“It’s a fine room,” Bessian said, looking questioningly at his wife.
“And can one have a fire?” she asked the landlord.
“Certainly. Right away if you wish.”
For the first time in a long while, Bessian thought he saw a gleam of pleasure in Diana’s eyes.
The innkeeper went away, and came back with an armload of wood. He lit the fire in a clumsy manner that showed it was something that he did very rarely. Both of them looked on as if it were the first time in their lives that they were looking at a fire kindled in a fireplace. He left at last, and Bessian, alone with his wife, felt again the secret pounding within his chest. Several times his eyes slid over to the large bed, with its counterpane the color of milk, which made it look warm. Diana was standing by the fire, her back turned to her husband. Timidly, as if he were drawing near to a stranger, Bessian took two steps towards her and put his arms around her shoulders. Her arms crossed, she did not move while he began to kiss her neck and then to kiss her near her lips. At times, from the side, he caught a glimpse of the red glow of the flame reflected on her cheek. Then, as his caresses grew more pressing, she said gently, “No, not now.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too cold. Besides, I have to have a bath.”
“You’re right,” he said, planting a kiss on her hair. Without saying anything more, he moved away from her and left the room. The lively sound of his footfalls on the stairs showed his pleasant mood. He came a few moments later, carrying a large iron bucket full of water.
“Thank you,” Diana said with a smile.
As if he were drunk, he set down the bucket on the fire, and then, looking as if he were thinking of something quite definite, he bent down to look under the mantelpiece, repeated that several times while keeping the sparks away with his hands, and found what he had been looking for, it seemed, since he called out, “There it is.”
Diana too, bent down, and she saw the end of a pot-hook black with soot, hanging above the fire as in most of the fireplaces of the countryfolk. Bessian picked up the bucket, and supporting himself with one hand on the masonry of the fireplace, tried to hang it on a notch of the pot-hook.
“Careful,” Diana said, “you’ll burn yourself.”
But the bucket was already in place, and Bessian was blowing gaily on his slightly reddened hand.
“Did you burn yourself?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
Someone was coming up the stairs. It was the coachman, bringing them their bags. Watching him with an abstracted smile, Bessian was thinking that those people who were coming and going on the stairs, bringing wood or their luggage, were arranging things so that he might be happy. He could scarcely keep still.
“What if we go downstairs for coffee until our room and the water are warmed up?”
“Coffee? If you like. But maybe it would be better to take a walk. I’m still a little dazed with travelling.”
A moment later they went down the stairs, that creaked under their tread, and Bessian told the innkeeper to take care of the fire because they were going to take a walk.
“Can you tell me if there’s a picturesque spot in the neighborhood, some place really worth seeing?”
“Something worth seeing in the neighborhood?” He shook his head. “No, sir. These parts are pretty much a desert.”
“Really?”
“Yes, except. . . . Wait a bit. You have a carriage, don’t you? That makes a difference. A half-hour, three quarters of an hour at most if your horses aren’t tired, you can get to Upper White Water to see the Alpine lakes.”
“Upper White Water is only a half-hour ride by carriage?” Bessian asked in surprise.
“Yes, sir. A half-hour, or three-quarters of an hour at most. Foreign visitors who come by this way never miss the opportunity to go there.”
“What do you think,” Bessian said, turning to his wife. “It’s true that we are tired of riding in the coach, but still it’s really worth seeing that village. Particularly for the famous lakes.”
“We learned that in geography class,” she said.
“The air is wonderful up there. And then, all the while our room will be warming up. . . .” He broke off to look meaningfully at her.
“Fine, let’s go,” she said.
The innkeeper went out to call the coachman, who came in a few moments later, looking not too pleased. He had to harness the horses once more, but he was careful not to say anything against it. Climbing into the carriage, Bessian told the innkeeper yet another time to see to the fire. At the last minute, he wondered, just for an instant, if he had not been wrong in leaving behind so easily the room at the inn that he had been at pains to secure, but he was reassured at once by the thought that after a pleasant tour, Diana would be feeling better in every respect.
The afternoon sun shone gently on the moorland. A crimson tint, with no apparent source, put a touch of warmth into the air.
“The days are getting longer,” Bessian said, and he thought, Don’t I find the most interesting things to say! The weather is still fine. The days are getting longer.
These were things that people who have nothing to say to each other cling to in order to fill the emptiness of their conversations. Had they become strangers to each other so that they must have recourse to phrases of that sort? That’s enough, he thought, as if dismissing something regrettable. It’s already done.
A half-hour later, Upper White Water did in fact come in sight. In the distance, the towers looked as if they were covered with moss. In places the snow had not yet melted, the patches of bare earth looked all the darker.
The carriage followed the road towards the lakes, along the edge of the village. As they stepped down, they heard the bells of a church ringing. Diana was the first to stop. She turned in order to find where the sounds were coming from, but she did not see the belfry. All she could see were the patches of black earth alternating bleakly with the sheets of snow. She turned away from them, and leaned on her husband’s arm. They were walking towards one of the lakes.
“How many are there?” Diana asked.
“Six, I think.”
They walked side by side on the thick dark brown carpet formed by successive layers of dead leaves, here and there richly rotten, as if suffering a luxurious disease. Bessian felt that his wife was getting ready to say something to him. She appeared uneasy, but the sound of the leaves underfoot seemed to relieve her in part.
“There’s another lake,” she said suddenly, on seeing the shoreline through the fir trees, and when he turned his head in that direction, she went on: “Bessian, surely you’ll write something better about these mountains.” He turned as if something had stung him in the back. He almost said, “What?”, but at the last instant he stifled that exclamation. It would be better not to hear that suggestion again. He felt that someone had pressed a white-hot horseshoe to his forehead.
“After this trip,” she said gently, “it would be natural if . . . . something truer. . . .”
“Yes, of course, of course.”
The glowing horseshoe was still pressed against his forehead. Part of the mystery was dispelled. The mystery of her silence. In fact it had never been that. He had been waiting, almost as a certainty, for her to say those words before the first night of their new love, as the price of their understanding, of their pact.
“I understand, Diana,” he said in a voice that was strangely weary. “Of course, it’s hard for me, but I understand—”
She interrupted him. “This is really a wonderful place. How right we were to come here.”
Bessian walked on, his thoughts elsewhere, and so they came to the second lake, and then they began to retrace their steps. On the way he got hold of himself; he was thinking of the room with the fireplace that was waiting for them, all warm, at the inn.
They came to the place where they had left their carriage, but instead of getting in they turned towards the village. The coach followed them.
&
nbsp; The first persons they met on the way, two women carrying casks of water on their heads, slowed their steps and looked at them for a moment. In contrast, with the beauty of the countryside, the towers, close up, seemed especially gloomy. The village streets and especially the little square in front of the church were filled with people. Those tight trousers of heavy wool, milk-colored, with its black stripe, oddly like the symbol of an electrical discharge, that ran down their sides, expressed all the agitation that marked their bearing.
“Something must have happened,” Bessian said.
They watched the people for a moment, trying to imagine what might have occurred. But, apparently, what had happened must have been something rather peaceful and solemn.
“Is that tower the one that is the tower of refuge?” Diana asked.
“Probably. It looks like one.”
Diana slowed her step to look at the tower rising somewhat apart from the others.
“If the truce that was granted to that mountaineer we saw—you know, the one we talked about today—if the truce ended in the last few days, he would certainly have taken refuge in a tower of that sort, wouldn’t he?”
“Oh, certainly,” Bessian said, still looking at the crowd.
“And if, at the expiration of the truce, the murderer is on the highway, far from his own village, he could take shelter in any one of those towers of refuge?”
“I think so. It’s the same as with travellers overtaken by night who go into the first inn they find on the road.”
“So that he could very well have sought refuge in this very tower?”
Bessian smiled.
“It’s possible. But I don’t think so. There are many towers, and besides, we met that man a long way from here.”
Diana turned her head once more towards the kulla, and, in the depths of her stare and the corners of her eyes, Bessian thought he detected something like a gentle yearning. But in that instant he saw in the crowd someone who was waving at him. A checkered vest, some familiar faces.
“Take a look at who’s over there,” Bessian said, with a gesture of his head in their direction.
“Well, Ali Binak,” Diana said in a low voice that expressed neither satisfaction nor annoyance.
They met in the center of the square. The surveyor seemed to have drunk one glass too many this time, too. The doctor’s pale eyes, and not his eyes alone but all of the delicate skin of his face, were sorrowful. As for Ali Binak, one could just make out, behind his customary coldness, a mournful weariness. The group of experts was attended by a small knot of mountaineers.
“You are going on with your journey through the High Plateau?” Ali Binak asked them in his sonorous voice.
“Yes,” Bessian said. “We shall be in this district a few days more.”
“The days are getting longer now.”
“Yes, we’re in the middle of April. And you, what are you doing in these parts?”
“What are we doing here?” the surveyor said. “As usual, running from one village to another, from one Banner to another. Portrait of a group with bloodstains. . . .”
“What?”
“Oh, I just wanted to use an image—how shall I say—well, borrowed from painting.”
Ali Binak darted a cold glance at the speaker.
“Is there some dispute here that you must arbitrate?” Bessian asked Ali Binak.
The latter nodded.
“And what a dispute!” the surveyor interposed again. “Today,” he said, with a jerk of the hand to indicate Ali Binak, “he has pronounced judgment in a way that will go down in history.”
“One mustn’t exaggerate,” Ali Binak said.
“It’s no exaggeration,” the surveyor said. “And this gentleman is a writer and we really must describe to him the case that you settled.”
In a few minutes the case for which Ali Binak and his assistants had been called to the village had been related by several speakers at once, particularly the surveyor, and they interrupted, amplified, or corrected one another. Things appeared to have happened in this fashion:
A week ago the members of a certain family had put to death one of their girls, who was pregnant. There was no doubt that they would promptly kill as well the boy who had seduced her. In the meantime, the boy’s family learned that the baby whom the young woman had not been able to bring into the world was a male child. The family forestalled their adversaries by declaring that they were the injured party in regard to the young woman’s kin, and argued that while the young man was not connected with the victim by marriage, the male child belonged to him. In so doing, the boy’s family made the claim that they were the ones who had a transgression to avenge, and that accordingly, it was their turn to kill a member of the young woman’s family. In that way, they not only protected their guilty boy against the punishment that awaited him, but also, by tying the hands of the adverse party, prolonged the de facto peace at their convenience. It goes without saying that the other family vigorously contested this view of the case. The business was brought before the village council of elders, who found it very hard to resolve. The parents of the young woman, devastated by their misfortune, were understandably outraged by the notion that they owed a victim to their adversaries when it was precisely a boy of that house who had brought about the death of their daughter. They insisted that another solution had to be found. And what further complicated the situation was that, according to the Kanun, a male child from the moment of conception belonged to the family of the boy, and must be avenged on the same principle as one avenges a man. The council of elders, declaring themselves unable to pronounce on the question, appealed to the great expert on the Kanun, Ali Binak.
The case had been considered an hour ago (just when we were walking on the banks of the lakes, Bessian thought). The judgment, as in all matters arising from the Kanun, was rendered promptly. The spokesman for the boy’s family had said to Ali Binak, “I should like to know why they spilled out my flour [meaning the baby that had been conceived].” And Ali Binak answered him at once: “What was your flour looking for in someone else’s flour sack [meaning the womb of the young stranger woman, not bound properly by marriage].” Both parties were thus non-suited, and both were declared blameless and not bound to seek vengeance.
Impassive, with never the quiver of a muscle in his pale face, not speaking at all, Ali Binak listened to the noisy account of how he had pronounced judgment.
“There’s nothing for it—you’re a wonder,” the surveyor said, his eyes wet with drunkenness and admiration.
They began to walk aimlessly around the square.
“When all is said and done, if you think about it calmly, these are really simple matters,” said the doctor, who was walking along with Bessian and Diana. “Even this last case, which seems so dramatic, is really a question of the relation of creditor to debtor.”
He went on talking, but Bessian was scarcely paying attention. He had another concern. Didn’t a discussion of this kind tend to have a bad effect on Diana? During the last two days they had rather neglected matters like these, and her face had begun at last to look less troubled.
“And what about you? How did you happen to settle on the High Plateau?” Bessian said in order to change the subject. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”
The doctor said, with a bitter smile, “I was one. Now I’m something else.”
His eyes showed his deep distress, and Bessian thought that light-colored eyes, even the ones that seem at first sight almost colorless, can reflect an inner pain more fully than any other kinds of eyes.
“I studied surgery in Austria,” he said. “I was among the first and only group of scholarship students that was sent there by the monarchy. Perhaps you have heard what became of most of those students when they returned from foreign parts. Well, I’m one of those. Absolute disappointment, no clinical practice, no possibility of working in my profession. I was unemployed for some time, and then, just by chance, in a café in Tirana, I met tha
t man—” and he motioned with his head towards the surveyor—“who suggested I take up this peculiar trade.”
“Portrait of a group with bloodstains,” said the surveyor, who had just come up to them and was following their conversation. “You’ll always find us wherever there is blood.”
The doctor ignored those words.
“And is it as a doctor that you assist Ali Binak in his work?” Bessian asked.
“Of course. Otherwise he would not take me with him.”
Bessian looked at him in surprise.
“There’s nothing to be surprised at there. In judgments made in accordance with the Code, particularly when it is a question of blood-letting, and most of all in the matter of wounds, the presence of someone with an elementary knowledge of medicine is always necessary. Naturally, there is no need for a surgeon’s services. I would even say that the irony of my situation is precisely that I perform work that can be done quite well by the most junior kind of nurse, not to say anyone at all who has a rudimentary knowledge of the anatomy of the human body.”
“Rudimentary knowledge? Is that enough?”
The doctor smiled the same bitter smile.
“The trouble is that you are sure that my function here is to dress and cure wounds—isn’t that so?”
“Yes, of course. I can understand that, for the reasons you’ve mentioned, you gave up your profession as a surgeon—but you can still treat wounds, can’t you?”
“No,” the doctor said. “There would be some compensation in that. But I have nothing to do with things of that kind. Do you understand? Nothing at all. The mountaineers have always treated their wounds themselves, and they are still doing that to this very day, with raki, tobacco, in accordance with the most barbaric practices, as, for example, dislodging a bullet with another bullet, etc. So they will never call on a doctor for his services. And I am here to fulfill a very different function. Do you understand? I am not here as a doctor but as the assistant to a judge. Does that seem odd to you?”
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