Broken April (2 page)

All watched at their windows to see the delegation come out again. “Will they grant the truce?” the women asked.

At last the four mediators came out. The discussion had been short. Their bearing gave nothing away but a voice soon gave out the news.

“The Kryeqyqe family has granted the
bessa
.”

Everyone knew that it was the short truce, the twenty-four hour
bessa
. As for the long
bessa
, the thirty-day truce, no one spoke of it yet, for only the village could ask for it—and in any case it could not be requested until after the burial of the last victim.

The voices flew from house to house:

“The Kryeqyqe family has granted the
bessa
.”

“
Bessa
has been granted by the Kryeqyqes.”

“And a good thing, too. At least we'll have twenty-four hours without bloodshed,” a hoarse voice breathed from behind a shutter.

The funeral took place the next day around noon. The professional mourners came from afar, clawing their faces and tearing their hair according to the custom. The old churchyard was filled with the black tunics of the men who had come to the burial. After the ceremony, the funeral cortege returned to the Kryeqyqes' house. Gjorg, too, walked in the procession. At first he had refused to take part in the ceremony, but at last he had given in to his father's urging. He had said, “You must go to the burial. You must also go to the funeral dinner to honor the man's soul.”

“But I am the
Gjaks
,”
*
Gjorg had protested. “I'm the one who killed him. Why must I go?”

“For that very reason you must go,” his father declared. “If there is anyone who cannot be excused from the burial and the funeral dinner today, it's you.” “But why?” Gjorg had asked one last time. “Why must I go?” But his father glared at him and Gjorg said no more.

Now he walked among the mourners, pale, with unsteady steps, feeling people's glances glide by him and turn aside at once, losing themselves in the banks of mist. Most of them were relatives of the dead man. Perhaps for the hundredth time he groaned inwardly: Why must I be here?

Their eyes showed no hatred. They were cold as the March day, as he himself had been cold, without hatred, yesterday evening as he lay in wait for his quarry. Now the newly dug grave, the crosses of stone and wood—most of them askew—and the plaintive sound of the tolling bell, all these struck home. The faces of the mourners, with the hideous scratches left by their fingernails (God, he thought, how did they get their nails to grow so long in twenty-four hours?), their hair torn out savagely and their eyes swollen, the muffled footsteps all around him, all these trappings of death—it was he who had brought them about. And as if that were not enough, he was forced to walk in that solemn cortege, slowly, in mourning, just like them.

The braid on the seams of their tight trousers of white felt nearly touched his own, like poisonous black snakes ready to strike. But he was calm. He was better protected
by the twenty-four hour truce than by the loophole of any
kulla
or fortress. The barrels of their rifles were aligned straight upwards against their short, black tunics, but for the time being they were not free to shoot at him. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after. And if the village asked for the thirty-day
bessa
on his behalf, he would be at peace for another four weeks. And then. . . .

But a few paces ahead of him a rifle barrel swayed as if to stand out among the others. Another barrel, a short one, was to his left. Still others were all around him. Which of them. . . . at the last moment, in his mind, the words “will kill me” changed—as if to soften them—to “will fire at me.”

The road from the graveyard to the dead man's house seemed endless. And he still had before him an even more arduous test, the funeral dinner. He would sit at the table with the dead man's kin. They would pass the bread to him, they would set food before him, spoons, forks, and he would have to eat.

Two or three times he felt the urge to get out of that absurd situation, to bolt from the funeral cortege. Let them insult him, jeer at him, accuse him of violating age-old custom, let them shoot at his retreating back if they liked, anything so long as he got away from there. But he knew very well that he could never run away, no more than his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his great-great-grandfather, and all his ancestors five hundred, a thousand years before him had been able to run away.

They were coming close to the house of the dead man. The narrow windows above the arch of the house door had been hung with black cloth. Oh, where am I going, he moaned to himself, and while the low door of the
kulla
was still a hundred paces off, he lowered his head so as not to strike against the stone arch.

The funeral meal took place in accordance with the rules. As long as it went on Gjorg thought about his own funeral feast. Which of these people would go there, just as he had come here today, just as his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather and all his ancestors had gone to such feasts down through the centuries?

The faces of the mourners were still gouged and bloody. Custom forbade them to wash either in the village where the killing had taken place or on the way back. They could wash only after they reached their homes.

The streaks on their faces and foreheads made them look as if they were wearing masks. Gjorg imagined how his own mourners would look when they had gouged their faces. He felt that from now on the lives of all the generations to come in the two families would be an endless funeral feast, each side playing host in turn. And each side, before leaving for the feast, would don that blood-stained mask.

That afternoon, after the funeral meal, there were once again unusual comings and goings in the village. In a few hours, Gjorg Berisha's one-day truce would be at an end, and now the village elders, as the rules required, were preparing to visit the Kryeqyqes to ask for the thirty-day truce, the long
bessa
, in the name of the village.

On the doorsteps of the
kullas
, on the first floors where the women lived, and in the village squares, people talked of nothing else. This was the first blood-taking of that spring, and of course there was much discussion of everything connected with it. The killing had been performed in
accordance with the rules, and as for the burial, the funeral feast, the one-day
bessa
, and everything else, these had been carried out with scrupulous obedience to the ancient Code. So the thirty-day truce that the elders were preparing to ask of the Kryeqyqes would certainly be granted.

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.