Ruins of Autumn

34• Broken Black

 
    Like someone who had just miraculously escaped the fight to survive against a pack of wolves and was still running chased by them in a dense forest at dusk through the snow, such a feeling, which had been able to imprison her heart in the icy cell of fear, wasn't allowing Leonora to sleep peacefully.
 
    Anila Idrizaj.
 
    That name was engraved in the centre of her thoughts, and her brain was creating all kinds of images of what the person in question, about whom she had said didn't exist, could look like.
 
    She was covered in white sheets, and while staying half-raised at the head of the bed in the bedroom with the curtains closed, she was rolling her phone in her hands on her belly and thinking about searching for Anila on the Internet. 
 
    Anxiety, from what she could find out, increased her reluctance to turn on the phone. She had to do such a search; she was aware that that was the right path to follow. This was about a fatal crime against an innocent person, and she couldn't close her eyes before such injustice. Perhaps she was mistaken in her intuition that Diana had been lying and Blerimi was really to blame.
 
    What if that was true? All that time, she had loved a monster? The hands that had touched her soul in healing were the very ones that had killed another woman's soul forever? The lips that had recovered her body were the same ones that had destroyed every cell of another woman's body? While she herself had been enjoying life on the verge during those months thanks to Blerimi, a woman on the other side of the world had been imprisoned under the trauma caused by him? Leonora didn't have to guess how depressed Anila must have been because she had experienced such a disaster herself.
 
    Maybe Anila had fallen in love and was healed.
 
    But was there truly a criminal that wicked in the same house as Leonora at those moments?
 
    Her eyes risked bursting into tears when that hypothesis was thrown as a true one. She would be completely devastated if she had really been wrong about him, but she'd rather experience that kind of devastation than suffer the same fate as Anila, someone else to risk suffering like her, or even her future child falling into the same trap. 
 
    She turned on her phone, went to Google, and typed 'Anila Idrizaj'.
 
    With frozen hands and a stiff stabbing sensation through them, she read the information shown: a public Instagram account with the username @anila.idrizaj , which had 30.3k followers, 2387 accounts following, and 3045 posts. 
 
    She touched the account's link to go to Instagram to see the photos, with the argument that perhaps Anila was a book or a movie character, which Diana had said, thinking that she and Blerimi wouldn't recognise her, and therefore there was no need to tremble in panic, that she was leaving the safe shore and entering the deep, turbulent sea.
 
    That Instagram account's profile picture was of a real woman, not an animated figure, and in the bio was the quote, 'Live the now.' She went straight to the last picture Anila had taken, wearing a long sleeveless lilac pink dress with a slightly open neckline, her back against the closed door of a white car, her elbows on the window, her head tilted back, and smiling with her face in the sun, her long light almond hair loose, and her eyes closed. The photo was posted over three years ago with the caption 'Happy, inner child 💗'. 
 
        Leonora looked at the next post, a picture of Anila with just the physical part over her shoulders, wearing a primrose top, her hair swept to the left, a small mole on her right ear, small bright cocoa eyes, and pouty lips sweetly inseparable from each other. For that post, she had published the caption 'Virgo rising vibes 🌸 (looks like a cinnamon roll, could... )'. The feeling of perfection that Leonora got from that photo created a positive impression of how beautiful Anila was and a wish to see her photos again.
 
    But maybe that wasn't the girl Leonora was looking for. She logged out of her account and searched for anyone else with that name. It had to be someone else. Or maybe Anila really didn't exist at all. Diana had searched for that name on Instagram, figuring Leonora would search for it as well, had found that account, and had created the story based on its existence, knowing the two women would never meet each other. She couldn't find any other information for Anila Idrizaj. 
 
    She scrolled down the screen and stopped at the name Amarildo Idrizaj. For him, it was written that three years ago, on November 3rd, the thirty-year-old was found murdered in Tirana in the early hours of the morning.
 
    That story would have been valid, too, for the accusations made by Diana that morning, and she had taken the necessary measures regarding them. Such an argument seemed illogical to Leonora, as if she were deliberately trying to convince herself that she shouldn't trust the information she had found out because if she did, she would have to admit that Blerimi was against her.
 
    She couldn't keep on living that way. She had to clarify that misunderstanding once and for all, and the person who could help her was Denada Gjozefi.
 
••••
    Blerimi opened the door of their bedroom after half an hour and found Leonora sitting on the dark red armchair next to the windows with a lost look and the switched-off phone in her right hand.
 
    "Couldn't you sleep?" He entered the room and closed the door behind him. 
 
    "No," Leonora said in a low voice. "I talked to Denada, and she told me about Amarildo Idrizaj and your sister, Xhuliana."
 
    He stopped walking in the middle of the room, and his breath suddenly got caught in his throat from her stern gaze.
 
    "What on God's name have you done, Blerim?"
 
    "Nora, don't think about anything without listening to my explanation." Blerimi approached with little hope that he hadn't lost his wife forever.
 
    "Don't come near me!" she ordered harshly, without turning her head to look at him, and he stopped right away.
 
    Leonora had turned on the voice recorder on the phone to get Blerimi's confession about the crime against Anila and would use it to put him in prison with its help. At least the denial in front of Diana and standing by her husband's side a little while ago would be worth something to her. She would hardly have been able to take that record if she had faced him then. 
 
    "That's why you apologised for not meeting me before? We were supposed to meet that night, but you didn't come because you were with Anila? You were planning to..." She dropped her head on her hands and closed her tired eyes to remove the mask of stoicism and express how much she was suffering from the pain by clutching her hair.
 
    "Please," he felt the multiple of her suffering, and it hurt him even more that he couldn't calm her down. "I acted out of hatred and out of pain from the loss of Xhuliana and my mother's death. If I had been with the current mindset, I would never have acted in that way."
 
    "Oh, so if you had been with the mentality of that time, you would have acted," Leonora assumed ironically.
 
    "No," Blerimi protested. "I would have thought more deeply and wouldn't have included Anila at all. I cannot express how sorry I am."
 
    "This can't be tolerated, Blerim. Forgiveness isn't included at all in this case, only tolerance. You have committed an atrocity, and you can do it again, to me or to Anila."
 
    "Nora, I would never do that to you or anyone else," he swore, more hurt by her guessing his intentions. "And I have thought about apologising to Anila all those times, but I thought about letting some time pass."
 
    "If you would have done this, too..." she forced a sarcastic laugh.
 
    "Things have changed now. Maybe she has also left it in the past." Blerimi justified himself.
 
    "Maybe," Leonora continued ironically. "And it must have been simple, because rape isn't that much trauma, like some people exaggerate, by saying that it isn't that easy to forget it, right?"
 
    "Amarildo killed Xhuliana!" he protested against her insistence on seeing only one side of the coin. "He destroyed my whole family! Should I have done nothing?"
 
    "You didn't have any right to mess with Anila!" Leonora also lost her temper and stood up with an accusing look, without any feelings of love towards him. "What crime did she commit?" she asked, her voice raised from fury.
 
    Blerimi had no response.
 
    "Even if she had known about Juliana, she should have gone to prison, not suffered what you did to her."
 
    "I was blinded by revenge," he tried to convince her.
 
    "You blinded yourself with revenge," corrected Leonora, unmoved by her attitude. "Did you kill her brother?"
 
    "... Yes."
 
    "Where are the videos?"
 
    "What videos?"
 
    "Yours and Anila's together."
 
    "I have deleted them," Blerimi admitted, guilty of their existence in the past. "That day when I met you for the first time."
 
    "What about ours?"
 
    "Nora," the whipping of that question along with her disgusted look towards him showed no mercy at all for Blerimi, the stab of which he felt, shattered the centre of his chest.
 
    "Where are they?" Her insistence broke him even more.
 
    "I haven't filmed us," he saw as the only solution, to be believed, giving that answer.
 
    "Denada asked me to leave the house secretly before you found out that I knew about you and Anila because you might hurt me, and I told her that I would leave. Do you want to know why I stayed? Not because I love you." Leonora removed that option herself. "But because deep down that was what I wanted—you to try to hurt me so that I could have a reason to get rid of you."
 
    Blerimi tried to find out in her eyes that she was lying, but Leonora seemed more ready than ever to really kill him.
 
    "I will tell the lawyer to prepare the divorce papers as soon as possible."
 
    "No," he denied, his eyes almost in tears.
 
    It couldn't be the end between them after everything they had been through. There had to be enough love from her side to fight one last battle for them. 
 
    "You're saying that only out of anger at the moment," argued Blerimi. "Think this through once more, and put yourself in my position. How would you have acted if such an injustice was done to your sister? Wouldn't you have wanted the culprit to suffer the same way?"
 
    "I would have thought that once, affected by the pain, but never acted that way. Now step aside." She turned to the white wardrobes and reached out to take the suitcase prepared with clothes, which she had placed between the two wardrobes, but he pulled it away from her.
 
    "Nora, don't decide right away." Blerimi tried again to change her decision, and she sighed impatiently. "Just give me more time, and things will be better. Only one chance."
 
    "No!" Leonora answered with a harsh, raised voice. "You are evil, and I would be so much more if I would continue to stay with you."
 
    "Please, I lo..." he stretched his hands towards her arms.
 
    "Don't touch me with those hands!" she shouted, and Blerimi stepped back, not to scare her more.
 
    Leonora took her suitcase and left the room. She ignored his entreaties to not leave him and headed for the exit of the house.
 
    It still seemed unreal to her, as she took determined steps towards the gate at the end of the courtyard, that she was leaving in that way, that she was going to divorce him, that such events were happening to her on her birthday, on the day she had thought she would celebrate it alongside Blerimi. Now she didn't even want to live in the same universe as him.
 
        "Nora." He followed her to the road while she kept walking, indifferent to his words, and looked casually at the black car a few metres away from them on the other side of the empty street. 
 
    She froze when she saw the barrel of a gun through the driver's window in that car, and unable to think or speak from the paralysis she felt, seizing her brain from shock, she looked wearily at the unremarkable face of the criminal, accepted the bullet in her body, the pain that promptly took over her whole being, didn't let her make even a sound, and pushed her to fall back in the arms of Blerimi.
 
    She was hearing his calling as a sound more and more distant while looking up at the clear sky. She felt ashamed that she hadn't known how to live her life as she should have, the consent to end it, and she didn't fight at all against closing her eyelids, only to then fall into complete unconsciousness in the form of darkness.
 
   
    Leonora kneeled next to the baby, wrapped in a white blanket, and looked admiringly at the little creature with clear blue eyes. 
 
    "It's your sister," she heard a voice next to her, which first sounded like hers and then that of a man next to them.
 
    She couldn't make the difference and didn't raise her head to look and find out who had talked to her. That sentence was confirmed inside her—that the little girl was her sister, Arjanela Vitori, and Leonora was feeling the blood relationship between them with all her soul.
 
    "See that dreams do come true?"
 
    The previous voice was now more clearly recognised as a man's voice. She, however, kept her gaze fixed on the baby, who was smiling.
 
    "I see," she said happily, already feeling complete within herself.
 
    She felt richer than ever before and as if she lacked nothing.
 
    "I will never leave her alone," Leonora vouched and kissed her sister on her forehead. "I will always take care of her."