“How can that be?” he asked.
“When he said that he was Constantine and that he had come to get me I was so confused that a terrible dread seized me.”
“You thought something bad had happened?”
“Of course. The worst thing. Death.”
“First that your mother was dead, then that it was one of your brothers?”
“Yes, each of them in turn, including Constantine.”
“Is that why you asked him why he had mud in his hair and smelled of sodden earth?”
“Yes, of course.”
Poor woman, thought Stres. He imagined the horror she must have felt if she thought, even for an instant, that she was riding with a dead man. For it seemed she must have spent a good part of the journey haunted by just that fear.
“There were times,” she went on, “when I drove the idea from my mind. I told myself that it really was my brother, and that he was alive. But. . . .”
She stopped.
“But . . . ,” Stres repeated. “What were you going to say?”
“Something stopped me from kissing him,” she said, her voice almost inaudible. “I don’t know what.”
Stres stared at the curve of her eyelashes, which fell now to the ridge of her cheekbones.
“I wanted so much to take him in my arms, yet I never had the courage, not even once.”
“Not even once,” Stres repeated.
“I feel such terrible remorse about that, especially now that I know he is no longer of this world.”
There was more life in her voice now, her breathing was more rapid.
“If only I could make that journey again,” she sighed, “if only I could see him just once more!”
She was absolutely convinced that she had traveled in the company of her dead brother. Stres wondered whether he ought to let her believe that or tell her his own suspicions.
“So, you never saw his face,” he said. “Not even when you parted and he said, ‘Go on ahead, I have something to do at the church’?”
“No, not even then,” she said. “It was very dark and I couldn’t see a thing. And during the journey I was always behind him.”
“But didn’t you ever stop. Didn’t you stop to rest anywhere?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t remember.”
Stres waited until her eyes, still fastened on his own, had recovered their fixed stare.
“But didn’t you say that he could have been hiding something from you?” Stres asked. “He didn’t want to set foot on the ground, even when he came to get you; he never so much as turned his head during the whole journey; and judging by what you’ve told me, he wanted to travel only by night. Wasn’t he hiding something?”
She nodded.
“I thought about that,” she replied, “but since he was dead, it was only natural for him to hide his face from me.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t Constantine,” he said suddenly.
Doruntine looked at him a long while.
“It comes to the same thing,” she said, her voice calm.
“What do you mean, the same thing?”
“If he was not alive, then it’s as if it wasn’t him.”
“That’s not what I meant. Did it ever occur to you that this man may not have been your brother, alive or dead, but an imposter, a false Constantine?”
Doruntine gestured no.
“Never,” she said.
“Never?” Stres repeated. “Try to remember.”
“I might think so now,” she said, “but that night I never had any such doubt, not for a moment.”
“But now you might?”
As she stared deeply into his eyes once more, he tried to decide just what it was that dominated that look of hers: grief, terror, doubt, some painful longing. All these were present, but there was more; there was still room for something more, some feeling indecipherable, or seemingly indecipherable, perhaps because it was a mixture of all the others.
“Maybe it wasn’t him,” Stres said again, moving his head closer to hers and looking into her eyes as though into the depths of a well. A wetness of tears rose up. She was crying again.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said between sobs.
He let her cry in silence for a while, then took her hand, pressed it softly and, after glancing at the mother, who seemed to be sleeping in the other bed, left noiselessly.
The first reports from the innkeepers began to come in two days later. Nowhere had anyone seen a man and woman riding on the same horse or on two horses, nor a woman traveling alone, either on horseback or in a carriage. Although no reports had yet arrived from the most distant inns, Stres was irritated. He had been sure that he would find some trace of them at once. Is it possible, he wondered as he read the reports. Could it be that no human eye had spotted them? Was everyone asleep as they rode through the night? No, impossible, he told himself in an effort to boost his own morale. Tomorrow someone would surely come forward and say that he had seen them. If not tomorrow then the next day. He was sure he would find some seeing eye.
In the meantime, acting on Stres’s orders, his deputy was sifting carefully through the family archives, seeking some thread that might lead to the solution to the puzzle. At the end of his first day’s work, his eyes swollen from going through a great pile of documents, he reported to his chief that the task was damnable and that he would have preferred to have been sent out on the road, from inn to inn, seeking the trail of the fugitives rather than torturing himself with those archives. The Vranaj were one of the oldest families of Albania, and had kept documents for two hundred and sometimes three hundred years. These were written in a variety of languages and alphabets, from Latin to Albanian, from Cyrillic to Gothic. There were old deeds, wills, legal judgments, notes on the genealogy of the family that went back as far as the year 881, citations, decorations. The documents included correspondence about marriages. There were dozens of letters, and Stres’s deputy set aside the ones dealing with Doruntine’s marriage, intending to examine them at his leisure. Some of them had been drafted in Gothic characters, apparently in German, and sent to Bohemia. Others, and these seemed to him even more noteworthy, were copies of letters sent by the Lady Mother to her old friend Count Thopia, lord of the neighboring principality, from whom, it seemed, she requested advice about various family matters. The Count’s answers were in the archives too. In two or three letters over which Stres’s aide cast a rapid eye, the Lady Mother had in fact confessed to the Count her reservations about Doruntine’s marriage to a husband from so far away, soliciting his view of the matter. In one of them—it must have been among the most recent—she complained about her terrible loneliness, the words barely legible (one felt that it had been written in a trembling hand, at an advanced age). The brides of her sons had departed one by one, taking their children with them and leaving her alone in the world. They had promised to come back to visit her, but none had done so, and in some sense she felt she could hardly blame them. What young woman would want to return to a house that was more ruin than home and on which, it was said, the seal of death had been fixed?
Stres listened attentively to his deputy, although the latter had the impression that his chief’s attention sometimes wandered.
“And here?” Stres finally asked, “what are they saying here?”
The deputy looked at him, puzzled.
“Here,” Stres repeated. “Not in the archives, but here among the people, what are they saying about it?”
His deputy raised his arms helplessly.
“Naturally, everyone is talking about it.”
Stres let a moment pass before adding, “Yes, of course. That goes without saying. It could hardly be otherwise.”
He closed his desk drawer, pulled on his cloak and left, bidding his deputy good night.
His path home took him past gates and fences of the one-story houses that had sprung up since the town, not long ago as small and quiet as the surrounding villages,
had become the regional center. The porches on which people whiled away the summer evenings were deserted now, and only a few chairs or swings had been left outside in the apparent hope of another mild day or two before the rigors of winter set in.
But though the porches were empty, young girls, sometimes in the company of a boy, could be seen whispering at the gates and along the fences. As Stres approached, they interrupted their low masses and watched him pass with curiosity. The events of the night of October eleventh had stirred everyone’s imagination, girls and young brides most of all. Stres guessed that each one must now be dreaming that someone—brother or distant friend, man or shadow—would some day cross an entire continent for her.
“So,” his wife said to him when he got home, “have you finally found out who she came back with?”
Taking off his cloak, Stres glanced covertly at her, wondering whether there was not perhaps a touch of irony in her words. Tall, blond, she looked back at him with the hint of a smile, and in a fleeting instant it occurred to Stres that though he was by no means insensitive to his wife’s charms, he could not imagine her riding behind him, clinging to him in the saddle. Doruntine, on the other hand, seemed to have been born to ride like that, hair streaming in the wind, arms wrapped around her horseman.
“No,” he said drily.
“You look tired.”
“I am. Where are the children?”
“Upstairs playing. Do you want to eat?”
He nodded yes and lowered himself, exhausted, into a chair covered with a shaggy woolen cloth. In the large fireplace tepid flames licked at two big oak logs but were unable to set them ablaze. Stres sat and watched his wife moving back and forth.
“As if all the other cases were not enough, now you have to search for some vagabond,” she said through a clinking of dishes.
She made no direct reference to Doruntine, but somehow her hostility came through.
“Nothing I can do about it,” said Stres.
The clinking of dishes got louder.
“Anyway,” his wife went on, “why is it so important to find out who that awful girl came home with anyway?” This time the reproach was aimed in part at Stres.
“And what makes her so awful?” he said evenly.
“What, you don’t think so? A girl who spends three years wallowing in her own happiness without so much as a thought for her poor mother stricken with the most dreadful grief? You don’t think she’s an ingrate?”
Stres listened, head down.
“Maybe she didn’t know about it.”
“Oh, she didn’t know? And how did she happen to remember so suddenly three years later?”
Stres shrugged. His wife’s hostility to Doruntine was nothing new. She had shown it often enough; once they had even fought about it. It was two days after the wedding, and his wife had said, “How come you’re sitting there sulking like that? Are all of you so sorry to see her go?” It was the first time she had ever made such a scene.
“She left her poor mother alone in her distress,” she went on, “and then suddenly took it into her head to come back just to rob her of the little bit of life she had left. Poor woman! What a fate!”
“It’s true,” Stres said, “such a desert—”
“Such a hellish solitude, you mean,” she broke in. “To see her daughters-in-law leave one after the other, most of them with small children in their arms, her house suddenly dark as a well. But her daughters-in-law, after all, were only on loan, and though they were wrong to abandon their mother-in-law in her time of trouble, who can cast a stone at them when the first to abandon the poor woman was her only daughter?”
Stres sat looking at the copper candelabrum, astonishingly similar to the ones he had seen that memorable morning in the room where Doruntine and her mother languished. He now realized that everyone, each in his own way, would take some stand in this affair, and that each person’s attitude would have everything to do with his station in life, his luck in love or marriage, his looks, the measure of good or ill fortune that had been his lot, the events that had marked the course of his life, and his most secret feelings, those a person sometimes hides even from himself. Yes, that would be the echo awakened in these people by what had happened, and though they would believe they were passing judgment on someone else’s tragedy, in reality, they would simply be giving expression to their own.
In the morning a messenger from the prince’s chancellery delivered an envelope to Stres. Inside was a note stating that the prince, having been informed of the events of October eleventh, ordered that no effort be spared in bringing the affair to light so as to forestall what Stres himself feared, any uneasiness or misapprehension among the people.
The chancellery asked that Stres notify the prince the moment he felt that the matter had been resolved.
“Hmm,” Stres said to himself after reading the laconic note a second time. The moment he felt that the matter had been resolved. Easy enough to say. I’d like to see you in my shoes.
He had slept badly, and in the morning he again encountered the inexplicable hostility of his wife, who had not forgiven him for failing to endorse her judgment of Doruntine with sufficient ardor, though he had been careful not to contradict her. He had noticed that this sort of friction, though it did not lead to explosions, was in fact more pernicious than an open dispute, which was generally followed by reconciliation. Friction of this kind, on the contrary, could fester for days on end in search of good reasons to rise to the surface. And since the pretext was usually irrelevant and unjustified, the resentments and misunderstandings aroused by it were far more bitter than the consequences of any ordinary quarrel.
Stres was still holding the letter from the chancellery when his deputy came in to tell him that the cemetery guard had something to report.
“The cemetery guard?” Stres said in astonishment, eying his aide reproachfully. He was tempted to ask, “You’re not still trying to convince me that someone has come back from the grave?”—but just then, through the half-open door, he saw a man who seemed to be the guard in question.
“Bring him in,” Stres said coldly.
The guard entered, bowing deferentially.
“Well?” said Stres looking up at the man, who stood rigid as a post.
The guard swallowed.
“I am the guard at the church cemetery, Mister Stres, and I would like to tell you—”
“That the grave has been violated?” Stres interrupted. “I know all about it.”
The guard looked at him, taken aback.
“I, I,” he stammered, “I want to say—”
“If it’s about the gravestone being moved, I know all about it,” Stres interrupted again, unable to hide his annoyance. “If you have something else to tell me, I’m listening.”
Stres expected the guard to say, No, I have nothing to add, and had already leaned over his desk again when, to his great surprise, he heard the man’s voice.
“I have something else to tell you.”
Stres raised his head and looked sternly at the man, making it clear that this was neither the time nor the place for jokes.
“So you have something else to tell me?” he said in a skeptical tone. “Well, let’s hear it.”
The guard, still disconcerted by the coolness of his reception, watched Stres lift his hands from the papers spread out on his desk as if to say, Well, you’ve taken me away from my work, are you satisfied? Now let’s hear your little story.
“We are uneducated people, Mister Stres,” the man said timidly. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, please excuse me, but I thought that, well, who knows—”
Suddenly Stres felt sorry for the man and said in a milder tone, “Speak. I’m listening.”
What’s the matter with me? he wondered. Why do I take out on others the irritation I feel over this business?
“Speak,” he said again. “What is it you have to tell me?”
The guard, somewhat reassured, took a deep bre
ath and began.
“Everyone claims that one of the Lady Mother’s sons came back from the grave,” he said, eyes fixed on Stres. “You know more about all that than I do. Some people have even come over to the cemetery to see whether any stones have been moved, but that’s another story. What I wanted to say is about something else—”
“Go on,” said Stres.
“One Sunday, not last Sunday or the one before, but the one before that, the Lady Mother came to the cemetery, as is her custom, to light candles at the graves of each of her sons.”
“Three Sundays ago?” Stres asked.
“Yes, Mister Stres. She lit one candle for each of the other graves, but two for Constantine’s. I was standing very near her at the time, and I heard what she said when she leaned toward the niche in the gravestone.”
The guard paused briefly again, his eyes still riveted on the captain. Three Sundays ago; in other words, Stres thought to himself, not knowing quite why he made the calculation, a little more than two weeks ago. “I have heard the lamentations of many a mother,” the guard went on, “hers included. But never have I shuddered as I did at the words she spoke that day.”
Stres, who had raised his hand to his chin, listened with the greatest attention.
“These were not the usual tears and lamentations,” the guard explained. “What she spoke was a curse.”
“A curse?”
The guard took another deep breath, making no attempt to conceal his satisfaction at having finally caught the captain’s undivided attention.
“Yes, sir, a curse, and a frightful one.”
“Go on,” Stres said impatiently. “What kind of curse?”
“It is hard to remember the exact words, I was so shaken, but it went something like this: ‘Constantine, have you forgotten your promise to bring Doruntine back to me whenever I longed for her?’ As you probably know, Mister Stres, I mean almost everybody does, Constantine had given his mother his bessa to—”
“I know, I know,” said Stres. “Go on.”
“Well, then she said: ‘Now I am left alone in the world, for you have broken your promise. May the earth never receive you!’ Those were her words, more or less.”