Ismail Kadare - Broken April

Holding his wife’s hand, Bessian Vorpsi moved his head close to the window to make sure that the small town they had left half an hour before, the last one at the foot of the Rrafsh , the high plateau of the north, had disappeared from view. Now, before them and on either side there stretched away heathland on a slight slope, a rather strange piece of country, neither plain, nor mountain nor plateau. The mountains, properly speaking, had not yet begun, but one felt their looming shadow, and it seemed that it was that very shadow which while rejecting any connection between the plateau and the mountain world, kept it from being classed as a plain. So it was a border region, barren and almost uninhabited.

Now and then droplets of rain pearled the glass of the carriage window.

“The Accursed Mountains,” he said softly, with a slight tremor in his voice, as if he were greeting a vision that he had been expecting for a very long time. He felt that the name, with its solemnity, had made an impression on his wife, and he took a certain satisfaction in it.

Her face came closer, and he breathed in the perfume of her neck.

“Where are they?”

He nodded ahead, and then he pointed, but in that direction she saw nothing but a heavy layer of mist.

“You can’t see anything yet,” he explained. “We’re far away from them.”

She left her hand in her husband’s and leaned back into the velvet cloth of her seat. The jostling of the carriage sent the newspaper in which they were mentioned, and which they had bought in the small town a little before their departure, sliding to the floor, but neither of them moved to pick it up. She smiled vaguely, recalling the title of the short piece announcing their trip: “Sensation: The writer, Bessian Vorpsi, and his young bride are spending their honeymoon on the Northern Plateau!”

The article was rather vague. You could not tell whether the author, a certain A.G. (could that be their acquaintance, Adrian Guma?) was in favor of the trip or was being slightly ironic about it.

She herself, when her fiance had announced it to her two weeks before the wedding, had thought the idea pretty bizarre. Don’t be surprised at anything, her friends had told her. If you marry a man who’s a bit odd, you have to expect surprises. But at bottom we have to say you’re very lucky.

And in fact she was happy. During the last days before the wedding, in the half-fashionable, half-artistic circles of Tirana, people talked about nothing but their honeymoon trip. Her friends envied her and told her: You’ll be escaping the world of reality for the world of legend, literally the world of epic that scarcely exists anymore. And they would go on talking about fairies, mountain nymphs, bards, the last Homeric hymns in the world, and the Kanun , terrifying but so majestic. Others shrugged their shoulders at all this enthusiasm, hinting discreetly at their astonishment, which was aroused particularly by the question of comfort, the more so since this was a honeymoon trip, something that called for certain conveniences, whereas, in the mountains the weather was still quite cold, and those epic kullas were of stone. On the other hand, there were others — few in number — who listened to all those opinions with a rather amused air, as if to say, “Right, go on up north among the mountain nymphs. It will do both of you good, and especially Bessian.”

And now they were heading towards the grim Northern Plateau. This Rrafsh , about which she had read and heard so much during her studies at the institute for young ladies named “The Queen Mother,” and especially later during her engagement to Bessian, attracted her and alarmed her at the same time. In fact, what she had read and heard on the subject, and even Bessian’s own writings had not given her any idea of what life was really like up there in the highlands amidst the never-ending mists. It seemed to her that everything people said about the High Plateau took on at once an ambiguous, nebulous character. Bessian Vorpsi had written half-tragic, half-philosophical sketches about the North, to which the press had responded in a rather halfway fashion too: some reviewers had hailed the pieces as jewels of the first water, and others had criticized them as lacking in realism. On a number of occasions it had occurred to Diana that if her husband had decided to undertake this rather strange tour, it was not so much to show her what was so remarkable about the North as to settle something that he felt within him. But each time she had given up the idea, thinking that if that was his object he could have taken that trip long ago, and alone at that.

She was watching him now, and from the way his set jaw made his cheekbones more prominent, and the way he stared through the carriage windows, she felt that he was holding back his impatience — which she found quite understandable. He was certainly telling himself that this part-imaginary, part-epic world that he talked about for days on end was taking its time about showing itself. Outside, on either side of the carriage, the endless wasteland unfolded, without a sign of human presence, its countless grey rocks watered by the dullest downpour in the world. He’s afraid that I’ll be disappointed, she thought, and several times she was on the point of saying, “Don’t worry, Bessian, we’ve only been travelling an hour, and I’m not so impatient or so naive as to think that all the wonders of the North are going to appear before our eyes at once.” But she did not say those words; unselfconsciously, she rested her head on his shoulder. She knew that the gesture was more reassuring than any words, and she stayed a long time like that, looking out of the corner of her eye at her light chestnut hair moving upon his shoulder with the motion of the carriage.

She was nearly asleep when she felt his shoulder move.

“Diana, look,” he said softly, taking her hand.

In the distance, beside the road, there were some black figures.

“Mountain people?” she asked.

“Yes.”

As their carriage drew nearer, the dark figures seemed to grow taller. Both the passengers’ faces were glued to the window, and Diana several times wiped from the glass the mist made by their breath.

“What are they holding in their hands, umbrellas?” she asked, but very softly, when the carriage was no more than fifty paces from the mountaineers.

“Yes, that’s what it looks like,” he muttered. “Where did they get those umbrellas?”

At last the carriage passed the mountaineers, who stared after it. Bessian turned his head, as if to make sure that the things they had in their hands really were old umbrellas with broken struts and ragged cloth.

“I’ve never seen mountaineers carrying brollies,” he murmured. Diana was surprised too, but she took care not to mention it, so as not to make him angry.

When further on they saw another group of mountaineers, two of whom were laden with sacks, Diana pretended not to see them. Bessian looked at them for a while.

“Corn,” he said at last, but Diana did not answer. Again she leaned her head upon his shoulder, and again her hair began to slide gently to and fro with the movement of the carriage.

Now it was he who watched the road attentively. As for her, she tried to turn her thoughts to more pleasant things. After all, it was no great misfortune if a legendary mountaineer heaved a sack of corn onto his back, or carried a dilapidated umbrella against the rain. Had she not seen more than one man from the mountains, in the city streets at the end of autumn, with an axe over his shoulder, and crying out plaintively, “Any wood to cut?”, a cry that was more like the cry of a night bird. But Bessian had told her that those people were not representative of the mountain country. Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue. The real mountaineers are up there, on the Rrafsh , he had said to her one night, lifting his arms towards the celestial heights beyond the horizon, as if the Rrafsh were somewhere in the sky rather than on earth.