“A little.”
“We should be there in an hour, or an hour and a quarter at most.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently to him. She let him do that, not resisting, but she did not make herself lighter so as to let him pull her closer. He noticed, but stirred by the odor of her neck, he leaned his head towards her ear and whispered, “How are we going to sleep tonight?”
She shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “How would I know?”
“At least the tower of Orosh is the kulla of a prince, and I think they will put us in the same room,” he went on softly, almost conspiratorially
He looked sidelong at her face, and his expression was like the insinuating caress of his voice. But she kept her eyes before her and did not answer. Unsure whether to be offended or not, he relaxed his arm somewhat, and he would surely have taken it away completely if at the last moment, perhaps because she had guessed his intention or perhaps by accident, she had not asked him a question.
“What?”
“I asked you if the prince of Orosh is a blood relation of the royal family.”
“No, not at all,” he replied.
“Then how is it that he is called a prince?”
Bessian frowned a little.
“It’s rather complicated,” he said. “To tell the truth, he’s not a prince, despite the fact that they call him one in certain circles and the people of the High Plateau call him “Prenk,” which means prince exactly. But mostly they call him Kapidan, even though….”
Bessian remembered he had not smoked a cigarette for quite a while. Like all those who smoke only now and then, it took some time for him to take the cigarette from the pack and the match from the little box. Diana felt that he did this whenever he wanted to put off a difficult explanation. And indeed the explanation he began to give her about the Kulla of Orosh (an explanation that he had left unfinished in Tirana, when from the prince’s chancellory, in stilted language — really rather strange — an invitation to the Kulla of Orosh had reached him, saying that he would be welcome at any season of the year and at any hour of the day or the night) was no clearer than the one he had cut off then in Tirana, drinking a cup of tea, seated on the sofa in his studio. But perhaps that came from the fact that there was something unclear in everything that had to do with the kulla where they would soon be guests.
“He’s not exactly a prince,” Bessian said, “and yet, in a way, he’s more than a prince, not only because of his lineage, much older than that of the royal family, but chiefly because of the way he rules over all the High Plateau.”
He went on explaining that the prince’s power was of a very special kind, founded on the Kanun and unlike any other regime in the world. Time out of mind, neither police nor government had had any authority over the High Plateau. The castle itself had neither a police force nor governmental powers, but the High Plateau was nonetheless wholly under its control. That had been true in the time of the Turks, and even earlier, and that state of affairs had gone on under the Serbian occupation and the Austrian occupation, and then under the first republic, and the second, and now under the monarchy. Some years ago a group of deputies tried to put the High Plateau under the authority of the national government, but the attempt failed. The partisans of Orosh had said that we should act so that the Kanun would extend its sway over the entire country instead of trying to uproot it in the mountains, though of course no power in the world could achieve that.
Diana asked Bessian a question about the princely origins of the master of the Kulla, and he had the feeling that she did that in the naive way that a woman tries to find out if the jewelry someone is about to give her is really gold.
He told her that he did not believe in the princely origins of the lords of Orosh. At the very least, that matter had not been established. Their origins were lost in the mists of time. According to Bessian, there were two possibilities: either they were descendants of a very old but not very distinguished feudal family, or else they were a family that, generation after generation, had dealt in interpreting the Kanun. It was well known that a dynasty of that kind, which was rather like a temple of the law, an institution halfway between oracles and repositories of legal tradition, could in time amass great power, until their origins were quite forgotten and they exercised absolute dominion.
“I said that the family interpreted the Kanun,” Bessian went on, “because to this day, the Kulla of Orosh is recognized as the guardian of that very Kanun.”
“But isn’t the family itself outside the Code?” Diana asked. “I think you told me that once.”
“Yes, that is the case. It is the only family that is not under the jurisdiction of the Kanun.”
“And there are all sorts of grim legends about it, aren’t there?”
“Yes, of course. Naturally, a castle as old as this is bound to have an atmosphere of mystery.”
“How interesting,” Diana said, gaily this time, cuddling up to him as before. “It’s so exciting to be visiting there, isn’t it?”
He took a deep breath, as if after some great exertion. He pulled her close again, and he looked at her with a mixture of tenderness and reproof, as if he were telling her, why do you torment me by removing yourself so suddenly and so far, when you are so close to me?
Her face was lit once again by that smile that he could see only from the side, and that was almost entirely directed straight before her, into the distance.
He put his head to the window.
“It will be night soon.”
“The tower must not be far now,” Diana said.
Both were trying to find it, each looking out through the window nearest them. The late-afternoon sky was set in a heavy immobility. The clouds seemed to have frozen forever, and if some sense of motion still persisted around them, its locus was not the sky but the earth. The mountains filed by slowly before their eyes, at the same speed as their rolling carriage.
Holding hands, they searched the horizon to find the tower. The mystery of it brought them closer still. Several times they cried out almost simultaneously, “There it is! There it is!” But they knew at once that they were mistaken. It was only the mountain peaks with shreds of cloud clinging to them.
All around them was empty space. One would have thought that other buildings and life itself had withdrawn so as not to disturb the solitude of the Kulla of Orosh.
“But where is it?” Diana said plaintively.
Their eyes sought the tower at every point on the horizon, and it would have seemed just as natural to see it appear high in the sky, among the tattered clouds, as somewhere on the earth, among the rocky peaks.
The light of the copper lamp carried by the man who was leading them up to the third storey of the kulla wavered mournfully on the walls.
“This way, sir,” he said for the third time, holding the lamp away from him the better to light their way. The floor was made of wooden boards that seemed to creak louder at that hour of the night. “This way, sir.”
In the room, another lamp, also of copper, its wick scarcely turned up, shed a feeble light on the walls and on the pattern of the carpet on a deep red ground. Against her will, Diana sighed.
“I’ll bring your suitcases at once,” said the man, and he went away quietly.
They stood there for a moment, looking at each other, and then they looked around the room.
“What did you think of the prince?” Bessian asked in a low voice.