Ismail Kadare - The Ghost Rider

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.