The Ghost Rider Read online

  “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 daughter died first, then the mother.”

  “Doruntine died first?”

  “Yes, Captain. And for the aged mother, it’s plain that there was nothing left but to close the circle of death.”

  “What a tragedy! What a tragedy!” someone near them said. “All the Vranaj are gone, gone for ever!”

  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 thought of the nine tombs in the churchyard and almost shouted out loud: “You have left me on my own!” They had gone, abandoning him to this horror.

  The crowd was in turmoil, diabolically agitated. The captain felt so stressed that he thought his head would burst. He wondered where the greater danger lay – in this swirling crowd or inside himself.

  “The Vranaj are no more!” a 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 lineage that had lived under that roof.

  CHAPTER THREE

  From the four corners of the principality people flocked to the funeral of the Lady Mother and her daughter. Since time immemorial, events have always been one of two kinds: those that bring people together and those that tear them asunder. The first kind can be experienced and appreciated at market days, crossroads or coaching inns. As for the second, each of us takes them in, or is consumed by them, in solitude. It soon became apparent that the funeral belonged to both categories at once. Although at first sight it seemed to belong to the crowd and the street, what people said about it brought to the surface all that had been whispered or imagined within the walls of every house, and brought confusion to everyone’s mind.

  Like any disquiet that gestates at first in solitary pain before coming out into the open, rumours about Doruntine grew and swelled up, changing in the most unforeseeable ways. An endless stream of people dragged the story behind them but were yet drawn forward by it. As they sought to give it a shape they found acceptable, they were themselves altered, bruised or crushed by it.

  High-born folk with family arms painted on their carriage doors, wandering monks, ruffians and all manner of other people filled and then emptied the high road as they made their way on horseback, in vehicles, but mostly on foot to the county town.

  Funeral services had been set for Sunday. The bodies lay in the great reception hall that had been 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 (Lady Mother had stipulated in her will that a large sum be set aside 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 reddish gleam of the coffins’ reflection had become more regulated, 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 and 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 sang 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 besa, sang these words:

  A curse be on thee, Kostandin!

  Do you recall the solemn promise you made?

  Or has your besa rotted with you in the grave?

  Then the first mourner sang of the resurrection of the son who had been cursed, and of his journey by night to the land where his married sister lived:

  If it’s joy that brings you here

  I’ll wear a dress that’s fair.

  If it’s grief that brings you here

  Weeds is what I must wear.

  While the third responded with the dead man’s words:

  Come, sister mine, come as you are.

  Then the fourth and first mourners, responding one to the other, sang together of the brother’s and sister’s journey, and of the astonishment of the birds they passed on the way:

  Strange things have we seen beyond count

  Save a living soul and a dead man

  Riding by on the same mount.

  The third mourner told of their arrival at the house and of Kostandin’s flight towards 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:

  Kostandin died and was buried as he must.

  Three years have gone since he was laid to rest.

  Why then is he not now just soil and dust?

  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 were replaced completely. In these new songs, the mourners summarised episodes recounted in the earlier recitals, or else elaborated a passage they had previously mentioned only fleetingly or omitted entirely. Thus it was that one chant gave greater prominence to the background of the incident, or to the great Vranaj family’s happier days, or the doubts about Doruntine’s marriage to a husband from a distant land, and Kostandin’s promise to bring his sister back whenever their mother wished. In another all this was recalled only briefly, and the mourners would linger instead on that dark journey, 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 leaves me cold.”

  The people Stres had sent to keep their ears open 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 individual words or whole lines.

  “However much we might rack our brains day and night to find an explanation,” he said to his deputy, “the mourners will go on in their own way.”

  “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 fable.”

  The deputy cast an eye over the pages of underlined verses and words, dotted with brief marginal notes. In places, Stres had drawn 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. I’ve noticed that an ancient way of bewailing the dead has recently come back into use. It’s called ‘lamenting within the law’.”

  “Yes”, the deputy concurred.

  “I don’t know if the phrase exists in any other language,
but as a servant of the law, I am, for my own part, struck by such an expression to describe women’s wailing at a funeral.”

  “Indeed”, said the deputy.

  “Maybe it means that this kind of keening means more than it appears to mean. That it tends to become a law.”

  His aide was at a loss for a reply.

  Through the window you could see the main road, and on it a continuing stream of people coming to attend the burial. Local inns, as well as those for miles around, were overflowing. There were old friends of the family and relatives by marriage. There were representatives of both churches, Byzantium and Rome, as well as members of the prince’s family and other lords of neighbouring principalities and counties. 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 cortège made its way with some difficulty to the church. Many were compelled to cross 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 they sounded very different – protracted and muffled, as if obeying the laws of another kingdom. But apart from that, there was much that was similar: as in the wedding procession three years before, the members of the funeral cortège craned their necks to see the hearse in the same way they had gaped at the bridal steed; the road itself again seemed unable to contain such a milling throng, be it gathered in joy or in grief, and pushed many aside.

  Between Doruntine’s marriage and her burial, her nine brothers had died. It was like a nightmare of which no more than a confused memory remained. 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 for ever. 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 hadn’t 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 hadn’t 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 huge. 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 done nowhere else. Only then did people hear that the Albanians had been fighting against an army sick with the plague, and that 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 Vranaj, once so boisterous and full of joy, was transformed into a house of shadows. Only Doruntine, who had left not long before, was unaware of the dreadful slaughter.

  The church bell continued to toll the death knell, but among the many who had come to this burial it would have been hard to find a single one who had any distinct memory of the funerals of the nine brothers. It had all happened so nightmarishly, in deep shadow. Coffins were carried out of the Vranaj house nearly every day for more than a week. Many could not recall clearly the order in which the young men had died, and, before long, would be hard pressed to say which of the brothers fell on the battlefield, which died of illness, and which of the combination of his wounds and the terrible disease.

  Doruntine’s marriage, on the contrary, was an event each and every one remembered in minute detail, one of those that time has a way of embellishing, not necessarily because they are so unforgettable in and of themselves, but because they somehow come to embody everything in the past that was beautiful, or considered so, but is no more. Moreover, it was the first time a young girl of the country had married so far away. This kind of marriage had stirred controversy since time immemorial. Various opinions were expressed, and there were endless conflicts and clashes over it. One group was adamant that local marriages, or at least those within the same village or region, kept the clan free from turmoil and especially from suspect foreign blood. They used as a warning to naysayers the plight of coastal towns like Durrës and Lezhë, where the noble race of the Arberësh had been obliged to mix with all kinds of newcomers. Their prime example was Maria Matrenga, a woman famed for her beauty, who had married a man from another county, and as a result of the distance, the different climate and different customs of her husband’s abode, had wilted and finally faded away.

  Those who favoured distant marriages made the opposite claim. They invoked the ancient kanun, the customary law that prohibited marriage within the four-hundredth degree of relatedness, and scared folk by hinting at the results of inbreeding. To counter the sad story of Maria Matrenga, they reminded people of Palok the Idiot, a seventeen-year-old retard whose parents were close cousins, and who could be seen wandering around the village at all hours.

  The two camps fought it out for a long time. At times it seemed that the celestial tale of Maria Matrenga, sprinkled with gold dust like an icon, was in the ascendant, especially at twilight and at the change of seasons; but along came damp and smelly days, when the spittle and stutter of the poor cretin struck fear into people’s hearts.

  The distant marriage faction had begun to gain ground, but although those who feared inbreeding were easily dissuaded from local marriages, they were equally pained by the prospect of separation. In the beginning, then, the distances were kept small, and marriages two, four, even seven mountains away were countenanced. But then came the striking separation with Doruntine, divided from her family by half a continent.

  Now, as the throng following along behind the procession of invited guests headed slowly towards the church, people talked, whispered, recalled the circumstances of Doruntine’s marriage, the reluctance of her mother and the brothers who opposed the union, Kostandin’s insistence that the marriage take place and his besa to his mother that he would always bring Doruntine back to her. As for Doruntine herself, no one knew whether she had freely consented to the marriage. More beautiful than ever, on horseback among her brothers and relatives – who were also mounted – misty with tears, as custom requires of every young bride, she was a wraith already belonging more to the horizon than to them.

  All this now came to mind as the procession followed the same path the throng of guests had taken then. And just as crystal shines the more brightly on a cloth of black velvet, so the memory of Doruntine’s marriage against the background of grief now gained in brilliance in the minds of all those present. Henceforth it would be difficult for people to think of the one without the other, especially since everyone felt that Doruntine looked as beautiful in her coffin as she had done astride the horse caparisoned for the wedding. Beautiful, but to what end? they murmured. No one had partaken of her beauty. Now the earth alone would enjoy it.

  Others, in voices even more muted, spoke of her mysterious return, repeating what peopl
e had told them or denying it.

  “It seems,” someone said, “that Stres is trying to solve the mystery. The prince himself has ordered him to get to the root of it.”

  “Believe me,” a companion interrupted, “there’s no mystery about it. She returned to close the circle of death, that’s all.”

  “Yes, but how did she come back?”

  “Ah, that we shall never know. It seems that one of her brothers rose from the grave by night to go and fetch her. That’s what I heard, it’s really astounding. But some people claim that – I know, I know, but don’t say it, it’s a sin to say such things, especially on the day of her burial. We should rather pray for the poor girl, let the earth not weigh on her too heavily!”

  Talk turned once again to the wedding of three years ago, and many felt that the funeral was only its extension, or, more exactly, was the wedding itself, turned upside down. After her bridal journey, Doruntine had simply gone on another outing, one that was macabre … with a dead man, or … an unidentified … Well, whoever it was, it was a most unusual journey … or rather, an unnatural one … and what’s more, with a corpse … or worse still, with a … But let’s drop all that, it’s a sin to speak of such things. May God forgive the sinners that we are, and may the earth lie lightly upon her!

  And people cut short their discussions, tacitly agreeing that a few days hence, perhaps even on the morrow, once the dead were buried and tranquillity restored, they would speak of this again, perhaps less guardedly, and surely with greater malice.

  Which is exactly what happened. Once the burial was over and the whole story seemed at an end, a great clamour arose, the like of which had rarely been heard. It spread in waves through the surrounding countryside and rolled on farther, sweeping to the frontiers of the principality, spilling over its borders and cascading through neighbouring principalities and counties. It was as if many of the people who had attended the burial had carried bits of it away to sow throughout the land.