Why doesn’t he tell it to me? she wondered, after a silence long enough to seem unwonted. And she was really not in a state to know whether or not she cared to hear yet another disturbing story.
“A man was killed,” he said, “not from ambush, but right in the marketplace.”
Looking at him sidelong, Diana watched the corners of his lips. He told her that the killing had taken place in broad daylight, in the bustle of the marketplace, and the victim’s brothers had set out immediately in pursuit of the killer, for these were the first hours after the murder, when the truce had not yet been asked for, and the bloodshed could be avenged at once. The killer managed to elude his pursuers, but meanwhile the dead man’s whole clan was up in arms and was seeking him everywhere. Night was falling, and the murderer, who came from another village, did not know the country well. Fearing that he might be discovered, he knocked at the first door he found on his way, and asked that he be granted the bessa. The head of the household took the stranger in and agreed to his wish.
“And can you guess what house it was to which he had come for sanctuary?” said Bessian, with his mouth quite close to her neck.
Diana turned her head suddenly, her eyes wide and motionless.
“It was his victim’s house,” he said.
“I thought as much. And then? What happened then?”
Bessian took a deep breath. He told her that at first on either side no one suspected what had happened. The killer understood that the house to which he had come as a guest had been stricken with misfortune, but he never imagined that he himself had brought it about. The head of the house, on his part, in spite of his grief, welcomed the visitor in keeping with the custom, guessing that he had just killed someone and was being pursued, but not suspecting — he, too — that the murdered man was his own son.
And so they sat together by the hearth, eating and drinking coffee. As for the dead man, in keeping with the custom, he had been laid out in another room.
Diana started to say something, but she felt that the only words she could possibly utter were, “absurd” and “fateful”; she preferred to be silent.
Bessian resumed, “Late in the evening, worn out by the long chase, the brothers of the murdered man came home. As soon as they came in they saw the guest sitting by the hearth, and they recognized him.”
Bessian turned his head towards his wife to gauge the effect of his words. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Nothing happened.”
“What?”
“Nothing at all. At first, in a fury, the brothers reached for their weapons, but a word from their father was enough to stop them and to calm them. I think you can imagine what it was that he said.”
Embarrassed, she shook her head.
“The old man simply said, ’He is a guest. Don’t touch him.’ ”
“And then? What happened then?”
“Then they sat down with their enemy and guest for as long as the custom required. They conversed with him, they prepared a bed for him, and in the morning they escorted him to the village boundary.”
Diana pressed two fingers between her eyebrows, as if she meant to extract something from her forehead.
“So that is their conception of a guest.”
Bessian brought out that sentence between two silences, as one sets an object in an empty space in order to throw it into relief. He waited for Diana to say “That’s terrible,” as she had the first time, or to say something else, but she said nothing. She kept her fingers on her forehead, where the brows meet, as if she could not find the thing that she wanted to tear away.
The muffled panting of the horses reached them from outside, and the coachman’s occasional whistles. Together with these sounds, Diana heard her husband’s voice, which for some reason had again become deep and slow.
“And now,” he said, “the question that arises is to understand why the Albanians have created all that.”
He talked on, his head quite close to her shoulder, as if he meant to ask her for answers to all the questions or speculations that he advanced, though his delivery scarcely allowed for any responses on her part. He went on to ask (it was not clear if the questions were addressed to himself, or Diana, or someone else), why the Albanians had created the institution of the guest, exalting it above all other human relations, even those of kinship.
“Perhaps the answer lies in the democratic character of this institution,” he said, setting himself to think his way through the matter. “Any ordinary man, on any day, can be raised to the lofty station of a guest. The path to that temporary deification is open to anybody at any time. Isn’t that so, Diana?”
“Yes,” she said softly, without taking her hand from her forehead.
He shifted in his seat, as if looking both for a more comfortable position and for the most appropriate language in which to express his idea.
“Given that anyone at all can grasp the sceptre of the guest,” he went on, “and since that sceptre, for every Albanian, surpasses even the king’s sceptre, may we not assume that in the Albanian’s life of danger and want, that to be a guest if only for four hours or twenty-four hours, is a kind of respite, a moment of oblivion, a truce, a reprieve, and — why not? — an escape from everyday life into some divine reality?”
He fell silent, as if waiting for a reply, and Diana, feeling that she had to say something to him, found it easier to lay her head on his shoulder again.
Bessian found that the familiar odor of his wife’s hair rather disturbed the stream of his thoughts. Just as the greening of nature gives us the feeling of spring, or snow the feeling of winter, her chestnut hair tumbling over his shoulder aroused in him better than anything else the sensation of happiness. The thought that he was a happy man began to shine feebly in his consciousness, and in the velvet jewel-case of the carriage, that idea took on the secret languor of luxurious things.
“Are you tired?” he asked.
“Yes, a bit.”
He slipped his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently to him, breathing in the perfume of his young wife’s body, given off subtly, like every valued thing.
“We’ll be there soon.”
Without removing his arm, he lowered his head slightly towards the window so as to glance outside.
“In an hour, an hour and a half at most, we’ll be there,” he said.
Through the glass, one could see in the distance, standing out clearly, the jagged outlines of the mountains in that March afternoon flooded with rain.
“What district are we in?”
He looked outside but did not answer her, merely shrugging his shoulders to indicate that he did not know. She remembered the days before their departure (days that now seemed to have been torn away not from this month of March, but from another March, as far off as the stars), filled with witty sayings, with laughter, with jokes, fears, jealousies, all stemming from their “northern adventure” as Adrian Guma had dubbed it when they had met him at the post office where they were composing a telegram to send to someone who lived on the High Plateau. He had said, That’s like sending a message to the birds or to the thunderbolts. Then the three had laughed, and in all the merriment, Adrian had gone on asking, “You really have an address up there? Forgive me, I just can’t believe it.”
“A little while longer and we’ll be there,” Bessian said for the third time, leaning towards the window. Diana wondered how he could know that they were approaching their destination, travelling on a road without signposts or milestones. As for Bessian, he was thinking that he did not have time to say more about the cult of hospitality, just as evening was drawing on, and they were drawing nearer and nearer to the tower in which they would spend the night.