Stres had not been particularly impressed by this aspect of Constantine’s personality, possibly because he himself harbored no special respect for religion, an attitude that was in fact not uncommon among the functionaries of the principality. And for good reason: the struggle between Catholicism and Orthodoxy since time immemorial had greatly weakened religion in the Albanian principalities. The region lay just on the border between the two religions, and for various reasons, essentially political and economic, the principalities leaned now toward one, now toward the other. Half of them were now Catholic, but that state of affairs was by no means permanent, and each of the two churches hoped to win spheres of influence from the other. Stres was convinced that the prince himself cared little for religious matters. He had allies among the Catholic princes and enemies among the Orthodox. The principality had once been Catholic, turning Orthodox only half a century before, and the Roman Church had not given up hope of bringing it back to the fold.
Like most functionaries, Stres did his best not to be drawn into religious issues, and he never took the edicts of the Church too seriously. Indeed, he might well have sought some excuse not to respond to the archbishop’s summons were it not for the fact that the prince, eager to avoid poisoning relations with Byzantium, had recently issued an important circular urging all officials of the principality to treat the Church with respect. The circular emphasized that this attitude was dictated by the higher interests of the State and that, consequently, any action at variance with the spirit of the directive would be punished.
All this passed through Stres’s mind in snatches as his glance embraced the bleak expanse of the plain. The October cold filled the air. Suddenly Stres shivered. Behind a bush several paces off the road he caught sight of the skeleton of a horse standing out in all its whiteness. It was a section of the ribcage and the backbone; the skull was missing. My God, Stres thought to himself a little further on, what if that had been his horse?
He drew his cloak tighter around him, trying to drive the image from his mind. He felt sad, but it was not a painful sadness. The shape of his melancholy mood had been softened in the great stretch of plain, in which winter’s approach could be read. What possessed you to come out of the earth, what message did you mean to bring us? Stres was astonished at the question, which had risen like a sigh from the depths of his being. He shook his head as if to clear his mind. He who had laughed so derisively at everyone who had believed that story! He smiled bitterly. What nonsense! he said to himself, spurring his horse. What a gloomy afternoon! he thought a moment later. Dusk was falling as he urged his mount into a quicker trot. All the rest of the way to the village he strove to purge his mind of anything connected with the case. He arrived in the dark of night. The lights of the houses shone feebly here and there. The barking of dogs in the distance broke the night silence from time to time. Stres guided his horse not homeward, but toward the town’s main street. He had no idea why. Soon he reached the vacant lot that stretched before the house of the Lady Mother. There was no other house to be seen. The dark and dismal mass of the great abandoned building loomed at the far end of a desolate field studded with tall trees that now, in the dark, seemed to droop even more sharply than they really did. Stres approached the doorway, gazed for a moment at the darker rectangles of the windows, then turned his horse in the direction from which he had come. He found himself among the trees. A man standing where he now stood could be seen from the door. The night of October eleventh must have been more or less like this: no moon, but not too dark. It must have been here that Doruntine parted from the unknown horseman. When her mother opened the door, he was probably riding off, but perhaps she had already seen something from the window. Something that caused that fatal shock. Stres turned his horse again. What discovery had the old woman made in the half-darkness? That the man riding off was her dead son? (It was my brother Constantine who brought me back, Doruntine had told her.) Or perhaps, on the contrary, that it was not her son and that her daughter had deceived her. But that would not explain her shock. Or perhaps, just before they separated, Doruntine and the unknown rider had embraced one last time in the dark—Enough! Stres said to himself sharply, and turned his horse back toward the road. At the very last moment, with the furtive movement of a man trying to catch a glimpse of someone spying on him in the darkness, he turned his head toward the closed door once more.
CHAPTER IV
The day after his return from the Monastery of the Three Crosses Stres set to work again to unravel the mystery of Doruntine’s return. He drafted a new directive, more detailed than the first, not only ordering the arrest of all suspects but also offering a reward to anyone who helped capture the impostor, whether directly or by providing information leading to his arrest. He also instructed his deputy to make a list of all those who had been out of town between the end of September and the eleventh of October, and to discretely look into the activities of every person on the list. In the meantime, he ordered one of his men to set out at once for the far reaches of Bohemia, in order to investigate on the spot the circumstances of Doruntine’s departure.
The man had not yet left when a second directive, even more compelling than the first, came from the prince’s chancellery demanding that the entire matter be brought to light as soon as possible. Stres understood at once that the archbishop must have been in touch with the prince and that the latter, aware of his captain’s reluctance to obey Church injunctions, had decided that a fresh personal intervention was required. The directive emphasized that the tense political situation of recent times, in particular relations with Byzantium, demanded discretion and understanding on the part of all officials of the prince.
Meanwhile, the archbishop never left the Monastery of the Three Crosses. Why on earth did he hunker there, refusing to budge, Stres wondered. The old fox had obviously decided to stick around and keep an eye on things.
Stres felt more and more nervous. His aide was coming to the end of all that research in the archives. His eyes bleary from the long sessions of reading, he went around looking dreamy. You seem sunk in deep meditation, Stres observed jokingly at a break in his own hectic schedule. Who knows what you’re going to pull out of those archives for us? Instead of smiling, the deputy looked strangely at Stres, as if to say: you may think it’s a laughing matter, but what I pull out of them will take your breath away.
Sometimes, walking to the window to gaze out at the broad plain, Stres wondered if the truth about Doruntine’s tale might not be completely different from what they all assumed, if that macabre ride with an unknown horseman was in fact no more than the product of her own sick mind. After all, no one had seen that horseman, and Doruntine’s old mother, who had opened the door for her and who was the only witness, had made no such assertion. Good God, he said to himself, could it be that the whole thing never happened? Perhaps Doruntine had somehow learned of the disaster that had befallen her family and, driven mad by the shock, had set out for home on her own. In a state of such deep distress she might have taken much time indeed—months, even years—to complete a journey she believed had taken a single night. That might well explain the flocks of stars she thought she saw streaming across the sky. Besides, someone who believed that the ten-day-and-night journey from Bohemia (for that was the least it could take) had lasted but a single night might well feel that a hundred nights were one. And of course a person in such a state might fall prey to all sorts of hallucinations.
In vain Stres sought to recall Doruntine’s face as it had looked when he saw her for the first time, so that he might detect some sign of mental illness. But her image eluded him. In the end he resolved to drive the theory of madness from his mind, for he feared it might dampen his zeal for the investigation. It will all be cleared up soon enough, he told himself. As soon as my man comes back from Bohemia.
Thirty-six hours after the man’s departure, Stres was informed that some relatives of Doruntine’s husband had just arrived. At first it was rumored that her
husband himself had come, but it was soon clear that the visitors were his two first cousins.
After dispatching a second messenger to overtake the first and tell him to turn back, Stres hurried to meet the new arrivals, who had taken lodgings at the inn at the crossroads.
The two young men were so alike in bearing and appearance that they might have been taken for twins, though they were not. They were still tired from their long journey and had not yet had time to wash or change their clothes when Stres arrived. He could not help staring at their dust-covered hair, and looked at them in so odd a way that one, with just the hint of a guilty smile, passed his fingers through his hair and spoke a few words in an incomprehensible tongue.
“What language do they speak?” Stres asked his deputy, who had arrived at the inn shortly before him.
“God knows,” was the reply. “It sounds to me like German laced with Spanish. I sent someone to the Old Monastery to fetch one of the monks who speaks foreign languages. He shouldn’t be long.”
“I have a hard time making myself understood with the little Latin I know,” said the innkeeper. “And they massacre it too.”
“Perhaps they need to wash and rest a bit,” Stres said to the innkeeper. “Tell them to go upstairs if they like, until the interpreter gets here.”
The innkeeper passed on Stres’s message in his fractured Latin. The visitors nodded agreement and, one behind the other, began climbing the wooden stairs, which creaked as if they might collapse. Stres could not help staring at their dust-covered cloaks as he watched them go up.
“Did they say anything?” he asked when the staircase had stopped creaking. “Do they know that Doruntine is dead?”
“They learned of her death and her mother’s while on their way here,” the deputy answered, “and surely other things as well.”
Stres began pacing back and forth in the large hall, which also served as the reception room. The others—his aide, the innkeeper, and a third man—watched him come and go without daring to break the silence.
“This interpreter is taking his time,” Stres said three or four times, though he had not been waiting long.
The monk from the Old Monastery arrived half an hour later. Stres immediately sent the innkeeper to fetch the foreigners. One behind the other they descended the wooden stairs, whose creaking seemed more and more sinister to Stres’s ear. Their hair, free of most of the journey’s dust, looked quite fair.
Stres turned to the monk and spoke.
“Tell them that I am Captain Stres, responsible for keeping order in this district. I believe they have come to find out what happened to Doruntine, have they not?”
The monk translated these words for the strangers, but they looked blankly at one another, seeming not to understand.
“What language are you speaking?” Stres asked the monk.
“I’ll try another,” he said without answering the question.
He spoke to them again. The two strangers leaned forward with the pained expression of men straining to understand what is being said to them. One of them spoke a few words, and this time it was the monk whose face took on the troubled expression. These exchanges of words and grimaces continued for some time until finally the monk spoke several long sentences to which the strangers now listened with a nod of great satisfaction.
“Finally found it,” said the monk. “They speak a German dialect mixed with Slavonic. I think we’ll be able to understand one another.”
Stres spoke immediately.
“You have come just in time,” he said. “I believe you have heard what happened to your cousin’s wife. We are all dismayed.”
The strangers’ faces darkened.
“When you arrived I had already sent someone to your country to find out the circumstances of her leaving there,” Stres went on. “I hope that we may be able to learn something from you, as you may learn something from us. I believe that all of us have an equal interest in finding out the truth.”
The two strangers nodded in agreement.
“When we left,” said one of them, “we knew nothing save that our cousin’s wife had gone off suddenly, under rather strange circumstances, with her brother Constantine.”
He stopped and waited for the monk, who kept his light-colored eyes fixed upon him, to translate his words.
“While en route,” the stranger continued, “when we were still far from your country, we learned that our cousin’s wife had indeed arrived at her parents’ home, but that her brother Constantine, with whom she said she had left, had departed this life three years ago.”
“Yes,” said Stres, “that is correct.”
“On the way we also learned of the old woman’s death, news that grieved us deeply.”
The stranger lowered his eyes. A silence followed, during which Stres motioned to the innkeeper and two or three onlookers to go away.
“You wouldn’t have a room where we could talk, would you?” Stres asked the owner.
“Yes, of course, Captain. There is a quiet place just over there. Come.”
They filed into a small room. Stres invited them to sit on carved wooden chairs.
“We had but one goal when we set out,” one of the two strangers continued, “and that was to satisfy ourselves about her flight. In other words, first of all to make sure that she had really gotten to her own family, and second to learn the reason for her flight, to find out whether or not she meant to come back, among other things that go without saying in incidents of this kind.”
As the monk translated, the stranger stared at Stres as if trying to guess whether the captain grasped the full meaning of his words.
“For an escapade of this kind, as I’m sure you must realize, arouses. . . .”
“Naturally,” said Stres. “I quite understand.”
“Now, however,” the visitor continued, “another matter has arisen: this question of the dead brother. Our cousin, Doruntine’s husband, knows nothing of this, and you may well imagine that this development gives rise to yet another mystery. If Doruntine’s brother has been dead for three years, then who was the man who brought her here?”
“Just so,” Stres replied. “I have been asking myself that question for several days now, and many others have asked it too.”
He opened his mouth to continue, but suddenly lost his train of thought. In his mind, he knew not why, he saw in a flash the white bones of the horse lying on the plain that afternoon, as if they had tumbled there from some troubled dream.
“Did anyone see the horseman?” he asked.
“Where? What horseman?” the two strangers said, together.
“The one believed to have been her brother, the man who brought Doruntine here.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, there were women who happened to be close by. They said they saw a horseman near our cousin’s house, and that Doruntine hurried to mount behind him. And then there’s also the note she left.”
“That’s true,” Stres said. “She told me about a note. Have you read it?”
“We brought it with us,” said the second stranger, the one who had spoken less.
“What? You have the note with you?”
Stres could scarcely believe his ears, but the stranger was already rummaging through his leather satchel, from which he finally took out a letter. Stres leaned forward to examine it.
“It’s her handwriting, all right,” said the deputy, peering over Stres’s shoulder. “I recognize it.”
Stres, his eyes wide, gaped at the crude letters, which seemed to have been formed by an awkward hand. The text, in a foreign language, was incomprehensible. One word, the last, had been crossed out.
“What does it say?” asked Stres, leaning even closer. Only one word was recognizable, her brother’s name, spelled differently than in Albanian: Cöstanthin. “What do these other words mean?” Stres asked.
“I am going away with my brother Constantine,” the monk translated.
“And the word that’s scratched out?”
br /> “It means ‘if’.”
“So: ‘I am going away with my brother Constantine. And if . . .’,” Stres repeated. “What was the ‘if’ for, and why did she cross it out?”
Was she trying to hide something, Stres thought suddenly. Looking for a way to camouflage the truth? Or was this a final attempt to reveal something? But then why did she suddenly change her mind?
“It could be that she found it hard to explain in this language,” said the monk, without taking his eyes from the paper. “The other words, too, are full of mistakes.”
All were silent.
Stres’s thoughts were focused on one point: he finally had a genuine piece of evidence. From all the fog-shrouded anguish there had at last come a piece of paper bearing words written in her own hand. And the horseman had been seen by those women, so he too was real.
“What day did this happen?” he asked. “Do you remember?”
“It was September 29th,” one of them answered.
Now the chronology in turn was coming out of that blanket of fog. One very long night, Doruntine had said, with flocks of stars streaming across the sky. But in fact it was a journey of twelve, or more exactly thirteen, days.
Stres felt troubled. The concrete, incontrovertible evidence with which he had just been provided—Doruntine’s note, the horseman who had taken her up behind him, the thirteen-day journey—far from giving him any sense that he was finally making some progress and stood on solid ground, left him with no more than a feeling of great emptiness. It seemed that coming closer to the unreal, far from diminishing it, made it even more terrifying. Stres was not sure quite what to say.