“Gjorg,” the stranger replied in a rather unsteady, cracked voice, like someone who had not spoken for a very long time.
Bessian slipped down into the seat beside his wife.
“He killed a man a few days ago, and now he’s coming back from Orosh.”
“I heard,” she said quietly, still looking out of the window.
From where he stood as if rooted to the ground, the mountaineer stared feverishly at the young woman.
“How pale he is.”
“His name is Gjorg,” said Bessian, settling into his seat. Diana’s head was still quite close to the window. Outside, the innkeeper was lavishing advice on the coachman.
“Do you know the way? Be careful at the Graves of the Krushks. People always go wrong there. Instead of taking the right fork they take the left.”
The carriage began to move. The stranger’s eyes, that seemed very dark, perhaps because of the paleness of his face, followed the square of window where Diana’s face appeared. She too, even though she knew that she should not be looking at him still, did not have the strength to turn her eyes from the wayfarer who had loomed up suddenly at the side of the road. As the coach drew away, several times she wiped away the mist that her breath left upon the glass, but it condensed again at once as if anxious to draw a curtain between them.
When the carriage had rolled a good distance, and not a soul could be seen outside, she said, leaning back wearily in her seat, “You were right.”
Bessian studied his wife for a moment with a certain surprise. He was about to ask her what he had been right about, but something stopped him. To tell the truth, all during the long morning’s trip he had had the feeling that on some matters she did not agree with him. And now that she was adopting his views of her own accord, it seemed superfluous, not to say imprudent, to ask her to explain herself. The main thing was that she had not found the journey a disappointment. And she had just reassured him on that point. Bessian felt enlivened. It seemed to him that he was beginning, if only vaguely, to understand more or less what it was that he had been right about.
“Did you notice how pale that mountaineer was, the one who killed a man a few days ago?” asked Bessian, staring God knows why at the ring on one of her fingers.
“Yes, he was dreadfully pale,” Diana said.
“Who can tell what doubts, what hesitations he had to overcome before setting out to commit that crime. What are Hamlet’s doubts, compared with this Hamlet of our mountains?”
The look she gave her husband was one of gratitude.
“You feel it’s a bit much for me to call up the Danish prince in connection with a mountaineer of the High Plateau.”
“Not at all,” Diana said. “You put things so well, and you know how much I value that gift of yours.”
The suspicion crossed his mind that it was perhaps that very gift that had won Diana for him.
“Hamlet was spurred to vengeance by his father’s ghost,” Bessian went on excitedly. “But can you imagine what dreadful ghost rises up before a mountaineer to spur him on to vengeance?”
Diana’s eyes, grown enormously wide, looked at him fixedly.
“In houses that have a death to avenge, they hang up the victim’s bloodstained shirt at a corner of the tower, and they do not take it down until the blood has been redeemed. Can you imagine how terrible that must be? Hamlet saw his father’s ghost two or three times, at midnight, and for only a few moments, while the shirt that calls for vengeance in our kullas stays there day and night, for whole months and seasons; the bloodstains become yellow and people say, ‘Look, the dead man is impatient for revenge.’ ”
“Perhaps that’s why he was so pale.”
“Who?”
“The mountaineer we saw just now.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
For a moment Bessian thought that Diana had uttered the word “pale” as if she had said “beautiful,” but he dismissed the idea at once.
“And what will he do now?”
“Who?”
“Well, that mountaineer.”
“Ah, what will he do?” Bessian shrugged his shoulders. “If he killed his man four or five days ago, as the innkeeper said, and if he has been granted the long bessa, that is to say thirty days, then he still has twenty-five days of normal life before him.” Bessian smiled sourly, but his face was still expressionless. “It’s like a last authorization to go on leave in this world. The well-known saying that the living are only the dead on leave has a very real significance in our mountain country.”
“Yes,” she said, “he looked just like a man on leave from the other world, with the insignia of death on his sleeve.” Diana gave a deep sigh. “You told me so—just like Hamlet.”
Bessian looked through the window with a fixed smile; only the upper part of his face smiled.
“And it has to be said, too, that once Hamlet was sure of what it was he had to do, he carried out his murder in hot blood. As for him—” Bessian waved his hand at the stretch of road they were leaving behind them—“he is moved by a machine that is foreign to him, and occasionally even to the times he lives in.”
Diana listened to him attentively, even though some of the import of his meaning escaped her.
“A man must have the will of a Titan to turn towards death on orders that come from a place so far away,” Bessian said. “For, in point of fact, at times the orders come from a really distant place, the place of generations long gone.”
Diana took a deep breath again.
“Gjorg,” she said softly. “That is his name, isn’t it?”
“Whose?”
“That mountaineer, of course . . . at the inn.”
“Oh, yes, Gjorg. That’s his name all right. He really impressed you, didn’t he?”
She nodded her head.
Several times it looked as if it was going to rain, but the raindrops were lost in space before they could reach the earth. Only a few splashed on the carriage window and these quivered on the pane like tears. Diana had been watching them for some moments, and the glass itself seemed troubled.
She did not feel tired at all now. On the contrary, as if she had been unburdened within her, she felt that she had somehow grown transparent, but it was a cold sensation, not at all pleasant.
“This has been a long winter,” Bessian said. “It simply refuses to yield its place to spring.”
Diana was still looking at the landscape. There was something about the scene that disturbed one’s attention, that emptied one’s mind—by diluting one’s thoughts, as it seemed. Diana thought about the examples of Ali Binak’s subtle interpretations of the Kanun that she had heard the innkeeper recount. Actually, she remembered only certain facets or fragments of those reports, moving slowly along on the current of her thoughts. For example, two large doors of two houses were ordered lifted from their hinges and exchanged one for the other. One of those doors had been pierced by a bullet on a summer evening. The master of the house, wronged in that way, had to avenge himself for the affront, but how was he to go about it? A door holed by a bullet is not a cause for blood vengeance under the Code, and yet the offense must nonetheless be atoned for. To decide the matter, they appealed to Ali Binak, who declared that the door of the offender must be taken from its hinges and replaced by the one with the bullet hole, which that man was to keep forever.
Diana imagined Ali Binak going from village to village and from banner to banner, escorted by his two assistants. It was hard to imagine a more curious group. And, on another night, a man who had a friend visit him unexpectedly, sent his wife to the neighbors to borrow some victuals. Hours passed, and the woman did not return, but the husband controlled himself and hid his disquiet until the morning. Well, she did not come back on that day or the next. Something without precedent had happened on the High Plateau: the three brothers who lived in the neighboring house had kept her by force, each of them spending one night with her.
Diana imagined herself in the wife’s p
lace, and she shuddered. She shook her head as if to rid herself of the horrible thought, but she could not free herself of it.
On the morning following the third night, the woman returned at last, and she told her husband everything. But what could the injured man do? It was a most extraordinary incident, and the affront could only be washed away in blood. The clan to which the three depraved brothers belonged was large and powerful, and if a feud were to start, the family of the wronged man would be doomed to annihilation. Besides, it turned out that the husband’s strong point was not courage. So, given this unusual case, he asked for something that a mountaineer rarely seeks, having recourse to judgment by a council of elders. The judgment was hard to arrive at. It was awkward to pronounce on a matter that had no precedent in the memory of the people of the Rrafsh, and it was equally difficult to fix a punishment for the three brothers. So they called for Ali Binak, and he ended by proposing two courses to the guilty men, who were to choose between the two. Either the three brothers would send their wives in turn to spend a night with the wronged husband, or they must choose one among them who would pay for the crime with his blood, and whose death could not be avenged thereafter. The brothers held a counsel and chose the second course: one of them would pay with his life for what they had done: the lot fell on the second brother.
Diana imagined the death of the second brother in slow motion as if in a film. He had asked the council of elders to grant him the thirty-day truce. Then, on the thirtieth day, the wronged man lay in wait for him and killed him with no trouble at all.
“And then?” Bessian had asked. “Then, nothing,” the innkeeper said. “He lived on this earth, and then he disappeared—all that for nothing, for a whim.”
Diana, on the edge of sleep, thought about the time that was left to the mountaineer named Gjorg, whose fate was already settled, and she sighed.
“Look, there’s a tower of refuge,” Bessian said, tapping the window pane with his finger.
Diana looked where her husband was pointing.
“That one over there, standing by itself, can you see it? The one with the narrow loopholes.”
“How grim it looks,” Diana said.
She had often heard talk about those famous towers, where the killers might take refuge at the end of the truce so as not to put their families in danger. But this was the first time that she had seen one.
“The tower loopholes look out on all the roads in the village, so that nobody can come near without being seen by the men immured within,” Bessian told her. “And there is always one loophole that faces the church door, because of the possibility of an offer to make peace, but those cases are very few.”
“And how long do people stay shut up inside?” Diana asked.
“Oh, for years, until new occurrences change the relations between the blood that has been shed and the blood that has been avenged.”
“The blood that has been shed, the blood that has been avenged,” Diana repeated. “You speak of those things as if they were bank transactions.”
Bessian smiled.
“At bottom, in one sense, those things are not very different. The Kanun is cold calculation.”
“That’s really dreadful,” Diana said, and Bessian could not tell if she had said that about the tower of refuge or about his last remark. In fact, she had pressed her face against the glass in order to see the dark tower again.
That’s where that mountaineer with the pale face might take refuge, she thought. But he might be killed before he could shut himself up inside that stony mass.
Gjorg. She said the name to herself and she felt that an emptiness was spreading inside her chest. Something was coming apart painfully there, but there was a certain sweetness in it.
Diana sensed that she was losing the defenses that protect a young woman from the very idea of having strong feelings about another man during the time of her engagement or when she is very much in love. This was the first time since she had known Bessian that she allowed herself to think quite freely about someone else. She thought of him, the man who was still on leave in this world, as Bessian had put it, a very brief leave, scarcely three weeks and each passing day shortened it further, as he wandered in the mountains with that black ribbon on his sleeve, the sign of his blood debt that he seemed to be paying even beforehand—so pale he was—chosen by death, like a tree to be felled in the forest. And that was what his eyes had said, fixed on hers: I am here only a short time, foreign woman.
Never had a man’s stare troubled Diana so much. Perhaps, she thought, it was the nearness of death, or the sympathy awakened in her by the beauty of the young mountaineer. And now she could scarcely tell whether the few drops of water on the glass were not tears in her eyes.
“What a long day,” she said aloud, and was surprised at her own words.
“Do you feel tired?” Bessian asked.
“A little.”
“We should be there in an hour, or an hour and a quarter at most.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently to him. She let him do that, not resisting, but she did not make herself lighter so as to let him pull her closer. He noticed, but stirred by the odor of her neck, he leaned his head towards her ear and whispered, “How are we going to sleep tonight?”
She shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “How would I know?”
“At least the tower of Orosh is the kulla of a prince, and I think they will put us in the same room,” he went on softly, almost conspiratorially
He looked sidelong at her face, and his expression was like the insinuating caress of his voice. But she kept her eyes before her and did not answer. Unsure whether to be offended or not, he relaxed his arm somewhat, and he would surely have taken it away completely if at the last moment, perhaps because she had guessed his intention or perhaps by accident, she had not asked him a question.
“What?”
“I asked you if the prince of Orosh is a blood relation of the royal family.”
“No, not at all,” he replied.
“Then how is it that he is called a prince?”
Bessian frowned a little.
“It’s rather complicated,” he said. “To tell the truth, he’s not a prince, despite the fact that they call him one in certain circles and the people of the High Plateau call him “Prenk,” which means prince exactly. But mostly they call him Kapidan, even though. . . .”
Bessian remembered he had not smoked a cigarette for quite a while. Like all those who smoke only now and then, it took some time for him to take the cigarette from the pack and the match from the little box. Diana felt that he did this whenever he wanted to put off a difficult explanation. And indeed the explanation he began to give her about the Kulla of Orosh (an explanation that he had left unfinished in Tirana, when from the prince’s chancellory, in stilted language—really rather strange—an invitation to the Kulla of Orosh had reached him, saying that he would be welcome at any season of the year and at any hour of the day or the night) was no clearer than the one he had cut off then in Tirana, drinking a cup of tea, seated on the sofa in his studio. But perhaps that came from the fact that there was something unclear in everything that had to do with the kulla where they would soon be guests.
“He’s not exactly a prince,” Bessian said, “and yet, in a way, he’s more than a prince, not only because of his lineage, much older than that of the royal family, but chiefly because of the way he rules over all the High Plateau.”
He went on explaining that the prince’s power was of a very special kind, founded on the Kanun and unlike any other regime in the world. Time out of mind, neither police nor government had had any authority over the High Plateau. The castle itself had neither a police force nor governmental powers, but the High Plateau was nonetheless wholly under its control. That had been true in the time of the Turks, and even earlier, and that state of affairs had gone on under the Serbian occupation and the Austrian occupation, and then under the first republic, and the secon
d, and now under the monarchy. Some years ago a group of deputies tried to put the High Plateau under the authority of the national government, but the attempt failed. The partisans of Orosh had said that we should act so that the Kanun would extend its sway over the entire country instead of trying to uproot it in the mountains, though of course no power in the world could achieve that.
Diana asked Bessian a question about the princely origins of the master of the Kulla, and he had the feeling that she did that in the naive way that a woman tries to find out if the jewelry someone is about to give her is really gold.
He told her that he did not believe in the princely origins of the lords of Orosh. At the very least, that matter had not been established. Their origins were lost in the mists of time. According to Bessian, there were two possibilities: either they were descendants of a very old but not very distinguished feudal family, or else they were a family that, generation after generation, had dealt in interpreting the Kanun. It was well known that a dynasty of that kind, which was rather like a temple of the law, an institution halfway between oracles and repositories of legal tradition, could in time amass great power, until their origins were quite forgotten and they exercised absolute dominion.
“I said that the family interpreted the Kanun,” Bessian went on, “because to this day, the Kulla of Orosh is recognized as the guardian of that very Kanun.”
“But isn’t the family itself outside the Code?” Diana asked. “I think you told me that once.”
“Yes, that is the case. It is the only family that is not under the jurisdiction of the Kanun.”
“And there are all sorts of grim legends about it, aren’t there?”
“Yes, of course. Naturally, a castle as old as this is bound to have an atmosphere of mystery.”
“How interesting,” Diana said, gaily this time, cuddling up to him as before. “It’s so exciting to be visiting there, isn’t it?”