Diana felt that the mountain folk, distracted for some time by the business of setting the markers, were once again turning their attention upon them. She was the first to climb into the coach, and Bessian waved for the last time to the distant figures of Ali Binak and his assistants.
Diana was a little tired, and all during the ride back to the inn she scarcely spoke.
“Shall we have some coffee before we leave?” Bessian suggested.
“If you like,” Diana said.
While serving them, the innkeeper told them about famous cases of boundary disputes in which Ali Binak had been the arbitrator, the details of which had in some sort passed into the oral legendry of the mountains. You could see that he was very proud of his guest.
“When he is in these parts, he always stays at my inn.”
“But where does he live?” Bessian asked, just to be saying something.
“He doesn’t have any fixed residence,” the innkeeper said. “He is everywhere and nowhere. He’s always on the road, because there is no end to the quarrels and disputes, and people call on him to judge them.”
Even after he had served them their coffee, he went on talking about Ali Binak and the centuries-old hatreds that rend mankind. He brought up the subject again when he came back to take away the cups and collect his money, and once more on accompanying them to their carriage.
Bessian was about to climb into the coach when he felt Diana press his arm.
“Look,” she said softly.
A few paces away a young mountaineer, very pale, was looking at them as if dumbfounded. A black ribbon was sewn to his sleeve.
“There’s a man engaged in the blood feud,” Bessian said to the innkeeper. “Do you know him?”
The innkeeper’s squinting eyes stared into the void a few yards to one side of the mountaineer. It was obvious that he was about to enter the inn and he had just stopped to see these persons of distinction get into their carriage.
“No,” said the innkeeper. “He came by three days ago on his way to Orosh, to pay the blood-tax. “Say, young man,” he called to the stranger. “What’s your name?”
The young man, visibly surprised at the innkeeper’s hail, turned to look at him. Diana was already inside the carriage, but Bessian paused an instant on the footboard to hear the stranger’s answer. Diana’s face, slightly tinged with blue by the glass, was framed in the window of the coach.
“Gjorg,” the stranger replied in a rather unsteady, cracked voice, like someone who had not spoken for a very long time.
Bessian slipped down into the seat beside his wife.
“He killed a man a few days ago, and now he’s coming back from Orosh.”
“I heard,” she said quietly, still looking out of the window.
From where he stood as if rooted to the ground, the mountaineer stared feverishly at the young woman.
“How pale he is.”
“His name is Gjorg,” said Bessian, settling into his seat. Diana’s head was still quite close to the window. Outside, the innkeeper was lavishing advice on the coachman.
“Do you know the way? Be careful at the Graves of the Krushks. People always go wrong there. Instead of taking the right fork they take the left.”
The carriage began to move. The stranger’s eyes, that seemed very dark, perhaps because of the paleness of his face, followed the square of window where Diana’s face appeared. She too, even though she knew that she should not be looking at him still, did not have the strength to turn her eyes from the wayfarer who had loomed up suddenly at the side of the road. As the coach drew away, several times she wiped away the mist that her breath left upon the glass, but it condensed again at once as if anxious to draw a curtain between them.
When the carriage had rolled a good distance, and not a soul could be seen outside, she said, leaning back wearily in her seat, “You were right.”
Bessian studied his wife for a moment with a certain surprise. He was about to ask her what he had been right about, but something stopped him. To tell the truth, all during the long morning’s trip he had had the feeling that on some matters she did not agree with him. And now that she was adopting his views of her own accord, it seemed superfluous, not to say imprudent, to ask her to explain herself. The main thing was that she had not found the journey a disappointment. And she had just reassured him on that point. Bessian felt enlivened. It seemed to him that he was beginning, if only vaguely, to understand more or less what it was that he had been right about.
“Did you notice how pale that mountaineer was, the one who killed a man a few days ago?” asked Bessian, staring God knows why at the ring on one of her fingers.
“Yes, he was dreadfully pale,” Diana said.
“Who can tell what doubts, what hesitations he had to overcome before setting out to commit that crime. What are Hamlet’s doubts, compared with this Hamlet of our mountains?”
The look she gave her husband was one of gratitude.
“You feel it’s a bit much for me to call up the Danish prince in connection with a mountaineer of the High Plateau.”
“Not at all,” Diana said. “You put things so well, and you know how much I value that gift of yours.”
The suspicion crossed his mind that it was perhaps that very gift that had won Diana for him.
“Hamlet was spurred to vengeance by his father’s ghost,” Bessian went on excitedly. “But can you imagine what dreadful ghost rises up before a mountaineer to spur him on to vengeance?”
Diana’s eyes, grown enormously wide, looked at him fixedly.
“In houses that have a death to avenge, they hang up the victim’s bloodstained shirt at a corner of the tower, and they do not take it down until the blood has been redeemed. Can you imagine how terrible that must be? Hamlet saw his father’s ghost two or three times, at midnight, and for only a few moments, while the shirt that calls for vengeance in our kullas stays there day and night, for whole months and seasons; the bloodstains become yellow and people say, ‘Look, the dead man is impatient for revenge.’ ”
“Perhaps that’s why he was so pale.”
“Who?”
“The mountaineer we saw just now.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
For a moment Bessian thought that Diana had uttered the word “pale” as if she had said “beautiful,” but he dismissed the idea at once.
“And what will he do now?”
“Who?”
“Well, that mountaineer.”
“Ah, what will he do?” Bessian shrugged his shoulders. “If he killed his man four or five days ago, as the innkeeper said, and if he has been granted the long bessa, that is to say thirty days, then he still has twenty-five days of normal life before him.” Bessian smiled sourly, but his face was still expressionless. “It’s like a last authorization to go on leave in this world. The well-known saying that the living are only the dead on leave has a very real significance in our mountain country.”
“Yes,” she said, “he looked just like a man on leave from the other world, with the insignia of death on his sleeve.” Diana gave a deep sigh. “You told me so — just like Hamlet.”
Bessian looked through the window with a fixed smile; only the upper part of his face smiled.
“And it has to be said, too, that once Hamlet was sure of what it was he had to do, he carried out his murder in hot blood. As for him—” Bessian waved his hand at the stretch of road they were leaving behind them—“he is moved by a machine that is foreign to him, and occasionally even to the times he lives in.”
Diana listened to him attentively, even though some of the import of his meaning escaped her.