Doruntine (2 page)

“Which is the mother's bed?” he asked softly.

The woman pointed to one of the beds.

“Leave us alone for a moment,” Stres said.

The woman opened her mouth, doubtless to oppose him, but her gaze fell on Stres's uniform and she was silent. She walked over to her companion, who was very old, and both women went out without a word.

Walking carefully so as to make no noise, Stres approached the bed where the old woman lay, her head in the folds of a white bonnet.

“My Lady,” he whispered, “Lady Mother”—for so had she been called since the death of her sons. “It's me, Stres, do you know me?”

She opened her eyes. They seemed glazed with
grief and terror. He withstood her gaze for a moment and then murmured, leaning a little nearer the white pillow, “How do you feel, Lady Mother?”

Her expression was unreadable.

“Doruntine came back last night, didn't she?” Stres asked.

The woman looked up from her bed, her eyes saying “yes.” Her gaze then settled on Stres as though asking him some question. Stres stood there for a moment, hesitant.

“How did it happen?” he asked very softly. “Who brought her back?”

The old woman covered her eyes with one hand, then her head moved in a way that told him she had lost consciousness. Stres took her hand and found her pulse with difficulty. Her heart was still beating.

“Call one of the women,” Stres said quietly to his deputy.

His aide left and soon returned with one of the women who had just left the room. Stres let go of the old woman's hand and, with the same silent steps, walked to the bed where Doruntine lay. He could see her blond hair on the pillow. He felt a wrench at his heart, but the sensation had nothing to do with what was happening now. A distant wrench, it went back to that wedding three years before. On that day, as she rode off on the customary white horse in the cavalcade of relatives and
friends of the bride, his heart was suddenly so heavy that he wondered what had come over him. Everyone looked sad, not only Doruntine's mother and brother, but all her relatives, for she was the first girl of the country to marry so far away. But Stres's sorrow was quite special. As she rode off, he realized all at once that the feeling he had had for her had been love. But it was a love without shape, a love which had never condensed, for he himself had gently prevented it. It was like the morning dew that appears for the first few minutes after sunrise, only to vanish during the other hours of day and night. The only moment when that bluish fog had nearly condensed, had tried to form itself into a cloud, was when she left. But it had been no more than an instant, quickly forgotten.

Stres stood at Doruntine's bed, looking steadily into her face. She was as beautiful as ever, perhaps even more beautiful, with those lips that seemed somehow full and light at the same time.

“Doruntine,” he said in a very soft voice.

She opened her eyes. Deep within them he sensed a void that nothing could fill. He tried to smile at her.

“Doruntine,” he said again. “Welcome home.”

She stared at him.

“How do you feel?” he said slowly, carefully, and unconsciously he took her hand. She was burning hot. “Doruntine,” he said again, more gently, “you
came last night after midnight, didn't you?”

Her eyes answered “yes.” He would rather have put off asking the question that troubled him, but it rose up of itself.

“Who brought you back?”

The young woman's eyes stared steadily back at his own.

“Doruntine,” he asked again, “who brought you back?”

Still she stared at him with those eyes in whose depths gaped a desperate void.

“You told your mother that it was your brother Constantine, didn't you?”

Again her look assented. Stres searched her eyes for some sign of madness, but could read nothing in their emptiness.

“I think you must have heard that Constantine left this world three years ago,” he said in the same faint voice. He felt tears well up within him before they suddenly filled her eyes. But hers were tears unlike any others, half-visible, half-impalpable. Her face, bathed by those tears, seemed even more remote. What's happening to me? her eyes seemed to say. Why don't you believe me?

He turned slowly to his deputy and to the other woman standing near the mother's bed and motioned to them to leave. Then he leaned toward the young woman again and stroked her hand.

“How did you get here, Doruntine? How did
you manage that long journey?”

It seemed to him that something strained to fill those immeasurably enlarged eyes.

Stres left an hour later. He looked pale, and without turning his head or speaking a word to anyone, he made his way to the door. His deputy, following behind, was tempted several times to ask whether Doruntine had said anything new, but he did not dare.

As they passed the church, Stres seemed about to enter the cemetery, but changed his mind at the last minute.

His deputy could feel the glances of curious onlookers as they walked along.

“It's not an easy case,” Stres said without looking at his deputy. “I expect there will be quite a lot of talk about it. Just to anticipate any eventuality, I think we would do well to send a report to the Prince's chancellery.”

I believe it useful to bring to your attention events that occurred at dawn on this October eleventh in the noble house of Vranaj and whose consequences may be unpredictable.

On the morning of October 11, Lady Vranaj, who as everyone knows has been living alone since the death of her nine sons on the battlefield, was found in a state of profound distress, along with her daughter, Doruntine, who, by her own account, had arrived the night before, accompanied
by her brother Constantine, who died three years ago when her other brothers died.

Having repaired to the site and tried to speak with the two unfortunate women, I concluded that neither showed any sign of mental irresponsibility, though what they now claim, whether directly or indirectly, is completely baffling and incredible. It is as well to note at this point that they had given each other this shock, the daughter by telling her mother that she had been brought home by her brother Constantine, the mother by informing her daughter that Constantine, with all her brothers, had long since departed this world.

I tried to discuss the matter with Doruntine, and what I managed to glean from her, in her distress, may be summarized more or less as follows:

One night not long ago (she does not recall the exact date), in the small city of central Europe in which she had been living with her husband since her marriage, she was told that a traveler was asking for her. On going out, she saw the horseman who had just arrived and who seemed to her to be Constantine, although the dust of the long journey had rendered him almost unrecognizable. But when the traveler, still in the saddle, said that he was indeed Constantine, and that he had come to take her to her mother as he had promised before her marriage, she was reassured. (Here we must recall the stir caused at the time by Doruntine's engagement to a man from a land so far away, the opposition of the other brothers and especially the mother, who did not want to send her daughter so far off, Constantine's insistence that the marriage take place, and finally his solemn promise, his
bessa
, that he would bring her back himself whenever their mother yearned for her daughter's company.)

Doruntine confided to me that her brother's behavior seemed rather strange, since he did not get off his horse and refused to go into the house. He insisted on taking her away as soon as possible, and when she asked him why she had to leave in such haste—for if the occasion was one of joy, she would don a holiday dress, and if it was one of sorrow, she would wear her mourning clothes—he said, with no further explanation, “Come as you are.” His behavior was scarcely natural; moreover, it was contrary to all the rules of courtesy. But since she had been consumed with yearning for her family for these three years (“I lived in the most awful solitude,” she says), she did not hesitate, wrote a note to her husband, and allowed her brother to lift her up behind him.

She also told me that it had been a long journey, though she was unable to say exactly how long. She says that all she remembers is an endless night, with myriad stars streaming across the sky, but this vision may have been suggested by an endless ride broken by longer or shorter intervals of sleep. It is interesting to note that she does not recall having traveled by day. She may have formed this impression either because she dozed or slept in the saddle all day, so that she no longer remembers the daylight at all, or because she and her escort retired at dawn and went to sleep, awaiting nightfall to continue their journey. Were this to prove correct, it would suggest that the rider wished to travel only by night. In Doruntine's mind, exhausted as
she was (not to mention her emotional state), the ten or fifteen nights of the trip (for that is generally how long it takes to travel here from Bohemia) may have blended into a single long—indeed endless—nocturnal ride.

On the way, pressed against the horseman as she was, she noticed quite unmistakably that his hair was not just dusty, but covered with mud that was barely dry, and that his body smelled of sodden earth. Two or three times she questioned him about it. He answered that he had been caught in the rain several times on his way there and that the dust on his body and in his hair, thus moistened, had turned to clots of mud.

When, towards midnight of October eleventh, Doruntine and the unknown man (for let us so designate the man the young woman took to be her brother) finally approached the residence of the Lady Mother, he reined in his horse and told his companion to dismount and go to the house, for he had something to do at the church. Without waiting for an answer, he rode toward the church and the cemetery, while she ran to the house and knocked at the door. The old woman asked who was there, and then the few words exchanged between mother and daughter—the latter having said that it was she and that she had come with Constantine, the former replying that Constantine was three years dead—gave to both the shock that felled them.

This affair, which one is bound to admit is most puzzling, may be explained in one of two ways: either someone, for some reason, deceived Doruntine,
posing as her brother with the express purpose of bringing her back, or Doruntine herself, for some unknown reason, has not told the truth and has concealed the manner of her return or the identity of the person who brought her back.

I thought it necessary to make a relatively detailed report about these events because they concern one of the noblest families in the principality and because they are of a kind that might seriously trouble people's minds.

Captain Stres

After initialing his report, Stres sat staring absently at his slanting handwriting. Two or three times he picked up his pen and was tempted to lean over the sheets of paper to amend, recast, or perhaps correct some passage, but each time he was about to put pen to paper his hand froze, and in the end he left his text unaltered.

He got up slowly, put the letter into an envelope, sealed it, and called for a messenger. When the man had gone, Stres stood for a long moment looking out the window, feeling his headache worsen. A crowd of theories jostled one another to enter his head as if through a narrow door. He rubbed his forehead as though to stem the flood. Why would an unknown traveler have done it? And if it was not some imposter, the question was even more delicate: What was Doruntine hiding? He paced back and forth in his office; when he came near the window he could see the messenger's back, shrinking
steadily as he threaded his way through the bare poplars. And what if neither of these suppositions was correct, he suddenly said to himself. What if something else had happened, something the mind cannot easily comprehend?

He stopped for a moment, his eyes fixed on one particular spot on the floor, then suddenly he made for the door, hurried down the stairs, hailed his deputy on the way down the hallway, and went out into the street.

“Let's go to the church,” he said to his deputy when he heard the man's footsteps, then his panting, at his back. “Let's have a look at Constantine's grave.”

“A good idea. When all is said and done, the story makes sense only if someone came back from the grave.”

“I'm not thinking of anything so insane. I have something else in mind.”

His stride lengthened as he said to himself, why am I taking this business so much to heart? After all, there had been no murder, no serious crime, nor indeed any offense of the kind he was expected to investigate in his capacity as regional captain. A few moments ago, as he was drafting his report, this thought had come to him several times: Am I not being too hasty in troubling the Prince's chancellery about a matter of no importance? But some inner voice told him he was not. That same voice told him that something outrageous had occurred,
something that went beyond mere murder or any other crime, something that made assassination and similar heinous acts seem mere trifles.

The little church, with its freshly repaired bell tower, was now very near, but Stres suddenly veered off and went straight into the cemetery, not through the iron grille, but through an inconspicuous wooden gate. He had not been in the cemetery for a long time, and he had trouble getting his bearings.

“This way,” said his deputy as he strode along, “the graves of the Vranaj sons must be over here.”

Stres fell in step beside him. The ground was soft in places. Small icons, half-blackened where candle wax had dripped, exuded quiet sadness. Some of the graves were overgrown with moss. It must be very cool here in summer, Stres thought.

The deputy, who had gone on ahead of him, was walking among the graves, looking this way and that. Stres stooped to right an overturned cross, but it was heavy and he had to leave it. He walked on. He saw his deputy beckon in the distance: he had found them at last.