The Accident by Ismaíl Kadaré Page A

your slave.”
    He let her say her piece. She said he had enslaved her. He had closed every door that opened for her, and not allowed her the slightest freedom. He wanted her entirely for himself, like every tyrant. He had made her seek therapy. He had crippled her, he had ruined her sex life.
    He butted in to say that the opposite was true, that he, or rather both of them, as she had said time and again, had refined their sex life to a degree that few others had achieved. But that, she protested, is precisely what should not have happened. He had violated her nature . . . her psyche.
    “Is that the twaddle your German doctor talks?” he interrupted.
    “Precisely that,” came her answer.
    He imagined her breasts, and the insult and pain he felt at the prospect of never seeing them again made his response unexpectedly quiet. He would leave her in peace, but she should understand one thing, that her description of him was unfair. He had been her liberator, but this was not the first time in history that a liberator had been taken for a tyrant, just as many a tyrant had been taken for a liberator.
    That was more or less all he said. Her next telephone call three weeks later came to him as if from a great distance. Her voice was different. Neither of them mentioned the quarrel. She said that she’d been in London with the rest of her course group. That she had taken up sport, mainly swimming. It was as if nothing had happened. Only when she asked, “Are we going to see each other?” a silence fell.
    “What do you think?” he asked.
    Her reply was unexpected: “I don’t know.”
    He almost shouted, “Then what the hell are you calling for? Why ask if we are going to see each other?”
    “Listen,” she went on. “I want us to meet, like before, but I don’t want to lie to you . . . Something has happened . . .”
    So that was it. In the long silence that followed, she seemed to be waiting for the question whose time had finally come. Is there somebody else? But he said nothing. He had asked this question at the wrong time, and now that its hour had struck he kept his silence. Slut, he said to himself. NGO whore. International scholarship tart. But aloud he said, “I don’t want to know.”
    Her own reply was also slow in coming. Perhaps she expected something else, or took his answer as a sign he didn’t care. “Really? So you don’t want to know? OK, I’ll give you the whole bitter truth: you are no longer what you were. I belong to someone else.”
    “I realise that. I’ve known for some time . . .”
    She wanted to reply: “But you pretend not to care. That’s how you usually behave. You hit back at someone else when you’re on the ropes yourself.” But she did not utter this final retort out loud. Her unspoken words flew round her brain like lost birds that could not find their way out. He listened to her laboured breathing, until finally she said, “If that’s the case, then come here . . .”
    The flight was tiring. The plane listed perpetually to one side, or so it seemed to him. It was literally a lame journey. Drowsily he imagined her in front of the mirror, getting ready for another man. Choosing lingerie. Her armpits, between her legs. An unnatural faintness, at the same time a burning and a weakness, slowed his heartbeat. If it was another man who had caused this estrangement, why should she be so angry with him? The anger should be on his side.
    The flight was like a journey in a dream, in which arrival is indefinitely deferred.
    He saw her from a distance, waiting in the same place as always. Her paleness made her even more beautiful. She had changed her hairstyle, and lowered her head in a different way as she walked.
    They embraced hesitantly in the taxi, as if through glass. She was the same and not the same. Words beginning with “re”– recognition, resurrection – sprung to mind. They would haunt him for days. He had thought that he would never arrive, but now the prospect of