Broken April

CHAPTER II

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.

On that same October day, it came out who it was that had shot the unknown traveller. It was a young man of the Kryeqyqe family, who had been on the watch for him a long time because the man had done him an injury in a cafe, in front of a woman, also unknown. And so, at the end of that October day, the Berisha found themselves in enmity with the Kryeqyqe. Gjorg’s clan, which had hitherto lived in peace, was at last caught up by the great engine of the blood feud. Forty-four graves had been dug since then, and who knows how many are to come, and all because of the knocking at the gate on that autumn night.

Many times, when he was alone, when he let his mind stray, Gjorg had tried to imagine how the life of his clan would have run, had that late guest not knocked at the gate of their kulla, but at another gate. If, by magic, those knocks could be blanked out from reality, then, oh, then (and on this matter Gjorg thought the stuff of legend to be quite real), one would see the heavy stone slabs lifted from forty-four graves, and the forty-four dead men would rise, shake the earth from their faces, and return to the living; and with them would come the children who could not have been born, then the babies that those children could not bring into the world, and everything would be different, different. And all that would happen if, by enchantment, one could correct the course of things. Oh, if only he had stopped a little farther along. A little farther on. But he had stopped exactly where he had, and no one could change that anymore, no more than anyone could change the direction in which the victim had fallen, no more than anyone could ever change the rules of the ancient Kanun…. Without the knocking at the door, everything would be so different that at times he was afraid to think of it, and he consoled himself with the notion that perhaps it had to happen this way, and that if life outside the whirlpool of blood might perhaps be more peaceful, by the same token it would be even more dull and meaningless. He tried to call to mind families that were not involved in the blood feud, and he found no special signs of happiness in them. It even seemed to him that, sheltered from that danger, they hardly knew the value of life, and were only the more unhappy for that. Whereas clans that were in the blood feud lived in a different order of days and seasons, accompanied as it were by an inner tremor; the people were more handsome, and the young men were in favor with the women. Even the two nuns whom he had first passed, when they had seen the black ribbon sewn to his sleeve that meant that he was searching for his death or that his death was searching for him, had looked at him strangely. But that was not the important thing; what was happening within him was the important thing. Something terrifying and majestic at the same time. He could not have explained it. He felt that his heart had leaped from his chest, and, opened up in that way, he was vulnerable, sensitive to everything, so that he might rejoice in anything, be cast down by anything, small or large, a butterfly, a leaf, boundless snow, or the depressing rain falling on that very day. But all that — and the sky itself might fall down upon him — his heart endured, and could endure even more.

He had been walking for hours, but except for a slight numbness in his knees, he was not at all tired. The rain was still falling, but the drops were sparse, as if someone had pruned away the clouds’ roots. Gjorg was sure he had passed the boundaries of his own district and was journeying through another region. The country looked much the same; mountains raising their heads behind the shoulders of other mountains as if in frozen curiosity. He met a small party of mountaineers and asked them if he was on the right road for the Castle of Orosh, and how far off it might be. They told him he was going the right way, but that he would have to hurry if he wanted to arrive before nightfall. As they spoke, their eyes drifted towards the black ribbon on his sleeve and, perhaps because of the ribbon, they suggested again that he quicken his pace.

I’ll hurry, I’ll hurry, Gjorg said to himself, not without bitterness. Don’t worry, I’ll get there in time to pay the tax before nightfall. Without thinking, perhaps because of his sudden anger, or simply following automatically the advice of those strangers, he had indeed picked up his pace.

Now he was quite alone on the road, which crossed a narrow tableland furrowed by old watercourses. Around him the fields were desolate and untilled. He thought he heard the rumbling of distant thunder and looked up. A single airplane was flying slowly among the clouds. Wonderingly his eyes followed its flight for a while. He had heard that in the neighboring district a passenger plane flew by once a week, from Tirana to a far-off foreign country in Europe, but he had never seen it before.

When the airplane disappeared in the clouds, Gjorg felt a pain in his neck, and only then realized that he had stared at it for a long time. The plane left a great emptiness behind it, and Gjorg sighed unawares. Suddenly he felt hungry. He looked around for a fallen tree trunk or stone to sit upon and eat the bread and goat cheese he had brought along, but on either side of the road there was only the naked earth, dried watercourses, and nothing more. I’ll go on a little further, he said to himself.

And after another half-hour of walking, he made out the roof of an inn in the distance. He traversed almost at a run the stretch of road leading to it, stopped for a moment before the door, then went into the building. It was an ordinary inn, like all the others in the mountain districts, with no signboard, the roof steep-pitched, smelling of straw, and with a large common room. On either side of a long oaken table with many scorch marks, some customers were sitting on chairs of the same wood. Two of them were bending down to bowls of beans, eating greedily. Another stared vacantly at the planks of the table, his head supported by his hands.

As he sat down on one of the chairs, Gjorg felt the muzzle of his rifle touch the floor. He slipped the weapon from his shoulder, set it down across his thighs, and, with a shake of his head, threw back the soaked hood of his cloak. He felt the presence of other people behind him, and only then noticed that on either side of the stairway that led to the upper storey, other mountaineers were sitting on black sheepskins and woolen packs. Some of them, leaning against the wall, were eating corn bread that they dipped in whey. Gjorg thought that he would get up from the table, and like them, take out his bread and his cheese from his bag, but at that moment the smell of beans reached his nostrils and at once he wanted terribly a plate of hot beans. His father had given him a coin, but it was not clear to Gjorg whether he could really spend it or if he was supposed to bring it back unspent. Meanwhile, the innkeeper, whom Gjorg had not been aware of until then, appeared before him.

“Going to the Kulla of Orosh?” he asked. “Where are you from?”

“From Brezftoht.”

“Then you must be hungry. Would you like to have something?”

The innkeeper was skinny and deformed. Gjorg thought the man must be a sharper, because while saying, “Would you like to have something?” instead of looking him in the eye, he stared at the black band on Gjorg’s sleeve, as if to say, “If you’re about to pay five hundred groschen for the murder you did, the world won’t come to an end if you spend a couple of them in my inn.”

“Would you like to have something?” the innkeeper asked again, turning his eyes from Gjorg’s sleeve at last but still not looking at his face but at some place off to the side.

“A plate of beans,” said Gjorg. “How much will it be? I’ve got my own bread.”

He blushed, but he had to ask the question. Not for anything would he spend any part of the money set aside for the blood tax.

“A quarter groschen,” said the innkeeper.

Gjorg breathed a sigh of relief. The innkeeper turned away, and when he came back a moment later with a wooden bowl full of beans in his hand, Gjorg saw that he had a squint. As if to forget, he bent his head over the bowl of beans and began to eat quickly.

“Would you like coffee?” the innkeeper asked, when he came to take away the empty bowl.

Gjorg looked at him bewildered. His eyes seemed to say, don’t tempt me. I may have five hundred groschen in my purse but I’d rather give you my head (Lord, he thought, that’s just what it will cost me, my head thirty days from now, and even before thirty days, twenty-eight days), before time, than one groschen from the purse that’s owing to the Kulla of Orosh. But the innkeeper, as if he guessed what was in Gjorg’s mind, added:

“It’s very cheap. Ten cents.”

Gjorg nodded impatiently. The innkeeper, moving awkwardly between the chairs and the table, cleared away dishes, brought fresh ones, and then disappeared again, finally coming back with a cup of coffee in his hand.

Gjorg was still sipping his coffee when a small group entered the inn. From the stir their arrival caused, from the turning of heads and by the way the lame innkeeper behaved in their presence, he understood that the newcomers must be well-known in the district. One of them, the man who came at once into the center of the room, was very short, with a cold, pallid face. After him came a man dressed like a townsman, but very oddly, with a checked jacket, and his breeches stuffed into his boots. The third man had a face whose features seemed somehow blunted and whose eyes rained scorn. But it was clear at once that everybody’s attention was centered upon the short man.

“Ali Binak, Ali Binak,” people began to whisper around Gjorg. His eyes widened, as if he could scarcely believe that there, in the same inn as himself, was the famous interpreter of the Kanun, of whom he had heard since he was a child.

The innkeeper, with his odd sideling walk, invited the small party into an adjacent room, evidently reserved for distinguished guests.

The short man mumbled a brief greeting to no one in particular, and without turning his head either to the right or to the left, he followed the innkeeper. While appearing to be aware of his fame, he was, surprisingly, quite without the haughty bearing common among men of small stature who have a sense of their own importance; on the contrary, his movements, his face, and especially his eyes, suggested the calm of a man without illusions.

The newcomers had disappeared into the other room, but the whispering on their account had not stopped. Gjorg had finished his coffee, but while he knew that time was important now, he was pleased to be sitting there, listening to the lively comments on every hand. Why had Ali Binak come? he wondered. No doubt to settle some complex case. Besides, he had been dealing with such things all his life. They called him from Province to Province and from Banner to Banner to ask his opinion in difficult cases, when the elders were divided among themselves over the interpretation of the Code. Of the hundreds of interpreters in the limitless space of the north country rrafsh*, there were no more than ten as famous as Ali Binak. So that it was not for nothing that he went to one place or another. This time, too, someone said, he had come about a complicated boundary question that had to be settled promptly, tomorrow, in the neighboring Banner. But who was the other, the man with the light-colored eyes? That’s right, who was he? They said he was a doctor whom Ali Binak often brought with him in thorny affairs, especially when it was a matter of reckoning up wounds to be paid for with fines. Well, if that was the case, Ali Binak hadn’t come about a boundary dispute but for some other reason, since of course a doctor had no business with boundaries. Perhaps they had misunderstood all along. Some said that he was in fact here about another matter, very complicated, that had come up a few days ago in the village beyond the plateau. In an exchange of shots because of a quarrel, a woman who happened to be there, between the rivals, had been killed in the crossfire. She was pregnant, and with a man-child, as was proved after the baby had been extracted. The village elders, it appeared, were very perplexed in deciding who had the duty of taking revenge for the infant. Could it be that Ali Binak had come to clear up this very case?

But the other one in his odd get-up, who was he? Just as with all the other questions, there was an answer to this one. He was a sort of public servant whose business was measuring land, but he had the Devil knows what kind of name to him that ended in “meter,” the kind of word you can’t pronounce without twisting your tongue, geo, geo…. that’s it, geometer.

Oh, then it must be about the boundary business, if this geometer, or whatever you call him, is here.

Gjorg wanted to stay and listen a while longer, the more so because there was every reason to think that people would be telling other kinds of stories at the inn, but if he lingered, he risked not getting to the castle in time. He stood up suddenly, so as not to be tempted again, paid for the beans and the coffee, and was about to leave; at the last moment he remembered to ask for directions once more.

“You take the highroad,” the innkeeper said, “then, when you come to the Graves of the Wedding Guests, at the place where the road forks, make sure you go right, not left. You hear, the right fork.”

When Gjorg went outside, the rain had fallen off still more, but the air was very damp. The day was as cloudy as the morning had been, and just as there are certain women whose age you cannot guess, there was no way to tell what time it was.

Gjorg went on, trying to think of nothing at all. The road stretched endlessly with grey wasteland on either hand. Once his eye fell on some half-sunken graves scattered along the roadside. He thought that these must be the Graves of the Wedding Guests. Then, since the road did not fork there, he decided that those graves must be further on. And so it turned out. They appeared a quarter of an hour later, and they were sunken like the others, but even more dismal, and covered with moss. As he passed them he imagined that the party of wedding guests he had met with that morning had simply turned round and come back to bury themselves in this cemetery and take up their abode here forever.

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.

In the days that followed the failure of the attempted settlement, when in the sky that had been empty for a little while the clouds of danger massed again, Gjorg asked himself often whether that attempt at reconciliation had been for the best or not, and he had no answer. The advantage had been that it had given him another year of free life, but in other respects it had been disastrous in that now he had to reaccustom himself to the life from which he had broken away, to the idea of killing someone. Soon he would have to become a justicer, as the Code called those who killed to avenge the dead. The justicers were a kind of vanguard of the clan, the ones who carried out the killings, but also the first to be killed in the blood feud. When it was the turn of the opposing clan to wreak vengeance, they tried to do so by killing the other clan’s justicer. Only if that were not possible would they mark down another man in place of him. During seventy years of enmity for the Kryeqyqe family, the Berishas had produced twenty-two justicers, most of whom had been killed by a bullet later. The justicers were the flower of a clan, its marrow, and its chief memorial. Many things were forgotten in the life of the clan, men and events alike covered with dust; only the justicers, tiny, inextinguishable flames on the graves of the clan, were never effaced from its memory.

Summer came and went, more swiftly than in any other year. The Berishas hurried to finish the work in the fields, so that after the killing they could shut themselves up in their kulla. Gjorg experienced a kind of quiet bitterness, something like what a young man might feel on the eve of his wedding day.

At last, at the end of October, he fired at Zef Kryeqyqe, without managing to kill him. He only wounded him in the jawbone. Then came the doctors of the Code, whose business it was to assess the fine to be paid by the man who inflicted a wound, and since this was a head wound, they valued it at three purses of groschen, which amounted to half the price of a killing. This meant that the Berishas could choose either to pay the fine or to regard the wound as representing one-half of their vengeance. In the latter case, if they did not pay the fine but treated the wound as a part settlement of the blood that was owed, then they had no right to kill a Kryeqyqe, because half the blood had already been taken. They had the right to inflict a wound only.

Naturally, the Berishas did not agree to reckon the wound as a part payment. Though the fine was heavy, they dug down into their savings and paid it so that the blood account remained intact.

As long as the matter of the fine to be paid for the wound was still going on, Gjorg saw that his father’s eyes were darkened by a veil of scorn and bitterness. They seemed to say, not only did you draw out the business of taking revenge for so long, but now you’re driving us to rack and ruin.

Gjorg himself felt that all this had been brought about by his hesitation, which had made his hand tremble at the last moment. To tell the truth, he could not tell if his hand had really trembled when he took aim, or if he had purposely dropped the front sight of his weapon from the man’s forehead to the lower portion of his face.

All this was followed by apathy. Life seemed to mark time. The wounded man suffered at home for a long while. The bullet had broken his jawbone, they said, and infection had set in. The winter was long and more dismal than ever before. Over the placid snow (the old men said that no one could remember the snow being so quiet — not one avalanche), the wind made a slight whistling sound as unchanging as the snow. Zef of the Kryeqyqe, the sole object of Gjorg’s life, went on languishing in bed, and Gjorg felt like a man out of work, wandering about uselessly.

It really felt as if that winter would never end. And the very moment when they learned that the wounded man was getting better, Gjorg fell ill. Sick at heart, he would have borne martyrdom so as not to have to take to his bed before he had carried out his mission, but it was quite impossible. He turned pale as wax, kept on his feet as long as he could, then collapsed. He was bedridden for two months while Zef Kryeqyqe, taking advantage of Gjorg’s illness, began to walk about the village free as air. From the corner of the second storey of the kulla where he lay, Gjorg looked out, scarcely thinking at all, at the patch of landscape framed by the window. Beyond that stretched the world whitened by the snow, a world to which nothing bound him anymore. For a long time he had felt himself a stranger in that world, absolutely superfluous, and if outside his window people sill expected anything of him, it was only in terms of the murder he was to do.

For hours on end he looked scornfully at the snow-covered ground, as if to say, yes, I’ll go out there, I’ll go out quickly to spill that bit of blood. The thought haunted him so much that sometimes he thought he really saw a small red stain take shape in the heart of that endless white.

In the first days of March he felt a little better, and in the second week of the month he left his bed. When he stepped outside his legs were shaky. Nobody imagined that in his condition, still dizzy from his illness, his face white as a sheet, he would go out to lie in ambush for his man. Perhaps that was why Zef of the Kryeqyqe, knowing that his enemy was still ill, had been taken unawares.

At moments the rain fell so sparsely that one would imagine it must stop, but suddenly it started up again better than ever. By that time it was afternoon and Gjorg felt his legs getting numb. The gray day was the same; only the district was different. Gjorg could tell because the mountaineers he met wore different clothing. The small villages were farther and farther from the highroad. In places the bronze of a church bell glinted weakly in the distance. Then for miles the landscape was empty.

He met fewer and fewer travelers. Gjorg asked again about the Kulla of Orosh. First, people told him it was quite close by, then, further on, when he thought he must really be drawing near, they told him it was still a long way. And each time the passers-by pointed in the same direction, in the distance where sight was lost in the mist.

Two or three times Gjorg imagined that night was falling, but it turned out that he was mistaken. It was still that endless afternoon in which the villages drew further away from the highway as if they meant to hide from the road and from the world. Once more he asked if the castle was still far off, and he was told that it was very near now. The last traveler even stretched his hand in the direction where it was supposed to be.

“Will I get there before nightfall?” Gjorg asked him.

“I think so,” he said. “Just around nightfall.”

Gjorg set off again. He was sinking with fatigue. Sometimes he was ready to believe that the evening, in delaying, was keeping the Kulla far off, and sometimes on the contrary, it was the remoteness of the Kulla that kept the evening suspended, without letting it settle on the earth.

Once he thought he could make out the silhouette of the Kulla through the fog, but the dark mass proved to be a convent, like the one he had seen in the morning of that long day. Farther along, he felt once again that he was close to the Kulla, and even thought that at last he could see it clearly on the top of a steep hill, but going on he saw that it was not the Kulla of Orosh, it was not a building at all, but a mere rag of fog darker than the others.

When he found himself alone again on the highroad, he felt all hope of ever reaching the castle fail within him. The emptiness of the road on either side seemed emptier still because of the shrubby growth that had sprung up there as if with an evil intention. What is the matter, Gjorg thought. Now, he could see no villages at all, no matter how far back from the road, and the worst of it was his conviction that they would never appear again.

Walking along, he raised his head from time to time, looking for the Kulla on the horizon, and again he thought he saw it, but scarcely believing that he did. From the time of his childhood, he had heard about the princely castle that had guarded for centuries men’s adherence to the Code, but for all that he did not know what it looked like, nor anything more about it. The people of the Plateau simply called it Orok, and it was impossible to imagine the appearance of the place from their stories. And now that Gjorg caught sight of it in the distance, not believing that it was really the castle, he could not make out its shape. In the fog its silhouette seemed neither high nor low, and sometimes he thought it must be quite spread out and sometimes he thought it a compact mass. Gjorg found that it gave the impression that the road climbed up in switchbacks, and that his changing point of view made the building change continually. But even when he was quite close, he could make out nothing distinctly. He was sure that it must be the castle and he was certain that it was not. At one moment he thought he saw a single roof covering various buildings, and at another, several roofs covering a single building. Its appearance changed as he approached. Now he thought he saw a castle-keep rising amidst a number of structures that seemed to be outbuildings. But when he had walked on a bit farther, the main tower disappeared and he saw only those outbuildings. Then these too began in turn to break up, and when he came closer still, he saw that they were not fortified towers, but dwellings of some kind, and in part not even that but perhaps galleries, more or less abandoned. There was no one about. Did I take the wrong road, he wondered. But just then a man appeared before him.

“The death tax?” the man asked, glancing surreptitiously at Gjorg’s right sleeve, and without waiting for an answer, he extended his arm towards one of the galleries.

Gjorg turned in that direction. He felt that his legs would not hold him up. Before him was a wooden door, a very old one. He turned round, as if to ask the man who had spoken to him if he should go in there, but the man was gone. He looked at the door for a moment before making up his mind to knock. The wood was all rotten, bristling with all sorts of nail-heads and bits of iron carelessly hammered in, mostly askew and serving no purpose. All that metal had become one with the ancient wood, like the fingernails of an old man’s hand.

He started to knock, but he noticed that the door, though punched and stuck with so many pieces of iron, had no knocker, nor even any trace of a lock. Only then did he see that the door was ajar, and he did something he had never done in his life before: he pushed open a door, without first calling out: “Oh, master of the house!”

The long room was in semi-darkness. At first he thought it was empty. Then he made out a fire in one corner. Not much of a fire, and fed with damp wood that gave out more smoke than flame. Some men were waiting in that room. He smelled the odor of the heavy woolen cloth of their cloaks before he could see their forms, sitting on wooden stools or squatting in the corners.

Gjorg too huddled in a corner, putting his rifle between his knees. Little by little his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. The acrid smoke gave him a bitter taste in his throat. He began to see black ribbons on their sleeves and he understood that, like him, they had come there to pay the death tax. There were four. A little later he thought he saw five. But less than a quarter of an hour later he thought there were four again. What he had taken for the fifth man was only a log stood on end, who could tell why, in the darkest corner.

“Where are you from?” asked the man nearest him.

Gjorg told him the name of his village.

Outside, night had fallen. To Gjorg it seemed to have come down all at once, as soon as he had crossed the threshold of the long room, like the wall of a ruin that collapses as soon as you have left its shadow.

“Not all that far, then,” the man said. “I’ve had to travel two days and a half without stopping.”

Gjorg did not know what to say.

Someone came in having pushed open the door, which creaked. He carried an armload of wood that he threw on the fire. The wood was wet and the flickering light went out. But a moment later, the man, who seemed to be crippled, lit an oil lamp and hung it on one of the many nails hammered into the wall. The yellow light, enfeebled by the soot on the lamp-chimney, tried in vain to reach the far corners of the room.

No one spoke. The man left the room, and a moment later another man came in. He resembled the first one, but he carried nothing in his hands. He looked at them all as if he was counting them (two or three times he looked at the log, as if to make sure that it was not a man) and he went out. A little later he came back with an earthen pot. After him came another man carrying bowls and two loaves of cornbread. He set down before each man a bowl and some bread, and the other poured bean soup from the pot.

“You’re lucky,” Gjorg’s neighbor said. “You came just at the time when they’re serving a meal. Otherwise you’d have to tighten your belt until dinnertime tomorrow.”

“I brought along a little bread and cheese with me,” said Gjorg.

“Why? At the castle they serve meals twice a day to those who come to pay the blood tax.”

“I didn’t know,” said Gjorg, swallowing a great mouthful of bread. The cornbread was hard, but he was very hungry.

Gjorg felt some metal thing fall across his knees. It was his neighbor’s tobacco tin.

“Have a smoke,” he said.

“How long have you been here?”

“Since noon.”

Although Gjorg said nothing, the other man seemed to have guessed that he was surprised.

“Why are you surprised? There are people who have been waiting since yesterday.”

“Really?” Gjorg exclaimed. “I thought I could pay the money tonight and set out for my village tomorrow.”

“No. If you get to pay before tomorrow evening, you’ll be lucky. You might have to wait two days, if not three.”

“Three days? How can that be?”

“The Kulla is in no hurry to collect the blood tax.”

The door creaked and the man who had brought the pot of bean soup came in again. He picked up the empty bowls, stirred up the fire as he went by it, and went out again. Gjorg’s eyes followed him.

“Are these people the prince’s servants?” he asked his neighbor in a low voice.

The other man shrugged his shoulders.

“I can’t rightly say. It seems that they are distant cousins of the family who also work as servants.”

“Really?”

“Did you see those buildings round about? A lot of families live in them who have blood ties with the captain. Those people are both guards and officials. Did you see how they dress? Neither like mountain people nor townsfolk.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Gjorg said.

“Roll yourself another smoke,” said the other man, reaching him the tobacco tin.

“No, thank you,” said Gjorg. “I don’t smoke much.”

“When did you kill your man?”

“The day before yesterday.”

You could hear the sound of falling rain outside.

“This winter’s dragging on.”

“Yes, that’s true. It’s been a long one.”

Far off, from deep within the group of buildings, perhaps from the main tower itself, there came the sharp grating of a gate. It was one side of a pair of heavy gates opening, or closing, and the grating noise went on for a time. It was followed at once by a cry that was like the cry of a night bird, and that might just as well have been a sentinel’s cry, or a shout of farewell to a friend. Gjorg huddled deeper into his corner. He could not convince himself that he was at Orosh.

The creaking of the door cut through his drowsiness. For the third time Gjorg opened his eyes and saw the crippled man enter with an armload of wood in his arms. After throwing the wood on the fire, he turned up the wick of the oil lamp. The logs dripped water, and Gjorg thought that it must still be raining.

In the lamplight, Gjorg could see that nobody in the room was sleeping. His back was cold, but something kept him from moving nearer the fire. Besides, he had the feeling that it gave no warmth. The wavering light, splashed here and there with black stains, deepened the silence that hung over the waiting men.

Two or three times it occurred to Gjorg that all these men had killed, and that each had his story. But those stories were locked deep within them. It was not just chance that in the glow of the fire their mouths, and even more their jaws, looked as if they had the shape of certain antique locks. All during his journey to the Kulla, Gjorg had been terrified by the thought that somebody might ask him about his own story. And his fear was at its worst when he had entered this long room, though once he was inside something had persuaded him that he was out of danger. Perhaps he found reassurance in the stiff manner of those who were already there, or even from the log, that the newcomer mistook for a man before realizing his mistake, or on the contrary, took it for a log and then, smiling at what he supposed to be an error, greeted it as a man — only to find out the truth later. And at this point, Gjorg was inclined to think that the log had been put there for just that purpose.

As soon as the wet logs had been thrown upon the fire by the crippled man, they began to crackle. Gjorg took a deep breath. Outside, the night had certainly grown darker. In the distance, the north wind whistled low as it skimmed over the earth. He was surprised to find that he felt the need to say something. But besides that he was surprised by a very strange feeling indeed. It seemed to him that the jaws of the men around him were slowly changing their shape. Their stories were rising in their throats, and they began to chew them the way cattle chew their cud during the cold winter nights. Now their stories began to drip from their mouths. How many days now since the killing? Four. And you?

Little by little the stories came out from under the coarse cloth of their cloaks, like blackbeetles, wandered out quietly, passed one another. What will you do with your thirty-day truce?

What will I do? Gjorg wondered. Nothing.

Sometimes he thought he would be stuck forever in that damp room, by that fire that never really burst into flame, that made you shiver rather than warmed you, and with those black bugs shining on the floor.

When would they call him to pay his tax? Since the time he had come there, only one man had been called out. Would he have to wait for days and days? And what if a week passed and nobody called him out? What if they did not take him in at all?

The door opened and a stranger came in. One could see that he had come from far away. The fire gave a couple of contemptuous flickers, just enough light to show that he was all muddy and drenched to the skin, and left him in the semi-darkness, like all the others.

The man, looking confused and bewildered, found a seat right by the log of wood. Gjorg watched him out of the corner of his eye, to see how he himself had looked when he had come in a few hours ago. The man threw back his hood and let his chin sink to his raised knees. His story, obviously, buried deep inside him, was still far from his throat. Or perhaps it had not entered his body but was still outside, on his icy hands with which he had done murder, and that now stirred nervously about his knees.

* A tower without windows where a man who has killed may seek permanent refuge, and be maintained indefinitely with food and drink set just inside the door.

* Plateau, in Albanian.