Ismail Kadare - Broken April

“For no good reason,” he repeated. Those words seemed to him to be dangerous as a ring with poison in it. Somewhere inside him a knot of rage was forming. So you did all that for no good reason? For nothing, just to torture me? But the wave of anger toppled and broke at once.

Two or three times in these last days she had turned her head to look at the young mountaineers that they passed on the road. He understood that she thought she had recognized the young man who had been at the inn, but he attached no importance to that. And now that she had mentioned him, he still felt that way.

The carriage stopped suddenly, interrupting his train of thought.

“What is it?” he said, to no one in particular.

The coachman, who had climbed down from the box, appeared a moment later near the window. His arm extended, he was pointing at the road. Only then did Bessian see an old mountain woman squatting by the roadside. She was looking at them, and she seemed to be muttering something. Bessian opened the carriage door.

“There’s an old woman over there by the roadside. She says that she can’t move,” the coachman said.

Bessian stepped down from the carriage, and after taking a few steps for the sake of his stiff legs, he went over to the old woman, who now and again was crying out softly while clasping her knee with her hands.

“What’s the matter, good mother?” Bessian asked.

“Oh, it’s this accursed cramp,” the old woman said. “I’ve been rooted here since morning, my child.”

Like all the mountain women of that district, she wore a cloth dress decorated with embroidery, and a scarf on her head that showed a few wisps of grey hair.

“I have been waiting since morning for one of God’s creatures who could help me away from here.”

“Where are you from?” the coachman asked her.

“From the village over there.” The woman stretched out her arm, pointing uncertainly. “It’s not far, just along the highway.”

“Let’s take her with us,” Bessian said.

“Thank you, my son.”

With the coachman’s help, he lifted her up carefully, supporting her under her arms, and the two men led her to the carriage. Diana watched from inside the vehicle.

“Good day, daughter,” the old woman said when she was in the carriage.

“Good day, good mother,” Diana said, moving in order to give her room.

“Ah,” the old woman said as the carriage moved off, “I spent the whole morning all alone by the roadside. There wasn’t a living soul to be seen anywhere. I thought I was going to die there.”

“It’s true,” Bessian said, “this road is almost deserted. Your village is a big one, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s big,” the woman said, her face darkening,

“It’s big all right, I should say so, but what good is that?”

Bessian was looking attentively at the old woman’s features and their somber expression. For a moment he thought he detected signs of hostility towards the people of her village, because no one had come by to help her and everyone had forgotten her. But the emotion that had clouded her face was something much deeper than momentary annoyance.

“Yes, my village is quite big, but most of the men are cloistered in the towers. That’s why I was all alone, abandoned on the road, and almost died there.”

“Cloistered because of blood-vengeance?”

“Yes, my son, for blood-vengeance. Nobody has ever seen anything to match it. Well, of course people have killed one another within the village, but never anything like this.”

The old woman took a deep breath.

“Of the two hundred households of our village, only twenty are not involved in the blood-feud.”

“How can that possibly be?”

“You’ll see for yourself, my boy. The village looks as if everything had turned to stone, as if the plague had struck it.”

Bessian put his head near the window, but the village was not yet in sight.

“Two months ago,” the mountain woman said, “I myself buried a nephew, a boy beautiful as an angel.”

She began to talk about that boy, and to tell how he had been killed, but as she spoke — and this was strange — the order of the words in her sentences began to change. And not only their order but the spaces between them, as if a special atmosphere was clothing them, painful and disturbing. As happens with fruit before it is fully ripe, her language changed from its ordinary condition to quite another condition, the prelude to song or lamentation. It would seem that this is how the songs of the bards come about, Bessian thought.

He was looking fixedly at the old mountain woman. That state of feeling that preceded song was accompanied by corresponding changes in the expression of her face. In her eyes there was lamentation, but no tears. And they seemed all the more disconsolate.

The carriage entered the village, followed by the echoing clatter of its wheels on the empty road. On either side stone kullas rose up, seeming even more silent in broad daylight.

“This kulla belongs to the Shkreli, and that one, farther along, to the Krasniq, and the blood-vengeance that must be carried out is so mixed up that no one really knows which clan is the one that is supposed to take vengeance now, so much so that both families are holed up in their towers. That tower over there, the one that is three storeys high, belongs to the Vithdreq, who are feuding with the Bunga, whose kulla you can hardly see from here — the one whose walls are made partly of black stone. And those are the towers of the Karakaj and the Dodanaj, who are feuding, and each of those families has carried out two coffins through their doors this spring. As for those other kullas over that way, in the same line and facing each other, they belong to the Ukas and the Kryezeze, but since they are within rifle-shot, not just the men of each house but even the women and the young girls open fire on one another from inside their walls and do not go out.”

The mountain woman went on talking in this way while the two outlanders turned to this window and that in an attempt to grasp the meaning of this strange form of civic life governed by the blood-feud as she described it to them. There was no sign of life in the heavy silence of those kullas . The pallid sunlight falling obliquely on their stonework only emphasized their desolate air.

They set down the old woman not far from the center of the village, and they accompanied her to her own kulla . Then the carriage started off again through that stone kingdom, that looked as if it were under a spell. And just imagine that there are people behind those walls and their narrow loopholes, Bessian thought. There are ardent young women and young wives. And for a moment it seemed to him that despite that stiff carapace he could feel the pulsing of life, fearfully intense and beating against the walls with Beethovian power. The outside, however, the walls, the rows of loopholes, the pallid sunlight falling upon them, gave nothing away. And suddenly he cried out to himself, what is all that to you? You’d better concern yourself with your wife’s unyielding stiffness. He felt rage rising swiftly in him, and he turned to Diana to break that unbearable silence once and for all, to speak to her, to demand an explanation to the very last detail, of the mute riddle of her conduct towards him.

It was not the first time that he had been on the point of doing that. Dozens of times he had rehearsed what he would say, from the most gentle appeal, Diana, what’s the matter? Tell me what’s troubling you, to the harshest reproofs, of the kind one can’t compose without the word “devil”—what the devil is wrong with you? What the devil do you mean by that? Oh, go to the devil! In these cases, he found, that word was irreplaceable. And right now, in that haze of rage that was upon him, it was the first word that occurred to him, ready to be a part of any sentence whatever, glad to be of use, eager to take part in the argument. Well, just as in all those other times, not only could he not use that word against her, but like a man who has made a mistake and means to make amends and be responsible for the consequences, he used it against himself. He was still turned towards her, and instead of speaking harshly to her, he said to himself, what the devil is wrong with you?