Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

by Ismail Kadare

  “Hmm, so that’s what it’s about,” he mumbled when Mark had finished, then took up the binoculars again.

  He looked into the far distance for a moment.

  “So that’s what it’s all about,” he repeated, as if he could see in the viewfinder whatever it was that had surprised him.

  “I’m not asking for an immediate answer,” said Mark. “I do realize that my request is extremely unusual. I must ask you once again to forgive me.”

  “Fine, fine,” the policeman murmured.

  Mark wanted to break the ice that had formed between them by moving on to some other topic, something harmless or amusing. He had only worried that the police chief would answer him with a decisive no.

  As he racked his brains for a subject that might lighten the atmosphere, maybe something about the NYPD methods featured in the papers recently, or about the training some Albanian policemen were getting in America to learn about those methods, he stumbled onto a quite different tack and came out with the view that humanity, up to the present, had been following a completely wrong path.

  The police chief began to listen with rapt attention. I must be crazy, Mark thought, to choose a time like this to start philosophizing!

  “Could I look through the binoculars one more time?” he asked point-blank, perhaps to avert a complete rupture between the two of them.

  The policeman handed him the glasses.

  “If you should happen to see anything suspicious, let me know. Meanwhile, I’ll have a little nap.”

  Mark stretched out his hand and took the binoculars. He had never imagined things would proceed in such an ordinary way.

  He clapped the instrument to his eyes and directed it once more toward the mountainside. And as before, the mountains swooped first to the left, as if to shake off the snow from their peaks and shoulders, then to the right, and then came to a relative degree of rest. The summits stayed icy sharp, all the same, and the dark streaks etched into their sides seemed to have no intention of reaching an arrangement with the world down below. “If you happen to see anything suspicious, let me know,” Mark mumbled, repeating the policeman’s words like an incantation. As the chief was asleep, that meant that he, Mark, was now deputizing for him. You could tell he was asleep by the change in his breathing and by the regular dilation of his nostrils. Up above, in fact, everything looked suspicious, even the foreign body that had fallen from the sky — the snow.

  Lord, what is the great sin that has been committed and is all around us? Mark wondered. He immediately realized why the whole world looked suspicious to him. It was because of the dense mass of brambles that hid the tunnel that led to the Secret Archives. As they resembled a woman’s entrance, so they spread the awareness of sin far and wide. His mistress had cheated on him for sure during her stay in Tirana, and afterward too. Maybe even with her own brother. He steadied the binoculars with both his hands. As he was almost certain that the tunnel’s entrance was on the narrow rocky shelf he had in his view, he was expecting to pierce its secret any minute now. On the surface of the human body, there were only two small spy-holes through which the image of the outside world could enter the inner darkness. The terrestrial globe must also have a similar passageway through which you could go from one zone to the other. Men had been looking for it for thousands of years, to no avail. He thought of Ulysses sacrificing a sheep, three thousand years ago, in the hope that the smell and color of its blood would help him find the passage.

  Mark could hear the police chief snoring, as if in the far distance. He propped himself up on an elbow, to hold the binoculars more steadily.

  Up in the heights, the undergrowth was rustling in an anxious wind. All around, everything seemed unsettled and expectant. Guilt might suddenly make its appearance; Mark was afraid of dozing off and missing it.

  Don’t drop off! he ordered himself. Keep the vigil a little longer. You only get one chance at this in a lifetime.

  And then they did indeed begin to appear, in a long line. Not the bank robbers, but a procession of official cars. The first to stop was a long black limousine, but the man who stepped out of it was not the Albanian dictator. His beetlelike eyebrows gave him away: Mark recognized Leonid Brezhnev, the former leader of the Soviet Union. Next to step out was Walter Ulbricht, and behind him two cloaked figures costumed as for a fancy-dress ball.

  They’re all looking for the same thing, Mark thought.

  He was sure that the Guide of the Albanian People, though he had been here once before, would return. He wouldn’t miss his chance to be in this parade of rubble.

  And indeed Hoxha did come, but he arrived late — which was a deception, of course, since he was actually early, doing everything as he always did, back to front, like the registration plate on his limousine. As tricky as ever! Mark exclaimed.

  For a brief instant the lenses clouded over. Then a flurry, which could have been a cloud of dust or a shower of dried violet petals, signaled the arrival of another high personage. He came in a black carriage with wide-spoked wheels, and he climbed down with some difficulty. Well, well, Mark said to himself, here comes Oedipus Rex! … The old man stumbled forward as he turned the black holes of his eyes this way and that.

  So there you are at last! Mark almost said aloud, but then he realized he was not in the least surprised. It seemed he had been expecting this arrival since the beginning of his vigil.

  Unhappy monarch! he thought. You are the only one in this whole crowd of murderers to have truly repented. Yes, you alone, you strange hybrid of good and bad fortune!

  He was strangled by emotion, and his hand shook. The picture in the viewfinder could hardly stay still and nearly collapsed for good.

  Mark could see that the old king was still in pain as he continued to turn his empty sockets in all directions. Mark wanted to say something to him, to share with him things that were bursting out of his imagination, but he did not know what language to use. O man of mystery, son and father of yourself, why did you shoulder a crime that you did not commit?

  Mark was convinced he had always known what suddenly became clear: that Oedipus had not killed his own father. Nor had he ever been his mother’s lover. These legends were just symbols of possible offenses — declared to have already been committed the day that Oedipus became a tyrant.

  Mark’s mind was as incandescent as burning coal. Every tyrant is a potentially infinite sequence of crimes. On the very day that a tyrant seizes the crown, those crimes are transferred from the future, from what is yet to come, to the past, to its furthest reaches, as far as that surest haven of rest, the mother’s womb….

  Through the misty lens of the binoculars, on the other side of the valley, Mark could see Oedipus still rolling his absent eyes. O blind tyrant! Mark shouted out once again, O father and son of sin, what are you seeking with your non-eyes?

  But the old man kept on poking the undergrowth with his walking stick, seeking the mysterious door to the tunnel from which he had once, by mistake, emerged, hoping to delve back down into the dark….

  A week later, Mark Gurabardhi received an answer from the legal and police authorities. The state declined to amend its regulations to conform to the rules of the Kanun. Among the reasons given for this refusal was a recent circular from the Council of Europe that seemed to have some indirect bearing on the matter.

  Mark read the letter several times over. He stopped for a long while on the word Europe, staring at it so hard that it seemed to wobble, then to go hazy, as if trying to erase itself forever.

  He raised his eyes to the sky as if in response to a call from on high. But the sky was tiresomely void. He was aware that a vacuum can have immense destructive force, but this was the first time he had come up against such a feeling of oppression. The clouds stood stock-still, and the birds, who seemed to be in collusion, had all flown away. Things must have looked more or less like that at the start or the end of the season when, as people have always supposed, the gods deserted Earth. A sky bereft of it
s masters, a sky in mourning stretching to infinity. Who knows why the gods left? Where in the universe did they go?

  Mark didn’t know why, but he felt like crying.

  Tirana-Paris, 1998-2000