Broken April (3 page)

Now at last the shirt was hanging on the clothesline. But strangely it gave Gjorg no comfort.

Meanwhile, like a new banner hoisted after the old one had been hauled down, on the upper storey of the Kryeqyqe
kulla
, they had hung out the bloody shirt of the new victim.

The seasons, hot or cold, would affect the color of the dried blood, and so would the kind of cloth that the shirt was made of, but no one wanted to take such things into
account; all those changes would be taken as mysterious messages, whose import no one dared question.

*
The code of customary law.

**
A stone dwelling in the form of a tower, peculiar to the mountain regions of Albania.

*
The pledged word, faith, truce.

*
From the Albanian
gjak
(blood), killer, but with no pejorative connotation, since the
gjaks
is fulfilling his duty under the provisions of the
Kanun
.

*
Literally a flag. By extension, a collection of various villages under the authority of a local chief who was himself the flag-bearer.

Gjorg had been travelling across the High Plateau for several hours, and there was still no sign that the Kulla of Orosh was near.

Under the fine rain, nameless waste lands, or moorlands with names unknown to him, came into view one after another, naked and dreary. Beyond them, he could just make out the line of mountains veiled in mist, and through the veil he thought he saw the pale reflection, multiplied as if in a mirage, of a single great mountain rather than a range of real peaks differing in height. The fog had made them unsubstantial, but it was strange how much more oppressive they seemed than in fine weather, when their rocks and sheer cliffs were plain to see.

Gjorg heard the dull grating of the pebbles under foot. The villages along the road were far apart, and places with administrative functions or with an inn were rarer still.
But had there been more of these, Gjorg would not have stopped in any of them. He had to be at the
Kulla
of Orosh by nightfall, or at worst late in the evening, so that he could return to his own village the next day.

For the most part, the road was nearly deserted. Now and then solitary mountaineers appeared in the fog, headed somewhere, like himself. At a distance, like everything else on that day of mists, they looked anonymous and unsubstantial.

The settlements were as silent as the road. Here and there were a few scattered houses, each with a wavering plume of smoke rising above its steep roof. “A house is a stone building, or hut, or any other structure that has a hearthstone and emits smoke.” He did not know why that definition of a dwelling, which appears in the
Kanun
and which he had known since childhood, had come to mind. “No one enters a house without calling out from the courtyard.” But I don't mean to knock or go in anywhere, he said to himself plaintively.

The rain was still falling. Along the way he overtook another group of mountaineers, walking in single file, burdened with sacks of corn. Under the load, their backs seemed more stooped than one would expect. He thought, wet grain is heavier. He remembered having carried a sack of corn once in the rain from the storehouse at the subprefecture all the way to his village.

The laden mountaineers fell back behind him, and again he was alone on the highroad. Its edges on either side were sometimes quite clear and sometimes indistinct. In some stretches flooding and landslides had narrowed the roadway. “A road shall be as wide as a flagstaff is long,” he said to himself again, and he realized that for some time the
Kanun's
prescriptions about roads had been running
involuntarily through his head. “A road is for the use of men and livestock, for the passage of the living and the passage of the dead.”

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.

When for the first time he had convinced himself that he had to kill a man, Gjorg had called to mind all that part of the Code that dealt with the rules of the blood feud. If only I don't forget to say the right words before I fire, he thought. That's the main thing. If I don't forget to turn him the right way up and put his weapon by his head. That's the other main point. All the rest is easy, child's play.

However, the rules of the blood feud were only a small part of the Code, just a chapter. As weeks and months went by, Gjorg came to understand that the other part, which was concerned with everyday living and was not drenched with blood, was inextricably bound to the bloody part, so much so that no one could really tell where one part left off and the other began. The whole was so conceived that one begat the other, the stainless giving birth to the bloody, and the second to the first, and so on forever, from generation to generation.

In the distance, Gjorg saw a group of people on horseback. When they drew nearer, he made out a bride among
them and he knew that the cavalcade consisted of the relatives of the bride who were taking her to her husband. Drenched by the rain, they seemed tired, and only the horses' bells lent a bit of gaiety to the little troop.

Gjorg stepped aside to let them pass. The horsemen, like himself, carried their weapons muzzle down to protect them from the rain. Looking at the parti-colored bundles which no doubt contained the bride's trousseau, he wondered in which corner, which box, which pocket, which embroidered waistcoat, the bride's parents had put the “trousseau bullet” with which, according to the Code, the bridegroom had the right to kill the bride if she should try to leave him. That thought mingled with the memory of his dead fiancée, whom he had not been able to marry because of her long illness. Whenever he saw a wedding party go by he could not help thinking about her, but on this day, oddly enough, his pain was lessened by a consoling thought: perhaps it was better for her that she had gone first to where he would soon overtake her, rather than to have before her a long life as a widow. And, as for that “trousseau bullet” that the parents were supposed to give the young husband so that he might kill his wife if she left him, he would certainly have tossed it into the ravine. Or perhaps he felt that way now that she was gone and the idea of killing someone who was no longer alive seemed to him as unreal as fighting with a ghost.

The relatives of the bride had disappeared from view before they faded from his mind. He thought of them, travelling along the road in accordance with all the rules, the chief of her kinsmen, the
Krushkapar
, at the end of the procession, the only difference being that now, under the veil, in the place of the bride, he imagined his betrothed. “A wedding day is never postponed,” the Code said.
“Even if the bride is dying, the wedding party sets out, if necessary dragging her along to the bridegroom's house.” Gjorg had often heard these words repeated during the sickness of his betrothed, when they talked at home of his approaching wedding day. “A wedding party sets out even if there is a death in the house. When the bride enters the house, the dead person leaves. Tears on one side, song on the other.”

All these memories that he forced himself to entertain wearied him, and he tried not to think of anything. On either side of the road stretched long strips of fallows, and again nameless waste lands. Somewhere on the right he saw a watermill, then, farther off, a flock of sheep, and a church with its graveyard. He passed by them without turning his head, but that did not prevent him from remembering the portions of the Code that dealt with mills, flocks, churches and graves. “Priests have no part in the blood feud.” “Among the graves of a family or a clan, no stranger's tomb may lie.”

He was tempted to say, “That's enough,” but could not find the strength to say it. He lowered his head and went on walking at the same pace. In the distance he could see the roof of an inn, further on a convent, then another flock of sheep, and beyond, smoke and perhaps a settlement; there were centuries-old laws for all these things. There was no escaping them. No one had ever succeeded in escaping them. And yet. . . . “Priests have no part in the blood feud,” he repeated, citing one of the best known clauses of the Code. He was thinking of that as he was going along the stretch of road from which the convent was clearly visible, and the thought that only if he had been a priest would he have been spared by the
Kanun
got mixed up with thinking about nuns and the relations that
people said they had with the young priests, and with the idea of possibly having an affair with a nun himself, but he suddenly remembered that nuns cropped their hair and he dismissed that fantasy. But I would have had to be a priest, he thought, so as not to be subject to the
Kanun
. But other sections of the Code were in fact applicable to priests, who were exempt only from the provisions that regulated the blood feud.

For a moment he felt as if he were trapped in bird-lime by the bloody part of the
Kanun
. Truly, that was the essential thing, and it was useless to console yourself that everyone was shackled by the same chains. Besides priests, there were numerous other people who escaped the rule of blood-law. He had already thought of that on another occasion. The world was divided into two parts: the one that fell under the blood-law, and the other that was outside that law.

Beyond the blood-law. He almost let out a sigh. What must life be like in such families? How did they get up in the mornings and how did they go to bed at night? It all seemed almost incredible, as remote perhaps as the life of the birds. And yet there were such houses. In fact, that had been the case of his own house seventy years ago, until that fateful autumn night when a man had knocked at their door.

Gjorg's father, who had it from his own father, had told him the story of their enmity with the Kryeqyqe family. It was a story marked by twenty-two graves on each side, forty-four in all, with the same set phrases to be spoken before the killings, but yet with more silence than speech, with sobs, with the death-rattle in the throat that chokes off a last wish, with three bardic songs, one of them forgotten, with the grave of a woman killed by accident
whose death was indemnified according to the rules, with the men of both families immured in the tower of refuge
*
, with an attempt at reconciliation that failed at the last moment, with a killing that took place at a wedding with the granting of a short and a long truce, with a funeral dinner, with the cry, “So and so of the Berisha has fired at so and so of the Kryeqyqe,” or the other way around, with torches, and comings and goings in the village and so on until that afternoon of March 17, when it had been Gjorg's turn to join the grisly dance.

And all this had begun seventy years ago, on a cold October night, when a man had knocked at their door, “Who was that man?” Gjorg had asked as a little boy, when for the first time he had heard the story of the knocking at the door. The question would be repeated many times in their house, at that time and later on, and no one would ever answer it. For no one had ever known who that man was. And even now, Gjorg could not believe that anyone had actually knocked at their door. It was easier for him to imagine that a ghost had knocked, or fate itself, rather than an unknown traveler.

The man, after knocking, had called from the gate and asked for shelter for the night. The head of the house, Gjorg's grandfather, had opened the door to him. They had welcomed him as was the custom, had brought him food and prepared him a bed, and early next morning, still according to custom, one of the family, his grandfather's younger brother, had escorted the unknown guest to the outer limits of the village. He had just left the man when he heard a shot. The stranger had fallen, dead, exactly at
the border of the village lands. Now, according to the
Kanun
, when the guest whom you were accompanying is killed before your eyes, you are bound to avenge him. But if he had been struck down after you had turned your back, you were free of that obligation. The man who had been escorting his guest had in fact turned his back before the man had been hit; therefore it was not his responsibility to avenge him. But no one had seen it happen. It was very early in the morning and no one in the neighborhood could testify in the matter. Even so, his protector's word would have been believed, since the
Kanun
trusts a man's word, and it would have been regarded as established that the man who had accompanied his guest had taken leave of him and turned his back by the time the killing had occurred, if another obstacle had not arisen. That was the orientation of the victim's body. The committee that was formed at once to determine if the duty of avenging the unknown guest fell to the house of Berisha, considered everything minutely, and concluded at last that the Berisha were indeed the ones who must avenge him. The stranger had fallen face down with his head towards the village. For that reason, according to the Code, the Berisha who had given the stranger shelter and had fed him, had had the duty to protect him until he left the village lands, and must now avenge him.

The men of the Berisha family returned in silence from the wood where the commission had debated around the corpse for hours, and the women at the windows of the
kulla
had understood. Pale as wax, they had listened to the men's brief words, and had turned paler still. Yet no curse was murmured against the unknown guest who had brought death to their house, since a guest is sacred and, according to the custom, a mountaineer's house, before
being his home and the home of his family, is the home of God and of guests.