The Ghost Rider relates the legend of Doruntine to the invention or emergence of the besa, the Albanian “promise” or “troth” from which the rules of hospitality and the blood feud are derived in the fifteenth-century Kanun of Lek Dukagjin, the famous and long-lasting code of Albanian customary law. But alongside his speculation on the origins of a key part of Albanian national identity — a part that Enver Hoxha, self-proclaimed “engineer of human souls”, was seeking to eradicate and replace with the “New Man” — Kadare uses the legend to broach more pressing and dangerous questions: What are the means of resistance that a culture can use when under attack? How do people organise themselves to survive oppression? It is not a coincidence that the police chief charged with elucidating the mystery of Doruntine’s return in Kadare’s novel often sounds like a harassed bureaucrat of modern times trying hard to hang on to rationality when all around him seem to have gone mad.
For this new edition of Jon Rothschild’s original translation, I have inserted the many additions made by Kadare in 1993, and also put personal and place names in forms closer to their Albanian originals. In addition, Ismail Kadare has authorised one or two further small changes that improve the coherence of the text, as well as the new title.
David Bellos
Princeton, NJ, May 2009
GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION
Most letters of the Albanian alphabet are pronounced more or less as in English. The main exceptions are as follow:
c ts as in curtsy ç ch as in church gj gy as in hogyard j y as in year q ky as in stockyard or the t in mature x dz as in adze xh j as in joke zh s as in measure
CHAPTER ONE
Stres was still in bed when he heard the knocking at the door. He was tempted to bury his head in the pillow to blot out the noise, but the sound came again, louder this time.
“Who the Devil would pound on my door before daybreak?” he grumbled, throwing off the blanket.
He was on his way down the stairs when he heard the hammering for the third time, but now the rhythm of the metal knocker told him who it was. He slid back the bolt and opened the door. There was no need to say, “And what possesses you to wake me before dawn?” for the look on his face and his bleary eyes conveyed the message well enough.
“Something’s happened,” his deputy hastened to say.
Stres stared at him sceptically, as if to say,
“It better be good to justify a visit at this ungodly hour.” But he was well aware that his aide rarely blundered. Indeed, whenever he had been moved to rebuke him, he had found himself compelled to hold his tongue. Still, he would have been delighted had his deputy been in the wrong this time, so that he could work off his ill humour on him.
“So?”
The deputy glanced at his chief’s eyes for an instant, then stepped back and spoke.
“The dowager Vranaj and her daughter, Doruntine, who arrived last night under very mysterious circumstances, both lie dying.”
“Doruntine?” said Stres, dumbfounded. “How can it be?”
His deputy heaved a sigh of relief: he had been right to pound on the door.
“How can it be?” Stres said again, rubbing his eyes as if to wipe away the last trace of sleep. And in fact he had slept badly. No first night home after a two-week mission had ever been so trying. One long nightmare. “How can it be?” he asked for the third time. Doruntine had married into a family that lived so far from her own that she hadn’t been able to come back even when they were in mourning.
“How, indeed,” said the deputy. “As I said, the circumstances of her return are most mysterious.”
“And?”
“Well, both mother and daughter have taken to their beds and lie dying.”
“Strange! Do you think there’s been foul play?”
The deputy shook his head. “I think not. It looks more like the effect of some dreadful shock.”
“Have you seen them?”
“Yes. They’re both delirious, or close to it. The mother keeps asking, ‘Who brought you back, daughter?’ And the daughter keeps saying, ‘My brother Kostandin.’”
“Is that what she says: Kostandin? But, good God, he died three years ago, he and all his brothers …”
“According to the local women now gathered at their bedsides, that is just what the mother told her. But the girl insists that she arrived with him last night, just after midnight.”
“How odd,” said Stres, all the while thinking how ghastly.
They stared at each other in silence until Stres, shivering, remembered that he was not dressed.
“Wait for me,” he said, and went back in.
From inside came his wife’s drowsy “What is it?” and the inaudible words of his reply. Soon he came out again, wearing the regional captain’s uniform that made him look even taller and thinner.
“Let’s go see them,” he said.
They set out in silence. A handful of white rose petals fallen at someone’s door reminded Stres somehow of a brief scene from the dream that had slipped so strangely into his fitful sleep.
“Quite extraordinary,” he said.
“It beggars belief,” replied his deputy, raising the stakes.
“To tell you the truth, I was tempted not to believe it at first.”
“So I noticed. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it. Very mysterious.”
“Worse than that,” Stres said. “The more I think about it, the more inconceivable it seems.”
“The main thing is to find out how Doruntine got back,” said the deputy.
“And then?”
“The case will be solved if we can find out who accompanied her, or rather, if we can uncover the circumstances of her arrival.”
“Who accompanied her,” Stres repeated. “Yes, who and how … Obviously she is not telling the truth.”
“I asked her three times how she got here, but she offered no explanation. She was hiding something.”
“Did she know that all her brothers, including Kostandin, were dead?” Stres asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“It’s possible she didn’t know,” Stres said. “She married so far away …” To his surprise his jaw suddenly felt as heavy as lead, making it difficult for him to speak. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. He could feel a heaviness in his lungs too, as if they had filled with coal dust.
He pressed forward, and the exercise helped to clear his dulled mind.
“What was I saying? Oh, yes … She married so far abroad that she’s not been able to return home since her wedding. As far as I know this is the first time she’s been back.”
“She can’t have known about the death of her nine brothers or she would have come then,” said the deputy. “The dowager complained often enough about her daughter not being at her side during those grief-stricken days.”
“The forests of Bohemia where she lives lie at least two weeks’ journey from here, if not more,” Stres observed.
“Yes, if not more,” repeated his deputy. “Almost at the heart of Europe.”
As they walked, Stres noticed more white rose petals strewn along the path, as if some invisible hand had scattered them during the night. Fleetingly he recalled seeing them somewhere before. But he couldn’t really remember his dream. He also had a faint pain in his forehead. At the exact spot where his dream must have entered last night, he thought, before exiting the same way later on, towards dawn perhaps, irritating the wound it had already made.