Broken April

  Perhaps that was why the prince had talked more than usual last night. Everyone knew that he was restrained in his speech; sometimes he only opened his mouth to welcome his guests, and usually it was other people who kept the conversation going. But last night, to everyone’s astonishment, he had broken his custom. And in whose presence? A woman’s. Not a woman—a witch. Beautiful as the fairies of the high mountains, but evil. The first mistake was to have allowed that woman to enter the men’s chamber, against all custom. The Kanun knew what it was doing in forbidding women to enter that room. But recently, worse luck, fashion had grown so powerful that one could sense the diabolical spirit even here, in the very pillar of the Kanun, at Orosh.

  Mark Ukacierra felt again the nauseous hollow in his stomach. A secret spite contributed to that sick sensation, and it wanted to vent itself, but finding no proper outlet, it turned inward to make him suffer. He wanted to vomit. In fact, he had noticed for some time now that an ill wind blowing from afar, from the cities and the low country that had long ago lost their virility, was trying to stain and infect the high country too. And it had started with the appearance in the Rrafsh of these women dressed to kill, with chestnut or auburn hair, who stirred up a lust for life—even without honor; women who traveled in carriages that rolled along swaying from side to side, carriages of corruption, accompanied by men who were men in name only. And the worst of it was that these capricious dolls were brought right into the men’s chamber, and at Orosh, no less, in the cradle of the Kanun. No, all that wasn’t just chance. Something was blighted, something was rotting away visibly around him. And he was the one who had to account for the decline of the number of killings in the blood feud. Last night, the prince had said—rancorously, looking sidelong at him—“There are some people who would like to see the Kanun of our forefathers softened.” What had the lord of Orosh meant by that look? Was it Mark Ukacierra who was responsible for the fact that the Code, and especially the blood feud, had shown signs of weakening recently? Couldn’t he smell the stench that rose from those androgynous cities? It was true that revenues from the blood tax were smaller this year, but he was not the only person responsible, any more than the fine corn crop was solely to the credit of the bailiff. If the weather had not been in our favor, then he would have seen what the harvest was like! But the year had been good and the prince had praised the bailiff. But blood was not rain falling from the sky. The reasons for its decline were obscure. Of course he had some share of responsibility for all that. But not everything was his doing. Well, if they had given him fuller powers, and if they had let him manage things his way, then, certainly, they could take him to task about the blood tax. Then he would know how to go about it. However, while his impressive title made people tremble, his powers were limited. That was why the blood-feud and everything connected with it was in jeopardy. The number of killings had fallen year after year, and the first season of the current year had been disastrous. He had sensed that, and had awaited anxiously the accounting that his assistants had drawn up for him a few days before. The results had been even worse than he had feared: the monies collected were less than seventy percent of the revenue of the corresponding period in the preceding year. And this at a time when not only the bailiff in charge of croplands but all the other managers in the Prince’s service, the bailiff for cattle and pastures, the bailiff for loans, and most of all, the bailiff for mills and mines, who attended to all the trades that required tools, from looms to forges, had payed large sums into the general treasury. As for himself, the chief bailiff (for the sums realized by the others came solely from the holdings of the castle, while his were levied upon the whole of the High Plateau) who at one time used to collect sums equal to the total of all other revenues, he now brought in only half the amount of those monies.

  That was why the look that the prince had given him at dinner last night was harsher than his words. That look seemed to say, you are the steward of the blood, and therefore you ought to be the chief instigator of feuds and acts of vengeance; you ought to be encouraging them, stirring them up, whipping them on when they flag or falter.

  But you do just the opposite. You don’t deserve your title. That was what that look meant. O Lord, Mark Ukacierra groaned as he stood by the window. Why didn’t they let him alone? Didn’t he have enough trouble?

  He tried to put aside his troubled thoughts, bent down to the lowest shelf of the bookcase, and pulling open the heavy door, took out a thick, leather-bound ledger. This was The Blood Book. For some time he leafed through the stout pages filled with dense script in double column. His eyes took in nothing, merely skimming coldly over those thousands of names, whose syllables were as alike as the pebbles of an endless beach. Here were detailed descriptions of the feuds of the entire High Plateau, the debts of death that families or clans owed to one another, the payment of those deaths by the parties concerned, the cases of vengeance not yet satisfied that would keep the feuds alive ten, twenty, sometimes one hundred and twenty years later, the unending accounts of debts and payments, of whole generations annihilated, the blood-oak (the male line, or the line of inheritance), the milk-oak (the line of the womb), blood washed away by blood, so-and-so for so-and-so, one for one, one head for another, four brace killed, fourteen, eighty, and always blood that was still to be shed; blood left over that, like the ram that leads the flock, draws after it new multitudes of the dead.

  The book was old, perhaps as old as the castle. It was complete, and it was opened when people came to consult it, people sent by their family or their clan who had been living in peace for a long time, but who suddenly—because of a doubt, a supposition, a rumor, or a bad dream—felt their tranquility shaken. Then the steward of the blood, Mark Ukacierra, like some dozens of his predecessors, would open the thick pages of the book, searching page by page and column by column the spread of the blood-oak, and stop at last at one place. “Yes, you have blood to settle. In such a year, such a month, you left this debt of blood unpaid.” In a case of that kind, the expression of the steward of the blood was one of stern reproach for the long period of forgetfulness. His eyes seemed to say, your peace has been a falsehood, unhappy man!

  But that seldom happened. Mostly, the members of a family remembered from generation to generation every failure to avenge blood with blood. They were the living memory of the clan, and forgetting such things could only occur because of quite extraordinary events with long-lasting effects, like natural catastrophes, wars, migrations, plagues, when death was devalued, losing its grandeur, its rules, its loneliness, becoming something common and familiar, ordinary, insignificant. In some such flood of death, drear and turbid, it could happen that a debt of vengeance was forgotten. But even if that happened, the book was always there, under lock and key in the Kulla of Orosh, and the years might pass, the family flourish and put out new shoots, and then one day the doubt would arise, the rumor, or the mad dream that would bring everything to life again.

  Mark Ukacierra went on leafing through the ledger. His eyes paused at the years of harvest for the blood feud, or again at the years of famine. Although he had seen the notations and compared them many, many times before, in going through them now he shook his head uncomprehendingly. That head-shaking was at once a complaint and a threat, as if he were secretly inveighing against the times gone by. Here were the years 1611-1628, that tallied the largest number of killings in the whole seventeenth century. And here was the year 1639, with the lowest count: 722 murders in all for the High Plateau. That was the dreadful year in which there were two insurrections, when seas of blood had been shed—but that was blood of another sort, not the blood of the Kanun. Then, one after the other, the years 1640 to 1690, an entire half-century in which, year by year, the blood that had once flowed in a torrent flowed scarcely at all, in droplets. One would have thought that the blood-feud was coming to an end. But just when the killings seemed to stop completely, they came back in force. The year 1691: double the previous year’s toll of vengeance.
In 1693 the number tripled. In 1694 it quadrupled. The Code had undergone a basic transformation. The duty of exacting vengeance from the perpetrator of a murder was now extended to his whole family. The last years of that century and the first of the following one were drenched in blood. That condition prevailed until the middle of the eighteenth century, at which time there was another era of drought. Then came the famine year of 1754. Then 1799. A century later, three years—1878, 1879, 1880—were years of revolutions or wars against foreigners, and the number of blood-feud killings fell. The blood spilled in the course of these wars was foreign to the Kulla of Orosh and to the Kanun, and accordingly these were the gjakhups* years.

  But the spring season of this current year could not possibly be worse. He came close to trembling when he remembered the seventeenth of March. Seventeenth of March, he said to himself. If that killing had not taken place at Brezftoht, there would have been no blood vengeance at all on that day. It would have been the first day of its kind—a blank—in a century, perhaps during two, three, five centuries, perhaps from the time of the origin of the blood feud. And now as he leafed through the ledger, it seemed to him that his hands were shaking. Look, on March 16, there were eight murders; eleven on the eighteenth; the nineteenth and the twentieth, five each; while the seventeenth had just missed being without a single death. At the very idea that such a day might come about, Mark was terror-stricken. And to imagine that it just might have happened. That dreadful thing would indeed have come to pass if a certain Gjorg from Brezftoht had not arisen and bloodied that day of the Lord. He had saved the day. So that, when he had come last night to pay the blood tax, Mark Ukacierra had looked into his eyes with compassion, with gratitude, so much so that the young man was taken aback.

  At last he set down the ledger on the highest shelf of the bottom compartment of the bookcase. For the tenth time, his eyes skimmed over the contemporary books and journals. When the person who was in charge of the collection put those works in order, sometimes he would read to Mark snatches of the writings of the enemies of the Kanun. Mark was astonished and enraged that passages of the Code and even the Kulla of Orosh were attacked almost openly. Hm, read me the rest, Mark grunted, interrupting the man. And his mounting rage caught up in its whirlwind not just the people who wrote such horrors, such shameless things, but all the people of the cities and the plains, and the cities and the lowlands themselves, not to say all the flatlands of all the countries of the world.

  Sometimes his curiosity made him listen hours on end to what was being said there, as in the case of a discussion sponsored by one of the journals, on the question of whether the Code and its severe prescriptions had the effect of inciting the blood feud or putting obstacles in its way. Certain writers held that a number of basic articles of the Kanun, like the one stating that blood was never lost and could only be redeemed by blood, were open incitements to the blood feud, and in consequence barbarous. On the other hand, some wrote that those articles, apparently monstrous, were in reality most humane, since the law of retaliation in itself tended to dissuade a possible murderer by warning him; it said: Shed no blood if you do not wish to spill your own.

  Mark could bear that kind of writing, but there were other sorts that drove him mad. One such article—absolutely criminal—that made the prince sleepless for many nights, and had even been accompanied by calculations that amounted to bookkeeping, had been published anonymously four months ago by one of those accursed journals. In the table presented were the figures, astonishingly accurate, of all the revenues under the heading of blood tax collected by the castle of Orosh in the course of the last four years; they were compared with other sources of income: those from corn, from cattle, from the sale of land, from loans at high interest—and senseless conclusions had been drawn from those figures. One of these was that, supposedly, the general decline that was the hallmark of our own era was reflected in the decay of such keystones of the Kanun as the bessa, the blood feud, the status of one’s guest, which having been at one time elements of sublimity and grandeur in Albanian life had become denatured in the course of time, changing gradually into an inhuman machine, to the point of being reduced at last, according to the author of the article, to a capitalist enterprise carried on for the sake of profit.

  The author of that article had made use of many foreign expressions that Mark could not understand, and the monk who was in charge of the library had explained them to him patiently. Such, for example, were the terms “blood industry,” “blood merchandise,” “blood-feud mechanism.” As for the title, it was monstrous: “Blood-feudology.”

  Naturally, the prince, through his agents in Tirana, had succeeded in having the journal promptly banned, but despite all his efforts, he could not learn the author’s name. The ban on the periodical did not calm Mark Ukacierra. The fact that things like that could be written at all, or even conceived by the human mind, was dreadful to him.

  The big clock on the wall struck seven. Again he drew near the windows, and standing there, his eyes staring in the direction of the high peaks, he felt his brain empty itself of his heavy thought. But, as usual, the emptiness was temporary. Slowly, his mind filled itself again with a cloudy grey mass. Something more than mist and less than thought. Something in between, troubling, enormous, incomplete. As soon as one part of it revealed itself, another covered it over immediately. And Mark felt that the state of mind that had invaded him might last for hours, even days.

  It was not the first time that his mind had frozen in that way, faced with the riddle of the High Plateau. That part of the world was the only permissible one, normal and reasonable. The other part of the world, “down there,” was a marshy hollow in the earth that gave off foul vapors and the atmosphere of degeneracy.

  Motionless at the window, as so often in the past, he tried vainly to take in by thinking of it all the endless expanse of the Rrafsh, which began in the heart of Albania and reached just beyond the frontiers of the country. All of the High Plateau, to which in a sense he was linked by the fact that the blood taxes came to him from everywhere, was nonetheless an enigma. The bailiff in charge of croplands and vineyards, and the bailiff for mines—they had an easy task: The corn or the vine stricken with rust could be detected simply by sight, and that was true, too, of the condition of the mines, whereas the fields that had fallen to him to manage were quite invisible. Every once in a while, he thought he was just about to pierce the mystery, to lay hold of it in his imagination so as to resolve it once and for all, but slowly, as the clouds move insensibly in the sky, it escaped him. Then he returned in his thought to the fields of death, in a vain struggle to discover the secret of their fertility or their barrenness. But their drought was of a different sort, often manifesting itself in wet weather and in winter, and all the more terrible by that very fact.

  Mark Ukacierra sighed. Staring at the horizon, he tried to imagine the endless spaces of the Rrafsh. The High Plateau had an abundance of streams, of deep gullies, snow, prairies, villages, churches, but none of that was of interest to him. For Mark Ukacierra, all of the great plateau was divided in two parts only—the part that engendered death, and the part that did not. The portion that bore death, with its fields, its objects, and its people, passed slowly before him in his mind, as it had often done There were tens of thousands of irrigation canals, large and small, running from west to east, or from south to north, and on their banks there had sprung up countless quarrels that gave rise to feuds; hundreds of mill-races, thousands of landmarks, and these gave birth easily to disputes, and then blood-vengeance; tens of thousands of marriages, some of which were dissolved for one reason or another, but which brought one thing only—mourning; the men of the High Plateau themselves, formidable, hot-tempered, who played with death as if they were playing a game on Sunday; and so on. As for the sterile portion of the region, it was equally vast, with its cemeteries that, satiated with death, seemed to refuse any more corpses, since murder, brawling, or mere argument were prohibited w
ithin their confines. There were the gjakhups, those persons that because of the way in which they had been killed or because of the circumstances of their death, the Kanun decreed unworthy of being avenged; the priests, who did not fall within the scope of the rules of blood vengeance; and all the women of the High Plateau, who did not fall within their scope either.

  At times, Mark had thought of mad things that he dared not confess to anyone. Oh, if only the women as well as the men were subject to the rules of blood-letting. Then he was ashamed, even terrified—but that seldom happened, only sometimes at the end of the month or the quarter, when he felt despondent because of the figures in the ledger. Weary as he was, he would try to put those ideas from him, but his mind could find no respite and he went back to them. But this time, in going back to them, it was not to blaspheme the Kanun but simply to give vent to his astonishment. He thought it very strange that weddings, which were usually occasions for joy, often brought about quarrels that led to feuding, while funerals, which were necessarily sad, never led to anything of the kind. That led him to compare the ancient blood-feuds with those of recent times. On both sides of the comparison, there was both good and bad. The old feuds, just like fields that had been tilled for a long time, were dependable, but rather cold and slow to bear. Contrarily, the new feuds were violent, and sometimes they brought about as many deaths in a single year as the old ones in two decades. But since they were not deep-rooted, they might easily be brought to a stop by a reconciliation, while those of olden times were very hard to bring to a settlement. Successive generations had been accustomed to the feuds from their cradles, and so, not being able to conceive of life without them, it never entered their minds to try to free themselves from their destined end. It was not for nothing that people said, “Blood-letting that lasts twelve years is like the oak, hard to uproot.” In any case, Mark Ukacierra had come to the conclusion that the two kinds of feud, the ancient one rooted in history, and the new one with its vitality, had somehow joined together, and the exhaustion of the one sort had affected the other. That was why for some time now, for example, it was hard to understand which of the two had begun to weaken first. O Lord, he said aloud, if things go on like this it will be my undoing.