Ismail Kadare - Broken April

“I see,” she said. “But what is it?”

“It’s the famous gallery where the gjaks wait for days and sometimes weeks on end to pay the blood-tax.”

He felt her breath come faster by his shoulder.

“Why do they have to wait so long?” she asked.

“I don’t know. The kulla doesn’t make paying the tax easy. Perhaps so that there will always be people waiting in that gallery. You’re cold. Put something over your shoulders.”

“That mountaineer back there, at the inn, he must have come here, too?”

“Certainly. The innkeeper told us about him. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, that’s right. It seems that he came here three days ago to pay the blood tax. That’s what he told us.”

“Just so.”

Diana could not suppress a sigh.

“So he was here….”

“Without exception, every killer on the High Plateau goes through that gallery,” he said.

“That’s terrifying. Don’t you think so?”

“It’s true. To think that for more than four hundred years, since the building of the castle of Orosh, in that gallery, night and day, winter and summer, there have always been killers waiting there.”

She felt his face near her forehead.

“Of course it’s frightening, it couldn’t be otherwise. Murderers waiting to pay. It’s truly tragic. I’d even say that in a certain way there is grandeur in it.”

“Grandeur?”

“Not in the usual meaning of the word. But in any case, that glimmer in the darkness, like a candle shining on death…. Lord, there really is something supremely sinister about it. And when you think that it’s not just a matter of the death of a single man, of a candle-end shining on his grave, but infinite death. You’re cold. I told you to put something over your shoulders.”

They stood there awhile, not turning their eyes from that light at the foot of the kulla , until Diana felt chilled to her marrow.

“Brr! I’m freezing,” she said, and moving away from the window she said, “Bessian, don’t stay there, you’ll catch cold.”

He turned and took two or three steps towards the centre of the room. At that moment, a clock on the wall that he had not noticed struck twice with a deep sound that made them both start.

“Goodness, how frightened I was,” Diana said.

She knelt down again to her suitcase. “I’m taking out your pyjamas,” she said a moment later.

He murmured a few words and began to walk up and down the room. Diana went over to a mirror that stood on a chest of drawers.

“Are you sleepy?” she asked.

“No. Are you?”

“Me neither.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette.

“It would have been better not to have had that second cup of coffee.”

Diana said something, but since she had a hairpin in her mouth, he could not make out the words.

Bessian stretched out now, and leaning on his elbow, looked on distractedly at his wife’s familiar gestures before the mirror. That mirror, the chest, the clock, as well as the bed and most of the other furniture of the kulla , were related, as their lines showed, to a baroque style, but simplified in the extreme.

As she combed her hair in the mirror, Diana watched out of the corner of her eye the wreaths of smoke floating over Bessian’s abstracted face. The comb moved ever more slowly through her hair. With an unhurried gesture she put it down on the chest, and watching her husband in the mirror, quietly, as if she did not want to attract his attention, she walked with light steps to the window.

Beyond the glass was anguish and night. She let their tremors pass through her while her eyes searched insistently for the tiny lost glimmer of light in the chaos of darkness. It was there down below, in the same place, as if suspended above the chasm, flickering wanly, about to be swallowed up by the night. For a long moment she could not take her eyes from the feeble red glow in that abyss of darkness. It was like the redness of primeval fire, a magma ages old whose pallid reflection came from the centre of the earth. It was like the gates of hell. And suddenly, with unbearable intensity, the guise of the man who had passed through that hell was present to her. Gjorg, she cried out within her, moving her cold lips. He wandered forbidden roads, bearing omens of death in his hands, on his sleeve, in his wings. He must be a demigod to face that darkness and primal chaos of creation. And being so strange, so unattainable, he took on enormous size, he swelled and floated like a universal howling in the night.

Now she could not believe that she had actually seen him, and that he had seen her. Comparing herself with him she felt colorless, stripped of all mystery. Hamlet of the mountains, she thought, repeating Bessian’s words. My black prince.

Would she ever meet him again? And there, by the window, her forehead icy from the frozen pane, she felt she would give anything to see him again.

Then she felt her husband’s breath behind her, and his hand resting upon her hip. For some moments he gently caressed that part of her body that moved him more than any other, then, not seeing what was happening in her face, he asked her in a muffled voice, “What’s the matter?”

Diana did not answer, but she kept her head turned towards the black panes, as if inviting him to look out there too.

Mark Ukacierra was going up the wooden stairway leading to the third storey of the kulla when he heard a voice calling to him in a low tone, “Hush! The guests are still asleep!”

He went on his way without any attempt to lighten his footfalls, and the voice above him on the stairs, came again: “I told you not to make noise. Didn’t you hear me? The guests are still asleep!”

Mark raised his eyes to see who had dared address him in that way, just as one of the servants put his head over the banister to see who had shattered the quiet. But recognizing the steward of the blood, the servant, horrified, clapped his hand over his mouth.

Mark Ukacierra went on ascending, and when he reached the top of the stairway, he passed right by the terror-stricken man without saying a word to him, not even turning his head.

Ukacierra was first cousin to the prince, and since on the roster of duties in the castle he was concerned with all the business connected with bloodshed, he was called the steward of the blood. The other servants, while for the most part also cousins of the prince, albeit distant ones, feared the steward just as much as the prince. They stared in amazement at their colleague who had so narrowly escaped a storm, and recalled, not without resentment, other occasions on which the slightest misstep had cost them dear. But the steward of the blood, even though he had dined sumptuously with distinguished guests last night, was distracted this morning. His face ashen, he was obviously out of sorts. Without glancing at any of them, he pushed open the door of a large room adjoining the living room and went in.

The room was cold. Through the panes of the high, narrow windows framed in unpainted oak, came a light that seemed to him the light of an evil day. He went closer to the windows and looked out at the motionless clouds. April was almost here, but the sky had not yet taken leave of March. That idea came to him and brought a particular sense of annoyance, as if it were an injustice aimed specifically at him.

His eyes fixed on the scene beyond the window, as if he wanted to torment them with the grey light that was quite as trying, he forgot the corridors filled with cautious steps, with “Sh! Quiet!” and the guests who had arrived last night, who had aroused in him without his taking account of it a vague disquiet.