When evening came, he made a kind of discovery: daytime waiting was different from waiting at dusk, which in turn was distinct from a nighttime vigil. He still had to experience the most acute form of the latter state, when all his waiting would condense as at the leading edge of a comet: waiting after midnight.
Since he had prepared himself for it, the last stage of waiting turned out to be less dreary than he had imagined. Sheer fatigue numbed his senses somewhat, so that the first minutes after midnight seem to pass quite quickly.
When he heard her coming up the stairs, the first thing that occurred to him was that his girlfriend was not alone. But his brain was in no state to process it, and only when he opened the door and saw the figure standing behind the girl did he almost exclaim, I thought as much!
“My brother Angelin,” she said.
Now he was sure he had guessed correctly. The boy’s thin, badly shaven face matched in every particular the visage he had often imagined. Yes, of course, he had guessed! Just as he had intuited that his girlfriend, like most Albanian women, more than a wife or a mistress, was first and foremost a sister.
His first thought after closing the door was to go and take down the nude for which she had sat. Though the face was still only sketched in, he felt that the other man would also be able to identify her by her sexual organs. He must be familiar with them. He must have seen his sister. Maybe he had even touched her, some summer afternoon…. That pill she had taken at an unexpected time, when she was in distress about her brother … My God, maybe it wasn’t so much the fear of getting pregnant as the unconscious terror of consanguinity that had pushed her toward the pill?
“Sit down, please,” Mark said to the two of them, thinking inwardly, What a mess we’re in! Then: “You must excuse me, if I seem distracted, but you can understand that…”
“Of course,” the young woman said. “We are too. Angelin and I wanted first of all to ask you to forgive us for disturbing you at such a late —”
“No matter,” said Mark.
He would have liked to add that he thought it quite natural that they should turn to him, but he immediately saw-that if the young man was unaware of their relationship, then there was no reason for Angelin to find it natural
He remembered the bottle of schnapps. It was like a life buoy, and he busied himself for a moment with getting it and some glasses out of the cupboard.
“Mark,” she said, with her eyes steady on him. “We have come about something very important.”
“I was sure you had,” he replied.
She took a deep breath. He quickly realized that only she would speak. The brother and the sister must have gone over the issue many times together, he thought, for hours on end, side by side….
What she said turned out to be a bit of a muddle. Conventional ways of saying things seemed not much use in the context. Rather the opposite: instead of opening up new lines of thought, they seemed to block things off. Her brother had killed, in circumstances that were obscure. Contrary to what many people thought, he had not been pressured into committing the act by some devotee of the ancient Kanun — such as their uncle. It was sheer chance that made their uncle’s four-day stay coincide with the period of deep distress that Angelin had gone through. If they had had a different visitor at that time — say, the leader of a Japanese or Tibetan sect, a collector of weapons for Kosovo, an Irish Republican, or a member of a secret society recruiting suicide bombers to rid the world of dictators — then Angelina fate might also have been quite different. But what came up was the Kanun, and he had been entranced by it. It really was bad luck that news of the Kosovo uprising had been so long in coming, just like the reply from the Association of Young Idealists in Tirana.
During his stay in Tirana the previous spring, he had suffered his first great shock. He’d been out every evening with his cousins and their friends, crawling from bar to dive and from bingo hall to gambling den. His rejection had come in stages. At first, he thought that the money talk would eventually run out and give way to other subjects of discussion. But night after night the talk of money resumed, ever more anxious, more desperate, smothering everything else and becoming, in the end, suffocating. After so many years of tightened belts, his sister said, to justify this state of affairs, it was perfectly normal that people should be greedy for material satisfactions. But Angelin could not get used to it. Such greed seemed to him an ill omen. On his fourth evening in the capital, he invented an excuse for not going to bingo. The next day he did not even want to go outside. I know what you re feeling, his sister told him then. And she’d told him about the Association of Young Idealists, as she’d come across two of its members quite by chance. The same afternoon, the four of them got together at the Piazza Café. He listened patiently to the Idealists as they laid out their program, and then opined that a more radical plan of action was needed. He admitted he had always been slow in reacting to events. His favorite hero was Jan Palac, the Czech who had set fire to himself to protest the Russian occupation, but he had never had the opportunity to do anything similar: he was only fourteen when the Communist regime had fallen. After that, things had changed in such a confusing way that he had found it difficult to know how to orient himself. He was ready to join their organization and to carry out any of its orders. If they decided to issue warnings to corrupt ministers of state, and then to members of parliament, for instance, and if these high and mighty folk did not give up their ignoble ways, then he was prepared to put the threats into effect, with his own hand … that is to say, to carry out the first murder!
The two Idealists were dumbfounded. They declared they had never gone so far as to envisage action of that kind. In any event, they would give him an answer on that point later.
Angelin returned to the North and waited in vain for the Idealists5 answer. His eyes became ever hollower. He spoke less and less. And that was when the uncle from the country came on his visit. He too was full of rancor and deeply disappointed. In his view, the country was going to the dogs. Decline and decay were everywhere to be seen. Courage and honor, which he had expected to be reinvigorated by the fall of Communism, were losing ever more ground. The only hope lay in the resurrection of the old customary law. The doreras, the executioners, had been the flower of the country’s youth. Unlike their counterparts today, who played bingo until dawn, the doreras had gone bravely toward their own death…. Angelin listened to this talk with utter disdain.
He had never had any particular respect for the Kanun, and he would no doubt have continued listening to his uncle in the same way, that is to say, with indifference, if in the flood of the old man’s words there hadn’t been three or four that struck him and entered his head like well-aimed nails. Those young executioners, the country’s hope, had no thought for gain, the uncle had said. They were ready to run in the precisely opposite direction: to their loss.
These words left Angelin stunned. The uncle had gone on talking, longer than he ever talked before, until his nephew interrupted him to ask if there were not blood to be claimed by their family.
From one moment to the next, the uncle’s speech slowed down, became as heavy and bare as the flagstones in a mausoleum. Yes, within their very own family, there was a blood that had not been taken back. That was the very reason that he had taken to the roads in midwinter. The Communists may have stolen their pastures and a part of their herd, but they couldn’t take away the command of the blood. Yes, sure, they had tried to do that too. At school and in meetings they had said time and again that young people should be ready to lay down their lives for the ideas of Lenin, but everyone knew now that that business was finished…. Yes, so there was a blood to be reclaimed by their family, and neither he, nor his children, nor his children’s children, would ever be able to escape it.