I’ll wear a dress that’s fair.
If it’s grief that brings you here
Weeds is what I must wear.
While the third responded with the dead man’s words:
Come, sister mine, come as you are.
Then the fourth and first mourners, responding one to the other, sang together of the brother’s and sister’s journey, and of the astonishment of the birds they passed on the way:
Strange things have we seen beyond count
Save a living soul and a dead man
Riding by on the same mount.
The third mourner told of their arrival at the house and of Kostandin’s flight towards the graveyard. Then the fourth concluded the lament, singing of Doruntine’s knocking at the door, of the words with which she told her mother that her brother had brought her home, so as to keep his promise, and of her mother’s response from within the house:
Kostandin died and was buried as he must.
Three years have gone since he was laid to rest.
Why then is he not now just soil and dust?
After a chorus of lamentations by all the women present, the mourners rested briefly, then took up their chants again. The words with which they punctuated their wailing varied from song to song. Some verses were repeated, others changed or were replaced completely. In these new songs, the mourners summarised episodes recounted in the earlier recitals, or else elaborated a passage they had previously mentioned only fleetingly or omitted entirely. Thus it was that one chant gave greater prominence to the background of the incident, or to the great Vranaj family’s happier days, or the doubts about Doruntine’s marriage to a husband from a distant land, and Kostandin’s promise to bring his sister back whenever their mother wished. In another all this was recalled only briefly, and the mourners would linger instead on that dark journey, recounting the words that passed between dead brother and living sister. In yet another song all this was treated more briskly, while new details were offered, such as her brother’s quest for Doruntine as he drifted from dance to dance (for a festival was under way in Doruntine’s village at that time) and what the horseman said of the girls of the village: “Beautiful all, but their beauty leaves me cold.”
The people Stres had sent to keep their ears open took careful note of the tenor of these laments and reported to him at once. The captain sat near the window through which the cold north wind blew and, seeming numb, examined the reports, taking up his pen and underlining individual words or whole lines.
“However much we might rack our brains day and night to find an explanation,” he said to his deputy, “the mourners will go on in their own way.”
“That’s true,” his aide replied. “They have no doubt at all that he returned from the dead.”
“A legend is being born right before our eyes,” Stres said, handing him the sheaf of reports with their underlined passages. “Just look at this. Until two days ago, the songs gave little detail, but since last night, and especially today, they have taken shape as a well-defined fable.”
The deputy cast an eye over the pages of underlined verses and words, dotted with brief marginal notes. In places, Stres had drawn question marks and exclamation points.
“Which doesn’t mean that we can’t get something out of the mourners anyway,” he said, with the hint of a smile.
“That’s right. I’ve noticed that an ancient way of bewailing the dead has recently come back into use. It’s called ‘lamenting within the law’.”
“Yes”, the deputy concurred.
“I don’t know if the phrase exists in any other language, but as a servant of the law, I am, for my own part, struck by such an expression to describe women’s wailing at a funeral.”
“Indeed”, said the deputy.
“Maybe it means that this kind of keening means more than it appears to mean. That it tends to become a law.”
His aide was at a loss for a reply.
Through the window you could see the main road, and on it a continuing stream of people coming to attend the burial. Local inns, as well as those for miles around, were overflowing. There were old friends of the family and relatives by marriage. There were representatives of both churches, Byzantium and Rome, as well as members of the prince’s family and other lords of neighbouring principalities and counties. Count Thopia, the Lady Mother’s old friend, unable to make the journey (whether for reasons of ill health or because of a certain chill that had arisen between him and the prince, no one could say), had sent one of his sons to represent him.
The burial took place on Sunday morning as planned. The road was too narrow to accommodate the crowd, and the long cortège made its way with some difficulty to the church. Many were compelled to cross ditches and cut through the fields. A good number of these people had been guests at Doruntine’s wedding not so long ago, and the doleful tolling of the death knell reminded them of that day. The road was the same from the Vranaj house to the church, the same bells tolled, but on this day they sounded very different — protracted and muffled, as if obeying the laws of another kingdom. But apart from that, there was much that was similar: as in the wedding procession three years before, the members of the funeral cortège craned their necks to see the hearse in the same way they had gaped at the bridal steed; the road itself again seemed unable to contain such a milling throng, be it gathered in joy or in grief, and pushed many aside.
Between Doruntine’s marriage and her burial, her nine brothers had died. It was like a nightmare of which no more than a confused memory remained. It had lasted two weeks, the chain of calamity seemingly endless, as though death would be satisfied only when it had closed the door of the house of Vranaj for ever. After the first two deaths, which happened on a single day, it seemed as if fate had at last spent its rage against the family, and no one could have imagined what the morrow would bring. No one thought that two more brothers, borne home wounded the evening before, would die just three days later. Their wounds hadn’t seemed dangerous, and the members of the household had thought them far less serious than the afflictions of the two who had died. But when they were found dead on that third day, the family, already in mourning, this new grief compounding the old, was struck by an unendurable pain, a kind of remorse at the neglect with which the two wounded brothers had been treated, at the way they had been abandoned (in fact they hadn’t been abandoned at all, but such was the feeling now that they were dead). They were mad with sorrow — the aged mother, the surviving brothers, the young widowed brides. They remembered the dead men’s wounds, which, in hindsight, seemed huge. They thought of the care they ought to have lavished on them, care which they now felt they had failed to provide, and they were stricken with guilt. The death of the wounded men was doubly painful, for they felt that they had held two lives in their hands and had let them slip away. A few days later, when death visited their household again with an even heavier tread, carrying off the five remaining brothers, the aged mother and the young widows sank into despair. God himself, people said, doesn’t strike twice in the same place, but calamity had struck the house of Vranaj as it had done nowhere else. Only then did people hear that the Albanians had been fighting against an army sick with the plague, and that the wounded and most of those who had returned from the war alive would probably suffer the very same fate.
In three months the great house of Vranaj, once so boisterous and full of joy, was transformed into a house of shadows. Only Doruntine, who had left not long before, was unaware of the dreadful slaughter.
The church bell continued to toll the death knell, but among the many who had come to this burial it would have been hard to find a single one who had any distinct memory of the funerals of the nine brothers. It had all happened so nightmarishly, in deep shadow. Coffins were carried out of the Vranaj house nearly every day for more than a week. Many could not recall clearly the order in which the young men had died, and, before long, would be hard pressed to say which of the brothers fell on the battlefield, which died of illness, and which of the combination of his wounds and the terrible disease.