The Ghost Rider (11 page)

Stres stared at him. The fettered man bore his scrutiny calmly.

“Well,” said Stres, “be that as it may, once again I ask you the question you find so insane. This will be the last time. Think carefully before you answer. Did you bring a young woman named Doruntine Vranaj here from Bohemia or from any other far-off place?”

“No,” the prisoner replied firmly.

“Wretch,” said Stres, turning his eyes from the man. “Put him to the torture,” he ordered.

The man’s eyes widened in terror. He opened his mouth to speak or to scream, but Stres charged out of the dungeon. As he followed a guard carrying a lantern up the stairs, he quickened his pace so as not to hear the prisoner’s cries.

A few minutes later he was on his way home, alone. The rain had stopped, but the path was dimpled with puddles. He let his boots splash in the water as he strode along distractedly. It’s dark, you know, I can’t see anything, he muttered to himself, repeating the words of the seller of icons.

He thought he heard a voice in the distance, but it was a barking that moved farther away and faded little by little, like ripples on water, in the expanse of the night.

It must be foggy, he thought, or the shadows would not be so deep.

He thought he heard that voice again, and even the muffled sound of footsteps. He started and looked back. Now he could make out the gleam of a lantern swaying in the distance, lighting the broken silhouette of a man in its wan glow. He stopped. The lantern and the splashing of the puddles, which seemed to rise up from a nightmare, were still quite far off when he first heard the voice. He
cupped his hand to his ear, trying to make out the words. There were uhs and ehs, but he heard nothing more distinct. When the man with the lantern had finally come closer, Stres called out.

“What is it?”

“He has confessed,” the man answered, breathless. “He has confessed!”

He has confessed, Stres repeated to himself. So those were the words that had sounded to him like
uhs
and
ehs
. He has confessed!

Stres, still motionless, waited until the messenger reached him. He was breathing hard.

“God be praised, he has confessed,” the messenger said again, waving his lantern as if to make his words more understandable. “Scarcely had he seen the instruments of torture when he broke down.”

Stres looked at him blankly.

“Are you coming back? I’ll light the way. Will you question him now?”

Stres did not answer. In fact, that was what the regulation called for. You were supposed to interrogate the prisoner immediately after his confession, while he was still exhausted, without giving him time to recover. And it was the middle of the night, the best time.

The man with the lantern stood two paces away, still panting.

I must not let him recover, Stres said to himself. Of course. Don’t allow him even an instant of respite. Don’t let him collect himself. That’s right, he thought, that’s exactly right as far as he’s concerned, but what about me? Don’t I too need to recover my strength?

And suddenly he realised that the interrogation of the prisoner might well be more trying for him than for the suspect.

“No,” he said, “I won’t interrogate him tonight. I need some rest.” And he turned his back on the man with the lantern.

The next morning, when Stres went down to the cell with his aide, he detected what he thought was a guilty smile on the prisoner’s face.

“Yes, truly I would have done better to confess from the start,” he said before Stres could ask him a single question. “That’s what I had thought to do, in any case, for after all I have committed no crime, and no one has ever yet been condemned for travelling or wandering about in a woman’s company. Had I told the truth from the beginning, I would have spared myself this torture, and instead of lying in this dungeon, I would have been at home, where my family is waiting for me. The problem is that once I found myself caught up in this maelstrom of lies – unwittingly, quite by chance – I couldn’t extricate myself. Like a man who, after telling some small, inoffensive lie, sinks deeper and deeper instead of taking it back right away, I too believed that I could escape this vexed affair by inventing things which, far from delivering me from my first lie, plunged me further into it. It was all the ruckus about this young woman’s journey that got me into this mess. So let me repeat that if I did not confess at once it was only because when I realised what a furore this whole story had caused, and how deeply it had upset everyone, I suddenly felt like a child who has shifted some object
the moving of which is a frightful crime in the eyes of the grownups. On the morning of that day – I’ll tell you everything in detail in just a minute – when I saw that the homecoming of this young woman had been so, so – how shall I put it? – so disturbing to everyone, especially when everyone suddenly started running around so feverishly asking ‘Who was she with?’ and ‘Who brought her back?’, my instinct was to slip away, to get myself out of the whole affair, in which my role, after all, was in any event quite accidental. And that is what I tried to do. Anyway, now I’ll tell you the whole story from the beginning. I think you want to know everything, in detail, isn’t that right, officer?”

Stres stood, as if frozen, near the rough wooden table.

“I’m listening,” he said. “Tell me everything you think you ought to.”

The suspect seemed a little uneasy at Stres’s indifferent air.

“I don’t know, this is the first time I’ve ever been interrogated, but from what I’ve heard, the investigator is supposed to ask questions first, then the prisoner answers, isn’t that how it works? But you …”

“Tell me what you have to say,” Stres said. “I’m listening.”

The prisoner shifted on his pile of straw.

“Are your shackles bothering you?” Stres asked. “Do you want me to have them taken off?”

“Yes, if that’s possible.”

Stres motioned to his deputy to release him.

“Thank you,” said the prisoner.

He seemed even less self-assured when his hands were freed, and he looked up at Stres once more, still hoping
that he would be questioned. But once he realised that his hope was futile, he began speaking in a low voice, his earlier liveliness gone.

“As I told you yesterday, I am an itinerant seller of icons, and it was because of my trade that I happened to make the acquaintance of this young woman. I am from Malta, but I spend most of the year on the road in the Balkans and other parts of Europe. Please stop me if I’m giving you too much detail, for as I said, this is my first interrogation and I’m not sure of the rules. Anyway, I sell icons, and you can well imagine the taste women have for these objects. That was how I came to meet this woman Doruntine in Bohemia one day. She told me that she was a foreigner, originally from Albania, that she had married into a Bohemian family. When I mentioned that I had spent some time in her country, she could not contain her emotion. She said that I was the first person from there that she had met. She asked whether I had any news about what was happening there, whether some calamity had occurred, for none of her family had come to see her. I had heard talk of a war or a plague – in any case a scourge of some kind that had ravaged your country – and after telling her that, I added, hoping to set her mind at rest, that it had happened a long time ago, nearly three years before. Then she cried out, saying: ‘But it is exactly three years since I have had any news! Oh woe is me! Surely something terrible must have happened!’ Then, overcome, her voice broken by sobs, she told me that she had married a man from this land three years before, that her mother and brothers had not approved of her marrying so far away, but that one of her brothers, whose name was Kostandin,
had insisted on it. He had given his mother his word, his
besa
, as you Albanians now call one’s pledged word – though it was from her lips that I first heard the expression – promising to bring her daughter back from that far country whenever she wanted him to; that weeks and months had passed, and then years, but no one from her family had come to see her, not even Kostandin, and she missed them so much she couldn’t bear it, she felt so alone there among foreigners, and what with missing them so much and feeling so alone, she had begun to feel great anxiety that some catastrophe had happened at home. And since I had told her that there had in fact been a war or a plague, she was sure that something terrible had happened, that her forebodings were well founded. Then she said that she had been thinking of going to see her family herself, but she could not disobey her husband who, though he had promised to take her there, since her brothers seemed to have forsaken her, was too busy with his own affairs to undertake such a long journey.

“As I listened to her speak – in tears she looked even more beautiful – I was suddenly gripped by such a violent desire for her that without a moment’s thought I said that if she agreed I could take her to her family myself. My trade has accustomed me to long journeys, and I told her that as simply as if I had offered to take her to the next town, but she thought the idea mad. It was only natural for it to seem insane to her at first, yet curiously, the passion with which she initially rejected my proposal gave me hope, for I had the impression that her protest was meant not so much to persuade me that the idea was really insane as to convince herself. The more she said, ‘You’re mad,
and I am madder still for listening to you,’ the more I felt my desire increase, along with my hope that she would yield. So on the next day, when, after a sleepless night, she told me – pale, her voice dull – that she did not see what she could say to her husband if she agreed to come with me, I told myself that I had won. I was convinced that the main thing was to set out alone with her on the roads of Europe. After that, God would provide! Nothing else seemed to matter. I suggested that we didn’t have to tell him, for at bottom it was he who was forcing her to act in that way. Had she herself not told me that he had promised to take her to her mother, but that he was kept from doing so by his business? All she had to do, then, was to leave without telling him anything. ‘But how can I, how can I?’ she asked feverishly. ‘How can I explain it to him afterwards? Alone with a stranger!’ And she blushed. Of course not, I said, you cannot tell him that you made the journey with a stranger, God forbid! ‘Then what can I do?’ she asked. And I told her: ‘I’ve thought about it, and what you must do is leave him a letter saying that your brother came to fetch you in great haste, for mis fortune has befallen your family.’ ‘What misfortune?’ she interrupted. ‘You, stranger, you know what it is, but you don’t want to tell me. Oh, my brother must be dead, otherwise he would have come to see me!’

“Two days passed and still she hesitated. I was afraid of being found out and tried to meet her secretly. My desire became uncontrollable. At last she agreed. It was a gloomy late afternoon when she came in haste to the crossroads where I had told her that I would wait for her one last time. I helped her to the crupper and we set off without
a word. We rode for a long time, until we felt that we were far enough away that they would not be able to trace us. We spent the night in an out-of-the-way inn and set off again before dawn. I need hardly tell you that she was in a constant state of anxiety. I comforted her as well as I could, and we pressed on. We spent the second night in another inn even farther off the beaten track than the first, in a region I don’t even know the name of. I’ll spare you the details of my attempts to win her favours. Her pride, and especially her constant anxiety, held her back. But I used every means, from passionate entreaty to threats to abandon her, to leave her alone on the high plateaus of Europe. And so, on the fourth night she gave in. I was so drunk with passion, so giddy, that by the next morning I hardly knew where we were or where we were going. If I am giving useless detail, please stop me. We spent several strange days and nights. We slept in inns that we passed on the way, then we took up our journey again. We sold some of her jewels to pay our expenses. I wanted the journey to last as long as possible, but she was impatient. The closer we came to the Albanian border, the greater was her anxiety. ‘What could have happened there?’ she asked from time to time. ‘What of that war, that plague?’ We asked often at the inns, but received only evasive answers. There had indeed been talk of great conflict in Albanian territory, but the reports differed about when it had happened. Some said it had not been war, but plague; others held that the disease hadn’t stricken Albania, but some more distant land. Meanwhile, as we neared the Albanian border, the answers grew more definite. Without telling her, I tried to find out more while she rested at the
inns. Here everyone knew that war and plague had allied themselves, and had decimated the men of Albania. Once we were in the country’s northern principalities, we tried to avoid the major roads and inns, travelling mostly by night. We had now reached the principalities neighbouring her own, and she insisted that we do nothing to call attention to ourselves. We cut across fallow fields, often leaving the roads altogether. We made love wherever we could. In one of the few inns in which we were forced to take shelter from foul weather, I learned the terrible truth about her brothers. Everyone was talking about the great sorrow that had befallen that illustrious house. All her brothers were dead, Kostandin among them. The innkeeper knew the whole story. I began to fear that she would be recognised. As we came closer to her home, we strained our wits to find some acceptable explanation for her arrival. Believing her brothers still alive, she was more frightened than she need have been, whereas for me, knowing the truth as I did, things seemed simpler. In any event, it was easier to account to an old woman stunned by misfortune than to nine brothers.

“She was beside herself in her anxiety about what she could say to her brothers and her mother to explain her arrival. What would she answer when they asked her, ‘Who brought you back?’ Would she tell the truth? Would she lie? And, if so, what would she say?