Gjorg remembered the punishment meted out some years ago in his village when the bessa had been violated. The murderer had been shot by the assembled men of the village, and he had been declared unworthy of being avenged. Then, without taking into account that the people who lived in the house were not guilty of the murder, that house, in which a guest had been killed in violation of the bessa, was burned. The head of the household himself was the first to scatter the firebrands and take the axe to the building, shouting, “May I wash clean my sins against the village and the Banner.” At his back, with torch and axe, came all the men of the village. After that, for years, nothing could be handed to the head of the house except with the left hand passed under one’s thigh, to remind him that he should have avenged the blood of his guest. For it was a settled thing that one could atone for the blood of a father, of a brother—even one’s child—but never for the blood of a guest.
Who knows what treacherous act was committed in this house, he said to himself, dislodging a couple of stones with his foot. They rolled away with a dull sound. He looked around him to see if there were other houses there, but saw nothing but another ruin twenty paces away. What can that mean, he wondered. Mechanically, he rushed to that other ruin, went around it, and saw the same thing at the four corners. All the cornerstones had been torn away. Could it be that the whole village had been punished? But when he came upon still another ruin further on, he was convinced that that must be so. He had heard a few years ago of a village far away that had violated the bessa, and had been punished for it by the Banner. A go-between had been killed during a dispute about the boundaries between two villages. The Banner ruled that the village in which he had been killed had the duty to avenge him. And the village having been so thoughtless as not to avenge him, it had been decided that the village must be destroyed.
Gjorg walked softly, like a shadow, from one ruin to the next. Who had that man been who had involved a whole village in his death? Those deaf ruins were dreadful. A bird whose sound, Gjorg knew, was only heard at night, said, “Or, or,” and remembering that he had little time in which to reach the Kulla, he looked for the highway again. The bird’s cry rent the silence again, far away now, and Gjorg asked again who might that man be who had been betrayed in this ill-fated village. “Or-or!” came the answer, which to his ear seemed somewhat like his name, “Gjorg-Gjorg.” He smiled, telling himself, “Now you’re hearing voices,” and he turned towards the road.
A little later on, having resumed his journey, as if to jettison the feeling of oppression that the ruined village had left with him, he made an effort to call to mind the mildest penalties prescribed by the Code. Betraying one’s guest was most unusual, and therefore the burning of houses, and still more the razing of whole villages, was rarer still. He remembered that less serious offenses meant the banishment of the guilty party and all his kin from the Banner.
Gjorg noticed that as the penalties came thronging to his imagination, he walked faster, as if he wanted to escape them. The punishments were many: ostracism—the guilty man was segregated forever (debarred from funerals, weddings, and the right to borrow flour); withdrawal of the right to cultivate his land, accompanied by the destruction of his fruit trees; enforced fasting within the family; the ban on bearing arms whether on his shoulder or at his belt for one or two weeks; being chained or under house arrest; taking away from the master or mistress of the house his or her authority in the family.
The possibility of the punishment that he might incur within his own family had tormented him for a long time. And that suffering had begun the moment when his turn came to avenge his brother’s death.
He could not put out of mind that icy morning in January when his father had called him to the great room on the upper storey of the house so that they could talk privately. The day was particularly bright, the sky and the new-fallen snow were dazzling, the world shone like glass, and with a kind of crystal madness it seemed that it might begin to slip at any moment and shatter into thousands of fragments. It was that sort of morning when his father reminded him of his duty. Gjorg was sitting by the window, listening to his father who spoke to him of blood. The whole world was stained with it. It shone red upon the snow, pools of it spread and stiffened everywhere. Then Gjorg understood that all that red was in his own eyes. He listened to his father, his head down. And in the days that followed, for the first time, without knowing why, he began to tell over in his head all the punishments that a disobedient member of the family might incur. He did not want to admit to himself that he hated to kill a man. The hatred for the Kryeqyqe family that his father was trying to kindle in his heart on that January morning could not prevail over that brilliant light. Gjorg did not understand then that if the fire of hatred could not strike fire in him, one reason was that the man who tried to kindle it, his father, was himself ice-cold. It would seem that long ago, during that endless feud, all hatred had slowly cooled, or perhaps had never existed. His father talked on in vain. . . . Gjorg fearfully, almost in terror, understood that he could not hate the man he was supposed to kill. And when, in the days that followed, his mind would wander only to come back to the list of punishments in store for a disobedient member of the household, he began to understand that he was mentally preparing himself not to shed blood. But at the same time, he knew that it was useless to let his thoughts run on the punishments that his family might impose. Like everyone else he knew that for any breach of the rules of the blood feud there were other penalties, much more grim.
The second time they spoke about avenging the dead, his father’s tone was harsher. The day was quite different, too. It was wan, miserable, without rain or even fog, not to speak of lightning, which would have been too much luxury for that washed-out sky. Gjorg tried to avoid his father’s eyes, but at last his own were caught in that stare as in a trap.
“Look,” his father said, nodding at the shirt hanging on the wall in front of them.
Gjorg turned his head in that direction. He felt that the veins in his neck grated as if they were rusty.
“The blood is turning yellow,” his father said. “The dead man cries out for vengeance.”
The blood had in fact yellowed on the cloth. Or rather it had turned a rusty color like that of the first water flowing from a faucet that has not been used for a long time.
“Gjorg, you’re putting it off,” his father went on. “Our honor, but yours especially. . . .”
“Two fingers-breadth of honor have been stamped on our forehead by almighty God.” In the weeks that followed, Gjorg repeated to himself hundreds of times the words of the Code that his father had recited to him that day. “Whiten or further besmirch your dirty face, as you please. It is up to you to be a man or not.”
Am I free? he asked himself as he went upstairs to think about it alone on the kulla’s second storey. The punishments his father could subject him to for this or that infraction were nothing compared to the risk of losing his honor. Two fingers-breadth of honor on our forehead. He touched his forehead with his hand, as if to find the exact place where his honor might be. And why should it be just there? he wondered. It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed. Now at last he had fathomed its meaning. Honor had its seat in the middle of your forehead because that was the place where the bullet must strike your man. “Good shot,” the old men said when someone faced his man squarely and hit him right in the forehead. Or “Bad shot” when the bullet pierced the stomach or struck a limb, not to mention the back.
Whenever Gjorg climbed to the upper storey to look at Mehill’s shirt, he felt his forehead burning. The bloodstains on the cloth faded more and more. If warm weather came, they would turn yellow. Then people would begin to hand his coffee cup to him and to his kin under the leg. In the eyes of the Kanun, he would be a dead man.
There was no way out. Bearing the punishments, or any other sacrifice, would not save him. Coffee below the knee—that frightened him more than anything el
se—was waiting for him somewhere along the way. Every door was closed to him, except one. “The offense can be atoned for only through the Code,” the Code itself said. Only the murder of a member of the Kryeqyqe clan could open a door to him. And so, one day last spring, he decided to lie in ambush for his man.
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.
For hours on end he looked scornfully at the snow-covered ground, as if to say, yes, I’ll go out there, I’ll go out quickly to spill that bit of blood. The thought haunted him so much that sometimes he thought he really saw a small red stain take shape in the heart of that endless white.
In the first days of March he felt a little better, and in the second week of the month he left his bed. When he stepped outside his legs were shaky. Nobody imagined that in his condition, still dizzy from his illness, his face white as a sheet, he would go out to lie in ambush for his man. Perhaps that was why Zef of the Kryeqyqe, knowing that his enemy was still ill, had been taken unawares.
At moments the rain fell so sparsely that one would imagine it must stop, but suddenly it started up again better than ever. By that time it was afternoon and Gjorg felt his legs getting numb. The gray day was the same; only the district was different. Gjorg could tell because the mountaineers he met wore different clothing. The small villages were farther and farther from the highroad. In places the bronze of a church bell glinted weakly in the distance. Then for miles the landscape was empty.
He met fewer and fewer travelers. Gjorg asked again about the Kulla of Orosh. First, people told him it was quite close by, then, further on, when he thought he must really be drawing near, they told him it was still a long way. And each time the passers-by pointed in the same direction, in the distance where sight was lost in the mist.