Doruntine (10 page)

No one will ever know what happened between mother and daughter, what explanations, curses, or tears were exchanged once the door swung open.

Events then move rapidly. Doruntine learns the full dimensions of the tragedy, and needless to say loses all contact with her lover. Then the dénouement. Stres's mistake was to have asked, in his very first circular to the inns and relay stations, for information about two riders (a man and woman riding the same horse or two horses) coming into the principality. He should have asked that equal effort be concentrated on a search for any solitary traveler heading for the border. But he had corrected the lapse in his second circular, and he now hoped that the unknown man might still be apprehended, for he must have remained in hiding for some time waiting to see how things would turn out. Even if it proved impossible to capture him here, there was every chance that some trace of his passage would be found, and the neighboring principalities and dukedoms, strongly subject to Byzantium's influence, could be alerted to place him under arrest the moment he set foot in their territory.

Before going home for lunch, Stres again asked his aide whether he had heard anything from the inns. He shook his head no. Stres threw his cloak
over his shoulders and was about to leave when his deputy added:

“I have completed my search through the archives. Tomorrow, if you have time, I will be able to present my report.”

“Oh? And how do things look?”

His deputy stared at him.

“I have an idea of my own,” he replied evenly, “quite different from all current theories.”

“Oh?” Stres said again, smiling without looking at the man. “Good-bye, then. Tomorrow I'll hear your report.”

As he walked home his mind was nearly blank. He thought several times of the two strangers now riding back to Bohemia, going over the affair in their own minds again and again, no doubt thinking what he, in his own way, had imagined before them.

“You know,” he said to his wife the moment he came in, “I think you were right. There's a very strong chance that this whole Doruntine business was no more than an ordinary romantic adventure after all.”

“Oh really?” Beneath her flashing eyes, her cheeks glowed with satisfaction.

“Since the visit of the husband's two cousins it's all becoming clear,” he added, slipping off his cloak.

As he sat down by the fire, he had the feeling that something in the house had come to life again, an
animation sensed more than seen or heard. His wife's customary movements as she prepared lunch were more lively, the rattling of the dishes more brisk, and even the aroma of the food seemed more pleasant. As she set the table he noticed in her eyes a glimmer of gratitude that quickly dispelled the sustained chill that had marked their days recently. During lunch the look in her eyes grew still softer and more meaningful, and after the meal, when he told the children to go take their naps, Stres, stirred by a desire he had felt but rarely in these last days, went to their bedroom and waited for her. She came in a moment later, the same gleam in her eyes, her hair, just brushed, hanging loose upon her shoulders. Stres thought suddenly that in days to come, the dead woman would come back often, either to bring a chill, or, as now, to kindle their flesh.

Later, sated by love, they lay silent for a long moment, glancing now at the carved-wood ceiling, now at the window whose half-open shutters revealed a slice of low late-autumn sky.

“Look,” she said, “a stork. I thought they'd gone long ago.”

“A few sometimes stay behind. Laggards.”

He could not have said why, but he felt that the conversation about Doruntine, suspended since lunch, now threatened to arise again. With a caressing touch that smoothed a lock of her hair on her temple, he turned his wife's eyes from the sky,
convinced that he had managed, in this way, to escape any further talk of the dead woman.

The next day Stres summoned his deputy so that he might report on the conclusions he had drawn from examining the Vranaj archives. The man still looked haggard, and Stres thought him even paler than usual.

“As I have said before, and as I repeated to you yesterday,” he began, “my research in these archives has led me to a conclusion about this disturbing incident quite different from those commonly held.”

I never would have imagined that prolonged contact with archives could give anyone that papier-mâché expression, Stres said to himself.

“And,” the deputy went on, “the explanation I have come to is also very different from what you yourself think.”

Stres raised his eyebrows in mock astonishment.

“I'm listening,” he said as his aide seemed to hesitate.

“This is not a figment of my imagination,” the deputy went on. “It is a truth that became clear to me once I had scrupulously examined the Vranaj archives, especially the correspondence between the old woman and Count Thopia.”

He opened the folder he was holding and took out a packet of large sheets of paper yellowed by time.

“And just what do these letters amount to?” Stres asked impatiently.

His deputy took a deep breath.

“From time to time the old woman told her friend her troubles, or asked his advice about family affairs. She had the habit of making copies of her own letters.”

“I see,” said Stres. “But please, try to keep it short.”

“Yes,” replied his deputy, “I'll try.”

He took another breath, scratched his forehead.

“In certain letters, one in particular, written long ago, the old woman alludes to an unnatural feeling on the part of her son Constantine for his sister, Doruntine.”

“Really?” said Stres. “What sort of unnatural feeling? Can you be more specific?”

“This letter gives no details, but bearing in mind other things mentioned in later letters, particularly Count Thopia's reply, it is clear that it was an incestuous feeling.”

“Well, well.”

Thick drops of sweat stood out on the deputy's forehead. He continued, pretending not to notice his chief's ironic tone.

“In fact, the count immediately understood what she meant, and in his reply,” said the aide, slipping a sheet of paper across the table to Stres, “he tells her not to worry, for these were temporary things, common at their ages. He even mentions two or
three similar examples in families of his acquaintance, emphasizing that it happens particularly in families in which there is but one daughter, as was the case with Doruntine. However, it takes attention and care to bring this somewhat perverse feeling back to normal. In any event, we'll talk about this at length when we see each other again.”

The deputy looked up to see what impression the reading had had on his chief, but Stres was staring at the tabletop, tapping his fingers nervously.

“Their subsequent letters make no further mention of the matter,” the aide went on. “One has the impression that, as the count predicted, the brother's unhealthy feeling for his sister had become a thing of the past. But in another letter, written several years later, when Doruntine was of marriageable age, the old woman tells the count that Constantine is unable to conceal his jealousy of any prospective fiancé. On his account, she says, we have had to reject several excellent matches.”

“And what about Doruntine?” Stres interrupted.

“Not a word about her attitude.”

“And then what?”

“Later, when the old woman told the count of the far-away marriage that had just been arranged, she wrote that she herself, Doruntine, and most of her sons had long hesitated, concerned that the distance was too great, but that this time it was Constantine who argued vigorously for the prospective marriage. In his letter of congratulation,
the count tells the old woman, in particular, that Constantine's attitude toward the marriage is not at all surprising, that on the contrary, in view of what she had told him it was understandable that Constantine, angered by the possibility of any local marriage which would have forced him to see his sister united with a man he knew, could more easily resign himself to her marriage to an unknown suitor, preferably a foreigner as far out of his sight as possible. It is a very good thing, the count wrote, that this marriage has been agreed upon, if only for that reason.”

The deputy leafed through his folder for a few moments. Stres's eyes were fixed on the floor.

“Finally,” the aide continued, “we have here the letter in which the old woman described the wedding to her correspondent, and, among other things, the incident that took place there.”

“Ah yes, the incident,” said Stres, as if torn from his somnolence.

“Though this incident passed largely unnoticed, or in any event was considered natural enough in the circumstances, it was only because people were unaware of those other elements I have just told you about. The Lady Mother, on the other hand, who was well acquainted with these elements, offers the proper explanation of the event. Having written to the count that after the church ceremony Constantine paced back and forth like a madman, that when they had accompanied the groom's kinsmen
as far as the highway, he accosted his sister's husband, saying to him: ‘She is still mine, do you understand, mine!' the old woman tells her friend that this, thank God, was the last disgrace she would have to bear in the course of this long story.”

Stres's subordinate, apparently fatigued by his long explanation, paused and swallowed.

“That's what these letters come to,” he said. “In the last two or three, written after her bereavement, the old woman complains of her loneliness and bitterly regrets having married her daughter to a man so far away. There's nothing else. That's it.”

The man fell silent. For a moment the only sound came from Stres's fingers tapping on the tabletop.

“And what does all this have to do with our case?”

His deputy looked up.

“There is an obvious, even direct, connection.”

Stres looked at him with a questioning air.

“I think you will agree that there is no denying Constantine's incestuous feelings.”

“It's not surprising,” Stres said. “These things happen.”

“You will also admit, I imagine, that his stubborn desire to have his sister marry so far away is evidence of his struggle to overcome that perverse impulse. In other words, he wanted his sister to have a husband as far from his sight as possible, so as to remove any possibility of incest.”

“That seems clear enough,” said Stres. “Go on.”

“The incident at the wedding marks the last torment he was to suffer in his life.”

“In his life?” Stres asked.

“Yes,” said the deputy, raising his voice for no apparent reason. “I am convinced that Constantine's unslaked incestuous desire was so strong that death itself could not still it.”

“Hm,” Stres said.

“Incest unrealized survived death,” his aide went on. “Constantine believed that his sister's distant marriage would enable him to escape his yearning, but, as we shall see, neither distance nor even death itself could deliver him from it.”

“Go on,” Stres said drily.

His aide hesitated for a moment. His eyes, burning with an inner flame, stared at his chief, as if to make sure that he had leave to continue.

“Go on,” said Stres a second time.

But his deputy was still staring, still hesitating.

“Are you trying to suggest that his unsated incestuous desire for his sister lifted the dead man from his grave?” asked Stres, his voice icy.

“Precisely!” his aide cried out. “That macabre escapade was their honeymoon.”

“Enough!” Stres bellowed. “You're talking nonsense!”

“I suspected, of course, that you would not share my view, but that is no reason to insult me, sir.”

“You're out of your mind,” Stres said. “Completely
out of your mind.”

“No, sir, I am not out of my mind. You are my superior. You have the right to punish me, to dismiss me, even to arrest me, but not to insult me. I, I—”

“You, you, you what?”

“I have my own view of this matter, and I believe it to be no more than a case of incest, for Constantine's actions can be explained in no other way. As for the theory, which I have lately heard expressed, that he insisted that his sister marry into a distant family because he had some inkling of the calamity that was soon to befall the family and did not wish to see her so cruelly hurt, I consider it absurd. It is true that Constantine harbored dark forebodings, but it was the threat of incest that tormented him, and if he sent his sister away, it was to remove her from this danger rather than to ensure that she would escape a calamity of some other kind. . . .”

The deputy spoke rapidly, not even pausing for breath, lest he be forbidden to continue.

“But as I said, neither distance nor death itself allowed him to escape incest. Thus it was that one stifling night he rose from his grave to do what he had dreamed of doing all his life—let me speak, please, do not interrupt—he rose from the earth on that wet and sultry October night and, mounting his gravestone become a horse, set out to live his life's dream. And thus did that sinister honeymoon
journey come about, the girl riding from inn to inn, just as you said, not with a living lover but with a dead one. And it was just that heinous fact that her aged mother discovered before she opened the door. Yes, she saw Doruntine kiss someone in the shadows, not the lover or impostor you believed, but her dead brother. What the old woman had feared all her life had finally happened. That was the disaster she discovered, and that was what brought her to her grave—”

“Madman,” said Stres, more softly this time, as though murmuring the word to himself. “I forbid you to continue,” he said evenly.

His aide opened his mouth, but Stres leapt to his feet and, leaning close to the man's face, shouted: