Broken April

by Ismail Kadare

  Broken April

  Broken

  April

  Ismail Kadare

  Translated from the Albanian

  BROKEN APRIL. Copyright © 1982 by Librairie Arthème

  Fayard. English translation copyright © 1990 by New Amsterdam Books and Saqui Books. First English-language edition published 1990 by New Amsterdam Books and Saqui Books. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. For information, address: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago 60622. Manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Kadare, Ismail.

  Broken April.

  ISBN: 978-1-56131-065-4

  I. Title.

  PG9621.K3A9613 1989

  891'89.9913

  89–8241

  BROKEN APRIL

  A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  The Albanian alphabet is phonetic; it sometimes uses two letters to indicate a single sound. Some Albanian letters have sound values that do not coincide with those of English. Among them are the following letters, which occur in proper names in Broken April:

  Vowels

  ë

  an unstressed vowel, like “a” in “a lot”

  y

  German “u” or the “u” of French “rendu, attendu,” etc.

  Consonants

  c

  “ts” as in “curtsy”

  ç

  “ch” as in “church”

  dh

  voiced “th” as in “there”

  gj

  “g” as in “gem”

  j

  “y” as in “yellow”

  q

  a sound approximating the shortened sound of “tu” as in “future”

  CHAPTER I

  His feet were cold, and each time he moved his numbed legs a little he heard the desolate grating of pebbles under his shoes. But the sense of desolation was really inside him. Never before had he stayed motionless for so long, lying in wait behind a ridge that overlooked the highway.

  Daylight was fading. Fearful or simply troubled, he brought the rifle’s stock to his cheek. Soon it would be dusk, and he would not be able to see the sights of the weapon in the fading light. “He’s sure to come by before it’s too dark to take aim,” his father had said. “Just be patient and wait.”

  Slowly the gun barrel swept over some patches of the half-thawed snow towards the wild pomegranates scattered through the brush-covered space on both sides of the road. For perhaps the hundredth time he thought that this was a fateful day in his life. Then the gun barrel swung back again to where it had been. What in his mind he had called a fateful day was no more than those patches of snow and those wild pomegranates that seemed to have been waiting since midday to see what he would do.

  He thought, soon night will fall and it will be too dark to shoot. He wished that dusk would come swiftly, that night would race on after it, so that he could run away from this accursed ambush. It was the second time in his life that he had lain in wait to take revenge, but the man he must kill was the same one, so that this ambush was really an extension of the other.

  He became aware again of his icy feet, and he moved his legs as if to keep the cold from rising in his body, but it had long since reached his belly, his chest and even his head. He had the feeling that bits of his brain had frozen, like those patches of snow along the sides of the road.

  He felt that he could not shape a clear thought. He had only a vague animosity for the wild pomegranates and the patches of snow, and sometimes he told himself that were it not for them, he would have given up his vigil long ago. But there they were, motionless witnesses that had kept him from going away.

  At the bend in the road, for perhaps the twentieth time that day, he thought he saw the man he had been waiting for. The man came on with short steps; the black barrel of his rifle rose above his right shoulder. The watcher started. This time it was no hallucination. It really was the man he was waiting for.

  Just as he had done so many times before, Gjorg brought the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the man’s head. For a moment the head seemed to resist him, trying to elude his sights, and at the last instant he even thought he saw an ironic smile on the man’s face. Six months before, the same thing had happened, and so as not to disfigure that face (who can say whence that touch of pity came at the last moment?) he had lowered the front sight of his weapon and wounded his enemy in the neck.

  The man came closer. Please not a wound this time, Gjorg said to himself in a kind of prayer. His family had had great trouble paying the fine for the first wound, and a second fine would ruin them. But there was no penalty for death.

  The man came closer. Gjorg thought, better a clean miss than a wound. As he had done each time he had imagined he saw the man, in keeping with the custom, he warned the man before he fired. Neither then nor later did he know if he had called aloud or if the words had been stifled in his throat. In fact the other man turned his head sharply. Gjorg saw him move his arm as if to unsling the rifle from his shoulder, and he fired. Then he raised his head, and as if bewildered watched the dead man—still standing, but Gjorg was sure he had killed him—take a step forward, drop his rifle on the right side, and immediately fall to the left.

  Gjorg came out of concealment and walked towards the body. The road was deserted. The only sound was the sound of his own footsteps. The dead man had fallen in a heap. Gjorg bent down and laid his hand on the man’s shoulder, as if to wake him. “What am I doing?” he said to himself. He gripped the dead man’s shoulder again, as if he wanted to bring him back to life. “Why am I doing this?” he thought. At once he realized that he had bent down over the other man not to awaken him from eternal sleep but to turn him on his back. He simply meant to follow the custom. Around him patches of snow were still there, scattered witnesses.

  He stood up and was about to leave when he remembered that he had to put the dead man’s rifle near his head.

  He did it all as if in a dream. He felt like vomiting, and he told himself several times that it must be because of the blood. A few moments later he was fleeing down the deserted road, almost at a run.

  Dusk was falling. He looked back two or three times without knowing why. The road was still completely empty. In the dying day the still deserted road stretched away between brush and thicket.

  Somewhere ahead he heard mule bells, then human voices, and he saw a group of people. In the twilight it was hard to tell whether they were visitors or mountain folk returning from the market. They came up with him sooner than he had expected. Men, young women, and children.

  They said, “Good evening,” and he stopped. Even before he spoke, he motioned in the direction from which he had come. Then he said in a hoarse voice, “Over there by the bend in the road I killed a man. Turn him on his back, good people, and put his rifle by his head.”

  The little group was still. Then a voice asked, “You’re not blood-sick are you?” He did not answer. The voice suggested a remedy, but he did not hear it. He had started walking again. Now that he had asked them to turn over the dead man’s body as it should be, he felt relieved. He could not remember whether or not he had done that himself. The Kanun* provided for a state of shock on the part of the killer, and permitted passers-by to complete whatever he had not been able to do. In any case, to leave a dead man face-down, his weapon far off, was an unforgivable disgrace.

  Night had not yet fallen when he reached the village. It was still his fateful day. The door of the kulla** was ajar. He pushed it open with his shoulder and went in.

  “Well?” someone asked from inside.

  He nodded.

  “When?”
/>
  “Just now.”

  He heard footsteps coming down the wooden stairs.

  “There’s blood on your hands,” his father said. “Go and wash them.”

  “It must have happened when I turned him over.”

  He had tormented himself needlessly. A glance at his hands would have told him that he had done everything in keeping with the rules.

  There was a smell of roasted coffee in the kulla. Astonishingly, he was sleepy. He yawned twice. The gleaming eyes of his little sister, who leaned against his left shoulder, seemed far away, like two stars beyond a hill.

  “And now?” he said suddenly, to no one in particular.

  “We must tell the village about the death,” his father answered. Only then did Gjorg notice that his father was putting on his shoes.

  He was drinking coffee his mother had made for him when he heard, outside, the first shout:

  “Gjorg of the Berisha has shot Zef Kryeqyqe.”

  The voice, with its peculiar ring, sounded at once like the call of a town crier and the singing of an ancient psalmist.

  That inhuman voice roused him from his drowsiness for an instant. He felt as if his name had quitted his body, his chest, his skin, to pour itself cruelly outside. It was the first time he had ever felt anything like that. Gjorg of the Berisha, he repeated within him the cry of the pitiless herald. He was twenty-six, and for the first time his name plumbed the depths of life.

  Outside the messengers of death, as if on wings, spread that name everywhere.

  Half an hour later, they brought back the man’s body. Following the custom, they had put him on a litter made of four beech branches. Some still hoped that he was not dead.

  The victim’s father waited at the door of his house. When the men bearing his son were forty paces off, he called out:

  “What have you brought me? A wound or a death?”

  The answer was short, dry.

  “A death.”

  His tongue sought moisture, deep, deep in his mouth. Then he spoke painfully:

  “Carry him in and tell the village and our kin of our bereavement.”

  The bells of the cattle returning to the village of Brezftoht, the bell tolling vespers, and all the other sounds of nightfall seemed laden with news of the death.

  The streets and lanes were unusually lively for that evening hour. Torches that looked cold in the waning light flickered somewhere at the edge of the village. People came and went by the house of the dead man and by the house of his murderer, going in and coming out. Others, in twos and threes, went off and came back.

  At the windows of houses on the outskirts, people exchanged the latest news:

  “Have you heard? Gjorg Berisha has killed Zef Kryeqyqe.”

  “Gjorg Berisha has taken back his brother’s blood.”

  “Are the Berishas going to ask for the twenty-four hour bessa?”*

  “Yes, of course.”

  The windows of the tall stone houses looked upon the comings and goings in the village streets. Now night had fallen. The torchlight seemed to thicken as if solidifying. Little by little it turned a deep red, lava springing from mysterious depths, and sparks flew upward from it as if announcing the bloodletting to come.

  Four men, one of them elderly, were walking towards the dead man’s house.

  “The deputation is going to ask for the twenty-four hour bessa for the Berishas,” someone said from a window.

  “Will they grant it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Nevertheless, the entire clan of the Berisha were preparing to defend themselves. Here and there you could hear voices: Murrash, go home at once! Cen, close the door. Where’s Prenga?

  The doors of all the houses of the clan, of kinsfolk near and distant, were closing, for this was the moment of danger, before the victim’s family had granted either of the two periods of truce; according to the Code, the Kryeqyqe, blinded by the newly shed blood, had the right to take vengeance on any member of the Berisha family.

  All watched at their windows to see the delegation come out again. “Will they grant the truce?” the women asked.

  At last the four mediators came out. The discussion had been short. Their bearing gave nothing away but a voice soon gave out the news.

  “The Kryeqyqe family has granted the bessa.”

  Everyone knew that it was the short truce, the twenty-four hour bessa. As for the long bessa, the thirty-day truce, no one spoke of it yet, for only the village could ask for it—and in any case it could not be requested until after the burial of the last victim.

  The voices flew from house to house:

  “The Kryeqyqe family has granted the bessa.”

  “Bessa has been granted by the Kryeqyqes.”

  “And a good thing, too. At least we’ll have twenty-four hours without bloodshed,” a hoarse voice breathed from behind a shutter.

  The funeral took place the next day around noon. The professional mourners came from afar, clawing their faces and tearing their hair according to the custom. The old churchyard was filled with the black tunics of the men who had come to the burial. After the ceremony, the funeral cortege returned to the Kryeqyqes’ house. Gjorg, too, walked in the procession. At first he had refused to take part in the ceremony, but at last he had given in to his father’s urging. He had said, “You must go to the burial. You must also go to the funeral dinner to honor the man’s soul.”

  “But I am the Gjaks,”* Gjorg had protested. “I’m the one who killed him. Why must I go?”

  “For that very reason you must go,” his father declared. “If there is anyone who cannot be excused from the burial and the funeral dinner today, it’s you.” “But why?” Gjorg had asked one last time. “Why must I go?” But his father glared at him and Gjorg said no more.

  Now he walked among the mourners, pale, with unsteady steps, feeling people’s glances glide by him and turn aside at once, losing themselves in the banks of mist. Most of them were relatives of the dead man. Perhaps for the hundredth time he groaned inwardly: Why must I be here?

  Their eyes showed no hatred. They were cold as the March day, as he himself had been cold, without hatred, yesterday evening as he lay in wait for his quarry. Now the newly dug grave, the crosses of stone and wood—most of them askew—and the plaintive sound of the tolling bell, all these struck home. The faces of the mourners, with the hideous scratches left by their fingernails (God, he thought, how did they get their nails to grow so long in twenty-four hours?), their hair torn out savagely and their eyes swollen, the muffled footsteps all around him, all these trappings of death—it was he who had brought them about. And as if that were not enough, he was forced to walk in that solemn cortege, slowly, in mourning, just like them.

  The braid on the seams of their tight trousers of white felt nearly touched his own, like poisonous black snakes ready to strike. But he was calm. He was better protected by the twenty-four hour truce than by the loophole of any kulla or fortress. The barrels of their rifles were aligned straight upwards against their short, black tunics, but for the time being they were not free to shoot at him. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after. And if the village asked for the thirty-day bessa on his behalf, he would be at peace for another four weeks. And then. . . .

  But a few paces ahead of him a rifle barrel swayed as if to stand out among the others. Another barrel, a short one, was to his left. Still others were all around him. Which of them. . . . at the last moment, in his mind, the words “will kill me” changed—as if to soften them—to “will fire at me.”

  The road from the graveyard to the dead man’s house seemed endless. And he still had before him an even more arduous test, the funeral dinner. He would sit at the table with the dead man’s kin. They would pass the bread to him, they would set food before him, spoons, forks, and he would have to eat.

  Two or three times he felt the urge to get out of that absurd situation, to bolt from the funeral cortege. Let them insult him, jeer at him, accuse him of violating
age-old custom, let them shoot at his retreating back if they liked, anything so long as he got away from there. But he knew very well that he could never run away, no more than his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his great-great-grandfather, and all his ancestors five hundred, a thousand years before him had been able to run away.

  They were coming close to the house of the dead man. The narrow windows above the arch of the house door had been hung with black cloth. Oh, where am I going, he moaned to himself, and while the low door of the kulla was still a hundred paces off, he lowered his head so as not to strike against the stone arch.

  The funeral meal took place in accordance with the rules. As long as it went on Gjorg thought about his own funeral feast. Which of these people would go there, just as he had come here today, just as his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather and all his ancestors had gone to such feasts down through the centuries?

  The faces of the mourners were still gouged and bloody. Custom forbade them to wash either in the village where the killing had taken place or on the way back. They could wash only after they reached their homes.

  The streaks on their faces and foreheads made them look as if they were wearing masks. Gjorg imagined how his own mourners would look when they had gouged their faces. He felt that from now on the lives of all the generations to come in the two families would be an endless funeral feast, each side playing host in turn. And each side, before leaving for the feast, would don that blood-stained mask.

  That afternoon, after the funeral meal, there were once again unusual comings and goings in the village. In a few hours, Gjorg Berisha’s one-day truce would be at an end, and now the village elders, as the rules required, were preparing to visit the Kryeqyqes to ask for the thirty-day truce, the long bessa, in the name of the village.

  On the doorsteps of the kullas, on the first floors where the women lived, and in the village squares, people talked of nothing else. This was the first blood-taking of that spring, and of course there was much discussion of everything connected with it. The killing had been performed in accordance with the rules, and as for the burial, the funeral feast, the one-day bessa, and everything else, these had been carried out with scrupulous obedience to the ancient Code. So the thirty-day truce that the elders were preparing to ask of the Kryeqyqes would certainly be granted.