Doruntine (12 page)

He touched the thick paper of the report with his fingers as if to convince himself that the man he was waiting for was really coming. We can't go any faster, it's dark, you see. He repeated to himself the delirious prisoner's words. Don't be afraid, none of your brothers is still alive. . . .

He's the one, Stres said to himself. Now he was sure of it. Just as he had imagined. He recalled the moment in the cemetery, that day in the snow when he told himself that it was all lies. Well, it wasn't all lies, he now thought, his eyes fixed on the icy expanse. The plain stretched to infinity in the grey rain, and the snow itself had melted or withdrawn into the distance without a trace, as if to help him forget the ideas he had had that day.

The dusk was getting thicker. On either side of the road an occasional idler could be seen, no doubt awaiting the arrival of the carriage. News of the arrest had apparently spread.

The messenger, dozing in his corner, made a sound like a groan. If what he had said was true, Stres thought, they should be here by now. The deputy seemed lost in thought. Stres had heard no further mention of that incest theory of his. He must be embarrassed now.

The messenger let out another groan and half opened his eyes. A madman's eyes, one would have said.

“What's going on?” he asked. “Are they here yet?”

No one answered. Stres went to the window for perhaps the hundredth time. The plain was now so gloomy that it was hard to make out anything. But soon the arrival of the carriage was heralded, first by a far-off rumbling, and then by the clatter of its wheels.

“Good God! They're finally here,” said Stres's deputy, shaking the messenger by the shoulder.

Stres ran down the stairs, followed by his aide and the messenger. The carriage was rolling up as they got to the threshold. A few people were following along in the dark. Others could be heard running from farther off. At last the carriage stopped and a man dressed in the uniform of an officer of the prince got off.

“Where is Captain Stres?” he asked.

“I am he,” said Stres.

“I believe you have been informed that—”

“Yes,” Stres interrupted. “I know all about it.”

The man in uniform seemed about to add something, but then turned and headed for the carriage, leaned in through the window, and said a few words to the people inside.

“Light a lantern,” someone called out.

The footman opened the carriage door, revealing a pair of booted legs, then a second pair of legs thoroughly spattered with mud. When the bodies
that went with the legs appeared, it could be seen that the man covered with dried mud was shackled.

“It's him! It's him!” whispered the people who had gathered around.

The flickering gleam of the lantern revealed no more than half the face of the man in irons, a face bizarrely streaked with mud. The men who had brought him handed him over to two of Stres's men, who took hold of him, as the first ones had, by the armpits. The shackled man offered no resistance.

“To the dungeon,” Stres said shortly. “What about you, what do you mean to do now?” he added, addressing the man in uniform, who seemed to be the commander of the small detachment.

“We're going back at once,” he replied.

“Are you going with them?” Stres asked the messenger.

“Yes, sir.”

Stres stood there until the carriage shook into motion, then turned toward the building. At the very last moment he paused on the threshold. He sensed the presence of people in the half-darkness. In the distance he heard the footsteps of a man running toward them.

“What are you all waiting for, good people?” Stres asked quietly. “Why don't you go home and go to bed? We have to stay up, it's part of our job, but why should you stand around here?”

No answer came from the shadows. The light of the lantern flickered briefly as if terrified by those waxy twisted faces, then abandoned them to the darkness.

“Good night,” said Stres, entering the building and, lantern in hand, following his deputy down the staircase that led to the dungeon. The smell of mold choked him. He felt suddenly uneasy.

His aide pushed open the iron door of the dungeon and stood aside to let his chief pass. The prisoner was slumped on a pile of straw, head resting on his chained hands. Sensing a presence, he looked up. Stres could just make out his features in the gleam of the lantern. He seemed handsome, even marked as he was by the mud and the blows he had suffered. Stres's eyes were drawn involuntarily to the man's lips, and those human lips—cracked in the corners by fever, yet strangely alien to those shackles, those guards, those orders—suggested to Stres more than any other detail that he had before him the man who had made love to Doruntine.

“Who are you?” asked Stres, his voice icy.

The prisoner looked up. His expression, like his lips, seemed foreign to the setting. Seducer's eyes, Stres said to himself.

“I am a traveler, officer,” the man answered. “An itinerant seller of icons. They arrested me. Why I don't know. I am very sick. I shall lodge a complaint.”

He spoke a labored but correct Albanian. If he really was a seller of icons, he had apparently learned the language for his trade.

“Why did they arrest you?”

“Because of some woman I don't even know, whom I've never seen. A certain Doruntine. They told me I made a long journey on horseback, with her behind me, and they added I don't know what other foolishness as well.”

“Did you really travel with a woman? More precisely, did you bring a woman here from far away?” Stres asked.

“No, officer, I did not. I have traveled with no woman at all, at least not in several years.”

“About a month ago,” said Stres.

“No. Absolutely not!”

“Think about it,” said Stres.

“I don't have to think about it,” said the shackled man in a sonorous voice. “I am sorry to see, officer, that you too apparently subscribe to this general foolishness. I am an honest man. I was arrested while lying on the roadside in agony. It's inhuman! To suffer like a dog and wake up in chains instead of finding help or care. It is truly insane!”

“I am no madman,” said Stres. “As I think you will have occasion to find out.”

“But what you're doing is pure madness,” the man in shackles replied in the same stentorian voice. “At least accuse me of something plausible. Say that I stole something or killed someone. But
don't come and tell me, You traveled on horseback with a woman. As if that was a crime! I would have done better to admit it from the outset, then you would all have been satisfied: yes, I traveled on horseback with a woman. And what of it? What's wrong with that? But I am an honest man, and if I did not say it, it is because I am not in the habit of lying. I intend to lodge a complaint about this wherever I can. I'll go to your prince himself. Higher still if need be, to Constantinople!”

Stres stared at him. The shackled 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 absently, unseeing. It's
dark, you see, 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 circles on the 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 “uh's” and “eh's,” 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. So those were the words that had sounded to him like “uh's” and “eh's.” 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, brandishing 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 numbly.

“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 realized 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 traveling 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. For like a man who, after telling some small, inoffensive lie, sinks deeper and deeper instead of taking it back right away, so 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 realized what a furor 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 arrival 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 realized 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 Constantine, had insisted on it. He had given his mother his word, his
bessa
, 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 Constantine, 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.