Mark Ukacierra sighed. Staring at the horizon, he tried to imagine the endless spaces of the Rrafsh. The High Plateau had an abundance of streams, of deep gullies, snow, prairies, villages, churches, but none of that was of interest to him. For Mark Ukacierra, all of the great plateau was divided in two parts only — the part that engendered death, and the part that did not. The portion that bore death, with its fields, its objects, and its people, passed slowly before him in his mind, as it had often done There were tens of thousands of irrigation canals, large and small, running from west to east, or from south to north, and on their banks there had sprung up countless quarrels that gave rise to feuds; hundreds of mill-races, thousands of landmarks, and these gave birth easily to disputes, and then blood-vengeance; tens of thousands of marriages, some of which were dissolved for one reason or another, but which brought one thing only — mourning; the men of the High Plateau themselves, formidable, hot-tempered, who played with death as if they were playing a game on Sunday; and so on. As for the sterile portion of the region, it was equally vast, with its cemeteries that, satiated with death, seemed to refuse any more corpses, since murder, brawling, or mere argument were prohibited within their confines. There were the gjakhups, those persons that because of the way in which they had been killed or because of the circumstances of their death, the Kanun decreed unworthy of being avenged; the priests, who did not fall within the scope of the rules of blood vengeance; and all the women of the High Plateau, who did not fall within their scope either.
At times, Mark had thought of mad things that he dared not confess to anyone. Oh, if only the women as well as the men were subject to the rules of blood-letting. Then he was ashamed, even terrified — but that seldom happened, only sometimes at the end of the month or the quarter, when he felt despondent because of the figures in the ledger. Weary as he was, he would try to put those ideas from him, but his mind could find no respite and he went back to them. But this time, in going back to them, it was not to blaspheme the Kanun but simply to give vent to his astonishment. He thought it very strange that weddings, which were usually occasions for joy, often brought about quarrels that led to feuding, while funerals, which were necessarily sad, never led to anything of the kind. That led him to compare the ancient blood-feuds with those of recent times. On both sides of the comparison, there was both good and bad. The old feuds, just like fields that had been tilled for a long time, were dependable, but rather cold and slow to bear. Contrarily, the new feuds were violent, and sometimes they brought about as many deaths in a single year as the old ones in two decades. But since they were not deep-rooted, they might easily be brought to a stop by a reconciliation, while those of olden times were very hard to bring to a settlement. Successive generations had been accustomed to the feuds from their cradles, and so, not being able to conceive of life without them, it never entered their minds to try to free themselves from their destined end. It was not for nothing that people said, “Blood-letting that lasts twelve years is like the oak, hard to uproot.” In any case, Mark Ukacierra had come to the conclusion that the two kinds of feud, the ancient one rooted in history, and the new one with its vitality, had somehow joined together, and the exhaustion of the one sort had affected the other. That was why for some time now, for example, it was hard to understand which of the two had begun to weaken first. O Lord, he said aloud, if things go on like this it will be my undoing.
The first stroke of the clock startled him. He counted…. six, seven, eight. Behind doors, in the hallways, only the light rustling of brooms could be heard. The guests were still asleep.
The daylight, even though it was brighter now, still looked cold and hostile as the far spaces from which it came. Lord, he sighed, this time so deeply that he felt as if his ribs were creaking like the timbers of a hut that someone was trying to tear down. His eyes were fixed on the gray sky that spread, lonely, above the mountains; it was hard to tell whether he was making them turn dark or if the darkness within him came from them.
His expression was at once questioning, threatening, and prayerful. What’s wrong with you, he seemed to be saying to the scene before his eyes, why have you changed so.
He had always thought that he knew his Rrafsh, of which it was said that it was one of the largest and most sombre of the high plateaus of Europe, and that besides spreading over thousands of square miles in Albania it went beyond her frontiers, through the Albanian districts of Kosovo, those that the Slavs called “Old Serbia,” but were really part of the High Plateau. That is what he used to think, but lately he found more and more that there was something about it that estranged him from it. His mind wandered painfully towards its slopes, skirted its chasms, as if he wanted to discover from whence came that incomprehensible something — worse than incomprehensible, ironic, in broad daylight. Especially when the wind began to howl and those mountains huddled together, he found them completely foreign.
He knew that the machinery of death was there, set up from time immemorial, an ancient mill that worked day and night, and whose secrets he, the steward of the blood, knew better than anyone. And yet, that did not help him drive away that feeling of estrangement. Then, as if to convince himself that it was not so, feverishly he traversed in his imagination that cold expanse unfolding in his head in a peculiar form, something between a topographical map and a cloth spread for the funeral feast.
Right now he was calling up that dismal map, looking through the library windows. In strict order, his mind arrayed all of the fertile fields of the High Plateau. They were divided into two large groups: cultivated fields, and fields lying fallow because of the blood feud. That disposition of things corresponded to a simple rule: The people who had blood to redeem tilled their fields because it was their turn to kill, and accordingly, no one threatened them, they could go out to their fields when they pleased. On the other hand, those who owed blood left the fields untilled, and immured themselves in the tower of refuge for protection. But that situation changed abruptly as soon as those who had blood to redeem had committed their murder. Then, from a family with blood to redeem, they changed into a family that owed blood, and therefore, they became gjaks and betook themselves to the towers of refuge, letting their fields lie fallow. Conversely, of course, their enemies ceased to be gjaks, they left the towers in which they had been cloistered, and since it was now their turn to kill, they were not afraid and they set about cultivating their fields just as they chose. And that state of affairs lasted until the next murder was done. Then everything was reversed again.
Whenever he travelled in the mountains on business concerning the Kulla, Mark Ukacierra was always attentive to the connection between the cultivated fields and the fields that lay fallow. The former were generally more extensive. They made up nearly three-quarters of all the grain fields. In some years, however, the ratio changed and was more favorable to the fields lying fallow. Those fields reached a third or two-fifths of the total number, even rising on occasion so as to equal the area of the cultivated fields. People remembered two years in which the area of the fallow fields was greater than that of the cultivated fields. Yes, but that was a long time ago. Little by little, with the decline of the blood feud, the fallow fields shrank in number. Those fields were the special joy of Mark Ukacierra. They bore witness to the power of the Kanun. Whole clans allowed their fields to go uncultivated and themselves to suffer hunger so that the blood might be redeemed, and contrarily there were families who did just the opposite, putting off the redemption of blood from season to season and from year to year, to gather enough corn so as to be able to cloister themselves for a long time. You are free to choose between keeping your dignity as a man and losing it, the Kanun said. Each man chose between corn and vengeance. Some, to their shame, chose corn, others, on the contrary, vengeance.