When Mark came out of the café, he felt as if he’d just taken a sleeping pill. Some days he rather liked that sluggish torpor. At the crossroads, he slowed his pace to read the obituary notices posted on the wall. He read them slowly, line by line, as if he was deciphering difficult old texts. Then he shook his head, almost in fright. God knows why, but he felt as if he had just been looking for the name of his old friend Zef.
It was hustle and bustle at the Arts Center. A computer was being installed in the director’s office. In a week’s time — two weeks at the most — a delegation from the Council of Europe was due to visit. Still no news about the holdup at the bank. The music section was having a coffee break, as usual.
Mark lit a cigarette and slumped into one of his armchairs. Before opening his mouth to say anything about the Book of the Blood, he speculated on the reactions his question was likely to provoke. Someone might go pale, another might look dumbstruck, and yet another tell him to shut up. All the same, he would go right ahead.
The subject didn’t leave his mind all week long. At one point he wondered if he was not already obsessed with it; but then he told himself it was quite natural for it to be going around and around in his head, seeing that his girlfriend was directly involved. But did he really want the Book of the Blood to be found? At times, he reckoned that bringing it to light would prompt the much-desired miracle: your family has been worrying about nothing, you’ve no blood debt to pay, nor any to collect….
When he told this to his girlfriend, she shook her head in doubt. The memory of the old was quite as reliable as the book. If the old uncle were to state that the family was entangled in a blood feud, that would be as good as holy writ. He would already have been there actually, if he hadn’t had another attack of gout. But he had let them know that he would come, even if he had to be carried down on a stretcher.
May his legs drop off! Mark thought to himself. He grinned inwardly at his own thought, for it was the first time that he had caught himself uttering curses like a man of old.
What was known of the fate of the Book of the Blood up until World War II was generally consistent; but what had happened to it thereafter was the subject of widely divergent stories. When they came to power in 1945, the Communists burned down the Castle of Orosh, where the book had been kept for many centuries. At first it was supposed that the book had turned to ashes along with a part of the archives of the prince of Orosh, but soon after a different supposition came into circulation, namely, that the Book of the Blood had been stashed away safely somewhere else. That seemed all the more plausible when the suspicion that the Communists had gotten hold of it and destroyed it themselves turned out to be unjustified. After all, if the winning side had gone so far as to preserve the historical records of land ownership, it was hardly likely that it would have suppressed a mortal inventory. The Book of the Blood had rightly been called a “Domesday Book of Death” by a journalist of that period. For the Communists, property was a threat far greater than death!
One after another, people who still whispered about it came around to the view that the book still existed, in some secret hiding place. What no one knew was who had secreted it. Some thought that opponents of the new regime had hidden it safely — like the holy relics from the Church of Saint Anthony, the original emblem of the Dugagjin clan, an eleventh-century portrait of the Virgin, and various other treasures which it was obviously desirable to save from destruction. But there were others who thought that the book had been hidden by the Communists themselves. Having decided to put an end to the thousand-year-old system of customary law called the Kanun, they must have decided they needed to begin with its accounting system, the Book of the Blood. Some people of this persuasion went even further and speculated that the secret agents of the Sigurimi had started to use the book for their own sinister purposes. On reflection, though, that would have been only natural.
In later years, a cloak of silence fell on the Kanun, and the book sank into oblivion. Even the muffled rumors that could still be heard now and again seemed barely related to the original speculations, and they were far less sensational. In many cases, the rumors seemed to be only reflections of some public event. For example, when Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communist Party, visited Albania, people claimed he had been presented with a silver pistol — and the Book of the Blood. The same story was told about Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, and then again, some years later, about Franz-Josef Strauss, when, oddly enough, Albania was trying to improve relations with West Germany. Some people, it seemed, were absolutely determined to believe that Albania would pass the fearful book on to another nation.
When the dictatorship fell, many books about the Kanun were published, and there was renewed talk of the notorious ledger. The old speculations about its fate were put back into circulation, together with new guesses, some of which were quite crazy, as was the press in general at that time. In the Book it will all be found! some journalist wrote: our trial, and our judgment! Another journalist riposted, You’d better go and get hold of your personal file, you wretch, if you want to know what particular sentence you are under! In Tirana, there were as many gradations in rumors about the Book as in a musical scale. In one variant, the book was said to have been requested by the Helsinki Committee; in another, it was not the OSCE, but the International Court at The Hague that had requisitioned it. “And why, dear sir, should the International Court of Justice have subpoenaed our book?” “How should I know?” came the reply. “Maybe we’re under suspicion of genocide? It’s a very fashionable expression these days!” “Genocide of whom? By whom?” “Oh, stop getting on my nerves. Why should I know by whom and to whom? Maybe by the Albanians … against the Albanians?” “Aha, so that’s what the score is, then!” Well, that was the kind of argument you could hear in the cafés of the capital. But in the little town of B——, it all had a very different impact.
The afternoon suddenly seemed to have gone dead, as if it had been abandoned: a not uncommon impression toward the end of August, foreshadowing the coming autumn. A singer could be heard far away, and the monotonous strain only heightened the feeling of emptiness.
Mark looked at his watch. The locksmith should have finished installing his new front door by now. He dressed, went out, and made for his studio.
The streets were deserted. The singer’s voice grew nearer. Mark could now make out the words:
I‘m waiting for you in Station Road
Stand up straight, pretty girl, stand up straight!
Good Lord, what a stupid ditty! Mark thought. He had to listen for a while to make out the rest of it:
The boy is dying of love
Stand up straight, pretty girl, stand up straight!
It would have been hard to find a tune better fitted to this desolate provincial Sunday afternoon. Mark hurried on so as not to hear the song, but just as the unknown singer had faded into the distance, Mark found himself repeating the refrain:
Stand up straight, pretty girl, stand up straight!
It occurred to him that that was precisely how provincial dull-wittedness spreads from person to person. But that didn’t stop him from inwardly regurgitating those pointless words, in spite of himself, all the way back to the studio.
The locksmith had indeed finished the job. He had even stuck up a piece of paper next to the new door with the warning “Take Care! Wet Paint!”
Mark took his new key from his pocket, opened his new door, and then walked around his studio as if checking that nothing else had been changed inside it. The craftsman had told him that anyone, but especially an artist, feels different once he has an armored door.
He stopped for a moment in front of his unfinished nude, then, as his eye wandered toward the El Greco copy, his mind returned once again to the image of Philip II sinking slowly toward death at the Escorial. Like any king, he, too, must have wondered how best to make his doors protect him from intrusion.
To his considerable surprise, howe
ver, Mark did not feel safer; quite the opposite. In any case, he was ready to drop. The fitting of the new door had only made him tired. He lay down, back to the bay window, to shade his eyes from the light. Evening was coming on quite fast. It was a strange kind of dusk, for unlike an ordinary sundown, the heavenly orb was still shining at full strength…. At first he barely heard the knocking on the door, but soon the noise made by the messengers of Death grew ever more perceptible. Mark reached around himself with fevered movements to find the talisman of immortality, but he just could not remember where he had put it away. The hammering on the other side of the door got more and more violent. Only when Mark shouted “Enough!” did silence return.
It was the shout that woke him up. He looked at the bay window, then at the door. All his thinking about the door must have set off the nightmare, he decided.
“You won’t be getting any visitors now!” the locksmith had told him. “Your art’s quite safe till kingdom come.” Mark smiled to himself without bothering to explain out loud that he’d heard “your heart’s quite safe”; that is, he had become more or less immortal The cards had gotten shuffled in his poor head: immortals get burgled, whereas mediocre and mortal folk never have their things stolen….
His eyes alighted once again on the bay window. The watery light of the dying day was slowly fading away in a kind of haughty despair. He stood up and paced the studio floor once again.
Night had fallen when he went out. Before going to have dinner at the restaurant, he wandered past the block where Zef lived. The windows of his third-floor apartment were still dark.
“Where are you, Zef?” he cried out silently.
He continued on, trying to think of nothing at all. What peace! he said to himself as he stopped to light a cigarette. Was that a distant lowing he could hear? He went on his way, but stopped again immediately, since the distant noise sounded out a second time. It couldn’t be confused with the howling of the wind or with an echo from the mountain valleys. It was a rumbling that seemed to arise from an unimaginable depth and an impossible distance. Like the unending aftershock of the big bang rolling on eternally throughout the universe. And maybe that’s what it really is! Mark decided.
CHAPTER 4
IT TOOK NO MORE THAN A COUPLE of customers talking loudly at one of the five tables of the Town Café to make it seem like there was something going on. That morning, there was heated conversation at two of the said tables, and at both of them the discussion was so lively that a stranger coming into the room and wanting to get into the thick of things would have had a hard time deciding which table to sit at.
Mark hesitated himself as he stood in the door, but not for the same reason. When he could see that neither table was likely to calm down, he went up to the bar and stood alongside Cuf Kertolla, sitting by himself, as usual, with a glass in front of him. They can say what they like! thought Mark. He knew that the bar crowd took him for a standoffish and unsociable fellow, a stuck-up from the capital, or even a has-been, but he didn’t give a damn,
“They’ve got problems,” Cuf muttered as he nodded toward the noisy customers at the tables.
Mark pretended not to have heard and ordered a coffee. But however hard you tried to keep out of it, you couldn’t help picking up the main topic of conversation. At one of the tables, they were debating whether the new head of state was more afraid of his predecessor, the man whose place he had taken, than that predecessor had been of the terrifying leader he had replaced and who was, thank God, no longer of this world. At the other table, the drinkers were talking of some Judas or other who was expected to arrive from the capital, or who had maybe already arrived in discreet disguise. He was supposed to have denounced some prominent writers back in Tirana, and God only knew why he was now traipsing around in the provinces.
“They’ve really got problems!” Cuf Kertolla said again, but speaking directly to Mark this time. “They talk big, these Albanians! Always going on about heads of state, the UN, or Bible stories. But they don’t mention the holes in their own underpants! Say, do you know if they’re going to make us pay taxes?”
Cuf showed how proud he was of the relevance of his question by raising his eyebrows.
“No, I have no idea,” Mark answered.
“Apparently, we Albanians, after having suffered from all kinds of divisions and splits — Communists and bourgeois, northerners and southerners, Catholics and Muslims, and the devil knows how many other factions — we Albanians, I was saying, are giving it all up so as to form two new grand parties: the Tails and the Smalls. Have you already heard about that?”
“No,” said Mark, “I haven’t.”
“Well, it’s like I said. The leader of the Talis is the king, of course; he’s nearly seven feet. As for the Smalls, they’re under the whip of a fat little man from the South. It’s going to be a hoot!”
This time Mark said nothing. He drained his cup, paid, and left.
Outside he could feel the first whiff of autumn weather. The trees had already lost some of their leaves, and they looked foreign and menacing. Most of them seemed to have been designed as gallows, in any case.
Mark frowned and shook his head, as he did every time he wanted to get a disagreeable thought out of his head. Listening to a conversation about Judas first thing in the morning was not the best way to put him in a good mood.
As he drew close to the City Arts Center, he heard the sound of running right behind him. He turned around and saw the head of the music section coming up.
“I went to look for you at the studio,” he said, panting for breath. “The boss sent me to get you. We’re expecting a delegation this afternoon.”
“Really? I’d just stopped to have a coffee” Mark laughed. “Have you heard of the two new parties — the Tails and the Smalls?”
“No” the musician replied. “But that wouldn’t be so surprising.”
“There are reports of an old spy turning up here, too. They even came up with his name, Judas, which did surprise me a bit. I didn’t think anyone in this backwater would know any names.”
“You know, I’ve stopped being surprised by the gossip that goes around. Yesterday, my father-in-law, whom I took to be a man of sense, tried to persuade me that the bank heist was masterminded by the opposition!”
They both laughed out loud at this. Since Zef had disappeared, Mark found that he enjoyed the company of the head of the music section more and more.
“So now Judas is going to get his teeth into us at last!” he said. “That’s all that B—— has been waiting for!”
The City Arts Center was abuzz. The director’s sky blue tie quivered with excitement, and his whole being exuded an air of euphoria.
“Is the delegation from Spain?” Mark inquired in an undertone.
“Mmm … up to a point, perhaps. The people are actually from the Council of Europe,” the secretary explained. “But some of them might be from Spain.”
The director went over their marching orders. The delegation would arrive around 3:00 P.M. So everyone was to be at their posts by 2:30. As for the other rules of engagement, staff members already knew them.
The foreigners showed up at 3:00 P.M. precisely. There were two Germans, one Dutchman, and an Albanian guide. First they had coffee at the Arts Center, then they asked to see the surrounding area. They wanted to visit a convent that had been reopened after being left to its own devices for the fifty years of Communist rule, and a kulla, or Tower of Refuge, of the highland folk.
The director climbed into the foreigners’ car; Mark, with the head of the music section, got into the next, an aged Russian-made all-terrain vehicle originally leased to the ministry of the interior and then handed to the Arts Center after the fall of the old regime.
The bush-lined dirt road climbed on and on up into the mountains. There were not many towers, but they stopped at each one that came into sight. The Albanian guide — a tall lad with a sloping right shoulder beneath his check jacket — gave a commentary in
German. The Accursed Mountains could just be made out on the far horizon. The cold air made the Germans’ straw-colored hair look even thinner. The head of the music section, who stayed with Mark at the back of the party, twisted his head this way and that as if looking for something he had lost.
Mark thought he could hear a wolf howling in the distance, but no one else seemed to worry about it. It must have been the wind in the hills. He tried to imagine which steep path his girlfriend’s fearsome uncle would take when he came down from the northern plateau.
“Listen, Mark,” said the musician. “I don’t know why, but I’ve got a strong feeling that the path to the storage depot of the Secret Archives is somewhere around here.”
“Do you think so?” said Mark. “I’ve heard people say that sort of thing, but I thought it was just gossip.”
“Well, no, it’s not just another tall tale. It’s true they could have been moved since then, but in 1985, when Hoxha died, the archives really were in these parts.”
The area was undoubtedly suited to the role. A remote little spot at the foot of the Accursed Mountains: you couldn’t have dreamed of a more inaccessible hole.
“The cave must be somewhere nearby, I swear,” the music section head went on. “One of my cousins who worked for the Interior told me a very odd story about that.” He slowed his pace so as not to catch up with the main party. Mark was staring hard at him. “In April 1985, three days after the death of the tyrant, the first thing his successor did, just as soon as he had been sworn in, was to make a secret visit to B——.”