Ismail Kadare - Broken April

“Did you hear?” she said to Bessian. “They take me for a princess.”

Happy to see her a little more cheerful, he pressed her arm.

“Not so tired now?”

“No,” she said. “It’s lovely here.”

Without being aware of it, they had been approaching Ali Binak’s group. They exchanged introductions almost spontaneously because the mountain people seemed to be pushing the two groups of new arrivals together. Bessian told them who he was and where he came from. Ali Binak did the same, to the astonishment of the mountaineers who believed him to be famous throughout the world. As they talked, the crowd of people around them grew, staring at them and especially at Diana.

“The innkeeper told us a little while ago that this plain has known many disputes about boundaries,” Bessian said.

“That is true,” Ali Binak replied. He spoke quietly and in a somewhat monotonous tone, with no hint of passion. No doubt that was required of him because of his work as an interpreter of the Kanun . “I think you must have seen the muranës on either side of the road.”

Bessian and Diana both nodded their heads.

“And after all those deaths the dispute is still not settled?” Diana asked.

Ali Binak looked at her calmly. Compared with the curious looks of the crowd around them and especially the blazing eyes of the man with the checked jacket, who had introduced himself as a surveyor, Ali Binak’s eyes seemed to Diana to be those of a classical statue.

“No one is quarreling any longer about the boundaries established by bloodshed,” he said. “Those have been established forever on the face of the earth. It is the others that still stir up quarrels,” and he pointed towards the upland.

“The part that is not bloody?”

“Yes, just so, madam. For a good many years there has been discord over these pastures on the part of two villages, and it has not been brought to an end.”

“But is the presence of death indispensable in order for the boundary lines to be lasting?” Diana was surprised at having spoken, and particularly at her tone, in which a certain irony could clearly be distinguished.

Ali Binak smiled coldly.

“We are here, madam, precisely to prevent death from taking a hand in this affair.”

Bessian looked at his wife questioningly, as if to say, what has come over you? He thought he saw in her eyes a fleeting light that he had never seen before. Rather hurriedly, as if to wipe away all trace of this small incident, he asked Ali Binak the first question that came to him.

Around them all eyes were trained on the little group that was talking eagerly. Only a few old men sat to one side on some big stones, indifferent to everything.

Ali Binak went on talking slowly and only a minute later did Bessian realize that he had asked about the very thing he should have been careful not to mention, the deaths brought about by boundary disputes.

“If the man doesn’t die at once, and he forces himself along, whether walking or crawling, until he reaches someone else’s land, then, at the place where he collapses and succumbs to his wounds, there his muranë will be built, and even though it is on another’s land it remains forever the new boundary mark.”

Not only in Ali Binak’s appearance but in the syntax of his speech, there was something cold, something alien to ordinary language.

“And what if two men kill each other in the same instant?” Bessian asked.

Ali Binak raised his head. Diana thought she had never seen a man whose authority was so unaffected by his small stature.

“If two men kill each other at a certain distance from each other, then the boundary for each is the place where each man fell, and the space between is reckoned as belonging to no one.”

“No-man’s land,” Diana said. “Exactly as if it were a question of two countries.”

“It’s just as we were saying yesterday evening,” Bessian said. “Not only in their habits of speech, but in thought and action the people of the High Plateau have something of the attributes of independent countries.”

“And when there were no rifles?” Bessian went on. “The Kanun is older than firearms, isn’t it?”

“Yes, older, certainly.”

“Then they used blocks of stone for the purpose, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” said Ali Binak. “Before rifles were available, people practiced trial by ordeal, carrying stones. In the case of a quarrel between two families or villages or banners, each side appointed its champion. He who carried his block of stone farthest was the winner.”

“And what will happen today?”

Ali Binak looked around at the scattered crowd and then fixed his eyes upon the small group of old men.

“Venerable elders of this banner have been invited to bear witness about the former boundaries of the pasture.”

Bessian and Diana turned towards the old men who were sitting as if they were actors waiting to be given their roles. They were so ancient that from moment to moment they must certainly have forgotten why they were there.

“Shall you be starting soon?” Bessian said.

Ali Binak took out of his fob a watch fastened by a chain.

“Yes,” he said. “I think we shall start very soon.”

“Shall we stay?” Bessian asked Diana in a low voice.

“If you like,” she replied.

The eyes of the mountain people, particularly of the women and children, followed their every movement, but now Bessian and Diana were somewhat accustomed to it. Diana was anxious only to avoid the tipsy stare of the surveyor. He and the other assistant, who had been introduced at the inn as a doctor, followed Ali Binak step by step, although he seemed to ignore their presence, never speaking to them.

A certain restlessness suggested that the time to begin the ceremony was at hand. Ali Binak and his assistants, who had deserted the visitors, went from one group of people to the next. Only now, after the little crowd had moved, did Bessian and Diana notice the old boundary stones strung out along a line that crossed the plateau from one end to the other.

Suddenly, a feeling of expectancy seemed to invade the country round. Diana slipped her arm under Bessian’s and pressed herself against him.

“But what if something happens?” she said.

“What sort of thing?”

“All the mountaineers are armed. Haven’t you noticed?”

He stared at her, and he was about to say, when you saw those two mountaineers with their ramshackle umbrellas you thought you could make fun of the High Plateau region, and now you sense the danger, don’t you? But he remembered that she had not said a thing about the umbrellas, and that he had concocted all this in his mind.

“You mean that someone might be killed,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

In fact, all the mountaineers were armed, and an atmosphere of chill menace hung over the scene. The sleeves of a number of them bore the black ribbon. Diana moved even closer to her husband.

“It will begin soon,” he said, still looking at the old men, who had risen to their feet.

Diana’s mind was strangely vacant. By chance as she looked about her, her eye fell on their coach. Drawn up on the edge of the pasture, black, with its rococo turnings and its velvet upholstery like that of a theatre loge, it stood out against the grey background of the mountains, completely foreign to the scene, out of place. She wanted to shake Bessian’s arm and tell him, “Look at the carriage,” but just at that moment, he whispered, “It’s beginning.”

One of the old men had left his group and he seemed to be getting ready to fulfill a task.

“Let’s move a little closer,” Bessian said, drawing her along by her hand. “It looks as if both sides have chosen this old man to mark the boundary.”