was asking if you imagined the crater with molten lava or not?”
“Is that important? When you mentioned a volcano, I thought of lava.”
“But I imagined it extinct, black, desolate. And like that it’s twice as frightening. Wait, he said that this was what falling into a black hole would be like, coming out into another dimension …”
“Listen, Rova, and don’t misunderstand me. It would be good if you came here as soon as you can. Take a few days’ rest. This Alpine air will do you good. We’ll have a good time together, like in the old days. We’ll remember all those jokes from university. Remember that doggerel by the guy from Durrës in the other seminar group?
Rova is an antibiotic
Short for Rovamycin
But Rovena is hypnotic
Elegant and enticing.
The researcher used the young woman’s words “I’m scared”, repeated over and over again, as the starting point for his questioning of the taxi driver.
“She said, ‘I’m scared, but I don’t know why. I pretend not to be frightened of him. He also pretends not to frighten me any more. But none of this is true.’ Why were you so shaken by what you saw, or thought you saw, in the mirror?”
This question, although lifted from the written record, had lost none of its ominous weight.
“Did it remind you of anything? Even dimly, or indirectly? Some kind of obstacle, a taboo, something that should never happen?”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yes.”
Everybody in this story was scared, with or without reason. They were scared of one other, of themselves or of someone, no one could tell who.
Some part of this fear had been conveyed through the mirror in the taxi. But where had the rest come from?
The researcher finally succeeded in meeting Lulu Blumb, getting her to talk and ensuring her continued cooperation. Her suspicion of murder was difficult to dismiss, but also hard to confirm.
She almost exploded with rage. “Are you blind, or just pretending? You could tell a mile off that he was the murderous kind. That dream of his, or rather his nightmare, about the Hague Tribunal showed that.”
The researcher wanted to butt in to say that these days a lot of people were scared of The Hague – Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Montenegrins. You might say that the whole Balkans went in fear and trembling. But he restrained himself.
Lulu Blumb went on to say that neither the dream about the court summons nor the second one, which people generally called inexplicable, enigmatic and so forth, held any mystery for her. She said that the researcher no doubt knew about the funereal building, a cross between a mausoleum and a motel, at which a person knocks and looks for someone, who later turns out to be a young woman who is locked inside, turned to stone or murdered by some means.
The inquiry stated that Besfort Y. had had this dream one week before his death. Logically, he should have had this dream later, after killing Rovena. But as the researcher might be aware (and might well know better than she did) such displacements are quite common in dreams. The dream showed most of all that Besfort had already resolved to kill Rovena.
The researcher listened to the pianist with the same calm curiosity, both when he believed her and when he didn’t. This woman had a special talent, perhaps granted to her by music, for evoking the atmosphere of events, especially imagined events. For instance, whenever she described the final dream, she never forgot to mention the building’s midnight glow, which was a reflection of the plaster, or perhaps of despair.
Her description of the other incident on the morning of 17 May caused in the researcher’s mind an intoxicating frisson, whenever she mentioned it, that he could never shake off.
Dozens, hundreds of times, he imagined Besfort Y. walking through the rain and mist, holding the shape of a woman tight against himself – whether real or not, nobody knew.
As if ensnared by this scene, he was scarcely able to move on to ask, “So what happened later, in your opinion?”
Lulu Blumb, also caught in her own trap, seemed unwilling to answer. As he silently rehearsed the questions to himself, he thought he saw her scowl even before he spoke. “Who knows what happened next,” she said aloud. Tell me what happened next, Miss Blumb, he said to himself. “We know that she was accompanying him to the airport, but did not plan to travel herself. So we know that everything that could possibly have happened took place in the taxi between the hotel and the airport terminal. In fact something did happen, but it involved the entire taxi and all of the people inside. It is like imagining, at a time when two countries are at war, some catastrophe striking the entire planet … perhaps you think imagining a murder is the same as committing one. Sometimes that is how it seems to me. But this time we are trying to work out the murderer’s plan, even though it was not carried out by him, but by some external force. The possibilities of such a thing happening after they left the hotel are limited. Only if they stopped somewhere along the road, at some small building or secluded place … ‘Driver, please stop here. We have to do something at that chapel over there …’”
Lulu Blumb sighed, implying that they were thinking on entirely different lines and would never agree on anything.
“But you can still tell me the motive for the murder,” the researcher said aloud, certain that she would merely fold her arms.
The pianist did not get angry, but suddenly drew close to him and said gently that she had wanted to talk about this for a long time, but nobody would listen to her. She had talked about the late-night phone calls, about the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service, and his terror of the Hague Tribunal. But the investigators did not want to know. Obviously they were scared. Besfort Y. had been a danger to anyone who came near him. Especially to a woman who had slept with him. Apparently he had talked to her about things he should never have mentioned, and had later regretted it.
“Everybody knows what happens when a violent person has second thoughts: the witness disappears. Rovena St. knew the most appalling things. Any one of them would make your hair stand on end. I can tell you, for example, that she knew the precise hour when Yugoslavia would be bombed, two days in advance. You see why I don’t want to talk about these things?”
The inquiry dragged on and grew, sending out new tendrils in all kinds of directions. The researcher made visible efforts to dispel the fog, but equally obvious were his attempts to hide behind it.
Finally, towards the middle of the file, the question arose of why these two protagonists, Besfort Y. and Rovena St., seemed to be trying to cover up their love for each other by pretending to be whore and client.
Delving deeper, the researcher wondered whether Besfort Y. and his friend were merely two people outside the normal order of things.
It was in this part of the file that the researcher for the first time drew attention to his own self, like a man who wanders along an uncertain path and takes care to leave behind certain tokens of recognition, pebbles or dropped ash. After the words “But who am I, trying to enter where no one can go?” there came another phrase: “Look for me and you will find me!”
Apparently certain that another researcher would follow in his footsteps, and another after that, because the lust for knowledge is as inexhaustible and cyclic as the waves of the ocean of humanity, the author of the inquiry addressed his future counterpart. His words, the more one studied them, resembled the lament of someone who has fallen by his own fault into a trap or a deep dungeon and begs for rescue.
9
In an appendix to the first part of the inquiry, the researcher returned to what he called the “intrinsic perversity” of the entire story.
It wasn’t merely the speech, the phrases in the conversations and notes that sounded