“And where exactly do they expect to lay their hands on it?” Mark queried.
“Nobody knows where it is. They’ve looked high and low, so they say. They’ve been down into the secret section of the National Archives more than once, according to gossip. But in fact nobody even knows where the Secret Archives really are. Some say they are in deep storage right here, up in these mountains. I must confess I don’t really believe that. People are saying the same thing in at least three different parts of Albania.”
When Mark came out of the café, he felt as if he’d just taken a sleeping pill. Some days he rather liked that sluggish torpor. At the crossroads, he slowed his pace to read the obituary notices posted on the wall. He read them slowly, line by line, as if he was deciphering difficult old texts. Then he shook his head, almost in fright. God knows why, but he felt as if he had just been looking for the name of his old friend Zef.
It was hustle and bustle at the Arts Center. A computer was being installed in the director’s office. In a week’s time — two weeks at the most — a delegation from the Council of Europe was due to visit. Still no news about the holdup at the bank. The music section was having a coffee break, as usual.
Mark lit a cigarette and slumped into one of his armchairs. Before opening his mouth to say anything about the Book of the Blood, he speculated on the reactions his question was likely to provoke. Someone might go pale, another might look dumbstruck, and yet another tell him to shut up. All the same, he would go right ahead.
The subject didn’t leave his mind all week long. At one point he wondered if he was not already obsessed with it; but then he told himself it was quite natural for it to be going around and around in his head, seeing that his girlfriend was directly involved. But did he really want the Book of the Blood to be found? At times, he reckoned that bringing it to light would prompt the much-desired miracle: your family has been worrying about nothing, you’ve no blood debt to pay, nor any to collect….
When he told this to his girlfriend, she shook her head in doubt. The memory of the old was quite as reliable as the book. If the old uncle were to state that the family was entangled in a blood feud, that would be as good as holy writ. He would already have been there actually, if he hadn’t had another attack of gout. But he had let them know that he would come, even if he had to be carried down on a stretcher.
May his legs drop off! Mark thought to himself. He grinned inwardly at his own thought, for it was the first time that he had caught himself uttering curses like a man of old.
What was known of the fate of the Book of the Blood up until World War II was generally consistent; but what had happened to it thereafter was the subject of widely divergent stories. When they came to power in 1945, the Communists burned down the Castle of Orosh, where the book had been kept for many centuries. At first it was supposed that the book had turned to ashes along with a part of the archives of the prince of Orosh, but soon after a different supposition came into circulation, namely, that the Book of the Blood had been stashed away safely somewhere else. That seemed all the more plausible when the suspicion that the Communists had gotten hold of it and destroyed it themselves turned out to be unjustified. After all, if the winning side had gone so far as to preserve the historical records of land ownership, it was hardly likely that it would have suppressed a mortal inventory. The Book of the Blood had rightly been called a “Domesday Book of Death” by a journalist of that period. For the Communists, property was a threat far greater than death!
One after another, people who still whispered about it came around to the view that the book still existed, in some secret hiding place. What no one knew was who had secreted it. Some thought that opponents of the new regime had hidden it safely — like the holy relics from the Church of Saint Anthony, the original emblem of the Dugagjin clan, an eleventh-century portrait of the Virgin, and various other treasures which it was obviously desirable to save from destruction. But there were others who thought that the book had been hidden by the Communists themselves. Having decided to put an end to the thousand-year-old system of customary law called the Kanun, they must have decided they needed to begin with its accounting system, the Book of the Blood. Some people of this persuasion went even further and speculated that the secret agents of the Sigurimi had started to use the book for their own sinister purposes. On reflection, though, that would have been only natural.
In later years, a cloak of silence fell on the Kanun, and the book sank into oblivion. Even the muffled rumors that could still be heard now and again seemed barely related to the original speculations, and they were far less sensational. In many cases, the rumors seemed to be only reflections of some public event. For example, when Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communist Party, visited Albania, people claimed he had been presented with a silver pistol — and the Book of the Blood. The same story was told about Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, and then again, some years later, about Franz-Josef Strauss, when, oddly enough, Albania was trying to improve relations with West Germany. Some people, it seemed, were absolutely determined to believe that Albania would pass the fearful book on to another nation.
When the dictatorship fell, many books about the Kanun were published, and there was renewed talk of the notorious ledger. The old speculations about its fate were put back into circulation, together with new guesses, some of which were quite crazy, as was the press in general at that time. In the Book it will all be found! some journalist wrote: our trial, and our judgment! Another journalist riposted, You’d better go and get hold of your personal file, you wretch, if you want to know what particular sentence you are under! In Tirana, there were as many gradations in rumors about the Book as in a musical scale. In one variant, the book was said to have been requested by the Helsinki Committee; in another, it was not the OSCE, but the International Court at The Hague that had requisitioned it. “And why, dear sir, should the International Court of Justice have subpoenaed our book?” “How should I know?” came the reply. “Maybe we’re under suspicion of genocide? It’s a very fashionable expression these days!” “Genocide of whom? By whom?” “Oh, stop getting on my nerves. Why should I know by whom and to whom? Maybe by the Albanians … against the Albanians?” “Aha, so that’s what the score is, then!” Well, that was the kind of argument you could hear in the cafés of the capital. But in the little town of B—, it all had a very different impact.
The afternoon suddenly seemed to have gone dead, as if it had been abandoned: a not uncommon impression toward the end of August, foreshadowing the coming autumn. A singer could be heard far away, and the monotonous strain only heightened the feeling of emptiness.
Mark looked at his watch. The locksmith should have finished installing his new front door by now. He dressed, went out, and made for his studio.
The streets were deserted. The singer’s voice grew nearer. Mark could now make out the words:
I‘m waiting for you in Station Road
Stand up straight, pretty girl, stand up straight!