Gjorg did not want to go anywhere.
“Can’t it wait, father? Does the money have to be paid right away?”
“Yes, son, right away. It has to be settled as soon as possible. The blood tax must be paid right after the killing.”
The purse was now in Gjorg’s right hand. It seemed heavy. In it was all the money the family had saved, scrimping from week to week and month to month in anticipation of just this day.
“The day after tomorrow,” his father said again, “to the Kulla of Orosh.”
He had gone to the window and was looking fixedly at something outside. There was a gleam of satisfaction in his eye.
“Come here,” he said to his son, quietly.
Gjorg went to his father.
Outside in the yard a shirt hung on the wire clothesline.
“Your brother’s shirt,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Mehill’s shirt.”
Gjorg could not take his eyes from it. It fluttered white in the wind, waving, billowing joyously.
A year and a half after the day that his brother had been killed, his mother had finally washed the shirt he had worn that day. For a year and a half it had hung blood-soaked from the upper storey of the house, as the Kanun required, until the blood had been avenged. When bloodstains began to yellow, people said, it was a sure sign that the dead man was in torment, yearning for revenge. The shirt, an infallible barometer, indicated the time for vengeance. By means of the shirt the dead man sent his signals from the depths of the earth where he lay.
How many times, when he was alone, had Gjorg climbed to that fateful upper storey to look at the shirt! The blood turned more and more yellow. That meant that the dead man had found no rest. How many times had Gjorg seen that shirt in his dreams, washed in water and soapsuds, its whiteness shimmering like the spring sky! But in the morning when he awoke it would be there still, spattered with the brown stains of dried blood.
Now at last the shirt was hanging on the clothesline. But strangely it gave Gjorg no comfort.
Meanwhile, like a new banner hoisted after the old one had been hauled down, on the upper storey of the Kryeqyqe kulla, they had hung out the bloody shirt of the new victim.
The seasons, hot or cold, would affect the color of the dried blood, and so would the kind of cloth that the shirt was made of, but no one wanted to take such things into account; all those changes would be taken as mysterious messages, whose import no one dared question.
* The code of customary law.
** A stone dwelling in the form of a tower, peculiar to the mountain regions of Albania.
* The pledged word, faith, truce.
* From the Albanian gjak (blood), killer, but with no pejorative connotation, since the gjaks is fulfilling his duty under the provisions of the Kanun.
* Literally a flag. By extension, a collection of various villages under the authority of a local chief who was himself the flag-bearer.
CHAPTER II
Gjorg had been travelling across the High Plateau for several hours, and there was still no sign that the Kulla of Orosh was near.
Under the fine rain, nameless waste lands, or moorlands with names unknown to him, came into view one after another, naked and dreary. Beyond them, he could just make out the line of mountains veiled in mist, and through the veil he thought he saw the pale reflection, multiplied as if in a mirage, of a single great mountain rather than a range of real peaks differing in height. The fog had made them unsubstantial, but it was strange how much more oppressive they seemed than in fine weather, when their rocks and sheer cliffs were plain to see.
Gjorg heard the dull grating of the pebbles under foot. The villages along the road were far apart, and places with administrative functions or with an inn were rarer still. But had there been more of these, Gjorg would not have stopped in any of them. He had to be at the Kulla of Orosh by nightfall, or at worst late in the evening, so that he could return to his own village the next day.
For the most part, the road was nearly deserted. Now and then solitary mountaineers appeared in the fog, headed somewhere, like himself. At a distance, like everything else on that day of mists, they looked anonymous and unsubstantial.
The settlements were as silent as the road. Here and there were a few scattered houses, each with a wavering plume of smoke rising above its steep roof. “A house is a stone building, or hut, or any other structure that has a hearthstone and emits smoke.” He did not know why that definition of a dwelling, which appears in the Kanun and which he had known since childhood, had come to mind. “No one enters a house without calling out from the courtyard.” But I don’t mean to knock or go in anywhere, he said to himself plaintively.
The rain was still falling. Along the way he overtook another group of mountaineers, walking in single file, burdened with sacks of corn. Under the load, their backs seemed more stooped than one would expect. He thought, wet grain is heavier. He remembered having carried a sack of corn once in the rain from the storehouse at the subprefecture all the way to his village.
The laden mountaineers fell back behind him, and again he was alone on the highroad. Its edges on either side were sometimes quite clear and sometimes indistinct. In some stretches flooding and landslides had narrowed the roadway. “A road shall be as wide as a flagstaff is long,” he said to himself again, and he realized that for some time the Kanun’s prescriptions about roads had been running involuntarily through his head. “A road is for the use of men and livestock, for the passage of the living and the passage of the dead.”
He smiled. Whatever he did, he could not escape its definitions. It was no use deceiving himself. The Kanun was stronger than it seemed. Its power reached everywhere, covering lands, the boundaries of fields. It made its way into the foundations of houses, into tombs, to churches, to roads, to markets, to weddings. It climbed up to mountain pastures, and even higher still, to the very skies, whence it fell in the form of rain to fill the watercourses, which were the cause of a good third of all murders.
When for the first time he had convinced himself that he had to kill a man, Gjorg had called to mind all that part of the Code that dealt with the rules of the blood feud. If only I don’t forget to say the right words before I fire, he thought. That’s the main thing. If I don’t forget to turn him the right way up and put his weapon by his head. That’s the other main point. All the rest is easy, child’s play.
However, the rules of the blood feud were only a small part of the Code, just a chapter. As weeks and months went by, Gjorg came to understand that the other part, which was concerned with everyday living and was not drenched with blood, was inextricably bound to the bloody part, so much so that no one could really tell where one part left off and the other began. The whole was so conceived that one begat the other, the stainless giving birth to the bloody, and the second to the first, and so on forever, from generation to generation.
In the distance, Gjorg saw a group of people on horseback. When they drew nearer, he made out a bride among them and he knew that the cavalcade consisted of the relatives of the bride who were taking her to her husband. Drenched by the rain, they seemed tired, and only the horses’ bells lent a bit of gaiety to the little troop.
Gjorg stepped aside to let them pass. The horsemen, like himself, carried their weapons muzzle down to protect them from the rain. Looking at the parti-colored bundles which no doubt contained the bride’s trousseau, he wondered in which corner, which box, which pocket, which embroidered waistcoat, the bride’s parents had put the “trousseau bullet” with which, according to the Code, the bridegroom had the right to kill the bride if she should try to leave him. That thought mingled with the memory of his dead fiancée, whom he had not been able to marry because of her long illness. Whenever he saw a wedding party go by he could not help thinking about her, but on this day, oddly enough, his pain was lessened by a consoling thought: perhaps it was better for her that she had gone first to where he would soon overtake her, rather than to have before her a long life as a widow. And, as for that “trousseau bullet” that the parents were supposed to give the young husband so that he might kill his wife if she left him, he would certainly have tossed it into the ravine. Or perhaps he felt that way now that she was gone and the idea of killing someone who was no longer alive seemed to him as unreal as fighting with a ghost.