Broken April

His feet were cold, and each time he moved his numbed legs a little he heard the desolate grating of pebbles under his shoes. But the sense of desolation was really inside him. Never before had he stayed motionless for so long, lying in wait behind a ridge that overlooked the highway.

Daylight was fading. Fearful or simply troubled, he brought the rifle’s stock to his cheek. Soon it would be dusk, and he would not be able to see the sights of the weapon in the fading light. “He’s sure to come by before it’s too dark to take aim,” his father had said. “Just be patient and wait.”

The funeral took place the next day around noon. The professional mourners came from afar, clawing their faces and tearing their hair according to the custom. The old churchyard was filled with the black tunics of the men who had come to the burial. After the ceremony, the funeral cortege returned to the Kryeqyqes’ house. Gjorg, too, walked in the procession. At first he had refused to take part in the ceremony, but at last he had given in to his father’s urging. He had said, “You must go to the burial. You must also go to the funeral dinner to honor the man’s soul.”

“Yes, son, right away. It has to be settled as soon as possible. The blood tax must be paid right after the killing.”

The purse was now in Gjorg’s right hand. It seemed heavy. In it was all the money the family had saved, scrimping from week to week and month to month in anticipation of just this day.

A year and a half after the day that his brother had been killed, his mother had finally washed the shirt he had worn that day. For a year and a half it had hung blood-soaked from the upper storey of the house, as the Kanun required, until the blood had been avenged. When bloodstains began to yellow, people said, it was a sure sign that the dead man was in torment, yearning for revenge. The shirt, an infallible barometer, indicated the time for vengeance. By means of the shirt the dead man sent his signals from the depths of the earth where he lay.

He smiled. Whatever he did, he could not escape its definitions. It was no use deceiving himself. The Kanun was stronger than it seemed. Its power reached everywhere, covering lands, the boundaries of fields. It made its way into the foundations of houses, into tombs, to churches, to roads, to markets, to weddings. It climbed up to mountain pastures, and even higher still, to the very skies, whence it fell in the form of rain to fill the watercourses, which were the cause of a good third of all murders.

Many times, when he was alone, when he let his mind stray, Gjorg had tried to imagine how the life of his clan would have run, had that late guest not knocked at the gate of their kulla, but at another gate. If, by magic, those knocks could be blanked out from reality, then, oh, then (and on this matter Gjorg thought the stuff of legend to be quite real), one would see the heavy stone slabs lifted from forty-four graves, and the forty-four dead men would rise, shake the earth from their faces, and return to the living; and with them would come the children who could not have been born, then the babies that those children could not bring into the world, and everything would be different, different.

Gjorg remembered the punishment meted out some years ago in his village when the bessa had been violated. The murderer had been shot by the assembled men of the village, and he had been declared unworthy of being avenged. Then, without taking into account that the people who lived in the house were not guilty of the murder, that house, in which a guest had been killed in violation of the bessa, was burned. The head of the household himself was the first to scatter the firebrands and take the axe to the building, shouting, “May I wash clean my sins against the village and the Banner.” At his back, with torch and axe, came all the men of the village.

Two or three times it occurred to Gjorg that all these men had killed, and that each had his story. But those stories were locked deep within them.

It seemed to her that everything people said about the High Plateau took on at once an ambiguous, nebulous character. Bessian Vorpsi had written half-tragic, half-philosophical sketches about the North, to which the press had responded in a rather halfway fashion too: some reviewers had hailed the pieces as jewels of the first water, and others had criticized them as lacking in realism. On a number of occasions it had occurred to Diana that if her husband had decided to undertake this rather strange tour, it was not so much to show her what was so remarkable about the North as to settle something that he felt within him. But each time she had given up the idea, thinking that if that was his object he could have taken that trip long ago, and alone at that.

“But how does one tell the difference between those whose duty it is to avenge a killing and those from whom vengeance is sought?” she asked. “The black ribbon is the same for everyone, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s the same. The mark of death is exactly the same for those who mean to kill and those who are being hunted.”

“Yes, it’s only fair, we should be proud of it,” he went on. “The Rrafsh is the only region of Europe which—while being an integral part of a modern state, an integral part, I repeat, of a modern European state and not the habitat of primitive tribes—has rejected the laws, the legal institutions, the police, the courts, in short, all the structures of the state; which has rejected these things, you understand, because at one time it was subject to them, and it has renounced them, replacing them with other moral rules which are themselves just as adequate, so much so as to constrain the administrations set up by foreign occupying powers, and later the administration of the independent Albanian state, forcing them to recognize those rules, and thus to put the High Plateau, let’s say nearly half of the kingdom, quite beyond the control of the state.”

“That’s what the Kanun says. ‘When a death occurs during a boundary dispute, the grave itself serves as a boundary mark.’”

“Did you notice how pale that mountaineer was, the one who killed a man a few days ago?” asked Bessian, staring God knows why at the ring on one of her fingers.

“Yes, he was dreadfully pale,” Diana said.

“Who can tell what doubts, what hesitations he had to overcome before setting out to commit that crime. What are Hamlet’s doubts, compared with this Hamlet of our mountains?”

But the spring season of this current year could not possibly be worse. He came close to trembling when he remembered the seventeenth of March. Seventeenth of March, he said to himself. If that killing had not taken place at Brezftoht, there would have been no blood vengeance at all on that day. It would have been the first day of its kind—a blank—in a century, perhaps during two, three, five centuries, perhaps from the time of the origin of the blood feud.

Whenever he travelled in the mountains on business concerning the Kulla, Mark Ukacierra was always attentive to the connection between the cultivated fields and the fields that lay fallow. The former were generally more extensive. They made up nearly three-quarters of all the grain fields. In some years, however, the ratio changed and was more favorable to the fields lying fallow. Those fields reached a third or two-fifths of the total number, even rising on occasion so as to equal the area of the cultivated fields. People remembered two years in which the area of the fallow fields was greater than that of the cultivated fields. Yes, but that was a long time ago. Little by little, with the decline of the blood feud, the fallow fields shrank in number. Those fields were the special joy of Mark Ukacierra. They bore witness to the power of the Kanun.

It had happened to him seven years ago. He had consulted doctors and taken all sorts of medication, but nothing helped, until the day when an old man from Gjakova said to him, “It’s useless, my son, to take medicines and to consult doctors. Neither the doctors nor the medicines can do anything about your sickness. You are blood-sick.” Mark was astonished. “Blood? I haven’t killed anyone, father.” And the old man answered, “It doesn’t matter that you haven’t killed anyone. Your work is of such a nature that you have been stricken with blood-sickness.” And he spoke to him about other stewards of the blood who had been stricken with that sickness, and what was worse, never recovered from it. Well, Mark had managed to cure himself in the mountains that rise beyond Orosh. The air, in those heights, was good for that kind of sickness.

It was during the last days of March. April would soon be coming in. With the first half white and the other half black. Aprildeath. If he did not die, he would be languishing in the tower of refuge. His eyes would weaken in the darkness, so that one way or the other, even if he was still alive, he would never see the world again.

He did not know in what direction he ought to travel. Sometimes he wasted time on the wrong road, and sometimes he went back, not by design, to a place where he had already been. His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tormented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short.

“You’ll see for yourself, my boy. The village looks as if everything had turned to stone, as if the plague had struck it.”

The case had been considered an hour ago (just when we were walking on the banks of the lakes, Bessian thought). The judgment, as in all matters arising from the Kanun, was rendered promptly. The spokesman for the boy’s family had said to Ali Binak, “I should like to know why they spilled out my flour [meaning the baby that had been conceived].” And Ali Binak answered him at once: “What was your flour looking for in someone else’s flour sack [meaning the womb of the young stranger woman, not bound properly by marriage].” Both parties were thus non-suited, and both were declared blameless and not bound to seek vengeance.

In a gesture that was not violent but not gentle either, he seized his wife’s arm, and walking ahead of her he drew her towards the carriage, and they got in one behind the other, without a word and without a wave to anyone.

The carriage rolled swiftly on the highroad. How long had they been travelling in this way—a minute, a century? At last Bessian turned to his wife.

“Why don’t you say something? Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

She sat motionless on the seat, looking straight ahead, as if she were somewhere else. Then he seized her by the elbow, violently, harshly.

Momentarily, he would forget about it, but the road itself reminded him of it, even though he had lost all hope, or nearly, of finding it again. In fact, even if the carriage were to wander forever through the High Plateau, he would very soon immure himself in the tower of refuge, and it would not be possible for him to see it; and then, even if the impossible came to pass and he were to come out one day, his eyes would be so weakened that he would be able to see no more of it than a dim spot, like the bouquet of crushed roses that the sun drew today against the background of the clouds.

Sometimes, when he felt calmer, he told himself that no other attachment, no third person would ever be able to change in the slightest Diana’s feeling for him.[…] Like a butterfly touched by a black locomotive, she had been stricken by the ordeal of the High Plateau, and had been overcome.

Sometimes, calm in a way that frightened him, he thought that perhaps he had had to pay that tribute to the High Plateau. A tribute because of his writings, for the fairies and mountain nymphs that he had described in them, and for the little loge where he had watched the play in which the actors were a whole people drowned in blood.

But perhaps that punishment might have sought him out anywhere, even in Tirana, he thought consolingly. For the High Plateau sent out its waves afar, over all the country and for all time.

“I’d like to sell him before I shut myself up in the tower,” the mountaineer went on. “The family’s in bad shape, friend, and if I don’t sell him myself, there won’t be any one at home to sell him. But I don’t have much hope anymore. If I haven’t been able to sell him in the two weeks when I was still free, how am I going to sell him now that I can only go about by night? Well, what do you think?”

“You’re right,” Gjorg said. “It won’t be easy.”

Again, he heard footsteps, drawing away, and a number of times he wondered, whose steps are those? He felt that they were familiar. Yes, he knew them, and the hands that had turned him on his back. They’re mine! The seventeenth of March, the road, near Brezftoht. . . . He lost consciousness for a moment, then he heard the footsteps again, and again it seemed to him that they were his own, that it was himself and no one else who was running now, leaving behind, sprawled on the road, his own body that he had just struck down.