Ismail Kadare - Broken April

Several times he thought he had picked up their traces, but he lost them again. The approach of death made him wish even more for that meeting. And the long way he had come also sharpened his hunger to see her.

One day he saw a man in the distance who appeared to be riding a mule. It turned out to be the steward of the blood from the Kulla of Orosh, travelling God knows where. Having gone a little farther, Gjorg turned his head, as if to make sure that it was the steward of the blood. The other man had also turned around to look at him. “What’s the matter with him?” Gjorg thought.

Once someone told him that he had seen a carriage that was just like Gjorg’s description, but it was empty. Another time, someone described the carriage’s appearance with great accuracy, and even the head of the beautiful traveller, whose hair, through the window, had seemed auburn to some people and nut-brown to others.

At least she’s still here, on the High Plateau, he thought. At least she hasn’t yet gone down to the plain.

Meanwhile, the month of April was wearing on swiftly. The days went on, one after the other, without a pause, and the month that even without the coming end of his truce seemed to him the shortest of the year, was getting shorter, wearing itself out swiftly.

He did not know in what direction he ought to travel. Sometimes he wasted time on the wrong road, and sometimes he went back, not by design, to a place where he had already been. His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tormented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short.

The Vorpsis went on with their trip. Bessian looked at his wife from the side. Her features were somewhat drawn, and she was a little pale, which made her look only the more desirable, as had happened a few days ago. She is tired out, he thought, even though she won’t admit it. Actually, during all those days he had been waiting to hear her say at last the words that would have been so natural, “Oh, I’m so tired.” He had waited for those words impatiently, feverishly, the remedy for their trouble, but she had not said them. Her face pale, she looked out at the road in silence, or very nearly. As for her expression, which even when she was angry or humiliated had always seemed understandable to him, he now found that he had no clue to what it might mean. If only her eyes expressed annoyance, or worse, coldness. But there was something else in her eyes. In some way her look was empty at its center and only the edges were still there.

Seated side by side, they rarely spoke. Sometimes he tried to create a bit of warmth, but fearing that he might put himself in a position of inferiority, he did that with great discretion. The worst of it was that he felt quite unable to be angry at her. In his relations with women he had noticed that anger and quarrelling could at times bring about a sudden resolution of static situations that had seemed hopeless, as a storm can clear away an oppressively humid atmosphere. But there was something in the way that her eyes were set that defended her against anyone else’s anger. Something like the eyes of pregnant women. At one moment he even wondered — almost aloud — can she be expecting a child? But his mind, mechanically, reckoned up the time that had passed, and this disposed of his last hope. Bessian suppressed a sigh that he did not want her to hear, and he went on looking at the countryside. Night was falling.

For a little while that mood stayed with him, and when he began to think actively again, his mind brought him back to the same place. If only she would tell him that she had no heart for this trip, that she felt terribly disappointed, that his notion to spend their honeymoon on the High Plateau had proved to be idiotic, that they would do well to go back at once, this very day, this instant. But when he made a vague allusion to their leaving early, so as to give her a chance to express that wish, she said, “As you like. But in any case, please don’t feel troubled on my account.”

Of course the idea of breaking off their trip and going home tormented him more and more, but he entertained a vague hope that something might still be saved. Indeed, he felt that if something were to be saved, that could only happen while they were on the High Plateau, and that once they went down there would be no chance of a remedy.

Now it was full night and he could not see her face. Two or three times he leaned towards the window, but he could not tell where they were. A little later the moon shed its light on the road and he put his head close to the glass. He stayed a long while in that position, and the vibration of the cold pane entered his forehead and went all through his body. In the moonlight the road looked like glass to him. The silhouette of a small church slid off to his left. Then a water-mill loomed up, and one might think that in this waste it had been built to grind snow rather than corn. His hand sought his wife’s hand on the seat.

“Diana,” he said softly, “look out there. I think this is a road protected by the bessa .”

She put her face to the windowpane. Still speaking softly, using few words, and imposing upon them an order that seemed to him less and less natural, he explained to her what a road protected by the bessa was. He felt that the icy moonlight helped him with his task.

Then, when his words were spent, he moved his head towards her neck and kissed her timidly. The moonlight grazed her knees a number of times. She did not move, she came no closer nor did she draw away from him. Her body gave off still the odor of the perfume that he loved, and with an effort he repressed a groan. His last hope was that something would let go inside her. He hoped to hear a sob from her, if only a faint one, or at least a sigh. But she did not relinquish her strange attitude, silent but not completely, desolate as a field strewn with stars might be desolate. “O Lord,” he said to himself, “what is happening to me?”

The sky was only partly overcast. The horses trotted lightly on the ill-paved road. It was the Road of the Cross. From behind the glass, Bessian looked out on a landscape grown familiar to him. Except that this time, here and there, in places close to him and far away, it lay under a bluish coverlet. The snow had begun to melt, it wore away from the bottom up, from its contact with the soil, leaving above the hollow thus formed a kind of crust that scarcely melted at all.

“What day is it?” Diana asked.

Surprised, he looked at her for a moment before he replied.

“The eleventh.”

She seemed about to say something. Speak to me, he thought. Please speak. Hope invaded him like a hot vapor. Say anything, but speak to me.

Her lips that he was watching out of the corner of his eye moved again to say in a different way perhaps the words she had not spoken.

“Do you remember that mountaineer we saw the day that we were on our way to the prince?”

“Yes,” he said, “of course.”

What did that “of course” mean, spoken so naturally? For a moment he pitied himself, without knowing why. Perhaps because he had been so eager to keep this exchange going at any cost. Perhaps, too, for a different reason that he could not specify just then.

“The truce he had been granted was to end around mid-April, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, “something like that. Yes, that’s right, just in mid-April.”

“I don’t know why that came to mind,” she said, still looking out of the window. “It just came, for no good reason.”