Broken April (19 page)

Since his attention, in the course of his wanderings, was constantly distracted by one thing or the other, Gjorg felt more and more that his journey was fragmentary, interrupted by periods of utter vacancy and great discontinuities. Often he was surprised to find himself on a road or at an inn when he had thought he was still on the road or at the inn which in fact he had left behind hours ago. In that way, hour by hour and day by day, his mind was breaking away from reality, and his ramblings came to seem a journey in a dream.

Now he no longer hid from himself that he was hoping to find that carriage. He did not even conceal it from others. He had inquired several times, “You didn't happen to see a carriage with a curious body with odd lines. . . . it's hard to explain.” “How's that again?” they said. “Describe it. What sort of carriage?” “Well, it's very different, with black velvet inside, and bronze ornaments—like a coffin.” And they said, “Are you serious? You wouldn't be a bit off your nut, would you, old fellow?”

Once someone told him that he had seen a carriage that looked something like the one Gjorg had described, but he said it was the carriage of the bishop of the next district, who was travelling, oddly enough, in very bad weather.

They can put up in these filthy inns if they like, and even have bad teeth, as long as they mention her, he said to himself.

Several times he thought he had picked up their traces, but he lost them again. The approach of death made him wish even more for that meeting. And the long way he had come also sharpened his hunger to see her.

One day he saw a man in the distance who appeared to be riding a mule. It turned out to be the steward of the blood from the
Kulla
of Orosh, travelling God knows where. Having gone a little farther, Gjorg turned his head, as if to make sure that it was the steward of the blood. The other man had also turned around to look at him. “What's the matter with him?” Gjorg thought.

Once someone told him that he had seen a carriage that was just like Gjorg's description, but it was empty. Another time, someone described the carriage's appearance with great accuracy, and even the head of the beautiful traveller, whose hair, through the window, had seemed auburn to some people and nut-brown to others.

At least she's still here, on the High Plateau, he thought. At least she hasn't yet gone down to the plain.

Meanwhile, the month of April was wearing on swiftly. The days went on, one after the other, without a pause, and the month that even without the coming end of his truce seemed to him the shortest of the year, was getting shorter, wearing itself out swiftly.

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.

The Vorpsis went on with their trip. Bessian looked at his wife from the side. Her features were somewhat drawn, and she was a little pale, which made her look only the more desirable, as had happened a few days ago. She is tired out, he thought, even though she won't admit it. Actually, during all those days he had been waiting to hear her say at last the words that would have been so natural, “Oh, I'm so tired.” He had waited for those words impatiently, feverishly, the remedy for their trouble, but she had not said them. Her face pale, she looked out at the road in silence, or very nearly. As for her expression, which even when she was angry or humiliated had always seemed understandable to him, he now found that he had no clue to what it might mean. If only her eyes expressed annoyance, or worse, coldness. But there was something
else in her eyes. In some way her look was empty at its center and only the edges were still there.

Seated side by side, they rarely spoke. Sometimes he tried to create a bit of warmth, but fearing that he might put himself in a position of inferiority, he did that with great discretion. The worst of it was that he felt quite unable to be angry at her. In his relations with women he had noticed that anger and quarrelling could at times bring about a sudden resolution of static situations that had seemed hopeless, as a storm can clear away an oppressively humid atmosphere. But there was something in the way that her eyes were set that defended her against anyone else's anger. Something like the eyes of pregnant women. At one moment he even wondered—almost aloud—can she be expecting a child? But his mind, mechanically, reckoned up the time that had passed, and this disposed of his last hope. Bessian suppressed a sigh that he did not want her to hear, and he went on looking at the countryside. Night was falling.

For a little while that mood stayed with him, and when he began to think actively again, his mind brought him back to the same place. If only she would tell him that she had no heart for this trip, that she felt terribly disappointed, that his notion to spend their honeymoon on the High Plateau had proved to be idiotic, that they would do well to go back at once, this very day, this instant. But when he made a vague allusion to their leaving early, so as to give her a chance to express that wish, she said, “As you like. But in any case, please don't feel troubled on my account.”

Of course the idea of breaking off their trip and going home tormented him more and more, but he entertained a vague hope that something might still be saved. Indeed, he felt that if something were to be saved, that could only
happen while they were on the High Plateau, and that once they went down there would be no chance of a remedy.

Now it was full night and he could not see her face. Two or three times he leaned towards the window, but he could not tell where they were. A little later the moon shed its light on the road and he put his head close to the glass. He stayed a long while in that position, and the vibration of the cold pane entered his forehead and went all through his body. In the moonlight the road looked like glass to him. The silhouette of a small church slid off to his left. Then a water-mill loomed up, and one might think that in this waste it had been built to grind snow rather than corn. His hand sought his wife's hand on the seat.

“Diana,” he said softly, “look out there. I think this is a road protected by the
bessa
.”

She put her face to the windowpane. Still speaking softly, using few words, and imposing upon them an order that seemed to him less and less natural, he explained to her what a road protected by the
bessa
was. He felt that the icy moonlight helped him with his task.

Then, when his words were spent, he moved his head towards her neck and kissed her timidly. The moonlight grazed her knees a number of times. She did not move, she came no closer nor did she draw away from him. Her body gave off still the odor of the perfume that he loved, and with an effort he repressed a groan. His last hope was that something would let go inside her. He hoped to hear a sob from her, if only a faint one, or at least a sigh. But she did not relinquish her strange attitude, silent but not completely, desolate as a field strewn with stars might be desolate. “O Lord,” he said to himself, “what is happening to me?”

The sky was only partly overcast. The horses trotted
lightly on the ill-paved road. It was the Road of the Cross. From behind the glass, Bessian looked out on a landscape grown familiar to him. Except that this time, here and there, in places close to him and far away, it lay under a bluish coverlet. The snow had begun to melt, it wore away from the bottom up, from its contact with the soil, leaving above the hollow thus formed a kind of crust that scarcely melted at all.

“What day is it?” Diana asked.

Surprised, he looked at her for a moment before he replied.

“The eleventh.”

She seemed about to say something. Speak to me, he thought. Please speak. Hope invaded him like a hot vapor. Say anything, but speak to me.

Her lips that he was watching out of the corner of his eye moved again to say in a different way perhaps the words she had not spoken.

“Do you remember that mountaineer we saw the day that we were on our way to the prince?”

“Yes,” he said, “of course.”

What did that “of course” mean, spoken so naturally? For a moment he pitied himself, without knowing why. Perhaps because he had been so eager to keep this exchange going at any cost. Perhaps, too, for a different reason that he could not specify just then.

“The truce he had been granted was to end around mid-April, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” he said, “something like that. Yes, that's right, just in mid-April.”

“I don't know why that came to mind,” she said, still looking out of the window. “It just came, for no good reason.”

“For no good reason,” he repeated. Those words seemed to him to be dangerous as a ring with poison in it. Somewhere inside him a knot of rage was forming. So you did all that for no good reason? For nothing, just to torture me? But the wave of anger toppled and broke at once.

Two or three times in these last days she had turned her head to look at the young mountaineers that they passed on the road. He understood that she thought she had recognized the young man who had been at the inn, but he attached no importance to that. And now that she had mentioned him, he still felt that way.

The carriage stopped suddenly, interrupting his train of thought.

“What is it?” he said, to no one in particular.

The coachman, who had climbed down from the box, appeared a moment later near the window. His arm extended, he was pointing at the road. Only then did Bessian see an old mountain woman squatting by the roadside. She was looking at them, and she seemed to be muttering something. Bessian opened the carriage door.

“There's an old woman over there by the roadside. She says that she can't move,” the coachman said.

Bessian stepped down from the carriage, and after taking a few steps for the sake of his stiff legs, he went over to the old woman, who now and again was crying out softly while clasping her knee with her hands.

“What's the matter, good mother?” Bessian asked.

“Oh, it's this accursed cramp,” the old woman said. “I've been rooted here since morning, my child.”

Like all the mountain women of that district, she wore a cloth dress decorated with embroidery, and a scarf on her head that showed a few wisps of grey hair.

“I have been waiting since morning for one of God's
creatures who could help me away from here.”

“Where are you from?” the coachman asked her.

“From the village over there.” The woman stretched out her arm, pointing uncertainly. “It's not far, just along the highway.”

“Let's take her with us,” Bessian said.

“Thank you, my son.”

With the coachman's help, he lifted her up carefully, supporting her under her arms, and the two men led her to the carriage. Diana watched from inside the vehicle.

“Good day, daughter,” the old woman said when she was in the carriage.

“Good day, good mother,” Diana said, moving in order to give her room.

“Ah,” the old woman said as the carriage moved off, “I spent the whole morning all alone by the roadside. There wasn't a living soul to be seen anywhere. I thought I was going to die there.”

“It's true,” Bessian said, “this road is almost deserted. Your village is a big one, isn't it?”

“Yes, it's big,” the woman said, her face darkening,

“It's big all right, I should say so, but what good is that?”

Bessian was looking attentively at the old woman's features and their somber expression. For a moment he thought he detected signs of hostility towards the people of her village, because no one had come by to help her and everyone had forgotten her. But the emotion that had clouded her face was something much deeper than momentary annoyance.

“Yes, my village is quite big, but most of the men are cloistered in the towers. That's why I was all alone, abandoned on the road, and almost died there.”

“Cloistered because of blood-vengeance?”

“Yes, my son, for blood-vengeance. Nobody has ever seen anything to match it. Well, of course people have killed one another within the village, but never anything like this.”

The old woman took a deep breath.

“Of the two hundred households of our village, only twenty are not involved in the blood-feud.”

“How can that possibly be?”

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

Bessian put his head near the window, but the village was not yet in sight.

“Two months ago,” the mountain woman said, “I myself buried a nephew, a boy beautiful as an angel.”

She began to talk about that boy, and to tell how he had been killed, but as she spoke—and this was strange—the order of the words in her sentences began to change. And not only their order but the spaces between them, as if a special atmosphere was clothing them, painful and disturbing. As happens with fruit before it is fully ripe, her language changed from its ordinary condition to quite another condition, the prelude to song or lamentation. It would seem that this is how the songs of the bards come about, Bessian thought.

He was looking fixedly at the old mountain woman. That state of feeling that preceded song was accompanied by corresponding changes in the expression of her face. In her eyes there was lamentation, but no tears. And they seemed all the more disconsolate.

The carriage entered the village, followed by the echoing
clatter of its wheels on the empty road. On either side stone
kullas
rose up, seeming even more silent in broad daylight.