Broken April (24 page)

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.

He turned up his coatsleeve and looked at his watch. It was noon.

Gjorg raised his head and looked for the
stain that the sun made above the expanse of cloud. It's just noon, he thought. His
bessa
was at an end.

He jumped nimbly onto the fallows that bordered the highroad. Now he had to find a safe place in which he could wait for nightfall. On both sides of the road, the country was deserted, but he could not go on walking on the highroad. That would have seemed to him to violate the
Kanun
.

Around him was a flat expanse that went on and on. In the distance were cultivated fields and some trees, but he could not see the smallest hollow nor even some brush that would give him any cover. As soon as I can find a hiding-place, I'll be safe, he thought, as if he wanted to convince himself that if he was putting himself in danger it was not because he was deliberately playing the fool, but because there was no shelter to be found.

The moor seemed to extend to the horizon. He felt a strange calm inside his head, or rather a dull emptiness. He was absolutely alone under the sky which the weight of the sun now seemed to tilt slightly to the west. Around him, the day was just the same, bathed in the same air and the same purple shining, although the truce was over and he had entered into another time. His eyes roamed coldly all around. Was that how it looked, the time beyond the
bessa
? Eternal time, that was no longer his, without days, without seasons, without years, without a future, abstract time, to which he had no attachments of any kind. Wholly alien, it would no longer give him any sign, any hint, not even about the day when he would meet his punishment, which was somewhere in front of him, at a date and place unknown, and which would come to him by a hand equally unknown.

He was deep in these thoughts when he made out in the
distance some grey buildings that he thought he recognized. Look, those are the Manors of Rreze, he said to himself when he had come up with them. From those houses up to a brook whose name he had forgotten, the road, he believed, was under the
bessa
. The roads protected by the
bessa
had no signboards, nor any special marks, but nonetheless, everyone knew them. All he need do was to ask the first person he met.

Gjorg, walking on the moor now, quickened his pace. His mind had shaken off its somnolence. He would reach the road protected by the
bessa
, and he would stroll along on it until evening without having to cower under a bush. Meanwhile. . . . who could tell, the carriage lined with velvet might come that way. Once, people had told him, it had appeared at the Manors of Shala.

Yes, yes, that's what he would do. He turned his eyes to the left, then to the right, made certain that the road like the moor was deserted, and stepping lightly, in a few moments he reached the highroad and began to walk along it. He had taken that shortcut in order to get to the road that was under the
bessa
, failing which it would have been an hour's walk to get there.

Careful, he told himself. Now the shadow cast by his head fell to the east. But the highroad was still deserted. He walked swiftly, thinking of nothing. Far ahead he saw black figures that were hardly moving. As he came nearer, he saw that they were two mountaineers and a woman riding a donkey.

“That road over there, is it under the
bessa
?” Gjorg asked.

“Oh, yes, lad,” the older man replied. “For a hundred years now, the road that runs from the Manors of Rreze to the Nymph's Brook has been protected by the
bessa
.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all, my boy,” the old man said, stealing a glance at the black ribbon on Gjorg's sleeve. “A safe journey to you.”

As he strode swiftly down the road, Gjorg wondered what the killers overtaken by the end of their truce, all over the High Plateau, would do without those roads that were under the
bessa
, their places of refuge, where they were sheltered from their pursuers.

The section of the road protected by the
bessa
differed not at all from the rest of the road. It was the same ancient paving, damaged in places by horses' hooves and flowing water, with the same hollows in its surface and, at the sides, the same brush. But Gjorg felt that there was something warm about the golden dust. He took a deep breath and he slowed his pace. Here is where I'll wait for nightfall, he thought. He would sit down and rest on a stone. That would be better than hiding in a thicket. Besides, the carriage might come this way. He still had a faint hope that he might see her. And his musings went further than that: he saw the carriage stop and heard the people in it say, “Oh, mountaineer, if you're tired, climb into our carriage and ride with us a ways.”

Now and again, Gjorg looked up at the sky. In three hours, at most, night would fall. Mountaineers were going by, on foot or on horseback, alone or in small groups. In the distance he could see two or three motionless specks. They must surely be murderers like himself who were waiting for night in order to travel farther. They must be worried at home, he thought.

A mountaineer came along, walking slowly and driving before him an ox that was all black.

Gjorg was walking even more slowly than the mountaineer and his ox, and they came up with him.

“Good afternoon,” the man said.

“Good afternoon,” Gjorg said.

The man made a gesture with his head at the sky.

“Time just doesn't go by,” he said.

He had a reddish mustache that seemed to light up his smile.

“Your
bessa
's over?”

“Yes, since noon today.”

“Mine was over three days ago, but I haven't managed to sell this bull yet.”

Gjorg looked at him astonished.

“For two weeks I've been tramping the roads with him, and I can't manage to sell him. He's one fine animal, all my people wept when they saw him leaving, and I can't find a buyer.”

Gjorg did not know what to say. He had never had anything to do with selling cattle.

“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.”

Looking sidelong, he watched the black ox that was chewing calmly. The words of the old ballad of the soldier dying in a far-off country came to him: “Give my love to mother and tell her to sell the black ox.”

“Where are you from?” the mountaineer asked.

“From Brezftoht.”

“That's not so far from here. If you step along you can be home tonight.”

“And you?” Gjorg asked.

“Oh, I'm from very far from here, from the Krasniq banner.”

Gjorg whistled. “Yes, that's really far. You'll certainly have sold your bull before you get home.”

“I don't think so. Now the only places where I can sell him are the roads that are under the
bessa
, and they're scarce.”

Gjorg nodded.

“You see, if this road that's under the
bessa
went as far as the crossing with the Grand Road of the Banners, well, I could certainly sell him. But it ends before that.”

“Is the Road of the Banners nearby?”

“It's not far. That's what I call a road! What don't you see go by there!”

“It's true, you see very odd things on the roads. Once I happened to see a carriage—”

“A black carriage with a pretty woman in it,” the other man interrupted.

“How do you know that?” Gjorg cried.

“I saw her yesterday at the Inn of the Cross.”

“And what were they doing there?”

“What were they doing? Nothing. The carriage didn't have the horses in the shafts, and it was just in front of the inn. The coachman was drinking coffee in it.”

“And she?”

The mountaineer smiled. “They were inside the inn. They had been there two days and two nights without leaving their room. That's what the innkeeper said. Old boy, that woman was as beautiful as a fairy. Her eyes pierced you through and through. I left them behind me
last night. They certainly must have left today.”

“How do you know?”

“The innkeeper said so. They were supposed to leave the next day. The coachman told him.”

Gjorg was stunned for some moments. He stared at the paved road-surface.

“And what road do you take to get there?” he asked suddenly.

The other man pointed out the direction.

“It's an hour's walk from here. This road we're on crosses the Road of the Banners. They have to pass there, if they haven't done so already. There is no other road.”

Gjorg was staring in the direction that his companion had pointed to. Now the man looked at him in surprise.

“What's the matter with you, you poor fellow?” he said.

Gjorg did not answer. An hour's walk from here, he told himself. He raised his head to look for the sun's track behind the clouds. He reckoned that there were still two hours of daylight left. She had never been so near. He would be able to see his fairy.

Without further thought, without even saying goodbye to his fellow wayfarer, he went off like a madman in the direction where, according to the man with the black ox, the crossroads lay.

The Vorpsi's carriage was leaving the High Plateau behind at a good pace. The day was ending when the roads of the little town, the tops of two minarets, and the belfry of the only church appeared in the distance.

Bessian leaned towards the carriage window; the silly lanes among the buildings he filled at once in his imagination with the small city's people, employees of the sub-prefecture
carrying documents to the justice of the peace, with shops, with sleepy offices, and with four or five telephones of ancient vintage, the only ones in town, by means of which boring talk was carried on, mostly punctuated with yawning. He thought of all that, and all at once the world that awaited him in the capital seemed terribly pale and insipid compared with the one he had just left.

Nevertheless, he thought sadly, he belonged to that pale world, and since that was the case he ought never to have gone up to the High Plateau. It had not been created for ordinary mortals but for Titanic beings.

The smoke from the little town grew in volume. Diana, her head resting on the back of the seat, was as motionless as when they had entered the carriage. Bessian felt that he was bringing home only the outward form of his wife, and that he had left the woman herself somewhere in the mountains.

Now they were driving over the naked moor where their tour had begun a month ago. He turned his head again to see the
Rrafsh
, perhaps for the last time. The mountains were receding ever more slowly, sinking back into solitude. A white, mysterious mist came down upon them, like a curtain lowered on the play just ended.

At that moment, Gjorg was walking with long strides on the Road of the Banners, that he had reached an hour ago. The air was rippled with the first shiver of dusk when he heard, off to one side, a few short words:

“Gjorg, give my greeting to Zef Krye. . . .”

His arm, in a sudden motion, tried to slip the rifle from his shoulder, but that gesture became confounded with the syllables
qyqe
, the last half of the hateful name, which
made its way confusedly to his consciousness. Gjorg saw the ground reel, and then rear up violently to crash against his face. He had collapsed.

For a moment the world seemed to him to have gone absolutely still; then through that deafness he heard footsteps. He felt two hands moving his body. He's turning me on my back, he thought. But at that instant, something cold, perhaps the barrel of his rifle, touched his right cheek. God, according to the rules! He tried to open his eyes, and he could not tell if they were open or not. Instead of his murderer, he saw some white patches of snow that had not yet melted, and among those patches, the black ox, which still had not been sold. This is it, he thought, and really the whole thing has been going on too long.

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.

December 1978

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These are New Amsterdam books, available from Ivan R. Dee, Publisher