He stared at the cairn. Here’s what’s left of… of… (he meant to say, the other man’s life), but within him he thought, here’s what will be left of my own life.
All that torment, sleepless nights, the silent struggle with his father, his own hesitations, his brooding, his suffering, had brought about nothing more than these meaningless bare stones. He tried to leave them behind him, but he could not stir. The world about him began to dissolve swiftly, everything disappeared; he, Gjorg, and the cairn, were the only things left on the surface of the earth. Why? What had it all amounted to? The question was bare as the stones. It hurt him everywhere. Lord, how it hurt! At last he found the strength to move, to tear himself away, to flee as far as possible, even if the farthest place was hell, anywhere, rather than stay where he was.
Gjorg’s people greeted him with quiet warmth. His father asked him briefly about his journey, his mother watched him furtively with her eyes turned aside. He said that he was very tired after the long walk and his long sleeplessness, and he went to bed. For a long moment, the steps and the whispering in the kulla clawed at his sleep, and then he went under. The next morning, he woke late. Where am I? he asked two or three times, and he fell asleep again. When at last he got up, his head was heavy and felt as if it were stuffed with sponge. He was not up to doing anything. Not even thinking.
The day passed, and the next day and the next. He went through the house several times, noticing listlessly a section of the wall that had been in need of repair for a long time, or a corner of the roof that had fallen in during the winter. He had no heart for work. The worst of it was that any repair seemed useless to him.
It was during the last days of March. April would soon be coming in. With the first half white and the other half black. Aprildeath. If he did not die, he would be languishing in the tower of refuge. His eyes would weaken in the darkness, so that one way or the other, even if he was still alive, he would never see the world again.
After those somnolent days, his thoughts began to stir. And the first thing that his mind began to seek was a way of keeping himself from death and blindness. There was only one way, and he thought about it at great length: to be an itinerant woodcutter. That was the customary trade for mountaineers who left the High Plateau. With an axe on their shoulder (they slipped the handle under their tunic, while the axe-head, with its sharp edge shiny black, appearing behind their neck, looked like a fish’s fin), they went from town to town giving an air of purpose to their wandering with the long-drawn mournful cry, “Any wood to cut?” No, it would be better to stay in the realm of Aprildeath (now he was sure that the word, which was in his mind only, was understood, and of course used, by everyone), than to go down there, in the rain-soaked cities, a hapless woodcutter run aground on barred air-holes always covered with a kind of black dust (once in the city of Shkoder he had seen a mountaineer splitting firewood by a barred ventilator of that sort). No, never — better Aprildeath.
One morning, on the next-to-the-last day of March, as he went down the stone stairway of the Kulla, he found himself face to face with his father. He wanted to avoid having a silence settle upon them, but it did. And from behind that silence, as if from behind a wall, these words came:
“Well, Gjorg, what did you want to tell me?”
He answered, “Father, I’d like to go and wander around during the days I have left.”
His father looked into his eyes for a long moment, saying nothing. Really, Gjorg thought sleepily, it’s not important. At bottom, it wasn’t worth wrangling again with his father over that. They had argued enough, without speaking, up to this very day. Two weeks earlier, two weeks later, that made no real difference. He could do without seeing the mountains. To tell the truth, the preference that he had expressed was foolish. He started to say, no, it’s useless, father, but his father had already gone upstairs.
He came down again in a few moments, a purse in his hand. Compared to the purse that had held the money for the blood-tax, it was quite small. His father handed it to him.
“Go on, Gjorg. And have a good trip.”
Gjorg took the purse.
“Thanks, father.”
His father did not shift his eyes from him. “But don’t forget,” he said in a low voice, “your truce is over on the seventeenth of April.” And he said again, “Don’t forget, my son.”
Gjorg wandered for several days in the district. All sorts of roads. Inns strung along the highways. The faces of strangers. Although he had been shut up for so long in his village, he had always thought of the rest of the Rrafsh as being somehow frozen, especially in winter, but it was not like that at all. The High Plateau was a busy place. A continual stream of people flowed from its extremities to its center or the other way round. Some traveled in one direction, others in the opposite direction; some went uphill, some came down; and most went uphill and came downhill in the course of the same trip, and they did it so many times that at the end of their road they could not tell whether they were higher or lower than the place from which they had come.
Sometimes Gjorg thought of how the days were going by. The movement of time seemed very strange to him. Up to a certain hour, the day seemed endless to him, then, suddenly, like a drop of water that after having trembled a moment on the flower of a peach tree, falls suddenly, the day would shatter and die. April had come in, but spring was hardly in possession of things. At times, the sight of a bluish band stretching above the Alps depressed him unbearably. Well, here’s April, the travellers striking up acquaintance in the inns said everywhere. It’s time the spring was here. In fact, it’s very late this year. Then he thought of his father’s warning about the end of the truce, or rather, not all of his warning, nor even a part of it, but just the words, “my son” at the end, and at the same time, the part of the month from the first to the seventeenth of April, and the idea that everyone had a whole April, while his was amputated, chopped off. Then he tried not to think of that, and he listened to the stories of the travellers, who, to his surprise, even if they had no bread or salt in their wallets, were never short of stories.
In the inns you heard a swarm of facts and anecdotes about all sorts of people and times. He always stayed somewhat in the background and, pleased not to be disturbed by anyone, just lent an ear to what was being said. Sometimes his mind wandered, tried to seize bits of stories so as to fit them to his own life, or on the contrary, to join bits of his own life to the stories of other people, but that piecing together was not always easy to bring about.
And things might have gone on in this way to the end of his journey, if not for chance. One day, at an inn called The New Inn (most of the inns were named either The Old Inn or The New Inn), he heard mention of a carriage. A carriage that was lined inside with black velvet. A carriage from the city with very ornate decorations. Could it be she, he wondered, and he strained to hear. Yes, it was certainly she. Now they were talking about a beautiful woman from the city with fine eyes and auburn hair.