When they had left the wedding party behind them, 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.
The carriage drove on with its slight, rhythmic swaying. Sometimes, fighting against sleep, she heard his voice that seemed to come from far off, muffled in a cavernous echo. He went on citing articles of the Code to her, chiefly those having to do with everyday life. He talked to her about the rules of hospitality, in general referring to all the provisions concerning the guest within one’s gates, which, for an Albanian was sacred, quite beyond comparison with anything else. “Do you remember the definition of a house in the Kanun?” he said. “ ‘An Albanian’s house is the dwelling of God and the guest.’ Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one’s guest. The guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one’s father or of one’s son, but never the blood of a guest.”
He came back again and again to the laws of hospitality, but even in her drowsy state, she felt that his exposition of those ancient prescriptions, rolling on, grating away like the rusty teeth of a cogwheel, went from the peaceful side of daily life under the Code to the bloody side. No matter how one dealt with the Code, one always ended up there. And now, in a voice dressed in those resonances, he was recounting to her an incident that was typical of the world of the Kanun. She kept her eyes closed still, clinging to her half-sleep, for she sensed that only in that way would his voice come to her with those far-off echoes. That voice was telling her about a wayfarer travelling alone in the dark, at the foot of a steep mountain. Knowing that he was being hunted for blood vengeance, he had managed to keep safe from his avenger for a long time. Suddenly, on the highroad, with the night coming on, he was seized by a dark premonition. All around, there was nothing but the open heath, not a house, not a living soul from whom he could claim the protection due to a guest. He could see only a herd of goats that had been left to themselves by the herdsman. Then, so as to help pluck up his courage, or maybe so as not to die and disappear without a trace, he called out to the goatherd three times. No voice answered him. Then he called out to the buck with the big bell, “O buck with the big bell, if anything should happen to me, tell your master that before I reached the crest of the hill I was killed under your bessa.” And as if he had known what would happen, a few paces further on he was killed by the man who was lying in wait for him.
Diana opened her eyes.
“And then?” she asked, “what happened then?’
Bessian smiled a wry smile.
“Another goatherd who was not far off heard the stranger’s last words and told the man whose herd it was. And that man, even though he had never known the victim, had never seen him nor ever heard his name, left his family, his flock, and all his other concerns, to avenge the stranger who was connected with him under the bessa, and so plunged into the whirlwind of the blood feud.”
“That’s terrible,” Diana said. “But it’s absurd. There is fatality in it.”
“That’s true. It is at once terrible, absurd, and fatal, like all the really important things.”
“Like all the really important things,” she repeated, huddling back into her corner. She was cold. She looked abstractedly into the ragged pass between two mountains, as if she hopèd to find in that grey notch the answer to an enigma.
“Yes,” Bessian said, as if he had divined her unspoken question, “because to an Albanian a guest is a demi-god.”
Diana blinked, so that his words would not strike her so crudely. He lowered his tone, and his voice took on its echo as before, sooner than she would have expected.
“I remember having heard once, that, unlike many peoples among whom the mountains were reserved to the gods, our mountaineers, by the very fact that they lived in the mountains themselves, were constrained either to expel the gods or to adapt themselves to them so as to be able to live with them. Do you follow me, Diana? That explains why the world of the Rrafsh is half-real, half-imaginary, harking back to the Homeric ages. And it also explains the creation of demigods like the guest.”
He was silent for a moment, listening unawares to the sound of the wheels on the rocky road.
“A guest is really a demi-god,” he went on after a while, “and the fact that any one at all can suddenly become a guest does not diminish but rather accentuates his divine character. The fact that this divinity is acquired suddenly, in a single night simply by knocking at a door, makes it even more authentic. The moment a humble wayfarer, his pack on his shoulder, knocks at your door and gives himself up to you as your guest, he is instantly transformed into an extraordinary being, an inviolable sovereign, a law-maker, the light of the world. And the suddenness of the transformation is absolutely characteristic of the nature of the divine. Did not the gods of the ancient Greeks make their appearance suddenly and in the most unpredictable manner? That is just the way the guest appears at an Albanian’s door. Like all the gods he is an enigma, and he comes directly from the realms of destiny or fate — call it what you will. A knock at the door can bring about the survival or the extinction of whole generations. That is what the guest is to the Albanians of the mountains.”
“But that’s terrible,” she said.
He pretended not to have heard her and simply smiled, but with the cold smile of someone who intends to skirt what might well be the real subject of discussion.
“That is why an attack on a guest protected by the bessa is to an Albanian the worst possible misfortune, something like the end of the world.”
She looked out of the window and she thought that it would be hard to find a more suitable setting for a vision of the end of the world than these mountains.
“A few years ago, something took place in these parts that would astonish anyone but these mountain people,” said Bessian, and he put his hand on Diana’s shoulder. His hand had never felt so heavy to her. “Something really staggering.”