They met in the center of the square. The surveyor seemed to have drunk one glass too many this time, too. The doctor’s pale eyes, and not his eyes alone but all of the delicate skin of his face, were sorrowful. As for Ali Binak, one could just make out, behind his customary coldness, a mournful weariness. The group of experts was attended by a small knot of mountaineers.
“You are going on with your journey through the High Plateau?” Ali Binak asked them in his sonorous voice.
“Yes,” Bessian said. “We shall be in this district a few days more.”
“The days are getting longer now.”
“Yes, we’re in the middle of April. And you, what are you doing in these parts?”
“What are we doing here?” the surveyor said. “As usual, running from one village to another, from one Banner to another. Portrait of a group with bloodstains….”
“What?”
“Oh, I just wanted to use an image — how shall I say — well, borrowed from painting.”
Ali Binak darted a cold glance at the speaker.
“Is there some dispute here that you must arbitrate?” Bessian asked Ali Binak.
The latter nodded.
“And what a dispute!” the surveyor interposed again. “Today,” he said, with a jerk of the hand to indicate Ali Binak, “he has pronounced judgment in a way that will go down in history.”
“One mustn’t exaggerate,” Ali Binak said.
“It’s no exaggeration,” the surveyor said. “And this gentleman is a writer and we really must describe to him the case that you settled.”
In a few minutes the case for which Ali Binak and his assistants had been called to the village had been related by several speakers at once, particularly the surveyor, and they interrupted, amplified, or corrected one another. Things appeared to have happened in this fashion:
A week ago the members of a certain family had put to death one of their girls, who was pregnant. There was no doubt that they would promptly kill as well the boy who had seduced her. In the meantime, the boy’s family learned that the baby whom the young woman had not been able to bring into the world was a male child. The family forestalled their adversaries by declaring that they were the injured party in regard to the young woman’s kin, and argued that while the young man was not connected with the victim by marriage, the male child belonged to him. In so doing, the boy’s family made the claim that they were the ones who had a transgression to avenge, and that accordingly, it was their turn to kill a member of the young woman’s family. In that way, they not only protected their guilty boy against the punishment that awaited him, but also, by tying the hands of the adverse party, prolonged the de facto peace at their convenience. It goes without saying that the other family vigorously contested this view of the case. The business was brought before the village council of elders, who found it very hard to resolve. The parents of the young woman, devastated by their misfortune, were understandably outraged by the notion that they owed a victim to their adversaries when it was precisely a boy of that house who had brought about the death of their daughter. They insisted that another solution had to be found. And what further complicated the situation was that, according to the Kanun, a male child from the moment of conception belonged to the family of the boy, and must be avenged on the same principle as one avenges a man. The council of elders, declaring themselves unable to pronounce on the question, appealed to the great expert on the Kanun, Ali Binak.
The case had been considered an hour ago (just when we were walking on the banks of the lakes, Bessian thought). The judgment, as in all matters arising from the Kanun, was rendered promptly. The spokesman for the boy’s family had said to Ali Binak, “I should like to know why they spilled out my flour [meaning the baby that had been conceived].” And Ali Binak answered him at once: “What was your flour looking for in someone else’s flour sack [meaning the womb of the young stranger woman, not bound properly by marriage].” Both parties were thus non-suited, and both were declared blameless and not bound to seek vengeance.
Impassive, with never the quiver of a muscle in his pale face, not speaking at all, Ali Binak listened to the noisy account of how he had pronounced judgment.
“There’s nothing for it — you’re a wonder,” the surveyor said, his eyes wet with drunkenness and admiration.
They began to walk aimlessly around the square.
“When all is said and done, if you think about it calmly, these are really simple matters,” said the doctor, who was walking along with Bessian and Diana. “Even this last case, which seems so dramatic, is really a question of the relation of creditor to debtor.”
He went on talking, but Bessian was scarcely paying attention. He had another concern. Didn’t a discussion of this kind tend to have a bad effect on Diana? During the last two days they had rather neglected matters like these, and her face had begun at last to look less troubled.
“And what about you? How did you happen to settle on the High Plateau?” Bessian said in order to change the subject. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”
The doctor said, with a bitter smile, “I was one. Now I’m something else.”
His eyes showed his deep distress, and Bessian thought that light-colored eyes, even the ones that seem at first sight almost colorless, can reflect an inner pain more fully than any other kinds of eyes.
“I studied surgery in Austria,” he said. “I was among the first and only group of scholarship students that was sent there by the monarchy. Perhaps you have heard what became of most of those students when they returned from foreign parts. Well, I’m one of those. Absolute disappointment, no clinical practice, no possibility of working in my profession. I was unemployed for some time, and then, just by chance, in a café in Tirana, I met that man—” and he motioned with his head towards the surveyor—“who suggested I take up this peculiar trade.”
“Portrait of a group with bloodstains,” said the surveyor, who had just come up to them and was following their conversation. “You’ll always find us wherever there is blood.”
The doctor ignored those words.
“And is it as a doctor that you assist Ali Binak in his work?” Bessian asked.
“Of course. Otherwise he would not take me with him.”
Bessian looked at him in surprise.
“There’s nothing to be surprised at there. In judgments made in accordance with the Code, particularly when it is a question of blood-letting, and most of all in the matter of wounds, the presence of someone with an elementary knowledge of medicine is always necessary. Naturally, there is no need for a surgeon’s services. I would even say that the irony of my situation is precisely that I perform work that can be done quite well by the most junior kind of nurse, not to say anyone at all who has a rudimentary knowledge of the anatomy of the human body.”
“Rudimentary knowledge? Is that enough?”
The doctor smiled the same bitter smile.
“The trouble is that you are sure that my function here is to dress and cure wounds — isn’t that so?”
“Yes, of course. I can understand that, for the reasons you’ve mentioned, you gave up your profession as a surgeon — but you can still treat wounds, can’t you?”
“No,” the doctor said. “There would be some compensation in that. But I have nothing to do with things of that kind. Do you understand? Nothing at all. The mountaineers have always treated their wounds themselves, and they are still doing that to this very day, with raki, tobacco, in accordance with the most barbaric practices, as, for example, dislodging a bullet with another bullet, etc. So they will never call on a doctor for his services. And I am here to fulfill a very different function. Do you understand? I am not here as a doctor but as the assistant to a judge. Does that seem odd to you?”