Ismail Kadare - The Ghost Rider

“Yes,” said Stres, “in one sense it is indeed.”

“Not in one sense. Absolutely,” the archbishop said, nearly shouting. His voice had recovered its initial gravity. His head was now so close that Stres had to make an effort not to take a step backwards.

“Until now Jesus Christ alone has risen from his tomb! Do you follow me, Captain?”

“I understand, Monsignor,” Stres said.

“Well then, He returned from the dead to accomplish a great mission. But this dead man of yours, this Kostandin — that is his name, is it not? — by what right does he seek to ape Jesus Christ? What power brought him back from the world beyond, what message does he bring to humanity? Eh?”

Stres, nonplussed, had no idea what to say.

“None whatsoever!” shouted the archbishop. “Absolutely none! That is why the whole thing is nothing but imposture and heresy. A challenge to the Holy Church! And like any such challenge, it must be punished mercilessly.”

He was silent for a moment, as if giving Stres time to absorb the flood of words.

“So listen carefully, Captain.” His voice had softened again. “If we do not quell this story now, it will spread like wildfire, and then it will be too late. It will be too late, do you understand?”

Stres returned from the Monastery of the Three Crosses in the afternoon. His horse trotted slowly along the highway, and Stres mulled just as slowly over snatches of the long conversation he had just had with the archbishop. Tomorrow I’ll have to start all over again, he said to himself. He had, of course, been working on the case without respite, and had even relieved his deputy of his other duties so that he could spend all his time sifting through the Lady Mother’s archives. But now that the capital was seriously concerned at the turn of events, he was going to have to go back to square one. He would send a new circular to the inns and relay stations, perhaps promising a reward to anyone who helped find some trace of the impostor. And he would send someone all the way to Bohemia to find out what people there were saying about Doruntine’s flight. This latter idea lifted his spirits for a moment. How had he failed to think of it earlier? It was one of the first things he should have done after the events of 11 October. Well, he thought a moment later, it’s never too late to do things right.

He glanced up to see how the weather looked. The autumn sky was completely overcast. The bushes on either side of the road quivered in the north wind, and their trembling seemed to deepen the desolation of the plain. This world has only one Jesus Christ, thought Stres, repeating to himself the archbishop’s words. The sound of his horse’s tread reminded him that it was this very road that Kostandin had taken. The archbishop had spoken of the dead man with contempt. Come to think of it, Kostandin had never shown much respect for Orthodox priests while he lived. Stres himself hadn’t known Kostandin, but his deputy’s research into the family archives had produced some initial clues to his personality. Judging from the old woman’s letters, Kostandin had been, generally speaking, an oppositionist. Attracted by new ideas, he cultivated them with passion, sometimes carrying them to extremes. He had been like this on the question of marriage. He was against local marriages and, impassioned and extremist in his convictions, had been prepared to countenance unions even at the other end of the world. The Lady Mother’s letters suggested that Kostandin believed that distant marriages, hitherto the privilege of kings and princesses, should become common practice for all. The distance between the families of bride and groom was in fact a token of dignity and strength of character, and he persisted in saying that the noble race of Albanians was endowed with all the qualities necessary to bear the trials of separation and the troubles that might arise from them.

Kostandin had ideas of his own not only on marriage but on many other subjects too, ideas that ran counter to common notions and that had caused the old woman more than a little trouble with the authorities. Stres recalled one such instance, which had to do primarily with the Church. Two letters from the local archbishop to the Lady Mother had been found in the family archives in which the prelate drew her attention to the pernicious ideas Kostandin was expressing and to the insulting comments about the Byzantine Church he had occasionally been heard to utter. To judge by the report that Stres had read, Kostandin and some of his equally pigheaded friends had been against the severance with Rome and the compact with the Eastern Church. And there were other, more important matters, his aide had told him, but these would figure in the detailed report he would submit once he had concluded his investigation.

Stres had not been particularly impressed by this aspect of Kostandin’s personality, possibly because he himself harboured no special respect for religion, an attitude that was in fact not uncommon among the officials of the principality. And for good reason: the struggle between Catholicism and Orthodoxy since time immemorial had greatly weakened religion in the Albanian principalities. The region lay just on the border between the two religions and, for various reasons, essentially political and economic, the principalities leaned now towards one, now towards the other. Half of them were now Catholic, but that state of affairs was by no means permanent, and each of the two churches hoped to win spheres of influence from the other. Stres was convinced that the prince himself cared little for religious matters. He had allies among the Catholic princes and enemies among the Orthodox. In truth, the principality had once been Catholic, turning Orthodox only half a century before, and the Roman Church had not given up hope of bringing it back to the fold.

Stres was a servant of the state, and strived to remain neutral on the issue of religion, which was not really close to his heart in any case. All the same, he wasn’t pleased to see a part of Arbëria absorbed by the Eastern Church after a thousand years of Roman Christianity. Indeed, he might well have sought some excuse not to respond to the archbishop’s summons were it not for the fact that the prince, eager to avoid poisoning relations with Byzantium, had recently issued an important circular urging all officials of the principality to treat the Church with respect. The circular emphasised that this attitude was dictated by the higher interests of the state and that, consequently, any action at variance with the spirit of the directive would be punished.

All this passed through Stres’s mind in snatches as his glance embraced the bleak expanse of the plain. The October cold filled the air. Suddenly Stres shivered. Behind a bush several paces off the road he caught sight of the skeleton of a horse standing out in all its whiteness. It was a section of the ribcage and the backbone; the skull was missing. My God, Stres thought to himself a little further on, what if that had been his horse?

He drew his cloak tighter around him, trying to drive the image from his mind. He felt sad, but it was not a painful sadness. The shape of his melancholy had been softened in the great stretch of plain, in which winter’s approach could be read. What possessed you to come out of the earth, what message did you mean to bring us? Stres was astonished at the question, which had risen like a sigh from the depths of his being. He shook his head as if to clear his mind. He who had laughed so derisively at everyone who had believed that story! He smiled bitterly. What nonsense! he said to himself, spurring his horse. What a gloomy afternoon! he thought a moment later. Dusk was falling as he urged his mount into a canter. All the rest of the way to the village he strove to purge his mind of anything connected with the case. He arrived in the dark of night. The lights of the houses shone feebly here and there. From time to time the barking of dogs in the distance broke the night silence. Stres guided his horse not homeward, but towards the town’s main street. He had no idea why. Soon he reached the vacant lot that stretched before the house of the Lady Mother. There was no other house to be seen. The dark and dismal mass of the great abandoned building loomed at the far end of a desolate field studded with tall trees that now, in the dark, seemed to droop even more sharply than usual. Stres approached the doorway, gazed for a moment at the darker rectangles of the windows, then turned his horse in the direction from which he had come. He found himself among the trees. A man standing where he now stood could be seen from the door.