“When are you going to introduce me to that friend of yours?” “I don’t know. Do you really want to meet her?” “Why not? You haven’t mentioned her in a while.” “Perhaps because I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t, except that . . .” “Except what?” “Except that . . . she’s prettier than me.” “Aha . . .”
The coffee tasted bitter. Migena’s anxiety did not diminish, and became even more mysterious.
“Is this coffee different from usual?” he asked the waiter.
The waiter shrugged his shoulders.
He had said to her quite coolly that if their meetings were going to end in floods of tears it would be better not to see each other anymore. Her eyes sank even deeper into misery. Just don’t ever say that again, she had whispered. Never, do you hear me? Never.
“It’s the same coffee,” the waiter said, taking the cup. “Vietnamese.”
Rudian was sure that Migena’s unhappiness was about something unrelated to him, which he would never discover, just as he would never see this other wretched girl.
“Shall I bring you another coffee?” the waiter asked. “Not heated for so long. It’ll taste different.”
“No, thank you,” Rudian replied. “I have to go.”
As he stood up, the writer watched Rudian from his seat in the corner, as if about to greet him. Rudian pretended to take no notice.
Still there was no poster by the theater entrance. Better not to know. This phrase presented itself in his mind, unconnected to anything specific. Not to know what? The things they would say or had already said at the Artistic Board, and which he hadn’t yet heard? Of course, he thought, but then he recalled that it was someone else who had first uttered these words to him.
What was he better off not knowing about? he wondered. He was now angrier at himself than at the girl. He had heard these words and accepted them meekly. He should have responded in totally the opposite way. The bed where they made love was a more suitable place for a confession than any other.
What the hell was it that he shouldn’t know? That they were asking her about him at the Investigator’s Office? About the next play he intended to write? About his battles with his conscience over betraying her? All that?
Above his head, the city-center clock struck noon. However hard you try to elude me, I will track you down, he said to himself.
Wherever you hide, he added.
Fleeing the tones of the bell, he turned back toward the entrance to the Dajti Hotel, where he hesitated only briefly. He climbed the steps and passed disdainfully through the silent lobby, watched by the receptionists. Beyond the door to the bar, the counter loomed up in front of him.
He sat down and noticed that the bar was half empty.
You and your enigmas, he thought drowsily. And suddenly, waking up, he made a discovery. The name Migena and the word enigma fluttered through his mind, attempting to come together. They were anagrams. Migena, enigma. To make sure, he wrote the words on the menu, next to the words espresso coffee. Yes, they really were anagrams. Yes: shuffle the letters of Migena and you got enigma.
4
Seven days. This is day eight, he thought, sipping coffee a few days later at the same table in the Dajti. To his right, the director of the theater, who was sitting with the members of the Cuban cultural delegation recently arrived in Tirana, craned his neck as if to make sure that the man quietly drinking coffee three tables away really was Rudian Stefa, the playwright with one premiere temporarily postponed and another play waiting approval.
If you want to turn half of the state institutions in Albania upside down, his friend Llukan Herri used to say, drink your coffee in the Dajti at the very time you don’t feel safe. According to Llukan, each state agency would think that another one knew why the dramatist R.S. had drunk coffee in the Dajti for several days in a row without batting an eyelid. For instance, the director of the theater, instead of concentrating on the recent instructions delivered by Fidel Castro in a six-hour speech to the actors of Havana, would rack his brains for an explanation for Rudian Stefa’s boldness, and might suspect that the criticisms of Stefa’s most recent play that the director intended to put before the Artistic Board were too harsh.
Rudian stifled a sigh of such force that it seemed to kick against his ribs, unleashing an unpleasant wave of dizziness.
Why should I care about all this? he thought. Let them think what they want, I have no business with them. Nor did he need the mean-spirited pleasure that he had enjoyed five minutes ago, speculating about the qualms of the theater director as he listened to the pearls from Castro’s speech. Let them do what they want, so long as they don’t touch my play . . .
and . . . also . . . don’t keep Migena from me.
The realization that they could keep Migena from him flashed through his mind. But it was followed immediately by the thought that nobody was keeping her away. She had left him of her own accord.
A great weariness, like some mist from far away, seemed to have settled between them. It was a long time since he had fallen in love, although he wondered if this were not love but something else that had donned love’s familiar mask to deceive him.
She was avoiding him and soon she would become almost a stranger to him, the perfect stranger who would never be forgotten. He strove to recall her palpable form but already this was not easy. He could not even remember her body below the waist. Had she ever let him see it? At first he had interpreted this as her provincial shyness, but later he suspected something else.
He fumbled nervously in his jacket’s right-hand pocket for the letter that she had placed on the pillow before she left their last meeting but one. “There’s a letter for you on the bed,” she had whispered in his ear, before fleeing downstairs as if scared he might follow her. Who are you? Are you really my prince? These words had been scrawled in red ballpoint in the semidarkness after their lovemaking. The question Who are you? was repeated at the end, with another question: And me, who am I?
He longed not only to fold her in his arms, in the usual way of men throughout the world, whether in socialist republics, confederations, kingdoms, or prince-bishoprics. He wanted to howl again and again as he had done by his bookshelves, among the streams, crags, and chasms with those treacherous names.
“Revolutionary Cuban theater, under the teaching of Fidel Castro, is advancing toward new developments . . .” What was that? He turned his head toward the now empty table where the Cuban cultural delegation had been sitting, astonished to hear their conversation again. Before he suspected himself of losing his wits, he saw the bartender fiddle with the radio and turn down the volume.
He motioned to the passing waiter and asked if this was still the radio program about Cuban theater. The waiter nodded. It was the same one. Day four.
His mind returned to the girl.
If she could ask him who he was, how had it not occurred to him to find out more about her? He had started on enigmas and anagrams but it struck him that he didn’t even know her surname. He had learned nothing from her but a little about her first sexual experience.
“It was our gym teacher, as so often in schools. Two or three of us girls had been together since the third grade. We thought we couldn’t say no, because he was the only man who had seen us in our underwear . . . Only one of us, your Linda.” “Who?” “I told you once, that’s what her friends called her . . . So my girlfriend stood up to him. Not that she was a prude, not at all, but because she was different, in every way . . .”
Idiot, he snorted to himself. What an idiot to listen to this sort of thing without caring. He reproached himself again but with less conviction, realising that without the summons to the Party Committee and all that followed he would have known nothing about this girl.
He ordered another coffee and thought that the waiter was looking at him with increased respect. New customers