A Girl in Exile Read online

  She listened to him attentively, before telling him that it was not as he imagined it.

  ‘We both had breast scans,’ she said after a moment. ‘In fact, it was at first not for Linda’s sake, but mine.’

  He tried to remain calm.

  ‘So it was you,’ he said. ‘I thought the opposite . . . I thought it was her . . . But it was you and not her who noticed the signs, who suspected . . . my darling.’

  His hand instinctively stroked her breasts more slowly, as if fearful of finding a lump.

  ‘My darling,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘When you just said you both did it, I thought it was her who felt the need, and you helped her.’

  The girl’s silence suggested only doubt.

  ‘It’s a bit more complicated,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘At first it really was for me, but then she wanted to do it too.’

  ‘I see, so she had the same symptoms.’

  ‘Wait, slow down. At first it wasn’t a question of symptoms or suspicions. She was just going to accompany me to the hospital. Then she had the idea of having a scan, but there was no way she could do it without me.’

  ‘I see, I can imagine that – in her situation.’

  Migena shook her head.

  ‘Perhaps you think she didn’t have the right to treatment because she was interned, and so forth. But that wasn’t true. If she had pains or symptoms, she could go for tests. But without them – as you might say for no reason, just because she was worried, or for prevention – no, she couldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I don’t believe that you went for the scan like that, for no reason.’

  To his astonishment, she replied, ‘Yes, I did, more or less.’

  He tried to smile, but it was sour.

  ‘So as I understand it, you both went to the doctor for no reason. First you, then Linda.’

  The girl took a deep breath.

  ‘Calm down. These things are hard to explain. It wasn’t just a whim, as it might seem. Especially not in Linda’s case. I’ll try to be clear, but please, don’t get irritated.’ The girl caressed his neck. ‘All right?’

  In a gentle voice she began explaining the regulations governing the medical care of high-level officials and their families. There was a programme of preventive medicine for senior cadres. He had heard vaguely of such a thing for Politburo members and perhaps for ministers too. But the scheme had been extended even into the provinces. Migena’s father, although without an official position, had benefitted, and consequently Migena had too, and so the story of the breast scan began. A doctor had arrived from Tirana and Migena went for the scan, accompanied by Linda. On the way . . .

  As she talked, he imagined how, on the way, her friend had come out with the idea of being examined herself, and how death had chosen that moment to take revenge for being treated so lightly. A revenge as cruel as only death knew, and if not on both of them, then on Linda.

  ‘On the way,’ Migena continued, ‘Linda asked me to help her . . .’

  He barely interrupted her, and at the end of the story she seemed so drained that when she asked ‘May I sleep a little?’ her words seemed to him the most natural in the world.

  He kissed her temples and took care that her shoulders were covered. He had never heard such an unhappy story in his life and perhaps never would again.

  Her soft breathing gave a different rhythm to the events as they sank into his memory. With Migena asleep, at one remove from life, he thought about her story of what had happened in that small provincial town, in the little hospital where a doctor had inconspicuously arrived from the capital city.

  The girls had made fragmentary conversation as they walked together along the deserted road towards the hospital. ‘Are you worried?’ Linda asked, and Migena replied, ‘I don’t know what to say, but I’m uneasy. In these cases, even when the examination is . . . for no reason . . . you worry.’ To her surprise, Linda seemed more unnerved than she was. ‘Listen,’ she said in a faint voice. ‘You’ve done so much for me, I’ll be grateful to you for ever, and I don’t want to take advantage in any way, but I would ask you for one more thing. I don’t have the slightest chance of having a scan. I don’t know if you can help me . . .’

  Migena smiled. ‘Darling, I’ll do anything for you, with all my heart, but why do you need it? You’ve told me that you have no symptoms, not even the slightest suspicion.’

  ‘I do have a reason,’ Linda replied. ‘A different reason, a very serious one.’

  So there is a reason, Migena thought. A terrible and irreversible one, which she had kept secret. Not to have any regrets perhaps. As if internment were not enough for this girl, now there was this.

  Linda received Migena’s emotional embrace with a certain coldness. ‘It’s not what you think. I told you, I haven’t any suspicions, there are no signs.’

  ‘What?’ Migena cried almost angrily. ‘Are you playing games with me?’

  Linda tried to explain. It wasn’t a game, not at all. The truth was that she had no pain, no suspicions, but still she was ready to do almost anything for that scan. It was her only chance, her only hope.

  Her only chance, Migena repeated to herself. Chance of what?

  What she heard next was worse than cruel. The explanation turned Migena’s brain inside out until finally she understood. This scan was the only chance for Linda to go to the longed-for capital city – if the result was unfavourable. A cousin, interned like herself, had told her that these were the only tests to which internees were entitled, and they were carried out at the Oncological Hospital in Tirana. Patients could travel by train to an appointment once a month. For practical reasons, they had to spend the night at a hotel and return the next day by train. The treatment would last from six to eight months. ‘Do you understand now why this is the last chance? Call me crazy, but in my situation it’s the only chance. Many women would do this.’

  Here Migena paused in her story. ‘I conceded she was right. I would have done the same. In Linda’s place, I would also have traded endless years of internment for six months of life, and perhaps, like a gift from heaven, the danger would have passed.’

  When the hospital came into view, Linda’s eyes sparkled with gratitude. There was now only the anxiety over whether the doctor would accept her.

  ‘Fortunately he was young and had been trained abroad. I did all I could. I told him she was my closest friend, and was concerned, but her family were not officials. He was hesitant but I think her beauty won him over. We both went into the anteroom to remove our blouses. It was the first time that we had seen each other’s breasts. I have a reason for mentioning this matter of our breasts. Please don’t interrupt.’

  Dazed but happy they emerged from the dark X-ray room. Their cheeks glowed, and as they left the building Linda continually whispered to Migena. She had worked it all out in detail. Ever since Migena told her to come to the hospital, Linda had been working out a plan which even she thought was crazy at first, but could not dispel from her mind. She pictured the features of the city that she had dreamed of for so long, and would finally see for herself. She brought to mind all the things they had talked about, one by one. She would meet Rudian Stefa. She knew that she was beautiful and she didn’t like to pretend otherwise. She would phone him and tell him straight out: I’m the girl to whom you sent a book inscribed to Linda B. I’d like us to get to know each other.

  The need for a hotel was a miracle, she kept saying. None of her family could accompany her because they were all interned.

  ‘Every one of them interned . . .’ Migena spoke these last words like the refrain of that old song of the Albanians from Calabria, ‘All Beneath the Earth’.

  ‘Do you remember it?’ asked Migena, and she sang:

  There is my strong father

  There is my gentle mother

  There is my brother

  All beneath the earth.

  As the date for the results drew closer, Linda’s imagination ran riot. Her idea
now – after saying, I’d like us to get to know each other – was to give Rudian the name of her hotel and the room number. She was serious about meeting him, as in everything she did, and was conscious that they had no time to waste. She had to be prepared for everything, and remembered the irritating fact of her virginity. She even thought of her gym teacher, whom she alone of the girls from her class had hitherto treated with indifference.

  Rudian had thought that Migena might stop her story at any moment. He barely kept himself from asking: And then . . . ? His mind raced ahead like a bolting animal. Of course this story ended badly. But what happened next?

  It was not long now until the decisive day. As if scared, the two girls avoided talking about it. But their silence could not banish the dark shadow, and only intensified its presence. As Rudian listened to Migena, he thought of how death, having been trifled with, might take its revenge. An aggressive tumour, found too late. Another reason for suicide might be an unexpected change to the Regulations of Internment: Paragraph 12, Subsection 4, Withdrawal of right to travel to Tirana for breast cancer treatment.

  The results arrived at the end of the week. The assistant doctor congratulated both girls, but was astonished at their reaction. First they stood dumbfounded, then embraced each another, but coldly, as if in a chill lunar light. The tears contained more sorrow than they should have done.

  ‘I don’t know how to describe it. Everything was turned inside out, joy turning to grief and back again.’ Vaguely, Migena offered a strange, inapt consolation.

  Two reasons for suicide were now eliminated, Rudian thought. The only one left was for Linda to have killed herself because no cancer had appeared.

  No. There was a limit to perversity. This was too much under any regime, however cruel.

  Rudian’s mind slowed down to take in this new information. Here, at the end of the twentieth century, was a young girl who’d thought of an unfavourable breast scan as her last chance, almost her salvation. A good result was bad news, an end to all her hopes. Even at the price of death, she’d wanted to buy a few days, a few hours of normal life. But her offer had been rejected.

  Rudian tried to imagine himself in Linda’s place. All her dreams had collapsed. Migena was going away. The prospect of endless loneliness. No wonder she thought of cancer as her salvation. People had become used to thinking of death like this, but not yet cancer.

  He had no right to . . . he said to himself vaguely. Then he lost the thread. What didn’t he have a right to? He had no right, in any event. That was it – he had no right to be surprised.

  The stronger the dictatorship of the proletariat, the greater the freedom! This slogan was displayed everywhere, on the walls of auditoriums, on balconies, beneath the state emblem. Everybody walked past these fluttering red banners without the slightest consternation. Why then should people rub their eyes to read a similar text, almost its twin: Cancer brings happiness!

  Migena was exhausted from talking, and she told him she wanted to sleep a little.

  He stroked her hair and said quietly, ‘It was what I suspected. The result of the scan upset her.’ Yet it had not been a bad result, but a good one: I don’t have cancer, I don’t want to live anymore.

  How dreadful, he thought.

  Migena’s eyes widened, and she shook her head in denial.

  ‘We’ll talk some more, darling,’ she whispered. ‘Let me rest now.’

  He wanted to tell her to wait, but the girl’s altered breathing told him it was too late.

  So it wasn’t the scan. He wanted to wake her and howl: If not this scan, what the hell was it? Why this silence when you should speak? What happened? Did you come between us? That’s the reason. The enigma? I thought I was the reason, with that damned book and its inscription. Then the breast scan, I believed that. Now it turns out to be something else. So who was it? There’s no one left but you. Why did you do it? Or rather, why did you tell her?’

  More than anything else, it was the girl’s quiet breathing that led him to suspect that Migena was hiding the answer. She had mentioned in passing an evening dance, and the recollection of this thrummed insistently through his mind. He had interrupted her two or three times to ask about that evening, but the girl had responded curtly, as if it were unimportant. It was the school graduation ball, the farewell dance . . . Didn’t they have them in his day?

  He could hardly wait to ask her properly, which it struck him he had not done before.

  Her breathing suggested that she was waking up at last. Amazingly, all the imagined brusqueness of his question melted away and he whispered tenderly into her ear, ‘So, it wasn’t the scan. It was a different reason, wasn’t it? Try to tell me what happened. Did you put yourself between us?’

  ‘I was expecting this question,’ she said.

  He imagined, rather than saw, her wintry smile. And also the ironic glitter in her eyes, mixed with anger.

  ‘I don’t blame you for asking,’ she said. ‘I would have thought the same.’

  ‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ Rudian said. ‘Any person in my position would just want to know the truth. I’ve thought so often that it was all my fault. Inadvertently, of course, but that’s no reassurance—’

  ‘I’m not blaming you,’ the girl interrupted. ‘Don’t you know what torture it’s been for me? I’ve suffered. I’ve cried so much, you know I have. Whenever you’ve shouted at me and hit me.’

  ‘I’ve never hit you.’

  ‘You’ve meant to, which is the same thing. You’ve yelled at me, called me a spy, screamed, What’s the matter with you? Now I think you understand what the matter was.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I meant no harm.’

  For a while nothing could be heard but their breathing, the two currents of air intertwined, as tangled as they were themselves.

  ‘I took everything from her,’ the girl said softly. ‘They had seized her family’s house, their property and jewels. I took from her the last thing she had, what she held most precious, the only thing . . .’ He wanted to stop her mouth and not to hear it, but the word came out: ‘You.’

  He wanted to tell her she had been kind. It had caused her tears and she had searched her conscience. But words seemed to him feeble and unnecessary.

  ‘We’re still not being honest,’ the girl said. ‘We don’t dare, either of us. We evade the truth, the dangerous part. We’re scared.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said.

  ‘Naturally, it’s all down to me. But you know something too. You can’t avoid it. You know that I was starting to fall in love with you.’

  Of course he knew, but it was outside the order of things. Once again Rudian could no longer think clearly, and Migena’s words, as if under his influence, became more obscure. Obviously, Migena’s love wasn’t her own. It belonged to her interned friend. She had found it ready-made. It was like wild clematis on someone else’s wall. A ring found somewhere. Is love contagious, like a disease? Apparently it was. She had caught it from Linda B. on her journeys between her friend and him. As if upon entering a contaminated area, Migena had been infected. She had gone to and fro happily without it occurring to her what might happen . . . Well, it was easy to assume that she hadn’t thought of it, but maybe the opposite was true: not only had she thought of it, but something had impelled her unconsciously towards him. There was a dark, perverse logic in it all. It was easy to say that she had taken her girlfriend’s lover. That’s a very popular sport. But there was something else. Her friend too, in her powerlessness, with the same perversity with which she had wished cancer on herself, had pushed Migena in his direction, within his grasp.

  Jealousy? Their story had all the ingredients of a romance, but with one difference. The events were always hidden behind a veil drawn by an unknown power, and seemed to come from the realm of destiny. It was this that upset the everyday equilibrium, logic and the order of things. Migena had been jealous of Linda, but very obliquely, under a mask of the opposite. Linda B. had also felt jealous of Mige
na, but still more covertly and beneath a double mask.

  Their mutual resentment had risen close to the surface, but stopped there. On one occasion, when Migena thought Linda was about to grab her by the hair, just as he had once done by the bookshelves, she thought: Of course, I’m her understudy – the other two are the protagonists in this affair. In fact, this was the most accurate word: ‘understudy’.

  Rudian’s temples beat feverishly. What did ‘understudy’ mean in this context? Everything was so obscure. He wanted to say that she was less an understudy than a courier of some kind, striving to do the impossible, to bring from a forbidden zone something that could not be transported – a girl’s love. It was not just impossible, but a crime against nature.

  Something occurred to him that was still more difficult to put into words. A courier of death, he said to himself. But there was no way you could carry death.

  Coming close to what he was thinking, the girl said, ‘It’s no use trying to excuse ourselves.’

  Her eyes glinted dangerously, as if to say: We both killed her.

  Perhaps, he thought. However invisibly, he too had played just as sinister a role in this.

  ‘There’s no need to punish yourself,’ he said in a gentle voice. ‘You’ve suffered in your conscience. That’s enough. In this country, nobody has a bad conscience about anything.’

  He caressed her and kissed the curls at her temples.

  We didn’t kill her, he thought. We just failed to get her out of that place. And that’s not the same thing.

  Migena made no sign of objection. With a distracted expression, she watched sidelong as he stroked her chest, but now absent-mindedly, as if he were a stranger.

  The girl still followed the movement of his hand. Then, to his astonishment, she murmured something very unclear, as if trying to say that there, in her breasts, there was something.

  So death is there. The thought of the scan flashed through Rudian’s mind, and he mentioned it again. But she shook her head in denial.

  That only left jealousy. They were back in the whirlpool of often-repeated themes. Cerberus not being lulled to sleep. The secret jealousy of one of the girls. Then the other’s jealousy, even more deeply hidden. Love passed on like a disease. Could it be given and received like a jewel, a loan or a legacy? The goddess Aphrodite had lent it to her female friends in the form of a girdle, tied round the hips, close to where the thighs meet. In a tangible form. As for conveying love from place to place, this was apparently more difficult, perhaps even more dangerous than the fearful transportation of plutonium. There could be no doubt that jealousy was all that was left.