Читать книгу The Accident - Ismail Kadare - Страница 8

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None of the other information, gathered in various places, helped the intelligence officers to pin down the facts at all. In the wake of the waiters’ evidence, the dead couple’s letters seemed even less coherent. Sometimes they read like the ordinary correspondence of lovers, even when she complained of his behaviour. Yet sometimes their tone was entirely different, and the terse notes between them suggested that this was a purely routine relationship between a call girl and her client.

The officers could hardly believe their eyes when they read phrases of hers such as “Whatever happens, I will love you all my life,” followed by notes from him on later dates, giving his hotel address and adding, “Everything OK on the same terms as last time?”

This could be interpreted in two ways. He could be referring to the length of their stay – one, two or more nights – but it rather hinted at remuneration. Moreover, now and then the expression “call girl” appeared, and he seemed eager to use it, whether accurately or not.

In her earlier letters she would quote phrases of his that implied he had once written quite normally – about how he had missed her, was impatient to see her, and so forth. The change apparently took place during the final phase of their long association.

Careful calculation revealed that their relationship had lasted some twelve years, and that their estrangement had occurred only in the last fifty-two weeks. The expression “call girl”, like some boundary marker, appeared forty weeks before their deaths.

“I admit that you have given me boundless happiness,” she had written in one of her letters, “but just as often your cruel irritability has made my life a misery.”

She had continually complained of this, and in a letter dated 2000 told him that the only time she had felt totally happy with him had been during the year of the Kosovo War, when he seemed to discharge his nervous tension in an entirely different direction.

“After Serbia was defeated you didn’t seem to know what to do with yourself and you turned on me again.”

This final phrase led the Albanian intelligence officers to believe that they had solved one of the mysteries: the reason for Besfort Y.’s surveillance by the Serbian and Montenegrin secret service. With his many contacts in Strasbourg and Brussels, and inside most of the international human rights organisations, Besfort Y. was naturally the kind of person to be a thorn in the side of Yugoslavia, and might in a way be deemed responsible for its bombing.

It was easy to deduce why this surveillance began at such a late stage, after the war was over. Just at this time, a kind of remorse at the punishment and dismemberment of Yugoslavia led to attempts to revise the facts. Thousands of people were either elated or thrown into despair at the prospect of the bombing being called a mistake.

As the tide of this campaign swelled, it became normal to sling mud at people like Besfort Y. and all those who had worked for the demise of Yugoslavia. His girlfriend’s letter could be interpreted to show that this man, driven by a kind of perverse fury, would not rest in peace until this neighbouring state was crushed, and that his girlfriend, perhaps his inspiration, was just an ordinary hooker.

Reluctant though they were to admit it, the Albanian intelligence officers suspected that there was an element of truth in what the Serbs said, especially about Besfort Y.’s girlfriend. In an attempt to prove the opposite, the interviewers did their rounds again, visiting the travel agencies, bars, hotel swimming pools and the small apartment where some of the dead woman’s cardboard boxes were still in the cellar.

This did nothing to dispel the confusion in their minds. They began to genuinely suspect that there had been not one but two women whose identities they had mixed up.

Or so they would have liked to believe, but to their despair they became more and more convinced that this young woman of such disturbing loveliness, whom they now knew so well from her letters, the testimonies of others and especially from private photographs, merely concealed within herself a second nature.