The Accident by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online Page B

such as his invitation over dinner, a week after they had met, to a three-day conference in a Central European city.
    She had said nothing. She had lowered her eyes in shame and a mist had crept over the evening after dinner, and over the whole world.
    All through that sleepless night, the same questions turned feverishly round in my brain. What was this invitation? Was it sexual? Of course it was. What else could it be? Alone in a hotel. Three days, in other words three nights, with a man that you have still not embraced. Oh God, it couldn’t mean anything else. And she started again: what if he didn’t mean what she thought? What if they didn’t share a room? But of course they would. It could only be a double room. A double bed too.
    One week later, he told me on the telephone in a restrained, almost cold, voice that the tickets had arrived. He left me no time to reply, or even feel a rush of anger. In an almost seigneurial fashion, he was issuing to a young woman an invitation for a trip, for love, for sex. Curtly, he informed me where he would give me my ticket and told me the departure date.
    All my protests starting with “How dare he . . .?” were useless and insincere. Obediently, with head bowed, for all my pretensions to be a young woman of discrimination, I went to the Café Europa, where he was waiting with the ticket. It hadn’t been as difficult as I expected to justify the trip. Remember that flood of invitations from associations, NGOs, religious sects, minority groups, all those “alternative” types. “Be careful they’re not a group of lesbians,” said my fiancé with a supposedly knowing grin. One week later, my face drained by insomnia, I found myself at Rinas Airport. We greeted each other from a distance. He had a brooding look, and I liked that. I could have borne anything at that moment except small talk.
    It was a day of fog and rain. The aircraft barely carved its way through the clouds. I was totally numb. The journey seemed endless . . . At one point I wanted to leave my seat and sit next to him, so that I could at least lay my head on his shoulder before we crashed.
    After our arrival in the evening, still strangers, we at last found ourselves in the taxi heading towards the great city. The headlights of oncoming cars slid past, in turn lighting up his face and leaving it in darkness, as if it were a mask.
    We did not speak. He put his arm round my shoulder. I limply waited for him to kiss me, but this did not happen. He seemed even more dazed and absent than I was.
    For a moment, my gaze caught the eyes of the driver in the rear-view mirror. He seemed to be staring at me instead of the road. I knew that this was because I was tired, but I moved aside slightly to be out of his line of vision. Besfort felt my movement and drew me closer. But still we did not embrace. In the hotel room, as we opened our bags, we seemed not to look at each other.
    In the late-night bar, we kissed for the first time. I was about to say something, but instead blurted out something else entirely: “My fiancé and I haven’t taken precautions recently . . .”
    There was no taking back what I’d said. It seemed to me later that it was these words that melted everything away.
    His eyes were fixed on my knees, as if he was seeing them for the first time. I felt his stare penetrate the black fabric of my miniskirt to the point where my thighs met, where he was now invited to enter without protection . . .
    “Shall we go upstairs?” he said after a short time.
    Freed from shame, and with reddened cheeks, I did not hide my eagerness. Let’s go upstairs as fast as we can, to the seventh floor, seventh heaven . . .
    When I came out of the bathroom and lay down beside him, before removing the towel from my chest, I whispered, “Am I too thin?”
    He did not understand what I said, or pretended not to. We caressed each other and I thought of the words of Zara the gypsy woman, yet I could not say them for shame,