Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

  “How come there are now so many of you?” Mark asked, but no answer came, as the snake had vanished.

  As it’s often been stated, all that happened at the time of the gods’ first departure. At the time, of course, nobody noticed at all. So we have lost the date of their departure and the real reason for it; yet it must have become pretty obvious to all. Now the opposite rumor was doing the rounds: the gods were coming back! They were returning from long years of wandering, and only they knew how to come back. (Maybe they were hitching rides in OSCE cars, or were using vehicles that mere mortals had not yet dreamed of.) Come as you can, bring what you will, but don’t leave us alone! Mark screamed — and this time, he screamed it all out loud.

  He was hanging on to the tassels of his bedspread as if to stop himself from falling into the pit.

  CHAPTER 5

  MARK WENT UP TO THE WINDOW to see what was going on outside. It was a most curious spectacle. The city was under water. Muddy brown water, the sort you see when there’s been flooding. Even from the balcony you could hear the lapping of the waves. Mark leaned over, dipped his fingers in it, and was surprised to find that it was not at all cold. He was alarmed to see how rapidly the flood had risen to the level of his second-floor apartment, and for a short while he stared at the buildings on the other side of the street and at the tops of the lampposts, which rose above the waterline. Then without a second thought he stripped off his shirt, and, as he was already in his underpants, put his leg over the balustrade. He dipped a toe into the water, and then let the rest of him slip in.

  For a short moment he wondered if he was dreaming; the quietness all around would otherwise have been inexplicable. But he soon realized that he was not in a dream. Everyone else seemed to be still asleep, unaware of what had happened during the night. In any case, it was very pleasant to swim about at second-floor level. Distances seemed somehow altered, crossroads seemed closer to each other, and Mark imagined he would get to his girlfriend’s window very easily indeed. How surprised she would be to see him swim up to her bay window! He would hang on to the railing for a few seconds to get his breath back, and then haul himself up over it.

  In the distance a siren — from a police car or some other emergency vehicle — could be heard blaring faintly. You’re taking your time! Mark thought.

  He swam toward the main crossroads at the center of town; with a bit more effort he could get to the town hall plaza and, farther on, to the Arts Center. On both sides of the street all sorts of things were stacked on people’s balconies: sofas, bicycle wheels, and multicolored beach balls, which brought back to mind the summer holidays.

  He suddenly thought of his studio, and shuddered with fear. What a muddlehead you are! he scolded himself. That’s what you should have worried about first! He made a sharp about-turn, in order to swim back toward the studio. Some alleys were completely submerged, so he was able to take short cuts straight over the roofs of low shacks that he could barely see through the murky water.

  His limbs, which up to then had moved with ease, now began to feel heavy. A panic came upon him. You must be crazy! he told himself a second time, as he craned his neck left and right to see if he really was the only swimmer in town. If there had been anyone else, he would have asked him to go to the studio in his stead, to make sure the paintings had not been swept away by the flood, since he was now feeling quite incapable of swimming so far. But to his renewed amazement he had no more company than Adam. So much so that he could have said, in retrospect, Darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of Mark moved upon the face of the waters…. He made a last effort with all his muscles to push against the weight of the water, and at that very moment, he woke up.

  What a dream! he thought, though he was greatly relieved all the same to be back in the real world. He went up to the window and drew back the curtain. It was still dark outside. The siren of the police car or the ambulance, which had apparently pierced his dream, could still be heard in the far distance.

  When he went out, Mark was still burdened by the distress that his dream had left him with. At the door of the Town Café, where he made his regular call, a knot of men were talking about the sirens that he had just been hearing. “No, no,” one of them was saying, “it cant be another holdup. In any case, there can’t be much left to steal at that sorry branch! Ndrek must be right — they’re testing the sirens on the cars that the Council of Europe sent us.”

  The barman, who seemed to assume that Mark was expecting his opinion, gave a twisted, smile and said, “We’d like to be part of Europe, but up to now all we’ve got from Europe are those damned sirens! Aren’t we lucky!”

  Mark could feel someone come in the door behind him, breathing hard.

  “Okay lads, you heard the news? Marian Shkreli…”

  The man was panting for breath and could hardly speak.

  “Well, what’s happened to him, then?”

  “He was shot as he came out of his front door…. That’s what’s happened to him!”

  “Not possible!”

  Mark was struck dumb for a moment. “Marian Shkreli has been shot….” The sentence sounded blind and foreign, and he could not get it into his head. He wanted to yell, “But that’s my boss!” as if this fact contradicted the news that had just been given out. For years, in fact, though he had no idea why, everyone had called him “boss” and had avoided using his surname. And now, on this fatal day, the boss’s actual name had suddenly reemerged from oblivion to take its rightful place. Hardened and darkened by the blood that had been spilled, the name reattached itself to the body as it grew cold.

  In no time at all the café filled with noise and bustle. Everyone was talking at the same time, without really bothering whether anyone else was listening.

  “So that’s what the wailing siren was about. I thought it might have been the fire engine….”

  Mark lit a cigarette and left without greeting anyone. He walked at a sharp pace and then broke into a run.

  A small crowd had gathered in front of the block where the victim lived. The police car was parked at the curbside. The local magistrate and his team were also on-site, already busy taking photographs. Mark just stood there like the other onlookers, not daring to ask for details. He knew he would find it all out soon enough without having to ask. He would just have to keep his ear open to gossip.

  Indeed, he caught up with the whole story very quickly. The director had been seriously wounded, and had been taken to the hospital. There was not much hope of saving him. A young man had fired a revolver at Marian as he came out of his front door. One single shot, to the forehead.

  A single shot, Mark said over and again to himself, like a man in a daze.

  Other people could now be seen converging on the spot from all directions. Asking the same questions, getting the same answers.

  “The boss has been killed.”

  “You dont say! Who did it, and for what reason?”

  “No idea. Maybe it was a crime of jealousy.”

  “But apparently it was more complicated than that, if you believe what people say.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean! A political murder! That’s the fashion these days — people assume that some political score’s being settled whenever someone has a stroke or gets buried in an avalanche.”

  “I don’t think people will say that in this case. As far as I know, he wasn’t involved in politics.”

  “By the way, which party did he support?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is that the left thought he was right-wing, and the right thought he was left-wing.”

  “Poor man!”

  Mark kept looking for the head of the music section in the ever-growing crowd. He didn’t know what best to do — to follow his boss to the hospital or stay at the scene of the crime with the others. Then something made him shiver from head to toe. In the stream of ordinary conversations overheard, he thought he could make out a another language, a language of frozen expressions drif
ting like ice floes on the swell of the sea of chatter. Those old, cold ways of saying, quite distinct from the warm words of living speech, could now be heard ever more insistently. The victim’s name — now preceded by the culprit’s name — froze the blood in Mark’s veins: Angelin of the Ukaj hath slain Marian of the Shkreli.

  Mark felt his heart sink. The old formula left no room for doubt. This ancestral sentence had come out of the buried passages and clefts of the mountain and was now taking wing in the wide open. People in the crowd were still asking about the assassin in everyday language — So who is this Angelin Ukaj? What made him want to hit the boss? Why?… But the proud and unbending saying of old flew straight to the heart with its single, repeated message: Angelin of the Ukaj hath slain Marian of the Shkreli.

  Mark thought he recognized the man in the felt hat whom he’d seen at that grim meeting in the warehouse…. He was observing the crowd with great attention, and it seemed to Mark that icy flames sprang forth now and again from the mans eyes. Mark’s heart sank even further.

  Someone took his elbow. It was his friend from the music section.

  “Let’s go to the hospital,” he said. “The boss is supposed to be dying.”

  They set off at a brisk pace. Mark asked: “So who is this Angelin Ukaj?”

  He got no answer for a moment; then, in a burst, “I don’t know. I heard a rumor that he was a fellow from the High Quarter. But what does it matter? He was only the doreras, the hit man.”

  Mark shot a glance at his friend that seemed to say, So are you also part of the plot?

  The head of the music section looked worried as he shook his head.

  “It really is as if it was being reborn … the Kanun, I mean. Just what we needed!”

  Mark would have liked to add, “And woe betide us!” but instead, his voice uttered words he had not even thought of: “You don’t happen to know if this fellow has a sister?”

  The other man shrugged his shoulders.

  “No, I don’t. I never even heard his name before.”

  There’s a tough day ahead! thought Mark.

  * * *

  Shortly after noon the director of the Arts Center breathed his last in his hospital bed. Toward four, a small crowd gathered in the courtyard of the Arts Center, believing that the coffin would be brought there to lie in state. Inside the building, the telephone never stopped ringing, but that didn’t mean people had any better idea of what had happened. In the end, someone from the town hall came to announce that the deceased, in accordance with his wishes, would be buried the next day in the village of his birth, Black Rock.

  Nearly everyone who heard the announcement was dumbfounded. The boss wants to be buried in the mountains? For they had all forgotten that that was where he came from, and more precisely from the hamlet called Black Rock. Younger folk, who were not interested in general in where other people came from, would more likely have assumed that Marian had come to B—— from Tirana, not from the high plateau.

  As they moved off, they talked about the way the boss had dressed, about his politeness and elegance, especially about those bunches of flowers he had delivered to his wife, just like a distinguished European. But some felt really disappointed as they made their way homeward. They would never have dreamed that a man so young, and so modern, could have come from such a desolate hole. Others just nodded their heads, gave a deep sigh, then, accustomed as they had been for so long to take nothing on trust, whispered in each other’s ears, “Do you think the boss really wanted to be buried at Black Rock?” And then there were those who shook hands with acquaintances only to find out whether the bus really was going to leave from the town hall, and to check that it would not take more than an hour to get to Black Rock.

  Mark had a cup of coffee at the bar of the Town Café and then went back up to his studio. He had a hunch that he would find a note from his girlfriend under the door. She hadn’t shown her face since her uncle had turned up. “Don’t fret, darling,” she had told him. “As soon as he’s gone, everything will return to normal. Just be patient.”

  With a flutter in his heart, he pushed open the heavy door. He forced himself not to look down to check if there was a piece of paper on the floor. But a strong intuition told him there wasn’t.

  He lit a cigarette and began to pace the room. He kept on walking up and down until his knees began to ache, and then he sat down.

  The young woman arrived after night had fallen. He recognized her footfall on the stairs and stood at the door to greet her. Her face was white as a sheet. Without a word, she collapsed into his arms and burst into tears.

  “My brother,” she wailed between her sobs.

  “It did occur to me,” Mark replied. “I tried to banish the thought of him from my mind, but I couldn’t. Good God, the worst of our fears has come to pass!”

  They both said the last sentence together. Unless, of course, they did not say it at all, but only thought it in unison.

  He stroked her hair and tried to calm her down. But when she asked what would happen now, he had no answer to give her.

  Right after the murder, the police had searched her family’s home, but her brother had already gone into hiding. The whole business was full of contradictions: there was a highly public side to executions of this kind, yet the murderer was obliged to go under cover.

  “It’ll work out in the end,” Mark said, looking as forlorn as ever. “There’s got to be a solution. There always is.”

  They were sitting on the sofa. Mark kept turning his head toward the bay window. It was getting darker and darker.

  The funeral procession drove very slowly along the mountain road. The hearse led the way, with a town-hall car following with the bereaved. Behind that was a jeep with NATO markings, a leftover from a recent mission to patrol the Kosovo border. There were two coaches, jam-packed with friends of the family, which could barely make the sharp curves. All of a sudden the tiny hamlet of Black Rock came into view, startlingly close up, as if seen through a zoom lens. Roofs, houses, windows, and the church with its recently repaired steeple stood out in the mist. It seemed so close you could touch it by stretching out your hand — but a moment later, after a hairpin turn in the mountain road, the village seemed to move off in a huff, into the far distance.

  Farther on, the road dropped down before rising again. Black Rock, first seen up on high, almost in the clouds, now turned out to be deep down, lower than the rolling mist. A skittish place!

  As he watched the landscape playing these games with the eye and the mind, Mark could not really concentrate on what the head of the music section was saying to him from the next seat in the coach. Black Rock now seemed to be dancing a crazy Irish reel.

  The other passengers were talking at the tops of their voices, smoking like chimneys and coughing their hearts out.

  “The killer made only the very slightest alteration to … how should I say… the outer dress of the execution ritual,” Mark’s friend and colleague explained to him. “Do you remember that grim meeting we went to? Where they were all adamant that the deed could only be done by a single shot? Well, the marksman kept to the rule: he fired only once. Tve heard it said that he even called out to his victim before pulling the trigger. The question now is whether he’s going to carry on with all the other rules from the Kanun, or stop short at this point. Did you see the two policemen who got into the other coach? I’m sure they’re coming up to Black Rock to arrest the murderer if he turns up at the wake, as the old Code dictates.”

  “I doubt it”

  “What do you doubt? That hell come to the wake, or that he’ll get arrested?”

  “Both,” Mark replied.

  His friend pursed his lips. “You know, this business is getting more absurd every minute,” he added after a pause. “None of it makes any sense.”

  “Of course. It was always that way.”

  Black Rock reappeared, and now it really was very close.

  A passenger at the back was telling his
neighbor that the poor man’s wife hadn’t wanted this highland burial at all, but in his very last moments, just before his dying breath, Marian had suddenly declared that such was his last wish.

  “I think we’re there, at last!” said the head of the music section.

  The burial took place when the sun was at its zenith, as custom and ritual required. The two policemen looked dazed as they joined the procession. They had been given orders to arrest the murderer, even though, despite the rule of the Kanun, there was little chance that the latter would come to the funeral.

  The men wailed the ancient lamentations, among which could be made out only the words “Woe betide us without thee, Marian Shkreli!” Following behind, the women sobbed, spoke of their memories, and sang the praises of the deceased.

  A journalist, thin as a rake, whom Mark thought he had seen before, flitted to and fro among the mourners.

  “As far as I know, the old custom only allowed men to shed tears. Isn’t that so?55 he mumbled.

  Mark shrugged his shoulders.

  “Are you working for the local paper?”

  “Yes, I am. And to be honest I dont understand any of all this. The old customs they’re supposed to be resurrecting are being trodden in the dust!”

  Mark didn’t respond, but the journalist kept on blathering just the same. He seemed to be talking to himself, or else dictating an article. His drone was constantly being interrupted by cries and wailing. The government of the left accused the right-wing opposition … of encouraging … a return to the Kanun … whereas the right… which pointedly called the victim a “beacon of democracy” … denounced the Communists … who, it contended, were trying to undermine national values … and the left responded to this accusation by saying that… whereas the right stressed the point that… Lord, what a shambles you have left us with, Marian Shkreli!