Planning that trip, without any special enthusiasm, began, little by little, stubbornly, to absorb him. And again, just as it had been a little while back, his thoughts began to untangle the roads that he would perhaps be taking, except that this time, connecting them in his mind with his boots or his horse’s shoes, he thought of them in a different way; he imagined in another fashion the inns and the houses where he might sleep, the horses whinnying at night, the bedbug bites.
It would be a working trip, in the course of which he would perhaps have to review everything that was connected, in his mind, with a rough sketch of a death-mill, with its millstones, its special tools, its countless wheels and gears. He would have to examine the entire mechanism minutely in order to find what it was that was blocking its action, what was rusted and what was broken.
Oh! he exclaimed, at the sudden pain of a stomach cramp, and he was tempted to say, you would do better to look at what is broken inside you, but he did not follow his thought to the end. Perhaps a change of air would rid him as well of the nauseous hollow in his stomach that was plaguing him. Yes, he ought to set out at once, leave this place, observe everything closely, discuss things at length — especially with the interpreters of the Kanun, ask their opinion — visit the towers of refuge, meet with the priests, ask them if there were any persons who grumbled about the Code and if so take down their names in order to ask the prince to expel them, etc. Mark Ukacierra’s spirits rose. Yes, certainly, he could draw up a detailed report on all those matters. Mark began to walk to and fro in the library. Sometimes he stopped before one of the windows; then, as a new idea occurred to him, he took up his pacing again. Already he could see the interpreters of the Code, by whose opinions the prince always set great store. There were some two hundred of them throughout the High Plateau, but only a dozen were famous. He must meet with at least half of those whose reputations were preeminent. They were the pillars of the Kanun, the intelligence of the High Plateau; they would certainly give their opinion of the state of affairs, and perhaps some advice about the means of improving it. But he must not rest content with that alone. His instinct told him that it would be useful to descend to the terrain that was the foundation of death, the murderer himself. He must enter the towers of refuge, speak one by one with each of the cloistered men, those who were the bread and salt of the Kanun. That last idea gave him special pleasure. Whatever words of wisdom might be uttered by the famous interpreters, the last word concerning death — so says the Kanun—belongs to the avengers of blood.
He rubbed his forehead, trying to recall the findings he had accurately reported four years ago. There were seventy-four towers of refuge in all the High Plateau, and about a thousand men cloistered in them. He tried to call up those towers in imagination, scattered, dark, forbidding, with their black loopholes and their heavy doors. Their image was bound up with that of the irrigation ditches, because of which some of those men were immured in the towers, and that was true also of those roads and inns protected by the bessa, and the interpreters of the Kanun, the story-tellers and the bards. Those were the screw mechanisms, the transmission belts, the gearwheels of the ancient machine that had worked without a stop for hundreds of years. For hundreds of years, he said again. Every day, every night. Without ever stopping. Summer and winter. But then came that day, the seventeenth of March, to disturb the order of things. Thinking of that day, Mark Ukacierra sighed once more. He felt that if that day had really passed as it very nearly had, all of that mill of death, its wheels, its heavy millstones, its many springs and gears, would make an ominous grating sound, would shake from top to bottom, and break and smash into a thousand pieces.
O Lord, may that day never come, he said, and again he felt that sensation in the hollow of his stomach. Then, mixed with the nausea, there came to mind once more some few passages of last night’s dinner, the prince’s discontent. And the animation he had felt for a few moments fell away completely, giving way to a strange anguish of mind. Let everything go to hell, he said. His uneasiness was of a very special kind, like a damp, gray mass that invaded him everywhere, softly, without any sharp edges nor painful pinchings. Oh, he would infinitely prefer an obvious pain, but what could he do against that pulp that he could not get rid of? People went on crushing him as if his own distress, which he never mentioned to a soul, were not enough. For three weeks now, he had been feeling it more and more frequently. All at once he asked himself the question that he had been putting off from day to day, night after night: Could he have been stricken with blood-sickness?
It had happened to him seven years ago. He had consulted doctors and taken all sorts of medication, but nothing helped, until the day when an old man from Gjakova said to him, “It’s useless, my son, to take medicines and to consult doctors. Neither the doctors nor the medicines can do anything about your sickness. You are blood-sick.” Mark was astonished. “Blood? I haven’t killed anyone, father.” And the old man answered, “It doesn’t matter that you haven’t killed anyone. Your work is of such a nature that you have been stricken with blood-sickness.” And he spoke to him about other stewards of the blood who had been stricken with that sickness, and what was worse, never recovered from it. Well, Mark had managed to cure himself in the mountains that rise beyond Orosh. The air, in those heights, was good for that kind of sickness.
For seven years, Mark had been untroubled by it, and it was only recently that his illness had come back. What was I thinking of when I took up this kind of work? The blood of one man, when it took you, was hard to overcome, but what could you do about blood that comes from who knows where, and stops flowing who knows where? It was not the blood of a single man, but torrents of the blood of generations of human beings that streamed all over the High Plateau, the blood of young men and old men, for years and for centuries.
But perhaps it isn’t that sickness that I have, he sighed from deep within him in a last glimmer of hope. Maybe it’s just a passing thing — if not, I’ll go crazy. He listened, because he thought he heard steps beyond the door. In fact, the squeaking of a door reached him from the hallway, and then the sound of footsteps and of voices.
The guests must be awake now, he thought.
* From the Albanian gjak: blood, and hup: to lose; that is, when the blood was lost, when one was not obliged to engage in the blood feud.
* A musical instrument having a long neck and a single string.
CHAPTER V
Gjorg was back in Brezftoht on the twenty-fifth of March. He had walked all day without stopping. In contrast to his journey to Orosh, he did the return trip in a semi-somnolent state, so that the road seemed shorter. He was surprised to see the outskirts of his village so soon. Without knowing why, he slowed his pace. His heart beat more slowly too, and his eyes seemed to study the surrounding hills. The snow has melted, he thought. But the wild pomegranate shrubs were still there. Despite everything, he breathed as if he felt relieved. For whatever reason, he had thought the patches of snow would be pitiless to him.
And there was the place. A small mouranë had been heaped up during his absence. Gjorg stopped in front of it. For an instant he felt that he was about to leap towards it, pull away the stones, and spread them about on every side so as to leave no trace of it. At the same time that his brain was imagining that act, his hand was groping feverishly for a pebble on the roadway. At last he found one, and his hand, moving awkwardly as if it were dislocated, tossed the pebble onto the cairn. The stone struck it with a dull sound, rolled over two or three times on its axis and settled among the others. Gjorg kept eyeing it as if he were afraid that it would shift again, but now it seemed that it was in its natural place, as if it had been thrown there long ago. And still, Gjorg did not stir.