Asgard Park

Chapter 5

Book 1, Shequere Avxhiu

Chapter 5THE SMELL OF DEVELOPER and fixer still clung to what passed for Avxhiu’s home. Charles Grenville found himself sitting in a run-down crumbling cubicle that once upon a time had doubled as photo-studio and apartment.

The days had gone by in a heady blur. Grenville had loved her company, but the young woman had ended their agreement in the face of his attempts to win her. To let her go without compensation was cruel. Succeeding in eluding his Sigurimi shadows, he had tracked her down to this run-down rut. Sitting on her single, rickety chair, staring at bare walls painted blue in the early days of Hoxha, he still wanted her. It was no longer a physical urge. Was he compromising her? Having a foreign man in her home at night might brand her.

“I am leaving tomorrow on the flight to Rome.”

His eyes wandered a rusty iron pipe along the flaking ceiling to seek out marks of the rope where the husband of this raven-haired child had hung himself. There was no reason to prolong his stay. Her dreams of a better life had no tangible connection with reality. Dreams of the good life rarely did. He would make one last pitch.

“Sweet Avxhiu”, he said carefully, “accept my offer. I will set you up in a private apartment in Paris.”

“I have apartment”, she said making a flippant gesture with her slender hand, and pride he did not understand.

“Avxhiu, a good apartment in Paris costs a million dollars or more. Hoxha studied there. He could not afford it. You love books. I will buy you books to read. You’ll have a good apartment, the best food in the world, fine clothes, money in your pocket. Everything you dreamt of.”

“And old man in my bed.”

Grenville understood that the first tiny cracks were showing in her defenses; that she was angry and needed to fight an unwanted temptation. With her back to him, she was boiling water on a one-ring stove. He could no longer let her run the slack. He played the ace up his sleeve.

“If you like, Avxhiu, you can take the Kid with you. The two of you will love Paris. The Kid wants to go. I asked her and she said yes. I don’t want her, but you need a companion. I can get both of you a visa and we can fly out together. Don’t stay behind, alone.”

“I’m not alone. I have brother Spiro!”

Grenville got up and crossed the floor. Being tall, he towered over this fine creature in her flat worn shoes. A slim white neck above a flowered cotton dress smelled of shampoo. Carefully he reached out and touched her waist from behind with both hands. Sensing her resistance, he made it a fatherly touch.

“Sweet Avxhiu, your brother has asked me to get him a job in Canada.”

“Can you do this, please?”

“Yes, of course, a well-paid job because he is your brother; and for you I will do anything!”

“I don’t f**k foreigners,” she said to say something.

Grenville smiled. She must have picked up the phrase from the Kid whom he f****d on that first night. There was no escaping that. A deal was a deal. He had walked brother and sister out into the warm summer night. Waving them off, he had taken the Kid to his room. Since then, it was a frantic race between age and days ebbing towards departure, doubtless with the Sigurimi watching. The Kid was a force of nature with no boundaries, an exhilarating and occasionally uplifting experience. Her persistence exhausted him. The smell of her slim adolescent body after a bath, her childlike looks with the cosmetics gone. The way she moved around a room like a half-grown. She was none of that when pleasing him. He had never thought anyone could go so far to please, even for money. What an odd discovery after so many righteous decades.

Grenville was not much for gossip. He had listened to boardroom discussions on forbidden pleasures. For many colleagues, it was humdrum routine. He was the bigger fool for it. But Avxhiu was no model short-shifted by falling demand, looking for a sugar daddy to keep her in designer clothes and sustain exclusive habits. She was no fading flower clinging to an agent’s scrapbook. It was enormously pleasing.

Grenville thought of Helene, his beloved wife, formerly Miss Kimberley. It was an oddly impersonal thought of a woman with whom he had shared a life. He had discovered a boardroom joke he would never tell; life sucks if you are married to a woman who doesn’t. And he reflected about his Grace the Archbishop, his lifelong friend. It evoked no remorse. On the contrary, if the Lord saw fit to smite him with the supreme sentence for this spell of unprotected carousing, he could abstain from the world and nurture a precious memory. Not that he was religious; he went through the motions with friends and family. Even the thought of his sweet granddaughter stirred no guilt: Laura was years older than the child who had fondled his private parts, trying patiently to work the miracle of life, and painfully succeeding at times. They would all think him a dirty old man if they knew, but for a few days he had been a happy one.

The heart of his problem was that Avxhiu had proved too wise and chaste to succumb to his machinations. In a way her steadfastness pleased him above all else. No vice president would keep a downtown flat with her installed as a prop for a rainy night. He tried to fuse the memory of the Kid’s slim body onto the memory of another face, another smile. A composite secret assembled from the Kid’s limbs and Avxhiu’s noble face. There was no contradiction in this, he felt. Two ideals fused into one; the earthly lover who greedily nestles in your darkest dreams, and the image of unattainable innocence.

“I am sincere, sweet Avxhiu. If you come with me, you will never want for anything.”

“If Grenville good man, please go away, but first I give coffee, yes.”

He left her by the little stove that was her pride and returned to sit heavily on the wobbly chair.

“We drink coffee together, yes please.” She bowed as she handed him a small, cracked cup of black boiled coffee.

“You wouldn’t have sugar and milk?”

He saw that deep blush again, close to tears. No, of course not; how could she have sugar and milk?

“You drink Avxhiu coffee?”

“All right, sweetheart.”

The wretched coffee was like something scraped off a new asphalt road. He toasted his secret love in this nauseating brew. There was this certain gleam in her eye; dark and mystical eyes that twinkled of sweet-natured perfection; eyes to occupy his secret memory.

“Sweet Avxhiu.”

He studied her face in the barren light from the single naked bulb in the ceiling. She studied him back through dark pools of beauty. A strange silence had descended on him. He wanted to say something but did not know what. A terrible pain had spiked his stomach. He saw a star swim in her unearthly eyes and dared not breathe. It seemed that his entire sensory system was drowning in a sea of pain. But his eyes enjoyed her face.

In the end, all that remained was the sparkle in her eye, a reflection of a barren bulb. It swam in his secret sea of fading light until the last twinkle died.

Avxhiu dared not sit on the bed for fear that he might come and sit beside her. She disliked him intensely, his velvet arrogance. His unwillingness to listen, a trait he hid behind an attentive ear. Making him coffee: a gift from Spiro, she was unsure how much sleeping medicine to put in. She needed to calm a lovesick man, not put him to sleep, and she was not going to let him make love to her. Spiro kept his drops in a can in the corner among the photo chemicals. The Kid had told her Spiro used them to drug people to rob them. What did Rakipe know? Spiro was always pulling her leg. The electricity was on, and she hoped it would last. The lamp had expired last time she used it. She was out of oil and did not wish to sit in the dark with a foreigner. The neighbors were suspicious enough. If he tried to have his way, she would not dare call out. They would not believe her.

And why was she even thinking about his lurid offer? It was Spiro and the Kid. Accepting, she could give them a future, but she recoiled from her part in that future; from the idea of kissing these thin colorless lips.

Memories of recklessly careening down potholed roads together on her husband’s bike with freedom on their faces, scattering flocks of chicken were different. In the mountains, they spent time off the road to make love. She ached for the feeling that life was going somewhere. Was this man her rope?

Avxhiu watched him go to sleep on that small chair. The incisive eyes grew soft in his pale, friendless face. This caused the first stirrings of panic. His pensive stare had nothing of its usual directness. The foreigner might think she planned to rob him.

“Maybe I go to Paris, Mr. Grenville, if Kid comes. Please no sleep here, sir.”

He did not close his eyes. The grand old head edged out of balance to the left; in the direction that he combed his thin well-groomed hair. Avxhiu thought he was going to be sick. She reached out deftly and relieved him of the coffee cup. With two cups on her cupboard, this was the better one. If he was going to throw up, it would be a mess: the water was not on.

He didn’t. Instead, he gently toppled over and tumbled onto the floor, slamming his head into its chipped bricks. His chin took the impact, but he did not make a sound. She knew it must have hurt. With the coffee cup in her hand, she was too slow to prevent it. His mouth was open in an ugly scowl, a familiar snarl of dim-witted pain and apprehensive distrust. Alarmed, she found it unsettling on the face of a rich foreigner.

“Mr. Grenville, you the winner. Maybe I go to Paris in your bed like Madame Bovary.” It was in one of her books.

In spite of her eloquence, the man on the floor was unmoved by this tactical surrender. Grenville had lost all interest in matters of the flesh. Avxhiu knew that this was not a healthy way to greet a conquest. She put out her hand to nudge a chest that no longer heaved. She bent down to put her ear to an open mouth. It offered no material temptations. This was all wrong.

It was how she felt when she found Emir hanging from the pipe in the corner, the familiar shock of suspended disbelief. This man was dead. Raising herself from the floor she stood motionless for a long time and stared at the distinguished foreigner who was no longer promising anybody a way out.

A little later, into her maze of thoughts there came a familiar sound associated with joy. It was the sound of a motorcycle. She fought to fit it into this calamity. The knock on the door brought her to her senses. Her cousin Fatos had come to return Emir’s motorcycle; as good as new, Spiro said. He would want coffee or a drink if she had any to offer. To send him away was rude after all his labors with the bike. She must not let him in. Allegations of promiscuity are better than accusations of murder. Shaking off the cotton dress, she stepped out of it and grabbed the bed sheet to drape over her shoulders, as she stepped outside. She took care that her cousin did not see the body on the floor as she whispered to him that she had a man in her bed. “Sigurimi,” she added for good measure, “come with the bike tomorrow and I will have something good for you.”

Had Spiro lied about the sleeping drops? The Sigurimi had closed the prison camps, but people said prisons were no better, particularly for women. She studied the pipe in the ceiling, but her courage betrayed her.

Besides, the Sigurimi had impounded the rope.