“No kidding?”
“It’s what my cousin told me at the time. It was the most discreet flying visit ever. Just two cars, so as not to attract attention.”
“That’s very odd,” Mark mumbled.
“Well, the next part is even odder,” the musician added. Although they were now way behind the visiting foreigners, they slowed their pace even more. “The small delegation from Tirana arrived precisely at 10:00 P.M. They didn’t stop in town and went straight to the deep storage depot. And there” — the head of the music section was already speaking in a whisper, but now, so it seemed to Mark, he was almost singing a lullaby — “and there, the new head of state hunted for things until three in the morning.”
“Well, well,” said Mark. “And then what?”
“Aren’t you going to ask me what he was looking for?” Mark shrugged. “Well, that is the question! What was he really after? I’ve puzzled over that so many times since then! No one has the faintest idea. Nor does anyone know if he found what he was looking for. My cousin was one of the small group of local officials who escorted the head of state to the cave, and he said that when the leader came out, he looked utterly depressed.”
The director was shouting from way up front: “Hey, you two! Get a move on, we’re on our way!”
He sounded just a little resentful of their confabulating out of earshot, but both of them knew that the boss was so delighted to be mingling with foreigners, they could bend the rules a little without making him angry.
“We were talking about the Kanun” the head of the music section said as he and Mark rejoined the main group.
“Really?” The director’s face clouded over. “That’s all people are interested in these days!” he said with a kind of sadness, and turned his back on them.
It was known in B—— that the director felt let down when visitors expressed interest in the old traditions. He was anxious to get down to talking about the latest advances of human civilization, about the Internet, the common currency, anything that had to do with the future of Europe. But to his amazement, foreigners not only spoke of such things without the least passion, but also couldn’t wait to quiz him about the old Kanun. How do you account for its revival? Do Towers of Refuge still exist? Were the ancient rules going to come back in a big way?
The two cars stopped in front of the convent. The foreigners snapped photographs of the restored gateway and walls. Once again, Mark thought he could hear that wolf in the distance. Images of his girlfriend’s armpits, of her uncle’s damaged leg, and of his much-allayed suspicion of her having had an affair in Tirana whirled about in his head.
The road ahead of them was virtually impassable, and the director reminded everyone that they had to be back in town before nightfall. Mark happened to notice the Albanian guide and interpreter just as he was bending down to get back in the car, and it suddenly occurred to him that what the Judas people were gossiping about was perhaps none other than he. The check jacket he was wearing somehow seemed to confirm the suspicion. God knows why, but he had always imagined that spies wore clothes of that sort.
On the way back, the cars passed by the hillside where the tunnel leading to the Secret Archives was supposed to be located. With his face pressed hard against the side window, Mark’s eyes hunted for some trace of an opening, but his breath misted up the glass. What had the head of state come to look for down in that hole? A message, a secret register, maybe his own file, kept there in case they might have to blackmail him, too? The dictator, people said, used that kind of armlock more and more as he grew old, to keep members of the Politburo totally dependent on him. So if it had seemed convenient to keep killer files on the others, it must have been even more necessary to keep information of last resort on the man who was to be his successor.
Mark had a feeling the head of the music section was having similar thoughts. He said to him in a whisper, “I cant get what you told me about the deep storage of state secrets out of my head.”
“I’m not surprised. After my cousin first told me about it, the mystery obsessed me for weeks.”
Obviously it would have, Mark thought. It raised a question of no small importance. What could the new Great Guide have been looking for in the dark, with a flashlight, the very moment he gained supreme power? What crime, what stain, did he have on his conscience?
All that spring and right through to the following winter, people never ceased to wonder whether the new president had murdered anyone. His supporters compared him — so as to whitewash him, if only a little — to the dead dictator and all the terror and horrors his reign had brought. The skeptics would not abandon their position that no one could have climbed so high without many a foul deed on his way up.
Mark was one of the skeptics. As Gentian used to say, crime is one of the most remarkable jewels in the crown of Communist potentates. Without it, the crown would be as precious as papier-mâché.
The two cars, traveling together, were now approaching the town. The first streaks of dusk in the sky made it look as if it was going to snow up in the hills.
Mark was exhausted. Words that sounded like the lyrics of a forgotten tune rang around his head:
Up in the mountain lies my fine secret…
Yes, it was like a snippet of an old folktale, of the kind you can never remember having read or heard for the first time: Once upon a time, there was a new ruler who lived in a palace in the capital. But his secret power, his soul, his very essence, was shut up in a casket buried deep beneath one of these great hills….
Mark and the head of music went to look for the hall where the meeting was scheduled to take place. An acquaintance told him on the telephone that it was in a warehouse that had been used for a while as an adult movie house. Nowadays, the owner rented it out for meetings, most often to religious sects and political factions.
“Renaming the streets, that’s another part of the muddle!” the head of music said to him. “Each time the town elects a different party, the first thing the new councillors do is change the street names. Right-wingers abolish names like ‘The Three Martyrs’ and put back the ancient sign invoking Our Immaculate Lady,’ and the leftists, when they get back in power, do just the same, only in reverse.”
Erotic graffiti on the walls indicated they were on the right track. They could see the half-opened metal doors of the warehouse from quite a distance.
“Isn’t this going to be dangerous?” Mark asked. “I mean, should we have invitations to be allowed in?”
“No, no, not at all,” said his friend.
They tried to make themselves as unremarkable as they could as they filed into the long, bare hall. At the back, sitting behind a table decked with a scarlet rug, were two men: an old man in highland folk dress, and another, pale-faced and smooth-skinned, wearing a felt hat. He must have been on edge, but his unwrinkled skin was probably the reason why his irritation could not be read on his face. Despite that, anger was in the air: you could see it in the trembling tassels of the scarlet tablecloth.
“We are all well aware that the Kanun has changed for the worse. What we need is to rid it of the filth and madness that is strangling it to death nowadays. That’s what we’re here to discuss. With as little bullshit as we can manage.”
Someone sitting in the middle of the hall shouted out, “The Russian Kalashnikov, that’s the Kanun’s number-one enemy!”
A great roar of applause and booing broke out instantly in the hall.
“You, sir, stand up and spell out your reasons!” said the platform speaker in the felt hat. So the man stood up.
Everyone in the hall turned to look at him, so Mark could see the faces of all the participants. They had turned their heads with such lack of ease that Mark almost expected to hear their necks creak like rusty hinges. He shuddered. In those frozen faces that looked as though they had been rescued from the morgue, the only trace of life was in the eyes. They glowed like embers in the wind. But there were other faces in the assembly to whi
ch the opposite had happened: faces where the eyes seemed to have gone dead first.
“The Kalashnikov rifle, like everything that comes from the Slav, undermines the Kanun]” the speaker explained. “We learned from our forebears, as they learned from theirs, that the Kanun is about one shot — the first shot. When you’ve pulled the trigger, you ve had your due. It’s now your opponent’s turn to shoot at you. A second shot is not allowed by the Kanun, and a third shot even less, so the thirty-odd bullets that come out of a Kalashnikov belt have nothing at all to do with the rules. But that’s what people are using these days to apply the old laws! It’s shameful!”
Several men approved with a “Well said!” or a “Right you are!”
The speaker now got into his stride.
“The Kanun does not allow the use of knives, axes, fire, or stone. Nor does it condone drowning, strangling, whipping, or the use of explosives.”
“That’s absolutely correct!” men shouted out around the hall
“Well, then, why are people doing all these things nowadays? These are shameful practices, and they must be stopped!”
The crowd of men expressed approval by rapping their knuckles on the seat backs in front of them.
“Where do these folk come from? How did they know about the meeting tonight?” Mark whispered into the ear of his friend.
“God only knows.”
On the way to the hall, the musician had explained to Mark that, according to what he had picked up, such assemblies — which had the appearance of political meetings, which were now quite legal — used to be held when there was a perceived need to amend an article or clause of the old Code of Laws of the Kanun. But they had always been very infrequent, happening maybe once every hundred or two hundred years.
Mark’s lungs felt close to bursting. It was a special kind of anxiety that he felt each time he was present at some exceptional event without fully appreciating just what he was witnessing. This meeting had the power to arouse emotions appropriate to events that happen only once in a lifetime. The huge gaps of time between each of these assemblies and the next — whole generations could pass through this world without ever having heard of them — made this night all the more daunting. It must have been at a general assembly of this kind in the distant past that the huge decision to replace knives with guns had once been taken.
Another man had risen to speak. He was demanding that a proclamation be drawn up and read out in every village by criers, just like in the old days.
The last speaker observed that after fifty years in deep freeze, the Kanun, unlike other corpses that are kept intact by ice and snow, had emerged in a sorry state. For the time being, it was everyone’s duty to speak out against the distortions of the old Code, and to call a halt to any further degradation. This speech prompted more knuckle-rapping on the seat backs.
Suddenly Mark thought he had caught sight of Zef. Yes, that was the nape of his neck, and the cheekbone was just like his; but the man kept his head stock-still. No, it can’t be, Mark thought, I must be hallucinating.
He felt a buzzing in his forehead and a weight against his temple that made his mind go cloudy, as it did every time that he thought of Zef.
Who knows what had become of Zef since they last met? Had he changed? A set of mental slides passed in front of his eyes: Zef as a factory boss whose workers had only ever seen his signature; Zef on a rubber dinghy, smuggling passengers across the Strait of Otranto; Zef lying in silk sheets with a naked woman; Zef lying at the bottom of the sea….
The noise of people striking the seat backs with their hands brought him back to himself. His friend muttered something in his ear. The assembly seemed to be going on forever.
In the end, they both got out of their seats and made their exit as discreetly as they had come. Dusk was falling. It seemed to Mark that the folk in the hall had deliberately stuck to saying the obvious on purpose, since hard thinking would have required too much effort.
Mark and his friend parted company at the first crossroads. On his way back to the studio, Mark went down Friars Street. As usual, there was no light in the windows of Zef’s third-floor apartment.
He lit a cigarette and tried to blank out everything from his mind.
The studio door made a creaking noise as he opened it. It would go on creaking like that until it had properly settled on its hinges, the locksmith had said. But there was a piece of paper, folded twice over, under the door. He bent down, picked it up, and as he read it he realized with alarm that the handwriting was his girlfriend’s:
“My uncle got here today. Nothing is quite sorted out yet. Je fembrasse”
He stood quite still for a moment with the letter in his hand. So the highland uncle had turned up. Judas too, he thought despondently.
The trumpets were sounding.
BY WAY OF A COUNTER-CHAPTER. Fever
THE VIRUSES WERE SPREADING ALL OVER. Most of them had no names. You thought you had a cold and ended up having tests for leprosy.
Mark had a fever. At times he felt as if he was turning endless somersaults down to the deepest basement in the universe. He was going down and down, in an elevator falling faster and faster, at vertiginous speed, toward Dante’s Inferno. The abrupt rediscovery of things that had been buried deep since time immemorial was something he could not stand. The old secrets were like oil fields without any soul or remorse, like sorrowful seams of long-abandoned coal, or a lode of sapphire giving off occasional smiling cynical sparkles….
When he came out of this whirlpool, he found himself in stark silence, beneath still waters, and that was just as unbearable. Nothing stirred; there was not the slightest breath of movement in the reed bed over there. All passion was spent, not a spark of human excitement was permitted. It was just a specimen book filled with dried Furies mounted like butterflies and identified at the bottom of each page by an inventory number and a Latin botanical name.
One afternoon Mark’s fever dropped a little. He realized he was not so sick when it occurred to him, without the slightest hesitation or doubt, that he knew who the real bank robbers were. At least, he knew who two of them were: Palok Kuqi and Cuf Kertolla, the man who propped up the bar at the Town Café. Things often turn out like that — you hunt high and low for clues, but the culprits have been in front of you all along, even sipping a cup of coffee right next to you. Mark felt too weary to work out how he had come by his certain knowledge. But next to the horror of falling and the terror he had felt, this seemed perfectly natural.
Then his fever went up again. No! no! he moaned intermittently. He was being pestered by the iceberg that sank the Titanic, which insisted on his hearing its confession. You’re the assistant commissioner, the iceberg said, so you have to take my confession! I really must lay down my burden of remorse! But nobody’s blaming you! Mark pointed out, but he didn’t dare speak the truth, that nobody in the force wanted to waste time on a lump of ice. Notwithstanding, the iceberg had already begun to pour out the story of its so-called life. It had been born when the Titanic was no more than a set of lines and numbers on a naval architect’s drawing boards. One winter’s night, its parents, two giant North Sea icebergs, collided, and from that amorous encounter, or monstrous crash, as you will, the young one was born. Like any newborn babe he was quite small at the start, but he grew and grew in height and weight. It was very cold, and as everyone knows there’s nothing better for the health than living on cold and nothing else. I was the son of the frost, and the frost was my master. Other people, like you, say that cold is death, but for us, it’s the opposite, it’s heat that is death. That’s the great gulf of misunderstanding that keeps us apart. And that’s where the famous accident of the night of April 14 comes from. I, the antisun, was solitary and cold, and found myself staring at the brand-new Titanic. But you can’t understand that. Your god is warmth. In your lust for heat you’re capable of anything, you could even burn the world down. See now: a few minutes ago you were complaining of being cold, and now your f
orehead is burning and all you dream of is an ice cube to put on it!
That’s true enough, Mark said to himself. But he did not quite know how to apologize. The fact that the huge ship Titanic, with its deck lights and searchlights, with its roaring boilers and its cabin fires, with its freight of smiles, music, and champagne, with its women’s unshaven love nests, should have smashed into the guardian of the glacial realm now seemed to Mark to be the most natural thing in the world.
Two entities made of opposite elements had come up against each other in the wrong place, somewhere they should never have been together, just like that other case, that other story … That’s right, in that faraway town where a man and a snake, like people who have to share a single suit of clothes, had shared the same physical appearance.
Mark wanted to yell: Not now! Some other time, please! But he knew it would have been a waste of breath. The snake was another one who wanted charges brought. He told the whole story in the generally accepted version, in other words toeing what could be called the official line. Before quizzing him on the other, secret version, Mark wanted to know more about the moment of transition, the moment that seemed to be not of this world, the instantaneous flash in which the metamorphosis of man into reptile and reptile into man took place. That’s the sole matter on which I would be grateful not to answer any questions, the snake replied. It cannot be told. Even if I wanted to tell you about it, I could not. You said it yourself: It’s not of this world; as a consequence, any attempt to understand it would fail, first of all, but would also quite possibly be a mortal sin.
I guess that’s true, Mark thought.
As for the other, secret version, it was just the official story turned on its head, as it often is in so many cases: instead of the snake-groom turning into a man every night, it was the man-groom who could suddenly change into a snake. It was reminiscent of the story of an Albanian girl who had landed in Italy in 1999 after crossing the Strait of Otranto. In a hotel room in Bari, her boyfriend had suddenly turned into a wild animal…. A high proportion of the Albanian prostitutes in Rome and Paris had more or less the same story to tell On each and every one of their wedding nights, the bridegroom had thrown off his human disguise, metamorphosed into an unrecognizable, alien being, and insisted that his bride go work on the streets.