Black Spring Read online

  That year the autumn was long and warm. On a clear, moonless evening when the stars were so bright they threw shadows, a man known only as Surinam came to Elbasa, seeking work. He was a stranger to us: many itinerants like Surinam arrived through the harvest season, staying for a night or a week or a month before moving on elsewhere, but he wasn’t one of our regulars. We already had our full complement of workers and he was directed to my uncle’s house, where he was given a meal and the hayloft for the night. He left early the next day, as dawn was lightening the Plateau. Later that morning his body was found slumped on the road by a shepherd boy. He had been shot twice, first in the stomach and then through his right eye.

  He was lying next to the border stone of the village, but we children, alerted before anyone else, didn’t think about what that meant. Most of us had seen corpses in our short lives, but few had seen a shot man, and this was an event. We stared with a fearful fascination at his deathly pale skin, at the dark, congealed pool of blood that seeped from beneath his body, at the pink mess that had erupted from his skull. Lina was pale with excitement: she bent down to peer at the body, her eyes bright, high spots of colour on her cheekbones, holding Damek’s hand so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  “He looks like a dead pig,” said one of the children.

  “No, he don’t,” said another scornfully. “You cut a pig’s throat. You don’t make its head explode.” He mimed the man’s brains gushing out of his skull.

  “He just looks dead,” said Damek. He alone seemed unimpressed, even disgusted. “That’s all. I don’t know why you’re all so beside yourselves. There’s nothing special about being dead. I wonder who shot him?”

  Lina glanced at Damek reproachfully, as if he were spoiling one of her games, and he glared back at her with something like contempt. Then he pulled back his hand from her grasp and stalked off by himself. Taken aback, Lina watched him leave, and turned to me and shrugged her shoulders. She picked up a stick and, despite my best attempts to stop her, poked the body, so it rolled stiffly. Its arm flopped back and we all flinched, afraid for a moment that it was still alive.

  It was probably fortunate that at this point some adults arrived, including my father, who boxed my ears and sent me home.

  XIII

  It was far from the end of it, of course. All the village children were agog: it was the most exciting thing that had happened that year, aside from Fatima’s two-headed chicken (which was later taken to be an omen of doom) and Kintur the Younger drowning when he fell off the bridge on his way home after a late drinking session. We were still considered too childish to be included in conversation; we were expected to be silent when adults spoke, and to obey their orders without question. But we knew everything the adults said to each other: children were invisible and everywhere, like mice, and we all had sharp ears. We heard the talk as we polished dishes in the kitchen or worked in the fields and orchards, and that evening as we gathered after our household tasks were finished, we told each other what we heard.

  At first it seemed to have nothing to do with us. Surinam was a stranger, after all. All that day, as the man’s body was brought to the town and washed and laid out for burial, the village hummed with disquiet. Who was Surinam? Where were his people? Was he in vendetta? Why else would anyone murder such a harmless-seeming, unimportant man? Or perhaps he was not as he seemed: some suggested he came from Skip, a nearby village towards which we harboured an ancient enmity, in which case evil goings-on were to be expected; others whispered that he was part of a gang of bandits, and that he was the victim of one of their feuds. At this, everyone checked their houses and sheds, but nothing seemed to be stolen. It was, everyone agreed, a deep mystery, and the old women declared that we would all be murdered in our beds and locked their doors.

  That evening, as the long summer twilight deepened over the plains, the Wizard Ezra was seen at the border stone, and the village’s curiosity was suddenly edged with fear. Old Yuri, who had seen him from a distance as he brought his goats in for the night, reported that the Wizard Ezra bent to the ground and sniffed the bloodstains, and then smeared a little of the blood – or was it the earth of the death-site? – on his forehead. Others saw the wizard striding through the village towards his house, where he shut himself in. When Fatima knocked on his door on some pretext, only the mute opened it, and he made clear that his master was not to be disturbed. Ezra wasn’t seen for two days, although his mute was sent out to bring him raki and food; and for those two days the villagers went silent, as if they didn’t dare even to whisper their fears in case the Devil heard them and came running.

  We discussed the murder in the schoolroom the next day. Lina had heard of the Wizard Ezra’s visit to the site of Surinam’s murder. “What’s it got to do with him?” she said scornfully. “Wizards are always poking their noses in where they’re not wanted.”

  “You shouldn’t speak about the wizards like that!” I said, scandalized and a little admiring.

  “They don’t frighten me!” said Lina. “Just because you’re a quaking goose doesn’t mean that everyone else is.”

  There was a short silence, and then Damek, who had been scowling at his book, looked up. “If it’s vendetta, it is wizard’s business,” he said.

  “Well, I still don’t see what it has to do with Wizard Ezra,” said Lina. “It’s not our vendetta. Though wouldn’t it be exciting if it was?” She looked up, her eyes sparkling. “Nothing interesting ever happens here.”

  Nobody had mentioned that possibility out loud, but I suddenly understood why I had been hushed that morning when I had asked my mother about the murder, and why people were looking sideways at each other, as if they were communicating in a secret code. Everyone was afraid that it might, after all, be our vendetta. I felt a clutch of foreboding in my middle, and for a moment almost felt as if I might be sick.

  “No, Miss Lina, a vendetta here would not be at all interesting,” said Mr Herodias, who had been listening to the conversation with his mouth drawn into a thin, disapproving line. “And I would thank you to pay some attention to the irregular verbs on the page before you, if you would be so kind.”

  After that it was all Latin and Greek, and my oppression dissolved in the steady concentration the lesson demanded. Later, when the village children gathered after dinner to play in the long evening, we chatted in a desultory fashion about the dead man, but nobody had anything new to report. After Lina declared that it would be much better if the murder was part of a bandit war than a boring old vendetta, we decided to play a game of bandits instead. We were young and heedless, after all; although events made deep impressions on our minds, they were rapidly effaced, just as finger holes in a lump of rising dough will plump out and disappear.

  The Wizard Ezra emerged from his house the following day, but such was the expression on his face that no one dared to ask him any questions. He demanded a bag of provisions from the inn, then took his staff and his mute and strode off down the road that leads towards the mountains. He wasn’t seen for two weeks, and by then the anxiety of our elders had faded into the background of our little concerns, and we had mostly forgotten about the whole affair.

  XIV

  A child’s perceptions are partial and often mistaken, and there was much that happened in the following weeks that I didn’t fully understand until later. As I told you, I was very happy that summer: my lessons were opening a new world, and I was making friends in the village and no longer missed my old home so fiercely. Damek and Lina remained close (which made a great deal of difference to the atmosphere of the household) and were the king and queen of our small domain. In the long, luminous twilights we ran free like young goats, kicking up our heels and pursuing our petty squabbles.

  As in the south, Lina was the most daring of us all. The only person who could check her impulses was Damek; if he made a rare objection to one of her suggestions, she would wrinkle her nose, but would accede. Most of our games were harmless, but sometimes we did
things that now make my hair stand on end.

  A couple of miles from the village there was an ancient tin mine, long played out, which was one of our favourite destinations, in part because we were all warned to stay away. We played games among its crumbling walls and lit fires in the stone chimney, but what fascinated us most of all was the shaft, a black square hole that plunged straight down into the earth. Once there had been a ladder, but all that remained were a few rusted iron spikes stuck into the shaft walls, with red streaks staining the rock below.

  Sometimes we all lay around its rim, trying to see how deep the hole was. The light petered out fast, leading to a bottomless blackness. It gave me a windy feeling in my tummy to look down, so I never dared to go too close to the lip, but others were braver and hung their heads over the edge, peering in.

  “If you got to the bottom,” said Damek, “you could look up and see stars in the sky, even in the daytime.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to see anything, because your head would be broken and you’d be dead,” said another boy.

  “I bet there’s bones down there,” said Lina. “Human skulls and animal bones. Or maybe it just goes on for ever, and everybody who’s fallen in is still falling.”

  That thought made me crawl back a little further.

  “I bet I could see something if I could get closer,” said Lina. “Why don’t you hold my feet, and I’ll have a proper look?”

  I shrieked with dismay, but my playmates thought this was a grand idea. Neither Lina nor Damek nor anyone else took any notice of my objections. After some discussion, it was decided that Damek should hold Lina’s ankles and lower her down into the shaft. Their only concession to safety was that someone else should hold Damek’s waist, in case he slipped.

  I stood up and watched this operation with my knuckles in my mouth, fearing at any moment there would be a dreadful accident.

  Lina’s voice floated up, echoing in the shaft. “Can’t you get me any deeper?”

  The boys shifted slightly, their feet slipping on the turf. Damek’s shoulders were straining with effort.

  “You’re very heavy,” he said, panting. “Can’t you see anything?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just the same, really, only darker and colder. I don’t think there’s any bottom at all.”

  Damek announced that if she didn’t come up now, he would drop her, and the boys pulled back, landing Lina on the edge of the mine like a big fish. It was only then that I realized I had been holding my breath the entire time.

  Lina stood up, all her clothes smeared with mud, her eyes sparkling. “That was fun!” she said. “Imagine if you had let me go! I might still be falling.”

  Despite Lina’s report, nobody else was keen to repeat the experiment, and soon our attention was diverted to safer pursuits. That night I had horrible nightmares about falling down a hole, but that was the worst effect of our adventure. All the same, the memory of Lina’s recklessness still gives me goosebumps.

  We were all busy with chores. The summer had been unusually golden, and there was a fat gathering in for the winter. We laid out quartered apples and peaches to dry, and pickled mountains of cherries and walnuts and beans, and fattened pigs were brought in and slaughtered and turned into sausages and great sides of bacon, and hard cheeses laid in the cool cellars, and fields of barley and spelt harvested and threshed and ground to the rough flour that makes the good, sour bread of the northern plains.

  The Wizard Ezra returned just as the last of the harvest was gathered, and called a council with the village elders. He told them that on the day of Surinam’s murder, he had called up his powers and had seen the murder in a vision. Surinam had been shot, he told them, by Lovro, the second son of Kutsak Eran, a landholder in Skip. At this, there was a sigh of relief: it was generally believed that the people of Skip were capable of every sort of iniquity. But Ezra held up his hand to silence the murmuring. No, he said: it was not as simple as it appeared. For Surinam was a man with no one to avenge his death: extensive enquiries had been made, and no one had found his family. And therefore the question hinged upon where he had been killed. Until he passed the borders of this village, he remained our guest: and as he was our guest, the man who had killed him had also insulted the honour of the men of our village.

  A dead silence fell over the gathering, and then Petar Oseku, in whose barn the unfortunate man had slept, stood up and angrily disputed that Surinam had been killed while under his protection. He had died at the border stone, and had therefore passed out of the village. No, said Ezra: the border stone marked the outer boundary of the village, but it was inclusive. Here he raised the Book, the root of all Lore, as his witness, and who was to dispute his word, since no other man in the village save my father and Mr Herodias could read it? The Book, the Wizard Ezra thundered, was unambiguous upon this point: and further, he had himself travelled far to consult with his brethren, and also with the wise counsellors of the royal family, to clarify this very point. It was on the honour of the House of Oseku, he said, to avenge this most shameful death. Now fifteen days had passed, and Petar Oseku, as the head of his family, had only twenty-five days of truce left. Once it was over, his duty was clear, if this village was to clear the filth of insult from its honour: he must travel to Skip and kill the second son of Kutsak Eran, may the Devil take his soul.

  Petar Oseku was my uncle, my father’s brother. He was, by the standards of the north, a good and gentle man. My aunt told me many years later that when he came home from that meeting he seemed to have aged a decade in a day. He wordlessly placed his rifle in the corner of the kitchen, and turned his face to the wall. My aunt, a true daughter of the north, wasn’t a woman whose tears came easily, but she threw her skirt over her face to muffle her weeping.

  What they both most feared had come to pass. Their children would now be fatherless, and within a year their two oldest sons – the first just now preparing for marriage – would be dead, and their youngest son – now growing his first straggling beard – would attain his manhood only to kill and then, in turn, be killed. In less than five years all the men of their family would be devoured by the vendetta. Perhaps some might escape to the living death of the odu, never to walk in the daylight again. Such a choice would have never occurred to a man like Petar Oseku, since it would only hasten the doom of his sons, who would have to make the revenge themselves. And how would they pay the Blood Tax? They were not poor, but they were not a rich family either: it was likely that by the time all my aunt’s sons were dead, she and her daughters would no longer have a house to mourn in, and would be reduced to begging for the charity of others.

  Once her family was destroyed, the duty would pass to the next male blood relative, until the curse had killed the men of the next family, and then the next. There was no peasant in the village who was not related to the Oseku household, even if it was some distant cousinship. The vendetta would burn through all the bloodlines of our village, leaving in its wake a desolation of graves. Beside them would stand a line of empty-eyed women, their faces hardened by sorrow, shivering against the cold wind in their ash-coloured rags. So my aunt wept silently for herself and for everyone she loved, and her husband sat beside her with his face turned to the wall; and they said nothing to each other, because there was nothing to say.

  XV

  The forty-day truce passed, and Petar Oseku was clearly in no hurry to kill his man. As custom demanded, his wife hung the sheet on which Surinam’s blood-weltered body had been laid from the top window of their house. It was a constant reminder of duty, and it flapped and snapped in the wind as the year turned towards winter. I crossed myself every time I passed: the sheet was like a shroud, and its rattling voice in the bitter air had a deathly sound.

  My uncle had until the stain faded to take his revenge. The blackened clots washed off and the marks faded to brown and then to an ever paler rust, but still Petar Oseku didn’t make his move. All the same, he wasn’t idle. He was gathering together money
for the Blood Tax: being a man of forethought and thrift, he made arrangements to cover not only his own payment, but that of his sons. He sold an orchard of almond trees, his most valuable property, as well as a couple of family treasures, including a small clock designed like a temple with tiny golden cherubs flourishing trumpets at each corner, and he put the money aside. Even if his household were stripped of its modest wealth, his wife and daughters would not now wander homeless.

  By then winter had its bite on the plains, and soon the roads would be snowed out. Winter was considered as good as a truce, since travel was impossible. Strictly speaking, Petar Oseku should have pursued the vendetta with all possible speed; but since it was not his own blood that he was avenging, no one, not even the Wizard Ezra, would look askance if he took his time.

  The snows came early that year, harbingers of a season of vicious blizzards punctuated by long, ice-bound nights. It was more than two months before the roads opened again, and in that time Petar Oseku made his peace with God. As soon as the spring melt came, he hefted his rifle and went, as a dutiful northern man, to preserve the honour of his family and his village. After he had shot Lovro, he immediately travelled to the King’s Palace to pay the Blood Tax. When he came home, we held the honouring feast for him. It was the first I ever attended, if not the last, and was one of the few times that Lina envied me. As she was of royal blood, and therefore exempt from the laws of vendetta, she was also forbidden from its celebrations.

  The honouring feast is a strange affair: proud and grieving and darkly joyous, all at the same time. We sang the mournful, keening songs of vendetta, and garlanded Petar Oseku’s neck with spring flowers, and he was in that moment a king, because he had kept faith with his honour, and so honoured all of us. The least admirable man blossoms into his manhood at these events; I have seen mean and vicious spirits attain a grace that was otherwise unimaginable. A good man could seem like a demigod.