Ismail Kadare - The Ghost Rider

“So, what does besa mean to you? Or rather, what did it mean to him, to Kostandin?”

None had been more deeply moved by Kostandin’s death than these four young men. He had been more than a brother to them, and even now, three years after his death, so strong was his presence in their words and thoughts that many people, half-seriously, half-jokingly, called them “Kostandin’s disciples”. They looked at one another again. Why was Stres asking them this question?

They had not accepted the captain’s company with good grace. Even when Kostandin was alive they had been cool towards him, but in the past few months, as Stres laboured to unravel the mystery of Doruntine’s return, the chill had turned icy, bordering on hostility. Stres’s first efforts to win them over had run up against this wall. But then, surprisingly, their attitude had changed completely so that they accepted the captain’s presence. Young people today are not stupid, was the popular comment at church on Sunday; they know what they’re doing.

“It’s a term that was used in olden days,” Stres went on, “but the meaning attached to it nowadays seems to me more or less new. It has come up more than once in trial proceedings.”

They pondered in silence. During their afternoons and evenings with Kostandin, so different from the morose sessions that were now their lot, they had discussed many subjects with great passion, but the besa had always been their favourite topic. And for good reason, too: it was a sort of fulcrum, the theme on which all the rest was based.

They had begun to weigh their words with greater care after the bishop issued warnings to all their families. But that was before Kostandin’s death. What would they do now that the man they had loved so much was gone? Stres seemed to be familiar with their ideas already; that being the case, all he really had to do was sit and listen. After all, they weren’t afraid to express their views. On the contrary, given the opportunity, they were prepared to proclaim them quite openly. What they feared was that their views might be distorted.

“What did Kostandin think about the besa ?” said Milosao, repeating Stres’s question. “It was part of his more general outlook. It would be difficult to explain it without showing its connection with his other convictions.”

And they set about explaining everything to him in detail. Kostandin, as the captain must surely know, was an oppositionist, a dissident, as were they, come to that. He was opposed to existing laws, institutions, decrees, prisons, police and courts, which he considered no more than a pack of coercive rules raining down on man like hail. He believed that these laws ought to be abolished and replaced by laws arising from within man himself. By this he did not mean purely spiritual standards dependent on conscience alone, for he was no naive dreamer who assumed that humanity could be ruled solely by conscience. He believed in something far more tangible, something the seeds of which he had detected scattered here and there in Albanian life in recent times, something he said should be nurtured, encouraged to blossom into a whole system. In this system there would be no further need for written laws, courts, jails or police. This new order, of course, would not be wholly free of tragedy, of murder and violence, but man himself would judge his neighbour and be judged by him quite apart from any rigid judicial structure. He would kill or be executed, he would imprison himself or leave prison, when he thought it appropriate.

“But how could such an order be achieved?” asked Stres. Didn’t it still come down to conscience in the end, and did not they themselves consider it merely a dream?

They replied that in this new world, existing institutions would have been replaced by immaterial and invisible rules that were nonetheless not at all chimerical or idyllic. In fact they would be rather bleak and tragic, and therefore as weighty as the old ones, if not more so. Except that they would lie within man, not in the form of remorse or some similar sentiment, but as a well-defined ideal, a faith, an order understood and accepted by everyone, but realised within each individual, not secret but revealed for all the world to see, as if man’s breast were transparent and his greatness or anguish, his pain, his tragedy, his decisions and doubts, were plainly visible. These were the main lines of an order of this kind. The besa was one of them, perhaps the principal one.

Stres butted in to remind them politely that this was quite at odds with the ancient kanun the Albanians had inherited from their Illyrian ancestors, whose customary laws, as everyone knew, had been very similar to those of the Ancient Greeks, who had given them the very word kanun . Just a year ago he’d read a stage play written by a Greek fifteen hundred years before, and he had been stunned by it …

They knew all this, just as they knew that law courts had superseded the kanun long before. But they thought that humankind had been inadequately prepared for the transition. They reckoned that in their own era it was more appropriate to renovate the old kanun than to adopt a new system of government. The besa was a good example …

It was still very rare: delicate, like a wild flower needing tender care, its shape as yet undefined. To illustrate their thesis, they reminded Stres of an incident that had occurred some years before, when Kostandin was still alive. In a village not far off, a man had killed his guest. Stres had heard talk of the case. It was then that the expression “He violated the besa ” had been used. Everyone in the village, young and old, had been deeply shaken by the event. Together they decided that no such disgrace would ever befall them again. In fact they went further still, decreeing that anyone, known or unknown, who entered the territory of their village would stand under the protection of the besa and would thereby be declared a friend and be protected as such, that the doors of the village would be opened to anyone, at any hour of the night or day, and that any passer-by must be given food and his safety assured. In the marketplace of the capital they were the butt of jokes. Anyone want a free meal? Just head for that village and knock on any door; talk about consideration, they’ll escort you to the village border as if you were a bishop. But the villagers, ignoring the mockery, went even further. They requested — and received — the prince’s permission to punish those who violated the besa . No one guilty of such an offence could leave the territory of the village alive. Another village, quite far from the first, asked the prince to grant them the same right, on terms that were no less curious: the villagers requested that protection of their besa cover not only their own place of habitation, but also a sector of the highway, including two inns and a mill. But the prince was afraid that if he allowed the new rule to spread it would interfere with traffic along the highway and complicate the administration of that part of the country, and so he refused.

That was what the besa meant. That was how Kostandin saw it. He considered the besa a bond linking all that was sublime, and he felt that once it and other similar laws had spread and held sway in every aspect of life, then external laws, with their corresponding institutions, would be shed naturally, just as a snake sloughs off its old skin.

Thus spoke Kostandin on those memorable afternoons they used to pass at the New Inn, where he went on and on about Albanianness . Perorating, or as some wits put it, albanating . “So that’s how it is,” he would say, “for my part, I shall give my mother my besa to bring Doruntine back to her from her husband’s home whenever she desires. And whatever happens — if I am lying on my deathbed, if I have but one hand or one leg, if I have lost my sight, even if … I will never break that promise.”