Obviously it would have, Mark thought. It raised a question of no small importance. What could the new Great Guide have been looking for in the dark, with a flashlight, the very moment he gained supreme power? What crime, what stain, did he have on his conscience?
All that spring and right through to the following winter, people never ceased to wonder whether the new president had murdered anyone. His supporters compared him — so as to whitewash him, if only a little — to the dead dictator and all the terror and horrors his reign had brought. The skeptics would not abandon their position that no one could have climbed so high without many a foul deed on his way up.
Mark was one of the skeptics. As Gentian used to say, crime is one of the most remarkable jewels in the crown of Communist potentates. Without it, the crown would be as precious as papier-mâché.
The two cars, traveling together, were now approaching the town. The first streaks of dusk in the sky made it look as if it was going to snow up in the hills.
Mark was exhausted. Words that sounded like the lyrics of a forgotten tune rang around his head:
Up in the mountain lies my fine secret…
Yes, it was like a snippet of an old folktale, of the kind you can never remember having read or heard for the first time: Once upon a time, there was a new ruler who lived in a palace in the capital. But his secret power, his soul, his very essence, was shut up in a casket buried deep beneath one of these great hills….
Mark and the head of music went to look for the hall where the meeting was scheduled to take place. An acquaintance told him on the telephone that it was in a warehouse that had been used for a while as an adult movie house. Nowadays, the owner rented it out for meetings, most often to religious sects and political factions.
“Renaming the streets, that’s another part of the muddle!” the head of music said to him. “Each time the town elects a different party, the first thing the new councillors do is change the street names. Right-wingers abolish names like ‘The Three Martyrs’ and put back the ancient sign invoking Our Immaculate Lady,’ and the leftists, when they get back in power, do just the same, only in reverse.”
Erotic graffiti on the walls indicated they were on the right track. They could see the half-opened metal doors of the warehouse from quite a distance.
“Isn’t this going to be dangerous?” Mark asked. “I mean, should we have invitations to be allowed in?”
“No, no, not at all,” said his friend.
They tried to make themselves as unremarkable as they could as they filed into the long, bare hall. At the back, sitting behind a table decked with a scarlet rug, were two men: an old man in highland folk dress, and another, pale-faced and smooth-skinned, wearing a felt hat. He must have been on edge, but his unwrinkled skin was probably the reason why his irritation could not be read on his face. Despite that, anger was in the air: you could see it in the trembling tassels of the scarlet tablecloth.
“We are all well aware that the Kanun has changed for the worse. What we need is to rid it of the filth and madness that is strangling it to death nowadays. That’s what we’re here to discuss. With as little bullshit as we can manage.”
Someone sitting in the middle of the hall shouted out, “The Russian Kalashnikov, that’s the Kanun’s number-one enemy!”
A great roar of applause and booing broke out instantly in the hall.
“You, sir, stand up and spell out your reasons!” said the platform speaker in the felt hat. So the man stood up.
Everyone in the hall turned to look at him, so Mark could see the faces of all the participants. They had turned their heads with such lack of ease that Mark almost expected to hear their necks creak like rusty hinges. He shuddered. In those frozen faces that looked as though they had been rescued from the morgue, the only trace of life was in the eyes. They glowed like embers in the wind. But there were other faces in the assembly to which the opposite had happened: faces where the eyes seemed to have gone dead first.
“The Kalashnikov rifle, like everything that comes from the Slav, undermines the Kanun]” the speaker explained. “We learned from our forebears, as they learned from theirs, that the Kanun is about one shot — the first shot. When you’ve pulled the trigger, you ve had your due. It’s now your opponent’s turn to shoot at you. A second shot is not allowed by the Kanun, and a third shot even less, so the thirty-odd bullets that come out of a Kalashnikov belt have nothing at all to do with the rules. But that’s what people are using these days to apply the old laws! It’s shameful!”
Several men approved with a “Well said!” or a “Right you are!”
The speaker now got into his stride.
“The Kanun does not allow the use of knives, axes, fire, or stone. Nor does it condone drowning, strangling, whipping, or the use of explosives.”
“That’s absolutely correct!” men shouted out around the hall
“Well, then, why are people doing all these things nowadays? These are shameful practices, and they must be stopped!”
The crowd of men expressed approval by rapping their knuckles on the seat backs in front of them.
“Where do these folk come from? How did they know about the meeting tonight?” Mark whispered into the ear of his friend.
“God only knows.”
On the way to the hall, the musician had explained to Mark that, according to what he had picked up, such assemblies — which had the appearance of political meetings, which were now quite legal — used to be held when there was a perceived need to amend an article or clause of the old Code of Laws of the Kanun. But they had always been very infrequent, happening maybe once every hundred or two hundred years.
Mark’s lungs felt close to bursting. It was a special kind of anxiety that he felt each time he was present at some exceptional event without fully appreciating just what he was witnessing. This meeting had the power to arouse emotions appropriate to events that happen only once in a lifetime. The huge gaps of time between each of these assemblies and the next — whole generations could pass through this world without ever having heard of them — made this night all the more daunting. It must have been at a general assembly of this kind in the distant past that the huge decision to replace knives with guns had once been taken.
Another man had risen to speak. He was demanding that a proclamation be drawn up and read out in every village by criers, just like in the old days.
The last speaker observed that after fifty years in deep freeze, the Kanun, unlike other corpses that are kept intact by ice and snow, had emerged in a sorry state. For the time being, it was everyone’s duty to speak out against the distortions of the old Code, and to call a halt to any further degradation. This speech prompted more knuckle-rapping on the seat backs.
Suddenly Mark thought he had caught sight of Zef. Yes, that was the nape of his neck, and the cheekbone was just like his; but the man kept his head stock-still. No, it can’t be, Mark thought, I must be hallucinating.
He felt a buzzing in his forehead and a weight against his temple that made his mind go cloudy, as it did every time that he thought of Zef.
Who knows what had become of Zef since they last met? Had he changed? A set of mental slides passed in front of his eyes: Zef as a factory boss whose workers had only ever seen his signature; Zef on a rubber dinghy, smuggling passengers across the Strait of Otranto; Zef lying in silk sheets with a naked woman; Zef lying at the bottom of the sea….