“Of course. It was always that way.”
Black Rock reappeared, and now it really was very close.
A passenger at the back was telling his neighbor that the poor man’s wife hadn’t wanted this highland burial at all, but in his very last moments, just before his dying breath, Marian had suddenly declared that such was his last wish.
“I think we’re there, at last!” said the head of the music section.
The burial took place when the sun was at its zenith, as custom and ritual required. The two policemen looked dazed as they joined the procession. They had been given orders to arrest the murderer, even though, despite the rule of the Kanun, there was little chance that the latter would come to the funeral.
The men wailed the ancient lamentations, among which could be made out only the words “Woe betide us without thee, Marian Shkreli!” Following behind, the women sobbed, spoke of their memories, and sang the praises of the deceased.
A journalist, thin as a rake, whom Mark thought he had seen before, flitted to and fro among the mourners.
“As far as I know, the old custom only allowed men to shed tears. Isn’t that so?55 he mumbled.
Mark shrugged his shoulders.
“Are you working for the local paper?”
“Yes, I am. And to be honest I dont understand any of all this. The old customs they’re supposed to be resurrecting are being trodden in the dust!”
Mark didn’t respond, but the journalist kept on blathering just the same. He seemed to be talking to himself, or else dictating an article. His drone was constantly being interrupted by cries and wailing. The government of the left accused the right-wing opposition … of encouraging … a return to the Kanun … whereas the right… which pointedly called the victim a “beacon of democracy” … denounced the Communists … who, it contended, were trying to undermine national values … and the left responded to this accusation by saying that… whereas the right stressed the point that… Lord, what a shambles you have left us with, Marian Shkreli!
“And what does Spain have to do with all this?” The journalist stopped his droning, and addressed this question directly to Mark. “That’s the second time the wailing women have mentioned Spain.”
Mark too had picked up a phrase: “In that funereal land of Spain …”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“Sounds like it has something to do with the death of the poor guy,” the journalist said. “According to what I heard a few minutes ago, he really did make a trip to Spain. But whether that has any connection with his murder, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Same here,” Mark admitted.
“It seems to me he went there to keep — or maybe to break — a promise. Do you think so too?”
“I really don’t know,” Mark replied. “As a matter of fact, he was a member of a delegation of the CNFR….”
The journalist tried to make out the words that went with the lamentations of the bereaved, but the cool mountain breeze blew them away, and the effort made the young man’s bony face look even more angular.
“In that funereal land of Spain?… Did you hear that? They said it again. It reminds me of that poem we had to learn at school, the ‘Ballad of Ago Ymer.’ Now, if I remember correctly, Ago was wilting away in a prison when he ‘received a piece of sad news’ or ‘had a funereal dream,’ I can’t quite recall….”
Mark drifted off, as discreetly as he could, to get out of range of the unstoppable chatterer.
As a matter of fact, though, much the same thought had occurred to Mark. Marian’s family must have heard of his trip to Spain, and they must have found it inexplicable, or at least puzzling. And since Spain played a role in the old “Ballad of Ago Ymer,” they must have connected Marian’s travel to the verses that had been handed on down the generations and had kept their truth for that very reason. In years to come, when they would tell the tale of Marian’s death to their own grandchildren, they might well say, He went to a distant land called Spain, and there he had a dream foretelling his own death….
The coffin was now being carried to the grave, and the crowd drew back all in one, like an ebbing wave.
Father Gjon gave a short oration, which he ended with the hope that the Albanians’ troubled souls would at long last be visited by the peace of the Lord. Then the coffin was lowered into the grave. It was being covered with earth when Tom Kola, the longest-standing employee of the Arts Center, who sometimes stood in for the announcer or else acted the clown, shouted out, in a voice strangled by emotion, “Okay, Marian!”
Nobody understood the meaning of this interjection. It could have seemed a disrespectful joke at the expense of the deceased, except that Tom’s eyes were red from weeping.
The funeral feast was laid out for the mourners when they came back from the cemetery to the house of Marian Shkreli’s elder brother. The murderer did not turn up there either, and the two policemen, who now knew that they had come for nothing, sat at the end of the table, looking embarrassed. The murderer had clearly wanted to respect the ritual of execution to the letter, by firing a single shot, but he hadn’t had the guts to take the old rules any further. That’s what was said around the table.
“Just look over there” the head of music whispered in Mark’s ear as they went into the guest room for coffee.
Mark looked where his friend was pointing, and what he saw astounded him. On the wall facing the door, over the fireplace, there hung the dead man’s white shirt, with the “Boss” logo clearly visible. It was the old custom. It had two screamingly obvious bloodstains on it, one almost circular in shape, the other a meandering streak, like a mountain stream.
“I never imagined things could go that far,” Mark’s friend said softly. “The dead man’s shirt hung out, just as it would have been four hundred years ago.”
Mark opened his mouth to utter a response, but immediately shut it again, as if he was afraid that the sound it would make would come from another world.
Toward four in the afternoon, the friends of the slain man got back into the coaches to go home. Some were impressed by all the ritual; others, on the contrary, didn’t try to hide their disappointment. There had been no request for a bessa for the murderer, and obviously no such offer had been made spontaneously. The murderer had undoubtedly observed some of the rules of the Kanun, but he’d turned a blind eye to many others. The dead man’s family were tarred with the same brush. Someone declared, “Better to have no Kanun than to have the Kanun messed with!” Others took a different line and would have been content with an approximate application of the old rules, with a haphazard kind of tradition. Could you ask for more from something that had been dead and buried for fifty years?
That’s how the conversation went in the coaches taking them all back down from Black Rock. People who thought these squabbles about ancient customs absurd kept their voices low as they chatted side by side. The fuss would drag on and on, they said, as it had with other Albanian lunacies of recent times. They reckoned that everyone involved was just play-acting, even without knowing it. Sure, they hung the dead man’s shirt over the hearth, but it was a fair bet they had no idea of the real meaning of this old custom. And even if some of them had remembered, where could they still find people who knew how to read the messages from the dead that the bloodstains were supposed to contain?
Mark looked distractedly at the desolate wayside scenery. A sparse layer of fresh snow was making puny efforts to blanket the ground. On the way up to Black Rock he had scrutinized the landscape for a cave entrance or a cleft that might have been the way into the notorious deep storage depot. But now, because of the snow, he had no chance of making out anything of the sort.