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.”