Broken April Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  His father looked at him amazed.

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

  “Oh, yes,” Gjorg said, relieved.

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

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

  Gjorg did not want to go anywhere.

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

  “Yes, son, right away. It has to be settled as soon as possible. The blood tax must be paid right after the killing.”

  The purse was now in Gjorg’s right hand. It seemed heavy. In it was all the money the family had saved, scrimping from week to week and month to month in anticipation of just this day.

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

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

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

  Gjorg went to his father.

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

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

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

  A year and a half after the day that his brother had been killed, his mother had finally washed the shirt he had worn that day. For a year and a half it had hung blood-soaked from the upper storey of the house, as the Kanun required, until the blood had been avenged. When bloodstains began to yellow, people said, it was a sure sign that the dead man was in torment, yearning for revenge. The shirt, an infallible barometer, indicated the time for vengeance. By means of the shirt the dead man sent his signals from the depths of the earth where he lay.

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

  Now at last the shirt was hanging on the clothesline. But strangely it gave Gjorg no comfort.

  Meanwhile, like a new banner hoisted after the old one had been hauled down, on the upper storey of the Kryeqyqe kulla, they had hung out the bloody shirt of the new victim.

  The seasons, hot or cold, would affect the color of the dried blood, and so would the kind of cloth that the shirt was made of, but no one wanted to take such things into account; all those changes would be taken as mysterious messages, whose import no one dared question.

  * The code of customary law.

  ** A stone dwelling in the form of a tower, peculiar to the mountain regions of Albania.

  * The pledged word, faith, truce.

  * From the Albanian gjak (blood), killer, but with no pejorative connotation,
since the gjaks is fulfilling his duty under the provisions of the Kanun.

  * Literally a flag. By extension, a collection of various villages under the authority of a local chief who was himself the flag-bearer.

  CHAPTER II

  Gjorg had been travelling across the High Plateau for several hours, and there was still no sign that the Kulla of Orosh was near.

  Under the fine rain, nameless waste lands, or moorlands with names unknown to him, came into view one after another, naked and dreary. Beyond them, he could just make out the line of mountains veiled in mist, and through the veil he thought he saw the pale reflection, multiplied as if in a mirage, of a single great mountain rather than a range of real peaks differing in height. The fog had made them unsubstantial, but it was strange how much more oppressive they seemed than in fine weather, when their rocks and sheer cliffs were plain to see.

  Gjorg heard the dull grating of the pebbles under foot. The villages along the road were far apart, and places with administrative functions or with an inn were rarer still. But had there been more of these, Gjorg would not have stopped in any of them. He had to be at the Kulla of Orosh by nightfall, or at worst late in the evening, so that he could return to his own village the next day.

  For the most part, the road was nearly deserted. Now and then solitary mountaineers appeared in the fog, headed somewhere, like himself. At a distance, like everything else on that day of mists, they looked anonymous and unsubstantial.

  The settlements were as silent as the road. Here and there were a few scattered houses, each with a wavering plume of smoke rising above its steep roof. “A house is a stone building, or hut, or any other structure that has a hearthstone and emits smoke.” He did not know why that definition of a dwelling, which appears in the Kanun and which he had known since childhood, had come to mind. “No one enters a house without calling out from the courtyard.” But I don’t mean to knock or go in anywhere, he said to himself plaintively.

  The rain was still falling. Along the way he overtook another group of mountaineers, walking in single file, burdened with sacks of corn. Under the load, their backs seemed more stooped than one would expect. He thought, wet grain is heavier. He remembered having carried a sack of corn once in the rain from the storehouse at the subprefecture all the way to his village.

  The laden mountaineers fell back behind him, and again he was alone on the highroad. Its edges on either side were sometimes quite clear and sometimes indistinct. In some stretches flooding and landslides had narrowed the roadway. “A road shall be as wide as a flagstaff is long,” he said to himself again, and he realized that for some time the Kanun’s prescriptions about roads had been running involuntarily through his head. “A road is for the use of men and livestock, for the passage of the living and the passage of the dead.”

  He smiled. Whatever he did, he could not escape its definitions. It was no use deceiving himself. The Kanun was stronger than it seemed. Its power reached everywhere, covering lands, the boundaries of fields. It made its way into the foundations of houses, into tombs, to churches, to roads, to markets, to weddings. It climbed up to mountain pastures, and even higher still, to the very skies, whence it fell in the form of rain to fill the watercourses, which were the cause of a good third of all murders.

  When for the first time he had convinced himself that he had to kill a man, Gjorg had called to mind all that part of the Code that dealt with the rules of the blood feud. If only I don’t forget to say the right words before I fire, he thought. That’s the main thing. If I don’t forget to turn him the right way up and put his weapon by his head. That’s the other main point. All the rest is easy, child’s play.

  However, the rules of the blood feud were only a small part of the Code, just a chapter. As weeks and months went by, Gjorg came to understand that the other part, which was concerned with everyday living and was not drenched with blood, was inextricably bound to the bloody part, so much so that no one could really tell where one part left off and the other began. The whole was so conceived that one begat the other, the stainless giving birth to the bloody, and the second to the first, and so on forever, from generation to generation.

  In the distance, Gjorg saw a group of people on horseback. When they drew nearer, he made out a bride among them and he knew that the cavalcade consisted of the relatives of the bride who were taking her to her husband. Drenched by the rain, they seemed tired, and only the horses’ bells lent a bit of gaiety to the little troop.

  Gjorg stepped aside to let them pass. The horsemen, like himself, carried their weapons muzzle down to protect them from the rain. Looking at the parti-colored bundles which no doubt contained the bride’s trousseau, he wondered in which corner, which box, which pocket, which embroidered waistcoat, the bride’s parents had put the “trousseau bullet” with which, according to the Code, the bridegroom had the right to kill the bride if she should try to leave him. That thought mingled with the memory of his dead fiancée, whom he had not been able to marry because of her long illness. Whenever he saw a wedding party go by he could not help thinking about her, but on this day, oddly enough, his pain was lessened by a consoling thought: perhaps it was better for her that she had gone first to where he would soon overtake her, rather than to have before her a long life as a widow. And, as for that “trousseau bullet” that the parents were supposed to give the young husband so that he might kill his wife if she left him, he would certainly have tossed it into the ravine. Or perhaps he felt that way now that she was gone and the idea of killing someone who was no longer alive seemed to him as unreal as fighting with a ghost.

  The relatives of the bride had disappeared from view before they faded from his mind. He thought of them, travelling along the road in accordance with all the rules, the chief of her kinsmen, the Krushkapar, at the end of the procession, the only difference being that now, under the veil, in the place of the bride, he imagined his betrothed. “A wedding day is never postponed,” the Code said. “Even if the bride is dying, the wedding party sets out, if necessary dragging her along to the bridegroom’s house.” Gjorg had often heard these words repeated during the sickness of his betrothed, when they talked at home of his approaching wedding day. “A wedding party sets out even if there is a death in the house. When the bride enters the house, the dead person leaves. Tears on one side, song on the other.”

  All these memories that he forced himself to entertain wearied him, and he tried not to think of anything. On either side of the road stretched long strips of fallows, and again nameless waste lands. Somewhere on the right he saw a watermill, then, farther off, a flock of sheep, and a church with its graveyard. He passed by them without turning his head, but that did not prevent him from remembering the portions of the Code that dealt with mills, flocks, churches and graves. “Priests have no part in the blood feud.” “Among the graves of a family or a clan, no stranger’s tomb may lie.”

  He was tempted to say, “That’s enough,” but could not find the strength to say it. He lowered his head and went on walking at the same pace. In the distance he could see the roof of an inn, further on a convent, then another flock of sheep, and beyond, smoke and perhaps a settlement; there were centuries-old laws for all these things. There was no escaping them. No one had ever succeeded in escaping them. And yet. . . . “Priests have no part in the blood feud,” he repeated, citing one of the best known clauses of the Code. He was thinking of that as he was going along the stretch of road from which the convent was clearly visible, and the thought that only if he had been a priest would he have been spared by the Kanun got mixed up with thinking about nuns and the relations that people said they had with the young priests, and with the idea of possibly having an affair with a nun himself, but he suddenly remembered that nuns cropped their hair and he dismissed that fantasy. But I would have had to be a priest, he thought, so as not to be subject to the Kanun. But other sections of the Code were in fact applicable to priests, who were exempt only from the provisions that regulated the
blood feud.

  For a moment he felt as if he were trapped in bird-lime by the bloody part of the Kanun. Truly, that was the essential thing, and it was useless to console yourself that everyone was shackled by the same chains. Besides priests, there were numerous other people who escaped the rule of blood-law. He had already thought of that on another occasion. The world was divided into two parts: the one that fell under the blood-law, and the other that was outside that law.

  Beyond the blood-law. He almost let out a sigh. What must life be like in such families? How did they get up in the mornings and how did they go to bed at night? It all seemed almost incredible, as remote perhaps as the life of the birds. And yet there were such houses. In fact, that had been the case of his own house seventy years ago, until that fateful autumn night when a man had knocked at their door.

  Gjorg’s father, who had it from his own father, had told him the story of their enmity with the Kryeqyqe family. It was a story marked by twenty-two graves on each side, forty-four in all, with the same set phrases to be spoken before the killings, but yet with more silence than speech, with sobs, with the death-rattle in the throat that chokes off a last wish, with three bardic songs, one of them forgotten, with the grave of a woman killed by accident whose death was indemnified according to the rules, with the men of both families immured in the tower of refuge*, with an attempt at reconciliation that failed at the last moment, with a killing that took place at a wedding with the granting of a short and a long truce, with a funeral dinner, with the cry, “So and so of the Berisha has fired at so and so of the Kryeqyqe,” or the other way around, with torches, and comings and goings in the village and so on until that afternoon of March 17, when it had been Gjorg’s turn to join the grisly dance.