Ismail Kadare - Broken April

Gjorg dismissed its image in his mind and began to think of his family. They would be waiting for him anxiously before noon, but he could not get there in time. Towards midday he was going to have to break off his journey and hide somewhere to wait for nightfall. Now he was a man stained with blood, and he could travel only by night and never on the main roads. The Kanun , far from regarding that precaution as a sign of fear, held it to be a sign of prudence and courage, for not only did it preserve the life of the murderer, but also hindered his moving about too freely and driving the family of his victim wild. While feeling satisfaction that he had done his duty, the murderer must also feel a sense of guilt before the world. In any case, at noon he would have to find a hiding place to hole up in until nightfall. These last days, in the inns where he had stopped to spend the night, more than once he had had the impression that he had seen the fleeting shape of a member of the Kryeqyqe family. Perhaps it was an illusion, but perhaps he had seen aright, and someone was on his heels in order to kill him as soon as his bessa was over, at a time when he had not yet become fully aware of the need to protect himself.

Whatever I do, I must be careful, he thought, and for the third time he lifted his eyes towards the sky. At that very moment he thought he heard a sound in the distance. He stopped, trying to find where it came from, but he could not. He walked on, and he heard the sound again. It was a muffled rumbling that alternately swelled and sank. It must be the sound of a waterfall, he thought. And that was indeed what it was. As he came nearer, he stopped, fascinated. In all his life, he had never seen a more wonderful waterfall. It was different from all those he had ever seen. Without throwing up foam or spurting, it flowed evenly along a dark-green rock, like thick massed tresses, that reminded Gjorg of the hair of the beautiful traveller from the capital. Under the sun’s rays you could easily mistake one for the other.

He stayed a while on the small wooden bridge, under which the waters that had fallen from the rock kept on flowing, but now the current was jumbled and without majesty. Gjorg’s eyes were fixed on the waterfall. A week ago, in an inn where he had spent the night, he had heard someone say that there were some countries in the world that drew electric light from waterfalls. A young mountaineer told two of the guests that he had been told that by a man who had heard it from some other one, and the guests listened to him while saying over and over, “Making light out of water? You’re off your rocker, friend. Water isn’t petroleum, you know, to make light with. If water drowns fire, how could it kindle fire?” But the mountaineer persisted. He had heard it explained just as he had told them, he wasn’t inventing anything. They made light by means of water, but not with just any old water, because water is as different as men are. You could only do that with the noble water of waterfalls. “The people who told you that one are pretty crazy, and you’re crazier still for having believed them,” the guests said. But that didn’t keep the mountaineer from saying that if that were to happen, if that were to happen on the High Plateau, then (once again according to what the man had told him, and who had received the information from yet another source) the Kanun would become somewhat more gentle and the Rrafsh would be rinsed somewhat of the death that flowed through it, just as poisoned lands got rid of their salt when they were irrigated. “Fool, you fool,” said the guests, but Gjorg himself, God knows why, believed what the unknown source had said.

With an effort he turned his back on the waterfall. The road stretched away endlessly, almost in a straight line, and at either extremity it was lightly tinted with purple.

Again, he looked up at the sky. Just a little while now and his bessa would be over, he himself would be leaving the time of the Kanun . Leaving time, he said to himself. It seemed strange that someone could leave his time. Just a little while now, he said, looking at the sky. Now the crushed roses beyond the clouds had grown a little darker. Gjorg smiled bitterly, as if to say, There’s no help for it!

Meanwhile, the coach that was carrying Bessian and Diana was rolling along the Grand Road of the Banners, the longest of all those roads that furrowed the High Plateau. The peaks half-whitened by the snow receded farther and farther, and Bessian, looking at them, was thinking that at last they were leaving the kingdom of death. Out of the corner of his right eye, he could sometimes catch sight of his wife’s face in profile. Pale, rigid in a way that was heightened rather than lessened by the jolting of the carriage, she was frightening to him. She seemed strange to him, mad, a body that had left its soul in the high country.

What the devil was I thinking of when I decided to take her to that accursed High Plateau? he said for the hundredth time. She had had just one brush with the High Plateau, and that had been enough to take her away from him. It had been enough for the monstrous mechanism merely to touch her, to ravish her away, to take her captive, or at best to make her a mountain nymph.

The squeaking of the carriage wheels were appropriate music for his doubts, his conjectures, his remorse. He had put his happiness to the test, as if he had wanted to find out whether he deserved it or not. He had directed that fragile happiness from its first spring season to the gates of hell. And it had not withstood the test.

Sometimes, when he felt calmer, he told himself that no other attachment, no third person would ever be able to change in the slightest Diana’s feeling for him. If that had really come about (Lord, how bitter those words were: really come about), it had nothing to do with any third person, but that something grand and terrible had intervened. Something dark, having to do with the ordeal of millions of souls during long centuries, and for that very reason seemingly irreparable. Like a butterfly touched by a black locomotive, she had been stricken by the ordeal of the High Plateau, and had been overcome.

Sometimes, calm in a way that frightened him, he thought that perhaps he had had to pay that tribute to the High Plateau. A tribute because of his writings, for the fairies and mountain nymphs that he had described in them, and for the little loge where he had watched the play in which the actors were a whole people drowned in blood.

But perhaps that punishment might have sought him out anywhere, even in Tirana, he thought consolingly. For the High Plateau sent out its waves afar, over all the country and for all time.

He turned up his coatsleeve and looked at his watch. It was noon.

Gjorg raised his head and looked for the stain that the sun made above the expanse of cloud. It’s just noon, he thought. His bessa was at an end.

He jumped nimbly onto the fallows that bordered the highroad. Now he had to find a safe place in which he could wait for nightfall. On both sides of the road, the country was deserted, but he could not go on walking on the highroad. That would have seemed to him to violate the Kanun .

Around him was a flat expanse that went on and on. In the distance were cultivated fields and some trees, but he could not see the smallest hollow nor even some brush that would give him any cover. As soon as I can find a hiding-place, I’ll be safe, he thought, as if he wanted to convince himself that if he was putting himself in danger it was not because he was deliberately playing the fool, but because there was no shelter to be found.

The moor seemed to extend to the horizon. He felt a strange calm inside his head, or rather a dull emptiness. He was absolutely alone under the sky which the weight of the sun now seemed to tilt slightly to the west. Around him, the day was just the same, bathed in the same air and the same purple shining, although the truce was over and he had entered into another time. His eyes roamed coldly all around. Was that how it looked, the time beyond the bessa ? Eternal time, that was no longer his, without days, without seasons, without years, without a future, abstract time, to which he had no attachments of any kind. Wholly alien, it would no longer give him any sign, any hint, not even about the day when he would meet his punishment, which was somewhere in front of him, at a date and place unknown, and which would come to him by a hand equally unknown.