The Ghost Rider (13 page)

Stres butted in to remind them politely that this was quite at odds with the ancient
kanun
the Albanians had inherited from their Illyrian ancestors, whose customary laws, as everyone knew, had been very similar to those of the Ancient Greeks, who had given them the very word
kanun
. Just a year ago he’d read a stage play written by a Greek fifteen hundred years before, and he had been stunned by it …

They knew all this, just as they knew that law courts had superseded the
kanun
long before. But they thought that humankind had been inadequately prepared for the transition. They reckoned that in their own era it was more appropriate to renovate the old
kanun
than to adopt a new system of government. The
besa
was a good example …

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 Kostandin 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
besa
” 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
besa
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 the 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
besa
. No one guilty of such an offence could leave the territory of the village alive. Another village, quite far from the first, asked the prince to grant them the same right, on terms that were no less curious: the villagers requested that protection of their
besa
cover not only their own place of habitation, but also a sector of the highway, including two inns and a mill. But the prince was afraid that if he allowed the new rule to spread it would interfere with traffic along the highway and complicate the administration of that part of the country, and so he refused.

That was what the
besa
meant. That was how Kostandin saw it. He considered the
besa
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 Kostandin on those memorable afternoons they used to pass at the New Inn, where he went on and on about
Albanianness
. Perorating, or as some wits put it,
albanating
. “So that’s how it is,” he would say, “for my part, I shall give my mother my
besa
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
besa
would reign supreme. In that world everything could be different.”

“Nevertheless, you live in our world, in this existing world,” said Stres.

“Yes. But a part of our being, perhaps the best part, lies in the other.”

“In the other,” he repeated softly. He was now the only one suppressing a smile.

They took no notice of it, or pretended not to, and went on discussing Kostandin’s other ideas, the reasons why he held that this reorganisation 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 vice 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, eternal and universal structures 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, it 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 imperatively or it would be wiped from the face of the earth. Thus spoke Kostandin. And he held that this new organisation would begin with the
besa
.

“Then of course,” Stres said, “Kostandin’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 – except Kostandin!”

“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?”

“But that is of no importance, Captain Stres. That is completely secondary. The essential thing is that it was he who brought Doruntine here.”

“Maybe it’s this business about two worlds that prevents us from understanding one another,” Stres said. “What is a lie in one may be the truth in the other, is that the idea?”

“Maybe … Maybe.”

Meanwhile, the country seethed as it awaited the great assembly. Words, calculations, forebodings and news fluttered in the wind like yellowing leaves before a storm, falling to earth only to be raised anew. Drenched in road dirt or whitened by rime, messengers began cropping up all over the place, even while the date of the great assembly remained unknown. Some believed it would happen before Easter, others said straight after. But once folk had become convinced that it would be around Easter time, they
claimed it was no coincidence that the Lord had set the date close to that of the Day of Resurrection: he wanted to test their souls one more time, to press them and torture them for who knows what ancient sin.

Turning his head towards the window to see if day had yet broken, Stres noticed a fine blond hair on his pillow. What’s that? he wondered, but sleep dragged him down before he could think about it any further.

When he woke up properly later on it was already broad daylight. He looked at his pillow as if trying to find something, then got out of bed noiselessly and went over to the window, where he inspected the catch to check whether or not it had been forced during the night. He could not have said whether he had just imagined Doruntine’s grave opening up and her hair waving in the wind or whether he had seen such a thing in a dream. Then he glanced at his pillow again. Really, his nerves must be in a terrible state if it took only a moment for his mind to wander off in such directions. He was so convinced he had seen that hair that he stopped to look at the house over the street, where, a few weeks previously, he had seen a girl brushing her hair at the window. If it had been summertime, and windows had been left open, he could have
believed that the wind had just blown one of her hairs into his bedroom.

“Stres?” his wife said, still drowsing. “You’re up at the crack of dawn once again. Brrr …”

She mumbled something incomprehensible but instead of then burying her head under the pillows as she usually did when her husband woke her up, she propped herself on an elbow and shot him a pitying glance:

“They’ll be the death you with their … what do you call them … with their
conferences
!”

Said by his wife, “conferences” sounded just as foreign to him as the mumbling that had preceded it.

“Conferences,” he muttered to himself, as if trying to summon up the word’s original meaning. It was an everyday kind of word, but there was an unprecedented air of horror hanging over it now. A horror that, unlike many others, did not spring up from the depths of the past but was prompted by a vision of the future.

Stres kept his eyes on the grey horizon. These days, his mind turned more and more towards the future, but far from giving him any relief, it only made him more distraught.

He left the house an hour later and from outside he glanced up at the window whence the blond hair had perhaps floated, then strode rapidly to his office.

“What’s new?” he asked his deputy.

The aide listed the latest events that he had received note of during the night.

“Nothing else?” Stres inquired. “Nothing unusual? No graves profaned? These days anything can happen, can’t it?”

His deputy reported that he had received no information about any acts of that kind.

“Really? Well then, take me to the Old Monastery. We’ll see how the preparations are coming along.”

It was in an inner courtyard of the Old Monastery, large enough to hold some two thousand people, that the great assembly was to be held. Carpenters spent several days setting up wooden grandstands for the guests and a platform from which Stres would speak. Tarpaulins were strung up in case of rain.

The meeting was to take place on the first Sunday in April, but by mid-week most of the region’s inns were full, not only those closest to the Old Monastery, but also the ones along the highway. Guests, clergy and laymen alike, poured in from the four corners of the principality and from neighbouring principalities, dukedoms and counties. Visitors were expected from the farthest principalities, and envoys from the Holy Patriarchate in the Empire’s capital.

As they watched the carriages parade down the highway – most of their doors decorated with coats of arms, the passengers dressed in gaudy clothes often embroidered with the same coats of arms as those on their coaches – the people, chatting with one another, learned more in those few days about princely courts, ceremonies, dignitaries and religious and secular hierarchies than they had in their whole lifetime. It was only then that they came to realise the full import, the truly enormous significance, of this whole affair, which, at first, on that night of 11 October, had been considered simply a ghost story.

Stres and his deputy went in through an ill-lit side
door. Once the preparations had been completed, the carpenters had gathered up their tools and left. The open stands were wet beneath the steady drizzle. Stres went up to the podium where he was going to speak and stared at the empty benches.

He stared at them for a long time, then suddenly turned his head sharply right and left, as though someone had called him or he had heard shouts. The hint of a bitter smile crossed his face; then, with long strides, he walked away.

Finally the long-awaited day dawned. It was cold, one of those days that seems all the more icy when you realise it’s Sunday. The high clouds were motionless, as if moored to the heavens. From early morning the monastery’s inner courtyard was packed with spectators – except for the stands reserved for high-ranking officials and guests – and the innumerable latecomers, hoping to be able to hear something, had no choice but to assemble outside in the empty field that ringed the walls. They had to learn, at all costs, what was said at the gathering, and quickly, for they formed the first circle the news must reach so that it might spread in waves throughout the world.

Bundled up in grey goatskins to protect themselves from the cold and especially the rain, they watched the arrival of the endless procession of horses and carriages from which the invited guests descended. They looked glum already, as if what was about to flood into the arena and invade their very breasts would turn out to be worse than a whirlwind. But no matter. They had all come here to confront a scourge – or else a divine revelation.

In the courtyard the stands were gradually filling up. Last to take their seats were the personal envoy of the prince, the delegates from Byzantium (accompanied by the archbishop of the principality), and Stres, dressed in his black uniform with the deer antler insignia, looking taller, but also paler, than usual.

The archbishop left the group of guests and walked towards the podium, apparently to open the meeting. A wave of shushing among the crowd allowed silence to settle gradually over the great courtyard. Only when it had become almost complete was that silence broken by a rumbling that had hitherto been inaudible. It was the noise of the crowd outside the monastery walls.

The archbishop tried to speak in a strong, loud voice, but outside the vaulted dome of his cathedral he could not make his voice really boom. He seemed annoyed at the feebleness of his diction and cleared his throat, but his tone was muffled mercilessly by the vastness of the courtyard whose walls, had they not been so low, might perhaps have given resonance and volume to his eloquence. But the prelate spoke on nonetheless. He briefly mentioned the purpose of this great meeting that had been called to shed light upon the great hoax that had so regrettably been born in this village with “someone’s alleged return from the grave and his journey with some living woman.” (His intonation of
someone
’s and
some
gave his audience to understand that he disdained to cite the names of Kostandin and Doruntine.) He mentioned the spread of this hoax throughout the principality, beyond its borders, and indeed even beyond the confines of Albania; he suggested what unimaginable catastrophes could result if such heresies
were permitted to spread freely. And finally he noted the efforts by the Church of Rome to exploit the heresy, using it against the Holy Byzantine Church, as well as the measures taken by the latter to unmask the imposture.

“And now,” he concluded, “I yield the platform to Captain Stres, who was entrusted with the investigation of this matter and who will now present a detailed report on all aspects of it. He will explain to you, step by step, how the hoax was conceived; he will tell you who was behind the story of the dead man returned from the grave, what the alleged journey of the sister with her dead brother really was, what happened afterwards, and how the truth was brought to light.”

A deep rumbling drowned out his final words as Stres rose from his seat and headed for the platform.

He raised his head, looked out at the crowd and waited for the first layer of silence to fall over it once more. He spoke his first words in a voice that seemed very soft. Little by little, as the crowd’s silence grew deeper, it sounded louder. In chronological order he set out the events of the night of 11 October and after; he recalled Doruntine’s arrival, her claim to have returned in the company of her dead brother, and his own initial suspicions: that an impostor had deceived Doruntine, that Doruntine herself had lied both to her mother and to him, that the young woman and her partner had hatched the hoax in concert, or even that it was no more than a belated vendetta of some kind, a settling of scores or a struggle for succession. He then reviewed the measures taken to discover the truth, the research into the family archives, the checks on the inns and relay stations, and finally the failure of all these
various efforts to shed any light at all on the mystery. Then he recalled the spread of the first rumours, mentioning the mourners, his suspicion that Doruntine had gone mad and that the trip with her brother was no more than the product of a diseased imagination. But at that point, he continued, the arrival of two members of the husband’s family had confirmed that the journey had really occurred and that the horseman who had taken Doruntine up behind him had been seen. Stres then described the fresh measures that he and other officials of the principality had been compelled to take in their effort to solve the mystery, measures that led at length to the capture of the impostor – the man who had played the role of the dead brother – at the Inn of the Two Roberts in the next county.

“I interrogated him myself,” Stres continued. “At first he denied knowing Doruntine. In fact he denied everything, and it was only when I ordered him put to the torture that he confessed. Here, according to him, is what really happened.”

Stres then recounted the prisoner’s confession. His every word brought murmurs of relief from the crowd. It was as if they had all been yearning for this bleak story, hitherto so macabre, to be freshened by the gentle breeze of the itinerant merchant’s tale of romantic adventure. The rippling murmur breached the monastery walls and spread into the field beyond, just as silence, shuddering and terror in turn had spread before.

“This, then, is what the prisoner stated,” Stres said, raising his voice. He paused for a moment, waiting for silence. “It was midnight …”

The silence grew deeper, but the murmur rising from
the most distant rows, and especially from outside the walls, was still audible.

“It was midnight when he finished his account, and it was then that I—”

Here he paused again, in one final effort to unroll the carpet of silence as far as possible.

“Then, to the astonishment of my aides, I ordered him put to the torture again.”

A sulphurous light seemed to glow in Stres’s eyes. He gazed for a moment at those silent faces, at the darkened features of the people in the grandstands, and spoke again.

“If I had him put to the torture again, it was because I doubted the truth of his tale.”

Silence still reigned, but Stres thought he felt what could have been a mild earthquake. Now! he said to himself, intoxicated, now! Bring it all down!

“He resisted the torture for a week. Then, on the eighth day, he confessed the truth at last. That is to say, he admitted that everything he had said until then had been nothing but lies.”

The earthquake, which he had been the first to sense, had now in fact begun: its roar was rising, a muffled thunder, out of phase, of course, like any earthquake, but powerful nonetheless. A lightning glance to his right showed all was still mute there. But those frozen faces in the grandstands had clouded over entirely.

“It was nothing but a tissue of lies from start to finish,” Stres continued, surprised that he hadn’t been interrupted. “The man had never met Doruntine, had never spoken to her, had neither travelled with her nor made love to her, any more than he had brought her back on the
night of 11 October. He had been paid to perpetrate the hoax.”

Stres raised his head, waiting for something that he himself could not have defined.

“Yes,” he went on, “paid. He himself confessed as much; paid by persons whose names I shall not mention here.”

He paused briefly once again. The crowd now suddenly seemed very far away. Maybe people’s screams could no longer reach him. Or their spears. Or their nails.

“At first,” Stres went on, “when this impostor denied knowing Doruntine, he played his role to perfection, and he did equally well afterwards, when he affirmed that in fact he had brought her back. But just as great impostors often betray themselves in small details, so he gave himself away with a trifle. In his attempt to be persuasive, and especially by rejoicing too soon at having achieved his aim, he was led to supply irrelevant details. That his how he tore the mask from his own face. Thus this impostor, this imaginary companion of Doruntine—”

“Then who brought the woman back?” shouted the archbishop from his seat. “The dead man?”

Stres turned towards him.

“Who brought Doruntine back? I will answer you on that very point, for I was in charge of this case. Be patient, Your Eminence, be patient, noble sirs!”

Stres took a deep breath. So many hundreds of lungs swelled along with his that he felt as if all the air about them had been set in motion. Once again he glanced slowly across the packed courtyard to the stands, at the foot of which the guards stood with their arms akimbo.

“I expected that question,” said Stres, “and am
therefore prepared to answer it.” He paused again. “Yes, I have prepared myself with the greatest care to answer it. The painstaking investigation I conducted is now closed, my file complete, my conviction unshakable. I am ready, noble sirs, to answer the question ‘Who brought Doruntine back?’”

Stres allowed yet another brief moment of silence, during which he glanced in all directions as if seeking to convey the truth with his eyes before expressing it with his voice.