Ismail Kadare - Broken April

It had happened to him seven years ago. He had consulted doctors and taken all sorts of medication, but nothing helped, until the day when an old man from Gjakova said to him, “It’s useless, my son, to take medicines and to consult doctors. Neither the doctors nor the medicines can do anything about your sickness. You are blood-sick.” Mark was astonished. “Blood? I haven’t killed anyone, father.” And the old man answered, “It doesn’t matter that you haven’t killed anyone. Your work is of such a nature that you have been stricken with blood-sickness.” And he spoke to him about other stewards of the blood who had been stricken with that sickness, and what was worse, never recovered from it. Well, Mark had managed to cure himself in the mountains that rise beyond Orosh. The air, in those heights, was good for that kind of sickness.

For seven years, Mark had been untroubled by it, and it was only recently that his illness had come back. What was I thinking of when I took up this kind of work? The blood of one man, when it took you, was hard to overcome, but what could you do about blood that comes from who knows where, and stops flowing who knows where? It was not the blood of a single man, but torrents of the blood of generations of human beings that streamed all over the High Plateau, the blood of young men and old men, for years and for centuries.

But perhaps it isn’t that sickness that I have, he sighed from deep within him in a last glimmer of hope. Maybe it’s just a passing thing — if not, I’ll go crazy. He listened, because he thought he heard steps beyond the door. In fact, the squeaking of a door reached him from the hallway, and then the sound of footsteps and of voices.

The guests must be awake now, he thought.

* From the Albanian gjak : blood, and hup : to lose; that is, when the blood was lost, when one was not obliged to engage in the blood feud.

* A musical instrument having a long neck and a single string.

Gjorg was back in Brezftoht on the twenty-fifth of March. He had walked all day without stopping. In contrast to his journey to Orosh, he did the return trip in a semi-somnolent state, so that the road seemed shorter. He was surprised to see the outskirts of his village so soon. Without knowing why, he slowed his pace. His heart beat more slowly too, and his eyes seemed to study the surrounding hills. The snow has melted, he thought. But the wild pomegranate shrubs were still there. Despite everything, he breathed as if he felt relieved. For whatever reason, he had thought the patches of snow would be pitiless to him.

And there was the place. A small mouranë had been heaped up during his absence. Gjorg stopped in front of it. For an instant he felt that he was about to leap towards it, pull away the stones, and spread them about on every side so as to leave no trace of it. At the same time that his brain was imagining that act, his hand was groping feverishly for a pebble on the roadway. At last he found one, and his hand, moving awkwardly as if it were dislocated, tossed the pebble onto the cairn. The stone struck it with a dull sound, rolled over two or three times on its axis and settled among the others. Gjorg kept eyeing it as if he were afraid that it would shift again, but now it seemed that it was in its natural place, as if it had been thrown there long ago. And still, Gjorg did not stir.

He stared at the cairn. Here’s what’s left of… of… (he meant to say, the other man’s life), but within him he thought, here’s what will be left of my own life.

All that torment, sleepless nights, the silent struggle with his father, his own hesitations, his brooding, his suffering, had brought about nothing more than these meaningless bare stones. He tried to leave them behind him, but he could not stir. The world about him began to dissolve swiftly, everything disappeared; he, Gjorg, and the cairn, were the only things left on the surface of the earth. Why? What had it all amounted to? The question was bare as the stones. It hurt him everywhere. Lord, how it hurt! At last he found the strength to move, to tear himself away, to flee as far as possible, even if the farthest place was hell, anywhere, rather than stay where he was.

Gjorg’s people greeted him with quiet warmth. His father asked him briefly about his journey, his mother watched him furtively with her eyes turned aside. He said that he was very tired after the long walk and his long sleeplessness, and he went to bed. For a long moment, the steps and the whispering in the kulla clawed at his sleep, and then he went under. The next morning, he woke late. Where am I? he asked two or three times, and he fell asleep again. When at last he got up, his head was heavy and felt as if it were stuffed with sponge. He was not up to doing anything. Not even thinking.

The day passed, and the next day and the next. He went through the house several times, noticing listlessly a section of the wall that had been in need of repair for a long time, or a corner of the roof that had fallen in during the winter. He had no heart for work. The worst of it was that any repair seemed useless to him.

It was during the last days of March. April would soon be coming in. With the first half white and the other half black. Aprildeath. If he did not die, he would be languishing in the tower of refuge. His eyes would weaken in the darkness, so that one way or the other, even if he was still alive, he would never see the world again.

After those somnolent days, his thoughts began to stir. And the first thing that his mind began to seek was a way of keeping himself from death and blindness. There was only one way, and he thought about it at great length: to be an itinerant woodcutter. That was the customary trade for mountaineers who left the High Plateau. With an axe on their shoulder (they slipped the handle under their tunic, while the axe-head, with its sharp edge shiny black, appearing behind their neck, looked like a fish’s fin), they went from town to town giving an air of purpose to their wandering with the long-drawn mournful cry, “Any wood to cut?” No, it would be better to stay in the realm of Aprildeath (now he was sure that the word, which was in his mind only, was understood, and of course used, by everyone), than to go down there, in the rain-soaked cities, a hapless woodcutter run aground on barred air-holes always covered with a kind of black dust (once in the city of Shkoder he had seen a mountaineer splitting firewood by a barred ventilator of that sort). No, never — better Aprildeath.

One morning, on the next-to-the-last day of March, as he went down the stone stairway of the Kulla , he found himself face to face with his father. He wanted to avoid having a silence settle upon them, but it did. And from behind that silence, as if from behind a wall, these words came:

“Well, Gjorg, what did you want to tell me?”

He answered, “Father, I’d like to go and wander around during the days I have left.”

His father looked into his eyes for a long moment, saying nothing. Really, Gjorg thought sleepily, it’s not important. At bottom, it wasn’t worth wrangling again with his father over that. They had argued enough, without speaking, up to this very day. Two weeks earlier, two weeks later, that made no real difference. He could do without seeing the mountains. To tell the truth, the preference that he had expressed was foolish. He started to say, no, it’s useless, father, but his father had already gone upstairs.

He came down again in a few moments, a purse in his hand. Compared to the purse that had held the money for the blood-tax, it was quite small. His father handed it to him.

“Go on, Gjorg. And have a good trip.”

Gjorg took the purse.