After the Shot: Procedure and Suspense in Kadare’s Broken April

Part of: The Deep Reader

Opening-chapter spoilers for Broken April.

Gjorg Berisha has killed a man in a blood feud governed by the Kanun, the customary code, and arranged the body as it requires. On his way home, he asks passing travelers to turn it on its back and place the rifle beside its head. They are being asked to see to something he has already done. The narrator remembers the action for us; the man who performed it can no longer trust his memory.

The reader can remember this small part of the killing more securely than the killer. Kadare keeps that unequal knowledge active through the journey home, where a father's ordinary instruction will return us to the corpse. Meanwhile, Gjorg has to find his next action inside the same code that required him to kill. Even its accommodations for distress have work for him to do.

A task persists after its purpose becomes confused

Beside the dead man, his own gesture briefly seems like an attempt to wake him. He has to ask:

“What am I doing?”

Only afterward does the customary purpose return to him. The question has interrupted the gesture before the explanation can settle it, so that performing the duty and knowing what he is doing briefly come apart. On the road, he still needs somebody else to make sure of the arrangement.

The code anticipates such an appeal. Passersby can complete the arrangement when the killer cannot, and Gjorg's request therefore gives the strangers an intelligible duty toward the body. His uncertainty draws other people into a killing they did not witness. They need not examine his distress or decide how justified it is before knowing what assistance they can offer.

There is a disquieting kindness in this accommodation. A man who cannot quite manage the aftermath can ask for help. Kadare gives the custom enough practical solicitude to make its continuance believable: the demands remain usable even by someone suffering under them. The next duty is waiting when his own intention becomes confused.

The answer on his hands

At home, his father notices the blood on Gjorg's hands and tells him to wash. Gjorg attributes it to turning the body. The evidence has traveled with him, unnoticed, through his doubts and his appeal to the strangers; the narrator can now point out that a glance down would have spared him the uncertainty. The father's household instruction completes a connection the son was unable to make on the road.

Such a small delay carries much of the scene's force. We saw the arrangement, accompanied the doubt, and only now attend to its unused proof. Kadare has allowed an unnecessary request to occupy real narrative time and involve real people. Gjorg's suffering includes the actions it makes him repeat and the help it makes him seek, even when the fact troubling him is already settled for us.

What a wound costs

Before the shot, the code has already entered Gjorg's attention through an earlier failure. He wounded this man on a previous attempt, and his family paid a fine. Another wound could ruin them. Waiting to fire, he has to live with the financial difference expressed in the sentence:

“But there was no penalty for death.”

The sentence concerns the wound fine. Death brings other expenses: later in the chapter, Gjorg's father gives him five hundred groschen for the blood tax. Nor does payment buy safety from retaliation. Within that dangerous prospect, however, the remembered fine makes a second wound immediately costly in a way a successful killing is not. The family's spent money enters the hesitation of the shot.

The recollection of pity accompanies his present fear of firing badly. Kadare keeps the approaching man alive long enough for the calculation to be uncomfortable. Gjorg has to act under several pressures at once, and the narrative offers no clean allocation of motive afterward. The practical provisions have reached him where intention is still being formed.

This is also how the opening teaches us its unfamiliar rules. The wound fine enters as a remembered expense; the arrangement of the corpse becomes a task; help from travelers answers a lapse; the blood tax requires money from the father. Each provision arrives with somebody needing to act on it. Our growing knowledge of the system accompanies Gjorg's difficulty in living through its next demand.

Afterward, procedure keeps setting the duration of the act. There are demands concerning the body and the dead man's family, then payment. Gjorg cannot end the killing's obligations by arriving home, by remembering correctly, or by explaining what he intended. Other people still have claims upon what he has done.

What can travel into another story

For a writer, the early confirmation of the body arrangement offers a useful freedom. Once the completed act is known, attention can remain with the performer's uncertain access to it. A mystery about whether something happened would organize the scene differently; here the unnecessary request has consequences of its own, and the overlooked blood can change our experience without revealing a previously hidden event.

Consider the narrower device in an invented scene. A dispatcher checks a crate's seal and signs it out. Walking to the loading bay, she cannot remember the check. A colleague offers another inspection as the carrier prepares to leave; distracted by her search for the keys, she overlooks the token in her pocket recording that the inspection is complete. The scene would need to earn her distraction and establish the practice, but it could make us anxious about the consequences of a doubt whose answer we already possess.

That transfer leaves out the most troubling part of Kadare's scene. The colleague's help would have to acquire a further history before it resembled the code's assistance to Gjorg.

In Broken April, the provisions which accommodate a shocked killer also keep him inside the demands that brought him to the killing. His father tells him to wash when he comes home. Later, the same father gives him the money for the blood tax.

Sources

Ismail Kadare, Broken April. Vintage, 2003; ebook version 1.0, EPUB ISBN 9781446414170; Chapter I, especially the ambush, the body-arrangement and traveler sequence, the return home, and the later obligations. Title page: translated from the Albanian. English translation copyright New Amsterdam Books and Saqi Books, 1990; no individual translator is named in the title and copyright pages. Publisher-supplied sample.