Dimiter (5 page)

As he entered his office Vlora winced, blinded by the unexpected midday sunlight shafting through the small square windows of the room like the fiery blessings of a troublesome saint. He had been in the darkness of the torture chamber for hours. Striding to an old wooden desk he sat down with his back to the clear and relentless light, for in no other way could he protect his delusions, and so briefly he rested, waiting for peace; then, as if wanting to reassure himself, he slid open a drawer of the desk and looked down at his ribbons and decorations: the Partisan Star, the Order of Skanderbeg, the Order of the National Hero. He gave them grudging recognition, pushed the drawer shut, and examined his hands. He saw that they were still, that at least he was calm. He picked up the telephone receiver on his desk, punched into an unlit station and dialed.

In accordance with some arbitrary sense of balance that shifted within him from day to day, he adjusted certain objects on his desk: a paper clip tray; a clutch of fresh-cut flowers propped in a glass half-filled with water; an in-basket stacked with reports on the Prisoner; and an old framed photo of a
melancholy woman, his mother, and a five-year-old boy with green eyes. Beneath the layers of tinting and the graceless touch-up strokes, their smiles seemed dreamy and distant, like wan, blurred greetings from a bygone time. On top of the papers that were resting in the basket lay a crudely formed paperweight heart made of clay and cheerily painted in a swirl of vivid colors, on its back the name “Kiri” engraved in small letters. The flowers and the heart were the room’s only life, and already the flowers had the look of coming death. It was something he had noticed always happened in this building, it seemed. There was something in the air of this place.

The Interrogator’s wife came on the line. “Hallo?”

Vlora shifted his gaze to the drooping flowers, absorbing the sadness that flowed through the line as he reached out a hand to reposition a violet struggling for breath amid a crush of red poppies. “It is I,” he said wearily.

“Yes.”

“And how is my little Kiri?”

“She is better.”

“And her temperature?”

“Fine. It’s just a four-day flu.”

“Tell her ‘Baba’ sends millions of kisses.”

“I will.”

“And hugs, too, Moricani.”

“That, too.”

The Interrogator stared at the opposite wall while he waited for the pain to speak again. His wife’s voice had grown even more dead and despondent. I must say something kind, he thought. But what? A sudden gloom washed over the wall and he heard a quick spattering of rain on the windows. He reached for the switch on a gooseneck metal lamp that was
painted khaki and after a click a bright pool of light spilled onto the desk.

“That will make her very happy,” the wife said damply.

The words had the sound of a rebuke.

The Interrogator twisted the head of the lamp so that it shone on the flowers in the glass like a spotlight. “Good,” he said tersely. His guilt was overcome by angry resentment, and he looked on helplessly, surprised, as the comforting words that he had reached for drifted away like shipwreck survivors in a lifeboat, specks at the edge of a chilling sea.

“I must go,” he said remotely. He could not control it.

He thought of the artificial rage of the torturers.

“No, wait!” she said quickly.

“Yes, what is it? Moricani?”

She mentioned an errand.

“Elez, the new grocer in the Square,” she began.

The Interrogator stared at the papers in the basket. Absorbed in the Prisoner again, he half-listened. “I know that he’s lying,” he dimly heard; “I can tell: when he lies his left shoulder starts twitching.” Vlora struggled to focus on the rush of her words. It was something to do with canned beans.

“Did you hear what I’m telling you?” she asked him.

“Beans.”

“Yes, the fava beans. He says that he’s out, but he’s lying. There are cans in the back. He wants a bribe. If you go there he will give them to you gladly, he’ll be frightened.”

“No, I can’t, Moricani.”

“You can’t?”

“It isn’t right. I cannot use my position for personal advantage.”

He listened then to silence and the heaviness of nothing.

He could not cut her off now. She had to let him go.

“It’s Kiri’s favorite,” she spoke up mournfully. “The fava beans, cold, with lots of olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic: I was hoping I could fix it for tonight.”

He had lost.

“I make no promises,” he wearily warned her. “And I’m not about to tell them who I am.”

“No, of course not.” Suddenly a lilt had come into her voice. “It’s just that dealing with a man he’ll be different. It’s the women who are lied to all the time. That’s how it is.” She knew that everybody recognized her husband and dreaded him, a fact known to every Albanian but him. How naïve he was in so many ways! she believed: locked deep inside the tower of his ardent ideals he was either a truly good man or just a child. Why, he wanted people treated all alike and to be happy! He should have been a monk in a contemplative order, she thought, glumly smoldering while making perfect cheese. “Keep an eye on his shoulder,” she said. “That’s the key.”

“I’ll remember that, Mooki.” He had used the affectionate nickname that pleased her. His fond tone of voice had cost him an effort. It was worth it: he was free until her next sad look when he would ask her, ‘ “What is wrong?” and she would lower her eyes and murmur wretchedly, “Nothing. No, nothing at all.”

“Don’t be late,” she admonished him blithely.

“I won’t.”

V
lora hung up with grateful relief, dimly heard Leda answering a call, and was suddenly assailed by a vivid recollection of a lucid dream of the night before, a chronic nightmare
of a terrified infant abandoned in a corner of endless night. Then came a new and more dreadful visitation of which he remembered only disparate images: Russians. Ho Chi Minh. A banquet in Tirana. A death.

What did it mean?

He didn’t know.

He turned his gaze to reports in a wire basket and lifted them out. They made an ambiguous rustling sound, the kind in which sometimes in the quiet of dawn one imagines one’s name has just been whispered. Carefully, he placed them before him on the desk. The answer was here, he felt, in these papers, though he’d pondered their contents so often before. Staring at the redness of a thing hid its greenness, he knew; he must look from the right point of view. On top of the stack lay a white identity card that was soiled and battered from handling. The emblem of the eagle and the cornstalk on the cover had faded to a bloodless apparition of itself. The Interrogator picked it up gently and unfolded it, then scanned its twin columns of data: . . . father’s name . . . mother’s name . . . residence . . . profession . . . eyes . . . mouth . . . distinguishing marks. His pensive stare slipped down to the photo glued at the bottom of the left-hand column where the Prisoner’s eyes stared back with the trust of a simple heart.

T
russed up in a jacket, shirt, and tie, his head and shoulders were drawn up affectedly in that pleased and prideful bearing so typical of peasants when posing for this photo, and the too-tight jacket, buttoned and tugging, had the look of something borrowed or rented for this day. Was he smiling?
Yes, a little bit, decided the Interrogator. The effect was of a childlike innocence that he found to be oddly touching. How could the Prisoner have feigned such a look? He found himself thinking of
The Brothers Karamazov
and the deathbed speech of little Rusha: “Father, don’t cry, and when I die get a good boy, another one. Choose one of my friends, a good one, call him Ilusha and love him instead of me.” There were times when reading it caused him to weep. Why had he thought of it now? he wondered. What could be the triggering association? He put the identity card aside and then labored at the papers for hours in silence, polishing and burnishing each fact, every riddle, and then turning them end over end and around before holding them up to the light of sense; but still no insight gleamed, no hidden fact cried out its secret name, and at the end was the taunting fog of the beginning.

And that certain touch of fear.

Vlora put away the papers and listened to the reassurring patter of the rain. Was there nothing amiss after all? he wondered. Were his worries imagined? Danger’s dream? From behind him he heard thunder rumbling faintly high in the mountains of Selca Decani, and abruptly a keening wind leaped up, slamming rain against the windows in bursts. Mysterious flashes danced on his spectacles, far lightning, memory of suns; then suddenly the wind trailed away to a hush that once again softly bedded a steady light rain. Vlora listened and for moments he did not move, his gaze fixed upon a deep bottom drawer of his desk. Then he slid the drawer open, reached in, and lifted out a yellowing cardboard shoebox that he carefully placed atop the desk as if it contained some priceless relic. Thick rubber bands stretched a guard around the box. For a
moment Vlora pensively rubbed a thumb back and forth atop a knot where one of the bands had snapped and been retied. Then he slipped off the bands, removed the shoebox lid, and peered down at the items in the whiteness of the box: the stub of a pencil; a packet of matches; a worn brown wallet made of cheap, cracking leather; fifty-seven
leks
in paper and coins; a small frayed ledger logging sales of cheese in a cramped and tiny hand; a snapshot of a woman; and a personal letter that seemed written in a hurried but stately script: these were the contents of the Prisoner’s pockets that were found by his captors in the village of Quelleza.

Vlora stared at the photo of the woman. Worn and faded, its borders were ragged, as if it had been scissored from a larger scene. The woman looked young, in her twenties, though her features were clouded from the softness of the focus, and, through a veil, from a place where the air was all tears, glowed great dark chestnut eyes filled with anger. Vlora put down the photo, resting it close to the paperweight heart; and then his hand dipped gingerly into the box, pinched a corner of the letter with his thumb and forefinger, and then slowly and soundlessly lifted it out like a miniature crane in a penny arcade. Folded over several times, it was a single small sheet found tucked between the pages of the ledger. With the back of his hand Vlora nudged the box aside and bent the lamp head lower, adjusted its beam, very carefully unfolded the letter, and read it.

My universe! Who knows if this letter will reach you? Enver has died. May God be good to him, for always he treated me kindly. But now you must come to me, my heart! Oh, Selca, my morning light, my angel! Have you any idea how much I have missed you? Oh, come to me! Come now, sweetest boy!
My love, my youth, my very soul! I must hold you. Come quickly. I am free but I am not.

Morna

 

At Theti every villager had told the same story: that Selca Decani and Morna Altamori had dangerously and recklessly loved one another since the earliest days of their youth, and that nothing—no parental threat, no punishment—could keep their laughter apart. But when the girl had reached seventeen years of age her parents married her off to another, a quiet and stolid-eyed irrigation expert in comfortable employ of the State. His soul snatched out of his body, torn open and robbed of day, the young Selca Decani abandoned the village and settled far away near the marshes of the south, and soon time lost track even of the lovers’ names. But then Death spoke. First, Morna’s husband was killed by a lightning bolt when surprised in the field by a storm. Almost a year before that stroke, however, the mournful, hollow-eyed Morna had herself begun to languish in the arms of an illness that, while nameless and un-diagnosed, was quietly and steadily eating her breath. On her husband’s passing she sent for Decani, who arrived back in Theti to find her dead, and after grief too immense for human thought to contain, Decani resumed his life in the village where soon he, too, was stricken dead by an illness for which no doctor had a name, but which anyone in Theti, when asked, could tell you was surely nothing other than a broken heart.

I am free but I am not.

Vlora stared at the words. What was their meaning? Amid the tumble of his thoughts the now-hesitant raindrops tapped at the windows like a blind man’s cane. Complex analysis had shown that the letter had been folded and unfolded again
and again; in fact, innumerable times. Who would cherish and reread such a letter repeatedly other than the man to whom the letter was addressed?

The dead man. The phantom. Selca Decani.

Vlora’s eyes flicked up. An eerie whipping wind had arisen behind him, softly moaning and thumping at the window-panes. Uneasy, feeling watched, the Interrogator swiveled his chair around and looked through the windows to the flickering north where thick black clouds were scudding toward the city from the mountains like the angry belief of fanatical hordes, and in a moment they would darken the Square below and its anonymous granite government buildings, the broad streets drearily leading nowhere, and the rain-slick statue of Lenin commanding the empty storefront windows crammed with the ghosts of a million longings, dust, and the dim recollection of hope. Clanking and aimless, two dilapidated automobiles crawled wetly amid whirring streams of grim-lipped bicyclists glumly churning their way on plodding errands, damp, drab souls underneath their bright slickers, while pedestrians trudged in shabby dress beneath wall posters shrieking at “enemies” and “traitors” in huge block letters that rain and the cheapness of the ink had caused to run in moody red and black streaks. The Interrogator singled out a column of children, two by two in their collarless tunics, as they trooped to the Palace of Culture or some other of the Square’s monolithic museums. They were passing in front of the Dajti Hotel, and for a moment the Interrogator wished that it were June and he were sitting at the Dajti’s sidewalk cafe tasting beer and the plentiful assortment of snacks that went well with a tango or
The Blue Danube
rasping thinly through the cafe’s outdoor speakers into the tired evening air.