Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

by Ismail Kadare

  During his stay in Tirana the previous spring, he had suffered his first great shock. He’d been out every evening with his cousins and their friends, crawling from bar to dive and from bingo hall to gambling den. His rejection had come in stages. At first, he thought that the money talk would eventually run out and give way to other subjects of discussion. But night after night the talk of money resumed, ever more anxious, more desperate, smothering everything else and becoming, in the end, suffocating. After so many years of tightened belts, his sister said, to justify this state of affairs, it was perfectly normal that people should be greedy for material satisfactions. But Angelin could not get used to it. Such greed seemed to him an ill omen. On his fourth evening in the capital, he invented an excuse for not going to bingo. The next day he did not even want to go outside. I know what you re feeling, his sister told him then. And she’d told him about the Association of Young Idealists, as she’d come across two of its members quite by chance. The same afternoon, the four of them got together at the Piazza Café. He listened patiently to the Idealists as they laid out their program, and then opined that a more radical plan of action was needed. He admitted he had always been slow in reacting to events. His favorite hero was Jan Palac, the Czech who had set fire to himself to protest the Russian occupation, but he had never had the opportunity to do anything similar: he was only fourteen when the Communist regime had fallen. After that, things had changed in such a confusing way that he had found it difficult to know how to orient himself. He was ready to join their organization and to carry out any of its orders. If they decided to issue warnings to corrupt ministers of state, and then to members of parliament, for instance, and if these high and mighty folk did not give up their ignoble ways, then he was prepared to put the threats into effect, with his own hand … that is to say, to carry out the first murder!

  The two Idealists were dumbfounded. They declared they had never gone so far as to envisage action of that kind. In any event, they would give him an answer on that point later.

  Angelin returned to the North and waited in vain for the Idealists5 answer. His eyes became ever hollower. He spoke less and less. And that was when the uncle from the country came on his visit. He too was full of rancor and deeply disappointed. In his view, the country was going to the dogs. Decline and decay were everywhere to be seen. Courage and honor, which he had expected to be reinvigorated by the fall of Communism, were losing ever more ground. The only hope lay in the resurrection of the old customary law. The doreras, the executioners, had been the flower of the country’s youth. Unlike their counterparts today, who played bingo until dawn, the doreras had gone bravely toward their own death…. Angelin listened to this talk with utter disdain.

  He had never had any particular respect for the Kanun, and he would no doubt have continued listening to his uncle in the same way, that is to say, with indifference, if in the flood of the old man’s words there hadn’t been three or four that struck him and entered his head like well-aimed nails. Those young executioners, the country’s hope, had no thought for gain, the uncle had said. They were ready to run in the precisely opposite direction: to their loss.

  These words left Angelin stunned. The uncle had gone on talking, longer than he ever talked before, until his nephew interrupted him to ask if there were not blood to be claimed by their family.

  From one moment to the next, the uncle’s speech slowed down, became as heavy and bare as the flagstones in a mausoleum. Yes, within their very own family, there was a blood that had not been taken back. That was the very reason that he had taken to the roads in midwinter. The Communists may have stolen their pastures and a part of their herd, but they couldn’t take away the command of the blood. Yes, sure, they had tried to do that too. At school and in meetings they had said time and again that young people should be ready to lay down their lives for the ideas of Lenin, but everyone knew now that that business was finished…. Yes, so there was a blood to be reclaimed by their family, and neither he, nor his children, nor his children’s children, would ever be able to escape it.

  Angelin interrupted his uncle once again to ask for the name of the blood debtor. Then they both fell silent.

  The day after the murder, remorse came faster than he had thought it would. The first night, he had waited in vain for sleep to come. On the second night too. What came to him instead was a vision of the blue necktie of his victim at the moment when he fell. It had waved to the side, as if wanting to stay up in the air a little longer, while its owner fell to the ground. Angelin had long dreamed of having such a fine tie, and he imagined he could see it coming toward his own neck. Since its owner was now not of this world, nothing stopped the tie from being his….

  He had told his sister all that in the course of the many hours they had spent together after the execution. He had waited a long time for an order to obey. No such thing came to him from any quarter, so he yielded to what cropped up on his path — the Kanun. As soon as he had carried out the act, he realized that the order was wrong. But it was too late….

  As she recounted the hours she and her brother had spent together since the fatal act, Mark could easily imagine the two of them in conversation. Oddly enough, he could only imagine it as a conversation between two naked bodies, both of them stripped and scrubbed, as if in preparation for leaving the world, beside a grave, or awaiting a postmortem. My God, he thought, that is exactly when they must have committed incest!

  She finally got around to explaining the reason for their visit. Her explanations became more and more confused. Her brother was now entangled in the blood feud, because of the murder, and was therefore unable to do anything useful for anybody. For example, he couldn’t go to Kosovo, where the insurrection had now broken out. He would either have to hide, or risk the revenge of the other clan, or give himself up to the authorities. In any case, nothing could now stop the blood from following its course. Whether he took refuge in the highlands or behind prison bars or in the grave, he had no means of stopping the wheels of the machine. If he went into hiding or into prison, then the opposing clan would kill someone else in his stead. If he were to die, then his own clan would be drawn into the infernal cycle. So everything would unfold along lines laid down centuries ago. And that was also the main cause of his distress: he had wanted to put a situation to right, to do something for others, and he found he had done precisely the opposite. As for knowing how to atone for his act, he … or rather, she and he (it had to be the two of them, Mark thought, with her white body laid out beside his thin and waxen shape, on the dissecting table) … well, they had had long arguments over it, because Angelin, against his sister’s strong advice, had resolved to give up his life. However, the Kanun did not permit suicide, so he had thought of asking for help from the state … and that was why they had come to see Mark.

  The painter was on the verge of saying, But why here, in my studio? when his eyes strayed toward his old traveling chest. That was where his other dress must be hidden — a police uniform … or a snakeskin!

  You’re such a dolt, Mark told himself. Obviously they had to come to see you. Aren’t you the next deputy chief of police?

  Coming face-to-face with death had led them to be the first to discover the great secret of his own life. They’d guessed what no one else had yet seen. For Angelin and his sister, from now on, the other world where Mark would have been the deputy chief of police was the only one that mattered.

  Mark needed some time to measure fully what they were asking. The only way to block the mechanism that Angelin had set in motion — to halt the rusty gearwheels that even death could no longer arrest—was to have recourse to another machine, the machinery of state. The plan was simple: the young man would give himself up to the police, and the state would give him a heavy sentence, the harshest of all. Not fifteen years in jail, as the current law required, but capital punishment. At a time like the present when laws were changing from day to day and cases were batted back and forth between Tirana and the
Council of Europe, that was a conceivable plan. So the boy would be judged and sentenced, then shot like most murderers. His only request was that in this case the state would assume the role of the opposing clan’s executioner. He was perfectly aware that in ordinary circumstances such a request would be considered insane. But in current conditions, with so many Albanian issues going to Brussels and Strasbourg and suchlike, and also more especially because the National Ferment Party was demanding that the ancient Kanun be incorporated in the revised penal code, everything was possible. So that…

  Mark rubbed his forehead from time to time — the best way to restore the flow of blood to his brain when it was slowing down.

  So, in that way, by inserting the state into the system, the circle of revenge would be automatically squared. The family — that’s to say, us, she said, pointing to her breast — would claim its blood (she pointed to her brother) not from the Shkreli, but from the state!

  The two of them then expanded on their plan and expressed themselves quite clearly. Shifting the claiming of the blood into a new, unprecedented area made it all different. The state was accustomed to facing enemies. It could tolerate and maintain hostilities more easily than any clan. It all hung on whether the state would consent to the plan; that is to say, whether it would agree to pronounce the brother’s sentence not just as an expression of the law and the penal code, but also as an expression of the rules of the Kanun. Furthermore, the two of them insisted that in the death certificate that the prosecutor and the coroner would sign after the execution (or else in the report of it that would be published in the records), the following wording would have to be used: “The State of Albania has shot Angelin of the Ukaj, cleansing the blood of Marian Shkreli, its servant.”

  Mark took his head in his hands, as if to stop it bursting. He hadn’t interrupted throughout his girlfriend’s long explanation. When she finished, he asked what he thought was a whole variety of questions, but it all boiled down to a single query: “So you think the state should become a player in the feud? “And every time she answered “Yes, exactly,” her eyes flashed with an icy gleam that seemed to say, And what’s so strange about that? Throughout its long life the state has done nothing but kill and slaughter people. You yourself are in a better position than anyone to know that!

  In other circumstances Mark would have shouted back, “Why me?” But it was too late now. He drew himself up to his full height, and though he said nothing, his whole body, like a dancer’s, expressed a single thought: Of course I am.

  Of course he was.

  None of them had been watching the clock. It must have been near dawn when Mark promised to put in a word with the police chief or the prosecutor in the morning, or, if the opportunity arose, with the two of them.

  Mark, Angelin, and his sister were all dead tired. The two visitors got up to take their leave. Mark went to the bay window, looked outside, and declared that they would perhaps be better advised to wait for dawn.

  He showed them the bed where he only rarely spent the night and stretched out on the sofa. For a long while he thought he could hear snatches of their whispering to each other, which sounded to him like so many lovers’ sighs.

  As the first rays of light came through the window, he remembered she had taken the pill, which reassured him, and he fell asleep immediately.

  When he woke, he knew intuitively that they had already left. He moved around the empty bed, thinking he could recognize her smell, which he knew so well, but then suddenly turned his eyes away, as if afraid of finding something revolting.

  It looked like a fine day outside. The prosecutor was nowhere to be found. As for the police chief, Mark ran into him as he was leaving his office.

  “I was sure we’d run into each other someday,” the chief said warmly.

  Mark was no longer surprised by anything. The idea that the chief had also foreseen and even expected this meeting seemed natural.

  “Listen, do you want to come with me? I have to go out of town, and on the way we’ll have all the time you need to tell me about your request.”

  Mark was tempted to answer that he had no request to make, but the chief didn’t let him get a word in. As he got into the car, he confided that he had always enjoyed the company of artists. To back this up, he nodded toward a literary review lying on the rear seat. Then he leaned toward the driver, presumably to whisper directions in his ear.

  “You won’t be bored,” he told Mark. “Quite the opposite. I think you’ll have a great time.”

  Just my luck! Mark thought. I could do without that — watching someone get arrested! This whole business could have begun far more simply — like, with forms to fill out.

  “Despite all the work I get loaded with, I do try to find the time to read,” the police chief went on. “Of course, I dont really grasp all the contemporary stuff. You know, in that issue there, for instance, there are some poems … How should I say… Well, I would really like your opinion, at least on one of them, the one that mentions the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg….”

  Mark leafed through the magazine until he found the poem. A moment later, he burst out laughing.

  “You see!” the police chief exclaimed. “You’re an artist, but even you couldn’t help yourself laughing. That proves there’s something not quite right.”

  “That’s true enough,” Mark said.

  “Please read me the first two lines. I’d like to hear them said by you.”

  Mark began to recite the verse aloud:

  I shall come unto you dressed in sackcloth

  Wearing Luxembourg as a condom

  They guffawed in unison for a while. Then the policeman expressed his fear that the lines might be seen as offensive to the duchy. “We mustn’t forget that tiny Luxembourg is a member-state of the European Union!” Mark shrugged his shoulders. The chief went on: “What I say to myself is this: if you allow someone to refer to Luxembourg or Denmark as condoms, what would you say if someone else wanted to describe you — I mean, your country — as, let’s say, a chamber pot? That would be shocking, wouldn’t it? The land of eagles … a toilet bowl?”

  Mark laughed again.

  They had left the town and were driving toward the highlands. Mark could barely stop himself asking where they were heading. From time to time he told himself that the farther they got from town, the easier it would be to broach the subject he was anxious to discuss.

  At last they came to a halt at the edge of a copse.

  “Beautiful scenery, isn’t it?” the police chief said. “I told you you wouldn’t be bored.”

  He got out first, and looked around. The driver opened the trunk and took out a blanket and two bottles of water, which he set down beside his boss.

  Mark and the policeman sat down as if they were about to have a picnic.

  “Marvelous scenery, you must admit,” the chief said again.

  Then he took a pair of binoculars from his bag and began to adjust the focus.

  “I have to look at something,” he said suddenly as he put the binoculars to his eyes.

  What a magnificent police force! No two ways about it! Mark thought, ironically. God alone knew what there could be to observe in these boondocks.

  “Do you want a turn?” the other man asked as he offered Mark the binoculars.

  Mark took the instrument, placed it on the bridge of his nose, and steered it toward the area that the police chief had been watching. As he turned the focus knob, the mountains raced nearer with frightening speed. He thought he could make out the overgrown bushes that masked what was supposed to be the secret entrance to the deep storage depot of the National Archives. A strange association of ideas brought his girlfriend’s genitals to mind. Then he thought of the head of state making his way into the depot the day after assuming supreme power.

  He was intensely eager to learn something more about that whole story. But he restrained himself, remembering he had vowed to ask no questions until he had managed to get the main matter of
f his chest.

  He handed the binoculars back to their owner, and with a slight feeling of guilt repeated the police chief’s own words back to him:

  “What a marvelous view! …”

  He sensed that he was being looked at sourly. Was the chief so naive as to think no ill? Maybe he ought to interrogate the policeman about some case or other. About the bank holdup, for instance. Or even, so as to seem even more loyal, to ask him if they had any chance, from their vantage point, of seeing the robbers on the move.

  He made up his mind to ask that question and waited for the chief to put down the binoculars before speaking.

  When his companion lowered his arm, Mark saw that his eyes had gone quite empty, as if their former liveliness had stayed stuck to the viewfinden He must have seen something, Mark thought to himself. Something he would rather not have seen. How else could he account for the policeman’s expression, halfway between weariness and annoyance?

  “Unless I’m mistaken, you have something to say to me,” the police chief said at last.

  Mark took a deep breath before launching into his subject. The policeman listened without interrupting once. He batted his eyelids several times, then opened them wide before shutting them completely.