Kostandin’s presence, too, like that of any other dead man returned to the land of the living, would be welcome for no more than the briefest lapse of time (You go on, I have something to do at the church), for his dead life’s proper place was there, in the grave. They say there was a time when dead and living, men and gods, all lived together and sometimes even intermarried, engendering hybrid creatures. But that was an era of barbarism that would never return.
Others listened to these morbid words but preferred to look at matters more simply. If this was all some yearning for resurrection, they said, why bother trying to decide whether it was good or ill? God, after all, would set the date of the Apocalypse, and none save He was entitled to pass judgement on the matter, and still less to decree its advent. But that, others replied, is exactly what’s wrong with this rumour of Kostandin’s resurrection. The alleged resurrection is taken as a sign that the Apocalypse could occur without an order from the Lord. And the Roman Church accuses ours of having sanctioned this travesty. Now, however, everything will be put right. The Church of Byzantium will not be found wanting. Stres had finally unmasked the great hoax, and the whole country — nay, the whole world, from Rome to Constantinople — would soon learn the truth. Stres would surely be awarded high honours for his achievement.
The light in his window was the last to go out each night. He must be preparing his report. Who can say what we’re going to find out, everyone repeated. Blessed are the deaf! In times like these, they are the only people who can sleep soundly.
The sky, though low, seemed particularly distant. Boorishly blocking the view of all four points of the compass, it made not only the old folk but everyone else too complain of the crushing humidity.
But that did not stop them from gossiping. Every day brought new chapters to the story of Doruntine, or else erased parts of it. Only the mourners remained steadfast in their ritual. On the day of the dead, as people made the traditional visits to the graves of their relatives, these women mourned the Vranaj with the very same songs they had sung before:
Woe betide thee, Kostandin!
What have you done with your word?
Does it lie in the grave as you do?
Stres listened to all this talk with an enigmatic smile. He had stopped railing at the old crones or calling them snakes with forked tongues. He’d grown paler of late, but pallor quite suited his looks in winter.
“What exactly does the besa mean to you?” he would ask of Kostandin’s companions — having recently found pleasure in their company.
The young men looked at one another. There were four of them: Shpend, Milosao, and the two Radhen boys. Stres met them nearly every afternoon at the New Inn, where they used to pass the time when Kostandin was alive. People shook their heads in wonder when they saw Stres with them. Some said that he befriended them as a matter of official duty. Others maintained that he was just killing time. He has finished his report, they said, and now he’s taking time off. Others simply shrugged. Who knows why he spends his time with them? He’s deep as a well, that Stres. You can never guess why he does one thing rather than another.
“So, what does besa mean to you? Or rather, what did it mean to him, to Kostandin?”
None had been more deeply moved by Kostandin’s death than these four young men. He had been more than a brother to them, and even now, three years after his death, so strong was his presence in their words and thoughts that many people, half-seriously, half-jokingly, called them “Kostandin’s disciples”. They looked at one another again. Why was Stres asking them this question?
They had not accepted the captain’s company with good grace. Even when Kostandin was alive they had been cool towards him, but in the past few months, as Stres laboured to unravel the mystery of Doruntine’s return, the chill had turned icy, bordering on hostility. Stres’s first efforts to win them over had run up against this wall. But then, surprisingly, their attitude had changed completely so that they accepted the captain’s presence. Young people today are not stupid, was the popular comment at church on Sunday; they know what they’re doing.
“It’s a term that was used in olden days,” Stres went on, “but the meaning attached to it nowadays seems to me more or less new. It has come up more than once in trial proceedings.”
They pondered in silence. During their afternoons and evenings with Kostandin, so different from the morose sessions that were now their lot, they had discussed many subjects with great passion, but the besa had always been their favourite topic. And for good reason, too: it was a sort of fulcrum, the theme on which all the rest was based.
They had begun to weigh their words with greater care after the bishop issued warnings to all their families. But that was before Kostandin’s death. What would they do now that the man they had loved so much was gone? Stres seemed to be familiar with their ideas already; that being the case, all he really had to do was sit and listen. After all, they weren’t afraid to express their views. On the contrary, given the opportunity, they were prepared to proclaim them quite openly. What they feared was that their views might be distorted.
“What did Kostandin think about the besa?” said Milosao, repeating Stres’s question. “It was part of his more general outlook. It would be difficult to explain it without showing its connection with his other convictions.”
And they set about explaining everything to him in detail. Kostandin, as the captain must surely know, was an oppositionist, a dissident, as were they, come to that. He was opposed to existing laws, institutions, decrees, prisons, police and courts, which he considered no more than a pack of coercive rules raining down on man like hail. He believed that these laws ought to be abolished and replaced by laws arising from within man himself. By this he did not mean purely spiritual standards dependent on conscience alone, for he was no naive dreamer who assumed that humanity could be ruled solely by conscience. He believed in something far more tangible, something the seeds of which he had detected scattered here and there in Albanian life in recent times, something he said should be nurtured, encouraged to blossom into a whole system. In this system there would be no further need for written laws, courts, jails or police. This new order, of course, would not be wholly free of tragedy, of murder and violence, but man himself would judge his neighbour and be judged by him quite apart from any rigid judicial structure. He would kill or be executed, he would imprison himself or leave prison, when he thought it appropriate.
“But how could such an order be achieved?” asked Stres. Didn’t it still come down to conscience in the end, and did not they themselves consider it merely a dream?
They replied that in this new world, existing institutions would have been replaced by immaterial and invisible rules that were nonetheless not at all chimerical or idyllic. In fact they would be rather bleak and tragic, and therefore as weighty as the old ones, if not more so. Except that they would lie within man, not in the form of remorse or some similar sentiment, but as a well-defined ideal, a faith, an order understood and accepted by everyone, but realised within each individual, not secret but revealed for all the world to see, as if man’s breast were transparent and his greatness or anguish, his pain, his tragedy, his decisions and doubts, were plainly visible. These were the main lines of an order of this kind. The besa was one of them, perhaps the principal one.