And there was the place. A small mouranë had been heaped up during his absence. Gjorg stopped in front of it. For an instant he felt that he was about to leap towards it, pull away the stones, and spread them about on every side so as to leave no trace of it. At the same time that his brain was imagining that act, his hand was groping feverishly for a pebble on the roadway. At last he found one, and his hand, moving awkwardly as if it were dislocated, tossed the pebble onto the cairn. The stone struck it with a dull sound, rolled over two or three times on its axis and settled among the others. Gjorg kept eyeing it as if he were afraid that it would shift again, but now it seemed that it was in its natural place, as if it had been thrown there long ago. And still, Gjorg did not stir.
He stared at the cairn. Here’s what’s left of . . . of . . . (he meant to say, the other man’s life), but within him he thought, here’s what will be left of my own life.
All that torment, sleepless nights, the silent struggle with his father, his own hesitations, his brooding, his suffering, had brought about nothing more than these meaningless bare stones. He tried to leave them behind him, but he could not stir. The world about him began to dissolve swiftly, everything disappeared; he, Gjorg, and the cairn, were the only things left on the surface of the earth. Why? What had it all amounted to? The question was bare as the stones. It hurt him everywhere. Lord, how it hurt! At last he found the strength to move, to tear himself away, to flee as far as possible, even if the farthest place was hell, anywhere, rather than stay where he was.
Gjorg’s people greeted him with quiet warmth. His father asked him briefly about his journey, his mother watched him furtively with her eyes turned aside. He said that he was very tired after the long walk and his long sleeplessness, and he went to bed. For a long moment, the steps and the whispering in the kulla clawed at his sleep, and then he went under. The next morning, he woke late. Where am I? he asked two or three times, and he fell asleep again. When at last he got up, his head was heavy and felt as if it were stuffed with sponge. He was not up to doing anything. Not even thinking.
The day passed, and the next day and the next. He went through the house several times, noticing listlessly a section of the wall that had been in need of repair for a long time, or a corner of the roof that had fallen in during the winter. He had no heart for work. The worst of it was that any repair seemed useless to him.
It was during the last days of March. April would soon be coming in. With the first half white and the other half black. Aprildeath. If he did not die, he would be languishing in the tower of refuge. His eyes would weaken in the darkness, so that one way or the other, even if he was still alive, he would never see the world again.
After those somnolent days, his thoughts began to stir. And the first thing that his mind began to seek was a way of keeping himself from death and blindness. There was only one way, and he thought about it at great length: to be an itinerant woodcutter. That was the customary trade for mountaineers who left the High Plateau. With an axe on their shoulder (they slipped the handle under their tunic, while the axe-head, with its sharp edge shiny black, appearing behind their neck, looked like a fish’s fin), they went from town to town giving an air of purpose to their wandering with the long-drawn mournful cry, “Any wood to cut?” No, it would be better to stay in the realm of Aprildeath (now he was sure that the word, which was in his mind only, was understood, and of course used, by everyone), than to go down there, in the rain-soaked cities, a hapless woodcutter run aground on barred air-holes always covered with a kind of black dust (once in the city of Shkoder he had seen a mountaineer splitting firewood by a barred ventilator of that sort). No, never—better Aprildeath.
One morning, on the next-to-the-last day of March, as he went down the stone stairway of the Kulla, he found himself face to face with his father. He wanted to avoid having a silence settle upon them, but it did. And from behind that silence, as if from behind a wall, these words came:
“Well, Gjorg, what did you want to tell me?”
He answered, “Father, I’d like to go and wander around during the days I have left.”
His father looked into his eyes for a long moment, saying nothing. Really, Gjorg thought sleepily, it’s not important. At bottom, it wasn’t worth wrangling again with his father over that. They had argued enough, without speaking, up to this very day. Two weeks earlier, two weeks later, that made no real difference. He could do without seeing the mountains. To tell the truth, the preference that he had expressed was foolish. He started to say, no, it’s useless, father, but his father had already gone upstairs.
He came down again in a few moments, a purse in his hand. Compared to the purse that had held the money for the blood-tax, it was quite small. His father handed it to him.
“Go on, Gjorg. And have a good trip.”
Gjorg took the purse.
“Thanks, father.”
His father did not shift his eyes from him. “But don’t forget,” he said in a low voice, “your truce is over on the seventeenth of April.” And he said again, “Don’t forget, my son.”
Gjorg wandered for several days in the district. All sorts of roads. Inns strung along the highways. The faces of strangers. Although he had been shut up for so long in his village, he had always thought of the rest of the Rrafsh as being somehow frozen, especially in winter, but it was not like that at all. The High Plateau was a busy place. A continual stream of people flowed from its extremities to its center or the other way round. Some traveled in one direction, others in the opposite direction; some went uphill, some came down; and most went uphill and came downhill in the course of the same trip, and they did it so many times that at the end of their road they could not tell whether they were higher or lower than the place from which they had come.
Sometimes Gjorg thought of how the days were going by. The movement of time seemed very strange to him. Up to a certain hour, the day seemed endless to him, then, suddenly, like a drop of water that after having trembled a moment on the flower of a peach tree, falls suddenly, the day would shatter and die. April had come in, but spring was hardly in possession of things. At times, the sight of a bluish band stretching above the Alps depressed him unbearably. Well, here’s April, the travellers striking up acquaintance in the inns said everywhere. It’s time the spring was here. In fact, it’s very late this year. Then he thought of his father’s warning about the end of the truce, or rather, not all of his warning, nor even a part of it, but just the words, “my son” at the end, and at the same time, the part of the month from the first to the seventeenth of April, and the idea that everyone had a whole April, while his was amputated, chopped off. Then he tried not to think of that, and he listened to the stories of the travellers, who, to his surprise, even if they had no bread or salt in their wallets, were never short of stories.
In the inns you heard a swarm of facts and anecdotes about all sorts of people and times. He always stayed somewhat in the background and, pleased not to be disturbed by anyone, just lent an ear to what was being said. Sometimes his mind wandered, tried to seize bits of stories so as to fit them to his own life, or on the contrary, to join bits of his own life to the stories of other people, but that piecing together was not always easy to bring about.
And things might have gone on in this way to the end of his journey, if not for chance. One day, at an inn called The New Inn (most of the inns were named either The Old Inn or The New Inn), he heard mention of a carriage. A carriage that was lined inside with black velvet. A carriage from the city with very ornate decorations. Could it be she, he wondered, and he strained to hear. Yes, it was certainly she. Now they were talking about a beautiful woman from the city with fine eyes and auburn hair.
Gjorg started. He looked about him, scarcely knowing why. It was a room in an inn, dirty, with a sharp odor of smoke and wet wool, and as if that was not enough, the mouth that talked about that woman gave off at the same time a bad smell of tobacco and onions. Gjorg turned his eyes in every directi
on, as if to say, wait a minute, is this a fit place to bring up her name? But they went on talking and laughing. Gjorg was like a man in a trap, in a state between listening and not-listening, and with a ringing in his ears. And suddenly it came to him in complete clarity why it was he had undertaken this journey. He had tried to hide it from himself. He had dismissed it from his mind obstinately, had suppressed it, but the reason why was right there, in the center of his being: if he had set out on the road, it wasn’t to look at the mountains, but to see that woman again. Without being aware of it, he had been looking for that carriage with the strange outlines, that rolled and rolled forever across the High Plateau, while he, from far away, murmured to it, “Why do you wander through these parts, butterfly-carriage?” In reality, with its gloomy appearance, bronze door-handles, and complicated lines, the carriage reminded him of a coffin that he had seen at one time, when he had been on his only journey to Shkoder, in the Cathedral, between a funeral cortege and solemn organ music. And inside that carriage, butterfly-coffin, were the eyes of the woman with the auburn hair, that he had breathed in with a sweetness and an emotion that he had never felt in the presence of any other being in the world. He had looked into women’s eyes in his life, and many of those eyes, ardent, bashful, stirring, delicate, artful, or proud, had looked into his, but never eyes like those. They were at once distant and close, understandable and enigmatic, unmoved and sympathetic. That glance, while it aroused desire, had some quality that took hold of you, carried you far away, beyond life, beyond the grave, to where you could look upon yourself with serenity.
In the night (that fragments of sleep tried to fill in disorder, as a few stars try to people a dark autumn sky), that look was the only thing that his sleep did not blot out. It remained there, at his very center, a lost jewel in whose making all the light of the world had been consumed.
Yes, it was to meet those eyes again that he had set out across the High Plateau. And these men talked about that woman as an everyday matter, in that dirty inn, in the acrid smoke, with their mouths filled with bad teeth. Suddenly, he jumped to his feet, unslung the rifle from his shoulder, and fired at them once, twice, three times, four times. He killed them all, then killed those who came to their rescue, at the same time as the innkeeper and the police who just happened to be there, then ran out and fired again at his pursuers, at still others, at whole villages that were hunting him, at the Banners, at the Provinces. All that he imagined, while in fact he did nothing more than get up and leave. The cold wind was grateful on his forehead. He stood still for a moment, his eyes half-closed, and without being able to account for it, he remembered a phrase that he had heard once, several years ago, on a damp September day, while standing in a long line of people that had formed in front of a warehouse for corn belonging to the sub-prefecture: “It seems that the young women in the city kiss you on the lips.”
Since his attention, in the course of his wanderings, was constantly distracted by one thing or the other, Gjorg felt more and more that his journey was fragmentary, interrupted by periods of utter vacancy and great discontinuities. Often he was surprised to find himself on a road or at an inn when he had thought he was still on the road or at the inn which in fact he had left behind hours ago. In that way, hour by hour and day by day, his mind was breaking away from reality, and his ramblings came to seem a journey in a dream.
Now he no longer hid from himself that he was hoping to find that carriage. He did not even conceal it from others. He had inquired several times, “You didn’t happen to see a carriage with a curious body with odd lines. . . . it’s hard to explain.” “How’s that again?” they said. “Describe it. What sort of carriage?” “Well, it’s very different, with black velvet inside, and bronze ornaments—like a coffin.” And they said, “Are you serious? You wouldn’t be a bit off your nut, would you, old fellow?”
Once someone told him that he had seen a carriage that looked something like the one Gjorg had described, but he said it was the carriage of the bishop of the next district, who was travelling, oddly enough, in very bad weather.
They can put up in these filthy inns if they like, and even have bad teeth, as long as they mention her, he said to himself.
Several times he thought he had picked up their traces, but he lost them again. The approach of death made him wish even more for that meeting. And the long way he had come also sharpened his hunger to see her.
One day he saw a man in the distance who appeared to be riding a mule. It turned out to be the steward of the blood from the Kulla of Orosh, travelling God knows where. Having gone a little farther, Gjorg turned his head, as if to make sure that it was the steward of the blood. The other man had also turned around to look at him. “What’s the matter with him?” Gjorg thought.
Once someone told him that he had seen a carriage that was just like Gjorg’s description, but it was empty. Another time, someone described the carriage’s appearance with great accuracy, and even the head of the beautiful traveller, whose hair, through the window, had seemed auburn to some people and nut-brown to others.
At least she’s still here, on the High Plateau, he thought. At least she hasn’t yet gone down to the plain.
Meanwhile, the month of April was wearing on swiftly. The days went on, one after the other, without a pause, and the month that even without the coming end of his truce seemed to him the shortest of the year, was getting shorter, wearing itself out swiftly.
He did not know in what direction he ought to travel. Sometimes he wasted time on the wrong road, and sometimes he went back, not by design, to a place where he had already been. His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tormented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short.
CHAPTER VI
The Vorpsis went on with their trip. Bessian looked at his wife from the side. Her features were somewhat drawn, and she was a little pale, which made her look only the more desirable, as had happened a few days ago. She is tired out, he thought, even though she won’t admit it. Actually, during all those days he had been waiting to hear her say at last the words that would have been so natural, “Oh, I’m so tired.” He had waited for those words impatiently, feverishly, the remedy for their trouble, but she had not said them. Her face pale, she looked out at the road in silence, or very nearly. As for her expression, which even when she was angry or humiliated had always seemed understandable to him, he now found that he had no clue to what it might mean. If only her eyes expressed annoyance, or worse, coldness. But there was something else in her eyes. In some way her look was empty at its center and only the edges were still there.
Seated side by side, they rarely spoke. Sometimes he tried to create a bit of warmth, but fearing that he might put himself in a position of inferiority, he did that with great discretion. The worst of it was that he felt quite unable to be angry at her. In his relations with women he had noticed that anger and quarrelling could at times bring about a sudden resolution of static situations that had seemed hopeless, as a storm can clear away an oppressively humid atmosphere. But there was something in the way that her eyes were set that defended her against anyone else’s anger. Something like the eyes of pregnant women. At one moment he even wondered—almost aloud—can she be expecting a child? But his mind, mechanically, reckoned up the time that had passed, and this disposed of his last hope. Bessian suppressed a sigh that he did not want her to hear, and he went on looking at the countryside. Night was falling.
For a little while that mood stayed with him, and when he began to think actively again, his mind brought him back to the same place. If only she would tell him that she had no heart for this trip, that she felt terribly disappointed, that his notion to spend their honeymoon on the High Plateau had proved to be idiotic, that they would do well to go back at once, this very day, this instant. But when he
made a vague allusion to their leaving early, so as to give her a chance to express that wish, she said, “As you like. But in any case, please don’t feel troubled on my account.”
Of course the idea of breaking off their trip and going home tormented him more and more, but he entertained a vague hope that something might still be saved. Indeed, he felt that if something were to be saved, that could only happen while they were on the High Plateau, and that once they went down there would be no chance of a remedy.
Now it was full night and he could not see her face. Two or three times he leaned towards the window, but he could not tell where they were. A little later the moon shed its light on the road and he put his head close to the glass. He stayed a long while in that position, and the vibration of the cold pane entered his forehead and went all through his body. In the moonlight the road looked like glass to him. The silhouette of a small church slid off to his left. Then a water-mill loomed up, and one might think that in this waste it had been built to grind snow rather than corn. His hand sought his wife’s hand on the seat.
“Diana,” he said softly, “look out there. I think this is a road protected by the bessa.”
She put her face to the windowpane. Still speaking softly, using few words, and imposing upon them an order that seemed to him less and less natural, he explained to her what a road protected by the bessa was. He felt that the icy moonlight helped him with his task.
Then, when his words were spent, he moved his head towards her neck and kissed her timidly. The moonlight grazed her knees a number of times. She did not move, she came no closer nor did she draw away from him. Her body gave off still the odor of the perfume that he loved, and with an effort he repressed a groan. His last hope was that something would let go inside her. He hoped to hear a sob from her, if only a faint one, or at least a sigh. But she did not relinquish her strange attitude, silent but not completely, desolate as a field strewn with stars might be desolate. “O Lord,” he said to himself, “what is happening to me?”