Broken April

CHAPTER III

The carriage went on climbing the mountain road at a lively pace. It was a rubber-tired vehicle of the kind used in the capital for excursions, or as a hackney coach. Its seats were upholstered in black velvet, but there was also something velvety about its very aspect. Perhaps that was why it rolled along on that rather poor mountain road much more easily than one would have expected, and perhaps it would have done so more quietly still but for the panting of the horses and the clopping of their hooves, which the upholstery could do nothing to muffle.

Holding his wife’s hand, Bessian Vorpsi moved his head close to the window to make sure that the small town they had left half an hour before, the last one at the foot of the Rrafsh, the high plateau of the north, had disappeared from view. Now, before them and on either side there stretched away heathland on a slight slope, a rather strange piece of country, neither plain, nor mountain nor plateau. The mountains, properly speaking, had not yet begun, but one felt their looming shadow, and it seemed that it was that very shadow which while rejecting any connection between the plateau and the mountain world, kept it from being classed as a plain. So it was a border region, barren and almost uninhabited.

Now and then droplets of rain pearled the glass of the carriage window.

“The Accursed Mountains,” he said softly, with a slight tremor in his voice, as if he were greeting a vision that he had been expecting for a very long time. He felt that the name, with its solemnity, had made an impression on his wife, and he took a certain satisfaction in it.

Her face came closer, and he breathed in the perfume of her neck.

“Where are they?”

He nodded ahead, and then he pointed, but in that direction she saw nothing but a heavy layer of mist.

“You can’t see anything yet,” he explained. “We’re far away from them.”

She left her hand in her husband’s and leaned back into the velvet cloth of her seat. The jostling of the carriage sent the newspaper in which they were mentioned, and which they had bought in the small town a little before their departure, sliding to the floor, but neither of them moved to pick it up. She smiled vaguely, recalling the title of the short piece announcing their trip: “Sensation: The writer, Bessian Vorpsi, and his young bride are spending their honeymoon on the Northern Plateau!”

The article was rather vague. You could not tell whether the author, a certain A.G. (could that be their acquaintance, Adrian Guma?) was in favor of the trip or was being slightly ironic about it.

She herself, when her fiance had announced it to her two weeks before the wedding, had thought the idea pretty bizarre. Don’t be surprised at anything, her friends had told her. If you marry a man who’s a bit odd, you have to expect surprises. But at bottom we have to say you’re very lucky.

And in fact she was happy. During the last days before the wedding, in the half-fashionable, half-artistic circles of Tirana, people talked about nothing but their honeymoon trip. Her friends envied her and told her: You’ll be escaping the world of reality for the world of legend, literally the world of epic that scarcely exists anymore. And they would go on talking about fairies, mountain nymphs, bards, the last Homeric hymns in the world, and the Kanun, terrifying but so majestic. Others shrugged their shoulders at all this enthusiasm, hinting discreetly at their astonishment, which was aroused particularly by the question of comfort, the more so since this was a honeymoon trip, something that called for certain conveniences, whereas, in the mountains the weather was still quite cold, and those epic kullas were of stone. On the other hand, there were others — few in number — who listened to all those opinions with a rather amused air, as if to say, “Right, go on up north among the mountain nymphs. It will do both of you good, and especially Bessian.”

And now they were heading towards the grim Northern Plateau. This Rrafsh, about which she had read and heard so much during her studies at the institute for young ladies named “The Queen Mother,” and especially later during her engagement to Bessian, attracted her and alarmed her at the same time. In fact, what she had read and heard on the subject, and even Bessian’s own writings had not given her any idea of what life was really like up there in the highlands amidst the never-ending mists. It seemed to her that everything people said about the High Plateau took on at once an ambiguous, nebulous character. Bessian Vorpsi had written half-tragic, half-philosophical sketches about the North, to which the press had responded in a rather halfway fashion too: some reviewers had hailed the pieces as jewels of the first water, and others had criticized them as lacking in realism. On a number of occasions it had occurred to Diana that if her husband had decided to undertake this rather strange tour, it was not so much to show her what was so remarkable about the North as to settle something that he felt within him. But each time she had given up the idea, thinking that if that was his object he could have taken that trip long ago, and alone at that.

She was watching him now, and from the way his set jaw made his cheekbones more prominent, and the way he stared through the carriage windows, she felt that he was holding back his impatience — which she found quite understandable. He was certainly telling himself that this part-imaginary, part-epic world that he talked about for days on end was taking its time about showing itself. Outside, on either side of the carriage, the endless wasteland unfolded, without a sign of human presence, its countless grey rocks watered by the dullest downpour in the world. He’s afraid that I’ll be disappointed, she thought, and several times she was on the point of saying, “Don’t worry, Bessian, we’ve only been travelling an hour, and I’m not so impatient or so naive as to think that all the wonders of the North are going to appear before our eyes at once.” But she did not say those words; unselfconsciously, she rested her head on his shoulder. She knew that the gesture was more reassuring than any words, and she stayed a long time like that, looking out of the corner of her eye at her light chestnut hair moving upon his shoulder with the motion of the carriage.

She was nearly asleep when she felt his shoulder move.

“Diana, look,” he said softly, taking her hand.

In the distance, beside the road, there were some black figures.

“Mountain people?” she asked.

“Yes.”

As their carriage drew nearer, the dark figures seemed to grow taller. Both the passengers’ faces were glued to the window, and Diana several times wiped from the glass the mist made by their breath.

“What are they holding in their hands, umbrellas?” she asked, but very softly, when the carriage was no more than fifty paces from the mountaineers.

“Yes, that’s what it looks like,” he muttered. “Where did they get those umbrellas?”

At last the carriage passed the mountaineers, who stared after it. Bessian turned his head, as if to make sure that the things they had in their hands really were old umbrellas with broken struts and ragged cloth.

“I’ve never seen mountaineers carrying brollies,” he murmured. Diana was surprised too, but she took care not to mention it, so as not to make him angry.

When further on they saw another group of mountaineers, two of whom were laden with sacks, Diana pretended not to see them. Bessian looked at them for a while.

“Corn,” he said at last, but Diana did not answer. Again she leaned her head upon his shoulder, and again her hair began to slide gently to and fro with the movement of the carriage.

Now it was he who watched the road attentively. As for her, she tried to turn her thoughts to more pleasant things. After all, it was no great misfortune if a legendary mountaineer heaved a sack of corn onto his back, or carried a dilapidated umbrella against the rain. Had she not seen more than one man from the mountains, in the city streets at the end of autumn, with an axe over his shoulder, and crying out plaintively, “Any wood to cut?”, a cry that was more like the cry of a night bird. But Bessian had told her that those people were not representative of the mountain country. Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue. The real mountaineers are up there, on the Rrafsh, he had said to her one night, lifting his arms towards the celestial heights beyond the horizon, as if the Rrafsh were somewhere in the sky rather than on earth.

Now, pressed against the window, he never turned his eyes from the desolate landscape, for fear that his wife might ask: these poor wayfarers, with their skeletal umbrellas in hand, or their backs bent under a sack of corn, are these the legendary mountain stalwarts of whom you have told me so much? But Diana, even if she were to lose all her illusions, would never ask him that question.

Leaning against him, her eyes closing now and then with the jolting of the carriage, as if to ward off the sadness that the barren scene aroused in her, she thought in a fragmentary way about the days when they were first acquainted and the early weeks of their engagement. The chestnut trees lining the boulevard, café doors, the glitter of rings as they embraced, park benches strewn with autumn leaves, and dozens of other such memories — all those things she poured out upon the endless waste, in the hope that those images might in some sort people the void. But the wasteland did not change. Its wet nakedness was ready to engulf in a moment not just her own store of happiness but perhaps the heaped-up joy of whole generations. She herself had never seen such a country. The mountains that loomed above her were well named “the Accursed Mountains.”

She was pulled out of her dozing state by a movement of his shoulder, and then by his voice, which had a tender note.

“Diana, look. A church.”

She drew near the glass pane and caught sight of the cross that surmounted the stone belfry. The church rose up from a rocky height, and since the road descended very steeply, or perhaps because of the grey background of the sky, the black cross seemed to rise up and sway threateningly among the clouds. The church was still far off, but as they drew closer, they could make out the bell and its bronze shimmer spreading abroad like a smile beneath that black cross-shaped menace.

“How beautiful!” Diana exclaimed.

Bessian nodded, but did not speak. The dark shadow of the cross and the pleasant gleam of the bell soared aloft in every direction and must have been visible, one and inseparable, for miles around.

“Oh, look. There are the kullas of the mountains,” he said.

With difficulty, she turned her eyes from the church to look for the high stone dwellings.

“Where are they?”

“Look up there on that slope,” he said, pointing. “And there, there’s another farther on, on that other hill.”

“Ah, yes!”

Suddenly he came to life, and his eyes began to search the horizon avidly.

“Mountaineers,” he said, his hand stretched out towards the little window in front.

The mountaineers were coming towards them, but they were still a long way off and you could hardly see them.

“There must be a big village somewhere near.”

The carriage drew nearer to them, and Diana guessed at her husband’s sense of strain.

“They have rifles slung on their shoulders,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, relieved, not taking his eyes from the window. He was looking for something else. The mountaineers were now no more than twenty paces away.

“There,” he called out at last, seizing Diana by the shoulder. “You see the black ribbon on his right sleeve. Do you see?”

“Yes, yes,” she said.

“There’s another mark of death. And there’s another.”

Excitement made his breathing irregular.

“How terrible!” The words had escaped her.

“What?”

“I meant to say that it’s beautiful and terrible at the same time.”

“Yes, it’s true. It’s tragically beautiful, or wonderfully tragic, if you will.”

He turned towards her, suddenly, with an odd light in his eye, as if to say: Admit it. You never believed all this. As it happened, she had never mentioned any such doubt.

The carriage had left the mountaineers behind, and Bessian, his face lit with a smile now, had thrown himself back in his seat.

“We are entering the shadow-land,” he said, as if talking to himself, “the place where the laws of death prevail over the laws of life.”

“But how does one tell the difference between those whose duty it is to avenge a killing and those from whom vengeance is sought?” she asked. “The black ribbon is the same for everyone, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s the same. The mark of death is exactly the same for those who mean to kill and those who are being hunted.”

“How horrible,” she said.

“In no other country in the world can one see people on the road who bear the mark of death, like trees marked for felling.”

She looked at him kindly. Bessian’s eyes shone with the deep brilliance that bursts out after unbearable waiting. Now, those other mountain folk, with their ridiculous ramshackle umbrellas, their prosaic sacks of corn on their backs, seemed never to have been.

“Look, there are still some more of them,” he said.

This time she was the one who first saw the black ribbon on the sleeve of one among them.

“Yes, now I can say that we are well within death’s kingdom,” Bessian said, never turning his eyes from the window. Outside, the rain was still falling, a fine rain, as if diluted with mist.

Diana started to smile.

“Yes,” he said, “we have entered death’s kingdom like Ulysses, with this difference — Ulysses had to descend in order to reach it, but we must climb.”

She listened, looking at him still. He had leaned his forehead against the glass that was clouded over by their breath. Beyond it, the world seemed transformed.

“They wander these roads with that black ribbon on their sleeves like ghosts in the mist,” he said.

She listened, but she did not speak. How many times, before they had started out, had he talked about these things, but now his words had a different sound. Behind them, like a film scene behind the subtitles, the landscape looked even more somber. She wanted to ask him if they would also meet on the roads men whose heads were muffled up in their shrouds, whom he had mentioned once, but something kept her from asking. Perhaps it was simply fear that just asking the question would provoke the apparition.

The carriage had gone quite some distance now, and the village was out of sight. Only the cross above the church swayed slowly on the horizon, leaning to one side like crosses on graves, as if the sky, imitating the soil in cemeteries, had also fallen in a little.

“There’s a cairn,” he said, pointing to the roadside.

She leaned forward to see better. It was a heap of stones somewhat lighter in color than those around the spot, piled carelessly with no obvious design. She thought that if it had not rained that day, those stones would not look so forlorn. She told him that, but he smiled and shook his head.

“The muranë, as they are called, always look sad,” he said. “More than that, the more pleasant the countryside the sadder they look.”

“That may be so,” she replied.

“I’ve seen all kinds of tombs and graveyards, with every sort of sign and symbol,” he went on, “but I don’t think there is any grave more real than the simple heap our mountain people build, on the very spot where a man was killed.”

“That’s true,” she said. “It has an air of tragedy about it.”

“And the very word, muranë, naked, cruel, suggesting pain that nothing can soften — isn’t that so?”

She nodded and sighed again. Roused by his own words, he went on talking. He spoke of the absurdity of life, and the reality of death in the North country, about the men of those parts who were esteemed or despised essentially in terms of the relations they created with death, and he brought up the terrible wish expressed by the mountaineers on the birth of a child. “May he have a long life, and die by the rifle!” Death by natural causes, from illness or from old age, was shameful to the man of the mountain regions, and the only goal of the mountaineer during his entire life was laying up the hoard of honor that would allow him to expect a modest memorial on his death.

“I’ve heard certain songs about the men who are killed,” she said. “They are just like their graves, their muranë.”

“That’s true. They weigh on the heart like a heap of stones. In fact, the same concept that governs the structure of the muranë governs the structure of the songs.”

Diana barely repressed another sigh. Minute by minute, she felt as if something were collapsing inside her. As if he guessed what she felt, he hastened to tell her that if all this was very sad, at the same time it had grandeur. He set himself to explaining to her that, when all was said and done, the aspect of death conferred on the lives of these men something of the eternal, because its very grandeur raised them above paltry things and the petty meanness of life.

“To measure one’s days by the yardstick of death, isn’t that a very special gift?”

She smiled, shrugging her shoulders.

“That is what the Code does,” Bessian went on, “particularly in the section devoted to the law of the blood feud. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she said, “I remember quite well.”

“It is a genuine constitution of death,” he said, turning suddenly towards her. “People tell a lot of stories about it, and yet, however wild and merciless it may be, I’m convinced of one thing, that it is one of the most monumental constitutions that have come into being in the world, and we Albanians ought to be proud of having begotten it.”

He seemed to wait for a word of approval, but she was silent; her eyes, however, looked into his with the same kindness.

“Yes, it’s only fair, we should be proud of it,” he went on. “The Rrafsh is the only region of Europe which — while being an integral part of a modern state, an integral part, I repeat, of a modern European state and not the habitat of primitive tribes — has rejected the laws, the legal institutions, the police, the courts, in short, all the structures of the state; which has rejected these things, you understand, because at one time it was subject to them, and it has renounced them, replacing them with other moral rules which are themselves just as adequate, so much so as to constrain the administrations set up by foreign occupying powers, and later the administration of the independent Albanian state, forcing them to recognize those rules, and thus to put the High Plateau, let’s say nearly half of the kingdom, quite beyond the control of the state.”

Diana’s eyes sometimes followed the movements of her husband’s lips, sometimes his eyes.

“That history is very old,” he continued. “It began to crystallize when the Constantine of the ballad rose from the grave to keep his pledged word. Did you ever think, when we were studying that ballad in school, that the bessa mentioned in it is one of the foundation stones of a structure as majestic as it is terrifying? Because the Kanun is not merely a constitution,” he went on fervently, “it is also a colossal myth that has taken on the form of a constitution. Universal riches compared to which the Code of Hammurabi and the other legal structures of those regions look like children’s toys. Do you follow me? That is why it is foolish to ask, like children, if it is good or bad. Like all great things, the Kanun is beyond good and evil. It is beyond….”

At those words she was offended and her cheeks burned. A month ago she herself had put that very question to him: Is the Code good or bad? Then he had smiled without answering her, but now….

“You needn’t be sarcastic!” She withdrew to the far end of the seat.

“What?”

It took some minutes before they came to an understanding. He laughed aloud, swore to her that he had never meant to offend her, that he did not even remember that she had once put the question to him, and he ended by asking her to forgive him.

That little incident seemed to bring a bit of life into the carriage. They embraced, they caressed each other, then she opened her handbag and took out her pocket mirror to see if the light lipstick had rubbed away. That little business was accompanied by lively talk about their friends and about Tirana, which, it suddenly seemed to her, they had left long ago, and when they spoke again about the Code, the conversation was no longer stiff and cold, like the edge of an old sword, but more natural, perhaps because they mentioned especially those parts of the Code that dealt with daily life. When just before their engagement, he had given her as a present a fine edition of the Kanun, she had read those very passages without paying much attention, and she had forgotten most of the prescriptions that he was citing to her now.

From time to time, they returned in spirit to the streets of the capital and spoke of friends they knew, but it was enough for a mill, a flock of sheep, or a lone traveller to appear on the horizon, for Bessian to bring up the articles of the Code that dealt with those things.

“The Kanun is universal,” he said at one point. “It has not forgotten a single aspect of economics or ethics.”

A little before midday they came upon a wedding party, a cavalcade of krushks, and he explained to her that the order of the guests conformed to very strict rules, any breach of which could turn the wedding into a funeral. “Oh, look, there, at the end of the cavalcade, the chief of the krushks, the krushkapar, the bride’s father or brother, leading a horse by the bridle.”

Diana, her face pressed to the window, delighted, could not take her eyes from the costumes of the women. How beautiful, Lord, how beautiful, she repeated to herself, while, leaning against her he recited in a caressing voice the clauses of the Code dealing with the krushks: “The wedding day can never be put off to another time. In the case of a death in the family, the krushks will go to meet the bride nonetheless. The bride enters on one side, the dead man leaves on the other. On the one side people weep, on the other side they sing.”

When they had left the wedding party behind them, they talked about the notorious “blessed cartridge” that, in accordance with the Code, the bride’s family gave to the groom so that he could use it to shoot his wife if she proved unfaithful, even telling him, “May your hand be blessed,” and the two, joking about what would happen if she or he were to violate their marriage vows, they teased each other, and pulled their ears as a sign of reproach, saying, “May your hand be blessed!”

“You are a child,” said Bessian, when the storm of laughter had passed, and she felt that at bottom he hated to joke about the Kanun, and that he had done so only to give her that small pleasure.

The Code is never a laughing matter, she remembered someone saying, but at once she dismissed the thought from her mind. She had to look outside the coach two or three times before her fit of laughter passed. The landscape had changed, the sky seemed to have opened out, and just because it seemed enlarged it was even more oppressive. She thought she saw a bird, and almost cried aloud, “A bird!” as if she had found in the sky a sign of forbearance or understanding. But what she had seen was only another cross, leaning slightly, like the first one, in the deeps of fog. Somewhere farther on, she thought, there are Franciscan monasteries, and still farther, nuns’ convents.

The carriage drove on with its slight, rhythmic swaying. Sometimes, fighting against sleep, she heard his voice that seemed to come from far off, muffled in a cavernous echo. He went on citing articles of the Code to her, chiefly those having to do with everyday life. He talked to her about the rules of hospitality, in general referring to all the provisions concerning the guest within one’s gates, which, for an Albanian was sacred, quite beyond comparison with anything else. “Do you remember the definition of a house in the Kanun?” he said. “ ‘An Albanian’s house is the dwelling of God and the guest.’ Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one’s guest. The guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one’s father or of one’s son, but never the blood of a guest.”

He came back again and again to the laws of hospitality, but even in her drowsy state, she felt that his exposition of those ancient prescriptions, rolling on, grating away like the rusty teeth of a cogwheel, went from the peaceful side of daily life under the Code to the bloody side. No matter how one dealt with the Code, one always ended up there. And now, in a voice dressed in those resonances, he was recounting to her an incident that was typical of the world of the Kanun. She kept her eyes closed still, clinging to her half-sleep, for she sensed that only in that way would his voice come to her with those far-off echoes. That voice was telling her about a wayfarer travelling alone in the dark, at the foot of a steep mountain. Knowing that he was being hunted for blood vengeance, he had managed to keep safe from his avenger for a long time. Suddenly, on the highroad, with the night coming on, he was seized by a dark premonition. All around, there was nothing but the open heath, not a house, not a living soul from whom he could claim the protection due to a guest. He could see only a herd of goats that had been left to themselves by the herdsman. Then, so as to help pluck up his courage, or maybe so as not to die and disappear without a trace, he called out to the goatherd three times. No voice answered him. Then he called out to the buck with the big bell, “O buck with the big bell, if anything should happen to me, tell your master that before I reached the crest of the hill I was killed under your bessa.” And as if he had known what would happen, a few paces further on he was killed by the man who was lying in wait for him.

Diana opened her eyes.

“And then?” she asked, “what happened then?’

Bessian smiled a wry smile.

“Another goatherd who was not far off heard the stranger’s last words and told the man whose herd it was. And that man, even though he had never known the victim, had never seen him nor ever heard his name, left his family, his flock, and all his other concerns, to avenge the stranger who was connected with him under the bessa, and so plunged into the whirlwind of the blood feud.”

“That’s terrible,” Diana said. “But it’s absurd. There is fatality in it.”

“That’s true. It is at once terrible, absurd, and fatal, like all the really important things.”

“Like all the really important things,” she repeated, huddling back into her corner. She was cold. She looked abstractedly into the ragged pass between two mountains, as if she hopèd to find in that grey notch the answer to an enigma.

“Yes,” Bessian said, as if he had divined her unspoken question, “because to an Albanian a guest is a demi-god.”

Diana blinked, so that his words would not strike her so crudely. He lowered his tone, and his voice took on its echo as before, sooner than she would have expected.

“I remember having heard once, that, unlike many peoples among whom the mountains were reserved to the gods, our mountaineers, by the very fact that they lived in the mountains themselves, were constrained either to expel the gods or to adapt themselves to them so as to be able to live with them. Do you follow me, Diana? That explains why the world of the Rrafsh is half-real, half-imaginary, harking back to the Homeric ages. And it also explains the creation of demigods like the guest.”

He was silent for a moment, listening unawares to the sound of the wheels on the rocky road.

“A guest is really a demi-god,” he went on after a while, “and the fact that any one at all can suddenly become a guest does not diminish but rather accentuates his divine character. The fact that this divinity is acquired suddenly, in a single night simply by knocking at a door, makes it even more authentic. The moment a humble wayfarer, his pack on his shoulder, knocks at your door and gives himself up to you as your guest, he is instantly transformed into an extraordinary being, an inviolable sovereign, a law-maker, the light of the world. And the suddenness of the transformation is absolutely characteristic of the nature of the divine. Did not the gods of the ancient Greeks make their appearance suddenly and in the most unpredictable manner? That is just the way the guest appears at an Albanian’s door. Like all the gods he is an enigma, and he comes directly from the realms of destiny or fate — call it what you will. A knock at the door can bring about the survival or the extinction of whole generations. That is what the guest is to the Albanians of the mountains.”

“But that’s terrible,” she said.

He pretended not to have heard her and simply smiled, but with the cold smile of someone who intends to skirt what might well be the real subject of discussion.

“That is why an attack on a guest protected by the bessa is to an Albanian the worst possible misfortune, something like the end of the world.”

She looked out of the window and she thought that it would be hard to find a more suitable setting for a vision of the end of the world than these mountains.

“A few years ago, something took place in these parts that would astonish anyone but these mountain people,” said Bessian, and he put his hand on Diana’s shoulder. His hand had never felt so heavy to her. “Something really staggering.”

Why doesn’t he tell it to me? she wondered, after a silence long enough to seem unwonted. And she was really not in a state to know whether or not she cared to hear yet another disturbing story.

“A man was killed,” he said, “not from ambush, but right in the marketplace.”

Looking at him sidelong, Diana watched the corners of his lips. He told her that the killing had taken place in broad daylight, in the bustle of the marketplace, and the victim’s brothers had set out immediately in pursuit of the killer, for these were the first hours after the murder, when the truce had not yet been asked for, and the bloodshed could be avenged at once. The killer managed to elude his pursuers, but meanwhile the dead man’s whole clan was up in arms and was seeking him everywhere. Night was falling, and the murderer, who came from another village, did not know the country well. Fearing that he might be discovered, he knocked at the first door he found on his way, and asked that he be granted the bessa. The head of the household took the stranger in and agreed to his wish.

“And can you guess what house it was to which he had come for sanctuary?” said Bessian, with his mouth quite close to her neck.

Diana turned her head suddenly, her eyes wide and motionless.

“It was his victim’s house,” he said.

“I thought as much. And then? What happened then?”

Bessian took a deep breath. He told her that at first on either side no one suspected what had happened. The killer understood that the house to which he had come as a guest had been stricken with misfortune, but he never imagined that he himself had brought it about. The head of the house, on his part, in spite of his grief, welcomed the visitor in keeping with the custom, guessing that he had just killed someone and was being pursued, but not suspecting — he, too — that the murdered man was his own son.

And so they sat together by the hearth, eating and drinking coffee. As for the dead man, in keeping with the custom, he had been laid out in another room.

Diana started to say something, but she felt that the only words she could possibly utter were, “absurd” and “fateful”; she preferred to be silent.

Bessian resumed, “Late in the evening, worn out by the long chase, the brothers of the murdered man came home. As soon as they came in they saw the guest sitting by the hearth, and they recognized him.”

Bessian turned his head towards his wife to gauge the effect of his words. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Nothing happened.”

“What?”

“Nothing at all. At first, in a fury, the brothers reached for their weapons, but a word from their father was enough to stop them and to calm them. I think you can imagine what it was that he said.”

Embarrassed, she shook her head.

“The old man simply said, ’He is a guest. Don’t touch him.’ ”

“And then? What happened then?”

“Then they sat down with their enemy and guest for as long as the custom required. They conversed with him, they prepared a bed for him, and in the morning they escorted him to the village boundary.”

Diana pressed two fingers between her eyebrows, as if she meant to extract something from her forehead.

“So that is their conception of a guest.”

Bessian brought out that sentence between two silences, as one sets an object in an empty space in order to throw it into relief. He waited for Diana to say “That’s terrible,” as she had the first time, or to say something else, but she said nothing. She kept her fingers on her forehead, where the brows meet, as if she could not find the thing that she wanted to tear away.

The muffled panting of the horses reached them from outside, and the coachman’s occasional whistles. Together with these sounds, Diana heard her husband’s voice, which for some reason had again become deep and slow.

“And now,” he said, “the question that arises is to understand why the Albanians have created all that.”

He talked on, his head quite close to her shoulder, as if he meant to ask her for answers to all the questions or speculations that he advanced, though his delivery scarcely allowed for any responses on her part. He went on to ask (it was not clear if the questions were addressed to himself, or Diana, or someone else), why the Albanians had created the institution of the guest, exalting it above all other human relations, even those of kinship.

“Perhaps the answer lies in the democratic character of this institution,” he said, setting himself to think his way through the matter. “Any ordinary man, on any day, can be raised to the lofty station of a guest. The path to that temporary deification is open to anybody at any time. Isn’t that so, Diana?”

“Yes,” she said softly, without taking her hand from her forehead.

He shifted in his seat, as if looking both for a more comfortable position and for the most appropriate language in which to express his idea.

“Given that anyone at all can grasp the sceptre of the guest,” he went on, “and since that sceptre, for every Albanian, surpasses even the king’s sceptre, may we not assume that in the Albanian’s life of danger and want, that to be a guest if only for four hours or twenty-four hours, is a kind of respite, a moment of oblivion, a truce, a reprieve, and — why not? — an escape from everyday life into some divine reality?”

He fell silent, as if waiting for a reply, and Diana, feeling that she had to say something to him, found it easier to lay her head on his shoulder again.

Bessian found that the familiar odor of his wife’s hair rather disturbed the stream of his thoughts. Just as the greening of nature gives us the feeling of spring, or snow the feeling of winter, her chestnut hair tumbling over his shoulder aroused in him better than anything else the sensation of happiness. The thought that he was a happy man began to shine feebly in his consciousness, and in the velvet jewel-case of the carriage, that idea took on the secret languor of luxurious things.

“Are you tired?” he asked.

“Yes, a bit.”

He slipped his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently to him, breathing in the perfume of his young wife’s body, given off subtly, like every valued thing.

“We’ll be there soon.”

Without removing his arm, he lowered his head slightly towards the window so as to glance outside.

“In an hour, an hour and a half at most, we’ll be there,” he said.

Through the glass, one could see in the distance, standing out clearly, the jagged outlines of the mountains in that March afternoon flooded with rain.

“What district are we in?”

He looked outside but did not answer her, merely shrugging his shoulders to indicate that he did not know. She remembered the days before their departure (days that now seemed to have been torn away not from this month of March, but from another March, as far off as the stars), filled with witty sayings, with laughter, with jokes, fears, jealousies, all stemming from their “northern adventure” as Adrian Guma had dubbed it when they had met him at the post office where they were composing a telegram to send to someone who lived on the High Plateau. He had said, That’s like sending a message to the birds or to the thunderbolts. Then the three had laughed, and in all the merriment, Adrian had gone on asking, “You really have an address up there? Forgive me, I just can’t believe it.”

“A little while longer and we’ll be there,” Bessian said for the third time, leaning towards the window. Diana wondered how he could know that they were approaching their destination, travelling on a road without signposts or milestones. As for Bessian, he was thinking that he did not have time to say more about the cult of hospitality, just as evening was drawing on, and they were drawing nearer and nearer to the tower in which they would spend the night.

“In a little while, this evening, we shall assume the crown of the guest,” he murmured, only just touching her cheek with his lips. She moved her head towards him, her breath came faster as in their most intimate moments, but it ended in a sigh.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said quietly. “I’m just a little frightened.”

“Really?” he said, laughing. “But how can that be?”

“I don’t know.”

He shook his head for a moment, as if her half-smile, close to his face, were the flicker of a match that he must try to blow out.

“Well, Diana, let me tell you that it doesn’t matter at all that we are in death’s kingdom — you can be sure that you have never been so well shielded from danger or the least affront. No royal pair has ever had more devoted guards ready to sacrifice their present and their future than we shall have tonight. Doesn’t that give you a sense of security?”

“That’s not what I was thinking about,” Diana said, changing her position on the seat. “I’m troubled by something else, and I don’t really know how to explain it. A little while ago you talked about divinity, destiny, fatality. They are all very fine things, but they are frightening, too. I don’t want to bring misfortune to anyone.”

“Oh,” he said gaily, “like every sovereign, you find the crown both alluring and frightening. That’s quite understandable, since, after all, if every crown is glorious, every crown is woeful, too.”

“That’s enough, Bessian,” she said quietly. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not making fun of you,” he said with the same playful air. “I have the very same feeling. The guest, the bessa, and vengeance are like the machinery of classical tragedy, and once you are caught up in the mechanism, you must face the possibility of tragedy. But despite all that, Diana, we have nothing to fear. In the morning, we’ll take off our crowns and be relieved of their weight until the night.”

He felt her fingers stroking his neck, and he pressed his head against her hair. How shall we sleep there, she wondered, together or apart? And now she asked him aloud, “Is it still very far?”

Bessian opened the carriage door a little to put the question to the coachman, whose existence he had nearly forgotten. The man’s reply was accompanied by a blast of cold air.

“We’re nearby,” he said.

“Brr, it’s cold,” Diana said.

Outside, the afternoon that until then had seemed never-ending, showed the first signs of fading. The panting of the horses now became louder, and Diana imagined the froth of foam at their mouths as they drew the carriage towards the unknown kulla where Bessian and herself were to stay the night.

Dusk had not quite fallen when the carriage halted. The couple got down. After the long clop-clapping of hooves, the protracted jolting, the world seemed mute and frozen. The coachman pointed to one of the towers that rose up a good distance away beside the road, but Bessian and Diana, whose legs were quite stiff, wondered how they would manage to reach it.

For a while they prowled about the coach, climbing in again to take their travelling bags and suitcases, and they set out at last towards the tower — an odd procession, the couple, arm in arm, leading the way, followed by the coachman who was carrying their suitcases.

When they drew near the tower, Bessian let go his wife’s arm, and with steps that she thought not very confident, went right up to the stone building. The narrow door was closed, and there was no sign of life at the loopholes, and in a flash a question came to him: Had they received their telegram?

Now Bessian halted before the kulla, and he looked up to call out, according to custom, “O, master of the house, are you receiving guests?” In other circumstances, Diana would have burst out laughing to see her husband playing the part of a visiting mountaineer, but now something restrained her. Perhaps it was the shadow of the tower (stone casts a heavy shadow, the old men said) that was putting a weight on her heart.

Bessian raised his head a second time, and to Diana who was looking at him, he seemed small and defenseless at the foot of that cold, thousand-year-old wall to which he was about to call out.

Midnight had long passed, but Diana, who was alternately too cold and too hot under two heavy woollen blankets, had not managed to go to sleep. They had arranged a bed for her on the second storey, right on the floor with the women and girls of the household. Bessian had been installed on the storey above, in the guest chamber. He too, she thought, could not possibly have fallen asleep.

From beneath her came the lowing of an ox. At first she was terrified, but one of the women of the house who was lying beside her, said in a low voice, “Don’t be frightened, it’s Kazil.” Diana remembered that animals that chew the cud make that sort of noise when digesting, and she felt reassured. But nevertheless she still could not go to sleep.

Her mind was full of scraps of notions and opinions that came to her confusedly and with no particular emphasis, things heard long ago or a few hours before. She thought that her not being able to sleep came from that very confusion, and she tried to put those things in some kind of order. But it was a difficult task. As soon as she managed to channel one line of thought, another revolted at once, spilling out of its bed. For a while she tried to concentrate on the rest of their trip, as Bessian and she had planned it before their departure. She began to count the days they were to spend in the mountains, the houses that they were to stay in, some of which were quite unknown to her, like the Kulla of Orosh, where they were going to be received the next day by the mysterious lord of the Rrafsh. Diana tried to imagine all that, but at that very moment her mind wandered. She put her hands to her temples, as if to slow the rapid beating that seemed to come from the excitation of her brain, but in a little while she felt that the pressure seemed to make the giddy sensation worse. So she removed her hands, and for a moment she let her thoughts wander as they would. But that became intolerable. I must think of something ordinary, she said to herself. And she began to call up what they had talked about a few hours earlier in the guest chamber. I’m going to bring it all to mind again, she thought, like the ox in the stall down there. Bessian would certainly appreciate the image. He had been very attentive to her in the guest chamber a while ago. He had explained everything to her, first asking permission of the master of the house. For in the guest chamber, or the men’s chamber, as it was also called, no whispering or private conversation was allowed. All the talk there as Bessian explained to her was on men’s concerns, gossip was forbidden, as were incomplete sentences or half-formed thoughts, and every remark was greeted with the words, “You have spoken well,” or “May your mouth be blessed.” “There, listen to what they are saying,” Bessian had whispered. And she found that the conversation did in fact proceed in just the way he had told her it would. Given the fact that an Albanian’s home is a fortress in the literal sense of the word, Bessian told her, and since the structure of the family, according to the Code, resembles a little state, it is understandable that an Albanian’s conversation will more or less reflect those conditions in its style. Then, in the course of the evening, Bessian had come back to his favorite subject, the guest and hospitality, and had explained to her that the concept of “the guest,” like every great idea, carried with it not only its sublime aspect but its absurd aspect too. “Here, this evening, we are invested with the power of the gods,” he said. “We can abandon ourselves to any kind of madness, even commit a murder — and it is the master of the house who will bear the responsibility for it, because he has welcomed us to his table. Hospitality has its duties, says the Kanun, but there are limits that even we, the gods, may not transgress. And do you know what those limits are? If, as I have said, everything is possible for us, there is one thing that is forbidden, and that is to lift the lid of the pot on the fire.” Diana could hardly keep from laughing. “But that’s ridiculous,” she muttered. “Perhaps,” he said, “But it’s true. If I were to do that tonight, the master of the house would rise at once, go to the window, and with a terrible cry, proclaim to the village that his table had been insulted by a guest. And at that very moment the guest becomes a deadly enemy.” “But why?” Diana asked. “Why must it be that way?” Bessian shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it. Perhaps it’s in the logic of things that every great idea has a flaw that does not diminish it but brings it more within our reach.” While he spoke, she looked about surreptitiously, and several times she was on the point of saying, “Yes, it’s true, these things have a certain grandeur, but might there not be a little more cleanliness here? After all, if a woman can be compared with a mountain nymph, she must have a salle de bain.” But Diana had said nothing, not at all because she did not have the courage, but so as not to lose the thread of her thought. To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity.

Diana turned the other way on her bed, perhaps for the hundredth time. Her thoughts had begun to get mixed up in her mind while she and Bessian were still in the guest room. Despite her efforts to listen with attention to everything that was said, in that room her mind had started leaping from bough to bough. Now, as she listened to the noises of the cattle below (she smiled to herself once again) she began to feel the fearful approach of sleep put to flight at once by the creaking of a floorboard or by a sudden cramp. At one point she groaned, “Why did you bring me here?” and was surprised by her own cry, because she was still awake enough to hear her voice but she could not make out the words. And now sleep spread before her imagination, looking like the wilderness that they had travelled through, strewn everywhere with pots whose covers must never be removed, and then she performed the forbidden act, reaching out her hand towards them — which was causing all that plaintive creaking.

This is torture, she thought, and she opened her eyes. Before her, on the dark wall, she could see a patch of dim light. For a long moment, as if spellbound, she stared at the greyish patch. Where had it been, why hadn’t she noticed it sooner? Outdoors, as it seemed, day was breaking. Diana could not take her eyes from that narrow window. In the depressing darkness of the room, that shred of dawn was like a message of salvation. Diana felt its soothing effect freeing her swiftly from her terrors. Many mornings must have been condensed in that bit of grey light; if not it could never have been so alert, so tranquil, and so indifferent to the terrors of the night. Under its influence, Diana fell asleep quickly.

The carriage was travelling again over a mountain road. The day was grey, and the dull horizon closed down upon the distant heights. The men who had escorted Diana and Bessian had turned back, and the two were alone again, uncrowned guests, showing signs of fatigue from the past night, seated on the velvet-covered bench.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked her.

“Not much. Just towards morning.”

“Me too. I scarcely closed my eyes.”

“I thought as much.”

Bessian took her hand and held it. It was the first time since their marriage that they had slept apart. He glanced at her profile out of the corner of his eye. She seemed pale to him. He wanted to kiss her, but something that he did not understand held him back.

For a while he kept his eyes on the small carriage window, and then, without turning his head, he looked furtively at his wife once again. Her pale face seemed cold to him. Her hand lay inertly in his. He asked her, “What’s the matter?” but in fact no word came out. A faint alarm sounded somewhere deep within him.

Perhaps it was not really coldness? It was rather a certain detachment, or the first stage of a kind of estrangement from him.

The carriage rolled along, shaking more or less rhythmically, and he told himself that perhaps it was neither one nor the other. No, certainly not, he thought, neither one nor the other. It was something more simple: taking up the proper distance, that ability to slough one’s skin and become a far-off star which every human being has, and was really one of the reasons for her withdrawing. That was what had been emphasized this morning in Diana’s case, and what had particularly struck him, accustomed as he was to feeling her very close to him and very understanding.

The grey daylight found its way only sparingly into the carriage, and in addition the velvet upholstery absorbed part of it, deepening the gloom. Bessian thought that he might be in the early stage of a coming defeat, at the moment when one cannot tell if the savor is pleasant or bitter — for he thought himself sufficiently acute to see defeat where others would still see victory.

He smiled to himself and realized that he was not in the least unhappy. After all, she had always found him somewhat remote, and there was no harm if she were to become a little aloof herself. Perhaps she would seem even more desirable to him.

Bessian was surprised that he fetched a deep breath. Other days would come to them in their life together; by turns one would be a riddle to the other, and certainly he would recover the lost ground.

Lord, what ground have I lost that I must recover? He laughed at himself, but his laughter did not show in any part of his body, and it rolled along hollowly within him. And, to persuade himself that his doubts were foolish, once again he looked secretly at his wife’s face in the hope that they would be weakened. But Diana’s handsome features offered him no reassurance.

They had been travelling for some hours when their carriage halted at the side of the road. Before they had had time to ask why they had stopped, they saw the coachman come up to the window on Bessian’s side and open the door. He said that this was a place where they might have lunch.

Only then did Bessian and Diana notice that they had stopped in front of a steep-roofed building that must be an inn.

“Still another four or five hours to the Castle of Orosh,” the coachman explained to Bessian. “And I think that there is no other suitable place for refreshment between. Then, the horses need a rest, too.”

Without answering, Bessian stepped down and stretched out his hand to his wife to help her. She stepped down nimbly, and still holding her husband’s hand she looked towards the inn. Several people had come to the threshold and were staring at the new arrivals. Another man, the last to emerge from the inn door, approached them with a halting step.

“What can we do for you?” he said respectfully.

It was clear that this man was the innkeeper. The coachman asked him whether they could eat lunch at the inn and whether there was fodder for the horses.

“Certainly. Do come in, please,” the man replied, pointing to the door, but looking at a different part of the wall where there was no door nor any kind of entrance. “Enter, and welcome.”

Diana looked at him astonished, but Bessian whispered, “he’s squint-eyed.”

“I have a private room,” he explained. “It so happens that the table is taken today, but I’ll arrange another one for you. Ali Binak and his assistants have been here for three days,” he added proudly. “What did you say? Yes, Ali Binak himself. Don’t you know who he is?”

Bessian shrugged.

“Are you from Shkoder? No? From Tirana? Oh, of course, with a carriage like that. Will you stay the night here?”

“No, we’re going to the Kulla of Orosh.”

“Oh, yes. I thought as much. It’s more than two years since I saw a carriage like that. Relatives of the prince?”

“No, his guests.”

As they passed through the great hall of the inn on the way to their private room, Diana felt the stares of the customers, of whom some were eating lunch at a long, grubby oak table, while others sat in the corners on their packs of thick black woolen cloth. Two or three, sitting on the bare floor, moved a little to let the small group through.

“These past three days we have had a good deal of excitement because of a boundary dispute that is to be settled nearby.”

“A boundary dispute?” Bessian asked.

“Yes, sir,” said the innkeeper, pushing open a dilapidated door with one hand. “That’s why Ali Binak and his assistants have come.”

He said these last words in a low voice, just as the travellers crossed the threshold of the private room.

“There they are,” whispered the innkeeper, nodding towards an empty corner of the room. But his guests, now used to the innkeeper’s squint, looked in another direction, where at an oak table, but smaller and somewhat cleaner than the one in the public room, three men were eating lunch.

“I’ll bring another table right away,” the innkeeper said, and he disappeared. Two of the diners looked up at the newcomers, but the third went on eating without lifting his eyes from his plate. From behind the door, there came a grating noise punctuated by thumping sounds, drawing nearer and nearer. Soon they saw two table legs, then part of the innkeeper’s body, and then the whole table and the innkeeper grotesquely entangled.

He set down the table and left to fetch their seats.

“Please be seated,” he said, arranging the stools. “What would you like?”

After asking what there was, Bessian said at last that they would have two fried eggs and some cheese. The innkeeper said, “At your service” to everything, and for a while he was busy coming and going in all directions, trying to serve the new guests without neglecting the earlier ones. While hurrying from one group of his distinguished guests to the other, he seemed to be at a loss, obviously unable to make up his mind which was the more important. It looked as if his uncertainty worsened his physical handicap, and it seemed that he wanted to direct some of his limbs towards one group and some towards the other.

“I wonder just who they think we are,” Diana said.

Without raising his head, Bessian glanced sidelong at the three men who were eating lunch. It was apparent that the innkeeper, while bending down to wipe the table with a rag, was telling them about the new arrivals. One of them, the shortest, seemed to be making as if he were not listening, or perhaps he was in fact not listening. The second, who had colorless eyes that seemed to go with his slack, indifferent face, was looking on as if bewildered. The third man, wearing a checked jacket, could not keep his eyes off Diana. He was obviously drunk.

“Where is the place where the boundaries are to be established?” Bessian asked when the innkeeper served Diana her fried eggs.

“At Wolf’s Pass, sir,” the landlord said. “It is a half-hour’s walk from here. But if you go by carriage, of course, it will take less time.”

“What do you say, Diana, shall we go? It should be interesting.”

“If you like,” she said.

“Has there been feuding over the boundaries, or killings?” Bessian asked the innkeeper.

The man whistled. “Certainly, sir. That’s a strip of land greedy for death, studded with muranës time out of mind.”

“We’ll go without fail,” Bessian said.

“If you like,” his wife said again.

“This is the third time that they have called on Ali Binak, and still the dispute and the blood-letting have not ended,” the landlord said.

At that moment the short man got up from the table. From the way the other two rose immediately after him, Bessian surmised that he must be Ali Binak.

That man nodded towards them, without looking at anyone in particular, and led the way out. The two others followed. The man in the checked jacket brought up the rear, still devouring Diana with his reddened eyes.

“What a revolting man,” Diana said.

Bessian gestured vaguely.

“You mustn’t cast the first stone. Who knows how long he’s been wandering through these mountains, without a wife, without pleasure of any kind. Judging by his clothes, he must be a city man.”

“Even so, he might spare me those oily looks,” Diana said, pushing away her plate; She had eaten only one egg.

Bessian called the innkeeper for the bill.

“If the gentleman and the lady want to go to Wolf’s Pass, Ali Binak and his assistants have just started out. You could follow them in your carriage. Or perhaps you need someone to accompany you….”

“We’ll follow their horses,” Bessian said.

The coachman was drinking coffee in the public room. He rose at once and followed them. Bessian looked at his watch.

“We have a good two hours in which to see a boundary settlement, haven’t we?”

The coachman shook his head doubtfully.

“I don’t know what to say, sir. From here to Orosh is a long way. However, if that’s what you want to do….”

“We’ll be all right if we reach Orosh before nightfall,” Bessian continued. “It’s still early afternoon, and we have time. And then, it’s an opportunity not to be missed,” he added, turning to Diana, who was standing beside him.

She had turned up the fur collar of her coat and was waiting for them to make up their minds.

Ten minutes later, their carriage overtook the horses of Ali Binak’s small party. They stood to one side to let the carriage pass, and it took a while for the coachman to explain to them that he did not know the way to Wolf’s Pass, and that the carriage would follow after them. Diana was ensconced in the depths of the coach so as to avoid the annoying looks of the man in the checked jacket, whose horse kept appearing on one or the other side of the vehicle.

Wolf’s Pass turned out to be farther away than the innkeeper had said. In the distance they saw a bare plain on which some people appeared as moving black specks. As they drew nearer, Bessian tried to recall what the Kanun said about boundaries. Diana listened calmly. Bessian said, “Boundary marks shall not be disturbed, any more than the bones of the dead in their graves. Whosoever instigates a murder in a boundary dispute shall be shot by the whole village.”

“Are we going to be present at an execution?” Diana asked plaintively. “That’s all we needed.”

Bessian smiled.

“Don’t worry. This must be a peaceful settlement, since they’ve invited that — what’s his name again? Oh, yes, Ali Binak.”

“He seems to me to be a very responsible man,” Diana said. “I wouldn’t say as much for one of his assistants, the man in the clown’s jacket — he’s repulsive.”

“Don’t pay any attention to him.”

Bessian looked straight ahead, impatient as it seemed, to reach the plain as swiftly as possible.

“Setting up a boundary stone is a solemn act,” he said, still staring into the distance. “I don’t know if we’ll have the good fortune to be present at just such a ceremony. Oh, look. There’s a muranë.

“Where?”

“There, behind that bush, on the right.”

“Oh, yes,” Diana said.

“There’s another.”

“Yes, yes, I see it, and there’s another one further on.”

“Those are the muranës that the innkeeper mentioned,” Bessian said. “They serve as boundary marks between fields or property lines.”

“There’s another,” Diana said.

“That’s what the Kanun says. ‘When a death occurs during a boundary dispute, the grave itself serves as a boundary mark.’ ”

Diana’s head was right against the window-pane.

“The tomb that becomes a boundary mark cannot, according to the Kanun, ever be displaced by any person to the end of time,” Bessian continued. “It is a boundary that has been consecrated by bloodshed and death.”

“How many opportunities to die!” Diana said those words against the window-pane, which promptly steamed over, as if to cut her off from the sight of the landscape.

In front of them the three horsemen were dismounting. The carriage halted a few paces behind. As soon as Bessian and Diana stepped down from the coach, they felt that everyone’s attention was directed at themselves. Assembled all around them were men, women, and many children.

“There are children here, too, do you see?” Bessian said to Diana. “Establishing the boundaries is the only important event in the life of a mountaineer to which the children come, and that is done so as to preserve the memory of it for as long as possible.”

They went on talking to each other, supposing that it would allow them to face the curiosity of the mountain people in the most natural-seeming way. Out of the corner of her eye, Diana looked at the young women, the hems of whose long skirts billowed with their every movement. All of them had their hair dyed black and cut in the same style, with curls on their foreheads and straight hair hanging down on each side of their faces like curtains in the theatre. They looked at the newly arrived couple from a distance, but taking care to conceal their interest.

“Are you cold?” Bessian asked his wife.

“A bit.”

In fact it was quite cold on the high plateau, and the blue tints of the mountains all around seemed to make the air even colder.

“Lucky it’s not raining,” Bessian said.

“Why would it be raining?” she said in surprise. For a moment she thought of the rain as being a poor beggar-woman, out of place in this magnificent alpine winter scene.

In the middle of a pasture, Ali Binak and his assistants were carrying on a discussion with a group of men.

“Let’s go and see. We’re sure to find out something.”

They walked on slowly through the scattered people, hearing whispers — the words themselves, partly because they were mumbled and partly because of the unfamiliar dialect, were almost incomprehensible to them. The only words they did understand were “princess” and “the king’s sister,” and Diana, for the first time that day, wanted to laugh aloud.

“Did you hear?” she said to Bessian. “They take me for a princess.”

Happy to see her a little more cheerful, he pressed her arm.

“Not so tired now?”

“No,” she said. “It’s lovely here.”

Without being aware of it, they had been approaching Ali Binak’s group. They exchanged introductions almost spontaneously because the mountain people seemed to be pushing the two groups of new arrivals together. Bessian told them who he was and where he came from. Ali Binak did the same, to the astonishment of the mountaineers who believed him to be famous throughout the world. As they talked, the crowd of people around them grew, staring at them and especially at Diana.

“The innkeeper told us a little while ago that this plain has known many disputes about boundaries,” Bessian said.

“That is true,” Ali Binak replied. He spoke quietly and in a somewhat monotonous tone, with no hint of passion. No doubt that was required of him because of his work as an interpreter of the Kanun. “I think you must have seen the muranës on either side of the road.”

Bessian and Diana both nodded their heads.

“And after all those deaths the dispute is still not settled?” Diana asked.

Ali Binak looked at her calmly. Compared with the curious looks of the crowd around them and especially the blazing eyes of the man with the checked jacket, who had introduced himself as a surveyor, Ali Binak’s eyes seemed to Diana to be those of a classical statue.

“No one is quarreling any longer about the boundaries established by bloodshed,” he said. “Those have been established forever on the face of the earth. It is the others that still stir up quarrels,” and he pointed towards the upland.

“The part that is not bloody?”

“Yes, just so, madam. For a good many years there has been discord over these pastures on the part of two villages, and it has not been brought to an end.”

“But is the presence of death indispensable in order for the boundary lines to be lasting?” Diana was surprised at having spoken, and particularly at her tone, in which a certain irony could clearly be distinguished.

Ali Binak smiled coldly.

“We are here, madam, precisely to prevent death from taking a hand in this affair.”

Bessian looked at his wife questioningly, as if to say, what has come over you? He thought he saw in her eyes a fleeting light that he had never seen before. Rather hurriedly, as if to wipe away all trace of this small incident, he asked Ali Binak the first question that came to him.

Around them all eyes were trained on the little group that was talking eagerly. Only a few old men sat to one side on some big stones, indifferent to everything.

Ali Binak went on talking slowly and only a minute later did Bessian realize that he had asked about the very thing he should have been careful not to mention, the deaths brought about by boundary disputes.

“If the man doesn’t die at once, and he forces himself along, whether walking or crawling, until he reaches someone else’s land, then, at the place where he collapses and succumbs to his wounds, there his muranë will be built, and even though it is on another’s land it remains forever the new boundary mark.”

Not only in Ali Binak’s appearance but in the syntax of his speech, there was something cold, something alien to ordinary language.

“And what if two men kill each other in the same instant?” Bessian asked.

Ali Binak raised his head. Diana thought she had never seen a man whose authority was so unaffected by his small stature.

“If two men kill each other at a certain distance from each other, then the boundary for each is the place where each man fell, and the space between is reckoned as belonging to no one.”

“No-man’s land,” Diana said. “Exactly as if it were a question of two countries.”

“It’s just as we were saying yesterday evening,” Bessian said. “Not only in their habits of speech, but in thought and action the people of the High Plateau have something of the attributes of independent countries.”

“And when there were no rifles?” Bessian went on. “The Kanun is older than firearms, isn’t it?”

“Yes, older, certainly.”

“Then they used blocks of stone for the purpose, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” said Ali Binak. “Before rifles were available, people practiced trial by ordeal, carrying stones. In the case of a quarrel between two families or villages or banners, each side appointed its champion. He who carried his block of stone farthest was the winner.”

“And what will happen today?”

Ali Binak looked around at the scattered crowd and then fixed his eyes upon the small group of old men.

“Venerable elders of this banner have been invited to bear witness about the former boundaries of the pasture.”

Bessian and Diana turned towards the old men who were sitting as if they were actors waiting to be given their roles. They were so ancient that from moment to moment they must certainly have forgotten why they were there.

“Shall you be starting soon?” Bessian said.

Ali Binak took out of his fob a watch fastened by a chain.

“Yes,” he said. “I think we shall start very soon.”

“Shall we stay?” Bessian asked Diana in a low voice.

“If you like,” she replied.

The eyes of the mountain people, particularly of the women and children, followed their every movement, but now Bessian and Diana were somewhat accustomed to it. Diana was anxious only to avoid the tipsy stare of the surveyor. He and the other assistant, who had been introduced at the inn as a doctor, followed Ali Binak step by step, although he seemed to ignore their presence, never speaking to them.

A certain restlessness suggested that the time to begin the ceremony was at hand. Ali Binak and his assistants, who had deserted the visitors, went from one group of people to the next. Only now, after the little crowd had moved, did Bessian and Diana notice the old boundary stones strung out along a line that crossed the plateau from one end to the other.

Suddenly, a feeling of expectancy seemed to invade the country round. Diana slipped her arm under Bessian’s and pressed herself against him.

“But what if something happens?” she said.

“What sort of thing?”

“All the mountaineers are armed. Haven’t you noticed?”

He stared at her, and he was about to say, when you saw those two mountaineers with their ramshackle umbrellas you thought you could make fun of the High Plateau region, and now you sense the danger, don’t you? But he remembered that she had not said a thing about the umbrellas, and that he had concocted all this in his mind.

“You mean that someone might be killed,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

In fact, all the mountaineers were armed, and an atmosphere of chill menace hung over the scene. The sleeves of a number of them bore the black ribbon. Diana moved even closer to her husband.

“It will begin soon,” he said, still looking at the old men, who had risen to their feet.

Diana’s mind was strangely vacant. By chance as she looked about her, her eye fell on their coach. Drawn up on the edge of the pasture, black, with its rococo turnings and its velvet upholstery like that of a theatre loge, it stood out against the grey background of the mountains, completely foreign to the scene, out of place. She wanted to shake Bessian’s arm and tell him, “Look at the carriage,” but just at that moment, he whispered, “It’s beginning.”

One of the old men had left his group and he seemed to be getting ready to fulfill a task.

“Let’s move a little closer,” Bessian said, drawing her along by her hand. “It looks as if both sides have chosen this old man to mark the boundary.”

The old man took a few steps forward, and halted beside a stone and a clod of fresh earth. A heavy silence fell upon the plateau, but perhaps that was only an impression, because the grumbling of the mountain heights drowned the noise of conversation, so that the human element by itself, having given way, had no power to still any sound. And yet everyone had the feeling that silence had fallen.

The old man bent down, grasped the big stone with both hands, and heaved it up on his shoulder. Then someone set the clod of earth on that same shoulder. His withered face with its many brown patches showed no emotion. Then in that silence, a clear, resonant voice that came from someplace one could not identify, cried out: “Go forward, then, and if you do not go in good faith, may this stone crush you in the life to come!”

For a moment the old man’s eyes looked as if they had turned to stone. It seemed impossible that his limbs could make the slightest movement without bringing down the whole framework of his ancient body. Nevertheless, he took a step forward.

“Let’s go a little closer,” Bessian whispered.

Now they were very nearly in the center of the group of people who were following the old man.

“I hear someone speaking. Who is it?” Diana murmured.

“The old man,” Bessian answered in the same low tone. “He is swearing by the stone and the earth he carries on his shoulder, as the Kanun requires.”

The old man’s voice, deep, sepulcral, could scarcely be heard.

“By this stone and by this earth that I bear as a burden, by what I have heard from our forefathers, the old boundaries of the pasture are here and here, and here is where I set the boundaries myself. If I lie, may I carry nothing but stone and mud forever!”

The old man, followed by the same small group of people, moved slowly over the pasture. For the last time one could hear, “If I have not spoken truly, let this stone and this earth weigh me down in this life and the next.” And he dropped his load to the ground.

Some of the mountaineers who had been following him started at once to dig at all the places that he had pointed out.

“Look, they’re prising out the old markers and setting the new ones in place,” Bessian explained to his wife.

They heard the sound of hammer-blows. Someone called out, “Bring the children here so that they may see.”

Diana watched the setting of the boundary marks unseeing. Suddenly among the black jackets of the mountaineers she saw those hateful checks coming near, and she grasped her husband’s sleeve as if to ask him for help. He looked at her questioningly, but she did not have time to say a word to him, for the surveyor was already before them, smiling in a way that seemed even more drunken than before.

“What a farce,” he said, cocking his head towards the mountaineers. “What a tragi-comedy! You’re a writer, aren’t you? Well, write something about this nonsense, please.”

Bessian looked at him sternly, but made no reply.

“Pardon me for having troubled you. Especially you, madam, please.”

He bowed somewhat theatrically, and Diana smelled alcohol on his breath.

“What do you want?” she said coldly, without concealing her disgust.

The man made as if to speak, but it appeared that Diana’s manner overawed him, for he said nothing. He turned his head towards the mountaineers and stayed that way for a moment, his face set, and still lit with a spiteful half-smile.

“It’s enough to make you howl,” he muttered. “The art of surveying has never suffered a greater insult.”

“What?”

“How can I not be indignant at it? You must understand. Of course that’s the way I feel. I’m a surveyor. I’ve studied that science. I’ve learned the art of measuring land, of drawing up plans. And despite that I wander on the High Plateau all the year through without being able to practice my profession, because the mountain people do not regard a surveyor as having any skill in these matters. You’ve seen yourself how they settle disputed boundaries. With stones, with curses, with witches and what not. And my instruments spend years on end packed up in my luggage. I left them down there at the inn, in some corner or other. One day they’ll steal them on me, if they haven’t already — but I’ll steal a march on them before they pinch my things. I’ll sell them and drink up the proceeds. Oh, unhappy day! I’m going off now, sir. Ali Binak, my master, is beckoning me. Excuse my troubling you. Excuse me, lovely lady. Farewell.”

“What an odd fellow,” Bessian said when the surveyor had gone away.

“What shall we do now?” Diana asked.

They searched out the coachman among the thinning crowds, and he came to them as soon as they had caught his eye.

“Are we going?”

Bessian nodded.

As they turned towards their carriage, the old man put his hand on the stones that had just been set to mark the new borders, and laid a curse upon all those who might dare to move them.

Diana felt that the mountain folk, distracted for some time by the business of setting the markers, were once again turning their attention upon them. She was the first to climb into the coach, and Bessian waved for the last time to the distant figures of Ali Binak and his assistants.

Diana was a little tired, and all during the ride back to the inn she scarcely spoke.

“Shall we have some coffee before we leave?” Bessian suggested.

“If you like,” Diana said.

While serving them, the innkeeper told them about famous cases of boundary disputes in which Ali Binak had been the arbitrator, the details of which had in some sort passed into the oral legendry of the mountains. You could see that he was very proud of his guest.

“When he is in these parts, he always stays at my inn.”

“But where does he live?” Bessian asked, just to be saying something.

“He doesn’t have any fixed residence,” the innkeeper said. “He is everywhere and nowhere. He’s always on the road, because there is no end to the quarrels and disputes, and people call on him to judge them.”

Even after he had served them their coffee, he went on talking about Ali Binak and the centuries-old hatreds that rend mankind. He brought up the subject again when he came back to take away the cups and collect his money, and once more on accompanying them to their carriage.

Bessian was about to climb into the coach when he felt Diana press his arm.

“Look,” she said softly.

A few paces away a young mountaineer, very pale, was looking at them as if dumbfounded. A black ribbon was sewn to his sleeve.

“There’s a man engaged in the blood feud,” Bessian said to the innkeeper. “Do you know him?”

The innkeeper’s squinting eyes stared into the void a few yards to one side of the mountaineer. It was obvious that he was about to enter the inn and he had just stopped to see these persons of distinction get into their carriage.

“No,” said the innkeeper. “He came by three days ago on his way to Orosh, to pay the blood-tax. “Say, young man,” he called to the stranger. “What’s your name?”

The young man, visibly surprised at the innkeeper’s hail, turned to look at him. Diana was already inside the carriage, but Bessian paused an instant on the footboard to hear the stranger’s answer. Diana’s face, slightly tinged with blue by the glass, was framed in the window of the coach.

“Gjorg,” the stranger replied in a rather unsteady, cracked voice, like someone who had not spoken for a very long time.

Bessian slipped down into the seat beside his wife.

“He killed a man a few days ago, and now he’s coming back from Orosh.”

“I heard,” she said quietly, still looking out of the window.

From where he stood as if rooted to the ground, the mountaineer stared feverishly at the young woman.

“How pale he is.”

“His name is Gjorg,” said Bessian, settling into his seat. Diana’s head was still quite close to the window. Outside, the innkeeper was lavishing advice on the coachman.

“Do you know the way? Be careful at the Graves of the Krushks. People always go wrong there. Instead of taking the right fork they take the left.”

The carriage began to move. The stranger’s eyes, that seemed very dark, perhaps because of the paleness of his face, followed the square of window where Diana’s face appeared. She too, even though she knew that she should not be looking at him still, did not have the strength to turn her eyes from the wayfarer who had loomed up suddenly at the side of the road. As the coach drew away, several times she wiped away the mist that her breath left upon the glass, but it condensed again at once as if anxious to draw a curtain between them.

When the carriage had rolled a good distance, and not a soul could be seen outside, she said, leaning back wearily in her seat, “You were right.”

Bessian studied his wife for a moment with a certain surprise. He was about to ask her what he had been right about, but something stopped him. To tell the truth, all during the long morning’s trip he had had the feeling that on some matters she did not agree with him. And now that she was adopting his views of her own accord, it seemed superfluous, not to say imprudent, to ask her to explain herself. The main thing was that she had not found the journey a disappointment. And she had just reassured him on that point. Bessian felt enlivened. It seemed to him that he was beginning, if only vaguely, to understand more or less what it was that he had been right about.

“Did you notice how pale that mountaineer was, the one who killed a man a few days ago?” asked Bessian, staring God knows why at the ring on one of her fingers.

“Yes, he was dreadfully pale,” Diana said.

“Who can tell what doubts, what hesitations he had to overcome before setting out to commit that crime. What are Hamlet’s doubts, compared with this Hamlet of our mountains?”

The look she gave her husband was one of gratitude.

“You feel it’s a bit much for me to call up the Danish prince in connection with a mountaineer of the High Plateau.”

“Not at all,” Diana said. “You put things so well, and you know how much I value that gift of yours.”

The suspicion crossed his mind that it was perhaps that very gift that had won Diana for him.

“Hamlet was spurred to vengeance by his father’s ghost,” Bessian went on excitedly. “But can you imagine what dreadful ghost rises up before a mountaineer to spur him on to vengeance?”

Diana’s eyes, grown enormously wide, looked at him fixedly.

“In houses that have a death to avenge, they hang up the victim’s bloodstained shirt at a corner of the tower, and they do not take it down until the blood has been redeemed. Can you imagine how terrible that must be? Hamlet saw his father’s ghost two or three times, at midnight, and for only a few moments, while the shirt that calls for vengeance in our kullas stays there day and night, for whole months and seasons; the bloodstains become yellow and people say, ‘Look, the dead man is impatient for revenge.’ ”

“Perhaps that’s why he was so pale.”

“Who?”

“The mountaineer we saw just now.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.”

For a moment Bessian thought that Diana had uttered the word “pale” as if she had said “beautiful,” but he dismissed the idea at once.

“And what will he do now?”

“Who?”

“Well, that mountaineer.”

“Ah, what will he do?” Bessian shrugged his shoulders. “If he killed his man four or five days ago, as the innkeeper said, and if he has been granted the long bessa, that is to say thirty days, then he still has twenty-five days of normal life before him.” Bessian smiled sourly, but his face was still expressionless. “It’s like a last authorization to go on leave in this world. The well-known saying that the living are only the dead on leave has a very real significance in our mountain country.”

“Yes,” she said, “he looked just like a man on leave from the other world, with the insignia of death on his sleeve.” Diana gave a deep sigh. “You told me so — just like Hamlet.”

Bessian looked through the window with a fixed smile; only the upper part of his face smiled.

“And it has to be said, too, that once Hamlet was sure of what it was he had to do, he carried out his murder in hot blood. As for him—” Bessian waved his hand at the stretch of road they were leaving behind them—“he is moved by a machine that is foreign to him, and occasionally even to the times he lives in.”

Diana listened to him attentively, even though some of the import of his meaning escaped her.

“A man must have the will of a Titan to turn towards death on orders that come from a place so far away,” Bessian said. “For, in point of fact, at times the orders come from a really distant place, the place of generations long gone.”

Diana took a deep breath again.

“Gjorg,” she said softly. “That is his name, isn’t it?”

“Whose?”

“That mountaineer, of course… at the inn.”

“Oh, yes, Gjorg. That’s his name all right. He really impressed you, didn’t he?”

She nodded her head.

Several times it looked as if it was going to rain, but the raindrops were lost in space before they could reach the earth. Only a few splashed on the carriage window and these quivered on the pane like tears. Diana had been watching them for some moments, and the glass itself seemed troubled.

She did not feel tired at all now. On the contrary, as if she had been unburdened within her, she felt that she had somehow grown transparent, but it was a cold sensation, not at all pleasant.

“This has been a long winter,” Bessian said. “It simply refuses to yield its place to spring.”

Diana was still looking at the landscape. There was something about the scene that disturbed one’s attention, that emptied one’s mind — by diluting one’s thoughts, as it seemed. Diana thought about the examples of Ali Binak’s subtle interpretations of the Kanun that she had heard the innkeeper recount. Actually, she remembered only certain facets or fragments of those reports, moving slowly along on the current of her thoughts. For example, two large doors of two houses were ordered lifted from their hinges and exchanged one for the other. One of those doors had been pierced by a bullet on a summer evening. The master of the house, wronged in that way, had to avenge himself for the affront, but how was he to go about it? A door holed by a bullet is not a cause for blood vengeance under the Code, and yet the offense must nonetheless be atoned for. To decide the matter, they appealed to Ali Binak, who declared that the door of the offender must be taken from its hinges and replaced by the one with the bullet hole, which that man was to keep forever.

Diana imagined Ali Binak going from village to village and from banner to banner, escorted by his two assistants. It was hard to imagine a more curious group. And, on another night, a man who had a friend visit him unexpectedly, sent his wife to the neighbors to borrow some victuals. Hours passed, and the woman did not return, but the husband controlled himself and hid his disquiet until the morning. Well, she did not come back on that day or the next. Something without precedent had happened on the High Plateau: the three brothers who lived in the neighboring house had kept her by force, each of them spending one night with her.

Diana imagined herself in the wife’s place, and she shuddered. She shook her head as if to rid herself of the horrible thought, but she could not free herself of it.

On the morning following the third night, the woman returned at last, and she told her husband everything. But what could the injured man do? It was a most extraordinary incident, and the affront could only be washed away in blood. The clan to which the three depraved brothers belonged was large and powerful, and if a feud were to start, the family of the wronged man would be doomed to annihilation. Besides, it turned out that the husband’s strong point was not courage. So, given this unusual case, he asked for something that a mountaineer rarely seeks, having recourse to judgment by a council of elders. The judgment was hard to arrive at. It was awkward to pronounce on a matter that had no precedent in the memory of the people of the Rrafsh, and it was equally difficult to fix a punishment for the three brothers. So they called for Ali Binak, and he ended by proposing two courses to the guilty men, who were to choose between the two. Either the three brothers would send their wives in turn to spend a night with the wronged husband, or they must choose one among them who would pay for the crime with his blood, and whose death could not be avenged thereafter. The brothers held a counsel and chose the second course: one of them would pay with his life for what they had done: the lot fell on the second brother.

Diana imagined the death of the second brother in slow motion as if in a film. He had asked the council of elders to grant him the thirty-day truce. Then, on the thirtieth day, the wronged man lay in wait for him and killed him with no trouble at all.

“And then?” Bessian had asked. “Then, nothing,” the innkeeper said. “He lived on this earth, and then he disappeared — all that for nothing, for a whim.”

Diana, on the edge of sleep, thought about the time that was left to the mountaineer named Gjorg, whose fate was already settled, and she sighed.

“Look, there’s a tower of refuge,” Bessian said, tapping the window pane with his finger.

Diana looked where her husband was pointing.

“That one over there, standing by itself, can you see it? The one with the narrow loopholes.”

“How grim it looks,” Diana said.

She had often heard talk about those famous towers, where the killers might take refuge at the end of the truce so as not to put their families in danger. But this was the first time that she had seen one.

“The tower loopholes look out on all the roads in the village, so that nobody can come near without being seen by the men immured within,” Bessian told her. “And there is always one loophole that faces the church door, because of the possibility of an offer to make peace, but those cases are very few.”

“And how long do people stay shut up inside?” Diana asked.

“Oh, for years, until new occurrences change the relations between the blood that has been shed and the blood that has been avenged.”

“The blood that has been shed, the blood that has been avenged,” Diana repeated. “You speak of those things as if they were bank transactions.”

Bessian smiled.

“At bottom, in one sense, those things are not very different. The Kanun is cold calculation.”

“That’s really dreadful,” Diana said, and Bessian could not tell if she had said that about the tower of refuge or about his last remark. In fact, she had pressed her face against the glass in order to see the dark tower again.

That’s where that mountaineer with the pale face might take refuge, she thought. But he might be killed before he could shut himself up inside that stony mass.

Gjorg. She said the name to herself and she felt that an emptiness was spreading inside her chest. Something was coming apart painfully there, but there was a certain sweetness in it.

Diana sensed that she was losing the defenses that protect a young woman from the very idea of having strong feelings about another man during the time of her engagement or when she is very much in love. This was the first time since she had known Bessian that she allowed herself to think quite freely about someone else. She thought of him, the man who was still on leave in this world, as Bessian had put it, a very brief leave, scarcely three weeks and each passing day shortened it further, as he wandered in the mountains with that black ribbon on his sleeve, the sign of his blood debt that he seemed to be paying even beforehand — so pale he was — chosen by death, like a tree to be felled in the forest. And that was what his eyes had said, fixed on hers: I am here only a short time, foreign woman.

Never had a man’s stare troubled Diana so much. Perhaps, she thought, it was the nearness of death, or the sympathy awakened in her by the beauty of the young mountaineer. And now she could scarcely tell whether the few drops of water on the glass were not tears in her eyes.

“What a long day,” she said aloud, and was surprised at her own words.

“Do you feel tired?” Bessian asked.

“A little.”

“We should be there in an hour, or an hour and a quarter at most.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently to him. She let him do that, not resisting, but she did not make herself lighter so as to let him pull her closer. He noticed, but stirred by the odor of her neck, he leaned his head towards her ear and whispered, “How are we going to sleep tonight?”

She shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “How would I know?”

“At least the tower of Orosh is the kulla of a prince, and I think they will put us in the same room,” he went on softly, almost conspiratorially

He looked sidelong at her face, and his expression was like the insinuating caress of his voice. But she kept her eyes before her and did not answer. Unsure whether to be offended or not, he relaxed his arm somewhat, and he would surely have taken it away completely if at the last moment, perhaps because she had guessed his intention or perhaps by accident, she had not asked him a question.

“What?”

“I asked you if the prince of Orosh is a blood relation of the royal family.”

“No, not at all,” he replied.

“Then how is it that he is called a prince?”

Bessian frowned a little.

“It’s rather complicated,” he said. “To tell the truth, he’s not a prince, despite the fact that they call him one in certain circles and the people of the High Plateau call him “Prenk,” which means prince exactly. But mostly they call him Kapidan, even though….”

Bessian remembered he had not smoked a cigarette for quite a while. Like all those who smoke only now and then, it took some time for him to take the cigarette from the pack and the match from the little box. Diana felt that he did this whenever he wanted to put off a difficult explanation. And indeed the explanation he began to give her about the Kulla of Orosh (an explanation that he had left unfinished in Tirana, when from the prince’s chancellory, in stilted language — really rather strange — an invitation to the Kulla of Orosh had reached him, saying that he would be welcome at any season of the year and at any hour of the day or the night) was no clearer than the one he had cut off then in Tirana, drinking a cup of tea, seated on the sofa in his studio. But perhaps that came from the fact that there was something unclear in everything that had to do with the kulla where they would soon be guests.

“He’s not exactly a prince,” Bessian said, “and yet, in a way, he’s more than a prince, not only because of his lineage, much older than that of the royal family, but chiefly because of the way he rules over all the High Plateau.”

He went on explaining that the prince’s power was of a very special kind, founded on the Kanun and unlike any other regime in the world. Time out of mind, neither police nor government had had any authority over the High Plateau. The castle itself had neither a police force nor governmental powers, but the High Plateau was nonetheless wholly under its control. That had been true in the time of the Turks, and even earlier, and that state of affairs had gone on under the Serbian occupation and the Austrian occupation, and then under the first republic, and the second, and now under the monarchy. Some years ago a group of deputies tried to put the High Plateau under the authority of the national government, but the attempt failed. The partisans of Orosh had said that we should act so that the Kanun would extend its sway over the entire country instead of trying to uproot it in the mountains, though of course no power in the world could achieve that.

Diana asked Bessian a question about the princely origins of the master of the Kulla, and he had the feeling that she did that in the naive way that a woman tries to find out if the jewelry someone is about to give her is really gold.

He told her that he did not believe in the princely origins of the lords of Orosh. At the very least, that matter had not been established. Their origins were lost in the mists of time. According to Bessian, there were two possibilities: either they were descendants of a very old but not very distinguished feudal family, or else they were a family that, generation after generation, had dealt in interpreting the Kanun. It was well known that a dynasty of that kind, which was rather like a temple of the law, an institution halfway between oracles and repositories of legal tradition, could in time amass great power, until their origins were quite forgotten and they exercised absolute dominion.

“I said that the family interpreted the Kanun,” Bessian went on, “because to this day, the Kulla of Orosh is recognized as the guardian of that very Kanun.”

“But isn’t the family itself outside the Code?” Diana asked. “I think you told me that once.”

“Yes, that is the case. It is the only family that is not under the jurisdiction of the Kanun.”

“And there are all sorts of grim legends about it, aren’t there?”

“Yes, of course. Naturally, a castle as old as this is bound to have an atmosphere of mystery.”

“How interesting,” Diana said, gaily this time, cuddling up to him as before. “It’s so exciting to be visiting there, isn’t it?”

He took a deep breath, as if after some great exertion. He pulled her close again, and he looked at her with a mixture of tenderness and reproof, as if he were telling her, why do you torment me by removing yourself so suddenly and so far, when you are so close to me?

Her face was lit once again by that smile that he could see only from the side, and that was almost entirely directed straight before her, into the distance.

He put his head to the window.

“It will be night soon.”

“The tower must not be far now,” Diana said.

Both were trying to find it, each looking out through the window nearest them. The late-afternoon sky was set in a heavy immobility. The clouds seemed to have frozen forever, and if some sense of motion still persisted around them, its locus was not the sky but the earth. The mountains filed by slowly before their eyes, at the same speed as their rolling carriage.

Holding hands, they searched the horizon to find the tower. The mystery of it brought them closer still. Several times they cried out almost simultaneously, “There it is! There it is!” But they knew at once that they were mistaken. It was only the mountain peaks with shreds of cloud clinging to them.

All around them was empty space. One would have thought that other buildings and life itself had withdrawn so as not to disturb the solitude of the Kulla of Orosh.

“But where is it?” Diana said plaintively.

Their eyes sought the tower at every point on the horizon, and it would have seemed just as natural to see it appear high in the sky, among the tattered clouds, as somewhere on the earth, among the rocky peaks.

The light of the copper lamp carried by the man who was leading them up to the third storey of the kulla wavered mournfully on the walls.

“This way, sir,” he said for the third time, holding the lamp away from him the better to light their way. The floor was made of wooden boards that seemed to creak louder at that hour of the night. “This way, sir.”

In the room, another lamp, also of copper, its wick scarcely turned up, shed a feeble light on the walls and on the pattern of the carpet on a deep red ground. Against her will, Diana sighed.

“I’ll bring your suitcases at once,” said the man, and he went away quietly.

They stood there for a moment, looking at each other, and then they looked around the room.

“What did you think of the prince?” Bessian asked in a low voice.

“It’s hard to say,” Diana replied, almost in a whisper. At any other time she would have admitted that she did not know what to make of him; he was not very natural, any more than the style of his invitation, but she felt that long explanations were out of place at that late hour. “It’s hard to say,” she repeated. “As for the other one, the steward of the blood, I think he’s repulsive.”

“I do too,” Bessian said.

His eyes, and then Diana’s, rested stealthily on the heavy oak bed and its heavy red woolen coverlet with a deep nap. On the wall, above the bed, there was a cross of oak.

Bessian went to one of the windows. He was still standing there when the man came back, holding his copper lamp in one hand and the two suitcases in the other.

He set them down on the floor and Bessian, his back to the man and his face pressed to the window-pane, asked, “What is that, down there?”

The man walked over with a light step. Diana watched them both for a moment, leaning on the window-sill, looking down as if into a chasm.

“It’s a sort of large room, sir, a sort of gallery, I don’t know what to call it, where you take in the people from all parts of the Rrafsh when they come to pay the blood tax.”

“Oh,” Bessian said. Because his face was right against the pane, his voice sounded strange to Diana. “That’s the famous murderers’ gallery.”

“Gjaks, sir.”

“Yes, gjaks…. I know. I’ve heard of them.”

Bessian stayed by the window. The servant of the castle withdrew a few steps, noiselessly.

“Good night, sir. Good night, madam.”

“Good night,” Diana said, without raising her head that was bent over the suitcase that she had just opened. She went through her things languidly, without deciding to choose this or that. The evening meal had been heavy, and she felt an unpleasant weight in her stomach. She looked at the red woolen coverlet on the broad bed, then turned again to her suitcase, hesitating about putting on her nightgown.

She was still undecided when she heard his voice.

“Come see.”

She got up and went to the window. He moved to make room for her and she felt the icy coldness of the glass go right through her. Outside, the darkness seemed to hover over an abyss.

“Look down there,” Bessian said faintly.

She looked into the darkness, but saw nothing; she was penetrated with the vastness of the black night and she shivered.

“There,” he said, touching the glass with his hand, “down there, don’t you see a light?”

“Where?”

“Down there, all the way down.”

At last she saw a glimmer. Rather than a light it was a feeble reddish glow on the rim of the abyss.

“I see,” she said. “But what is it?”

“It’s the famous gallery where the gjaks wait for days and sometimes weeks on end to pay the blood-tax.”

He felt her breath come faster by his shoulder.

“Why do they have to wait so long?” she asked.

“I don’t know. The kulla doesn’t make paying the tax easy. Perhaps so that there will always be people waiting in that gallery. You’re cold. Put something over your shoulders.”

“That mountaineer back there, at the inn, he must have come here, too?”

“Certainly. The innkeeper told us about him. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, that’s right. It seems that he came here three days ago to pay the blood tax. That’s what he told us.”

“Just so.”

Diana could not suppress a sigh.

“So he was here….”

“Without exception, every killer on the High Plateau goes through that gallery,” he said.

“That’s terrifying. Don’t you think so?”

“It’s true. To think that for more than four hundred years, since the building of the castle of Orosh, in that gallery, night and day, winter and summer, there have always been killers waiting there.”

She felt his face near her forehead.

“Of course it’s frightening, it couldn’t be otherwise. Murderers waiting to pay. It’s truly tragic. I’d even say that in a certain way there is grandeur in it.”

“Grandeur?”

“Not in the usual meaning of the word. But in any case, that glimmer in the darkness, like a candle shining on death…. Lord, there really is something supremely sinister about it. And when you think that it’s not just a matter of the death of a single man, of a candle-end shining on his grave, but infinite death. You’re cold. I told you to put something over your shoulders.”

They stood there awhile, not turning their eyes from that light at the foot of the kulla, until Diana felt chilled to her marrow.

“Brr! I’m freezing,” she said, and moving away from the window she said, “Bessian, don’t stay there, you’ll catch cold.”

He turned and took two or three steps towards the centre of the room. At that moment, a clock on the wall that he had not noticed struck twice with a deep sound that made them both start.

“Goodness, how frightened I was,” Diana said.

She knelt down again to her suitcase. “I’m taking out your pyjamas,” she said a moment later.

He murmured a few words and began to walk up and down the room. Diana went over to a mirror that stood on a chest of drawers.

“Are you sleepy?” she asked.

“No. Are you?”

“Me neither.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette.

“It would have been better not to have had that second cup of coffee.”

Diana said something, but since she had a hairpin in her mouth, he could not make out the words.

Bessian stretched out now, and leaning on his elbow, looked on distractedly at his wife’s familiar gestures before the mirror. That mirror, the chest, the clock, as well as the bed and most of the other furniture of the kulla, were related, as their lines showed, to a baroque style, but simplified in the extreme.

As she combed her hair in the mirror, Diana watched out of the corner of her eye the wreaths of smoke floating over Bessian’s abstracted face. The comb moved ever more slowly through her hair. With an unhurried gesture she put it down on the chest, and watching her husband in the mirror, quietly, as if she did not want to attract his attention, she walked with light steps to the window.

Beyond the glass was anguish and night. She let their tremors pass through her while her eyes searched insistently for the tiny lost glimmer of light in the chaos of darkness. It was there down below, in the same place, as if suspended above the chasm, flickering wanly, about to be swallowed up by the night. For a long moment she could not take her eyes from the feeble red glow in that abyss of darkness. It was like the redness of primeval fire, a magma ages old whose pallid reflection came from the centre of the earth. It was like the gates of hell. And suddenly, with unbearable intensity, the guise of the man who had passed through that hell was present to her. Gjorg, she cried out within her, moving her cold lips. He wandered forbidden roads, bearing omens of death in his hands, on his sleeve, in his wings. He must be a demigod to face that darkness and primal chaos of creation. And being so strange, so unattainable, he took on enormous size, he swelled and floated like a universal howling in the night.

Now she could not believe that she had actually seen him, and that he had seen her. Comparing herself with him she felt colorless, stripped of all mystery. Hamlet of the mountains, she thought, repeating Bessian’s words. My black prince.

Would she ever meet him again? And there, by the window, her forehead icy from the frozen pane, she felt she would give anything to see him again.

Then she felt her husband’s breath behind her, and his hand resting upon her hip. For some moments he gently caressed that part of her body that moved him more than any other, then, not seeing what was happening in her face, he asked her in a muffled voice, “What’s the matter?”

Diana did not answer, but she kept her head turned towards the black panes, as if inviting him to look out there too.