Broken April

CHAPTER I

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.”

Slowly the gun barrel swept over some patches of the half-thawed snow towards the wild pomegranates scattered through the brush-covered space on both sides of the road. For perhaps the hundredth time he thought that this was a fateful day in his life. Then the gun barrel swung back again to where it had been. What in his mind he had called a fateful day was no more than those patches of snow and those wild pomegranates that seemed to have been waiting since midday to see what he would do.

He thought, soon night will fall and it will be too dark to shoot. He wished that dusk would come swiftly, that night would race on after it, so that he could run away from this accursed ambush. It was the second time in his life that he had lain in wait to take revenge, but the man he must kill was the same one, so that this ambush was really an extension of the other.

He became aware again of his icy feet, and he moved his legs as if to keep the cold from rising in his body, but it had long since reached his belly, his chest and even his head. He had the feeling that bits of his brain had frozen, like those patches of snow along the sides of the road.

He felt that he could not shape a clear thought. He had only a vague animosity for the wild pomegranates and the patches of snow, and sometimes he told himself that were it not for them, he would have given up his vigil long ago. But there they were, motionless witnesses that had kept him from going away.

At the bend in the road, for perhaps the twentieth time that day, he thought he saw the man he had been waiting for. The man came on with short steps; the black barrel of his rifle rose above his right shoulder. The watcher started. This time it was no hallucination. It really was the man he was waiting for.

Just as he had done so many times before, Gjorg brought the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the man’s head. For a moment the head seemed to resist him, trying to elude his sights, and at the last instant he even thought he saw an ironic smile on the man’s face. Six months before, the same thing had happened, and so as not to disfigure that face (who can say whence that touch of pity came at the last moment?) he had lowered the front sight of his weapon and wounded his enemy in the neck.

The man came closer. Please not a wound this time, Gjorg said to himself in a kind of prayer. His family had had great trouble paying the fine for the first wound, and a second fine would ruin them. But there was no penalty for death.

The man came closer. Gjorg thought, better a clean miss than a wound. As he had done each time he had imagined he saw the man, in keeping with the custom, he warned the man before he fired. Neither then nor later did he know if he had called aloud or if the words had been stifled in his throat. In fact the other man turned his head sharply. Gjorg saw him move his arm as if to unsling the rifle from his shoulder, and he fired. Then he raised his head, and as if bewildered watched the dead man — still standing, but Gjorg was sure he had killed him — take a step forward, drop his rifle on the right side, and immediately fall to the left.

Gjorg came out of concealment and walked towards the body. The road was deserted. The only sound was the sound of his own footsteps. The dead man had fallen in a heap. Gjorg bent down and laid his hand on the man’s shoulder, as if to wake him. “What am I doing?” he said to himself. He gripped the dead man’s shoulder again, as if he wanted to bring him back to life. “Why am I doing this?” he thought. At once he realized that he had bent down over the other man not to awaken him from eternal sleep but to turn him on his back. He simply meant to follow the custom. Around him patches of snow were still there, scattered witnesses.

He stood up and was about to leave when he remembered that he had to put the dead man’s rifle near his head.

He did it all as if in a dream. He felt like vomiting, and he told himself several times that it must be because of the blood. A few moments later he was fleeing down the deserted road, almost at a run.

Dusk was falling. He looked back two or three times without knowing why. The road was still completely empty. In the dying day the still deserted road stretched away between brush and thicket.

Somewhere ahead he heard mule bells, then human voices, and he saw a group of people. In the twilight it was hard to tell whether they were visitors or mountain folk returning from the market. They came up with him sooner than he had expected. Men, young women, and children.

They said, “Good evening,” and he stopped. Even before he spoke, he motioned in the direction from which he had come. Then he said in a hoarse voice, “Over there by the bend in the road I killed a man. Turn him on his back, good people, and put his rifle by his head.”

The little group was still. Then a voice asked, “You’re not blood-sick are you?” He did not answer. The voice suggested a remedy, but he did not hear it. He had started walking again. Now that he had asked them to turn over the dead man’s body as it should be, he felt relieved. He could not remember whether or not he had done that himself. The Kanun* provided for a state of shock on the part of the killer, and permitted passers-by to complete whatever he had not been able to do. In any case, to leave a dead man face-down, his weapon far off, was an unforgivable disgrace.

Night had not yet fallen when he reached the village. It was still his fateful day. The door of the kulla** was ajar. He pushed it open with his shoulder and went in.

“Well?” someone asked from inside.

He nodded.

“When?”

“Just now.”

He heard footsteps coming down the wooden stairs.

“There’s blood on your hands,” his father said. “Go and wash them.”

“It must have happened when I turned him over.”

He had tormented himself needlessly. A glance at his hands would have told him that he had done everything in keeping with the rules.

There was a smell of roasted coffee in the kulla. Astonishingly, he was sleepy. He yawned twice. The gleaming eyes of his little sister, who leaned against his left shoulder, seemed far away, like two stars beyond a hill.

“And now?” he said suddenly, to no one in particular.

“We must tell the village about the death,” his father answered. Only then did Gjorg notice that his father was putting on his shoes.

He was drinking coffee his mother had made for him when he heard, outside, the first shout:

“Gjorg of the Berisha has shot Zef Kryeqyqe.”

The voice, with its peculiar ring, sounded at once like the call of a town crier and the singing of an ancient psalmist.

That inhuman voice roused him from his drowsiness for an instant. He felt as if his name had quitted his body, his chest, his skin, to pour itself cruelly outside. It was the first time he had ever felt anything like that. Gjorg of the Berisha, he repeated within him the cry of the pitiless herald. He was twenty-six, and for the first time his name plumbed the depths of life.

Outside the messengers of death, as if on wings, spread that name everywhere.

Half an hour later, they brought back the man’s body. Following the custom, they had put him on a litter made of four beech branches. Some still hoped that he was not dead.

The victim’s father waited at the door of his house. When the men bearing his son were forty paces off, he called out:

“What have you brought me? A wound or a death?”

The answer was short, dry.

“A death.”

His tongue sought moisture, deep, deep in his mouth. Then he spoke painfully:

“Carry him in and tell the village and our kin of our bereavement.”

The bells of the cattle returning to the village of Brezftoht, the bell tolling vespers, and all the other sounds of nightfall seemed laden with news of the death.

The streets and lanes were unusually lively for that evening hour. Torches that looked cold in the waning light flickered somewhere at the edge of the village. People came and went by the house of the dead man and by the house of his murderer, going in and coming out. Others, in twos and threes, went off and came back.

At the windows of houses on the outskirts, people exchanged the latest news:

“Have you heard? Gjorg Berisha has killed Zef Kryeqyqe.”

“Gjorg Berisha has taken back his brother’s blood.”

“Are the Berishas going to ask for the twenty-four hour bessa?”*

“Yes, of course.”

The windows of the tall stone houses looked upon the comings and goings in the village streets. Now night had fallen. The torchlight seemed to thicken as if solidifying. Little by little it turned a deep red, lava springing from mysterious depths, and sparks flew upward from it as if announcing the bloodletting to come.

Four men, one of them elderly, were walking towards the dead man’s house.

“The deputation is going to ask for the twenty-four hour bessa for the Berishas,” someone said from a window.

“Will they grant it?”

“Yes, of course.”

Nevertheless, the entire clan of the Berisha were preparing to defend themselves. Here and there you could hear voices: Murrash, go home at once! Cen, close the door. Where’s Prenga?

The doors of all the houses of the clan, of kinsfolk near and distant, were closing, for this was the moment of danger, before the victim’s family had granted either of the two periods of truce; according to the Code, the Kryeqyqe, blinded by the newly shed blood, had the right to take vengeance on any member of the Berisha family.

All watched at their windows to see the delegation come out again. “Will they grant the truce?” the women asked.

At last the four mediators came out. The discussion had been short. Their bearing gave nothing away but a voice soon gave out the news.

“The Kryeqyqe family has granted the bessa.”

Everyone knew that it was the short truce, the twenty-four hour bessa. As for the long bessa, the thirty-day truce, no one spoke of it yet, for only the village could ask for it — and in any case it could not be requested until after the burial of the last victim.

The voices flew from house to house:

“The Kryeqyqe family has granted the bessa.”

“Bessa has been granted by the Kryeqyqes.”

“And a good thing, too. At least we’ll have twenty-four hours without bloodshed,” a hoarse voice breathed from behind a shutter.

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.”

“But I am the Gjaks,”* Gjorg had protested. “I’m the one who killed him. Why must I go?”

“For that very reason you must go,” his father declared. “If there is anyone who cannot be excused from the burial and the funeral dinner today, it’s you.” “But why?” Gjorg had asked one last time. “Why must I go?” But his father glared at him and Gjorg said no more.

Now he walked among the mourners, pale, with unsteady steps, feeling people’s glances glide by him and turn aside at once, losing themselves in the banks of mist. Most of them were relatives of the dead man. Perhaps for the hundredth time he groaned inwardly: Why must I be here?

Their eyes showed no hatred. They were cold as the March day, as he himself had been cold, without hatred, yesterday evening as he lay in wait for his quarry. Now the newly dug grave, the crosses of stone and wood — most of them askew — and the plaintive sound of the tolling bell, all these struck home. The faces of the mourners, with the hideous scratches left by their fingernails (God, he thought, how did they get their nails to grow so long in twenty-four hours?), their hair torn out savagely and their eyes swollen, the muffled footsteps all around him, all these trappings of death — it was he who had brought them about. And as if that were not enough, he was forced to walk in that solemn cortege, slowly, in mourning, just like them.

The braid on the seams of their tight trousers of white felt nearly touched his own, like poisonous black snakes ready to strike. But he was calm. He was better protected by the twenty-four hour truce than by the loophole of any kulla or fortress. The barrels of their rifles were aligned straight upwards against their short, black tunics, but for the time being they were not free to shoot at him. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after. And if the village asked for the thirty-day bessa on his behalf, he would be at peace for another four weeks. And then….

But a few paces ahead of him a rifle barrel swayed as if to stand out among the others. Another barrel, a short one, was to his left. Still others were all around him. Which of them…. at the last moment, in his mind, the words “will kill me” changed — as if to soften them — to “will fire at me.”

The road from the graveyard to the dead man’s house seemed endless. And he still had before him an even more arduous test, the funeral dinner. He would sit at the table with the dead man’s kin. They would pass the bread to him, they would set food before him, spoons, forks, and he would have to eat.

Two or three times he felt the urge to get out of that absurd situation, to bolt from the funeral cortege. Let them insult him, jeer at him, accuse him of violating age-old custom, let them shoot at his retreating back if they liked, anything so long as he got away from there. But he knew very well that he could never run away, no more than his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his great-great-grandfather, and all his ancestors five hundred, a thousand years before him had been able to run away.

They were coming close to the house of the dead man. The narrow windows above the arch of the house door had been hung with black cloth. Oh, where am I going, he moaned to himself, and while the low door of the kulla was still a hundred paces off, he lowered his head so as not to strike against the stone arch.

The funeral meal took place in accordance with the rules. As long as it went on Gjorg thought about his own funeral feast. Which of these people would go there, just as he had come here today, just as his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather and all his ancestors had gone to such feasts down through the centuries?

The faces of the mourners were still gouged and bloody. Custom forbade them to wash either in the village where the killing had taken place or on the way back. They could wash only after they reached their homes.

The streaks on their faces and foreheads made them look as if they were wearing masks. Gjorg imagined how his own mourners would look when they had gouged their faces. He felt that from now on the lives of all the generations to come in the two families would be an endless funeral feast, each side playing host in turn. And each side, before leaving for the feast, would don that blood-stained mask.

That afternoon, after the funeral meal, there were once again unusual comings and goings in the village. In a few hours, Gjorg Berisha’s one-day truce would be at an end, and now the village elders, as the rules required, were preparing to visit the Kryeqyqes to ask for the thirty-day truce, the long bessa, in the name of the village.

On the doorsteps of the kullas, on the first floors where the women lived, and in the village squares, people talked of nothing else. This was the first blood-taking of that spring, and of course there was much discussion of everything connected with it. The killing had been performed in accordance with the rules, and as for the burial, the funeral feast, the one-day bessa, and everything else, these had been carried out with scrupulous obedience to the ancient Code. So the thirty-day truce that the elders were preparing to ask of the Kryeqyqes would certainly be granted.

As people talked and waited for the latest news about the long bessa, they recalled the times, recent or long past, when the rules of the Code had been violated in their village and the surrounding region, and even in far places of the endless plateau. They remembered the violators of the Code as well as the harsh penalties exacted. They remembered persons punished by their own families, whole families punished by the village, or even whole villages punished by a group of villages, or by the Banner.* But, luckily, they said with a sigh of relief, no such disgrace had fallen on their village for a long time. Everything had been done according to the old rules, and not for ages had anyone had the insane notion to break them. This latest blood-taking, too, had been done according to the Code, and Gjorg Berisha, the gjaks, young though he was, had behaved well at his enemy’s burial and at the funeral dinner. The Kryeqyqes would certainly grant him the thirty-day truce. Especially since the village, having requested this kind of truce, could revoke it if the gjaks took it into his head to abuse his temporary respite and roam around the countryside boasting of his deed. But no, Gjorg Berisha was not that sort. On the contrary, he had always been thought quiet and sensible, quite the last young fellow one would expect to play the fool.

The Kryeqyqes granted the long truce late in the afternoon, a few hours before the short one was due to run out. One of the village elders came to the Berishas to tell them of the pledge, with renewed advice that Gjorg must not abuse it, etc.

After the envoy left, Gjorg sat numbly in a corner of the stone house. He could look forward to thirty days of safety. After that, death would lurk all around him. He would go about only in the dark like a bat, hiding from the sun, the moonlight, and the flicker of torches.

Thirty days, he said to himself. The shot fired from that ridge above the highway had cut his life in two: the twenty-six years he had lived thus far, and the thirty days that began on that very day, the seventeenth of March, and would end on the seventeenth of April. Then the life of a bat, but he was not counting that any longer.

Out of the corner of his eye, Gjorg looked at the scrap of landscape visible through the narrow window. Outside it was March, half-smiling, half-frozen, with the dangerous mountain light that belonged to March alone. Then April would come, or rather just the first half of it. Gjorg felt an emptiness in the left side of his chest. From now on, April would be tinged with a bluish pain…. Yes, that was how April had always seemed to him — a month with something incomplete about it. April love, as the songs said. His own unfinished April. Despite everything, it was better this way, he thought, though he could not say what was better, that he had avenged his brother or that he had shed blood in this season. It was only half an hour since he had been granted the thirty-day truce, and already he was almost used to the idea that his life had been cleft in two. Now it even seemed to him that it had always been split like that: one fragment twenty-six years long, slow to the point of boredom, twenty-six months of March and twenty-six months of April and as many winters and summers; and the other was short, four weeks, impetuous, fierce as an avalanche, half a March and half an April, like two broken branches glittering with frost.

What would he do in the thirty days left to him? During the long bessa, people usually hurried to finish what they had not managed to do so far in their lives. If there was no important thing left undone they busied themselves with the tasks of daily life. If it was seed-time, they hastened to sow. If it was harvest-time, they gathered in the sheaves. If it was neither seed-time nor harvest-time, they did even more ordinary things, like fixing the roof. And if that was not necessary, they just wandered about the countryside to see the cranes flying again, or the first October frosts. Generally, engaged men married during this time, but Gjorg would not marry. The young girl to whom he had been engaged, who lived in a distant Banner and whom he had never seen, had died a year ago after a long illness, and since that time there had been no woman in his life.

Without taking his eyes off the bit of misty landscape, he thought of what he might do in the thirty days left to him. At first it seemed a brief time, too brief, a handful of days too few for anything. But a few minutes later this same respite seemed horribly long and absolutely useless.

March seventeenth, he murmured. March twenty-first. April fourth. April eleventh. April seventeenth. Eighteenth. Aprildeath. Then on and on forever, Aprildeath, Aprildeath, and no more May. Never again.

He was mumbling dates in March and April, over and over, when he heard his father’s steps coming down from the floor above. He was holding an oilcloth purse.

“Here, Gjorg, it’s the five hundred groschen for the blood,” he said, holding out the purse to him.

Gjorg’s eyes opened wide, and he hid his hands behind his back as if to keep them as far as possible from that loathsome purse.

“What?” he said in a faint voice. “Why?”

His father looked at him amazed.

“What? Why? Have you forgotten that the blood tax must be paid?”

“Oh, yes,” Gjorg said, relieved.

The purse was still being held out to him, and he reached out his hands.

“The day after tomorrow you’ll have to start off for the Kulla of Orosh,” his father went on. “It’s one day’s journey on foot.”

Gjorg did not want to go anywhere.

“Can’t it wait, father? Does the money have to be paid right away?”

“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.

“The day after tomorrow,” his father said again, “to the Kulla of Orosh.”

He had gone to the window and was looking fixedly at something outside. There was a gleam of satisfaction in his eye.

“Come here,” he said to his son, quietly.

Gjorg went to his father.

Outside in the yard a shirt hung on the wire clothesline.

“Your brother’s shirt,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Mehill’s shirt.”

Gjorg could not take his eyes from it. It fluttered white in the wind, waving, billowing joyously.

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.

How many times, when he was alone, had Gjorg climbed to that fateful upper storey to look at the shirt! The blood turned more and more yellow. That meant that the dead man had found no rest. How many times had Gjorg seen that shirt in his dreams, washed in water and soapsuds, its whiteness shimmering like the spring sky! But in the morning when he awoke it would be there still, spattered with the brown stains of dried blood.

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.