Many were the messengers who fanned out from the capital through the province during those days, while others, equally numerous, were dispatched from the province to the capital. It was said that a great assembly was being prepared, at which all the rumors and agitation aroused by the alleged resurrection of one of the Vranaj brothers would be laid to rest once and for all. Stres was said to be preparing a detailed report to be presented at that meeting. He had kept the prisoner in isolation, his whereabouts unknown, safe from prying eyes and ears.
Those bits and pieces of the prisoner’s confession that had somehow leaked out were now spreading far and wide, carried by word of mouth on puffs of mist in the winter air and borne by carriage from road to road and inn to inn. People traveled less than usual because of the cold, but strangely, the rumors spread just as fast as they would have in more clement weather. It was as if, hardened to crystalline brilliance by the winter frost, they flowed more surely than the rumors of summer, for they were unimpeded by damp and suffocating heat, by the numbing of minds and the jangling of nerves. But that did not prevent them from changing daily as they spread, from swelling, from becoming lighter or darker. And as if all were not enough, there were still those who said, “Just wait, even stranger things will come.” Others, drifting off, would simply sigh, “What next, Lord, what next?”
Everyone awaited the great assembly at which the whole affair would be sifted in minute detail. The arrival of many nobles from all the principalities of Albania was announced. Rumor had it that the prince himself would attend. Other voices whispered that high church dignitaries from Byzantium would participate, while others, less numerous, even suggested that the Patriarch himself would come in person.
In fact, contrary to what might have been expected, echoes of the Doruntine affair had spread far indeed. The news had even reached Constantinople, capital of the Orthodox religion, and no one was unaware that such things were never pardoned in that city. The highest ecclesiastical authorities were worried, people said. The Emperor himself had been apprised of the incident, which had given him sleepless nights. The issue had proven far more ticklish than it had seemed at first. It was not a simple case of a ghostly apparition, nor even one of those typical calumnies that the Church had always punished with the stake and always would. No, this was far more serious, something that, may God protect us, was shaking the Orthodox religion to its foundations. It concerned the coming of a new messiah—in God’s name, lower your voice!—yes, a new messiah, for one man alone had been able to rise from his grave, and that was Jesus Christ, and whosoever affirmed this new resurrection was thereby guilty of an unpardonable sacrilege: belief in a new resurrection, which was tantamount to admitting that there could be two Jesus Christs, for if one believed that someone today had succeeded in doing what Jesus had done in His time, then it was but one small step to admitting—may God preserve us!—that this someone else might be His rival.
Not for nothing had Rome, in its hostility, paid the most careful attention to the development of the case. The Catholic monks had surely outdone themselves in propagating this fable of Constantine’s resurrection, thereby attempting to deal the Orthodox religion a mortal blow by accusing it of a monstrous heresy leading to dual Christs. Things had gotten so tense that there was now talk of a universal war of religion. Some even hinted that the impostor who had brought Doruntine back was himself an agent of the Roman Church entrusted with just that mission. Others went further still, claiming that Doruntine herself had fallen into Catholic clutches and had agreed to do their bidding. O great God above, people intoned, may it not be our lot to hear such things! That is how entangled the case had become. But the Orthodox Church of Byzantium, which had spared neither patriarchs nor emperors for infractions of this magnitude, had finally taken the matter in hand and would clear it all up soon enough. The enemies of the Church would be utterly routed.
So said some. Others shook their heads. Not because they disagreed, but because they suspected that the rumor of Constantine’s return from the grave might well have been generated not by the intrigues and rivalry of the world’s two major religions but by one of those mysterious disturbances which, like a wicked wind, periodically plagues the minds of men, robbing them of judgment, numbing them, and driving them thus dazed and blinded beyond life and death. For life and death, as they saw it, enveloped man in endless successive concentric layers, so that just as there was death within life, so death ought to contain life, which in turn contained death; or perhaps life, itself enveloped in death, harbored death in turn, and so on to infinity. Enough, objected the first group: forget the hairsplitting ratiocination, just say what you mean. The others then sought to explain their point of view more clearly, talking fast lest a mist descend upon their reasoning once more. This alleged resurrection of Constantine, they said, was in no sense real, and the hoax had been born not at that churchyard grave but in the minds of the people, who, it seemed, had been somehow gripped by a powerful yearning to spin this tale of the mingling of life and death, just as they are sometimes gripped by collective madness. This yearning had cropped up in scattered places, with one, then with another; it had infected them all, so as to turn, at last—abomination of abominations—into a common desire of the quick and the dead to give themselves over to this collective outburst. Short-sighted as they were, people gave no real thought to the abomination they had wrought, for though it is true that everyone feels the urge to see their dead once more, that longing is ephemeral, always arising after some time of turmoil (something stopped me from kissing him, Doruntine had said). If the dead ever really came back and sat before us big as life, you’d see just how terrifying it would be. You think it’s difficult to get along with a nonagenarian? Well, imagine dealing with a 900-year-old! Constantine’s presence, too, like that of any other dead man returned to the land of the living, would be welcome for no more than the briefest lapse of time (you go on, I have something to do at the church), for his dead life’s proper place was in the grave. They say there was a time when dead and living, men and gods, all lived together and sometimes even intermarried, engendering hybrid creatures. But that was an era of barbarism that would never return.
Others listened to these morbid words but preferred to look at matters more simply. If this was all some yearning for resurrection, they said, why bother trying to decide whether it was good or ill? God, after all, would set the date of the Apocalypse, and none save Him was entitled to pass judgment on the matter, and still less to decree its advent. But that, others replied, is exactly what’s wrong with this rumor of Constantine’s resurrection. The alleged resurrection is taken as a sign that the Apocalypse could occur without an order from the Lord. And the Roman Church accuses ours of having sanctioned this travesty. Now, however, everything will be put right. The Church of Byzantium will not be found wanting. Stres had finally unmasked the great hoax, and the whole country—nay, the whole world, from Rome to Constantinople—would soon learn the truth. Stres would surely be awarded high honors for his achievement.
The light in his window was the last to go out each night. He must be preparing his report. Who can say what we’re going to find out, everyone repeated.
All the talk was of Doruntine’s life. Only the mourners had changed nothing in their ritual. On the day of the dead, as people made the traditional visits to the graves of their relatives, these women mourned the Vranaj with the very same songs they had sung before:
Constantine, may evil strike you!
What has become of your promise,
Have you buried it with you?
Stres listened to all the talk with an enigmatic smile. For some time now he had been looking pale.
“What exactly does the bessa mean to you?” he would ask of Constantine’s companions—recently he had found pleasure in their company.
The young men looked at one another. There were four of them: Shpëndë, Milosao, and the two Radhen boys. Stres met them nearly every afternoon at the New Inn, where they
used to pass the time when Constantine was alive. People shook their heads in wonder when they saw Stres with them. Some said that he frequented them as a matter of official duty. Others maintained that he was just killing time. He has finished his report, they said, and now he’s resting. Others simply shrugged. Who knows why he spends his time with them? He’s deep as a well, that Stres. You can never guess why he does one thing rather than another.
“So, what does bessa mean to you? Or rather, what did it mean to him, to Constantine?”
No one had been more deeply moved by Constantine’s death than these four young men. He had been more than a brother to them, and even now, three years after his death, so strong was his presence in their words and thoughts that many people, half-seriously, half-jokingly, called them “Constantine’s disciples.” They looked at one another again. Why was Stres asking them this question?
They had not accepted the captain’s company with good grace. Even when Constantine was alive they had been cool towards him, but recently, as Stres labored to unravel the mystery of Doruntine’s return, the chill had turned icy, bordering on hostility. Stres’s first efforts to win them over had run up against that wall. But later, surprisingly, their attitude had changed completely and they accepted the captain’s presence. Young people today are not stupid, was the popular comment at church on Sunday; they know what they’re doing.
“It’s a term that was used in olden days,” Stres went on, “but the meaning attached to it in our own day seems to me more or less new. It has come up more than once in trial proceedings.”
They sat there, thoughtful. During their many afternoons and evenings with Constantine, so different from the morose sessions that were now their lot, they had discussed many subjects with great passion, but the bessa had always been their favorite topic. And for good reason too: it was a sort of fulcrum, the theme on which all the rest was based.
They had begun to weigh their words with greater care after the bishop issued warnings to all their families. But that was before Constantine’s death. What would they do now that the man they had loved so much was gone? Stres seemed to be familiar with their ideas already; that being the case, all he really had to do was sit and listen. After all, they were not afraid to express their views. On the contrary, given the opportunity they were prepared to proclaim them quite openly. What they feared was that their views might be distorted.
“What did Constantine think about the bessa?” said Milosao, repeating Stres’s question. “It was part of his more general ideas. It would be difficult to explain it without showing its connection with his other convictions.”
And they set about explaining everything to him in detail. Constantine, as the captain must surely know, was an oppositionist, a dissident, as were they, come to that. He was opposed to existing laws, institutions, decrees, prisons, police, and courts, which he considered no more than a pack of coercive rules raining down on man from the outside like hail. He believed that these laws ought to be abolished and replaced by inner laws arising from within man himself. By this he did not mean purely spiritual standards dependent on conscience alone, for he was no naive dreamer who assumed that humanity could be ruled solely by conscience. He believed in something far more tangible, something the seeds of which he had detected scattered here and there in Albanian life in recent times, something he said should be nurtured, encouraged to blossom into a whole system. In this system there would be no further need for written laws, courts, jails, or police. This new order, of course, would not be wholly free of tragedy, of killing and violence, but man himself would judge his neighbor and be judged by him quite apart from any rigid judicial structure. He would kill or be executed, he would imprison himself or leave prison, when he thought it appropriate.
“But how could such an order be achieved?” asked Stres. Didn’t it still come down to conscience in the end, and did not they themselves consider it merely a dream?
They replied that in this new world, existing institutions would have been replaced by others, invisible, not material, but not at all chimerical nor idyllic. In fact they would be rather bleak and tragic, and therefore as weighty as the old ones, if not more so. Except that they would lie within man, not in the form of remorse or some similar sentiment, but as a well-defined ideal, a faith, an order understood and accepted by everyone, but realized within each individual, not secret but revealed for all the world to see, as if man’s breast were transparent and his greatness or anguish, his pain, his tragedy, his decisions and doubts, were visible for all to see. Such would be the axes of an order of this kind. The bessa was one of them, perhaps the principal one.
It was still very rare: delicate, like a wild flower needing tender care, its shape as yet undefined. To illustrate their thesis, they reminded Stres of an incident that had occurred some years before, when Constantine was still alive. In a village not far off, a man had killed his guest. Stres had heard talk of the case. It was then that the expression “He violated the bessa” had been used. Everyone in the village, young and old, had been deeply shaken by the event. Together they decided that no such disgrace would ever befall them again. In fact they went further still, decreeing that anyone, known or unknown, who entered the territory of their village would stand under the protection of the bessa and would thereby be declared a friend and be protected as such, that the doors of the village would be opened to anyone, at any hour of night or day, and that any passer-by must be given food, and his safety assured. In the marketplace of the capital they were the butt of jokes. Anyone want a free meal? Just head for that village and knock on any door; talk about consideration, they’ll escort you to the village border as if you were a bishop. But the villagers, ignoring the mockery, went even further. They requested—and received—the prince’s permission to punish those who violated the bessa. No one guilty of that offense could leave the territory of the village alive. Another village, quite far from the first, asked the prince to grant them the same right, but their lord, fearing the spread of the practice, refused. That was what the bessa meant. That was how Constantine saw it. He considered the bessa a bond linking all that was sublime, and he felt that once it and other similar laws had spread and held sway in every aspect of life, then external laws, with their corresponding institutions, would be shed naturally, just as a snake sloughs off its old skin.
Thus spoke Constantine on those memorable afternoons they used to pass at the New Inn. As for myself, he said, I shall give my mother my bessa to bring Doruntine back to her from her husband’s home whenever she desires. And whatever happens—if I am lying on my deathbed, if I have but one hand or one leg, if I have lost my sight, even if—I will never break that promise.
“Even if. . . . ?” Stres repeated. “Tell me, Milosao, don’t you think he meant ‘even if I’m dead’?”
“Perhaps,” the young man answered absently, looking away.
“But how can you account for that?” Stres asked. “He was an intelligent man, he didn’t believe in ghosts. I have a report from the bishop stating that at Easter you and he laughed at people’s faith in the resurrection of Christ. So how could he have believed in his own resurrection?”
They looked at one another, each suppressing a smile.
“You are right, Captain, so long as you are speaking of the present world, the existing world. But you must not forget that he, that all of us, in our words and thoughts, had in mind another world, one with a new dimension, a world in which the bessa reigned supreme. In that world everything would be different.”
“Nevertheless, you live in our world, in this existing world,” said Stres.
“Yes. But a part of our being, perhaps the best, lies in the other.”
“In the other,” he repeated softly. Now it was he who suppressed a smile.
They took no notice of it, or pretended not to, and went on discussing Constantine’s other ideas, the reasons why he held that this reorganization of life in Albania was necessary. These had to do with the great storms
he saw looming on the horizon and with Albania’s location, caught in a vise between the religions of Rome and Byzantium, between two worlds, West and East. Their clash would inevitably bring appalling turmoil, and Albania would have to find new ways to defend itself. It had to create structures more stable than “external” laws and institutions, structures eternal and universal, lying within man himself, inviolable and invisible and therefore indestructible. In short, Albania had to change its laws, its administration, its prisons, its courts and all the rest, had to fashion them so that they could be severed from the outside world and anchored within men themselves as the tempest drew near. It had to do this or it would be wiped from the face of the earth. Thus spoke Constantine. And he held that this new organization would begin with the bessa.
“Then of course,” Stres said, “Constantine’s own default, the violation of his promise, was all the more serious and inadmissible, was it not?”
“Oh yes, certainly. Especially after his mother’s curse. Except for one thing, Captain Stres: there was no default. He kept his promise in the end. Somewhat belatedly, of course, but he had a good enough reason for being late: he was dead. In the end he kept his word in spite of everything.”
“But he was not the one who brought Doruntine back,” said Stres. “You know that as well as I do.”
“For you, perhaps, it wasn’t him. We see it differently.”
“Truth is the same for all. Almost anyone could have brought Doruntine here, but certainly not he.”
“Nevertheless, it was he who brought her back.”
“So you believe in resurrection?”
“That’s secondary. It has nothing to do with the heart of the matter.”
“Just the same, if you don’t accept the resurrection of the dead, how can you persist in claiming that he made that journey with his sister?”