The sky was only partly overcast. The horses trotted lightly on the ill-paved road. It was the Road of the Cross. From behind the glass, Bessian looked out on a landscape grown familiar to him. Except that this time, here and there, in places close to him and far away, it lay under a bluish coverlet. The snow had begun to melt, it wore away from the bottom up, from its contact with the soil, leaving above the hollow thus formed a kind of crust that scarcely melted at all.
“What day is it?” Diana asked.
Surprised, he looked at her for a moment before he replied.
“The eleventh.”
She seemed about to say something. Speak to me, he thought. Please speak. Hope invaded him like a hot vapor. Say anything, but speak to me.
Her lips that he was watching out of the corner of his eye moved again to say in a different way perhaps the words she had not spoken.
“Do you remember that mountaineer we saw the day that we were on our way to the prince?”
“Yes,” he said, “of course.”
What did that “of course” mean, spoken so naturally? For a moment he pitied himself, without knowing why. Perhaps because he had been so eager to keep this exchange going at any cost. Perhaps, too, for a different reason that he could not specify just then.
“The truce he had been granted was to end around mid-April, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, “something like that. Yes, that’s right, just in mid-April.”
“I don’t know why that came to mind,” she said, still looking out of the window. “It just came, for no good reason.”
“For no good reason,” he repeated. Those words seemed to him to be dangerous as a ring with poison in it. Somewhere inside him a knot of rage was forming. So you did all that for no good reason? For nothing, just to torture me? But the wave of anger toppled and broke at once.
Two or three times in these last days she had turned her head to look at the young mountaineers that they passed on the road. He understood that she thought she had recognized the young man who had been at the inn, but he attached no importance to that. And now that she had mentioned him, he still felt that way.
The carriage stopped suddenly, interrupting his train of thought.
“What is it?” he said, to no one in particular.
The coachman, who had climbed down from the box, appeared a moment later near the window. His arm extended, he was pointing at the road. Only then did Bessian see an old mountain woman squatting by the roadside. She was looking at them, and she seemed to be muttering something. Bessian opened the carriage door.
“There’s an old woman over there by the roadside. She says that she can’t move,” the coachman said.
Bessian stepped down from the carriage, and after taking a few steps for the sake of his stiff legs, he went over to the old woman, who now and again was crying out softly while clasping her knee with her hands.
“What’s the matter, good mother?” Bessian asked.
“Oh, it’s this accursed cramp,” the old woman said. “I’ve been rooted here since morning, my child.”
Like all the mountain women of that district, she wore a cloth dress decorated with embroidery, and a scarf on her head that showed a few wisps of grey hair.
“I have been waiting since morning for one of God’s creatures who could help me away from here.”
“Where are you from?” the coachman asked her.
“From the village over there.” The woman stretched out her arm, pointing uncertainly. “It’s not far, just along the highway.”
“Let’s take her with us,” Bessian said.
“Thank you, my son.”
With the coachman’s help, he lifted her up carefully, supporting her under her arms, and the two men led her to the carriage. Diana watched from inside the vehicle.
“Good day, daughter,” the old woman said when she was in the carriage.
“Good day, good mother,” Diana said, moving in order to give her room.
“Ah,” the old woman said as the carriage moved off, “I spent the whole morning all alone by the roadside. There wasn’t a living soul to be seen anywhere. I thought I was going to die there.”
“It’s true,” Bessian said, “this road is almost deserted. Your village is a big one, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s big,” the woman said, her face darkening,
“It’s big all right, I should say so, but what good is that?”
Bessian was looking attentively at the old woman’s features and their somber expression. For a moment he thought he detected signs of hostility towards the people of her village, because no one had come by to help her and everyone had forgotten her. But the emotion that had clouded her face was something much deeper than momentary annoyance.
“Yes, my village is quite big, but most of the men are cloistered in the towers. That’s why I was all alone, abandoned on the road, and almost died there.”
“Cloistered because of blood-vengeance?”
“Yes, my son, for blood-vengeance. Nobody has ever seen anything to match it. Well, of course people have killed one another within the village, but never anything like this.”
The old woman took a deep breath.
“Of the two hundred households of our village, only twenty are not involved in the blood-feud.”
“How can that possibly be?”
“You’ll see for yourself, my boy. The village looks as if everything had turned to stone, as if the plague had struck it.”
Bessian put his head near the window, but the village was not yet in sight.
“Two months ago,” the mountain woman said, “I myself buried a nephew, a boy beautiful as an angel.”
She began to talk about that boy, and to tell how he had been killed, but as she spoke—and this was strange—the order of the words in her sentences began to change. And not only their order but the spaces between them, as if a special atmosphere was clothing them, painful and disturbing. As happens with fruit before it is fully ripe, her language changed from its ordinary condition to quite another condition, the prelude to song or lamentation. It would seem that this is how the songs of the bards come about, Bessian thought.
He was looking fixedly at the old mountain woman. That state of feeling that preceded song was accompanied by corresponding changes in the expression of her face. In her eyes there was lamentation, but no tears. And they seemed all the more disconsolate.
The carriage entered the village, followed by the echoing clatter of its wheels on the empty road. On either side stone kullas rose up, seeming even more silent in broad daylight.
“This kulla belongs to the Shkreli, and that one, farther along, to the Krasniq, and the blood-vengeance that must be carried out is so mixed up that no one really knows which clan is the one that is supposed to take vengeance now, so much so that both families are holed up in their towers. That tower over there, the one that is three storeys high, belongs to the Vithdreq, who are feuding with the Bunga, whose kulla you can hardly see from here—the one whose walls are made partly of black stone. And those are the towers of the Karakaj and the Dodanaj, who are feuding, and each of those families has carried out two coffins through their doors this spring. As for those other kullas over that way, in the same line and facing each other, they belong to the Ukas and the Kryezeze, but since they are within rifle-shot, not just the men of each house but even the women and the young girls open fire on one another from inside their walls and do not go out.”
The mountain woman went on talking in this way while the two outlanders turned to this window and that in an attempt to grasp the meaning of this strange form of civic life governed by the blood-feud as she described it to them. There was no sign of life in the heavy silence of those kullas. The pallid sunlight falling obliquely on their stonework only emphasized their desolate air.
They set down the old woman not far from the center of the village, and they accompanied her to her own kulla. Then the carriage started off again through that stone kingdom,
that looked as if it were under a spell. And just imagine that there are people behind those walls and their narrow loopholes, Bessian thought. There are ardent young women and young wives. And for a moment it seemed to him that despite that stiff carapace he could feel the pulsing of life, fearfully intense and beating against the walls with Beethovian power. The outside, however, the walls, the rows of loopholes, the pallid sunlight falling upon them, gave nothing away. And suddenly he cried out to himself, what is all that to you? You’d better concern yourself with your wife’s unyielding stiffness. He felt rage rising swiftly in him, and he turned to Diana to break that unbearable silence once and for all, to speak to her, to demand an explanation to the very last detail, of the mute riddle of her conduct towards him.
It was not the first time that he had been on the point of doing that. Dozens of times he had rehearsed what he would say, from the most gentle appeal, Diana, what’s the matter? Tell me what’s troubling you, to the harshest reproofs, of the kind one can’t compose without the word “devil”—what the devil is wrong with you? What the devil do you mean by that? Oh, go to the devil! In these cases, he found, that word was irreplaceable. And right now, in that haze of rage that was upon him, it was the first word that occurred to him, ready to be a part of any sentence whatever, glad to be of use, eager to take part in the argument. Well, just as in all those other times, not only could he not use that word against her, but like a man who has made a mistake and means to make amends and be responsible for the consequences, he used it against himself. He was still turned towards her, and instead of speaking harshly to her, he said to himself, what the devil is wrong with you?
What the devil is wrong with me? Just as on those other occasions, he avoided giving himself an answer. Later. Later, perhaps, the opportunity would present itself. He had not understood until now just why he had not demanded an explanation. Now he felt that he did know why; it was that he was afraid of what she might answer. It was a fear akin to what he had experienced one winter night in Tirana in the course of a spiritualist seance at a friend’s house, when they were preparing themselves to hear the voice of one of their group who had died some time ago. Bessian did not quite know why, but he could only imagine that Diana’s explanation would be of the same kind, delivered as if from behind a curtain of smoke.
It was a long while since the carriage had left behind it that doomed village, and he told himself again that the only reason that he had put off having it out with his wife was fear. I’m afraid of what she might say, he thought, I’m afraid, but why?
The feeling that he was to blame had become even stronger during their journey. In fact that feeling had arisen much earlier, and perhaps he had undertaken this tour in order to rid himself of it. Well, the contrary effect had manifested itself. And now, apparently, the possibility that Diana’s response might have some connection with that feeling of culpability on his part was enough to make him tremble inwardly. No, it would be better that she keep silent all through this dreadful trial, that she turn into a mummy, and that he never hear her say to him the things that would give him pain.
At some places the road was full of holes, and the carriage lurched violently. As they were going by some pools of water formed by the melting snow, she asked him, “Where are we going to have lunch?”
He turned his head, astonished. Those simple words gave him a warm feeling.
“Wherever we can,” he said. “Do you have an idea?”
“No, no, that’s fine,” she said.
He was about to turn his whole body towards her, but he felt a strange misgiving, as if he had beside him a fragile glass object that kept him motionless.
“We might even stay the night in some inn,” he said, without turning his head.
“If you wish.”
He felt a wave of warmth flooding his chest. Couldn’t all this be quite simple, and he, with his habit of complicating things, had he not seen the beginning of a tragedy where perhaps there was only the fatigue of the trip, an ordinary headache, or something of that sort?
“In some inn,” he said, “the first one we come to.”
She consented with a nod.
Perhaps it will be really much better that way, he thought happily. They had been spending their nights in the houses of strangers, with friends of friends, or more accurately, with the links of a chain of friends who had a single origin: the person with whom they had spent the first night of their journey, the only person they had known before. And every night there was a repetition of more or less the same scene—words of welcome, conversation in the living room around the fireplace, topics such as the weather, cattle, the government. Then dinner, accompanied by the most carefully considered phrases, then coffee, and the next morning, their departure, attended by the traditional escort who accompanied them to the borders of the village. In sum, all that could get to be pretty tiresome for a young bride.
“An inn!” he cried out in his thoughts. An ordinary inn beside the road, that was where salvation lay. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? How stupid I am, he told himself happily. An inn, even a dirty one that smelled of cattle, would bring them closer together by surrounding them, if not with the kind of comfort it could not possibly provide, then with its dire poverty in whose depths there gleamed ten times more bright the happiness of temporary guests.
An inn loomed up beside the road sooner than they had expected. It rose in the midst of a barren stretch of land at the crossing of the Road of the Cross and the Great Road of the Banners, where there was no village to be seen nor any other sign of life.
“Do you serve meals?” Bessian asked as soon as he had passed the threshold.
The innkeeper, a tall, ungainly fellow with half-closed eyes answered between clenched teeth, “Cold beans.”
On seeing Diana and the coachman, who was carrying a travelling bag, the innkeeper became somewhat more lively, and he grew quite attentive when he heard one of the carriage horses neighing. He rubbed his eyes and said in a hoarse voice, “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen! We can give you fried eggs and cheese. I have raki* too.”
They sat down at the end of a long oak table that, as in most of the inns, took up the greater part of the common room. Two mountaineers, seated on the floor in one corner, looked curiously in their direction. A young woman was sleeping, her head resting on her baby’s cradle. Close by her, on a heap of many-colored bags, someone had set down a lahoute.
While waiting for the innkeeper to bring them their meal, they looked about them in silence.
“The other inns were more lively,” Diana said at last. “This one is very quiet.”
“Better that way, don’t you think?” Bessian looked at his watch. “Though at this time of day. . . .” His thoughts were elsewhere and his fingers kept up a drumming on the table. “But it doesn’t look too bad here, does it?”
“That’s true, especially from outside.”
“It has a steep roof, the kind you like.”
She nodded. Despite her weariness, her expression was softer.
“Shall we sleep here tonight?”
As he said the words, Bessian felt his heart pounding, as if in secret. What is happening to me? he said to himself.
When she was still unmarried and she had come to his place for the first time, he had been less stirred than he was now, when she was his wife. It’s enough to drive you crazy, he thought.
“If you like,” she said.
“What’s that?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“You asked me if I would like it if we slept here tonight, didn’t you?”
“And you would?”
“Yes, of course.”
That’s marvellous, he thought. He wanted to kiss that much-loved head that had been torturing him all these past days. A wave of warmth, of a kind he had never felt before, flooded through him. After so many nights of being separated, they would sleep together at last, in this isolated mountain inn, among these desolate roads. It was lucky, re
ally, that things had happened this way. If not for that, he would never have known the sensation that few men have had occasion to experience—to re-live one’s first embrace of a loved woman. She had become so distant in these days that now he felt that he was rediscovering her as she had been when he had known her before they were married. More, this second discovery seemed to him even sweeter and more unsettling. People are right to say it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good.
He sensed something moving behind him, and all at once, right under his eyes, as if coming at him from the world of the commonplace, were certain circular objects that gave off a piquant smell and were quite useless: the plates of fried eggs.
Bessian looked up.
“Do you have a good room for tonight?”
“Yes, sir,” the innkeeper said confidently. “One with a fireplace at that.”
“Really? That’s splendid.”
“Oh, yes,” the innkeeper went on. “There’s no room like it in all the inns of the district.”
I’m really in luck, Bessian thought.
“I’ll take you to it as soon as you’ve had your lunch,” the innkeeper said.
“Splendid.”
He had no appetite. Diana did not eat her eggs, either. She asked for some cream cheese, but she left it in the dish because it was dry and hard. Then she asked for yoghurt, and at last for eggs again, but boiled this time. Bessian ordered the same thing, but he ate nothing.
Right after lunch, they went upstairs to see the room. The chamber that, according to the innkeeper, was the envy of all the inns in that district of the High Plateau, was the plainest imaginable, with two windows, both with wooden shutters, facing north, and a large bed covered by a thick woolen counterpane. It did indeed have a fireplace, and there were ashes on the hearth.