Читать онлайн «Broken April»
Автор Исмаил Кадаре
Ismail Kadare
Broken April
A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION
The Albanian alphabet is phonetic; it sometimes uses two letters to indicate a single sound. Some Albanian letters have sound values that do not coincide with those of English. Among them are the following letters, which occur in proper names in
ë
an unstressed vowel, like “a” in “a lot”
y
German “u” or the “u” of French “rendu, attendu,” etc.
c
“ts” as in “curtsy”
ç
“ch” as in “church”
dh
voiced “th” as in “there”
gj
“g” as in “gem”
j
“y” as in “yellow”
q
a sound approximating the shortened sound of “tu” as in “future”
CHAPTER I
His feet were cold, and each time he moved his numbed legs a little he heard the desolate grating of pebbles under his shoes. But the sense of desolation was really inside him. Never before had he stayed motionless for so long, lying in wait behind a ridge that overlooked the highway.
Daylight was fading. Fearful or simply troubled, he brought the rifle’s stock to his cheek. Soon it would be dusk, and he would not be able to see the sights of the weapon in the fading light. “He’s sure to come by before it’s too dark to take aim,” his father had said. “Just be patient and wait. ”
Slowly the gun barrel swept over some patches of the half-thawed snow towards the wild pomegranates scattered through the brush-covered space on both sides of the road. For perhaps the hundredth time he thought that this was a fateful day in his life. Then the gun barrel swung back again to where it had been. What in his mind he had called a fateful day was no more than those patches of snow and those wild pomegranates that seemed to have been waiting since midday to see what he would do.
He thought, soon night will fall and it will be too dark to shoot. He wished that dusk would come swiftly, that night would race on after it, so that he could run away from this accursed ambush. It was the second time in his life that he had lain in wait to take revenge, but the man he must kill was the same one, so that this ambush was really an extension of the other.
He became aware again of his icy feet, and he moved his legs as if to keep the cold from rising in his body, but it had long since reached his belly, his chest and even his head. He had the feeling that bits of his brain had frozen, like those patches of snow along the sides of the road.
He felt that he could not shape a clear thought. He had only a vague animosity for the wild pomegranates and the patches of snow, and sometimes he told himself that were it not for them, he would have given up his vigil long ago. But there they were, motionless witnesses that had kept him from going away.
At the bend in the road, for perhaps the twentieth time that day, he thought he saw the man he had been waiting for. The man came on with short steps; the black barrel of his rifle rose above his right shoulder. The watcher started. This time it was no hallucination. It really was the man he was waiting for.
