Broken April by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online

that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed. Now at last he had fathomed its meaning. Honor had its seat in the middle of your forehead because that was the place where the bullet must strike your man. “Good shot,” the old men said when someone faced his man squarely and hit him right in the forehead. Or “Bad shot” when the bullet pierced the stomach or struck a limb, not to mention the back.
    Whenever Gjorg climbed to the upper storey to look at Mehill’s shirt, he felt his forehead burning. The bloodstains on the cloth faded more and more. If warm weather came, they would turn yellow. Then people would begin to hand his coffee cup to him and to his kin under the leg. In the eyes of the
Kanun
, he would be a dead man.
    There was no way out. Bearing the punishments, or anyother sacrifice, would not save him. Coffee below the knee—that frightened him more than anything else—was waiting for him somewhere along the way. Every door was closed to him, except one. “The offense can be atoned for only through the Code,” the Code itself said. Only the murder of a member of the Kryeqyqe clan could open a door to him. And so, one day last spring, he decided to lie in ambush for his man.
    From that moment the whole house sprang to life. The silence that had stifled it was suddenly filled with music. And its grim walls seemed to soften.
    He would already have done his duty, and he would be at peace, now, shut up in the tower of refuge, or still more at peace under the earth, had not something happened. From a far-off Banner, an aunt of theirs who had married there came unexpectedly. Anxious, distraught, she had crossed seven or eight mountain ranges and as many valleys to stop the bloodshed. Gjorg was the last man in the family after his father, she said. “Look, they’ll kill Gjorg, and then they’ll kill one of the Kryeqyqe, then it will be the turn of Gjorg’s father, and the Berisha family will be extinct. Don’t do it. Don’t let the oak tree wither. Ask for the right to pay the blood-money instead.”
    At first nobody would even listen, then they fell silent, they let her speak, and at last there was a lull in which they neither agreed nor disagreed with what she proposed. They were tired, but Gjorg’s aunt gave no sign of tiring. Keeping up the struggle day and night, sleeping now in this house and now in that, sometimes with her cousins and sometimes with her immediate family, she finally gained her point: after seventy years of death and mourning, the Berishas decided to seek blood settlement with the Kryeqyqes.
    The request for blood settlement—so rare in the mountains—caused a sensation in the village and throughout the Banner. Everything was done to ensure that the prescriptions of the Code were scrupulously observed. The arbiters, together with friends and kinsmen of the Berisha, who were called the “masters of the blood,” went to the home of the murderer, that is, to the Kryeqyqe, to eat the blood-compensation meal. So they ate the noon meal with the murderer in keeping with the custom, and settled the blood price that the Kryeqyqes would have to pay. After this it only remained for Gjorg’s father, the master of the blood, to carve a cross with hammer and chisel on the murderer’s door and for them to exchange a drop of blood with each other, at which point the reconciliation would be regarded as having been established forever. But that money never came, for an aged uncle kept the business from being settled in that way. After the meal, while the men, according to custom, were going through every room in the house, stamping their feet, a rite signifying that the last shadow of the feud must be driven out of every corner of the house, suddenly Gjorg’s old uncle shouted, “No!” He was a quiet old man who had never called attention to himself in the clan, and certainly the last person among those