Ismail Kadare - The Ghost Rider

“Well, well.”

Thick drops of sweat stood out on the deputy’s forehead. He continued, pretending not to notice his chief’s ironic tone.

“In fact, the count immediately understood what she meant, and in his reply,” said the aide, slipping a sheet of paper across the table to Stres, “he tells her not to worry, for these were temporary things, common at their ages. He even mentions two or three similar examples in families of his acquaintance, emphasising that it happens particularly in families in which there is only one daughter, as was the case with Doruntine. ‘However, alertness and great caution are needed to make this somewhat unnatural emotion revert to normal. In any event, we’ll talk about this at length when we see each other again’.”

The deputy looked up to see what impression the reading had had on his chief, but Stres was staring at the tabletop, drumming his fingers nervously.

“Their subsequent letters make no further mention of the matter,” the aide went on. “It seems that, as the count predicted, the brother’s unhealthy feeling for his sister had become a thing of the past. But in another letter, written several years later, when Doruntine was of marriageable age, the old woman tells the count that Kostandin is unable to conceal his jealousy of any prospective fiancé. On his account, she says, we have had to reject several excellent matches.”

“And what about Doruntine?” Stres interrupted.

“Not a word about her attitude.”

“And then what?”

“Later, when the old woman told the count of the distant marriage that had just been arranged, she wrote that she herself, alongside Doruntine and most of her sons, had long hesitated, concerned that the distance was too great, but that this time it was Kostandin who argued vigorously for the prospective marriage. In his letter of congratulations, the count told the old woman, among other things, that Kostandin’s attitude towards the marriage was not at all surprising, that, on the contrary, in view of what she had told him it was understandable that Kostandin, irritated by the possibility of any local marriage which would have forced him to see his sister united with a man he knew, could more easily resign himself to her marriage to an unknown suitor, preferably a foreigner as far out of his sight as possible. It is a very good thing, the count wrote, that this marriage has been agreed upon, if only for that reason.”

The deputy leafed through his folder for a few moments. Stres was staring hard at the floor.

“Finally,” the aide continued, “we have here the letter in which the old woman described the wedding to her correspondent, and, among other things, the incident that took place there.”

“Ah yes, the incident,” said Stres, as if torn from his somnolence.

“Though this incident passed largely unnoticed, or in any event was considered natural enough in the circumstances, it was only because people were unaware of those other elements I have just told you about. The Lady Mother, on the other hand, who was well acquainted with these elements, offers the proper explanation of the event. Having told the count that, after the church ceremony, Kostandin paced back and forth like a madman, and that when they had accompanied the groom’s kinsmen as far as the highway, he accosted his sister’s husband, saying to him: ‘She is still mine, do you understand, mine!’ the old woman tells her friend that this, thank God, was the last disgrace she would have to bear in the course of this long story.”

Stres’s subordinate, apparently fatigued by his long explanation, paused and swallowed.

“That’s what these letters come to,” he said. “In the last two or three, written after her bereavement, the old woman complains of her loneliness and bitterly regrets having married her daughter to a man so far away. There’s nothing else. That’s it.”

The man fell silent. For a moment the only sound came from Stres’s fingers tapping on the table.

“And what does all this have to do with our case?”

His deputy looked up.

“There is an obvious, even direct, connection.”

Stres looked at him with a questioning air.

“I think you will agree that there is no denying Kostandin’s incestuous feelings.”

“It’s not surprising,” Stres said. “These things happen.”

“You will also admit, I imagine, that his stubborn desire to have his sister marry so far away is evidence of his struggle to overcome that perverse impulse. In other words, he wanted his sister to have a husband as far from his sight as possible, so as to remove any possibility of incest.”

“That seems clear enough,” said Stres. “Go on.”

“The incident at the wedding marks the last torment he was to suffer in his own lifetime.”

“In his lifetime?” Stres asked.

“Yes,” said the deputy, raising his voice for no apparent reason. “I am convinced that Kostandin’s unslaked incestuous desire was so strong that death itself could not still it.”

“Hmm,” Stres said.

“Incest unrealised survived death,” his aide went on. “Kostandin believed that his sister’s distant marriage would enable him to escape his yearning, but, as we shall see, neither distance nor even death itself could deliver him from it.”

“Go on,” Stres said drily.

His aide hesitated for a moment. His eyes, burning with an inner flame, stared at his chief, as if to make sure that he had leave to continue.

“Go on,” said Stres a second time.

But his deputy was still staring, still hesitating.

“Are you trying to suggest that his unsated incestuous desire for his sister lifted the dead man from his grave?” asked Stres, his voice icy.

“Precisely!” his aide cried out. “That macabre escapade was their honeymoon.”

“Enough!” Stres bellowed. “You’re talking nonsense!”

“I suspected, of course, that you would not share my view, but that is no reason to insult me, sir.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Stres said. “Completely out of your mind.”

“No, sir, I am not out of my mind. You are my superior. You have the right to punish me, to dismiss me, even to arrest me, but not to insult me. I, I—”

“You, you, you what?”

“I have my own view of this matter, and I believe it to be no more than a case of incest, for Kostandin’s actions can be explained in no other way. As for the theory, which I have lately heard expressed, that he insisted that his sister marry into a distant family because he had some inkling of the calamity that was soon to befall the family and did not wish to see her so cruelly hurt, I consider it absurd. It is true that Kostandin harboured dark forebodings, but it was the threat of incest that tormented him, and if he sent his sister away, it was to remove her from this danger rather than to ensure that she would escape a calamity of some other kind …”

The deputy spoke rapidly, not even pausing for breath, apparently afraid that he would be prevented from speaking all his mind.

“But as I said, neither distance nor death itself allowed him to escape incest. Thus it was that one stifling night he rose from his grave to do what he had dreamed of doing all his life — let me speak, please, do not interrupt — he rose from the earth on that wet and sultry October night and, mounting his gravestone become a horse, set out to live his life’s dream. And thus did that sinister honeymoon journey come about, the girl riding from inn to inn, just as you said, not with a living lover but with a dead one. And it was just that heinous fact that her aged mother discovered before she opened the door. Yes, she saw Doruntine kiss someone in the shadows, not the lover or impostor you believed, but her dead brother. What the old woman had feared all her life had finally happened. That was the disaster she discovered, and that was what brought her to her grave—”