Doruntine Read online

  Doruntine

  Doruntine

  A Novel

  Ismail Kadare

  Translated from the French

  of Jusuf Vrioni by

  Jon Rothschild

  Copyright © Librarie Arthème Fayard, 1986

  Translation copyright © Jon Rothschild, 1988

  First cloth edition published in 1988 by

  New Amsterdam Books

  4720 Boston Way

  Lanham, MD 20706

  Original Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kadare, Ismail.

  Doruntine.

  Originally written in Albanian.

  I. Title.

  ISBN 978-1-56131-032-6

  PG 9621.K3D6713 1998

  891’.9913

  88-12591

  CIP

  ISBN 1-56131-032-8

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  DORUNTINE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stres was still in bed when he heard the knocking at the door. He was tempted to bury his head in the pillow to blot out the noise, but the sound came again, louder this time. Who the Devil would pound on my door before daybreak, he grumbled, throwing off the covers. He was on his way down the stairs when he heard the hammering for the third time, but now the rhythm of the metal knocker told him who it was. He slid back the bolt and opened the door. There was no need to say, “And what possesses you to wake me before dawn,” for the look on his face and his bleary eyes conveyed the message well enough.

  “Something’s happened,” his deputy hastened to say.

  Stres stared at him skeptically, as if to say, And it better be good to justify a visit at this ungodly hour. But he was well aware that his aide rarely blundered. Indeed, whenever he had been moved to rebuke him, he had found himself compelled to hold his tongue. Still, he would have been delighted had his deputy been in the wrong this time, so that he could work off his ill humor on him.

  “So?” he repeated.

  The deputy glanced at his chief’s eyes for an instant, then stepped back and spoke:

  “The dowager Vranaj and her daughter, Doruntine, who arrived last night under very mysterious circumstances, both lie dying.”

  “Doruntine?” said Stres, dumbfounded. “How can it be?”

  His deputy heaved a sigh of relief: he had been right to pound on the door.

  “How can it be?” Stres said again, rubbing his eyes as if to wipe away the last trace of sleep. And in fact he had slept badly. No first night home after a two-week mission had ever been so trying. One long nightmare. “How can it be?” he asked for the third time. Doruntine had married into a family that lived so far from her own that she hadn’t been able to come back even when her family was in mourning.

  “How, indeed,” said the deputy. “As I said, the circumstances of her return are most mysterious.”

  “And?”

  “Well, both mother and daughter have taken to their beds and lie dying.”

  “Strange! Do you think there’s been foul play?”

  The deputy shook his head. “I think not. It looks more like the effect of some dreadful shock.”

  “Have you seen them?”

  “Yes. They’re both delirious, or close to it. The mother keeps asking, ‘Who brought you back, daughter?’ And the daughter keeps saying, ‘My brother Constantine.’ ”

  “Constantine? But he died three years ago, he and all his brothers. . . .”

  “According to the neighbor women now gathered at the bedside, that is just what the mother told her. But the girl insists that she arrived with him last night, just after midnight.”

  “How odd,” said Stres, all the while thinking, “Horrible.”

  They stared at each other in silence until Stres, shivering, remembered that he was not dressed.

  “Wait for me,” he said, and went back in.

  From inside came his wife’s drowsy “What is it?” and the inaudible words of his reply. Soon he came out again, wearing the regional captain’s uniform that made him look even taller and thinner.

  “Let’s go see them,” he said.

  They set out in silence. A handful of white rose petals fallen at someone’s door seemed to remind Stres of a brief scene from the dream that had slipped so strangely into his fitful sleep.

  “Quite extraordinary,” he said.

  “Almost incredible,” replied his deputy, upping the ante.

  “To tell you the truth, at first I was tempted not to believe it.”

  “So I noticed. In fact it isn’t believable. It’s a real mystery.”

  “Worse than that,” Stres said. “The more I think about it, the more inconceivable it seems.”

  “The main thing is to find out how Doruntine got back,” said the deputy.

  “What?”

  “The case will be solved if we can find out who accompanied her, or rather, if we can uncover the circumstances of her arrival.”

  “Who accompanied her,” Stres repeated. “Yes, who and how. Obviously she is not telling the truth.”

  “I asked her three times how she got here, but she offered no explanation. She was hiding something.”

  “Did she know that all her brothers, including Constantine, were dead?” Stres asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “It’s possible she didn’t know,” Stres said. “She married so far away that she has never once come home since her wedding day. This is the first time so far as I know.”

  “She didn’t come back even when her nine brothers died, which seems proof enough that she was utterly unaware of the calamity,” said the deputy. “The dowager complained often enough that her daughter was not at her side during those days of grief.”

  “The forests of Bohemia lie at least two weeks’ journey from here, if not more,” Stres observed.

  “Yes, if not more,” repeated his deputy. “Almost the heart of Europe.”

  As they walked Stres noticed more white rose petals strewn along the path, as if some invisible hand had scattered them during the night.

  “In any event, someone must have come with her,” he said.

  “Yes, but who? Her mother can’t possibly believe that her daughter returned with a dead man, any more than we can.”

  “But why would she conceal who she came back with?”

  “I can’t explain it. It’s all very puzzling.”

  Once again they walked in silence. The autumn air was cold. Some cawing crows flew low. Stres watched their flight for a moment.

  “It’s going to rain,” he said. “The crows caw like that because their ears hurt when a storm is coming.”

  His deputy looked off in the same direction, but said nothing.

  “Earlier you mentioned something about a shock that might have brought the two women to their deathbed,” Stres said.

  “Well, it was certainly caused by some very powerful emotion.” He avoided the word terrible, for his chief had commented that he tended to use it in any and all circumstances. “Since neither woman shows any mark of violence, their sudden collapse must surely have been caused by some kind of shock.”

  “Do you think the mother suddenly discovered something terrible?” Stres asked.

  His deputy stared at him. He can use words as he pleases, he thought, but if others do he stuffs those words down their throat.

  “The mother?” he said. “I rather suspect that they both suddenly discovered something terrible, as you put it. At the same time.”

  As they continued to speculate about the shock mother and daughter had presumably inflicted on each other (both Stres and his deputy, warped by professional habit, increasingly tended to turns of phrase better suited to an investigative report), they mentally reconstructed, more or less, t
he scene that must have unfolded in the middle of the night. Knocks had sounded at the door of the old house at an unusual hour, and when the old lady called out—as she must have—“Who’s there?”—a voice from outside would have answered, “It’s me, Doruntine.” Before opening the door, the old woman, upset by the sudden knocking and convinced that it could not have been her daughter’s voice, must have asked, to ease her doubt, “Who brought you back?” Let us not forget that for three years she had been waiting in vain for her daughter’s arrival, desperate for some consolation in her grief. From outside, Doruntine answers, “My brother Constantine brought me back.” And the old woman receives the first shock. Perhaps, even shaken as she was, she found the strength to reply: “What are you talking about? Constantine and his brothers have been in their graves for three years.” Now it is Doruntine’s turn to be stricken. If she really believes that it was her brother Constantine who brought her back, then the shock is twofold: finding out that Constantine and her other brothers are dead and realizing at the same time that she has been traveling with a ghost. The old woman then summons up the strength to open the door, hoping against hope that she has misunderstood the young woman’s words, or that she has been hearing voices, or that it is not Doruntine at the door after all. Perhaps Doruntine, standing there outside, also hopes she has misunderstood. But when the door swings open, both repeat what they have just said, dealing each other the fatal blow.

  “No,” said Stres. “None of that makes much sense either.”

  “That’s just what I think,” said his deputy. “But one thing is certain: something must have happened between them for the two women to be in such a state.”

  “Something happened between them,” Stres repeated. “Of course something happened, but what? A terrifying tale from the girl, a terrifying revelation for the mother. Or else. . . .”

  “There’s the house,” said the deputy. “Maybe we can find out something.”

  The great building could be seen in the distance, dismal, at the far end of a flat expanse. The wet ground was strewn with dead leaves all the way to the house, which had once been one of the grandest and most imposing of the principality, but which now had an air of mourning and desolation. Most of the shutters on the upper floors were closed, the eaves were damaged in places, and the grounds before the entrance, with their ancient, drooping, mossy trees, seemed desolate.

  Stres recalled the burial of the nine Vranaj brothers three years before. There had been one tragedy after another, each more painful than the last, to the point that only by going mad could one erase the memory. But no generation could recall such a catastrophe: nine coffins for nine young men of a single household in just one week. It had happened five weeks after the grand wedding of the family’s only daughter, Doruntine. The principality had been attacked without warning by a Norman army, and all nine brothers had gone off to war. It had often happened that several brothers of a single household went to fight in far more bloody conflicts, but never had more than half of them fallen in combat. This time, however, there was something very special about the enemy army: it was afflicted with plague, and most of those who took part in the fighting died one way or another, victors and vanquished alike, some in combat, others after the battle. Many a household had two, three, even four deaths to mourn, but only the Vranaj mourned for nine. No one could recall a more impressive funeral. All the counts and barons of the principality attended, even the prince himself, and dignitaries of neighboring principalities came as well.

  Stres remembered it all quite clearly, most of all the words on everyone’s lips at the time: how the mother, in those days of grief, did not have her only daughter, Doruntine, at her side. But Doruntine alone had not been told about the disaster.

  Stres sighed. How quickly those three years had passed! The great double doors, worm-eaten in places, stood ajar. Walking ahead of his deputy, he crossed the courtyard and entered the house, from which he could hear vague murmuring. Two or three women, not young, apparently neighbors, examined the two new arrivals curiously.

  “Where are they?” Stres asked.

  One of the women nodded toward a door. Stres, followed by his deputy, walked into a vast, dimly lit room where his eyes were immediately drawn to two large beds set in opposite corners. Alongside each of these stood a woman, staring straight ahead. The icons on the walls, the two great copper candelabra above the fireplace, long unused, cast flickers of light through the atmosphere of gloom. One of the women turned her head toward them. Stres stopped for a moment, then motioned her to approach.

  “Which is the mother’s bed?” he asked softly.

  The woman pointed to one of the beds.

  “Leave us alone for a moment,” Stres said.

  The woman opened her mouth, doubtless to oppose him, but her gaze fell on Stres’s uniform and she was silent. She walked over to her companion, who was very old, and both women went out without a word.

  Walking carefully so as to make no noise, Stres approached the bed where the old woman lay, her head in the folds of a white bonnet.

  “My Lady,” he whispered, “Lady Mother”—for so had she been called since the death of her sons. “It’s me, Stres, do you know me?”

  She opened her eyes. They seemed glazed with grief and terror. He withstood her gaze for a moment and then murmured, leaning a little nearer the white pillow, “How do you feel, Lady Mother?”

  Her expression was unreadable.

  “Doruntine came back last night, didn’t she?” Stres asked.

  The woman looked up from her bed, her eyes saying “yes.” Her gaze then settled on Stres as though asking him some question. Stres stood there for a moment, hesitant.

  “How did it happen?” he asked very softly. “Who brought her back?”

  The old woman covered her eyes with one hand, then her head moved in a way that told him she had lost consciousness. Stres took her hand and found her pulse with difficulty. Her heart was still beating.

  “Call one of the women,” Stres said quietly to his deputy.

  His aide left and soon returned with one of the women who had just left the room. Stres let go of the old woman’s hand and, with the same silent steps, walked to the bed where Doruntine lay. He could see her blond hair on the pillow. He felt a wrench at his heart, but the sensation had nothing to do with what was happening now. A distant wrench, it went back to that wedding three years before. On that day, as she rode off on the customary white horse in the cavalcade of relatives and friends of the bride, his heart was suddenly so heavy that he wondered what had come over him. Everyone looked sad, not only Doruntine’s mother and brother, but all her relatives, for she was the first girl of the country to marry so far away. But Stres’s sorrow was quite special. As she rode off, he realized all at once that the feeling he had had for her had been love. But it was a love without shape, a love which had never condensed, for he himself had gently prevented it. It was like the morning dew that appears for the first few minutes after sunrise, only to vanish during the other hours of day and night. The only moment when that bluish fog had nearly condensed, had tried to form itself into a cloud, was when she left. But it had been no more than an instant, quickly forgotten.

  Stres stood at Doruntine’s bed, looking steadily into her face. She was as beautiful as ever, perhaps even more beautiful, with those lips that seemed somehow full and light at the same time.

  “Doruntine,” he said in a very soft voice.

  She opened her eyes. Deep within them he sensed a void that nothing could fill. He tried to smile at her.

  “Doruntine,” he said again. “Welcome home.”

  She stared at him.

  “How do you feel?” he said slowly, carefully, and unconsciously he took her hand. She was burning hot. “Doruntine,” he said again, more gently, “you came last night after midnight, didn’t you?”

  Her eyes answered “yes.” He would rather have put off asking the question that troubled him, but it rose up of itself.

>   “Who brought you back?”

  The young woman’s eyes stared steadily back at his own.

  “Doruntine,” he asked again, “who brought you back?”

  Still she stared at him with those eyes in whose depths gaped a desperate void.

  “You told your mother that it was your brother Constantine, didn’t you?”

  Again her look assented. Stres searched her eyes for some sign of madness, but could read nothing in their emptiness.

  “I think you must have heard that Constantine left this world three years ago,” he said in the same faint voice. He felt tears well up within him before they suddenly filled her eyes. But hers were tears unlike any others, half-visible, half-impalpable. Her face, bathed by those tears, seemed even more remote. What’s happening to me? her eyes seemed to say. Why don’t you believe me?

  He turned slowly to his deputy and to the other woman standing near the mother’s bed and motioned to them to leave. Then he leaned toward the young woman again and stroked her hand.

  “How did you get here, Doruntine? How did you manage that long journey?”

  It seemed to him that something strained to fill those immeasurably enlarged eyes.

  Stres left an hour later. He looked pale, and without turning his head or speaking a word to anyone, he made his way to the door. His deputy, following behind, was tempted several times to ask whether Doruntine had said anything new, but he did not dare.

  As they passed the church, Stres seemed about to enter the cemetery, but changed his mind at the last minute.

  His deputy could feel the glances of curious onlookers as they walked along.

  “It’s not an easy case,” Stres said without looking at his deputy. “I expect there will be quite a lot of talk about it. Just to anticipate any eventuality, I think we would do well to send a report to the Prince’s chancellery.”

  I believe it useful to bring to your attention events that occurred at dawn on this October eleventh in the noble house of Vranaj and whose consequences may be unpredictable.

  On the morning of October 11, Lady Vranaj, who as everyone knows has been living alone since the death of her nine sons on the battlefield, was found in a state of profound distress, along with her daughter, Doruntine, who, by her own account, had arrived the night before, accompanied by her brother Constantine, who died three years ago when her other brothers died.