Ismail Kadare - The Ghost Rider

Before going home for lunch, Stres again asked his aide whether he had heard anything from the inns. He shook his head. Stres threw his cloak over his shoulders and was about to leave when his deputy added:

“I have completed my search through the archives. Tomorrow, if you have time, I will be able to present my report.”

“Really? And how do things look?”

His deputy stared at him.

“I have an idea of my own,” he replied evenly, “quite different from all current theories.”

“Really?” Stres said again, smiling without looking at the man. “Goodbye, then. Tomorrow I’ll hear your report.”

As he walked home his mind was nearly blank. He thought several times of the two strangers now riding back to Bohemia, going over the affair in their own minds again and again, no doubt thinking what he, in his own way, had imagined before them.

“You know what?” he said to his wife the moment he came in, “I think you were right. There’s a very strong chance that this whole Doruntine business was no more than an ordinary romantic adventure after all.”

“Oh really?” Beneath her flashing eyes, her cheeks glowed with satisfaction.

“Since the visit of the husband’s two cousins it’s all becoming clear,” he added, slipping off his cloak.

As he sat down by the fire, he had the feeling that something in the house had come to life again, an animation sensed more than seen or heard. His wife’s customary movements as she prepared lunch were more lively, the rattling of the dishes more brisk, and even the aroma of the food seemed more pleasant. As she set the table he noticed in her eyes a glimmer of gratitude that quickly dispelled the sustained chill that had marked all their recent days. During lunch the look in her eyes grew still softer and more meaningful, and after the meal, when he told the children to go take their naps, Stres, stirred by a desire he had felt but rarely in these last days, went to their bedroom and waited for her. She came in a moment later, the same gleam in her eyes, her hair, just brushed, hanging loose upon her shoulders. Stres thought suddenly that in days to come, the dead woman would come back often, bringing them physical warmth, as now, or else an icy chill.

He made love to his wife with heightened sensuality. She too was, so to speak, at fever pitch. She offered herself to him by pushing her pelvis as high as it would go, and he entered her as deeply as he could, as if he were seeking out a second passageway inside her. He managed to get close to it, he felt, to a place where a different kind of damp darkness began, then the lips of the inner vagina drew him in further and invited him to an apparently inaccessible realm. An inhuman aah escaped him as his seed managed to spill, or so it seemed, into that other place, the dark kingdom where he would never go. Good God, he mumbled involuntarily as the tension subsided and he could feel himself collapsing all at once.

A few minutes later, lying beside his wife, whose blushing cheeks were lit by a smile, he heard her whisper words which, despite their long intimacy through many years of marriage, she had never dared say to him before. She confessed she had rarely had such strong pleasure and that his organ had never before been so … hard …

In other circumstances her lack of modesty would have taken him aback, but not today.

“It seems to me,” he said without looking at his wife, “that you’ve got something else to say.”

She smiled.

“Well, yes,” she replied, “it’s a curious sensation … I was thinking that it wasn’t just very hard … but also, how can I put it … very cold.”

Now it was his turn to smile. He explained that it was a feeling a woman has when she herself is at fever pitch.

As their breathing slowed they lay silent, gazing alternately at the carved wooden ceiling and through the half-shuttered window at the low late autumn sky.

“Look,” she said, “a stork. I thought they’d gone long ago.”

“A few sometimes stay behind. Laggards.”

He could not have said why, but he felt that the conversation about Doruntine, suspended since lunch, now threatened to return. Caressing a lock of hair on her temple, he turned his wife’s eyes from the sky, convinced that he had managed, in this way, to escape any further talk of the dead woman.

The next day, before summoning his deputy to get his report on the Vranaj archives, Stres glanced at the files on crimes committed in the last seven days. One burglary. Two murders. One rape.

He ran through the report on the murders. Both of them honour killings. Presumably taking advantage of all the commotion about Doruntine, the killers had seized an opportunity to take back the blood in accordance with the ancient kanun . Even so, you won’t get away with it, Stres muttered. When he reached the sentence, “The marksmen have been arrested,” Stres crossed out “marksmen” and replaced it with “murderers”. Then he added in the margin: “Put them in chains like ordinary criminals”.

“You thought you would get treated as special one more time”, he grunted. After lying dormant for many years, the kanun seemed for some reason to have come back to life and to be rising from its own ashes. Despite repeated and unambiguous warnings from the prince, who was adamant that only the laws of the state and not those of the kanun now held sway, family killings had gone on increasing in number.

Stres underlined “ordinary criminals” before reading the last file. Maria Kondi, aged twenty-seven. Married. Died suddenly as she left mass on Sunday. Raped at night two days after her burial. No bodily harm. Jewellery and wedding ring not stolen.

He rubbed his forehead. It was the second case of necrophilia in recent years. Good God, he sighed, in a sudden fit of weariness. But it wasn’t a true rape, just ordinary sex. Almost normal …

His deputy looked just as worried as he had the previous day. He also looked very unwell, Stres thought.

“As I have said before, and as I repeated to you yesterday,” he began, “my research in these archives has led me to a conclusion about this disturbing incident quite different from those commonly held.”

I never imagined that lengthy contact with archives could make a man’s face look so much like cardboard, Stres thought.

“And,” the deputy went on, “the explanation I have come to is also very different from what you yourself think.”

Stres raised his eyebrows in astonishment.

“I’m listening,” he said as his aide seemed to hesitate.

“This is not a figment of my imagination,” the deputy went on. “It is a truth that became clear to me once I had scrupulously examined the Vranaj archives, especially the correspondence between the old woman and Count Thopia.”

He opened the folder he was holding and took out a packet of large sheets of paper yellowed by time.

“And just what do these letters amount to?” Stres asked impatiently.

His deputy took a deep breath.

“From time to time the old woman told her friend her troubles, or asked his advice about family affairs. She had the habit of making copies of her own letters.”

“I see,” said Stres. “But please, try to keep it short.”

“Yes,” replied his deputy, “I’ll try.”

He took another breath, scratched his forehead.

“In some letters, one in particular, written long ago, the old woman alludes to an unnatural feeling on the part of her son Kostandin for his sister, Doruntine.”

“Really?” said Stres. “What sort of unnatural feeling? Can you be more specific?”

“This letter gives no details, but bearing in mind other things mentioned in later letters, particularly Count Thopia’s reply, it is clear that it was an incestuous feeling.”