Broken April by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online Page B

paid for the wound was still going on, Gjorg saw that his father’s eyes were darkened by a veil of scorn and bitterness. They seemed to say, not only did you draw out the business oftaking revenge for so long, but now you’re driving us to rack and ruin.
    Gjorg himself felt that all this had been brought about by his hesitation, which had made his hand tremble at the last moment. To tell the truth, he could not tell if his hand had really trembled when he took aim, or if he had purposely dropped the front sight of his weapon from the man’s forehead to the lower portion of his face.
    All this was followed by apathy. Life seemed to mark time. The wounded man suffered at home for a long while. The bullet had broken his jawbone, they said, and infection had set in. The winter was long and more dismal than ever before. Over the placid snow (the old men said that no one could remember the snow being so quiet—not one avalanche), the wind made a slight whistling sound as unchanging as the snow. Zef of the Kryeqyqe, the sole object of Gjorg’s life, went on languishing in bed, and Gjorg felt like a man out of work, wandering about uselessly.
    It really felt as if that winter would never end. And the very moment when they learned that the wounded man was getting better, Gjorg fell ill. Sick at heart, he would have borne martyrdom so as not to have to take to his bed before he had carried out his mission, but it was quite impossible. He turned pale as wax, kept on his feet as long as he could, then collapsed. He was bedridden for two months while Zef Kryeqyqe, taking advantage of Gjorg’s illness, began to walk about the village free as air. From the corner of the second storey of the
kulla
where he lay, Gjorg looked out, scarcely thinking at all, at the patch of landscape framed by the window. Beyond that stretched the world whitened by the snow, a world to which nothing bound him anymore. For a long time he had felthimself a stranger in that world, absolutely superfluous, and if outside his window people sill expected anything of him, it was only in terms of the murder he was to do.
    For hours on end he looked scornfully at the snow-covered ground, as if to say, yes, I’ll go out there, I’ll go out quickly to spill that bit of blood. The thought haunted him so much that sometimes he thought he really saw a small red stain take shape in the heart of that endless white.
    In the first days of March he felt a little better, and in the second week of the month he left his bed. When he stepped outside his legs were shaky. Nobody imagined that in his condition, still dizzy from his illness, his face white as a sheet, he would go out to lie in ambush for his man. Perhaps that was why Zef of the Kryeqyqe, knowing that his enemy was still ill, had been taken unawares.
    At moments the rain fell so sparsely that one would imagine it must stop, but suddenly it started up again better than ever. By that time it was afternoon and Gjorg felt his legs getting numb. The gray day was the same; only the district was different. Gjorg could tell because the mountaineers he met wore different clothing. The small villages were farther and farther from the highroad. In places the bronze of a church bell glinted weakly in the distance. Then for miles the landscape was empty.
    He met fewer and fewer travelers. Gjorg asked again about the
Kulla
of Orosh. First, people told him it was quite close by, then, further on, when he thought he must really be drawing near, they told him it was still a long way. And each time the passers-by pointed in the same direction, in the distance where sight was lost in the mist.
    Two or three times Gjorg imagined that night was falling, but it turned out that he was mistaken. It was stillthat endless afternoon in which the villages drew further away from the highway as if they meant to hide from the road and from the world. Once more he asked if the castle was still far off, and he was told that