They were coming close to the house of the dead man. The narrow windows above the arch of the house door had been hung with black cloth. Oh, where am I going, he moaned to himself, and while the low door of the kulla was still a hundred paces off, he lowered his head so as not to strike against the stone arch.
The funeral meal took place in accordance with the rules. As long as it went on Gjorg thought about his own funeral feast. Which of these people would go there, just as he had come here today, just as his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather and all his ancestors had gone to such feasts down through the centuries?
The faces of the mourners were still gouged and bloody. Custom forbade them to wash either in the village where the killing had taken place or on the way back. They could wash only after they reached their homes.
The streaks on their faces and foreheads made them look as if they were wearing masks. Gjorg imagined how his own mourners would look when they had gouged their faces. He felt that from now on the lives of all the generations to come in the two families would be an endless funeral feast, each side playing host in turn. And each side, before leaving for the feast, would don that blood-stained mask.
That afternoon, after the funeral meal, there were once again unusual comings and goings in the village. In a few hours, Gjorg Berisha’s one-day truce would be at an end, and now the village elders, as the rules required, were preparing to visit the Kryeqyqes to ask for the thirty-day truce, the long bessa, in the name of the village.
On the doorsteps of the kullas, on the first floors where the women lived, and in the village squares, people talked of nothing else. This was the first blood-taking of that spring, and of course there was much discussion of everything connected with it. The killing had been performed in accordance with the rules, and as for the burial, the funeral feast, the one-day bessa, and everything else, these had been carried out with scrupulous obedience to the ancient Code. So the thirty-day truce that the elders were preparing to ask of the Kryeqyqes would certainly be granted.
As people talked and waited for the latest news about the long bessa, they recalled the times, recent or long past, when the rules of the Code had been violated in their village and the surrounding region, and even in far places of the endless plateau. They remembered the violators of the Code as well as the harsh penalties exacted. They remembered persons punished by their own families, whole families punished by the village, or even whole villages punished by a group of villages, or by the Banner.* But, luckily, they said with a sigh of relief, no such disgrace had fallen on their village for a long time. Everything had been done according to the old rules, and not for ages had anyone had the insane notion to break them. This latest blood-taking, too, had been done according to the Code, and Gjorg Berisha, the gjaks, young though he was, had behaved well at his enemy’s burial and at the funeral dinner. The Kryeqyqes would certainly grant him the thirty-day truce. Especially since the village, having requested this kind of truce, could revoke it if the gjaks took it into his head to abuse his temporary respite and roam around the countryside boasting of his deed. But no, Gjorg Berisha was not that sort. On the contrary, he had always been thought quiet and sensible, quite the last young fellow one would expect to play the fool.
The Kryeqyqes granted the long truce late in the afternoon, a few hours before the short one was due to run out. One of the village elders came to the Berishas to tell them of the pledge, with renewed advice that Gjorg must not abuse it, etc.
After the envoy left, Gjorg sat numbly in a corner of the stone house. He could look forward to thirty days of safety. After that, death would lurk all around him. He would go about only in the dark like a bat, hiding from the sun, the moonlight, and the flicker of torches.
Thirty days, he said to himself. The shot fired from that ridge above the highway had cut his life in two: the twenty-six years he had lived thus far, and the thirty days that began on that very day, the seventeenth of March, and would end on the seventeenth of April. Then the life of a bat, but he was not counting that any longer.
Out of the corner of his eye, Gjorg looked at the scrap of landscape visible through the narrow window. Outside it was March, half-smiling, half-frozen, with the dangerous mountain light that belonged to March alone. Then April would come, or rather just the first half of it. Gjorg felt an emptiness in the left side of his chest. From now on, April would be tinged with a bluish pain…. Yes, that was how April had always seemed to him — a month with something incomplete about it. April love, as the songs said. His own unfinished April. Despite everything, it was better this way, he thought, though he could not say what was better, that he had avenged his brother or that he had shed blood in this season. It was only half an hour since he had been granted the thirty-day truce, and already he was almost used to the idea that his life had been cleft in two. Now it even seemed to him that it had always been split like that: one fragment twenty-six years long, slow to the point of boredom, twenty-six months of March and twenty-six months of April and as many winters and summers; and the other was short, four weeks, impetuous, fierce as an avalanche, half a March and half an April, like two broken branches glittering with frost.
What would he do in the thirty days left to him? During the long bessa, people usually hurried to finish what they had not managed to do so far in their lives. If there was no important thing left undone they busied themselves with the tasks of daily life. If it was seed-time, they hastened to sow. If it was harvest-time, they gathered in the sheaves. If it was neither seed-time nor harvest-time, they did even more ordinary things, like fixing the roof. And if that was not necessary, they just wandered about the countryside to see the cranes flying again, or the first October frosts. Generally, engaged men married during this time, but Gjorg would not marry. The young girl to whom he had been engaged, who lived in a distant Banner and whom he had never seen, had died a year ago after a long illness, and since that time there had been no woman in his life.
Without taking his eyes off the bit of misty landscape, he thought of what he might do in the thirty days left to him. At first it seemed a brief time, too brief, a handful of days too few for anything. But a few minutes later this same respite seemed horribly long and absolutely useless.
March seventeenth, he murmured. March twenty-first. April fourth. April eleventh. April seventeenth. Eighteenth. Aprildeath. Then on and on forever, Aprildeath, Aprildeath, and no more May. Never again.
He was mumbling dates in March and April, over and over, when he heard his father’s steps coming down from the floor above. He was holding an oilcloth purse.
“Here, Gjorg, it’s the five hundred groschen for the blood,” he said, holding out the purse to him.
Gjorg’s eyes opened wide, and he hid his hands behind his back as if to keep them as far as possible from that loathsome purse.
“What?” he said in a faint voice. “Why?”
His father looked at him amazed.
“What? Why? Have you forgotten that the blood tax must be paid?”
“Oh, yes,” Gjorg said, relieved.
The purse was still being held out to him, and he reached out his hands.
“The day after tomorrow you’ll have to start off for the Kulla of Orosh,” his father went on. “It’s one day’s journey on foot.”