Summary
In the third chapter, Kadaré focuses on two new characters: Bessian Vorpsi and his new wife Diana. At the beginning of the chapter, Bessian and Diana are riding into the mountains in a carriage. Recently married, Bessian and Diana are traveling from the Albanian capital of Tirana to spend their honeymoon.
From the outset, it is clear that Bessian and Diana hold romantic and idealized notions of life in the High Plateau where Gjorg and his family lives. For example, when Diana tells people that she will be spending her honeymoon in the region, “they would go on talking about fairies, mountain nymphs, bards, the last Homeric hymns in the world, and the Kanun, terrifying but so majestic” (63). Bessian, a writer of some renown, had also written “half-tragic, half-philosophical sketches about the North,” and appears to be returning to the region to gather material for a new project (64). As they ride in the carriage, Bessian explains the “part-imaginary, part-epic world” of the High Plateau to Diana (64).
Diana and Bessian begin to see men walking along the road with black ribbons pinned to their right sleeves. According to the rules of the Kanun, the black ribbon marks out men who have killed others in blood feuds. Bessian continues to talk about the region and its culture in a poetic way, and explains that the High Plateau “‘is the only region of Europe which…has rejected the laws, the legal institutions, the police, the courts, in short, all the structures of the state’” (72).
As he continues to explain the contents of the Kanun, he notes that “the guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations” (76). After explaining the sacred position of the guest in local culture, Bessian reveals that he wants to take Diana to the region so that they can “assume the crown of the guest” (84). Diana admits that she is frightened, and Bessian mocks her.
They arrive at a kulla and are taken in as guests to spend the night. Before they are split into separate sleeping chambers, Bessian explains the customs surrounding the position of the guest. As he says, “‘we can abandon ourselves to any kind of madness, even commit a murder… [but] there is one thing that is forbidden, and that is to lift the lid of the pot on the fire’” (88-89). That night, Diana struggles to sleep and feels frustrated that Bessian has brought her on the trip.
The following morning, they continue their journey in the carriage. Tired and upset, Diana feels “a certain detachment, or the first stage of a kind of estrangement from him” (91). Bessian begins to think that the trip might have been a mistake.
After several more hours of travel, they stop at an inn. The innkeeper tells them that Ali Binak is also staying at the inn while he resolves a boundary dispute in the area. Bessian decides that he and Anna will follow Ali to visit the site of the boundary dispute. On the way, Diana and Bessian notice piles of stones gathered in the surrounding fields. These muranës serve both as boundaries between properties and also as graves for those who have been killed during property disputes. At the site of the dispute, Ali explains that men who have been shot in disputes will often crawl as far as they can onto someone else’s land because “‘even though it is on another’s land it remains forever the new boundary mark’” (101).
Several old men begin to negotiate the boundary dispute. To do so, they lift stones onto their shoulders and place them where they believe the boundary should lie. Bessian and Diana travel back to the inn, where the innkeeper introduces them to Gjorg, who is returning from the Kulla of Orosh. Gjorg stares at Diana as her carriage pulls away.
As they continue on their way to the Kulla of Orosh, Diana begins to feel that “she had not found the journey a disappointment” (110). Diana and Bessian begin to talk about Gjorg, and Bessian compares him to Hamlet. Diana continues to think of Gjorg, in what is the “was the first time since she had known Bessian that she allowed herself to think quite freely about someone else” (116).
Diana asks Bessian about the Prince of Orosh, and Bessian explains that he is not actually a prince related to the royal family, but that his “power was of a very special kind, founded on the Kanun and unlike any other regime in the world” (119). Despite the fact that the Prince has no police or official government power, he maintains control over the entire High Plateau.
The plot jumps forward to after Diana and Bessian’s arrival at the Kulla of Orosh. They unpack their suitcases and look out their window to see “the famous murderers’ gallery” where men like Gjorg wait to pay their blood tax (122). Diana continues to stare out the window and thinks again of Gjorg and wonders if she will ever meet again. Bessian tries to initiate intimacy with Diana, but she remains silently staring out the window.
Analysis
Chapter III marks an abrupt shift in the novel, transporting the narrative focus from Gjorg to Bessian and Diana. This abrupt shift is wholly intentional, as Kadare endeavors to highlight the contrasts between Diana and Bessian, and Gjorg.
From the outset, it is clear that Kadaré is making a caricature of Bessian. That is to say, he is emphasizing his character traits to the point that they are so obvious as to be satirical. In this case, Bessian is made to be the pompous urbanite with fantastical notions about another culture. His poetic way of speaking about the High Plateau only makes it more obvious that he fundamentally does not understand what life is like for the people who live there, and one cannot help but feel pity for Diana as she is forced to endure Bessian's lecturing.
Kadaré's inclusion of Diana and Bessian into the narrative is a clever move. On one hand, it allows him to describe the culture of the High Plateau from a drastically different opinion. While in the first two chapters, we have encountered Gjorg's perspective living–and indeed dying–by the law of the Kanun, now we have the perspective of an outsider who admires the beauty of this same legal code. Here, Kadaré addresses the idealistic notions about culture that may commonly be held by those outside of that culture.
At the same time, Bessian's character also allows Kadaré to interrogate his own position as a writer. On the surface, Bessian and Kadaré share several similarities: both are writers from the urban area of Albania, and both have written works about the Kanun despite being outsiders to the culture of the High Plateau. Kadaré takes a radically different approach to his subject than Bessian, however. That is to say, he avoids the sort of idealization that dominates Bessian's understanding of the High Plateau. In this way, Kadaré uses Bessian to contrast his own approach to writing about the Kanun, and to acknowledge the critiques he might face as an outsider writing about the local culture. In this way, Broken April is an explicit engagement with the practice–and pitfalls–of cross-cultural understanding and engagement.
In this section, Gjorg and Diana see each other for the first time and Kadaré does a masterful job of depicting this encounter. As if to symbolize the distance in their life circumstances, Diana sees Gjorg through the window of her carriage, and the two never have a chance to speak. In a subtle fashion, Kadaré proceeds to describe the way in which Diana's thoughts repeatedly return to Gjorg. Careful to avoid any sense of an unrealistic or overly romantic development in the relation between Diana and Gjorg, Kadaré never explicitly refers to their feelings as "love." Therefore, it is up to the reader to intuit the intense feelings shared between them.
