She was nearly asleep when she felt his shoulder move.
“Diana, look,” he said softly, taking her hand.
In the distance, beside the road, there were some black figures.
“Mountain people?” she asked.
“Yes.”
As their carriage drew nearer, the dark figures seemed to grow taller. Both the passengers’ faces were glued to the window, and Diana several times wiped from the glass the mist made by their breath.
“What are they holding in their hands, umbrellas?” she asked, but very softly, when the carriage was no more than fifty paces from the mountaineers.
“Yes, that’s what it looks like,” he muttered. “Where did they get those umbrellas?”
At last the carriage passed the mountaineers, who stared after it. Bessian turned his head, as if to make sure that the things they had in their hands really were old umbrellas with broken struts and ragged cloth.
“I’ve never seen mountaineers carrying brollies,” he murmured. Diana was surprised too, but she took care not to mention it, so as not to make him angry.
When further on they saw another group of mountaineers, two of whom were laden with sacks, Diana pretended not to see them. Bessian looked at them for a while.
“Corn,” he said at last, but Diana did not answer. Again she leaned her head upon his shoulder, and again her hair began to slide gently to and fro with the movement of the carriage.
Now it was he who watched the road attentively. As for her, she tried to turn her thoughts to more pleasant things. After all, it was no great misfortune if a legendary mountaineer heaved a sack of corn onto his back, or carried a dilapidated umbrella against the rain. Had she not seen more than one man from the mountains, in the city streets at the end of autumn, with an axe over his shoulder, and crying out plaintively, “Any wood to cut?”, a cry that was more like the cry of a night bird. But Bessian had told her that those people were not representative of the mountain country. Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue. The real mountaineers are up there, on the Rrafsh, he had said to her one night, lifting his arms towards the celestial heights beyond the horizon, as if the Rrafsh were somewhere in the sky rather than on earth.
Now, pressed against the window, he never turned his eyes from the desolate landscape, for fear that his wife might ask: these poor wayfarers, with their skeletal umbrellas in hand, or their backs bent under a sack of corn, are these the legendary mountain stalwarts of whom you have told me so much? But Diana, even if she were to lose all her illusions, would never ask him that question.
Leaning against him, her eyes closing now and then with the jolting of the carriage, as if to ward off the sadness that the barren scene aroused in her, she thought in a fragmentary way about the days when they were first acquainted and the early weeks of their engagement. The chestnut trees lining the boulevard, café doors, the glitter of rings as they embraced, park benches strewn with autumn leaves, and dozens of other such memories—all those things she poured out upon the endless waste, in the hope that those images might in some sort people the void. But the wasteland did not change. Its wet nakedness was ready to engulf in a moment not just her own store of happiness but perhaps the heaped-up joy of whole generations. She herself had never seen such a country. The mountains that loomed above her were well named “the Accursed Mountains.”
She was pulled out of her dozing state by a movement of his shoulder, and then by his voice, which had a tender note.
“Diana, look. A church.”
She drew near the glass pane and caught sight of the cross that surmounted the stone belfry. The church rose up from a rocky height, and since the road descended very steeply, or perhaps because of the grey background of the sky, the black cross seemed to rise up and sway threateningly among the clouds. The church was still far off, but as they drew closer, they could make out the bell and its bronze shimmer spreading abroad like a smile beneath that black cross-shaped menace.
“How beautiful!” Diana exclaimed.
Bessian nodded, but did not speak. The dark shadow of the cross and the pleasant gleam of the bell soared aloft in every direction and must have been visible, one and inseparable, for miles around.
“Oh, look. There are the kullas of the mountains,” he said.
With difficulty, she turned her eyes from the church to look for the high stone dwellings.
“Where are they?”
“Look up there on that slope,” he said, pointing. “And there, there’s another farther on, on that other hill.”
“Ah, yes!”
Suddenly he came to life, and his eyes began to search the horizon avidly.
“Mountaineers,” he said, his hand stretched out towards the little window in front.
The mountaineers were coming towards them, but they were still a long way off and you could hardly see them.
“There must be a big village somewhere near.”
The carriage drew nearer to them, and Diana guessed at her husband’s sense of strain.
“They have rifles slung on their shoulders,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, relieved, not taking his eyes from the window. He was looking for something else. The mountaineers were now no more than twenty paces away.
“There,” he called out at last, seizing Diana by the shoulder. “You see the black ribbon on his right sleeve. Do you see?”
“Yes, yes,” she said.
“There’s another mark of death. And there’s another.”
Excitement made his breathing irregular.
“How terrible!” The words had escaped her.
“What?”
“I meant to say that it’s beautiful and terrible at the same time.”
“Yes, it’s true. It’s tragically beautiful, or wonderfully tragic, if you will.”
He turned towards her, suddenly, with an odd light in his eye, as if to say: Admit it. You never believed all this. As it happened, she had never mentioned any such doubt.
The carriage had left the mountaineers behind, and Bessian, his face lit with a smile now, had thrown himself back in his seat.
“We are entering the shadow-land,” he said, as if talking to himself, “the place where the laws of death prevail over the laws of life.”
“But how does one tell the difference between those whose duty it is to avenge a killing and those from whom vengeance is sought?” she asked. “The black ribbon is the same for everyone, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s the same. The mark of death is exactly the same for those who mean to kill and those who are being hunted.”
“How horrible,” she said.
“In no other country in the world can one see people on the road who bear the mark of death, like trees marked for felling.”
She looked at him kindly. Bessian’s eyes shone with the deep brilliance that bursts out after unbearable waiting. Now, those other mountain folk, with their ridiculous ramshackle umbrellas, their prosaic sacks of corn on their backs, seemed never to have been.
“Look, there are still some more of them,” he said.
This time she was the one who first saw the black ribbon on the sleeve of one among them.
“Yes, now I can say that we are well within death’s kingdom,” Bessian said, never turning his eyes from the window. Outside, the rain was still falling, a fine rain, as if diluted with mist.
Diana started to smile.
“Yes,” he said, “we have entered death’s kingdom like Ulysses, with this difference—Ulysses had to descend in order to reach it, but we must climb.”
She listened, looking at him still. He had leaned his forehead against the glass that was clouded over by their breath. Beyond it, the world seemed transformed.
“They wander these roads with that black ribbon on their sleeves like ghosts in the mist,” he said.
She listened, but she did not speak. How many tim
es, before they had started out, had he talked about these things, but now his words had a different sound. Behind them, like a film scene behind the subtitles, the landscape looked even more somber. She wanted to ask him if they would also meet on the roads men whose heads were muffled up in their shrouds, whom he had mentioned once, but something kept her from asking. Perhaps it was simply fear that just asking the question would provoke the apparition.
The carriage had gone quite some distance now, and the village was out of sight. Only the cross above the church swayed slowly on the horizon, leaning to one side like crosses on graves, as if the sky, imitating the soil in cemeteries, had also fallen in a little.
“There’s a cairn,” he said, pointing to the roadside.
She leaned forward to see better. It was a heap of stones somewhat lighter in color than those around the spot, piled carelessly with no obvious design. She thought that if it had not rained that day, those stones would not look so forlorn. She told him that, but he smiled and shook his head.
“The muranë, as they are called, always look sad,” he said. “More than that, the more pleasant the countryside the sadder they look.”
“That may be so,” she replied.
“I’ve seen all kinds of tombs and graveyards, with every sort of sign and symbol,” he went on, “but I don’t think there is any grave more real than the simple heap our mountain people build, on the very spot where a man was killed.”
“That’s true,” she said. “It has an air of tragedy about it.”
“And the very word, muranë, naked, cruel, suggesting pain that nothing can soften—isn’t that so?”
She nodded and sighed again. Roused by his own words, he went on talking. He spoke of the absurdity of life, and the reality of death in the North country, about the men of those parts who were esteemed or despised essentially in terms of the relations they created with death, and he brought up the terrible wish expressed by the mountaineers on the birth of a child. “May he have a long life, and die by the rifle!” Death by natural causes, from illness or from old age, was shameful to the man of the mountain regions, and the only goal of the mountaineer during his entire life was laying up the hoard of honor that would allow him to expect a modest memorial on his death.
“I’ve heard certain songs about the men who are killed,” she said. “They are just like their graves, their muranë.”
“That’s true. They weigh on the heart like a heap of stones. In fact, the same concept that governs the structure of the muranë governs the structure of the songs.”
Diana barely repressed another sigh. Minute by minute, she felt as if something were collapsing inside her. As if he guessed what she felt, he hastened to tell her that if all this was very sad, at the same time it had grandeur. He set himself to explaining to her that, when all was said and done, the aspect of death conferred on the lives of these men something of the eternal, because its very grandeur raised them above paltry things and the petty meanness of life.
“To measure one’s days by the yardstick of death, isn’t that a very special gift?”
She smiled, shrugging her shoulders.
“That is what the Code does,” Bessian went on, “particularly in the section devoted to the law of the blood feud. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” she said, “I remember quite well.”
“It is a genuine constitution of death,” he said, turning suddenly towards her. “People tell a lot of stories about it, and yet, however wild and merciless it may be, I’m convinced of one thing, that it is one of the most monumental constitutions that have come into being in the world, and we Albanians ought to be proud of having begotten it.”
He seemed to wait for a word of approval, but she was silent; her eyes, however, looked into his with the same kindness.
“Yes, it’s only fair, we should be proud of it,” he went on. “The Rrafsh is the only region of Europe which—while being an integral part of a modern state, an integral part, I repeat, of a modern European state and not the habitat of primitive tribes—has rejected the laws, the legal institutions, the police, the courts, in short, all the structures of the state; which has rejected these things, you understand, because at one time it was subject to them, and it has renounced them, replacing them with other moral rules which are themselves just as adequate, so much so as to constrain the administrations set up by foreign occupying powers, and later the administration of the independent Albanian state, forcing them to recognize those rules, and thus to put the High Plateau, let’s say nearly half of the kingdom, quite beyond the control of the state.”
Diana’s eyes sometimes followed the movements of her husband’s lips, sometimes his eyes.
“That history is very old,” he continued. “It began to crystallize when the Constantine of the ballad rose from the grave to keep his pledged word. Did you ever think, when we were studying that ballad in school, that the bessa mentioned in it is one of the foundation stones of a structure as majestic as it is terrifying? Because the Kanun is not merely a constitution,” he went on fervently, “it is also a colossal myth that has taken on the form of a constitution. Universal riches compared to which the Code of Hammurabi and the other legal structures of those regions look like children’s toys. Do you follow me? That is why it is foolish to ask, like children, if it is good or bad. Like all great things, the Kanun is beyond good and evil. It is beyond. . . .”
At those words she was offended and her cheeks burned. A month ago she herself had put that very question to him: Is the Code good or bad? Then he had smiled without answering her, but now. . . .
“You needn’t be sarcastic!” She withdrew to the far end of the seat.
“What?”
It took some minutes before they came to an understanding. He laughed aloud, swore to her that he had never meant to offend her, that he did not even remember that she had once put the question to him, and he ended by asking her to forgive him.
That little incident seemed to bring a bit of life into the carriage. They embraced, they caressed each other, then she opened her handbag and took out her pocket mirror to see if the light lipstick had rubbed away. That little business was accompanied by lively talk about their friends and about Tirana, which, it suddenly seemed to her, they had left long ago, and when they spoke again about the Code, the conversation was no longer stiff and cold, like the edge of an old sword, but more natural, perhaps because they mentioned especially those parts of the Code that dealt with daily life. When just before their engagement, he had given her as a present a fine edition of the Kanun, she had read those very passages without paying much attention, and she had forgotten most of the prescriptions that he was citing to her now.
From time to time, they returned in spirit to the streets of the capital and spoke of friends they knew, but it was enough for a mill, a flock of sheep, or a lone traveller to appear on the horizon, for Bessian to bring up the articles of the Code that dealt with those things.
“The Kanun is universal,” he said at one point. “It has not forgotten a single aspect of economics or ethics.”
A little before midday they came upon a wedding party, a cavalcade of krushks, and he explained to her that the order of the guests conformed to very strict rules, any breach of which could turn the wedding into a funeral. “Oh, look, there, at the end of the cavalcade, the chief of the krushks, the krushkapar, the bride’s father or brother, leading a horse by the bridle.”
Diana, her face pressed to the window, delighted, could not take her eyes from the costumes of the women. How beautiful, Lord, how beautiful, she repeated to herself, while, leaning against her he recited in a caressing voice the clauses of the Code dealing with the krushks: “The wedding day can never be put off to another time. In the case of a death in the family, the krushks will go to meet the bride nonetheless. The bride enters on one side, the dead man leaves on the other. On the one side people weep, on the other side they sing.”
When they had left the wedding party behind t
hem, they talked about the notorious “blessed cartridge” that, in accordance with the Code, the bride’s family gave to the groom so that he could use it to shoot his wife if she proved unfaithful, even telling him, “May your hand be blessed,” and the two, joking about what would happen if she or he were to violate their marriage vows, they teased each other, and pulled their ears as a sign of reproach, saying, “May your hand be blessed!”
“You are a child,” said Bessian, when the storm of laughter had passed, and she felt that at bottom he hated to joke about the Kanun, and that he had done so only to give her that small pleasure.
The Code is never a laughing matter, she remembered someone saying, but at once she dismissed the thought from her mind. She had to look outside the coach two or three times before her fit of laughter passed. The landscape had changed, the sky seemed to have opened out, and just because it seemed enlarged it was even more oppressive. She thought she saw a bird, and almost cried aloud, “A bird!” as if she had found in the sky a sign of forbearance or understanding. But what she had seen was only another cross, leaning slightly, like the first one, in the deeps of fog. Somewhere farther on, she thought, there are Franciscan monasteries, and still farther, nuns’ convents.
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