The relatives of the bride had disappeared from view before they faded from his mind. He thought of them, travelling along the road in accordance with all the rules, the chief of her kinsmen, the Krushkapar, at the end of the procession, the only difference being that now, under the veil, in the place of the bride, he imagined his betrothed. “A wedding day is never postponed,” the Code said. “Even if the bride is dying, the wedding party sets out, if necessary dragging her along to the bridegroom’s house.” Gjorg had often heard these words repeated during the sickness of his betrothed, when they talked at home of his approaching wedding day. “A wedding party sets out even if there is a death in the house. When the bride enters the house, the dead person leaves. Tears on one side, song on the other.”
All these memories that he forced himself to entertain wearied him, and he tried not to think of anything. On either side of the road stretched long strips of fallows, and again nameless waste lands. Somewhere on the right he saw a watermill, then, farther off, a flock of sheep, and a church with its graveyard. He passed by them without turning his head, but that did not prevent him from remembering the portions of the Code that dealt with mills, flocks, churches and graves. “Priests have no part in the blood feud.” “Among the graves of a family or a clan, no stranger’s tomb may lie.”
He was tempted to say, “That’s enough,” but could not find the strength to say it. He lowered his head and went on walking at the same pace. In the distance he could see the roof of an inn, further on a convent, then another flock of sheep, and beyond, smoke and perhaps a settlement; there were centuries-old laws for all these things. There was no escaping them. No one had ever succeeded in escaping them. And yet…. “Priests have no part in the blood feud,” he repeated, citing one of the best known clauses of the Code. He was thinking of that as he was going along the stretch of road from which the convent was clearly visible, and the thought that only if he had been a priest would he have been spared by the Kanun got mixed up with thinking about nuns and the relations that people said they had with the young priests, and with the idea of possibly having an affair with a nun himself, but he suddenly remembered that nuns cropped their hair and he dismissed that fantasy. But I would have had to be a priest, he thought, so as not to be subject to the Kanun. But other sections of the Code were in fact applicable to priests, who were exempt only from the provisions that regulated the blood feud.
For a moment he felt as if he were trapped in bird-lime by the bloody part of the Kanun. Truly, that was the essential thing, and it was useless to console yourself that everyone was shackled by the same chains. Besides priests, there were numerous other people who escaped the rule of blood-law. He had already thought of that on another occasion. The world was divided into two parts: the one that fell under the blood-law, and the other that was outside that law.
Beyond the blood-law. He almost let out a sigh. What must life be like in such families? How did they get up in the mornings and how did they go to bed at night? It all seemed almost incredible, as remote perhaps as the life of the birds. And yet there were such houses. In fact, that had been the case of his own house seventy years ago, until that fateful autumn night when a man had knocked at their door.
Gjorg’s father, who had it from his own father, had told him the story of their enmity with the Kryeqyqe family. It was a story marked by twenty-two graves on each side, forty-four in all, with the same set phrases to be spoken before the killings, but yet with more silence than speech, with sobs, with the death-rattle in the throat that chokes off a last wish, with three bardic songs, one of them forgotten, with the grave of a woman killed by accident whose death was indemnified according to the rules, with the men of both families immured in the tower of refuge*, with an attempt at reconciliation that failed at the last moment, with a killing that took place at a wedding with the granting of a short and a long truce, with a funeral dinner, with the cry, “So and so of the Berisha has fired at so and so of the Kryeqyqe,” or the other way around, with torches, and comings and goings in the village and so on until that afternoon of March 17, when it had been Gjorg’s turn to join the grisly dance.
And all this had begun seventy years ago, on a cold October night, when a man had knocked at their door, “Who was that man?” Gjorg had asked as a little boy, when for the first time he had heard the story of the knocking at the door. The question would be repeated many times in their house, at that time and later on, and no one would ever answer it. For no one had ever known who that man was. And even now, Gjorg could not believe that anyone had actually knocked at their door. It was easier for him to imagine that a ghost had knocked, or fate itself, rather than an unknown traveler.
The man, after knocking, had called from the gate and asked for shelter for the night. The head of the house, Gjorg’s grandfather, had opened the door to him. They had welcomed him as was the custom, had brought him food and prepared him a bed, and early next morning, still according to custom, one of the family, his grandfather’s younger brother, had escorted the unknown guest to the outer limits of the village. He had just left the man when he heard a shot. The stranger had fallen, dead, exactly at the border of the village lands. Now, according to the Kanun, when the guest whom you were accompanying is killed before your eyes, you are bound to avenge him. But if he had been struck down after you had turned your back, you were free of that obligation. The man who had been escorting his guest had in fact turned his back before the man had been hit; therefore it was not his responsibility to avenge him. But no one had seen it happen. It was very early in the morning and no one in the neighborhood could testify in the matter. Even so, his protector’s word would have been believed, since the Kanun trusts a man’s word, and it would have been regarded as established that the man who had accompanied his guest had taken leave of him and turned his back by the time the killing had occurred, if another obstacle had not arisen. That was the orientation of the victim’s body. The committee that was formed at once to determine if the duty of avenging the unknown guest fell to the house of Berisha, considered everything minutely, and concluded at last that the Berisha were indeed the ones who must avenge him. The stranger had fallen face down with his head towards the village. For that reason, according to the Code, the Berisha who had given the stranger shelter and had fed him, had had the duty to protect him until he left the village lands, and must now avenge him.
The men of the Berisha family returned in silence from the wood where the commission had debated around the corpse for hours, and the women at the windows of the kulla had understood. Pale as wax, they had listened to the men’s brief words, and had turned paler still. Yet no curse was murmured against the unknown guest who had brought death to their house, since a guest is sacred and, according to the custom, a mountaineer’s house, before being his home and the home of his family, is the home of God and of guests.