Broken April

by Ismail Kadare

  Gjorg raised his head again. His business, on this day, was linked with the sky and the motion of the sun. Then, as before, he lowered his dazed eyes to the road, which seemed to be drowning in the light. He turned his head and saw, spread everywhere, that uninterrupted brilliance. Apparently, the black carriage that he had looked for in vain for three weeks on all the roads of the High Plateau, was not going to appear on this last morning of his life as a free man either. How many times had he thought he had seen it loom up before him—but on each occasion the carriage seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Someone had seen it on the Road of Shadow, at the Manor Houses of Shala, on the Grand Road of the Banners, but despite his efforts he had not managed to find it. As soon as he came to the place where people said they had seen it, he found that it had just departed, and when he retraced his steps so as to intercept it on the road at some crossing where it might chance to go by, it had given him the slip again, having taken another, unforeseen direction.

  Momentarily, he would forget about it, but the road itself reminded him of it, even though he had lost all hope, or nearly, of finding it again. In fact, even if the carriage were to wander forever through the High Plateau, he would very soon immure himself in the tower of refuge, and it would not be possible for him to see it; and then, even if the impossible came to pass and he were to come out one day, his eyes would be so weakened that he would be able to see no more of it than a dim spot, like the bouquet of crushed roses that the sun drew today against the background of the clouds.

  Gjorg dismissed its image in his mind and began to think of his family. They would be waiting for him anxiously before noon, but he could not get there in time. Towards midday he was going to have to break off his journey and hide somewhere to wait for nightfall. Now he was a man stained with blood, and he could travel only by night and never on the main roads. The Kanun, far from regarding that precaution as a sign of fear, held it to be a sign of prudence and courage, for not only did it preserve the life of the murderer, but also hindered his moving about too freely and driving the family of his victim wild. While feeling satisfaction that he had done his duty, the murderer must also feel a sense of guilt before the world. In any case, at noon he would have to find a hiding place to hole up in until nightfall. These last days, in the inns where he had stopped to spend the night, more than once he had had the impression that he had seen the fleeting shape of a member of the Kryeqyqe family. Perhaps it was an illusion, but perhaps he had seen aright, and someone was on his heels in order to kill him as soon as his bessa was over, at a time when he had not yet become fully aware of the need to protect himself.

  Whatever I do, I must be careful, he thought, and for the third time he lifted his eyes towards the sky. At that very moment he thought he heard a sound in the distance. He stopped, trying to find where it came from, but he could not. He walked on, and he heard the sound again. It was a muffled rumbling that alternately swelled and sank. It must be the sound of a waterfall, he thought. And that was indeed what it was. As he came nearer, he stopped, fascinated. In all his life, he had never seen a more wonderful waterfall. It was different from all those he had ever seen. Without throwing up foam or spurting, it flowed evenly along a dark-green rock, like thick massed tresses, that reminded Gjorg of the hair of the beautiful traveller from the capital. Under the sun’s rays you could easily mistake one for the other.

  He stayed a while on the small wooden bridge, under which the waters that had fallen from the rock kept on flowing, but now the current was jumbled and without majesty. Gjorg’s eyes were fixed on the waterfall. A week ago, in an inn where he had spent the night, he had heard someone say that there were some countries in the world that drew electric light from waterfalls. A young mountaineer told two of the guests that he had been told that by a man who had heard it from some other one, and the guests listened to him while saying over and over, “Making light out of water? You’re off your rocker, friend. Water isn’t petroleum, you know, to make light with. If water drowns fire, how could it kindle fire?” But the mountaineer persisted. He had heard it explained just as he had told them, he wasn’t inventing anything. They made light by means of water, but not with just any old water, because water is as different as men are. You could only do that with the noble water of waterfalls. “The people who told you that one are pretty crazy, and you’re crazier still for having believed them,” the guests said. But that didn’t keep the mountaineer from saying that if that were to happen, if that were to happen on the High Plateau, then (once again according to what the man had told him, and who had received the information from yet another source) the Kanun would become somewhat more gentle and the Rrafsh would be rinsed somewhat of the death that flowed through it, just as poisoned lands got rid of their salt when they were irrigated. “Fool, you fool,” said the guests, but Gjorg himself, God knows why, believed what the unknown source had said.

  With an effort he turned his back on the waterfall. The road stretched away endlessly, almost in a straight line, and at either extremity it was lightly tinted with purple.

  Again, he looked up at the sky. Just a little while now and his bessa would be over, he himself would be leaving the time of the Kanun. Leaving time, he said to himself. It seemed strange that someone could leave his time. Just a little while now, he said, looking at the sky. Now the crushed roses beyond the clouds had grown a little darker. Gjorg smiled bitterly, as if to say, There’s no help for it!

  Meanwhile, the coach that was carrying Bessian and Diana was rolling along the Grand Road of the Banners, the longest of all those roads that furrowed the High Plateau. The peaks half-whitened by the snow receded farther and farther, and Bessian, looking at them, was thinking that at last they were leaving the kingdom of death. Out of the corner of his right eye, he could sometimes catch sight of his wife’s face in profile. Pale, rigid in a way that was heightened rather than lessened by the jolting of the carriage, she was frightening to him. She seemed strange to him, mad, a body that had left its soul in the high country.

  What the devil was I thinking of when I decided to take her to that accursed High Plateau? he said for the hundredth time. She had had just one brush with the High Plateau, and that had been enough to take her away from him. It had been enough for the monstrous mechanism merely to touch her, to ravish her away, to take her captive, or at best to make her a mountain nymph.

  The squeaking of the carriage wheels were appropriate music for his doubts, his conjectures, his remorse. He had put his happiness to the test, as if he had wanted to find out whether he deserved it or not. He had directed that fragile happiness from its first spring season to the gates of hell. And it had not withstood the test.

  Sometimes, when he felt calmer, he told himself that no other attachment, no third person would ever be able to change in the slightest Diana’s feeling for him. If that had really come about (Lord, how bitter those words were: really come about), it had nothing to do with any third person, but that something grand and terrible had intervened. Something dark, having to do with the ordeal of millions of souls during long centuries, and for that very reason seemingly irreparable. Like a butterfly touched by a black locomotive, she had been stricken by the ordeal of the High Plateau, and had been overcome.

  Sometimes, calm in a way that frightened him, he thought that perhaps he had had to pay that tribute to the High Plateau. A tribute because of his writings, for the fairies and mountain nymphs that he had described in them, and for the little loge where he had watched the play in which the actors were a whole people drowned in blood.

  But perhaps that punishment might have sought him out anywhere, even in Tirana, he thought consolingly. For the High Plateau sent out its waves afar, over all the country and for all time.

  He turned up his coatsleeve and looked at his watch. It was noon.

  Gjorg raised his head and looked for the stain that the sun made above the expanse of cloud. It’s just noon, he thought. His bessa was at an end.

  He jump
ed nimbly onto the fallows that bordered the highroad. Now he had to find a safe place in which he could wait for nightfall. On both sides of the road, the country was deserted, but he could not go on walking on the highroad. That would have seemed to him to violate the Kanun.

  Around him was a flat expanse that went on and on. In the distance were cultivated fields and some trees, but he could not see the smallest hollow nor even some brush that would give him any cover. As soon as I can find a hiding-place, I’ll be safe, he thought, as if he wanted to convince himself that if he was putting himself in danger it was not because he was deliberately playing the fool, but because there was no shelter to be found.

  The moor seemed to extend to the horizon. He felt a strange calm inside his head, or rather a dull emptiness. He was absolutely alone under the sky which the weight of the sun now seemed to tilt slightly to the west. Around him, the day was just the same, bathed in the same air and the same purple shining, although the truce was over and he had entered into another time. His eyes roamed coldly all around. Was that how it looked, the time beyond the bessa? Eternal time, that was no longer his, without days, without seasons, without years, without a future, abstract time, to which he had no attachments of any kind. Wholly alien, it would no longer give him any sign, any hint, not even about the day when he would meet his punishment, which was somewhere in front of him, at a date and place unknown, and which would come to him by a hand equally unknown.

  He was deep in these thoughts when he made out in the distance some grey buildings that he thought he recognized. Look, those are the Manors of Rreze, he said to himself when he had come up with them. From those houses up to a brook whose name he had forgotten, the road, he believed, was under the bessa. The roads protected by the bessa had no signboards, nor any special marks, but nonetheless, everyone knew them. All he need do was to ask the first person he met.

  Gjorg, walking on the moor now, quickened his pace. His mind had shaken off its somnolence. He would reach the road protected by the bessa, and he would stroll along on it until evening without having to cower under a bush. Meanwhile. . . . who could tell, the carriage lined with velvet might come that way. Once, people had told him, it had appeared at the Manors of Shala.

  Yes, yes, that’s what he would do. He turned his eyes to the left, then to the right, made certain that the road like the moor was deserted, and stepping lightly, in a few moments he reached the highroad and began to walk along it. He had taken that shortcut in order to get to the road that was under the bessa, failing which it would have been an hour’s walk to get there.

  Careful, he told himself. Now the shadow cast by his head fell to the east. But the highroad was still deserted. He walked swiftly, thinking of nothing. Far ahead he saw black figures that were hardly moving. As he came nearer, he saw that they were two mountaineers and a woman riding a donkey.

  “That road over there, is it under the bessa?” Gjorg asked.

  “Oh, yes, lad,” the older man replied. “For a hundred years now, the road that runs from the Manors of Rreze to the Nymph’s Brook has been protected by the bessa.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not at all, my boy,” the old man said, stealing a glance at the black ribbon on Gjorg’s sleeve. “A safe journey to you.”

  As he strode swiftly down the road, Gjorg wondered what the killers overtaken by the end of their truce, all over the High Plateau, would do without those roads that were under the bessa, their places of refuge, where they were sheltered from their pursuers.

  The section of the road protected by the bessa differed not at all from the rest of the road. It was the same ancient paving, damaged in places by horses’ hooves and flowing water, with the same hollows in its surface and, at the sides, the same brush. But Gjorg felt that there was something warm about the golden dust. He took a deep breath and he slowed his pace. Here is where I’ll wait for nightfall, he thought. He would sit down and rest on a stone. That would be better than hiding in a thicket. Besides, the carriage might come this way. He still had a faint hope that he might see her. And his musings went further than that: he saw the carriage stop and heard the people in it say, “Oh, mountaineer, if you’re tired, climb into our carriage and ride with us a ways.”

  Now and again, Gjorg looked up at the sky. In three hours, at most, night would fall. Mountaineers were going by, on foot or on horseback, alone or in small groups. In the distance he could see two or three motionless specks. They must surely be murderers like himself who were waiting for night in order to travel farther. They must be worried at home, he thought.

  A mountaineer came along, walking slowly and driving before him an ox that was all black.

  Gjorg was walking even more slowly than the mountaineer and his ox, and they came up with him.

  “Good afternoon,” the man said.

  “Good afternoon,” Gjorg said.

  The man made a gesture with his head at the sky.

  “Time just doesn’t go by,” he said.

  He had a reddish mustache that seemed to light up his smile.

  “Your bessa’s over?”

  “Yes, since noon today.”

  “Mine was over three days ago, but I haven’t managed to sell this bull yet.”

  Gjorg looked at him astonished.

  “For two weeks I’ve been tramping the roads with him, and I can’t manage to sell him. He’s one fine animal, all my people wept when they saw him leaving, and I can’t find a buyer.”

  Gjorg did not know what to say. He had never had anything to do with selling cattle.

  “I’d like to sell him before I shut myself up in the tower,” the mountaineer went on. “The family’s in bad shape, friend, and if I don’t sell him myself, there won’t be any one at home to sell him. But I don’t have much hope anymore. If I haven’t been able to sell him in the two weeks when I was still free, how am I going to sell him now that I can only go about by night? Well, what do you think?”

  “You’re right,” Gjorg said. “It won’t be easy.”

  Looking sidelong, he watched the black ox that was chewing calmly. The words of the old ballad of the soldier dying in a far-off country came to him: “Give my love to mother and tell her to sell the black ox.”

  “Where are you from?” the mountaineer asked.

  “From Brezftoht.”

  “That’s not so far from here. If you step along you can be home tonight.”

  “And you?” Gjorg asked.

  “Oh, I’m from very far from here, from the Krasniq banner.”

  Gjorg whistled. “Yes, that’s really far. You’ll certainly have sold your bull before you get home.”

  “I don’t think so. Now the only places where I can sell him are the roads that are under the bessa, and they’re scarce.”

  Gjorg nodded.

  “You see, if this road that’s under the bessa went as far as the crossing with the Grand Road of the Banners, well, I could certainly sell him. But it ends before that.”

  “Is the Road of the Banners nearby?”

  “It’s not far. That’s what I call a road! What don’t you see go by there!”

  “It’s true, you see very odd things on the roads. Once I happened to see a carriage—”

  “A black carriage with a pretty woman in it,” the other man interrupted.

  “How do you know that?” Gjorg cried.

  “I saw her yesterday at the Inn of the Cross.”

  “And what were they doing there?”

  “What were they doing? Nothing. The carriage didn’t have the horses in the shafts, and it was just in front of the inn. The coachman was drinking coffee in it.”

  “And she?”

  The mountaineer smiled. “They were inside the inn. They had been there two days and two nights without leaving their room. That’s what the innkeeper said. Old boy, that woman was as beautiful as a fairy. Her eyes pierced you through and through. I left them behind me last night. They certainly must have left today.”

  “How do
you know?”

  “The innkeeper said so. They were supposed to leave the next day. The coachman told him.”

  Gjorg was stunned for some moments. He stared at the paved road-surface.

  “And what road do you take to get there?” he asked suddenly.

  The other man pointed out the direction.

  “It’s an hour’s walk from here. This road we’re on crosses the Road of the Banners. They have to pass there, if they haven’t done so already. There is no other road.”

  Gjorg was staring in the direction that his companion had pointed to. Now the man looked at him in surprise.

  “What’s the matter with you, you poor fellow?” he said.

  Gjorg did not answer. An hour’s walk from here, he told himself. He raised his head to look for the sun’s track behind the clouds. He reckoned that there were still two hours of daylight left. She had never been so near. He would be able to see his fairy.

  Without further thought, without even saying goodbye to his fellow wayfarer, he went off like a madman in the direction where, according to the man with the black ox, the crossroads lay.

  The Vorpsi’s carriage was leaving the High Plateau behind at a good pace. The day was ending when the roads of the little town, the tops of two minarets, and the belfry of the only church appeared in the distance.

  Bessian leaned towards the carriage window; the silly lanes among the buildings he filled at once in his imagination with the small city’s people, employees of the sub-prefecture carrying documents to the justice of the peace, with shops, with sleepy offices, and with four or five telephones of ancient vintage, the only ones in town, by means of which boring talk was carried on, mostly punctuated with yawning. He thought of all that, and all at once the world that awaited him in the capital seemed terribly pale and insipid compared with the one he had just left.