl would read his thoughts faster than he could utter them. ‘Of course,’ he said aloud. ‘Come now.’ The feeling of reassurance swept over him so quickly that he realised he had been expecting her to say something awful.

  He imagined her arriving in her delicate high heels, and the word ‘darling’, which he had so missed, at last bringing him liberation.

  He waited for her as he used to, pacing the corridor, and as before, he discovered the little sounds that he usually overlooked: water flowing through pipes in the building, doors creaking for no reason, distant rasping noises, human voices.

  The unmistakable click of her steps finally came.

  They embraced without a word. Their arms tightened round each other, and when they couldn’t hold each other any more closely she whispered in his ear, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Her cheeks were wet with tears, but her crying was not the same as before. Still half-embracing, they entered his study, where the last sunlight of the morning fell sometimes on the grip in her hair and sometimes on the names of his books. Fitzgerald. Toponyms. Nobody had moved them and the ill-omened landscape was still there: the Evil Gorge, Zeka’s Field, Brigands’ Gulch. The Three Crosses with the little shrine beyond them. Then the shrieks of the writer’s demented wife, the echo of the rumbling avalanches in the Swiss mountains, and the luxurious sanatoriums.

  She looked sidelong at the shelves as if searching for the scene of the disaster. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again and, without waiting for him to ask why, went on to explain that it had been quite impossible for her to tell him that ‘Linda B.’ was interned. She hadn’t slept for weeks, unable to decide what to do, especially after the inscribed book became so important.

  Her words were mysterious. Perhaps this was all to the good, he thought, and they would understand each other better in this mist. ‘Darling, have I caused you trouble?’ she said between two caresses, and he replied in words so useless he forgot them instantly. He was used to it, meaning he was used to trouble, and he had been thinking of her. He wanted to ask if they had summoned her to the Investigator’s Office, but the question seemed premature. He did not need to tell her about his own summons to the Party Committee, and especially not about his meeting with the investigator in the Café Flora. He did not want to know how the two boys from the Investigator’s Office had tracked her down in order to send her to him. He was sure that the two must have joked with each other over a beer late one afternoon about the pretty girl they were sending to this writer. That while he was having his fun with her in bed he would never dream she was the one who was springing the trap on him.

  The thought of their laughter sparked the anger he needed to control himself. Cautiously, he asked if she had received any kind of summons, perhaps from an investigator.

  She replied quietly that she had been interviewed once, but she didn’t know which office they belonged to. They had come to her home and asked her about the book, in front of her father. That was the first and last time.

  ‘Aha,’ he said, involuntarily. More or less the same as in his case, he thought. The cautious questioning they do with favoured people.

  She stroked his neck and rested her head against his chest.

  ‘I didn’t betray you,’ she said very softly.

  Rudian moved his shoulders, as if to say: How could you possibly betray me? With startling suddenness he pictured Doctor Zhivago, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and Heidegger’s trap, lined up alongside Toponyms. The Brigands’ Well, Mark Marku’s Fields, the Evil Ambush.

  He smiled bitterly. As the investigator had explained to him, he could not be betrayed. Great acts of treason were not betrayed by others, they were invented.

  Almost whispering, she told him that they had asked her about his books too, but only in passing. The one thing they had wanted to know was whethe
r he had been aware before of Linda and her internment, or whether she, Migena, had instigated everything.

  He listened in confusion, because he was thinking of something else. He took a deep breath and thought of looking at her eyes when he asked his next question, but decided against it. Finally he ventured the question cautiously and in a very quiet voice, holding his head to one side so that her eyes were invisible to him.

  Migena clung to him, motionless and without hope.

  Say something, he thought, surprised by a cold, dead anger within him, of the kind one might catch in one’s own reflection in a mirror.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said out loud. ‘I asked you about Linda. Did they interrogate her?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ the girl replied. ‘I think they did.’

  Of course. They handled us two with great care. But what did they do to Linda?

  This was more or less what he said to her, but to his surprise Migena shook her head.

  ‘They didn’t harm her? Are you sure?’ he asked. In Albania, investigators’ offices had blood on the floor. How could he explain that to her?

  Migena was certain. She had met Linda that same afternoon when the investigators had gone to her house. Linda said that they had questioned her but she didn’t go into details. That was her way, to avoid anything to do with politics.

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t want to say how horrible it had been,’ Rudian said.

  ‘No,’ Migena said. ‘She didn’t give the least hint of the kind of thing you’re imagining.’

  ‘How strange,’ Rudian said. ‘I don’t understand this.’

  ‘Believe me,’ Migena said sweetly, bringing her head close to his shoulder.

  In a low murmur she told him how, over the next few days, they had talked again about Linda’s interview. It had concentrated entirely on the book and on Rudian himself. Did she know him or not? Had they exchanged letters or messages? That was all.

  Rudian was relieved. It seemed that Linda’s suicide had nothing to do with the book.

  He sensed that Migena wanted to say something more. In the same sweet voice she described how Linda was not only undaunted by her interview but, incredibly, had seemed excited by it. It was a shock, but a pleasant one. The dreamy glow that regularly illuminated Linda’s eyes increased. As they listed their friends to work out which of them, perhaps Natasha Hysa or Flora Dulaku, might have seen the book, she had seemed distracted and unconcerned.