Broken April (5 page)

He took the right fork of the road, as the innkeeper had advised, and, moving on, he had to force himself not to turn his head and look at the old graves again. For a time, he managed to walk without a thought in his head, yet with a curious sense of being at one with the humped shapes of the mountains and the clouds about him. He was not aware how long he had been going on in that indolent way. He would have liked to go on in that way forever, but suddenly there rose up before him something that took his mind off the rocks and mists at once. It was the ruins of a house.

As he went by it, he looked out of the corner of his eye at the great heap of stones; rain and wind had long ago effaced the marks of the fire, replacing them with a sickly grey tint the sight of which seemed to help you get rid of a sob long imprisoned in your throat.

Gjorg walked on, looking sidelong at the ruins. With a sudden jump he vaulted the shallow roadside ditch and in two or three strides reached the pile of burned stone. For an instant he was still, and then, like someone who, confronted by the body of a dying man, tries to find the wound and guess what weapon has brought death near, he went to one of the corners of the house, bent down,
moved a few stones, did the same thing with the other three corners, and having seen that the cornerstones had been pulled out of their beds, he knew that this was a house that had broken the laws of hospitality. Besides burning them down, there was this further treatment reserved for those houses in which the most serious crime had been committed, according to the
Kanun
: the betrayal of the guest who was under the protection of the
bessa
.

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. After that, for years, nothing could be handed to the head of the house except with the left hand passed under one's thigh, to remind him that he should have avenged the blood of his guest. For it was a settled thing that one could atone for the blood of a father, of a brother—even one's child—but never for the blood of a guest.

Who knows what treacherous act was committed in this house, he said to himself, dislodging a couple of stones with his foot. They rolled away with a dull sound. He looked around him to see if there were other houses there, but saw nothing but another ruin twenty paces away. What can that mean, he wondered. Mechanically, he
rushed to that other ruin, went around it, and saw the same thing at the four corners. All the cornerstones had been torn away. Could it be that the whole village had been punished? But when he came upon still another ruin further on, he was convinced that that must be so. He had heard a few years ago of a village far away that had violated the
bessa
, and had been punished for it by the Banner. A go-between had been killed during a dispute about the boundaries between two villages. The Banner ruled that the village in which he had been killed had the duty to avenge him. And the village having been so thoughtless as not to avenge him, it had been decided that the village must be destroyed.

Gjorg walked softly, like a shadow, from one ruin to the next. Who had that man been who had involved a whole village in his death? Those deaf ruins were dreadful. A bird whose sound, Gjorg knew, was only heard at night, said, “Or, or,” and remembering that he had little time in which to reach the
Kulla
, he looked for the highway again. The bird's cry rent the silence again, far away now, and Gjorg asked again who might that man be who had been betrayed in this ill-fated village. “Or-or!” came the answer, which to his ear seemed somewhat like his name, “Gjorg-Gjorg.” He smiled, telling himself, “Now you're hearing voices,” and he turned towards the road.

A little later on, having resumed his journey, as if to jettison the feeling of oppression that the ruined village had left with him, he made an effort to call to mind the mildest penalties prescribed by the Code. Betraying one's guest was most unusual, and therefore the burning of houses, and still more the razing of whole villages, was rarer still. He remembered that less serious offenses meant
the banishment of the guilty party and all his kin from the Banner.

Gjorg noticed that as the penalties came thronging to his imagination, he walked faster, as if he wanted to escape them. The punishments were many: ostracism—the guilty man was segregated forever (debarred from funerals, weddings, and the right to borrow flour); withdrawal of the right to cultivate his land, accompanied by the destruction of his fruit trees; enforced fasting within the family; the ban on bearing arms whether on his shoulder or at his belt for one or two weeks; being chained or under house arrest; taking away from the master or mistress of the house his or her authority in the family.

The possibility of the punishment that he might incur within his own family had tormented him for a long time. And that suffering had begun the moment when his turn came to avenge his brother's death.

He could not put out of mind that icy morning in January when his father had called him to the great room on the upper storey of the house so that they could talk privately. The day was particularly bright, the sky and the new-fallen snow were dazzling, the world shone like glass, and with a kind of crystal madness it seemed that it might begin to slip at any moment and shatter into thousands of fragments. It was that sort of morning when his father reminded him of his duty. Gjorg was sitting by the window, listening to his father who spoke to him of blood. The whole world was stained with it. It shone red upon the snow, pools of it spread and stiffened everywhere. Then Gjorg understood that all that red was in his own eyes. He listened to his father, his head down. And in the days that followed, for the first time, without knowing why, he began to tell over in his head all the punishments that a disobedient member of the family might incur. He
did not want to admit to himself that he hated to kill a man. The hatred for the Kryeqyqe family that his father was trying to kindle in his heart on that January morning could not prevail over that brilliant light. Gjorg did not understand then that if the fire of hatred could not strike fire in him, one reason was that the man who tried to kindle it, his father, was himself ice-cold. It would seem that long ago, during that endless feud, all hatred had slowly cooled, or perhaps had never existed. His father talked on in vain. . . . Gjorg fearfully, almost in terror, understood that he could not hate the man he was supposed to kill. And when, in the days that followed, his mind would wander only to come back to the list of punishments in store for a disobedient member of the household, he began to understand that he was mentally preparing himself not to shed blood. But at the same time, he knew that it was useless to let his thoughts run on the punishments that his family might impose. Like everyone else he knew that for any breach of the rules of the blood feud there were other penalties, much more grim.

The second time they spoke about avenging the dead, his father's tone was harsher. The day was quite different, too. It was wan, miserable, without rain or even fog, not to speak of lightning, which would have been too much luxury for that washed-out sky. Gjorg tried to avoid his father's eyes, but at last his own were caught in that stare as in a trap.

“Look,” his father said, nodding at the shirt hanging on the wall in front of them.

Gjorg turned his head in that direction. He felt that the veins in his neck grated as if they were rusty.

“The blood is turning yellow,” his father said. “The dead man cries out for vengeance.”

The blood had in fact yellowed on the cloth. Or rather it
had turned a rusty color like that of the first water flowing from a faucet that has not been used for a long time.

“Gjorg, you're putting it off,” his father went on. “Our honor, but yours especially. . . .”

“Two fingers-breadth of honor have been stamped on our forehead by almighty God.” In the weeks that followed, Gjorg repeated to himself hundreds of times the words of the Code that his father had recited to him that day. “Whiten or further besmirch your dirty face, as you please. It is up to you to be a man or not.”

Am I free? he asked himself as he went upstairs to think about it alone on the
kulla
's second storey. The punishments his father could subject him to for this or that infraction were nothing compared to the risk of losing his honor. Two fingers-breadth of honor on our forehead. He touched his forehead with his hand, as if to find the exact place where his honor might be. And why should it be just there? he wondered. It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed. Now at last he had fathomed its meaning. Honor had its seat in the middle of your forehead because that was the place where the bullet must strike your man. “Good shot,” the old men said when someone faced his man squarely and hit him right in the forehead. Or “Bad shot” when the bullet pierced the stomach or struck a limb, not to mention the back.

Whenever Gjorg climbed to the upper storey to look at Mehill's shirt, he felt his forehead burning. The bloodstains on the cloth faded more and more. If warm weather came, they would turn yellow. Then people would begin to hand his coffee cup to him and to his kin under the leg. In the eyes of the
Kanun
, he would be a dead man.

There was no way out. Bearing the punishments, or any
other sacrifice, would not save him. Coffee below the knee—that frightened him more than anything else—was waiting for him somewhere along the way. Every door was closed to him, except one. “The offense can be atoned for only through the Code,” the Code itself said. Only the murder of a member of the Kryeqyqe clan could open a door to him. And so, one day last spring, he decided to lie in ambush for his man.

From that moment the whole house sprang to life. The silence that had stifled it was suddenly filled with music. And its grim walls seemed to soften.

He would already have done his duty, and he would be at peace, now, shut up in the tower of refuge, or still more at peace under the earth, had not something happened. From a far-off Banner, an aunt of theirs who had married there came unexpectedly. Anxious, distraught, she had crossed seven or eight mountain ranges and as many valleys to stop the bloodshed. Gjorg was the last man in the family after his father, she said. “Look, they'll kill Gjorg, and then they'll kill one of the Kryeqyqe, then it will be the turn of Gjorg's father, and the Berisha family will be extinct. Don't do it. Don't let the oak tree wither. Ask for the right to pay the blood-money instead.”

At first nobody would even listen, then they fell silent, they let her speak, and at last there was a lull in which they neither agreed nor disagreed with what she proposed. They were tired, but Gjorg's aunt gave no sign of tiring. Keeping up the struggle day and night, sleeping now in this house and now in that, sometimes with her cousins and sometimes with her immediate family, she finally gained her point: after seventy years of death and mourning, the Berishas decided to seek blood settlement with the Kryeqyqes.

The request for blood settlement—so rare in the mountains—caused a sensation in the village and throughout the Banner. Everything was done to ensure that the prescriptions of the Code were scrupulously observed. The arbiters, together with friends and kinsmen of the Berisha, who were called the “masters of the blood,” went to the home of the murderer, that is, to the Kryeqyqe, to eat the blood-compensation meal. So they ate the noon meal with the murderer in keeping with the custom, and settled the blood price that the Kryeqyqes would have to pay. After this it only remained for Gjorg's father, the master of the blood, to carve a cross with hammer and chisel on the murderer's door and for them to exchange a drop of blood with each other, at which point the reconciliation would be regarded as having been established forever. But that money never came, for an aged uncle kept the business from being settled in that way. After the meal, while the men, according to custom, were going through every room in the house, stamping their feet, a rite signifying that the last shadow of the feud must be driven out of every corner of the house, suddenly Gjorg's old uncle shouted, “No!” He was a quiet old man who had never called attention to himself in the clan, and certainly the last person among those present of whom one might expect such a thing. Everyone was dumbfounded, and every eye, every neck that had been raised at the same time that their feet had risen to stamp again on the floor, all fell softly, as if on cotton batting. “No,” the old uncle said again. Then the priest who was there as the chief mediator waved his hand. He said, “More blood must flow.”

Gjorg, who for a time had been almost ignored, now found himself once more with all eyes upon him. Yet with the return of his old trouble, from which he had escaped
momentarily, he felt a certain satisfaction. It seemed that this satisfaction came from the sense that everyone was interested in him. Now he felt that he could not say which life was better, a quiet life dusted over with forgetfulness and excluded from the machinery of the blood feud, or that other life, the life of danger, but with a lightning bolt of grief that ran through it like a quivering seam. He had tasted both, and if someone had said to him now, “Choose one or the other,” Gjorg would certainly have hesitated. Perhaps it took years to get used to peace, just as it had taken so many years to get used to its absence. The mechanism of the blood feud was such that even as it freed you, it kept you bound to it in spirit for a long time.