Ismail Kadare - The Ghost Rider

“What?” Stres cried, and his aide realised that the very idea of the young woman’s death was unthinkable to his chief.

They covered the remaining distance to the Vranaj house without a word. On both sides of the road tall poplars dismally shook off the last of their leaves. Now they could clearly make out the wailing of women.

“She’s dead,” said Stres. “No doubt about it.”

“Yes, the courtyard is thick with people.”

“What’s happened?” Stres asked the first person they met.

“At the Vranaj’s!” the woman said. “Both are dead, mother and daughter.”

“It can’t be!”

She shrugged and walked away.

“I can’t believe it,” Stres muttered again, slowing his pace. His mouth was dry and tasted terribly bitter.

The gates of the house yawned wide. Stres and his deputy found themselves in the courtyard surrounded by a small throng of townspeople milling about aimlessly. Stres asked someone else and got the same answer: both of them were dead. From inside came the wailing of the mourners. Both of them, Stres repeated to himself, stunned.

He felt himself being jostled on all sides. He no longer had the slightest desire to pursue the inquiry further, or even to try to think clearly about it. In truth, the idea that it might be Doruntine who was dead had assailed him several times along the road, but he had rejected it each time. He simply could not believe that both no longer lived. At times, even though the idea horrified him, it was Doruntine’s death that had seemed to him most likely, for in riding with a dead man, which was what she herself believed she had done, she had already moved, to some degree, into the realm of death.

“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.

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.”