Why did the taxi crash on the autobahn in Vienna? Who exactly were Besfort Y and Rovena, the mysterious couple who died after being flung from the backseat? How was Besfort connected to the war in the Balkans? And why was his affair with Rovena clouded in jealousy and mistrust? Who wanted them dead? This is the story of the last forty weeks of their lives – a fever dream where love and obsession collide.
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Ismail Kadare. The Accident
Forty weeks before. A hotel. Morning
The same morning. Rovena
The same morning. Rovena again
The same day. Both together
Thirty-three weeks before. Liza, according to Besfort
The end of the same week. Rovena
Twenty-one weeks before. Snowstorm
Twelve weeks before. The other zone. Three chapters from Don Quixote
The same night. A Cervantes text
That same night. The occult text
The next day. Morning
The Hague. The last forty days
The last seven days
Also by Ismail Kadare
Copyright
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Part One
The police recorded the usual facts in such cases: the names of the victims (a man and a young woman, both Albanian citizens), the registration number of the cab, the name of the Austrian driver and the circumstances, or rather their total ignorance of the circumstances, in which the accident had occurred. There were no signs that the taxi had braked or been hit from any direction. The moving car had slid to the side of the road and somersaulted into a gully, as if the driver had suddenly lost his sight.
.....
Asked by the intelligence officers whether she nevertheless had any particular suspicions, Shpresa replied only after a long silence. Of course she had partly worked it out, if only vaguely. “I’ve got problems with Besfort,” Rovena had said on several other occasions, just generally, as anybody might open a conversation of this kind. When asked what sort of problems, she had replied that they were not easy to explain, and added after a silence: “B. is trying to persuade me we don’t need each other any more.”
“What sort of talk is that?” Shpresa had asked. When Rovena said nothing, her friend persisted. “And so? Does he want you to split up?”
