“In any event, someone must have come with her,” he said.
“Yes, but who? Her mother can’t possibly believe that her daughter returned with a dead man, any more than we can.”
“But why would she conceal who she came back with?”
“I can’t explain it. It’s very unclear.”
Once again they walked in silence. The autumn air was cold. Some cawing crows flew low. Stres watched their flight for a moment.
“It’s going to rain,” he said. “The crows caw like that because their ears hurt when a storm is coming.”
His deputy looked off in the same direction, but said nothing.
“Earlier you mentioned something about a shock that might have brought the two women to their deathbed,” Stres said.
“Well, it was certainly caused by some very powerful emotion.” He avoided the word terrible, for his chief had commented that he tended to overuse it. “Since neither woman shows any mark of violence, their sudden collapse must surely have been caused by some kind of shock.”
“Do you think the mother suddenly discovered some-thing terrible?” Stres asked.
His deputy stared at him. He can use words as he pleases, he thought in a flash, but if others do, he stuffs them back down their throats.
“The mother?” he said. “I suspect they both suddenly discovered something terrible, as you put it. At the same time.”
As they continued to speculate about the shock mother and daughter had presumably inflicted on one another (both Stres and his deputy, warped by professional habit, increasingly tended to turns of phrase better suited to an investigative report), they mentally reconstructed, more or less, the scene that must have unfolded in the middle of the night. Knocks had sounded at the door of the old house at an unusual hour, and when the old lady called out — as she must have done — “Who’s there?” — a voice from outside would have answered, “It’s me, Doruntine.” Before opening the door, the old woman, upset by the sudden knocking and convinced that it couldn’t be her daughter’s voice, must have asked, to ease her doubt, “Who brought you back?” Let us not forget that for three years she had been desperate for some consolation in her grief, waiting in vain for her daughter to come home. From outside, Doruntine answered, “My brother Kostandin brought me back.” And the old woman receives the first shock. Perhaps, even shaken as she was, she found the strength to reply, “What are you talking about? Kostandin and his brothers have been in their graves for three years.” Now it is Doruntine’s turn to be stricken. If she really believes that it was her brother Kostandin who had brought her back, then the shock is twofold: finding out that Kostandin and her other brothers were dead and realising at the same time that she had been travelling with a ghost. The old woman then summons up the strength to open the door, hoping against hope that she has misunderstood the young woman’s words, or that she has been hearing voices, or that it is not Doruntine at the door after all. Perhaps Doruntine, standing there outside, also hopes she has misunderstood. But when the door swings open, both repeat what they have just said, dealing each other a fatal blow.
“No,” said Stres. “None of that makes much sense either.”
“I agree with you,” said his deputy. “But one thing is certain: something must have happened between them for the two women to be in such a state.”
“Something happened between them,” Stres repeated. “Of course something happened, but what? A terrifying tale from the girl, a terrifying revelation for the mother. Or else …”
“There’s the house,” said the deputy. “Maybe we can find out something.”
The great building could be seen in the distance, standing all forlorn on the far side of an open plain. The wet ground was strewn with dead leaves all the way to the house, which had once been one of the grandest and most imposing of the principality, but now had an air of mourning and desertion. Most of the shutters on the upper floors were closed, the eaves were damaged in places, and the grounds before the entrance, with their ancient, drooping, mossy trees, seemed desolate.
Stres recalled the burial of the nine Vranaj brothers three years earlier. There had been one tragedy after another, each more painful than the last, to the point that only by going mad could one erase the memory. But no generation could recall a calamity on this scale: nine coffins for nine young men of a single household in a single week. It had happened five weeks after the grand wedding of the family’s only daughter, Doruntine. The principality had been attacked without warning by a Norman army and, unlike in previous campaigns, where each household had had to give up one of their sons, this time all eligible young men were conscripted. So all nine brothers had gone off to war. It had often happened that several brothers of a single household went to fight in far more bloody conflicts, but never had more than half of them fallen in combat. This time, however, there was something very special about the enemy army: it was afflicted with plague, and most of those who took part in the fighting died one way or another, victors and vanquished alike, some in combat, others after the battle. Many a household had two, three, even four deaths to mourn, but only the Vranaj mourned nine. No one could recall a more impressive funeral. All the counts and barons of the principality attended, even the prince himself, and dignitaries of neighbouring principalities came as well.
Stres remembered it all quite clearly, most of all the words on everyone’s lips at the time: how the mother, in those days of grief, did not have her only daughter, Doruntine, at her side. But Doruntine alone had not been told about the disaster.
Stres sighed. How quickly those three years had passed! The great double doors, worm-eaten in places, stood ajar. Walking ahead of his deputy, he crossed the courtyard and entered the house, where he could hear the faint sound of voices. Two or three elderly women, apparently neighbours, looked the newcomers up and down.
“Where are they?” Stres asked.
One of the women nodded towards a door. Stres, followed by his deputy, walked into a vast, dimly lit room where his eyes were immediately drawn to two large beds set in opposite corners. Beside each of these stood a woman, staring straight ahead. The icons on the walls and the two great brass candelabra above the fireplace, long unused, cast flickers of light through the atmosphere of gloom. One of the women turned her head towards them. Stres stopped for a moment, then motioned her to approach.
“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 left without a word.
Walking carefully so as not to make a 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 remember me?”
She opened her eyes. They seemed glazed with grief and terror. He withstood her gaze for a moment and then, leaning a little nearer the white pillow, murmured, “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. For a moment, Stres was unsure how to proceed.
“How did it happen?” he asked very softly. “Who brought her back?”