Ismail Kadare - The Ghost Rider

Stres turned to the monk and said, “Tell them that I am Captain Stres, responsible for keeping order in this district. I believe they have come to find out what happened to Doruntine, have they not?”

The monk translated these words for the strangers, but they looked blankly at one another, seeming not to understand.

“What language are you speaking?” Stres asked the monk.

“I’ll try another,” he said without answering the question.

He spoke to them again. The two strangers leaned forward with the pained expressions of men straining to understand what is being said to them. One of them spoke a few words, and this time it was the monk whose face took on a troubled expression. These exchanges of words and grimaces continued for some time until finally the monk spoke several long sentences to which the strangers now listened with nods of great satisfaction.

“Finally found it,” said the monk. “They speak a German dialect mixed with Slavonic. I think we’ll be able to understand one another.”

Stres spoke immediately.

“You have come just in time,” he said. “I believe you have heard what happened to your cousin’s wife. We are all dismayed.”

The strangers’ faces darkened.

“When you arrived I had already sent someone to your country to find out the circumstances of her leaving there,” Stres went on. “I hope that we may be able to learn something from you, as you may learn something from us. I believe that all of us have an equal interest in finding out the truth.”

The two strangers nodded in agreement.

“When we left,” said one of them, “we knew nothing, save that our cousin’s wife had gone off suddenly, under rather strange circumstances, with her brother Kostandin.”

He stopped and waited for the monk, who kept his pale eyes fixed upon him, to translate his words.

“While en route,” the stranger continued, “still far from your country, we learned that our cousin’s wife had indeed arrived at her parents’ home, but that her brother Kostandin, with whom she said she had left, had departed this life three years ago.”

“Yes,” said Stres, “that’s correct.”

“On the way we also learned of the old woman’s death, news that grieved us deeply.”

The stranger lowered his eyes. A silence followed, during which Stres motioned to the innkeeper and two or three onlookers to keep their distance.

“You wouldn’t have a room where we could talk, would you?” Stres asked the owner.

“Yes, of course, Captain. There is a quiet place just over there. Come.”

They filed into a small room. Stres invited them to sit on carved wooden chairs.

“We had but one goal when we set out,” one of the two strangers continued, “and that was to satisfy ourselves about her flight. In other words, first of all to make sure that she had really reached her own family, and secondly to learn the reason for her flight, to find out whether or not she meant to come back, among other things that go without saying in incidents of this kind.”

As the monk translated, the stranger stared at Stres as if trying to guess whether the captain grasped the full meaning of his words.

“For an escapade of this kind, as I’m sure you must realise, arouses …”

“Of course,” said Stres. “I quite understand.”

“Now, however,” the visitor continued, “another matter has arisen: this question of the dead brother. Our cousin, Doruntine’s husband, knows nothing of this, and you may well imagine that this development gives rise to yet another mystery. If Doruntine’s brother has been dead for three years, then who was the man who brought her here?”

“Precisely,” Stres replied. “I have been asking myself that question for several days now, and many others have asked it too.”

He opened his mouth to continue, but suddenly lost his train of thought. In his mind, he knew not why, he saw in a flash the white bones of the horse lying on the plain that afternoon, as if they had tumbled there from some troubled dream.

“Did anyone see the horseman?” he asked.

“Where? What horseman?” the two strangers said, almost in one voice.

“The one believed to have been her brother, the man who brought Doruntine here.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, there were women who happened to be close by. They said they saw a horseman near our cousin’s house, and that Doruntine hurried to mount behind him. And then there’s also the note she left.”

“That’s right,” Stres said. “She told me about a note. Have you read it?”

“We brought it with us,” said the second stranger, the one who had spoken least.

“What? You have the note with you?”

Stres could scarcely believe his ears, but the stranger was already rummaging through his leather satchel, from which he finally took out a letter. Stres leaned forward to examine it.

“It’s her handwriting, all right,” said the deputy, peering over Stres’s shoulder. “I recognise it.”

Stres stared with wide eyes at the crude letters, which seemed to have been formed by a clumsy hand. The text, in a foreign language, was incomprehensible. One word, the last, had been crossed out.

“What does it say?” asked Stres, leaning even closer. Only one word was recognisable, her brother’s name, spelled differently than in Albanian: Cöstanthin . “What do these other words mean?” Stres asked.

“I am going away with my brother Kostandin,” the monk translated.

“And the word that’s scratched out?”

“It means ‘if’.”

“So: ‘I am going away with my brother Kostandin. And if …’” Stres repeated. “What was the ‘if’ for, and why did she cross it out?”

Was she trying to hide something? Stres thought suddenly. Looking for a way to camouflage the truth? Or was this a final attempt to reveal something? But then why did she suddenly change her mind?

“It could be that she found it hard to explain in this language,” said the monk, without taking his eyes from the paper. “The other words, too, are full of mistakes.”

All were silent.

Stres’s thoughts were focused on one point: he finally had a genuine piece of evidence. From all the fog-shrouded anguish there had at last come a piece of paper bearing words written in her own hand. And the horseman had been seen by those women, so he too was real.

“What day did this happen?” he asked. “Do you remember?”

“It was 29 September,” one of them answered.

Now the chronology in turn was coming out of that blanket of fog. One very long night, Doruntine had said, with flocks of stars streaming across the sky. But in fact it was a journey of twelve or, to be exact, thirteen days.

Stres felt troubled. The concrete, incontrovertible evidence with which he had just been provided — Doruntine’s note, the horseman who had taken her up behind him, the thirteen-day journey — far from giving him any sense that he was finally making some progress and stood on solid ground, left him with no more than a feeling of great emptiness. It seemed that coming closer to the unreal, far from diminishing it, made it even more terrifying. Stres was not sure quite what to say.

“Would you like to go to the cemetery?” he finally asked.

“Yes, of course,” chorused the strangers.

They all went together on foot. From the windows and verandas of the houses, dozens of pairs of eyes followed their path to the church. The cemetery watchman had already opened the gate. Stres went through first, clods of mud sticking to the heels of his boots. The strangers looked absently at the rows of tombstones.

“This is where her brothers lie,” said Stres, stopping before a row of black slabs. And here are the graves of the Lady Mother and Doruntine,” he continued, pointing to two small mounds of earth into which temporary wooden crosses had been sunk.