The researcher spent years trying to reach the heart of the matter, like a workman going underground to find damaged cables.
His notes revealed his own agony as much as the suffering of the vanished couple, in a distorting perspective that was at times as intoxicating and liberating as a new vision of the world, and sometimes totally disabling.
What led the two lovers so willingly into such perverseness?
The death of love is like an enveloping chill. But it is never experienced equally by both partners. There is always one on whom the burden of suffering weighs most, at least at first.
However, this was something totally different. The question might be put in another way: were both of them, or only one, to be considered as post mortem?
It had to be only one of them. One of them had struck a blow at the other. But which?
Again and again the researcher came back to the same question. What had made this couple experience as normal a situation that seemed totally out of this world? What did they know, what did they see that others could not? What hidden laws had they uncovered, what different sequence or flow of time? He was so close. He needed only one step to carry him across into a new dimension of thought. But this single step was impossible.
What was this chain that tethered his mind, like a wild beast, within certain bounds? The suspicion dogged him that these two had been able, if only for an instant, to unleash this animal. They had stepped over the bounds and been lost.
He sometimes thought that what had happened related to the familiar doubt as to whether love really exists, or is merely a sick, over-the-rainbow fantasy, a new phantasm that has appeared on our planet only in the last five or six thousand years. Perhaps we still can’t tell if our planet will accept it, or reject it as foreign tissue.
Whistle-blowers had sounded the alarm about the hole in the ozone layer, about the encroaching deserts, and terrorism, but nobody had yet drawn attention to the fragile state of love. Perhaps a few sects had been created to investigate the truth or falseness of love, and maybe this couple, Besfort Y. and Rovena St., had been members of one of these.
One starry summer night, he felt that he was closer than ever to the forbidden zone, but on its very brink he had collapsed, as if struck by an epileptic fit.
He spent the entire summer in a lethargic depression of the kind that can land you in hospital.
Determined to keep going in spite of every danger, he thought he would try a new approach, using his research data to reconstruct, day by day and month by month, the story of what might have passed on earth between Rovena St. and Besfort Y. during the last forty weeks of their lives. Like Plato, he knew that this story could only be a pale reflection of its eternal form, yet he clung to the hope of finding the essence by starting from the appearance, however misleading this might be.
It would not be an easy task to tell the story of their last forty weeks, and maybe it would turn out to be impossible. The torrent of events surged ahead, and could not be controlled.
Perhaps he could tame it if he divided it into days and months, or acts or cantos, like an ancient epic.
He had heard that The Iliad took four days to tell. Would this be enough for his story too? Like every story, it would have three phases: the first purely imagined, the second clothed in words and the third finally told to others.
He had a presentiment that he would only be able to manage the first.
And so, one night in late summer, he started to imagine their story. But this effort of imagination was so strenuous, and consumed so much passion and empathy, that it drained his entire life-blood away.
Part Two
Chapter One
Forty weeks before. A hotel. Morning.
As so often in hotels, wakefulness crept up on him from the window. He stared at the curtains for a moment, trying to work out from them which hotel he was in. They told him nothing, not even the city. But he could still recall precisely his dream of a few moments before.
He turned his head. Rovena’s hair, spilt over the pillow, made her face and bare shoulder look even more fragile than usual.
Besfort Y. had always thought that women’s smooth necks and graceful arms were the sort of things that could be used as tactical weapons in war, as decoys by opposing armies.
Fragile, as if he could break her in his arms and master her easily: that is how Rovena had looked twelve years ago, when, for the first time, she had come out of the bath to lie beside him and conquer him. Her breasts were small, like a teenager’s, and strategically important in the battle. After them came her belly, the next snare. Below this, dark, threatening, marked by the dark triangle, lurked the final hurdle. And here he was defeated.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, he lifted the quilt and, as he had done dozens of times before, looked at her belly and the site of his surrender. It was surely the only place in the world where happiness could be found only in defeat.
He covered her up again with the same gentleness and looked at his watch. It was nearly time for her to wake up. Perhaps he still had time to tell her his dream before it faded irretrievably.
How many times, he said to himself, had they repeated all this in one hotel or another, without being entirely sure what “all this” was.
In his dream he had been eating lunch with Stalin. This seemed entirely normal, and it even made no particular impression on him when Stalin’s face alternated with that of a high-school classmate, a certain Thanas Rexha.
“My right hand has gone numb. It’s been like this for four days,” Stalin said to him. “You sign these two treaties for me.”
While he was signing the first treaty, he wanted to ask what it was about. But the second was quickly put in front of him. “It’s secret, but take a look at it if you like.” He felt no eagerness to read the text, but still, more out of a desire to please than out of curiosity, he glanced through the second treaty. It was extremely complicated, with knotty passages that apparently contradicted each other. He remembered again Thanas Rexha, who had given up high school after twice failing the history exam about the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact on the eve of World War II.
What a crazy dream, he thought. It had continued, but he could not remember how. His eyes wandered from the curtains back to Rovena’s face. Her eyelids were still closed in sleep, but fluttered slightly like a swallow in distress. Normally he got up before her, and whenever he studied her sleeping face, he thought that a woman who is loved opens her eyes in a different way to others.
But Rovena did not wake, and he got up and went to the window in the anteroom, a long way from the bed. He drew aside the curtain slightly and looked stonily at the street, where yellow leaves were falling.
Abstractedly, he listed the names of hotels where they had slept: Plaza, Intercontinental, Palace, Don Pepe, Sacher, Marriott. Their lights glittered palely, blue, orange, crimson. Why was he calling these hotels to mind as if looking for help? And why did they hurry past?
He felt a chill round his shoulders and turned to enter the bathroom. That same soft light glowed below the mirror. It came from her toiletries, her perfume, comb, creams, which had no doubt acquired something special over the years from contact with her face.
Among their sweetest moments had been the times when she had sat on the little white throne next to the bath and washed herself. Under the surface of the water, the patch of her bush would continually change shape, grow fuzzy, ambiguous.
“What are you thinking about?” she would ask him, lifting her eyes from