The guard had been watching Stres’s face as he spoke, expecting the captain to be horrified by his terrible tale, but when he had finished, it seemed clear that Stres was thinking of other things. The guard’s self-assurance vanished.
“I thought I ought to come and tell you, that it might be useful to you,” he said. “I hope I have not disturbed you.”
“No, not at all,” Stres hastened to answer. “On the contrary, you did well to come. Thanks very much.”
The guard bowed and left, still wondering whether or not he had made a mistake in coming to tell his story.
Stres still seemed lost in thought. A moment later, he felt another presence in the room. He looked up and saw his deputy, but then forgot about him immediately. How could we have been so stupid, he said to himself Why in the world didn’t we talk to the mother? Though he had gone twice to the house, he had questioned only Doruntine. The mother might well have her own version of the incident. It was an unpardonable idiocy not to have spoken to her.
Stres looked up. His deputy stood before him, waiting.
“We have committed an inexcusable blunder,” Stres said.
“About the grave? To tell you the truth, I did think of it, but—”
“What are you babbling about?” Stres interrupted. “It has nothing to do with the grave and all these ghost stories. The moment the guard told me of the old woman’s curse, I said to myself: how can we account for our failure to talk to her? How could we have been such idiots?”
“That’s a point,” said the deputy, his tone guilty. “You’re right.”
Stres stood suddenly.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We must correct that mistake as soon as possible.”
A moment later they were in the street. His deputy tried to match Stres’s long strides.
“It’s not only the curse,” Stres said. “We have to find out what the mother thinks of the affair. She might be able to shed new light on the mystery.”
“You’re right,” said the deputy, whose words, punctuated by his panting, seemed to fly off to float in the wind and fog. “Something else struck me while I was reading those letters,” he went on. “Certain things can be gleaned from them—but I won’t be able to explain until later. I’m not quite sure of it yet, and since it’s so out of the ordinary—”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Please don’t ask me to say more about it just yet. I want to finish going through the correspondence. Then I’ll give you my conclusions.”
“For the time being, the main thing is to talk to the mother,” Stres said.
“Yes, of course.”
“Especially in view of the curse the cemetery guard told us about. I don’t think he would have invented that.”
“Certainly not. He’s an honest, serious man. I know him well.”
“Yes, especially because of that curse,” Stres repeated. “For if we accept the fact that she uttered that curse, then there is no longer any reason to believe that when Doruntine said, from outside the house, ‘Mother, open the door, I’ve come back with Constantine’ (assuming she really spoke those words), the mother believed what she said. Do you follow me?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
“The trouble is, there’s another element here,” Stres went on without slowing his pace. “Did the mother rejoice to see that her son had obeyed her and had risen from the grave or was she sorry to have disturbed the dead? Or is it possible that neither of these suppositions is correct, that there was something even darker and more troubling.”
“That’s what I think,” said the deputy.
“That’s what I think too,” added Stres. “The fact that the old mother suffered so severe a shock suggests that she had just learned of a terrible tragedy.”
“Yes, just so,” said the aide. “That tallies with the suspicion I mentioned a moment ago—”
“Otherwise there’s no explanation for the mother’s collapse. Doruntine’s is understandable at bottom, for now she learns of the death of her nine brothers. The mother’s, on the other hand, is harder to understand. Wait a minute, what’s going on here?”
Stres stopped short.
“What’s going on?” he repeated. “I think I hear shouts—”
They were not far from the Vranaj house and they peered at the old house.
“I think I do, too,” said the aide.
“Oh my God,” said Stres, “I hope the old woman’s not dead! What a ghastly mistake we’ve made!”
He set off again, walking faster. His boots splashed in the puddles and the mud, trampling rotting leaves.
“What madness!” he muttered, “what madness!”
“Maybe it’s not her,” said the deputy. “It could be Doruntine.”
“What?” Stres cried, and his aide realized that the very idea of the young woman’s death was unthinkable for his chief.
They covered the remaining distance to the Vranaj house without a word. On both sides of the road tall poplars dismally shook off the last of their leaves. Now they could clearly make out the wailing of women.
“She’s dead,” said Stres. “No doubt about it.”
“Yes, the courtyard is thick with people.”
“What’s happened?” Stres asked the first person they met.
“At the Vranaj’s!” the woman said, “both are dead, mother and daughter.”
“It can’t be!”
She shrugged and walked away.
“I can’t believe it,” Stres muttered again, slowing his pace. His mouth was dry, and tasted terribly bitter.
The gates of the house yawned wide. Stres and his deputy found themselves in the courtyard surrounded by a small throng of townspeople milling about aimlessly. Stres asked someone else and got the same answer: both of them were dead. From inside came the wailing of the mourners. Both of them, Stres repeated to himself, stunned. So that was the reason for those shrill cries. He had wondered more than once on the way over: why all these cries if it’s the old woman? At her age, after all, the end was only natural. But the reality was quite different.
He felt himself being jostled on all sides. He no longer had the slightest desire to pursue the inquiry further, or even to try to think clearly about it. In truth, the idea that it might be Doruntine who was dead had assailed him several times along the road, but he had rejected it each time. He simply could not believe that both no longer lived. At times, even though the idea horrified him, it was Doruntine’s death that had seemed to him most likely, for in riding with a dead man, which was what she herself believed she had done, she had already, in some sense, accepted death.
“How did it happen?” he asked no one in particular in that whirlwind of shoulders and voices. “How did they die?”
The answer came from two or three voices at once.
“The daugher died first, then the mother.”
“Oh, Doruntine died first?”
“Yes, Captain. And for the aged mother, it’s plain that there was nothing left but to close the round of death.”
“What a tragedy! What a tragedy!” someone near them said. “All the Vranaj are gone, gone forever!”
Stres caught sight of his deputy, swept along, like himself, in the crowd. Now the mystery is complete, he thought. Mother and daughter have carried their secret to the grave.
He headed for the door of the house to go inside. “The Vranaj are no more!” another voice said. He raised his head to see who had uttered those words, but his eyes, instead of seeking out someone in the small crowd, rose unconsciously to the eaves of the house, as though the voice had come from there. For some moments he did not have the strength to tear his eyes away. Blackened and twisted by storms, jutting out from the walls, the beams of the wide porches expressed better than anything else the dark fate of the line that had lived under that roof.
CHAPTER III
From the four corners of the principality people flocked to the funeral of the Lady Mother and her daughter. It soon became apparent that this was on
e of those occasions that, for obscure reasons, people seem to need from time to time so that they may gather together and reaffirm the ties that bind them. Indeed, it had begun on the very day that people first heard of Doruntine’s return, but somehow the funeral brought to the surface all that had been whispered or imagined within the walls of every house. Now it coalesced in an endless stream of people, some on foot, others on muleback, still others in carriages, all converging on the region’s principal town.
Funeral services had been set for Sunday. The bodies lay in the great reception hall, unused since the death of the Vranaj sons. In the gleam of the candles the family’s ancient emblems, the arms and icons on the walls, as well as the masks of the dead, seemed covered with a silver dust.
Beside the majestic bronze coffins (the old mother, in her will, had set aside a large sum for her funeral), four professional mourners, seated on carved chairs, led the lamentations. Twenty hours after the deaths, the wailing of the mourners in the coppery glint of the coffins had become more regular, though more solemn. Now and then the mourners broke their keening with lines of verse. One by one or all four in unison they recalled various episodes in the saga of this unprecedented tragedy.
In a trembling voice, one of the mourners sang of Doruntine’s marriage, of her departure for a distant land. A second, her voice more tremulous still, lamented the nine boys who, so soon after the wedding, had fallen in battle against the plague-ridden army. The third took up the theme, and spoke of the grief of the mother left alone. The fourth, recalling the mother’s visit to the cemetery to put her curse upon the son who had broken his bessa, sang these words:
Constantine, may you be cursed;
Do you remember your bessa
Or was it buried with you?
Then the first mourner sang of the resurrection of the son who had been cursed and of his ride by night to the land where his married sister lived:
If it’s joy that brings you here
I’ll dress myself so fair,
If it’s grief that brings you here,
A rough-spun dress I’ll wear.
while the third responded with the dead man’s words:
Come, my sister, come as you are.
Then the fourth and first mourners, responding one to the other, sang together of the brother’s and sister’s ride, and of the astonishment of the birds they passed on the way:
Strange things have we seen,
But never the quick and the dead
Riding together thus.
The third mourner told of their arrival at the house and of Constantine’s flight toward the graveyard. Then the fourth concluded the lament, singing of Doruntine’s knocking at the door, of the words with which she told her mother that her brother had brought her home, so as to keep his promise, and of her mother’s response from within the house:
Constantine, poor girl, is dead,
And lying three years in the earth.
After a chorus of lamentations by all the women present, the mourners rested briefly, then took up their chants again. The words with which they punctuated their wailing varied from song to song. Some verses were repeated, others changed or replaced completely. In these new songs, the mourners passed rapidly over episodes recounted in the earlier chants, and sometimes lingered over a passage they had previously mentioned only fleetingly or had omitted entirely. Thus it was that one chant gave greater prominence to the background of the incident, to the great Vranaj family’s happier days, the doubts about Doruntine’s marriage to a husband from a distant land, and Constantine’s promise to bring his sister back whenever their mother wished. In another all this was recalled but briefly, and the mourners would linger instead on that dark ride, recounting the words that passed between dead brother and living sister. In yet another song all this was treated more briskly, while new details were offered, such as her brother’s quest for Doruntine as he drifted from dance to dance (for a festival was under way in Doruntine’s village at that time) and what the horseman said of the girls of the village: “Beautiful all, but their beauty left him cold.”
The people Stres had sent for the purpose took careful note of the tenor of these laments and reported to him at once. The captain sat near the window through which the cold north wind blew and, seeming numb, examined the reports, taking up his pen and underlining words or even entire lines.
“We might rack our brains night and day to explain what’s happened,” he said to his deputy. “The mourners carry on their work none the less.”
“That’s true,” his aide replied. “They have no doubt at all that he returned from the dead.”
“A legend is being born right before our eyes,” Stres said, handing him the sheaf of reports with their underlined passages. “Just look at this. Until two days ago, the songs gave little detail, but since last night, and especially today, they have taken shape as a well-defined legend.”
The deputy cast an eye over the pages of underlined verses and words, dotted with brief marginal notes. In places Stres had written question marks and exclamation points.
“Which doesn’t mean that we can’t get something out of the mourners anyway,” he said with the hint of a smile.
“That’s right.”
In the meantime, people known and unknown flocked to the funeral from all over. There were old friends of the family, relatives by marriage, titled personages and high officials, members of the princely family, and representatives of the Church. August dignitaries of other principalities and counties near and far also came. Count Thopia, the Lady Mother’s old friend, unable to make the journey (whether for reasons of ill health or because of a certain chill that had arisen between him and the prince, no one could say), had sent one of his sons to represent him.
The burial took place on Sunday morning as planned. The road was too narrow to accommodate the crowd, and the long cortege made its way with some difficulty to the church. Many were compelled to cross the ditches and cut through the fields. A good number of these people had been guests at Doruntine’s wedding not so long ago, and the doleful tolling of the death knell reminded them of that day. The road was the same from the Vranaj house to the church, the same bells tolled, but on this day with a very different sound. There had been almost as many guests at the wedding as now marched in the funeral procession, and then as now, many accompanied the cortege along the edges of the road.
Between Doruntine’s marriage and her burial, her nine brothers had died. That was like a nightmare of which no more than a confused memory remains. It had lasted two weeks, the chain of calamity seemingly endless, as though death would be satisfied only when it had closed the door of the house of Vranaj forever. After the first two deaths, which happened on a single day, it seemed as if fate had at last spent its rage against the family, and no one could have imagined what the morrow would bring. No one thought that two more brothers, borne home wounded the evening before, would die just three days later. Their wounds had not seemed dangerous, and the members of the household had thought them far less serious than the afflictions of the two who had died. But when they were found dead on that third day, the family, already in mourning, this new grief compounding the old, was struck by an unendurable pain, a kind of remorse at the neglect with which the two wounded brothers had been treated, at the way they had been abandoned (in fact they had not been abandoned at all, but such was the feeling now that they were dead). They were mad with sorrow—the aged mother, the surviving brothers, the young widowed brides. They remembered the dead men’s wounds, which in hindsight seemed to gape. They thought of the care they ought to have lavished on them, care which they now felt they had failed to provide, and they were stricken with guilt. The death of the wounded men was doubly painful, for they felt that they had held two lives in their hands and had let them slip away. A few days later, when death visited their household again with an even heavier tread, carrying off the five remaining brothers, the aged mother and the young widows sank into despair. God himself
, people said, doesn’t strike twice in the same place, but calamity had struck the house of Vranaj as it had never done to anyone. Only then did people hear that the Albanians had been fighting against an army sick with the plague, and that the dead, the wounded, and most of those who had returned from the war alive would probably suffer the very same fate.
In three months the great house of