The Ghost Rider

  “What is it?”

  “He has confessed,” the man answered, breathless. “He has confessed!”

  He has confessed, Stres repeated to himself. So those were the words that had sounded to him like uhs and ehs. He has confessed!

  Stres, still motionless, waited until the messenger reached him. He was breathing hard.

  “God be praised, he has confessed,” the messenger said again, waving his lantern as if to make his words more understandable. “Scarcely had he seen the instruments of torture when he broke down.”

  Stres looked at him blankly.

  “Are you coming back? I’ll light the way. Will you question him now?”

  Stres did not answer. In fact, that was what the regulation called for. You were supposed to interrogate the prisoner immediately after his confession, while he was still exhausted, without giving him time to recover. And it was the middle of the night, the best time.

  The man with the lantern stood two paces away, still panting.

  I must not let him recover, Stres said to himself. Of course. Don’t allow him even an instant of respite. Don’t let him collect himself. That’s right, he thought, that’s exactly right as far as he’s concerned, but what about me? Don’t I too need to recover my strength?

  And suddenly he realised that the interrogation of the prisoner might well be more trying for him than for the suspect.

  “No,” he said, “I won’t interrogate him tonight. I need some rest.” And he turned his back on the man with the lantern.

  The next morning, when Stres went down to the cell with his aide, he detected what he thought was a guilty smile on the prisoner’s face.

  “Yes, truly I would have done better to confess from the start,” he said before Stres could ask him a single question. “That’s what I had thought to do, in any case, for after all I have committed no crime, and no one has ever yet been condemned for travelling or wandering about in a woman’s company. Had I told the truth from the beginning, I would have spared myself this torture, and instead of lying in this dungeon, I would have been at home, where my family is waiting for me. The problem is that once I found myself caught up in this maelstrom of lies – unwittingly, quite by chance – I couldn’t extricate myself. Like a man who, after telling some small, inoffensive lie, sinks deeper and deeper instead of taking it back right away, I too believed that I could escape this vexed affair by inventing things which, far from delivering me from my first lie, plunged me further into it. It was all the ruckus about this young woman’s journey that got me into this mess. So let me repeat that if I did not confess at once it was only because when I realised what a furore this whole story had caused, and how deeply it had upset everyone, I suddenly felt like a child who has shifted some object the moving of which is a frightful crime in the eyes of the grownups. On the morning of that day – I’ll tell you everything in detail in just a minute – when I saw that the homecoming of this young woman had been so, so – how shall I put it? – so disturbing to everyone, especially when everyone suddenly started running around so feverishly asking ‘Who was she with?’ and ‘Who brought her back?’, my instinct was to slip away, to get myself out of the whole affair, in which my role, after all, was in any event quite accidental. And that is what I tried to do. Anyway, now I’ll tell you the whole story from the beginning. I think you want to know everything, in detail, isn’t that right, officer?”

  Stres stood, as if frozen, near the rough wooden table.

  “I’m listening,” he said. “Tell me everything you think you ought to.”

  The suspect seemed a little uneasy at Stres’s indifferent air.

  “I don’t know, this is the first time I’ve ever been interrogated, but from what I’ve heard, the investigator is supposed to ask questions first, then the prisoner answers, isn’t that how it works? But you …”

  “Tell me what you have to say,” Stres said. “I’m listening.”

  The prisoner shifted on his pile of straw.

  “Are your shackles bothering you?” Stres asked. “Do you want me to have them taken off?”

  “Yes, if that’s possible.”

  Stres motioned to his deputy to release him.

  “Thank you,” said the prisoner.

  He seemed even less self-assured when his hands were freed, and he looked up at Stres once more, still hoping that he would be questioned. But once he realised that his hope was futile, he began speaking in a low voice, his earlier liveliness gone.

  “As I told you yesterday, I am an itinerant seller of icons, and it was because of my trade that I happened to make the acquaintance of this young woman. I am from Malta, but I spend most of the year on the road in the Balkans and other parts of Europe. Please stop me if I’m giving you too much detail, for as I said, this is my first interrogation and I’m not sure of the rules. Anyway, I sell icons, and you can well imagine the taste women have for these objects. That was how I came to meet this woman Doruntine in Bohemia one day. She told me that she was a foreigner, originally from Albania, that she had married into a Bohemian family. When I mentioned that I had spent some time in her country, she could not contain her emotion. She said that I was the first person from there that she had met. She asked whether I had any news about what was happening there, whether some calamity had occurred, for none of her family had come to see her. I had heard talk of a war or a plague – in any case a scourge of some kind that had ravaged your country – and after telling her that, I added, hoping to set her mind at rest, that it had happened a long time ago, nearly three years before. Then she cried out, saying: ‘But it is exactly three years since I have had any news! Oh woe is me! Surely something terrible must have happened!’ Then, overcome, her voice broken by sobs, she told me that she had married a man from this land three years before, that her mother and brothers had not approved of her marrying so far away, but that one of her brothers, whose name was Kostandin, had insisted on it. He had given his mother his word, his besa, as you Albanians now call one’s pledged word – though it was from her lips that I first heard the expression – promising to bring her daughter back from that far country whenever she wanted him to; that weeks and months had passed, and then years, but no one from her family had come to see her, not even Kostandin, and she missed them so much she couldn’t bear it, she felt so alone there among foreigners, and what with missing them so much and feeling so alone, she had begun to feel great anxiety that some catastrophe had happened at home. And since I had told her that there had in fact been a war or a plague, she was sure that something terrible had happened, that her forebodings were well founded. Then she said that she had been thinking of going to see her family herself, but she could not disobey her husband who, though he had promised to take her there, since her brothers seemed to have forsaken her, was too busy with his own affairs to undertake such a long journey.

  “As I listened to her speak – in tears she looked even more beautiful – I was suddenly gripped by such a violent desire for her that without a moment’s thought I said that if she agreed I could take her to her family myself. My trade has accustomed me to long journeys, and I told her that as simply as if I had offered to take her to the next town, but she thought the idea mad. It was only natural for it to seem insane to her at first, yet curiously, the passion with which she initially rejected my proposal gave me hope, for I had the impression that her protest was meant not so much to persuade me that the idea was really insane as to convince herself. The more she said, ‘You’re mad, and I am madder still for listening to you,’ the more I felt my desire increase, along with my hope that she would yield. So on the next day, when, after a sleepless night, she told me – pale, her voice dull – that she did not see what she could say to her husband if she agreed to come with me, I told myself that I had won. I was convinced that the main thing was to set out alone with her on the roads of Europe. After that, God would provide! Nothing else seemed to matter. I suggested that we didn’t have to tell him, for at bottom it was he w
ho was forcing her to act in that way. Had she herself not told me that he had promised to take her to her mother, but that he was kept from doing so by his business? All she had to do, then, was to leave without telling him anything. ‘But how can I, how can I?’ she asked feverishly. ‘How can I explain it to him afterwards? Alone with a stranger!’ And she blushed. Of course not, I said, you cannot tell him that you made the journey with a stranger, God forbid! ‘Then what can I do?’ she asked. And I told her: ‘I’ve thought about it, and what you must do is leave him a letter saying that your brother came to fetch you in great haste, for mis fortune has befallen your family.’ ‘What misfortune?’ she interrupted. ‘You, stranger, you know what it is, but you don’t want to tell me. Oh, my brother must be dead, otherwise he would have come to see me!’

  “Two days passed and still she hesitated. I was afraid of being found out and tried to meet her secretly. My desire became uncontrollable. At last she agreed. It was a gloomy late afternoon when she came in haste to the crossroads where I had told her that I would wait for her one last time. I helped her to the crupper and we set off without a word. We rode for a long time, until we felt that we were far enough away that they would not be able to trace us. We spent the night in an out-of-the-way inn and set off again before dawn. I need hardly tell you that she was in a constant state of anxiety. I comforted her as well as I could, and we pressed on. We spent the second night in another inn even farther off the beaten track than the first, in a region I don’t even know the name of. I’ll spare you the details of my attempts to win her favours. Her pride, and especially her constant anxiety, held her back. But I used every means, from passionate entreaty to threats to abandon her, to leave her alone on the high plateaus of Europe. And so, on the fourth night she gave in. I was so drunk with passion, so giddy, that by the next morning I hardly knew where we were or where we were going. If I am giving useless detail, please stop me. We spent several strange days and nights. We slept in inns that we passed on the way, then we took up our journey again. We sold some of her jewels to pay our expenses. I wanted the journey to last as long as possible, but she was impatient. The closer we came to the Albanian border, the greater was her anxiety. ‘What could have happened there?’ she asked from time to time. ‘What of that war, that plague?’ We asked often at the inns, but received only evasive answers. There had indeed been talk of great conflict in Albanian territory, but the reports differed about when it had happened. Some said it had not been war, but plague; others held that the disease hadn’t stricken Albania, but some more distant land. Meanwhile, as we neared the Albanian border, the answers grew more definite. Without telling her, I tried to find out more while she rested at the inns. Here everyone knew that war and plague had allied themselves, and had decimated the men of Albania. Once we were in the country’s northern principalities, we tried to avoid the major roads and inns, travelling mostly by night. We had now reached the principalities neighbouring her own, and she insisted that we do nothing to call attention to ourselves. We cut across fallow fields, often leaving the roads altogether. We made love wherever we could. In one of the few inns in which we were forced to take shelter from foul weather, I learned the terrible truth about her brothers. Everyone was talking about the great sorrow that had befallen that illustrious house. All her brothers were dead, Kostandin among them. The innkeeper knew the whole story. I began to fear that she would be recognised. As we came closer to her home, we strained our wits to find some acceptable explanation for her arrival. Believing her brothers still alive, she was more frightened than she need have been, whereas for me, knowing the truth as I did, things seemed simpler. In any event, it was easier to account to an old woman stunned by misfortune than to nine brothers.

  “She was beside herself in her anxiety about what she could say to her brothers and her mother to explain her arrival. What would she answer when they asked her, ‘Who brought you back?’ Would she tell the truth? Would she lie? And, if so, what would she say?

  “So I found myself compelled to tell her a part of the truth; that is, of the terrible misfortune. I gave her to understand that her brother Kostandin, the one who had promised to bring her back, had died, together with some of his brothers.

  “You can well imagine that she went mad with grief, but neither the fatigue of the journey nor her sorrow lessened her worry over the explanation she would have to give for her sudden arrival. It was I who had the idea of explaining her journey in terms of some supernatural intervention. Though I racked my brain, I could find no better explanation. ‘There is no other way,’ I told her. ‘You have to repeat the lie you’ve already used with your husband. You’ll say that Kostandin brought you back.’ ‘But I was able to lie to my husband,’ she replied, ‘because he believed my brother was still alive. How can I say the same thing about someone they know is dead?’ ‘But it’ll be even easier,’ I told her, ‘just because he isn’t alive. You’ll say that it was your brother who brought you, and they can take it any way they like. What I mean is, they have only to imagine that it was his ghost who brought you back. After all, didn’t he promise that, dead or alive, he would fetch you? Everyone knows the exact words of his promise, and they will believe you.’

  “Since I knew that her mother alone was still alive, I found the matter quite simple, but she, thinking as she did that at least half of her brothers were alive, scarcely hoped to be believed. But, like it or not, she had to yield to my reasoning. There was no other way. We had no time to think of a more plausible explanation, and in any case neither of us was thinking clearly by then.

  “And so, the last night came, the night of 11 October, if I am not mistaken, when, slipping through the darkness like ghosts, we came up to the house. I won’t try to tell you about her state of mind – I couldn’t describe it. It was past midnight. As we had decided, I stood out of sight, hiding in the half-darkness as she approached the door. But she was in no condition to walk. So I had to lead her to the door where, her hand trembling, she knocked, or more accurately she rested her hand on the knocker, for it was I in fact who moved her hand, cold as a corpse’s. I wanted to run off at once, but she was terrified and wouldn’t let go of me. In order to calm her, I stroked her hair with my other hand one last time, but at that instant, God be praised, she not only let go but pushed me away in terror. I heard the old woman’s voice from behind the door: ‘Who is it?’ then her answer: ‘Open, Mother, it’s me, Doruntine,’ then the old woman’s voice again: ‘What did you say?’ I had moved away and could not hear the other words clearly, the more so because they were increasingly faint and interrupted with exclamations.

  “I made my way back to the highway, to the place where I had left my horse and, mounting, I wandered awhile looking for shelter for the night. We had agreed to meet secretly in two days, but at that point I knew that I would never see her again. The next day and in the days that followed, as I saw the turmoil caused by her arrival, I became convinced not only that I would never see her again but that I had better leave these parts as quickly as possible. I had in the meantime heard of the orders you had issued, and was sure that I was guilty of something impious which, however unaware of it I may have been, might cost me dear indeed. I wanted to slip away as quickly as possible, but how? All the inns, all the relay stations, had been alerted to arrest me on sight. At first I thought of turning myself in and confessing: yes, it was I who brought this woman back, forgive me if I did something wrong, but if I did, it was without realising it. Then I changed my mind. Why take such a risk? With a bit of skill I could evade the traps that were set for me and be quit of the whole affair. Yet I had a premonition that the honeymoon I had spent with that young woman would turn out to be deadly poisonous. I moved about very cautiously, far from the roads and inns, and mostly by night, like a fox in the woods, as people say. A thousand pardons, I’m getting lost in pointless details again … I thought that if I could cross the border of your principality I would be out of danger. I didn’t know that the neighbouri
ng principalities and counties had also been notified. And that’s how I came to grief. I caught a cold while fording a stream by the baneful name of Ujana e keqe – I think that was the name, the ‘Evil Uyana’ – and I am not quite sure what happened to me next. I was burning with fever, and I remember nothing until I came to and found myself bound hand and foot in an inn. And that’s it, Captain. I don’t know if I have explained everything properly, but you can ask me any detail at all, and I’ll tell you everything. I’m sorry that I didn’t behave as I should have from the very beginning, but I hope you’ll understand my situation. I’ll do everything I can to make amends by answering all your questions honestly.”

  At last he fell silent, and he sat unblinking under Stres’s inspection. His mouth was dry, but he dared not ask for water. Stres stared at him for a long moment. Then, as he opened his mouth to speak, a smile crossed his face like a flash of lightning.

  “Is that the truth?” Stres asked.

  “Yes, Captain. The whole truth.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. The whole truth, Captain.”

  Stres rose and, his neck stiff as a board, slowly turned his head towards his deputy and the two guards.

  “Put him to the torture,” he ordered.

  Not only the prisoner, but the three other men as well, stiffened in astonishment.

  “Torture?” asked his deputy, as though afraid he had misunderstood.

  “Yes,” said, Stres, his tone icy. “Torture. And don’t look at me like that. I know what I’m doing.”

  He turned on his heels, but at that instant, behind him, the prisoner began to scream, “Captain, no! No! My God, what is this? Why, why?”