Broken April Read Free

them look as if they were wearing masks. Gjorg imagined how his own mourners would look when they had gouged their faces. He felt that from now on the lives of all the generations to come in the two families would be an endless funeral feast, each side playing host in turn. And each side, before leaving for the feast, would don that blood-stained mask.
    That afternoon, after the funeral meal, there were once again unusual comings and goings in the village. In a few hours, Gjorg Berisha’s one-day truce would be at an end, and now the village elders, as the rules required, were preparing to visit the Kryeqyqes to ask for the thirty-day truce, the long
bessa
, in the name of the village.
    On the doorsteps of the
kullas
, on the first floors where the women lived, and in the village squares, people talked of nothing else. This was the first blood-taking of that spring, and of course there was much discussion of everything connected with it. The killing had been performed inaccordance with the rules, and as for the burial, the funeral feast, the one-day
bessa
, and everything else, these had been carried out with scrupulous obedience to the ancient Code. So the thirty-day truce that the elders were preparing to ask of the Kryeqyqes would certainly be granted.
    As people talked and waited for the latest news about the long
bessa
, they recalled the times, recent or long past, when the rules of the Code had been violated in their village and the surrounding region, and even in far places of the endless plateau. They remembered the violators of the Code as well as the harsh penalties exacted. They remembered persons punished by their own families, whole families punished by the village, or even whole villages punished by a group of villages, or by the Banner. * But, luckily, they said with a sigh of relief, no such disgrace had fallen on their village for a long time. Everything had been done according to the old rules, and not for ages had anyone had the insane notion to break them. This latest blood-taking, too, had been done according to the Code, and Gjorg Berisha, the
gjaks
, young though he was, had behaved well at his enemy’s burial and at the funeral dinner. The Kryeqyqes would certainly grant him the thirty-day truce. Especially since the village, having requested this kind of truce, could revoke it if the
gjaks
took it into his head to abuse his temporary respite and roam around the countryside boasting of his deed. But no, Gjorg Berisha was not that sort. On the contrary, he had always been thought quiet and sensible, quite the last young fellow one would expect to play the fool.
    The Kryeqyqes granted the long truce late in the afternoon, a few hours before the short one was due to run out. One of the village elders came to the Berishas to tell them of the pledge, with renewed advice that Gjorg must not abuse it, etc.
    After the envoy left, Gjorg sat numbly in a corner of the stone house. He could look forward to thirty days of safety. After that, death would lurk all around him. He would go about only in the dark like a bat, hiding from the sun, the moonlight, and the flicker of torches.
    Thirty days, he said to himself. The shot fired from that ridge above the highway had cut his life in two: the twenty-six years he had lived thus far, and the thirty days that began on that very day, the seventeenth of March, and would end on the seventeenth of April. Then the life of a bat, but he was not counting that any longer.
    Out of the corner of his eye, Gjorg looked at the scrap of landscape visible through the narrow window. Outside it was March, half-smiling, half-frozen, with the dangerous mountain light that belonged to March alone. Then April would come, or rather just the first half of it. Gjorg felt an emptiness in the left side of his chest. From now on, April would be tinged with a bluish pain. . . . Yes, that was how April had always seemed to him—a month with something incomplete about it.