The Accident Read Online Free PDF Page A

flying across a clear sky, re-enters a patch of turbulence. Dark surmises, grave suspicions, ambiguous phrases, obscure scraps of dialogue drawn from half-remembered phone conversations loomed out of the fog and vanished again. Besfort had written: “In your last letter you mentioned defeating me. Did you really dream of such a thing, even for a moment? Don’t you realise that I might be more dangerous in defeat?” Her reply: “Believe me, this misunderstanding between us has worn me down.” His answer: “Don’t worry about a thing like that. This sort of anxiety comes from the body, not the soul.”
    Then Rovena talked to her friend Shpresa.
    “He told me yesterday that I should keep to the pact between us.”
    “What pact? This is the first time you’ve mentioned such a thing.”
    “Really?”
    “If I’m really your friend, you must be more honest.”
    “I know, but do you think this is easy for me?”
    “This story just gets more obscure.”
    “Have you heard of Empedocles?”
    “Hm, I think I’ve heard the name, but I’m not sure.”
    “He was new to me too. He’s an ancient philosopher. Out of curiosity to see what no human eye had seen before, he threw himself into the crater of Etna.”
    “So? What’s he got to do with you?”
    “Not me, the two of us.”
    “I still don’t understand.”
    “Well, one day he said to me that we would try something totally unfamiliar, and he mentioned this famous man Empedocles.”
    “Rovena, I don’t understand you. Are you going to throw yourself off a cliff because some crazy character did so five thousand years ago?”
    “Slow down. I’m not as far gone as that. It was just a comparison. What we were taught at school to call a metaphor. But still, just imagining it makes me scared.”
    “Of course it’s scary. Just your talking about it makes my skin crawl. Someone jumping into the lava out of curiosity . . . a funny sort of curiosity!”
    “Is that how you imagined the crater? Active?”
    “What?”
    “I was asking if you imagined the crater with molten lava or not?”
    “Is that important? When you mentioned a volcano, I thought of lava.”
    “But I imagined it extinct, black, desolate. And like that it’s twice as frightening. Wait, he said that this was what falling into a black hole would be like, coming out into another dimension . . .”
    “Listen, Rova, and don’t misunderstand me. It would be good if you came here as soon as you can. Take a few days’ rest. This Alpine air will do you good. We’ll have a good time together, like in the old days. We’ll remember all those jokes from university. Remember that doggerel by the guy from Durrës in the other seminar group?
Rova is an antibiotic
Short for Rovamycin
But Rovena is hypnotic
Elegant and enticing.
    The researcher used the young woman’s words “I’m scared”, repeated over and over again, as the starting point for his questioning of the taxi driver.
    “She said, ‘I’m scared, but I don’t know why. I pretend not to be frightened of him. He also pretends not to frighten me any more. But none of this is true.’ Why were you so shaken by what you saw, or thought you saw, in the mirror?”
    This question, although lifted from the written record, had lost none of its ominous weight.
    “Did it remind you of anything? Even dimly, or indirectly? Some kind of obstacle, a taboo, something that should never happen?”
    “I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure.”
    “Were you scared?”
    “Yes.”
    Everybody in this story was scared, with or without reason. They were scared of one other, of themselves or of someone, no one could tell who.
    Some part of this fear had been conveyed through the mirror in the taxi. But where had the rest come from?
    The researcher finally succeeded in meeting Lulu Blumb, getting her to talk and ensuring her continued cooperation. Her suspicion of murder was difficult to dismiss, but also hard to confirm.
    She almost exploded with rage. “Are