Broken April

CHAPTER IV

Mark Ukacierra was going up the wooden stairway leading to the third storey of the kulla when he heard a voice calling to him in a low tone, “Hush! The guests are still asleep!”

He went on his way without any attempt to lighten his footfalls, and the voice above him on the stairs, came again: “I told you not to make noise. Didn’t you hear me? The guests are still asleep!”

Mark raised his eyes to see who had dared address him in that way, just as one of the servants put his head over the banister to see who had shattered the quiet. But recognizing the steward of the blood, the servant, horrified, clapped his hand over his mouth.

Mark Ukacierra went on ascending, and when he reached the top of the stairway, he passed right by the terror-stricken man without saying a word to him, not even turning his head.

Ukacierra was first cousin to the prince, and since on the roster of duties in the castle he was concerned with all the business connected with bloodshed, he was called the steward of the blood. The other servants, while for the most part also cousins of the prince, albeit distant ones, feared the steward just as much as the prince. They stared in amazement at their colleague who had so narrowly escaped a storm, and recalled, not without resentment, other occasions on which the slightest misstep had cost them dear. But the steward of the blood, even though he had dined sumptuously with distinguished guests last night, was distracted this morning. His face ashen, he was obviously out of sorts. Without glancing at any of them, he pushed open the door of a large room adjoining the living room and went in.

The room was cold. Through the panes of the high, narrow windows framed in unpainted oak, came a light that seemed to him the light of an evil day. He went closer to the windows and looked out at the motionless clouds. April was almost here, but the sky had not yet taken leave of March. That idea came to him and brought a particular sense of annoyance, as if it were an injustice aimed specifically at him.

His eyes fixed on the scene beyond the window, as if he wanted to torment them with the grey light that was quite as trying, he forgot the corridors filled with cautious steps, with “Sh! Quiet!” and the guests who had arrived last night, who had aroused in him without his taking account of it a vague disquiet.

Last night’s dinner had been troublesome. He had had no appetite. Something gnawed at his stomach, gave him an empty feeling that, while he forced himself to eat, seemed more empty with every mouthful.

Mark Ukacierra turned his eyes away from the windows, and looked for a moment at the heavy oak shelves of the library. Most of the books were old, religious works in Latin and in old Albanian. On another shelf set apart from these were, side by side, contemporary publications dealing directly or indirectly with the Kanun and the Kulla of Orosh. Some of the books treated these matters only, and there were journals that contained extracts, articles, monographs, and poems.

If the chief function of Mark Ukacierra was to look after the business of the blood-tax, he was also in charge of the castle’s archives. The various documents were kept in the lower part of the bookcase that was lined on the inside with sheet iron as a safety measure, and locked with a key: deeds, secret treaties, correspondence with foreign consuls, agreements with the successive governments of Albania, with the first republic, the second republic, and the monarchy, agreements with the governors or military commanders of the troops of occupying powers, Turks, Serbs, Austrians. There were documents in foreign languages but for the most part they were written in old Albanian. A great padlock, whose key Mark carried hanging from his neck, glittered yellow between the two doors.

Mark Ukacierra took a step towards the bookshelves, and passed his hand half-caressingly, half-angrily along the row of books and current magazines. He could read and write, but not well enough to really understand what they said about Orosh. A monk from the convent not far from the Kulla came once a month to arrange, according to their contents, the books and magazines that came by the post. He divided them into good and bad publications: the first were those that spoke well of Orosh and the Kanun, the second those that spoke ill, and the proportion of good to bad always varied. Usually the good publications were more numerous, but the number of the bad ones was by no means negligible. There were times when the bad ones increased so as to nearly equal the tally of the good.

Again, Mark passed his hand along the row of books in annoyance, and two or three fell down. There were stories, plays and legends of the High Plateau that, as the monk said, were good for the soul, but there were others bitter as poison, so that one could not understand how the prince could bear to see them on his bookshelves. If it were up to Mark Ukacierra, he would have burnt those books long ago. But the prince was easy-going. Far from burning them or throwing them out of the window, there were times when he actually leafed through them. He was the master and he knew what he was doing.

Last night after dinner, as he walked before his guests through the rooms that adjoined the great hall, he had said on coming to the library, “How many times they have spat upon Orosh, but Orosh was not shaken by it and never will be.” And instead of seeing to the battlements of the Kulla, he would leaf through the books and periodicals as if in them he might find the secret not only of the attacks upon his stronghold but of its defense. “How many governments have fallen,” the prince had gone on, “And how many kingdoms have been swept from the face of the earth, and Orosh is still standing.”

And that fellow, the writer, whom Mark had not cared for from the start, no more than for his beautiful wife, he had leaned down to the books and periodicals to read their titles, and he had said nothing. In the light of what Mark thought he understood in the course of the conversation at dinner, the man had written about the Rrafsh himself, but in such a way that you could not tell whether it was well meant or not. A kind of hybrid. But perhaps it was just for that reason that the prince had invited him to the castle with his wife — to see what he had in mind and to persuade him to adopt his own views.

The steward of the blood turned his back on the bookshelves and looked out of the window again. As far as he was concerned, he had no faith in these guests. It was not only the vague dislike he had felt as soon as he had laid eyes on them, going up the stairs with their leather suitcases, but rather because of a different feeling that was the source of that dislike, a kind of fear that these guests, the woman in particular, aroused in him. The steward of the blood smiled bitterly. Everyone who knew him would have been astonished to learn that he, Mark Ukacierra, who had seldom been afraid of anything all his life — even things that made brave men turn pale — had felt fear in the presence of a woman. Nevertheless, there it was: she had frightened him. By her expression he had understood at once that she had doubts about certain things that were being said around the table. Some of the opinions offered — quite discreetly — by his master, the prince, which had always seemed to him to have the force of law, to be beyond discussion, quietly fell apart, annihilated, as soon as they came before that young woman’s eyes. Can this be possible? Two or three times he had put the question to himself, and he had pulled himself up short immediately. No, it’s not possible. It’s me, I’m losing my wits. But he had glanced furtively at the young woman again, and he was certain that it was really so. The words dissolved in her eyes, lost their strength. And after the words, a wing of the kulla collapsed, and then himself. It was the first time that this had happened, and that was the reason for his fear. All kinds of distinguished guests had occupied the prince’s guest room, from papal envoys to persons close to King Zog, and even those bearded men they call philosophers or scholars, but not one of them had stirred any such feeling in him.

Perhaps that was why the prince had talked more than usual last night. Everyone knew that he was restrained in his speech; sometimes he only opened his mouth to welcome his guests, and usually it was other people who kept the conversation going. But last night, to everyone’s astonishment, he had broken his custom. And in whose presence? A woman’s. Not a woman — a witch. Beautiful as the fairies of the high mountains, but evil. The first mistake was to have allowed that woman to enter the men’s chamber, against all custom. The Kanun knew what it was doing in forbidding women to enter that room. But recently, worse luck, fashion had grown so powerful that one could sense the diabolical spirit even here, in the very pillar of the Kanun, at Orosh.

Mark Ukacierra felt again the nauseous hollow in his stomach. A secret spite contributed to that sick sensation, and it wanted to vent itself, but finding no proper outlet, it turned inward to make him suffer. He wanted to vomit. In fact, he had noticed for some time now that an ill wind blowing from afar, from the cities and the low country that had long ago lost their virility, was trying to stain and infect the high country too. And it had started with the appearance in the Rrafsh of these women dressed to kill, with chestnut or auburn hair, who stirred up a lust for life — even without honor; women who traveled in carriages that rolled along swaying from side to side, carriages of corruption, accompanied by men who were men in name only. And the worst of it was that these capricious dolls were brought right into the men’s chamber, and at Orosh, no less, in the cradle of the Kanun. No, all that wasn’t just chance. Something was blighted, something was rotting away visibly around him. And he was the one who had to account for the decline of the number of killings in the blood feud. Last night, the prince had said — rancorously, looking sidelong at him—“There are some people who would like to see the Kanun of our forefathers softened.” What had the lord of Orosh meant by that look? Was it Mark Ukacierra who was responsible for the fact that the Code, and especially the blood feud, had shown signs of weakening recently? Couldn’t he smell the stench that rose from those androgynous cities? It was true that revenues from the blood tax were smaller this year, but he was not the only person responsible, any more than the fine corn crop was solely to the credit of the bailiff. If the weather had not been in our favor, then he would have seen what the harvest was like! But the year had been good and the prince had praised the bailiff. But blood was not rain falling from the sky. The reasons for its decline were obscure. Of course he had some share of responsibility for all that. But not everything was his doing. Well, if they had given him fuller powers, and if they had let him manage things his way, then, certainly, they could take him to task about the blood tax. Then he would know how to go about it. However, while his impressive title made people tremble, his powers were limited. That was why the blood-feud and everything connected with it was in jeopardy. The number of killings had fallen year after year, and the first season of the current year had been disastrous. He had sensed that, and had awaited anxiously the accounting that his assistants had drawn up for him a few days before. The results had been even worse than he had feared: the monies collected were less than seventy percent of the revenue of the corresponding period in the preceding year. And this at a time when not only the bailiff in charge of croplands but all the other managers in the Prince’s service, the bailiff for cattle and pastures, the bailiff for loans, and most of all, the bailiff for mills and mines, who attended to all the trades that required tools, from looms to forges, had payed large sums into the general treasury. As for himself, the chief bailiff (for the sums realized by the others came solely from the holdings of the castle, while his were levied upon the whole of the High Plateau) who at one time used to collect sums equal to the total of all other revenues, he now brought in only half the amount of those monies.

That was why the look that the prince had given him at dinner last night was harsher than his words. That look seemed to say, you are the steward of the blood, and therefore you ought to be the chief instigator of feuds and acts of vengeance; you ought to be encouraging them, stirring them up, whipping them on when they flag or falter.

But you do just the opposite. You don’t deserve your title. That was what that look meant. O Lord, Mark Ukacierra groaned as he stood by the window. Why didn’t they let him alone? Didn’t he have enough trouble?

He tried to put aside his troubled thoughts, bent down to the lowest shelf of the bookcase, and pulling open the heavy door, took out a thick, leather-bound ledger. This was The Blood Book. For some time he leafed through the stout pages filled with dense script in double column. His eyes took in nothing, merely skimming coldly over those thousands of names, whose syllables were as alike as the pebbles of an endless beach. Here were detailed descriptions of the feuds of the entire High Plateau, the debts of death that families or clans owed to one another, the payment of those deaths by the parties concerned, the cases of vengeance not yet satisfied that would keep the feuds alive ten, twenty, sometimes one hundred and twenty years later, the unending accounts of debts and payments, of whole generations annihilated, the blood-oak (the male line, or the line of inheritance), the milk-oak (the line of the womb), blood washed away by blood, so-and-so for so-and-so, one for one, one head for another, four brace killed, fourteen, eighty, and always blood that was still to be shed; blood left over that, like the ram that leads the flock, draws after it new multitudes of the dead.

The book was old, perhaps as old as the castle. It was complete, and it was opened when people came to consult it, people sent by their family or their clan who had been living in peace for a long time, but who suddenly — because of a doubt, a supposition, a rumor, or a bad dream — felt their tranquility shaken. Then the steward of the blood, Mark Ukacierra, like some dozens of his predecessors, would open the thick pages of the book, searching page by page and column by column the spread of the blood-oak, and stop at last at one place. “Yes, you have blood to settle. In such a year, such a month, you left this debt of blood unpaid.” In a case of that kind, the expression of the steward of the blood was one of stern reproach for the long period of forgetfulness. His eyes seemed to say, your peace has been a falsehood, unhappy man!

But that seldom happened. Mostly, the members of a family remembered from generation to generation every failure to avenge blood with blood. They were the living memory of the clan, and forgetting such things could only occur because of quite extraordinary events with long-lasting effects, like natural catastrophes, wars, migrations, plagues, when death was devalued, losing its grandeur, its rules, its loneliness, becoming something common and familiar, ordinary, insignificant. In some such flood of death, drear and turbid, it could happen that a debt of vengeance was forgotten. But even if that happened, the book was always there, under lock and key in the Kulla of Orosh, and the years might pass, the family flourish and put out new shoots, and then one day the doubt would arise, the rumor, or the mad dream that would bring everything to life again.

Mark Ukacierra went on leafing through the ledger. His eyes paused at the years of harvest for the blood feud, or again at the years of famine. Although he had seen the notations and compared them many, many times before, in going through them now he shook his head uncomprehendingly. That head-shaking was at once a complaint and a threat, as if he were secretly inveighing against the times gone by. Here were the years 1611–1628, that tallied the largest number of killings in the whole seventeenth century. And here was the year 1639, with the lowest count: 722 murders in all for the High Plateau. That was the dreadful year in which there were two insurrections, when seas of blood had been shed — but that was blood of another sort, not the blood of the Kanun. Then, one after the other, the years 1640 to 1690, an entire half-century in which, year by year, the blood that had once flowed in a torrent flowed scarcely at all, in droplets. One would have thought that the blood-feud was coming to an end. But just when the killings seemed to stop completely, they came back in force. The year 1691: double the previous year’s toll of vengeance. In 1693 the number tripled. In 1694 it quadrupled. The Code had undergone a basic transformation. The duty of exacting vengeance from the perpetrator of a murder was now extended to his whole family. The last years of that century and the first of the following one were drenched in blood. That condition prevailed until the middle of the eighteenth century, at which time there was another era of drought. Then came the famine year of 1754. Then 1799. A century later, three years—1878, 1879, 1880—were years of revolutions or wars against foreigners, and the number of blood-feud killings fell. The blood spilled in the course of these wars was foreign to the Kulla of Orosh and to the Kanun, and accordingly these were the gjakhups* years.

But the spring season of this current year could not possibly be worse. He came close to trembling when he remembered the seventeenth of March. Seventeenth of March, he said to himself. If that killing had not taken place at Brezftoht, there would have been no blood vengeance at all on that day. It would have been the first day of its kind — a blank — in a century, perhaps during two, three, five centuries, perhaps from the time of the origin of the blood feud. And now as he leafed through the ledger, it seemed to him that his hands were shaking. Look, on March 16, there were eight murders; eleven on the eighteenth; the nineteenth and the twentieth, five each; while the seventeenth had just missed being without a single death. At the very idea that such a day might come about, Mark was terror-stricken. And to imagine that it just might have happened. That dreadful thing would indeed have come to pass if a certain Gjorg from Brezftoht had not arisen and bloodied that day of the Lord. He had saved the day. So that, when he had come last night to pay the blood tax, Mark Ukacierra had looked into his eyes with compassion, with gratitude, so much so that the young man was taken aback.

At last he set down the ledger on the highest shelf of the bottom compartment of the bookcase. For the tenth time, his eyes skimmed over the contemporary books and journals. When the person who was in charge of the collection put those works in order, sometimes he would read to Mark snatches of the writings of the enemies of the Kanun. Mark was astonished and enraged that passages of the Code and even the Kulla of Orosh were attacked almost openly. Hm, read me the rest, Mark grunted, interrupting the man. And his mounting rage caught up in its whirlwind not just the people who wrote such horrors, such shameless things, but all the people of the cities and the plains, and the cities and the lowlands themselves, not to say all the flatlands of all the countries of the world.

Sometimes his curiosity made him listen hours on end to what was being said there, as in the case of a discussion sponsored by one of the journals, on the question of whether the Code and its severe prescriptions had the effect of inciting the blood feud or putting obstacles in its way. Certain writers held that a number of basic articles of the Kanun, like the one stating that blood was never lost and could only be redeemed by blood, were open incitements to the blood feud, and in consequence barbarous. On the other hand, some wrote that those articles, apparently monstrous, were in reality most humane, since the law of retaliation in itself tended to dissuade a possible murderer by warning him; it said: Shed no blood if you do not wish to spill your own.

Mark could bear that kind of writing, but there were other sorts that drove him mad. One such article — absolutely criminal — that made the prince sleepless for many nights, and had even been accompanied by calculations that amounted to bookkeeping, had been published anonymously four months ago by one of those accursed journals. In the table presented were the figures, astonishingly accurate, of all the revenues under the heading of blood tax collected by the castle of Orosh in the course of the last four years; they were compared with other sources of income: those from corn, from cattle, from the sale of land, from loans at high interest — and senseless conclusions had been drawn from those figures. One of these was that, supposedly, the general decline that was the hallmark of our own era was reflected in the decay of such keystones of the Kanun as the bessa, the blood feud, the status of one’s guest, which having been at one time elements of sublimity and grandeur in Albanian life had become denatured in the course of time, changing gradually into an inhuman machine, to the point of being reduced at last, according to the author of the article, to a capitalist enterprise carried on for the sake of profit.

The author of that article had made use of many foreign expressions that Mark could not understand, and the monk who was in charge of the library had explained them to him patiently. Such, for example, were the terms “blood industry,” “blood merchandise,” “blood-feud mechanism.” As for the title, it was monstrous: “Blood-feudology.”

Naturally, the prince, through his agents in Tirana, had succeeded in having the journal promptly banned, but despite all his efforts, he could not learn the author’s name. The ban on the periodical did not calm Mark Ukacierra. The fact that things like that could be written at all, or even conceived by the human mind, was dreadful to him.

The big clock on the wall struck seven. Again he drew near the windows, and standing there, his eyes staring in the direction of the high peaks, he felt his brain empty itself of his heavy thought. But, as usual, the emptiness was temporary. Slowly, his mind filled itself again with a cloudy grey mass. Something more than mist and less than thought. Something in between, troubling, enormous, incomplete. As soon as one part of it revealed itself, another covered it over immediately. And Mark felt that the state of mind that had invaded him might last for hours, even days.

It was not the first time that his mind had frozen in that way, faced with the riddle of the High Plateau. That part of the world was the only permissible one, normal and reasonable. The other part of the world, “down there,” was a marshy hollow in the earth that gave off foul vapors and the atmosphere of degeneracy.

Motionless at the window, as so often in the past, he tried vainly to take in by thinking of it all the endless expanse of the Rrafsh, which began in the heart of Albania and reached just beyond the frontiers of the country. All of the High Plateau, to which in a sense he was linked by the fact that the blood taxes came to him from everywhere, was nonetheless an enigma. The bailiff in charge of croplands and vineyards, and the bailiff for mines — they had an easy task: The corn or the vine stricken with rust could be detected simply by sight, and that was true, too, of the condition of the mines, whereas the fields that had fallen to him to manage were quite invisible. Every once in a while, he thought he was just about to pierce the mystery, to lay hold of it in his imagination so as to resolve it once and for all, but slowly, as the clouds move insensibly in the sky, it escaped him. Then he returned in his thought to the fields of death, in a vain struggle to discover the secret of their fertility or their barrenness. But their drought was of a different sort, often manifesting itself in wet weather and in winter, and all the more terrible by that very fact.

Mark Ukacierra sighed. Staring at the horizon, he tried to imagine the endless spaces of the Rrafsh. The High Plateau had an abundance of streams, of deep gullies, snow, prairies, villages, churches, but none of that was of interest to him. For Mark Ukacierra, all of the great plateau was divided in two parts only — the part that engendered death, and the part that did not. The portion that bore death, with its fields, its objects, and its people, passed slowly before him in his mind, as it had often done There were tens of thousands of irrigation canals, large and small, running from west to east, or from south to north, and on their banks there had sprung up countless quarrels that gave rise to feuds; hundreds of mill-races, thousands of landmarks, and these gave birth easily to disputes, and then blood-vengeance; tens of thousands of marriages, some of which were dissolved for one reason or another, but which brought one thing only — mourning; the men of the High Plateau themselves, formidable, hot-tempered, who played with death as if they were playing a game on Sunday; and so on. As for the sterile portion of the region, it was equally vast, with its cemeteries that, satiated with death, seemed to refuse any more corpses, since murder, brawling, or mere argument were prohibited within their confines. There were the gjakhups, those persons that because of the way in which they had been killed or because of the circumstances of their death, the Kanun decreed unworthy of being avenged; the priests, who did not fall within the scope of the rules of blood vengeance; and all the women of the High Plateau, who did not fall within their scope either.

At times, Mark had thought of mad things that he dared not confess to anyone. Oh, if only the women as well as the men were subject to the rules of blood-letting. Then he was ashamed, even terrified — but that seldom happened, only sometimes at the end of the month or the quarter, when he felt despondent because of the figures in the ledger. Weary as he was, he would try to put those ideas from him, but his mind could find no respite and he went back to them. But this time, in going back to them, it was not to blaspheme the Kanun but simply to give vent to his astonishment. He thought it very strange that weddings, which were usually occasions for joy, often brought about quarrels that led to feuding, while funerals, which were necessarily sad, never led to anything of the kind. That led him to compare the ancient blood-feuds with those of recent times. On both sides of the comparison, there was both good and bad. The old feuds, just like fields that had been tilled for a long time, were dependable, but rather cold and slow to bear. Contrarily, the new feuds were violent, and sometimes they brought about as many deaths in a single year as the old ones in two decades. But since they were not deep-rooted, they might easily be brought to a stop by a reconciliation, while those of olden times were very hard to bring to a settlement. Successive generations had been accustomed to the feuds from their cradles, and so, not being able to conceive of life without them, it never entered their minds to try to free themselves from their destined end. It was not for nothing that people said, “Blood-letting that lasts twelve years is like the oak, hard to uproot.” In any case, Mark Ukacierra had come to the conclusion that the two kinds of feud, the ancient one rooted in history, and the new one with its vitality, had somehow joined together, and the exhaustion of the one sort had affected the other. That was why for some time now, for example, it was hard to understand which of the two had begun to weaken first. O Lord, he said aloud, if things go on like this it will be my undoing.

The first stroke of the clock startled him. He counted…. six, seven, eight. Behind doors, in the hallways, only the light rustling of brooms could be heard. The guests were still asleep.

The daylight, even though it was brighter now, still looked cold and hostile as the far spaces from which it came. Lord, he sighed, this time so deeply that he felt as if his ribs were creaking like the timbers of a hut that someone was trying to tear down. His eyes were fixed on the gray sky that spread, lonely, above the mountains; it was hard to tell whether he was making them turn dark or if the darkness within him came from them.

His expression was at once questioning, threatening, and prayerful. What’s wrong with you, he seemed to be saying to the scene before his eyes, why have you changed so.

He had always thought that he knew his Rrafsh, of which it was said that it was one of the largest and most sombre of the high plateaus of Europe, and that besides spreading over thousands of square miles in Albania it went beyond her frontiers, through the Albanian districts of Kosovo, those that the Slavs called “Old Serbia,” but were really part of the High Plateau. That is what he used to think, but lately he found more and more that there was something about it that estranged him from it. His mind wandered painfully towards its slopes, skirted its chasms, as if he wanted to discover from whence came that incomprehensible something — worse than incomprehensible, ironic, in broad daylight. Especially when the wind began to howl and those mountains huddled together, he found them completely foreign.

He knew that the machinery of death was there, set up from time immemorial, an ancient mill that worked day and night, and whose secrets he, the steward of the blood, knew better than anyone. And yet, that did not help him drive away that feeling of estrangement. Then, as if to convince himself that it was not so, feverishly he traversed in his imagination that cold expanse unfolding in his head in a peculiar form, something between a topographical map and a cloth spread for the funeral feast.

Right now he was calling up that dismal map, looking through the library windows. In strict order, his mind arrayed all of the fertile fields of the High Plateau. They were divided into two large groups: cultivated fields, and fields lying fallow because of the blood feud. That disposition of things corresponded to a simple rule: The people who had blood to redeem tilled their fields because it was their turn to kill, and accordingly, no one threatened them, they could go out to their fields when they pleased. On the other hand, those who owed blood left the fields untilled, and immured themselves in the tower of refuge for protection. But that situation changed abruptly as soon as those who had blood to redeem had committed their murder. Then, from a family with blood to redeem, they changed into a family that owed blood, and therefore, they became gjaks and betook themselves to the towers of refuge, letting their fields lie fallow. Conversely, of course, their enemies ceased to be gjaks, they left the towers in which they had been cloistered, and since it was now their turn to kill, they were not afraid and they set about cultivating their fields just as they chose. And that state of affairs lasted until the next murder was done. Then everything was reversed again.

Whenever he travelled in the mountains on business concerning the Kulla, Mark Ukacierra was always attentive to the connection between the cultivated fields and the fields that lay fallow. The former were generally more extensive. They made up nearly three-quarters of all the grain fields. In some years, however, the ratio changed and was more favorable to the fields lying fallow. Those fields reached a third or two-fifths of the total number, even rising on occasion so as to equal the area of the cultivated fields. People remembered two years in which the area of the fallow fields was greater than that of the cultivated fields. Yes, but that was a long time ago. Little by little, with the decline of the blood feud, the fallow fields shrank in number. Those fields were the special joy of Mark Ukacierra. They bore witness to the power of the Kanun. Whole clans allowed their fields to go uncultivated and themselves to suffer hunger so that the blood might be redeemed, and contrarily there were families who did just the opposite, putting off the redemption of blood from season to season and from year to year, to gather enough corn so as to be able to cloister themselves for a long time. You are free to choose between keeping your dignity as a man and losing it, the Kanun said. Each man chose between corn and vengeance. Some, to their shame, chose corn, others, on the contrary, vengeance.

Mark Ukacierra had had many opportunities to see, side by side, the fields of families engaged in the blood feud with each other.

And the picture was always the same: one field being worked here, another lying fallow there. The clods in the tilled fields struck Mark Ukacjerra as something shameful. And the vapor that rose from them, and its smell, and its quasi-feminine softness made him sick. But the neighboring fallow fields with their irregularities that sometimes looked like wrinkles and sometimes like clenched jaws, nearly moved him to tears. And everywhere in the high country, the picture was the same — cultivated fields and fields untilled, on one side of the road or the other, close but estranged, looking at each other with hatred. And what was even more peculiar was that one or two seasons later their positions would be interchanged; the fallow fields suddenly grew fertile, and the tilled fields lay fallow.

Perhaps for the tenth time that morning, Mark Ukacierra sighed. His thoughts were still far away. From the fields he turned to the roads, which he had travelled afoot or on horseback in the service of the Kulla. The Grand Highway of the Accursed Peaks, The Road of Shadow, the Road of the Black Drin River, the Road of the White Drin River, the Bad Road, the Great Highway of the Banners, the Road of the Cross — all these were travelled day and night by the people of the High Plateau. Special stretches of road were safeguarded by the perpetual bessa; that is, whoever committed a murder on those sections of roadway would incur the vengeance of a whole community. In that way, on the Grand Highway of the Banners, the section from Peter’s Bridge to the Big Sycamores was under the bessa of the Nikaj and the district of Shala. Whoever was wronged there would be avenged by the district of the Nikaj or the district of Shala. Likewise, on the Road of Shadow, the stretch from the Fields of Reka to the Deaf Man’s Mill was covered by the bessa. The Road of the Curraj as far as Cold Stream also benefited from the bessa. The manor houses of the Nikaj and of Shala were also protected by the bessa as well as the Old Inn on the Road of the Cross, except for its stable. The same was true of the Young Widow’s Inn, with four hundred paces of roadway from its north door, from the eight ravines of the Fairies’ Stream within a radius of forty paces; and the manor houses of Rreze; and the Storks’ Pasture.

He tried to recall one by one the other places protected by a special bessa, as well as those places that were under the bessa of everyone — that is to say, where it was forbidden to take vengeance, as was the case of all the mills without exception, and their surroundings within a radius of forty paces, and again of the waterfalls and their surroundings within a radius of four hundred paces, because the noise of the mills or the sound of falling water would not allow a person to hear the warning cry of the avenger. The Kanun had thought of everything. Often, Mark Ukacierra had wondered if such places protected by the bessa set limits to feuding or on the contrary helped to increase the number of such encounters. Sometimes it seemed to him that because of the protection afforded every passerby, such places put death aside, but sometimes he thought that on the contrary the very road or inn that was under the bessa, because of its promise to avenge the blood of whomever might be killed there, led to new feuds. In his mind, all this was vague and ambiguous, like many other things in the Kanun.

In the past, he had asked himself the same question about the many ballads on the theme of the blood-feud which were sung all over the High Plateau. There were many bards in the villages of the various districts. There was no road on which one did not meet them, and no inn in which one could not hear them. It was hard to say if the ballads increased or diminished the numbers of the dead. They did both. One could say the same about the tales that went from mouth to mouth concerning things that had occurred in olden times or more recently, recounted during the winter nights by the fireside which would spread abroad thereafter, just as the travellers did, and come back transformed on some other night, just as a former guest might come back changed by the passing of time. Sometimes he found parts of those stories published in those sickening periodicals, strung out along their columns as if in coffins. For Mark Ukacierra, what was printed in books was only the corpse of what was recounted orally, or accompanied by the sound of the lahoute.*

In any case, like it or not, these things were connected with his work. Two weeks ago, the prince, preparing to give him a dressing down about the unfavorable condition of affairs, had told him so directly. As it happened, his words were a bit obscure, but the gist of it was more or less like this: If you, the steward of the blood, are tired of your work, don’t forget that there are plenty of people who would be happy to have the post — and not just anybody, but university men.

It was the first time that the prince had mentioned the University in a somewhat threatening tone. On some earlier occasions, he had suggested that Mark study, with the help of the priest, every matter concerned with the blood-feud, but this time his tone had been cutting. And now that it had come to mind again, Mark Ukacierra could feel a kind of pressure in his temples. Go ahead, engage one of those educated men who stink of perfume and give him my job, he growled. Take on a steward of the blood who is educated, and when your little effeminate steward goes mad in his third week, then you’ll remember Mark Ukacierra.

For a while he let his thoughts go freely from one possible outcome to another, but they all ended in the same way — the prince would be sorry, and he himself would be triumphant. But one way or the other, I must take a tour through the whole of the High Plateau, he said to himself when he felt the flood of that brief euphoria ebb away. It would be a good idea to prepare a report for the prince’s eye, like the one he had made four years ago, giving precise data about the current situation and forecasts of future conditions. Perhaps the prince’s personal business was not going well either, and Mark Ukacierra was serving as his scapegoat. But that did not matter. The prince was his master, and it was not for the steward to sit in judgment of him. His anger had left him completely. His mind, whose sudden access of resentment had put him momentarily under stress, was now freed of its troubles, and it was wandering in the distance once more, among the mountains. Yes, he really must go on that journey. The more so because just now he was not feeling well. Perhaps a change of air would lighten somewhat his recent troubles. And perhaps he might be able to sleep again. Besides, it would be useful to disappear for a time from the prince’s sight.

Planning that trip, without any special enthusiasm, began, little by little, stubbornly, to absorb him. And again, just as it had been a little while back, his thoughts began to untangle the roads that he would perhaps be taking, except that this time, connecting them in his mind with his boots or his horse’s shoes, he thought of them in a different way; he imagined in another fashion the inns and the houses where he might sleep, the horses whinnying at night, the bedbug bites.

It would be a working trip, in the course of which he would perhaps have to review everything that was connected, in his mind, with a rough sketch of a death-mill, with its millstones, its special tools, its countless wheels and gears. He would have to examine the entire mechanism minutely in order to find what it was that was blocking its action, what was rusted and what was broken.

Oh! he exclaimed, at the sudden pain of a stomach cramp, and he was tempted to say, you would do better to look at what is broken inside you, but he did not follow his thought to the end. Perhaps a change of air would rid him as well of the nauseous hollow in his stomach that was plaguing him. Yes, he ought to set out at once, leave this place, observe everything closely, discuss things at length — especially with the interpreters of the Kanun, ask their opinion — visit the towers of refuge, meet with the priests, ask them if there were any persons who grumbled about the Code and if so take down their names in order to ask the prince to expel them, etc. Mark Ukacierra’s spirits rose. Yes, certainly, he could draw up a detailed report on all those matters. Mark began to walk to and fro in the library. Sometimes he stopped before one of the windows; then, as a new idea occurred to him, he took up his pacing again. Already he could see the interpreters of the Code, by whose opinions the prince always set great store. There were some two hundred of them throughout the High Plateau, but only a dozen were famous. He must meet with at least half of those whose reputations were preeminent. They were the pillars of the Kanun, the intelligence of the High Plateau; they would certainly give their opinion of the state of affairs, and perhaps some advice about the means of improving it. But he must not rest content with that alone. His instinct told him that it would be useful to descend to the terrain that was the foundation of death, the murderer himself. He must enter the towers of refuge, speak one by one with each of the cloistered men, those who were the bread and salt of the Kanun. That last idea gave him special pleasure. Whatever words of wisdom might be uttered by the famous interpreters, the last word concerning death — so says the Kanun—belongs to the avengers of blood.

He rubbed his forehead, trying to recall the findings he had accurately reported four years ago. There were seventy-four towers of refuge in all the High Plateau, and about a thousand men cloistered in them. He tried to call up those towers in imagination, scattered, dark, forbidding, with their black loopholes and their heavy doors. Their image was bound up with that of the irrigation ditches, because of which some of those men were immured in the towers, and that was true also of those roads and inns protected by the bessa, and the interpreters of the Kanun, the story-tellers and the bards. Those were the screw mechanisms, the transmission belts, the gearwheels of the ancient machine that had worked without a stop for hundreds of years. For hundreds of years, he said again. Every day, every night. Without ever stopping. Summer and winter. But then came that day, the seventeenth of March, to disturb the order of things. Thinking of that day, Mark Ukacierra sighed once more. He felt that if that day had really passed as it very nearly had, all of that mill of death, its wheels, its heavy millstones, its many springs and gears, would make an ominous grating sound, would shake from top to bottom, and break and smash into a thousand pieces.

O Lord, may that day never come, he said, and again he felt that sensation in the hollow of his stomach. Then, mixed with the nausea, there came to mind once more some few passages of last night’s dinner, the prince’s discontent. And the animation he had felt for a few moments fell away completely, giving way to a strange anguish of mind. Let everything go to hell, he said. His uneasiness was of a very special kind, like a damp, gray mass that invaded him everywhere, softly, without any sharp edges nor painful pinchings. Oh, he would infinitely prefer an obvious pain, but what could he do against that pulp that he could not get rid of? People went on crushing him as if his own distress, which he never mentioned to a soul, were not enough. For three weeks now, he had been feeling it more and more frequently. All at once he asked himself the question that he had been putting off from day to day, night after night: Could he have been stricken with blood-sickness?

It had happened to him seven years ago. He had consulted doctors and taken all sorts of medication, but nothing helped, until the day when an old man from Gjakova said to him, “It’s useless, my son, to take medicines and to consult doctors. Neither the doctors nor the medicines can do anything about your sickness. You are blood-sick.” Mark was astonished. “Blood? I haven’t killed anyone, father.” And the old man answered, “It doesn’t matter that you haven’t killed anyone. Your work is of such a nature that you have been stricken with blood-sickness.” And he spoke to him about other stewards of the blood who had been stricken with that sickness, and what was worse, never recovered from it. Well, Mark had managed to cure himself in the mountains that rise beyond Orosh. The air, in those heights, was good for that kind of sickness.

For seven years, Mark had been untroubled by it, and it was only recently that his illness had come back. What was I thinking of when I took up this kind of work? The blood of one man, when it took you, was hard to overcome, but what could you do about blood that comes from who knows where, and stops flowing who knows where? It was not the blood of a single man, but torrents of the blood of generations of human beings that streamed all over the High Plateau, the blood of young men and old men, for years and for centuries.

But perhaps it isn’t that sickness that I have, he sighed from deep within him in a last glimmer of hope. Maybe it’s just a passing thing — if not, I’ll go crazy. He listened, because he thought he heard steps beyond the door. In fact, the squeaking of a door reached him from the hallway, and then the sound of footsteps and of voices.

The guests must be awake now, he thought.

* From the Albanian gjak: blood, and hup: to lose; that is, when the blood was lost, when one was not obliged to engage in the blood feud.

* A musical instrument having a long neck and a single string.