The Accident

From Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail Kadare comes a dizzying psychological thriller of twisted passions, dual identities, and political subterfuge. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the war in the Balkans, The Accident closely documents an affair between two young lovers caught in each other’s webs.

The Accident opens upon the death of a young man and woman, both Albanian citizens, who perished when their taxi careened off the road, flinging them both from the backseat of the car. The driver survived, though his claims of being distracted by what he saw in the rearview mirror don’t convince officials that it could’ve caused him to lose control of the car, that he must’ve suffered psychological trauma that’s caused him to believe he actually saw what he claims: that the pair was about to kiss.

They don’t believe him because, as an investigation into the accident and the lives of its victims are opened, officials learn that the two had been lovers for twelve years. But the nature of their relationship is frustratingly opaque. The man, Besfort Y, was an analyst working for the Council of Europe on western Balkan affairs; the beautiful young woman, Rovena, an intern at the Archaeological Institute of Vienna. They’d been leaving the Miramax Hotel and were on their way to the airport. Though the accident is a bit curious, it’s still tremendously surprising to the police and archivists when the governments of two Balkan countries ask to inspect the file on the accident, and to learn that Serbia and Montenegro had been keeping both victims under surveillance for quite some time. The Serbian response sparks the Albanian secret service into action too, suspicious of an organized political murder. On their way to discounting their theory, the Albanian government unearths a tremendous amount of information on the couple’s perplexing union, including letters that vary wildly in tone, from ordinary correspondence between lovers (mostly from her) to others written in a manner that suggests their relationship was nothing more than that between a call girl and her client?cold, distant, factual (mostly from him). They discover that the relationship had taken a horribly toxic turn within the last year, that Besfort was becoming tired of Rovena, wanted to get rid of her; that she was in agony over his ability to both neglect and oppress her at the same time. They also learned that Besfort Y had many contacts throughout Europe inside most of the human rights organizations, that he was closely tied to political and military information, and that he was the kind of person to be a thorn in the flesh of Yugoslavia and might in a way be called responsible for its bombing?thus Serbia and Montenegro’s interest in him. Still, the war was over at the time of his death, making political motives unreliable.

Their investigation also leads them to famous pianist, Liza Blumberg, known as Lulu Blum, who claims to be Rovena’s former lover, and who is convinced that Befort Y intended to murder Rovena, even if it meant that he’d die with her. Lulu later reveals that Besfort often confided top secret, conspiratorial information to Rovena and later regretted it?easy motive for a violent man to turn on his too-informed lover. Correspondence between Rovena and other friends soon confirmed that she was desperate to free herself of Besfort, but hadn’t the willpower. But a witness from Besfort’s life claims that he too was afraid?of what he didn’t know, but that it merely had to do with a woman with whom he ?mistakenly” got involved. It was evident that the case was at a standstill; both governments soon felt the case go cold and abandoned their efforts to solve the mystery. It wasn’t until some time later that a single researcher took up the investigation and nearly solved the riddle of the accident. He imagines the last forty weeks of their lives:

As the passion fades and hostilities rise between the lovers, both are prone to reminisce about their beginnings. Rovena remembers first hearing about Besfort as a university student, whispers of some quarrel over Israel that would likely result in him losing his teaching job. Upon their first meeting, Besfort invites the then-betrothed Rovena to a three-day conference in central Europe where they sleep together on the first night, their passionate affair immediately consuming. The minute she arrives home, Rovena tells her fiance that she is in love with another man who is sometimes intimate with other men, as Besfort revealed to her now that Albania had changed enough for bisexuality to be accepted, or at least not feared.

From the get-go Rovena can tell that Besfort is haunted?his moods vary wildly, she feels suffocated by him and yet disposable. Still, she decides to devote her life to him, following him throughout Europe whenever he needs to switch countries, living from hotel rooms. Rovena’s tolerance of the arrangement doesn’t last long, however; as the years pass, Rovena begins to resent Besfort for making her feel like a kept woman. Her needs lead her to a one-night stand with a German man at a club. It is not her first infidelity: back when she was still a student and Besfort was traveling, she’d slept with a Slovakian friend too. And some years later, their estrangement allows for her romantic relationship with Lulu, an involvement that began merely as a way to start freeing herself from Besfort’s control and influence. The sexual nature of the women's relationship does make Besfort even more controlling, causing him to call her all the time. Lulu tries everything she can to convince Rovena to forget Besfort, that he’s poisoned her mind and heart. She even goes as far as to propose marriage, but her proposal has the opposite effect on Rovena: all it really does is make Rovena bitter and angry that Besfort isn’t the one who asked her to marry. Rovena’s contact with Besfort increases at this time, leading to jealousy on Lulu’s part and desperate attempts to win Rovena back. Eventually Rovena’s indecision wears on Lulu who soon collapses with frustration, screams for Rovena to return to her warmonger and terrorist.

The resulting jealousies and estrangements lead to a transformation in Besfort’s lust, but in no way diminish it. He begins to inch closer to his initial impulses to completely dominate Rovena. He decides that the only way he can establish full control over her is to take her very life in his hands; in other words, to murder her. Without going that far, he instead suggests a divorce, a shift to client and call-girl. An introduction of other men and lovers as a means to not only be free of their own toxic bonds, but to cause a distance that will deepen their lust for one another. Though his mind is twisted and tortured enough that he winds up shooting in her bed one evening, but purposefully in a place that won’t kill her. She doesn’t fight him, knows it’s coming and allows it to happen; she rises after he falls back to sleep, dresses the wound, and also go back to bed. It’s not discussed again.

Under this new arrangement, the pair secretly travels to The Hague under the guise of a having a holiday in Denmark. On the second night of their arrival, Rovena wakes up alone in the hotel room. For a moment, she’s startled by her solitude and fears she’s not in the right room. She notices that the aftershave on the bathroom counter is familiar, but none of Besfort’s clothes are hung in the closets as usual. His bags are the same, but inside she finds a folder full of war pictures of dead children?and their addressed to Besfort. As she travels into town, she learns of a tribunal at The Hague and deduces that Besfort must be there, that they’ve traveled in secret because he didn’t want anyone to know he would be at the courts?but was he summoned himself or his he merely a spectator? She never finds out for sure.

A week before the accident, Rovena and Besfort are once again apart, though connected through thought. She wants to call him, but restrains herself; he sits a thousand miles away worrying that she might be pregnant. The researcher shockingly stops here, never making it through their last week or the day of the accident. It remains incomplete to him. He knows only of Besfort’s request for a leave of absence from work three days before the accident was granted, but not why the leave was requested or where he was those three days. He knows that Lulu alleged that Besfort murdered Rovena the night before the accident. The researcher attempts to talk to the cab driver again, convinced he holds the key, but the man won’t give him anything new. He speaks again to Lulu, who holds firm that Rovena and Besfort had a maniacal, treacherous love built on dangerous games and the quest to procure a still-imagined level of love and necessity. He needed to own her, thus his reduction of her from idealized lover to call-girl and then, as she surmises, to her ultimate death at his hands. She also felt his impulse to kill her was borne in part from his fear that he’d bared his secret depths to this woman and could no longer accept that truth. To not believe that he killed her would be to not believe in their love. Finally Lulu reveals to the researcher that she knows Besfort killed Rovena because she herself harbored a secret plan to do the very same thing. She is also convinced that Rovena was killed before the accident and was not present in the car at all; that Besfort carried a dummy with him, a doll. The researcher starts at this news?there were indeed police reports that mentioned a dummy. But when he confronts the driver again, whom he now thinks was involved in the cover-up, the man still claims that he’s unsure about what he saw. The researcher is convinced that the driver was startled when Besfort attempted to kiss the doll, or perhaps even the corpse of Rovena, and that’s why he lost control.

Lulu then reneges her story about the murder when she's convinced that Rovena is alive, that she attended Lulu's recent concert, her hair dyed blonde, her name know Anevor (Rovena backwards), that they made love before Rovena fled in the early morning hours. In the end, the researcher must surrender to the fact that it’s impossible to deduce the last week of Besfort and Rovena’s lives, or the true nature of their unnatural and obsessive love.

Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Albania. His novels have been published in more than forty countries, and in 2005 he became the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize.