The playwright felt a void open up inside him. “May I ask what kind of problem?”
“Of course you may ask,” came the answer. “And in fact you should know. The girl is . . . or rather was . . . interned.”
Aha, he thought. He wanted to ask about the strange use of the two tenses, present and past, but a sudden exhaustion suppressed any desire to speak. Of course, he thought . . . being unable to come to Tirana . . . that hindrance . . .
The void inside him expanded. He heard a distant knell.
And so? he said to himself, as if in response to that knell.
2
And so? he asked himself again, but quite calmly. What did this story have to do with him? He’d signed dozens of books, mostly for strangers. Some murderer might have had one in his bag, signed before he was led off in handcuffs, or even after. It was a familiar request: Could you sign a book for my uncle . . . for my fiancé . . . for a friend who can’t come to Tirana?
He felt a stab under his ribs.
“May I see the book again?” he asked the investigator.
He opened it with his left hand, because his right hand was shaking. He stared at his own handwriting. The inscription had been written on the first night of his most recent play, in the foyer immediately afterward: For Linda B., a souvenir from the author. June 12.
With blinding clarity he remembered the line at the table where he was signing books. An attractive girl with chestnut hair had caught his eye, and for a reason he couldn’t understand, he speeded up his signing. Perhaps he was scared that this stranger, for one reason or another, would change her mind, as beautiful girls usually do, and leave the line.
“Could you sign it for a friend who can’t be here?”
Without lifting his head, he sensed it was this girl.
Her voice was sweet, and as she bent down he thought her long hair was about to touch him . . .
“Her name is Linda. Could you inscribe it for Linda B.?”
“What?” he asked, thinking he had not heard correctly.
“Linda B.,” the girl repeated. “That’s how she would like it.”
As he wrote the dedication, he heard the girl’s voice somewhere above him.
“My friend will be thrilled. She adores you.”
He held out the book toward her, and the girl, maintaining her playful gaze, added, “I’m delighted too.”
And then she had vanished without waiting for his smile.
The playwright returned the book to the investigator.
“I’m certain about the date of the dedication,” he said coldly. “It was the first night of my play. I don’t remember anything else.”
In fact, he did recall their later conversation about the letter B:
“What was your friend’s fanciful idea with this B?” “Our imagination had run riot,” the girl had said. “It had to do with Migjeni’s poem addressed to Miss B.”
For the second time, he shook his head to indicate he remembered nothing.
He decided then and there that he would no longer tell the truth, and was surprised how calm this decision made him feel. Nobody deserved it, he thought. Especially not these two at the end of the table. But not just them. Nobody. Starting with his girlfriend. None of them, not even this mysterious girl in internment.
He would behave like they did. This, he thought, would be his salvation. He would become invulnerable and would not communicate with anybody. Let them knock on his door, beg him, curse him, and scream that he had no soul. You do what you want. I’ll do what I want. I’ll become a sphinx.
Fury took hold of him again, but this time it was different. He thought about Migena. She might have been more honest. She knew her friend was interned and had asked for a book for her. After she had left him, he had gone to his bookshelves to pick up the fallen books and had felt ashamed of what he had done. He was surprised at the depth of his anger. The actual contents of these books, not just their names, seemed to have scattered where they fell, like in an earthquake. Especially one book: Toponyms. The names of places, streams, footpaths tumbled on all sides. Cuckoo Hill. The Ambush of the Three Wells. Zeka’s Trap, the Pit, the Raven, the Bad Foothills . . . all these grim place-names, he thought. There was nothing in this world whose identity, or CV as they now called it, was so repulsive as the land itself. Snares, treachery everywhere . . .
How long had he been in this office of the Party, which he had entered with such unconcern? His eyes wandered to the wall clock that dated back to the friendship with the Chinese. The clock said twenty-seven minutes past ten. Incredible. He thought he had been there for hours. The Path of the Sprites. The Rough Pass. Wolves. Had they questioned Migena? he wondered. Even if they hadn’t, how could these people who knew everything fail to know who this interned girl’s friend was?
He felt ashamed of his suspicion, although this did not prevent him from imagining Migena sitting in front of a similar table. What books did this writer have on his shelves? I think you’ll remember some of the authors at least. Do you mean the ones that fell when he tried to bash my head against the bookshelves? Not just those. You mean the others too? The books in general. You were there several times and of course you saw them. It’s true, I remember some of the names but I didn’t know most of the authors. I remember, for instance, Picasso, next to a Heidegger, if I’m not mistaken. The others were new to me.
Speak up. What’s the matter?
He thought back to his own questions. Oh God, those questions he’d asked her at their last meeting, like an interrogator.
Something is on your mind. We’ve talked about it so often. Tell me, what’s the matter? I can’t bear your tears. Nor those enigmatic phrases of yours: I don’t know who you are, my prince or someone else’s.
Now it was his turn to ask these questions, he thought. Who do you belong to? Are you my princess or . . . the Party’s?
Yet remorse still wormed its way inside him. Perhaps he was being unfair. Perhaps she was suffering too. Perhaps they had interrogated her at night and there was an explanation for all those sighs and tears: she was in two minds, to betray him or not.
A faint cough came like a distant roll of thunder from another age, no doubt a sign for him to break his long silence. They had allowed this silence as a sign of the respect for him that they had mentioned at the start, but he couldn’t continue it for ever.
It was possible that it was the other girl, the girl in exile, who had betrayed them. “You’re always going to Tirana, find a book of his, I need one . . .” Or maybe it was neither of them, but a third person.
As if waking up, he raised his head. There was a glint of malice in his interrogators’ eyes, like in those place-names. The evil eye. In that book of names that fell first after Fitzgerald.
What did it matter to him who was watching him? It wasn’t his problem, as people said nowadays. They might find a book signed by him in the bag of some criminal . . . It wasn’t the first time that they had harassed him. If they wanted a pretext to condemn his play, let them do what they wanted, just not torture him like this.
As had happened before, he spoke less than half of these words aloud. But they were enough for the second secretary to frown again. This time his frown looked different.
“That is not the problem,” the secretary said quietly. “It’s more complicated than it seems.” He fell silent, then added, “As I said at the beginning, the Party trusts you just as before. The problem is that the girl we are talking about killed herself.”
Rudian Stefa bit his lower lip, suddenly remembering how they had spoken of her in mixed