Read Online Broken April by Ismaíl Kadaré - Free Book Online Page B

light chestnut hair moving upon his shoulder with the motion of the carriage.
    She was nearly asleep when she felt his shoulder move.
    â€œDiana, look,” he said softly, taking her hand.
    In the distance, beside the road, there were some black figures.
    â€œMountain people?” she asked.
    â€œYes.”
    As their carriage drew nearer, the dark figures seemed to grow taller. Both the passengers’ faces were glued to the window, and Diana several times wiped from the glass the mist made by their breath.
    â€œWhat are they holding in their hands, umbrellas?” she asked, but very softly, when the carriage was no more than fifty paces from the mountaineers.
    â€œYes, that’s what it looks like,” he muttered. “Where did they get those umbrellas?”
    At last the carriage passed the mountaineers, who stared after it. Bessian turned his head, as if to make sure that the things they had in their hands really were old umbrellas with broken struts and ragged cloth.
    â€œI’ve never seen mountaineers carrying brollies,” he murmured. Diana was surprised too, but she took care not to mention it, so as not to make him angry.
    When further on they saw another group of mountaineers, two of whom were laden with sacks, Diana pretended not to see them. Bessian looked at them for a while.
    â€œCorn,” he said at last, but Diana did not answer. Againshe leaned her head upon his shoulder, and again her hair began to slide gently to and fro with the movement of the carriage.
    Now it was he who watched the road attentively. As for her, she tried to turn her thoughts to more pleasant things. After all, it was no great misfortune if a legendary mountaineer heaved a sack of corn onto his back, or carried a dilapidated umbrella against the rain. Had she not seen more than one man from the mountains, in the city streets at the end of autumn, with an axe over his shoulder, and crying out plaintively, “Any wood to cut?”, a cry that was more like the cry of a night bird. But Bessian had told her that those people were not representative of the mountain country. Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue. The real mountaineers are up there, on the
Rrafsh
, he had said to her one night, lifting his arms towards the celestial heights beyond the horizon, as if the
Rrafsh
were somewhere in the sky rather than on earth.
    Now, pressed against the window, he never turned his eyes from the desolate landscape, for fear that his wife might ask: these poor wayfarers, with their skeletal umbrellas in hand, or their backs bent under a sack of corn, are these the legendary mountain stalwarts of whom you have told me so much? But Diana, even if she were to lose all her illusions, would never ask him that question.
    Leaning against him, her eyes closing now and then with the jolting of the carriage, as if to ward off the sadness that the barren scene aroused in her, she thought in a fragmentary way about the days when they were first acquainted and the early weeks of their engagement. The chestnut trees lining the boulevard, café doors, the glitterof rings as they embraced, park benches strewn with autumn leaves, and dozens of other such memories—all those things she poured out upon the endless waste, in the hope that those images might in some sort people the void. But the wasteland did not change. Its wet nakedness was ready to engulf in a moment not just her own store of happiness but perhaps the heaped-up joy of whole generations. She herself had never seen such a country. The mountains that loomed above her were well named “the Accursed Mountains.”
    She was pulled out of her dozing state by a movement of his shoulder, and then by his voice, which had a tender note.
    â€œDiana, look. A church.”
    She drew near the glass pane and caught sight of the cross that