Angelin interrupted his uncle once again to ask for the name of the blood debtor. Then they both fell silent.
The day after the murder, remorse came faster than he had thought it would. The first night, he had waited in vain for sleep to come. On the second night too. What came to him instead was a vision of the blue necktie of his victim at the moment when he fell. It had waved to the side, as if wanting to stay up in the air a little longer, while its owner fell to the ground. Angelin had long dreamed of having such a fine tie, and he imagined he could see it coming toward his own neck. Since its owner was now not of this world, nothing stopped the tie from being his….
He had told his sister all that in the course of the many hours they had spent together after the execution. He had waited a long time for an order to obey. No such thing came to him from any quarter, so he yielded to what cropped up on his path — the Kanun. As soon as he had carried out the act, he realized that the order was wrong. But it was too late….
As she recounted the hours she and her brother had spent together since the fatal act, Mark could easily imagine the two of them in conversation. Oddly enough, he could only imagine it as a conversation between two naked bodies, both of them stripped and scrubbed, as if in preparation for leaving the world, beside a grave, or awaiting a postmortem. My God, he thought, that is exactly when they must have committed incest!
She finally got around to explaining the reason for their visit. Her explanations became more and more confused. Her brother was now entangled in the blood feud, because of the murder, and was therefore unable to do anything useful for anybody. For example, he couldn’t go to Kosovo, where the insurrection had now broken out. He would either have to hide, or risk the revenge of the other clan, or give himself up to the authorities. In any case, nothing could now stop the blood from following its course. Whether he took refuge in the highlands or behind prison bars or in the grave, he had no means of stopping the wheels of the machine. If he went into hiding or into prison, then the opposing clan would kill someone else in his stead. If he were to die, then his own clan would be drawn into the infernal cycle. So everything would unfold along lines laid down centuries ago. And that was also the main cause of his distress: he had wanted to put a situation to right, to do something for others, and he found he had done precisely the opposite. As for knowing how to atone for his act, he … or rather, she and he (it had to be the two of them, Mark thought, with her white body laid out beside his thin and waxen shape, on the dissecting table) … well, they had had long arguments over it, because Angelin, against his sister’s strong advice, had resolved to give up his life. However, the Kanun did not permit suicide, so he had thought of asking for help from the state … and that was why they had come to see Mark.
The painter was on the verge of saying, But why here, in my studio? when his eyes strayed toward his old traveling chest. That was where his other dress must be hidden — a police uniform … or a snakeskin!
You’re such a dolt, Mark told himself. Obviously they had to come to see you. Aren’t you the next deputy chief of police?
Coming face-to-face with death had led them to be the first to discover the great secret of his own life. They’d guessed what no one else had yet seen. For Angelin and his sister, from now on, the other world where Mark would have been the deputy chief of police was the only one that mattered.
Mark needed some time to measure fully what they were asking. The only way to block the mechanism that Angelin had set in motion — to halt the rusty gearwheels that even death could no longer arrest — was to have recourse to another machine, the machinery of state. The plan was simple: the young man would give himself up to the police, and the state would give him a heavy sentence, the harshest of all. Not fifteen years in jail, as the current law required, but capital punishment. At a time like the present when laws were changing from day to day and cases were batted back and forth between Tirana and the Council of Europe, that was a conceivable plan. So the boy would be judged and sentenced, then shot like most murderers. His only request was that in this case the state would assume the role of the opposing clan’s executioner. He was perfectly aware that in ordinary circumstances such a request would be considered insane. But in current conditions, with so many Albanian issues going to Brussels and Strasbourg and suchlike, and also more especially because the National Ferment Party was demanding that the ancient Kanun be incorporated in the revised penal code, everything was possible. So that…
Mark rubbed his forehead from time to time — the best way to restore the flow of blood to his brain when it was slowing down.
So, in that way, by inserting the state into the system, the circle of revenge would be automatically squared. The family — that’s to say, us, she said, pointing to her breast — would claim its blood (she pointed to her brother) not from the Shkreli, but from the state!
The two of them then expanded on their plan and expressed themselves quite clearly. Shifting the claiming of the blood into a new, unprecedented area made it all different. The state was accustomed to facing enemies. It could tolerate and maintain hostilities more easily than any clan. It all hung on whether the state would consent to the plan; that is to say, whether it would agree to pronounce the brother’s sentence not just as an expression of the law and the penal code, but also as an expression of the rules of the Kanun. Furthermore, the two of them insisted that in the death certificate that the prosecutor and the coroner would sign after the execution (or else in the report of it that would be published in the records), the following wording would have to be used: “The State of Albania has shot Angelin of the Ukaj, cleansing the blood of Marian Shkreli, its servant.”
Mark took his head in his hands, as if to stop it bursting. He hadn’t interrupted throughout his girlfriend’s long explanation. When she finished, he asked what he thought was a whole variety of questions, but it all boiled down to a single query: “So you think the state should become a player in the feud? “And every time she answered “Yes, exactly,” her eyes flashed with an icy gleam that seemed to say, And what’s so strange about that? Throughout its long life the state has done nothing but kill and slaughter people. You yourself are in a better position than anyone to know that!
In other circumstances Mark would have shouted back, “Why me?” But it was too late now. He drew himself up to his full height, and though he said nothing, his whole body, like a dancer’s, expressed a single thought: Of course I am.
Of course he was.
None of them had been watching the clock. It must have been near dawn when Mark promised to put in a word with the police chief or the prosecutor in the morning, or, if the opportunity arose, with the two of them.
Mark, Angelin, and his sister were all dead tired. The two visitors got up to take their leave. Mark went to the bay window, looked outside, and declared that they would perhaps be better advised to wait for dawn.
He showed them the bed where he only rarely spent the night and stretched out on the sofa. For a long while he thought he could hear snatches of their whispering to each other, which sounded to him like so many lovers’ sighs.
As the first rays of light came through the window, he remembered she had taken the pill, which reassured him, and he fell asleep immediately.