Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

by Ismail Kadare

  It comes to a point where time, whose flow has been stopped, seems about to burst its banks. Some of the gods go mad, perch on roofs, wait for the disaster. As time has apparently ceased to exist, nobody can say how long the panic went on. Consequently, nobody will ever be able to say whether it was dawn or dusk when the cry went out: “We’ve caught the culprit!”

  In chains, with eyes swollen from beatings, the prisoner is dragged right to the top of Olympus. Rubberneckers congregate to get a look, and all around they exclaim, “So it was Tantalus who did this monstrous thing?”

  Everybody has their eyes on the Great Prison where, according to the rumor, Zeus in person is to conduct the interrogation of the guilty party. People try to anticipate the questions: How did you manage to steal that? Who helped you? How did you carry the booty back down to earth?

  But now darkness descends once more. Nobody will ever know the questions that were actually asked. And our ignorance does not stop there. Nobody will ever know what really happened, how the crime was solved, how things returned to normal thereafter.

  When it wakes up again, Olympus seems all sleepy-eyed. After its indeterminate absence, dawn doesn’t quite know how to come upon the world, having lost its old habits. Here and there you can still see a few puddles of night lying around, with garbage collectors trying to shovel it up as if it were night soil. The whole place is buzzing with rumors about immortality. Some people think of it as an infinite number of particles spread around the body; others imagine it as a device that can be redirected toward the impossible; but most people see it as a key to some secret door. But these ramblings do not last long. By noontime, the stories have become utterly muddled…. In the taverns, people say that Tantalus was less greedy for immortality than he was for food and drink. The crimes he committed — which still cannot be named — should be put down to his insatiable appetite. They even say he’s going to be sent down to hell for voracity.

  Days go by, but things don’t calm down: they get harsher. The rumors decrease in number and variety, but that’s because a poster denouncing all of them has been put up on walls. Hades’ memoirs are banned; by the same order, his wife’s newspaper is closed down for being too freethinking. Even uttering the pentasyllable immortality is now against the law. One of Zeus’s advisers opines that in such circumstances it would be more appropriate not to ban use of the word but to empty it of all content. After some hesitations, this opinion prevails. Persons previously considered merely illustrious — poets, sculptors, war leaders, even great courtesans — will be designated henceforth as “immortals.”

  News of this new yardstick spreads in no time at all. It is a gift of the gods to the mortals on earth, and they are grateful. Each time the gods now skim through news from mortal humanity, they can barely control their anger and contempt. You really thought you’d become immortal, you little insects? But there are major reasons why they have to hide their resentment. Anything that helps keep the greatest mystery of the universe hidden has to be accepted. They may have the minds of gods, but their brains go cloudy when they try to fathom where Death’s exit door might be found. There is no such way out, the older gods declare. So put the temptation to the side. Even after torture and endless cross-examinations, Tantalus himself never lets out anything comprehensible on that subject. Maybe he acted like a sleepwalker, under the influence of an alien idea that had come to him from some other world? An alien idea that had perhaps been lost along the way, an idea that landed here by chance, before taking fright and fleeing in search of its own home?

  More than a hundred thousand years later — maybe two hundred or five hundred thousand years later — Mark Gurabardhi lay with his hands clasped in the nape of his neck, trying to figure out all these questions. Maybe they were like the questions that would soon be put to the robbers who had held up the National Bank — even if the crime of distant Olympus was unlike any other.

  He could picture the sinister two-story police barracks, and his face twisted into a scowl. All the same, he knew what the questions would be when they got the holdup men inside: Did anyone give you information about access to the bank? What means did you use to force the safe? Did you know what was inside it? Where have you hidden the money… the jewels … the crumbs of immortality?

  CHAPTER 3

  SHE HAD HAD HER HAIR DONE differently once again, but the style she had chosen really didn’t match the vaguely absent expression on her face. Any other time, she would have lit up the whole room with her smile, posing with her hips and arms like a runway model, and then teased him with a “Now, do you like me like this?”

  But this time she didn’t behave that way at all, as if she’d forgotten what she’d had done to her hair. As soon as she got into the studio she went over to the walls, inspecting them with what seemed to Mark a falsely interested eye, looking for the signs of the work that the locksmith had done.

  “Are you having the doors reinforced as well?” she asked, with her back still turned.

  Mark grunted “yes” in response. He was tempted to ask what the matter was, but he feared that in touchy circumstances such as these, which often arose without any obvious cause, asking a question like that would only make things worse.

  “You have a new hairdo?” he said at last. “It suits you very well.”

  “You think so? Thanks.”

  He brushed her cheek with his lips and could smell the perfume on her neck.

  “They’ve just opened a modern hair salon,” she said. “Have you seen it?”

  He thought she looked a little pale in the face, as well as distracted, and the hollows above her cheekbones suggested she’d had a sleepless night. He gave her another cuddle. She didn’t reject the overture, but she did nothing to encourage him either. As she lifted her arms to put them around his neck, Mark noticed the down that had begun to grow again under her armpits.

  Mark realized with a glum foreboding that all her preening had just been for her stay in Tirana.

  He slipped his hands down her back to her hips, and the feeling of her filmy underwear beneath the fabric of her dress made him bolder.

  She stiffened and pushed him away. “No,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  No: that’s how relations between a man and a woman begin to go cold, Mark thought.

  “Is there anything wrong?” he inquired.

  “No,” she said again as she drew his hand away from her shoulder.

  He could feel her awkwardness and stress.

  “I don’t understand,” he protested grumpily. “If there’s anything that’s not right between us, then be frank and tell me.”

  She sighed deeply. “I don’t know if I should … tell you.”

  Mark instantly regretted having spoken before thinking. He was also sorry he had pushed the discussion as if to the edge of a cliff. He was on the verge of shouting, I don’t want to know! I am fed up enough as it is, but it was too late.

  He guessed he knew what she had to tell him: I didn’t want to bring it up, but since you insist, I won’t hide anything….

  “As soon as you got back from your trip, I knew something had happened,” he mumbled with his eyes turned away from her. “Up there, in Tirana, apparently.”

  “No, not in Tirana. Right here!”

  Well, that takes the cake! Mark said to himself. The new hairstyle — he saw it now — was meant for the other man…. But to hell with it: every affair comes to an end! Such instantly invented self-consolation was hardly convincing.

  “All the same, I think I have a right to know what this is about”

  He was amazed to hear himself saying the exact opposite of what was actually in his mind. In truth, he would rather not ever know anything about it.

  “Of course,” she said. “However painful it may be, fll try to explain….”

  Okay, go on and hit me! he thought. Cut me into little pieces!

  He staggered, as if drunk, toward the low table and grasped a bottle of schnapps. Both the bottle and the gla
ss into which he poured a shot were blotched with yellow and blue fingerprints. He offered her the glass, but as she declined with a shake of her head, he downed it himself, in one go.

  She had begun to talk, but he didn’t look at her. He kept on staring at the big windowpane as if, by averting his gaze, he could delay the emergence of the truth. And that is more or less what happened. Her words were virtually incomprehensible. She was talking about the gloomy atmosphere in her family home, as if a frost had begun to take hold of everything and was growing harsher by the day. You would have thought she was talking about the frost coming down from the high peaks as winter sets in. At one point, Mark gave a deep sigh, as if he’d begun to grasp at least something of what she was going on about. As he heard her talk about “the old ways,” he first thought it was about an arranged marriage; in other words, that she had to get engaged — but she shook her head vigorously and quickly set him straight. No, no, it was something much more serious, and therefore, of course, much more sinister. Nonetheless, it was still all utterly confused. Even she couldn’t figure it out, because things were apparently being kept from her. But now her family was expecting the arrival of an aged uncle….

  He was on the verge of muttering, What’s your old uncle have to do with all this? Which stone did he crawl out from under? Why are you all so anxious to see him? But she didn’t give Mark time to grumble.

  “You told me about the permanent stress of life under the dictatorship,” she went on in the same tired voice. “Obviously, you can’t say that things are the same today. Nonetheless, the atmosphere in my family right now is just as suffocating….”

  Irritated by this, Mark shook his head sharply.

  “No!” he said, raising his voice. “No anguish or terror can ever equal that! Not ever!”

  He was coming close to losing the cool that he had only just recovered after his bout of jealousy. His girlfriend’s last remarks were like an insult — as if she doubted him, after all that he had told her about the Communist years.

  He was about to yell out loud, So tell me what this is all about! What’s behind this worry and stress? An incurable disease, a crime, a threat?

  Her eyes suggested she had to make a great effort to find the right words.

  “Have you heard about the revival of ancient traditions?” she asked after a moment’s silence.

  Mark gave a cautiously affirmative response — but as if to restrict his “ye… s” even more, he added that lots of things that had been in the news recently, especially stories filed by foreign journalists, seemed to him to be rather exaggerated.

  “I used to think so, too,” she said.

  The painter poured himself another drink.

  “Vendettas are back! The terrible law of the Kanun has been restored!” he bawled in a theatrical baritone, and then burst out laughing. “It’s nonsense! Journalists’ twaddle!”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Sure,” said Mark. “Don’t you?”

  The young woman smiled a faint but bitter smile.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she began, unsteadily. “Everything is so dark….”

  Abruptly and for no clear reason, but maybe because the sorrow he could see in her eyes struck him as quite different, almost alien, he regretted having let himself get carried away. He stroked her hair gently and asked:

  “Is there … something like that going on … at home?”

  He had to ask her twice before she felt entitled to speak about it. She was still not making very much sense. Yes, of course, there was something of that sort going on at home. Her brother Angelin had been in a kind of daze for almost a week. But nobody would tell her anything. She wondered if they were waiting for the uncle from Shala Province to come and explain it all to her.

  “But just who is this uncle?” Mark broke in. “I meant to ask you already: why the hell are you all waiting for this uncle?”

  “What do you mean, why? He’s the one who’s going to explain it all!”

  “Oh, I see now. He’s going to decide if you — if your family is or is not tangled up in one of these old stories. Wait a minute, the old saying is coming back to me: If your family has anything to do with a blood feud….”

  From this point on, Mark thought he understood why their conversation had been so awkward. The very language they now spoke was no longer appropriate to the subject matter. They would have had to go back to the old language, whose source had gone dry long ago, like a water pipe all clogged with lime.

  There was a long silence. Once again, Mark thought he heard something banging against the windowpane. But if it was a knock, it was clearly intended for someone else.

  “A vendetta coming back to life after lying dormant for fifty years … Frankly, I can’t take that seriously!” Mark declared.

  He sounded quite sincere, and, as a matter of fact, he really did not believe it was possible. It was probably the Kanuns last spasm, its dying effort to come up to the surface, along with everything else that had been pushed down to the bottom by the prohibitions of the Communist era. Mark wasn’t saying this just to reassure his girlfriend. At the turn of the millennium, the Kanun had outlived its natural life span. It would have died a natural death long ago had it not been banned by the Communists. Their attempt to suppress it was the only reason this madness had acquired new life.

  She listened to him with wide eyes in which tears seemed to be on the point of welling up.

  “My dearest darling” he said to her tenderly as he kissed her hair, thinking all the while, My Beatrice….

  The woman he had wanted to have as his guide to the new era now turned out to be held back by an ancient and rusty hook.

  She calmed down and started explaining again what was going on in her home. She used the word “cold” so often that Mark imagined she was actually shivering. He poured out another glass of schnapps, and this time she agreed to drink her round. As he put his hand on her knees, then between her legs, her speech slowed, and gave way to little gasps. This time, she sighed, instead of groaning in her usual way; but maybe Mark only thought this because her final outburst was a sound he had never heard before, an alien sound that seemed to come from the throat of a different person.

  As he lay motionless beside her, he realized that anyone listening attentively in the offices downstairs might have thought that he had not been making love to his girlfriend, but strangling her to death.

  She left the studio, and Mark went out shortly after, but before going back to his office, he put in an appearance at the café. All the dailies were strewn about the tables, as always, but Mark didn’t have the patience to skim through them.

  “Anything up?” he asked the waiter when the latter brought him his coffee.

  “Not a thing. The new police chief was supposed to lay his hands on the bank robbers by the end of the week, but he’s not done a thing so far. Apparently his hands are not as free as he would like. He grumbles about not getting any help at all”

  “Really? None at all?”

  “The rest of the news is the usual gossip and nonsense. They’re claiming that before dawn this morning the leader of the opposition sent a fax to some lady in the Council of Europe — and the fax was nine yards long! How about that, eh? Nine yards of fax, and at five in the morning! In a pinch, you could call that sexual harassment!”

  Mark chuckled.

  “And all these blood feud killings they keep going on about — are they true, or just space fillers cooked up by journalists short of real news?”

  The waiter pursed his lips. “Hmm … That depends on how you look at it. One of my cousins came down from Hoti and told me that they’d had cases of that kind up there these last few weeks. But —”

  “But what?”

  “Well, God only knows if it really is a blood feud, like in the old days, or something quite different…. Things are in such a muddle at the moment!”

  “And are there really any people who’ve shut themselves up at home, who�
��ve cloistered themselves in their kulla, like they used to?”

  “I’ve heard tell of some. But you know as well as I do that people like to embroider…. Some poor fellow stays at home because he’s got backache, and the next thing you know, people are saying he’s been cloistered as part of a blood feud!”

  They both laughed.

  “I find it all rather strange,” the waiter went on. “It’s as if it was just a game. But if they really do unearth the Book of the Blood — and you do hear people talking about it — then it’ll be quite a different kettle of fish, believe you me.”

  “The Book of the Blood?. Yeah, I think I heard of something of that sort.”

  Any other time the waiter would have been dumbfounded by such ignorance, but Mark, even though he had been living in B—— for some years, was still considered a newcomer to the North.

  “Well, as you’ve no doubt heard, this book is a list of all blood feuds since the beginning,” the waiter explained. “Who redeemed the blood, and who still has to do some redeeming, who still has a blood debt and who hasn’t; it even lays down cases where there is just a half-blood still to pay off…. In other words, when that book comes to light, we’d all better keep inside four walls. If it does come to light, that is….”

  “And where exactly do they expect to lay their hands on it?” Mark queried.

  “Nobody knows where it is. They’ve looked high and low, so they say. They’ve been down into the secret section of the National Archives more than once, according to gossip. But in fact nobody even knows where the Secret Archives really are. Some say they are in deep storage right here, up in these mountains. I must confess I don’t really believe that. People are saying the same thing in at least three different parts of Albania.”