Ismail Kadare - The Ghost Rider

“Even if …?” Stres repeated. “Tell me, Milosao, don’t you think he meant ‘even if I’m dead’?”

“Perhaps,” the young man answered absently, looking away.

“But how can you account for that?” Stres asked. “He was an intelligent man, he didn’t believe in ghosts. I have a report from the bishop stating that at Easter you and he laughed at people’s faith in the resurrection of Christ. So how could he have believed in his own resurrection?”

They looked at one another, each suppressing a smile.

“You are right, Captain, so long as you are speaking of the present world, the existing world. But you must not forget that he, that all of us, in our words and thoughts, had in mind another world, one with a new dimension, a world in which the besa would reign supreme. In that world everything could be different.”

“Nevertheless, you live in our world, in this existing world,” said Stres.

“Yes. But a part of our being, perhaps the best part, lies in the other.”

“In the other,” he repeated softly. He was now the only one suppressing a smile.

They took no notice of it, or pretended not to, and went on discussing Kostandin’s other ideas, the reasons why he held that this reorganisation of life in Albania was necessary. These had to do with the great storms he saw looming on the horizon and with Albania’s location, caught in a vice between the religions of Rome and Byzantium, between two worlds, West and East. Their clash would inevitably bring appalling turmoil, and Albania would have to find new ways to defend itself. It had to create structures more stable than “external” laws and institutions, eternal and universal structures lying within man himself, inviolable and invisible and therefore indestructible. In short, Albania had to change its laws, its administration, its prisons, its courts and all the rest, it had to fashion them so that they could be severed from the outside world and anchored within men themselves as the tempest drew near. It had to do this imperatively or it would be wiped from the face of the earth. Thus spoke Kostandin. And he held that this new organisation would begin with the besa .

“Then of course,” Stres said, “Kostandin’s own default, the violation of his promise, was all the more serious and inadmissible, was it not?”

“Oh yes, certainly. Especially after his mother’s curse. Except for one thing, Captain Stres: there was no default. He kept his promise in the end. Somewhat belatedly, of course, but he had a good enough reason for being late: he was dead. In the end he kept his word in spite of everything.”

“But he was not the one who brought Doruntine back,” said Stres. “You know that as well as I do.”

“For you, perhaps, it wasn’t him. We see it differently.”

“Truth is the same for all. Almost anyone could have brought Doruntine here — except Kostandin!”

“Nevertheless, it was he who brought her back.”

“So you believe in resurrection?”

“That’s secondary. It has nothing to do with the heart of the matter.”

“Just the same, if you don’t accept the resurrection of the dead, how can you persist in claiming that he made that journey with his sister?”

“But that is of no importance, Captain Stres. That is completely secondary. The essential thing is that it was he who brought Doruntine here.”

“Maybe it’s this business about two worlds that prevents us from understanding one another,” Stres said. “What is a lie in one may be the truth in the other, is that the idea?”

“Maybe … Maybe.”

Meanwhile, the country seethed as it awaited the great assembly. Words, calculations, forebodings and news fluttered in the wind like yellowing leaves before a storm, falling to earth only to be raised anew. Drenched in road dirt or whitened by rime, messengers began cropping up all over the place, even while the date of the great assembly remained unknown. Some believed it would happen before Easter, others said straight after. But once folk had become convinced that it would be around Easter time, they claimed it was no coincidence that the Lord had set the date close to that of the Day of Resurrection: he wanted to test their souls one more time, to press them and torture them for who knows what ancient sin.

Turning his head towards the window to see if day had yet broken, Stres noticed a fine blond hair on his pillow. What’s that? he wondered, but sleep dragged him down before he could think about it any further.

When he woke up properly later on it was already broad daylight. He looked at his pillow as if trying to find something, then got out of bed noiselessly and went over to the window, where he inspected the catch to check whether or not it had been forced during the night. He could not have said whether he had just imagined Doruntine’s grave opening up and her hair waving in the wind or whether he had seen such a thing in a dream. Then he glanced at his pillow again. Really, his nerves must be in a terrible state if it took only a moment for his mind to wander off in such directions. He was so convinced he had seen that hair that he stopped to look at the house over the street, where, a few weeks previously, he had seen a girl brushing her hair at the window. If it had been summertime, and windows had been left open, he could have believed that the wind had just blown one of her hairs into his bedroom.

“Stres?” his wife said, still drowsing. “You’re up at the crack of dawn once again. Brrr …”

She mumbled something incomprehensible but instead of then burying her head under the pillows as she usually did when her husband woke her up, she propped herself on an elbow and shot him a pitying glance:

“They’ll be the death you with their … what do you call them … with their conferences !”

Said by his wife, “conferences” sounded just as foreign to him as the mumbling that had preceded it.

“Conferences,” he muttered to himself, as if trying to summon up the word’s original meaning. It was an everyday kind of word, but there was an unprecedented air of horror hanging over it now. A horror that, unlike many others, did not spring up from the depths of the past but was prompted by a vision of the future.

Stres kept his eyes on the grey horizon. These days, his mind turned more and more towards the future, but far from giving him any relief, it only made him more distraught.

He left the house an hour later and from outside he glanced up at the window whence the blond hair had perhaps floated, then strode rapidly to his office.

“What’s new?” he asked his deputy.

The aide listed the latest events that he had received note of during the night.

“Nothing else?” Stres inquired. “Nothing unusual? No graves profaned? These days anything can happen, can’t it?”

His deputy reported that he had received no information about any acts of that kind.

“Really? Well then, take me to the Old Monastery. We’ll see how the preparations are coming along.”

It was in an inner courtyard of the Old Monastery, large enough to hold some two thousand people, that the great assembly was to be held. Carpenters spent several days setting up wooden grandstands for the guests and a platform from which Stres would speak. Tarpaulins were strung up in case of rain.

The meeting was to take place on the first Sunday in April, but by mid-week most of the region’s inns were full, not only those closest to the Old Monastery, but also the ones along the highway. Guests, clergy and laymen alike, poured in from the four corners of the principality and from neighbouring principalities, dukedoms and counties. Visitors were expected from the farthest principalities, and envoys from the Holy Patriarchate in the Empire’s capital.