“You told me about the permanent stress of life under the dictatorship,” she went on in the same tired voice. “Obviously, you can’t say that things are the same today. Nonetheless, the atmosphere in my family right now is just as suffocating….”
Irritated by this, Mark shook his head sharply.
“No!” he said, raising his voice. “No anguish or terror can ever equal that! Not ever!”
He was coming close to losing the cool that he had only just recovered after his bout of jealousy. His girlfriend’s last remarks were like an insult — as if she doubted him, after all that he had told her about the Communist years.
He was about to yell out loud, So tell me what this is all about! What’s behind this worry and stress? An incurable disease, a crime, a threat?
Her eyes suggested she had to make a great effort to find the right words.
“Have you heard about the revival of ancient traditions?” she asked after a moment’s silence.
Mark gave a cautiously affirmative response — but as if to restrict his “ye… s” even more, he added that lots of things that had been in the news recently, especially stories filed by foreign journalists, seemed to him to be rather exaggerated.
“I used to think so, too,” she said.
The painter poured himself another drink.
“Vendettas are back! The terrible law of the Kanun has been restored!” he bawled in a theatrical baritone, and then burst out laughing. “It’s nonsense! Journalists’ twaddle!”
“You really believe that?”
“Sure,” said Mark. “Don’t you?”
The young woman smiled a faint but bitter smile.
“I don’t know what to say,” she began, unsteadily. “Everything is so dark….”
Abruptly and for no clear reason, but maybe because the sorrow he could see in her eyes struck him as quite different, almost alien, he regretted having let himself get carried away. He stroked her hair gently and asked:
“Is there … something like that going on … at home?”
He had to ask her twice before she felt entitled to speak about it. She was still not making very much sense. Yes, of course, there was something of that sort going on at home. Her brother Angelin had been in a kind of daze for almost a week. But nobody would tell her anything. She wondered if they were waiting for the uncle from Shala Province to come and explain it all to her.
“But just who is this uncle?” Mark broke in. “I meant to ask you already: why the hell are you all waiting for this uncle?”
“What do you mean, why? He’s the one who’s going to explain it all!”
“Oh, I see now. He’s going to decide if you — if your family is or is not tangled up in one of these old stories. Wait a minute, the old saying is coming back to me: If your family has anything to do with a blood feud….”
From this point on, Mark thought he understood why their conversation had been so awkward. The very language they now spoke was no longer appropriate to the subject matter. They would have had to go back to the old language, whose source had gone dry long ago, like a water pipe all clogged with lime.
There was a long silence. Once again, Mark thought he heard something banging against the windowpane. But if it was a knock, it was clearly intended for someone else.
“A vendetta coming back to life after lying dormant for fifty years … Frankly, I can’t take that seriously!” Mark declared.
He sounded quite sincere, and, as a matter of fact, he really did not believe it was possible. It was probably the Kanuns last spasm, its dying effort to come up to the surface, along with everything else that had been pushed down to the bottom by the prohibitions of the Communist era. Mark wasn’t saying this just to reassure his girlfriend. At the turn of the millennium, the Kanun had outlived its natural life span. It would have died a natural death long ago had it not been banned by the Communists. Their attempt to suppress it was the only reason this madness had acquired new life.
She listened to him with wide eyes in which tears seemed to be on the point of welling up.
“My dearest darling” he said to her tenderly as he kissed her hair, thinking all the while, My Beatrice….
The woman he had wanted to have as his guide to the new era now turned out to be held back by an ancient and rusty hook.
She calmed down and started explaining again what was going on in her home. She used the word “cold” so often that Mark imagined she was actually shivering. He poured out another glass of schnapps, and this time she agreed to drink her round. As he put his hand on her knees, then between her legs, her speech slowed, and gave way to little gasps. This time, she sighed, instead of groaning in her usual way; but maybe Mark only thought this because her final outburst was a sound he had never heard before, an alien sound that seemed to come from the throat of a different person.
As he lay motionless beside her, he realized that anyone listening attentively in the offices downstairs might have thought that he had not been making love to his girlfriend, but strangling her to death.
She left the studio, and Mark went out shortly after, but before going back to his office, he put in an appearance at the café. All the dailies were strewn about the tables, as always, but Mark didn’t have the patience to skim through them.
“Anything up?” he asked the waiter when the latter brought him his coffee.
“Not a thing. The new police chief was supposed to lay his hands on the bank robbers by the end of the week, but he’s not done a thing so far. Apparently his hands are not as free as he would like. He grumbles about not getting any help at all”
“Really? None at all?”
“The rest of the news is the usual gossip and nonsense. They’re claiming that before dawn this morning the leader of the opposition sent a fax to some lady in the Council of Europe — and the fax was nine yards long! How about that, eh? Nine yards of fax, and at five in the morning! In a pinch, you could call that sexual harassment!”
Mark chuckled.
“And all these blood feud killings they keep going on about — are they true, or just space fillers cooked up by journalists short of real news?”
The waiter pursed his lips. “Hmm … That depends on how you look at it. One of my cousins came down from Hoti and told me that they’d had cases of that kind up there these last few weeks. But —”
“But what?”
“Well, God only knows if it really is a blood feud, like in the old days, or something quite different…. Things are in such a muddle at the moment!”
“And are there really any people who’ve shut themselves up at home, who’ve cloistered themselves in their kulla, like they used to?”
“I’ve heard tell of some. But you know as well as I do that people like to embroider…. Some poor fellow stays at home because he’s got backache, and the next thing you know, people are saying he’s been cloistered as part of a blood feud!”
They both laughed.
“I find it all rather strange,” the waiter went on. “It’s as if it was just a game. But if they really do unearth the Book of the Blood — and you do hear people talking about it — then it’ll be quite a different kettle of fish, believe you me.”
“The Book of the Blood?. Yeah, I think I heard of something of that sort.”
Any other time the waiter would have been dumbfounded by such ignorance, but Mark, even though he had been living in B— for some years, was still considered a newcomer to the North.
“Well, as you’ve no doubt heard, this book is a list of all blood feuds since the beginning,” the waiter explained. “Who redeemed the blood, and who still has to do some redeeming, who still has a blood debt and who hasn’t; it even lays down cases where there is just a half-blood still to pay off…. In other words, when that book comes to light, we’d all better keep inside four walls. If it does come to light, that is….”