Ismail Kadare - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

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 its 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