Ismail Kadare - Broken April

From that moment the whole house sprang to life. The silence that had stifled it was suddenly filled with music. And its grim walls seemed to soften.

He would already have done his duty, and he would be at peace, now, shut up in the tower of refuge, or still more at peace under the earth, had not something happened. From a far-off Banner, an aunt of theirs who had married there came unexpectedly. Anxious, distraught, she had crossed seven or eight mountain ranges and as many valleys to stop the bloodshed. Gjorg was the last man in the family after his father, she said. “Look, they’ll kill Gjorg, and then they’ll kill one of the Kryeqyqe, then it will be the turn of Gjorg’s father, and the Berisha family will be extinct. Don’t do it. Don’t let the oak tree wither. Ask for the right to pay the blood-money instead.”

At first nobody would even listen, then they fell silent, they let her speak, and at last there was a lull in which they neither agreed nor disagreed with what she proposed. They were tired, but Gjorg’s aunt gave no sign of tiring. Keeping up the struggle day and night, sleeping now in this house and now in that, sometimes with her cousins and sometimes with her immediate family, she finally gained her point: after seventy years of death and mourning, the Berishas decided to seek blood settlement with the Kryeqyqes.

The request for blood settlement — so rare in the mountains — caused a sensation in the village and throughout the Banner. Everything was done to ensure that the prescriptions of the Code were scrupulously observed. The arbiters, together with friends and kinsmen of the Berisha, who were called the “masters of the blood,” went to the home of the murderer, that is, to the Kryeqyqe, to eat the blood-compensation meal. So they ate the noon meal with the murderer in keeping with the custom, and settled the blood price that the Kryeqyqes would have to pay. After this it only remained for Gjorg’s father, the master of the blood, to carve a cross with hammer and chisel on the murderer’s door and for them to exchange a drop of blood with each other, at which point the reconciliation would be regarded as having been established forever. But that money never came, for an aged uncle kept the business from being settled in that way. After the meal, while the men, according to custom, were going through every room in the house, stamping their feet, a rite signifying that the last shadow of the feud must be driven out of every corner of the house, suddenly Gjorg’s old uncle shouted, “No!” He was a quiet old man who had never called attention to himself in the clan, and certainly the last person among those present of whom one might expect such a thing. Everyone was dumbfounded, and every eye, every neck that had been raised at the same time that their feet had risen to stamp again on the floor, all fell softly, as if on cotton batting. “No,” the old uncle said again. Then the priest who was there as the chief mediator waved his hand. He said, “More blood must flow.”

Gjorg, who for a time had been almost ignored, now found himself once more with all eyes upon him. Yet with the return of his old trouble, from which he had escaped momentarily, he felt a certain satisfaction. It seemed that this satisfaction came from the sense that everyone was interested in him. Now he felt that he could not say which life was better, a quiet life dusted over with forgetfulness and excluded from the machinery of the blood feud, or that other life, the life of danger, but with a lightning bolt of grief that ran through it like a quivering seam. He had tasted both, and if someone had said to him now, “Choose one or the other,” Gjorg would certainly have hesitated. Perhaps it took years to get used to peace, just as it had taken so many years to get used to its absence. The mechanism of the blood feud was such that even as it freed you, it kept you bound to it in spirit for a long time.

In the days that followed the failure of the attempted settlement, when in the sky that had been empty for a little while the clouds of danger massed again, Gjorg asked himself often whether that attempt at reconciliation had been for the best or not, and he had no answer. The advantage had been that it had given him another year of free life, but in other respects it had been disastrous in that now he had to reaccustom himself to the life from which he had broken away, to the idea of killing someone. Soon he would have to become a justicer, as the Code called those who killed to avenge the dead. The justicers were a kind of vanguard of the clan, the ones who carried out the killings, but also the first to be killed in the blood feud. When it was the turn of the opposing clan to wreak vengeance, they tried to do so by killing the other clan’s justicer. Only if that were not possible would they mark down another man in place of him. During seventy years of enmity for the Kryeqyqe family, the Berishas had produced twenty-two justicers, most of whom had been killed by a bullet later. The justicers were the flower of a clan, its marrow, and its chief memorial. Many things were forgotten in the life of the clan, men and events alike covered with dust; only the justicers, tiny, inextinguishable flames on the graves of the clan, were never effaced from its memory.

Summer came and went, more swiftly than in any other year. The Berishas hurried to finish the work in the fields, so that after the killing they could shut themselves up in their kulla . Gjorg experienced a kind of quiet bitterness, something like what a young man might feel on the eve of his wedding day.

At last, at the end of October, he fired at Zef Kryeqyqe, without managing to kill him. He only wounded him in the jawbone. Then came the doctors of the Code, whose business it was to assess the fine to be paid by the man who inflicted a wound, and since this was a head wound, they valued it at three purses of groschen , which amounted to half the price of a killing. This meant that the Berishas could choose either to pay the fine or to regard the wound as representing one-half of their vengeance. In the latter case, if they did not pay the fine but treated the wound as a part settlement of the blood that was owed, then they had no right to kill a Kryeqyqe, because half the blood had already been taken. They had the right to inflict a wound only.

Naturally, the Berishas did not agree to reckon the wound as a part payment. Though the fine was heavy, they dug down into their savings and paid it so that the blood account remained intact.

As long as the matter of the fine to be paid for the wound was still going on, Gjorg saw that his father’s eyes were darkened by a veil of scorn and bitterness. They seemed to say, not only did you draw out the business of taking revenge for so long, but now you’re driving us to rack and ruin.

Gjorg himself felt that all this had been brought about by his hesitation, which had made his hand tremble at the last moment. To tell the truth, he could not tell if his hand had really trembled when he took aim, or if he had purposely dropped the front sight of his weapon from the man’s forehead to the lower portion of his face.

All this was followed by apathy. Life seemed to mark time. The wounded man suffered at home for a long while. The bullet had broken his jawbone, they said, and infection had set in. The winter was long and more dismal than ever before. Over the placid snow (the old men said that no one could remember the snow being so quiet — not one avalanche), the wind made a slight whistling sound as unchanging as the snow. Zef of the Kryeqyqe, the sole object of Gjorg’s life, went on languishing in bed, and Gjorg felt like a man out of work, wandering about uselessly.

It really felt as if that winter would never end. And the very moment when they learned that the wounded man was getting better, Gjorg fell ill. Sick at heart, he would have borne martyrdom so as not to have to take to his bed before he had carried out his mission, but it was quite impossible. He turned pale as wax, kept on his feet as long as he could, then collapsed. He was bedridden for two months while Zef Kryeqyqe, taking advantage of Gjorg’s illness, began to walk about the village free as air. From the corner of the second storey of the kulla where he lay, Gjorg looked out, scarcely thinking at all, at the patch of landscape framed by the window. Beyond that stretched the world whitened by the snow, a world to which nothing bound him anymore. For a long time he had felt himself a stranger in that world, absolutely superfluous, and if outside his window people sill expected anything of him, it was only in terms of the murder he was to do.