Broken April Read Free Page B

half after the day that his brother had been killed, his mother had finally washed the shirt he had worn that day. For a year and a half it had hung blood-soaked from the upper storey of the house, as the
Kanun
required, until the blood had been avenged. When bloodstains began to yellow, people said, it was a sure sign that the dead man was in torment, yearning for revenge. The shirt, an infallible barometer, indicated the time for vengeance. By means of the shirt the dead man sent his signals from the depths of the earth where he lay.
    How many times, when he was alone, had Gjorg climbed to that fateful upper storey to look at the shirt! The blood turned more and more yellow. That meant that the dead man had found no rest. How many times had Gjorg seen that shirt in his dreams, washed in water and soapsuds, its whiteness shimmering like the spring sky! But in the morning when he awoke it would be there still, spattered with the brown stains of dried blood.
    Now at last the shirt was hanging on the clothesline. But strangely it gave Gjorg no comfort.
    Meanwhile, like a new banner hoisted after the old one had been hauled down, on the upper storey of the Kryeqyqe
kulla
, they had hung out the bloody shirt of the new victim.
    The seasons, hot or cold, would affect the color of the dried blood, and so would the kind of cloth that the shirt was made of, but no one wanted to take such things intoaccount; all those changes would be taken as mysterious messages, whose import no one dared question.
    * The code of customary law.
    ** A stone dwelling in the form of a tower, peculiar to the mountain regions of Albania.
    * The pledged word, faith, truce.
    * From the Albanian
gjak
(blood), killer, but with no pejorative connotation, since the
gjaks
is fulfilling his duty under the provisions of the
Kanun
.
    * Literally a flag. By extension, a collection of various villages under the authority of a local chief who was himself the flag-bearer.

CHAPTER II
    Gjorg had been travelling across the High Plateau for several hours, and there was still no sign that the Kulla of Orosh was near.
    Under the fine rain, nameless waste lands, or moorlands with names unknown to him, came into view one after another, naked and dreary. Beyond them, he could just make out the line of mountains veiled in mist, and through the veil he thought he saw the pale reflection, multiplied as if in a mirage, of a single great mountain rather than a range of real peaks differing in height. The fog had made them unsubstantial, but it was strange how much more oppressive they seemed than in fine weather, when their rocks and sheer cliffs were plain to see.
    Gjorg heard the dull grating of the pebbles under foot. The villages along the road were far apart, and places with administrative functions or with an inn were rarer still.But had there been more of these, Gjorg would not have stopped in any of them. He had to be at the
Kulla
of Orosh by nightfall, or at worst late in the evening, so that he could return to his own village the next day.
    For the most part, the road was nearly deserted. Now and then solitary mountaineers appeared in the fog, headed somewhere, like himself. At a distance, like everything else on that day of mists, they looked anonymous and unsubstantial.
    The settlements were as silent as the road. Here and there were a few scattered houses, each with a wavering plume of smoke rising above its steep roof. “A house is a stone building, or hut, or any other structure that has a hearthstone and emits smoke.” He did not know why that definition of a dwelling, which appears in the
Kanun
and which he had known since childhood, had come to mind. “No one enters a house without calling out from the courtyard.” But I don’t mean to knock or go in anywhere, he said to himself plaintively.
    The rain was still falling. Along the way he overtook another group of mountaineers, walking in single file, burdened with sacks of corn. Under the load,