Ismail Kadare - Broken April

Diana imagined herself in the wife’s place, and she shuddered. She shook her head as if to rid herself of the horrible thought, but she could not free herself of it.

On the morning following the third night, the woman returned at last, and she told her husband everything. But what could the injured man do? It was a most extraordinary incident, and the affront could only be washed away in blood. The clan to which the three depraved brothers belonged was large and powerful, and if a feud were to start, the family of the wronged man would be doomed to annihilation. Besides, it turned out that the husband’s strong point was not courage. So, given this unusual case, he asked for something that a mountaineer rarely seeks, having recourse to judgment by a council of elders. The judgment was hard to arrive at. It was awkward to pronounce on a matter that had no precedent in the memory of the people of the Rrafsh , and it was equally difficult to fix a punishment for the three brothers. So they called for Ali Binak, and he ended by proposing two courses to the guilty men, who were to choose between the two. Either the three brothers would send their wives in turn to spend a night with the wronged husband, or they must choose one among them who would pay for the crime with his blood, and whose death could not be avenged thereafter. The brothers held a counsel and chose the second course: one of them would pay with his life for what they had done: the lot fell on the second brother.

Diana imagined the death of the second brother in slow motion as if in a film. He had asked the council of elders to grant him the thirty-day truce. Then, on the thirtieth day, the wronged man lay in wait for him and killed him with no trouble at all.

“And then?” Bessian had asked. “Then, nothing,” the innkeeper said. “He lived on this earth, and then he disappeared — all that for nothing, for a whim.”

Diana, on the edge of sleep, thought about the time that was left to the mountaineer named Gjorg, whose fate was already settled, and she sighed.

“Look, there’s a tower of refuge,” Bessian said, tapping the window pane with his finger.

Diana looked where her husband was pointing.

“That one over there, standing by itself, can you see it? The one with the narrow loopholes.”

“How grim it looks,” Diana said.

She had often heard talk about those famous towers, where the killers might take refuge at the end of the truce so as not to put their families in danger. But this was the first time that she had seen one.

“The tower loopholes look out on all the roads in the village, so that nobody can come near without being seen by the men immured within,” Bessian told her. “And there is always one loophole that faces the church door, because of the possibility of an offer to make peace, but those cases are very few.”

“And how long do people stay shut up inside?” Diana asked.

“Oh, for years, until new occurrences change the relations between the blood that has been shed and the blood that has been avenged.”

“The blood that has been shed, the blood that has been avenged,” Diana repeated. “You speak of those things as if they were bank transactions.”

Bessian smiled.

“At bottom, in one sense, those things are not very different. The Kanun is cold calculation.”

“That’s really dreadful,” Diana said, and Bessian could not tell if she had said that about the tower of refuge or about his last remark. In fact, she had pressed her face against the glass in order to see the dark tower again.

That’s where that mountaineer with the pale face might take refuge, she thought. But he might be killed before he could shut himself up inside that stony mass.

Gjorg. She said the name to herself and she felt that an emptiness was spreading inside her chest. Something was coming apart painfully there, but there was a certain sweetness in it.

Diana sensed that she was losing the defenses that protect a young woman from the very idea of having strong feelings about another man during the time of her engagement or when she is very much in love. This was the first time since she had known Bessian that she allowed herself to think quite freely about someone else. She thought of him , the man who was still on leave in this world, as Bessian had put it, a very brief leave, scarcely three weeks and each passing day shortened it further, as he wandered in the mountains with that black ribbon on his sleeve, the sign of his blood debt that he seemed to be paying even beforehand — so pale he was — chosen by death, like a tree to be felled in the forest. And that was what his eyes had said, fixed on hers: I am here only a short time, foreign woman.

Never had a man’s stare troubled Diana so much. Perhaps, she thought, it was the nearness of death, or the sympathy awakened in her by the beauty of the young mountaineer. And now she could scarcely tell whether the few drops of water on the glass were not tears in her eyes.

“What a long day,” she said aloud, and was surprised at her own words.

“Do you feel tired?” Bessian asked.

“A little.”

“We should be there in an hour, or an hour and a quarter at most.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently to him. She let him do that, not resisting, but she did not make herself lighter so as to let him pull her closer. He noticed, but stirred by the odor of her neck, he leaned his head towards her ear and whispered, “How are we going to sleep tonight?”

She shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “How would I know?”

“At least the tower of Orosh is the kulla of a prince, and I think they will put us in the same room,” he went on softly, almost conspiratorially

He looked sidelong at her face, and his expression was like the insinuating caress of his voice. But she kept her eyes before her and did not answer. Unsure whether to be offended or not, he relaxed his arm somewhat, and he would surely have taken it away completely if at the last moment, perhaps because she had guessed his intention or perhaps by accident, she had not asked him a question.

“What?”

“I asked you if the prince of Orosh is a blood relation of the royal family.”

“No, not at all,” he replied.

“Then how is it that he is called a prince?”

Bessian frowned a little.

“It’s rather complicated,” he said. “To tell the truth, he’s not a prince, despite the fact that they call him one in certain circles and the people of the High Plateau call him “ Prenk ,” which means prince exactly. But mostly they call him Kapidan , even though….”

Bessian remembered he had not smoked a cigarette for quite a while. Like all those who smoke only now and then, it took some time for him to take the cigarette from the pack and the match from the little box. Diana felt that he did this whenever he wanted to put off a difficult explanation. And indeed the explanation he began to give her about the Kulla of Orosh (an explanation that he had left unfinished in Tirana, when from the prince’s chancellory, in stilted language — really rather strange — an invitation to the Kulla of Orosh had reached him, saying that he would be welcome at any season of the year and at any hour of the day or the night) was no clearer than the one he had cut off then in Tirana, drinking a cup of tea, seated on the sofa in his studio. But perhaps that came from the fact that there was something unclear in everything that had to do with the kulla where they would soon be guests.

“He’s not exactly a prince,” Bessian said, “and yet, in a way, he’s more than a prince, not only because of his lineage, much older than that of the royal family, but chiefly because of the way he rules over all the High Plateau.”