Thirty-six hours after the man’s departure, Stres was informed that some relatives of Doruntine’s husband had just arrived. At first it was rumoured that her husband himself had come, but it soon became clear that the visitors were his two first cousins.
After dispatching a second messenger to overtake the first and tell him to turn back, Stres hurried to meet the new arrivals, who had taken lodgings at the inn at the crossroads.
The two young men were so alike in bearing and appearance that they might have been taken for twins, though they were not. They were still tired from their long journey and had not yet had time to wash or change their clothes when Stres arrived. He couldn’t help staring at their dust-covered hair, and looked at them in so odd a fashion that one, with just the hint of a guilty smile, passed his fingers through his hair and spoke a few words in an incomprehensible tongue.
“What language do they speak?” Stres asked his deputy, who had arrived at the inn shortly before him.
“God knows,” was the reply. “It sounds to me like German laced with Spanish. I sent someone to the Old Monastery to fetch one of the monks who speaks foreign languages. He shouldn’t be long.”
“I have a hard time making myself understood with the little Latin I know,” said the innkeeper. “And they massacre it too.”
“Perhaps they need to wash and rest a bit,” Stres said to the innkeeper. “Tell them to go upstairs if they like, until the interpreter gets here.”
The innkeeper passed on Stres’s message in his fractured Latin. The visitors nodded agreement and, one behind the other, began climbing the wooden stairs, which creaked as if it might collapse. Stres could not help staring at their dusty cloaks as he watched them go up.
“Did they say anything?” he asked when the staircase had stopped creaking. “Do they know that Doruntine is dead?”
“They learned of her death and her mother’s while on their way here,” the deputy answered, “and surely other things as well.”
Stres began pacing back and forth in the large hall, which also served as the reception room. The others — his aide, the innkeeper and a third man — watched him come and go without daring to break the silence.
The monk from the Old Monastery arrived half an hour later. The two foreigners came down the wooden stairs, whose creaking seemed more and more sinister to Stres’s ear. Their hair, now free of most of the journey’s dust, was very blond.
Stres turned to the monk and said, “Tell them that I am Captain Stres, responsible for keeping order in this district. I believe they have come to find out what happened to Doruntine, have they not?”
The monk translated these words for the strangers, but they looked blankly at one another, seeming not to understand.
“What language are you speaking?” Stres asked the monk.
“I’ll try another,” he said without answering the question.
He spoke to them again. The two strangers leaned forward with the pained expressions of men straining to understand what is being said to them. One of them spoke a few words, and this time it was the monk whose face took on a troubled expression. These exchanges of words and grimaces continued for some time until finally the monk spoke several long sentences to which the strangers now listened with nods of great satisfaction.
“Finally found it,” said the monk. “They speak a German dialect mixed with Slavonic. I think we’ll be able to understand one another.”
Stres spoke immediately.
“You have come just in time,” he said. “I believe you have heard what happened to your cousin’s wife. We are all dismayed.”
The strangers’ faces darkened.
“When you arrived I had already sent someone to your country to find out the circumstances of her leaving there,” Stres went on. “I hope that we may be able to learn something from you, as you may learn something from us. I believe that all of us have an equal interest in finding out the truth.”
The two strangers nodded in agreement.
“When we left,” said one of them, “we knew nothing, save that our cousin’s wife had gone off suddenly, under rather strange circumstances, with her brother Kostandin.”
He stopped and waited for the monk, who kept his pale eyes fixed upon him, to translate his words.
“While en route,” the stranger continued, “still far from your country, we learned that our cousin’s wife had indeed arrived at her parents’ home, but that her brother Kostandin, with whom she said she had left, had departed this life three years ago.”
“Yes,” said Stres, “that’s correct.”
“On the way we also learned of the old woman’s death, news that grieved us deeply.”
The stranger lowered his eyes. A silence followed, during which Stres motioned to the innkeeper and two or three onlookers to keep their distance.
“You wouldn’t have a room where we could talk, would you?” Stres asked the owner.
“Yes, of course, Captain. There is a quiet place just over there. Come.”
They filed into a small room. Stres invited them to sit on carved wooden chairs.
“We had but one goal when we set out,” one of the two strangers continued, “and that was to satisfy ourselves about her flight. In other words, first of all to make sure that she had really reached her own family, and secondly to learn the reason for her flight, to find out whether or not she meant to come back, among other things that go without saying in incidents of this kind.”
As the monk translated, the stranger stared at Stres as if trying to guess whether the captain grasped the full meaning of his words.
“For an escapade of this kind, as I’m sure you must realise, arouses …”
“Of course,” said Stres. “I quite understand.”
“Now, however,” the visitor continued, “another matter has arisen: this question of the dead brother. Our cousin, Doruntine’s husband, knows nothing of this, and you may well imagine that this development gives rise to yet another mystery. If Doruntine’s brother has been dead for three years, then who was the man who brought her here?”
“Precisely,” Stres replied. “I have been asking myself that question for several days now, and many others have asked it too.”
He opened his mouth to continue, but suddenly lost his train of thought. In his mind, he knew not why, he saw in a flash the white bones of the horse lying on the plain that afternoon, as if they had tumbled there from some troubled dream.
“Did anyone see the horseman?” he asked.
“Where? What horseman?” the two strangers said, almost in one voice.
“The one believed to have been her brother, the man who brought Doruntine here.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, there were women who happened to be close by. They said they saw a horseman near our cousin’s house, and that Doruntine hurried to mount behind him. And then there’s also the note she left.”
“That’s right,” Stres said. “She told me about a note. Have you read it?”
“We brought it with us,” said the second stranger, the one who had spoken least.
“What? You have the note with you?”
Stres could scarcely believe his ears, but the stranger was already rummaging through his leather satchel, from which he finally took out a letter. Stres leaned forward to examine it.
“It’s her handwriting, all right,” said the deputy, peering over Stres’s shoulder. “I recognise it.”
Stres stared with wide eyes at the crude letters, which seemed to have been formed by a clumsy hand. The text, in a foreign language, was incomprehensible. One word, the last, had been crossed out.
“What does it say?” asked Stres, leaning even closer. Only one word was recognisable, her brother’s name, spelled differently than in Albanian: Cöstanthin. “What do these other words mean?” Stres asked.