The Accident by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online

It’s what all the mustachioed men of the Balkans and the East do. It’s so hard to quarrel with him. Sometimes in the middle of a fight you want to embrace him.”
    At such moments, try as she might, Rovena could not cope with the tide of her emotion. She kept thinking: he has me in chains. He calls me a princess, but in fact he knows very well that he is the prince and I am only a slave. “I keep telling myself this, but it changes nothing. Do you understand?” Her friend from Berne replied that it was hard to know what she meant.
    “I understand you when you say that together you get on wonderfully and then you quarrel on the phone, although, in my case, with the man I have, the opposite happens – we say sweet nothings on the phone and as soon as we see each other we’re at each other’s throats. I understand that bit, darling, but the other things, about slaves and masters, seem way over the top.”
    “I know, I know, that’s how other people’s problems always seem.” Sometimes, explaining a quarrel to her girlfriend was more exhausting than the original argument itself. “I’m trying to tell you simply that he’s preventing me from living my life. I’m not saying he does this on purpose, but the truth is that he has me tied hand and foot and he won’t let me go. His life is going downhill. Mine isn’t, and he only drags me after him. He doesn’t think of me, how young I am, the sacrifices I’m making.
    “As I said before, the problem is that it’s hard to quarrel with him, and still harder to win. Once I sobbed out that I had given him my entire youth and asked nothing in return and he replied coldly that he had also given me the best part of his life.” That was how their arguments usually ended. After them he would move on, confident that she would follow. Because he had known from the start that she would follow him, while she had only realised this later, and, crazy as she was, had not only admitted as much to him, but had also written it in letters. Did she understand now?
    “No. I don’t understand you,” was her friend’s reply. “You told me the opposite in your letters. You wrote that you were happy, madly in love. After all, every one of us expects this from life, to fall in love. There’s something unpleasant about this expression, looked at from the outside. Falling in love. A bit like falling into a pit, a trap, a kind of servitude. You have every right to get angry with this man Besfort if he treats you badly. But you have no right to get angry about the things that made you fall in love with him in the first place. You should thank him. And if you decide suddenly that this relationship is a mistake, then that’s your fault and not his. Rovena, darling, I don’t understand these things you say. Maybe there are other things that you’re not telling me. I don’t think you know yourself what you want.”
    This was in fact the truth: Rovena did not know what she wanted. His jealousy made her angry, but his indifference infuriated her even more. During one of her outbursts about this infamous obstacle that prevented her from living, after his bitter retort, “Aha, so you’ve got some adventure in mind,” he had uttered the hateful phrase: “Do what you want. We’ve never promised fidelity.”
    Really? she said to herself. Is that all I mean to you? Just you wait and see.
    For days the sour aftertaste of this phone conversation lingered. You will see, she repeated to herself. The day will come and you’ll throw off your mask.
    In the midst of her anger, she wondered what that day would be like and what lay behind this mask – and she longed to find out.
    He still stood motionless by the window, or rather his back did.
    Rovena made a final effort to sleep, even for a few minutes, in the hope of giving the day a different beginning. Like every day of crisis, it was starting badly. A few happy memories were not enough to put it back on course, as she used to imagine. Her