Letting his cigarette hang from his lip, as his father used to, he walked up to the little mound. On the ground, almost covered in grass, four lines of small logs, about thirty of them standing on end, formed a long rectangle. On top of the chunks of wood, someone had placed heavy rocks, as if the logs might fly away. There was a large grey stone at the head of the rectangle, crenellated, roughly dressed and with something engraved on it. It looked nothing like a ruin and much more like a grave, but a forbidden grave, if the woman’s insistence was anything to go by. The person buried here, far from anyone else, outside the graveyard, must be under some kind of taboo: perhaps an unmarried girl dead in childbirth, or a disgraced and excommunicated actor, or an unbaptised child. All round the tomb, the shoots of young trees had been cut, forming a dank background of rotting stumps.
Adamsberg sat down in the warm grass and patiently began scraping away at the moss and lichen on the grey tombstone, using twigs and shards of bark. He engaged contentedly in this task for an hour, scratching at the stone with his nails, or using a fine twig to dig into the letters. As he uncovered the inscription, he realised that the characters were foreign to him, a long sentence written in Cyrillic. Only the last four words were in Roman lettering. He stood up, gave the stone a final wipe with his hand and took a step back to read them.
Plog, as Vladislav would have said, and in this case it might have meant something like ‘Bingo!’ or ‘Success!’ He would have got there sooner or later in any case. Today or tomorrow, his steps would have brought him here, he would have sat down in front of this stone, looking at the root of Kisilova. The long epitaph in Serbian was indecipherable but the four words in Roman letters were ultra-clear, and quite enough to be getting on with: Petar Blagojević – Peter Plogojowitz. Then the dates of birth and death: 1663-1725. No cross.
Plog.
Plogojowitz, like Plogerstein, Plögener, Plog and Plogodrescu. Here lay the origin of the victim family. Original surname: Plogojowitz or Blagojević. The name must have been adapted or rearranged, according to the countries where his dispersed descendants had ended up. Here lay the root of the story, and the first of the victims, the ancestor banished, out of bounds to visitors, exiled to the edge of the wood. Perhaps murdered too, but back in 1725. By whom? The deadly hunt had not ended, and Pierre Vaudel, the descendant of Peter Plogojowitz had still been dreading it. Enough to warn another descendant of this man, Frau Abster-Plogerstein, with that KИCЛOBA as an alarm signal. ‘Guard our empire, resist to the end, stay beyond attack, Kisilova.’
Nothing to do with love, needless to say. But an imperative warning, a prayer that the Plogojowitz clan must be protected, and that all of them should be on the alert. Had Vaudel known about the death of Conrad Plögener? He must have. So he realised that the vendetta had started again, if it had ever ceased. The old man was afraid of being killed in his turn. He had made his will after the massacre at Pressbaum, keeping his son out of his direct line of inheritance. Josselin had been wrong about that, Vaudel’s enemies were by no means imaginary. They did have faces and names. They too must have taken root in this place, in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Nearly three hundred years ago.
Adamsberg sat on a stump, and thrust his hands into his hair. He was staggered. Three hundred years later, some kind of clan warfare was still going on, resulting in the heights of savagery. What for? What was at stake? Hidden treasure perhaps, a child might have said. Power, money, an adult might have said, which came to the same thing really. What on earth did you do, Peter Blagojević-Plogojowitz, to leave this kind of fate to your descendants? And what did they do to you? Adamsberg ran his fingers over the stone, warm in the sun, murmuring his questions to himself, and realising that if the sun was on his face and on the back of the stone, it was not facing east towards Jerusalem, but turned round, facing west. A murderer, then? Did you massacre the inhabitants of the village, Peter Plogojowitz? Or one of its families? Did you go round devastating the countryside, looting and terrorising people? What did you do for Zerk to be still fighting you, with his white skeleton on his black T-shirt?
Peter, what did you do?
Adamsberg carefully copied out the long inscription, reproducing the foreign lettering as best he could.
Пролазниче, продужи својим путем, не освђи се и не понеси ништа ода6де. Ту лежи проклетник Петар Благојевић, умревши лета гоцподњег 1725 у својој 62 години. нека 6и му клета душа нашла покоја.
XXXII
HIS BEDROOM HAD A HIGH CEILING, LAYERS OF ANCIENT multicoloured carpets on the floor and a bed with a blue quilt. Adamsberg let himself relax on to it, and put his hands behind his neck. Fatigue from the journey had made his limbs feel heavy, but he smiled, his eyes closed, happy at having unearthed the roots of the Plog clan, but incapable of understanding their story. He didn’t have the strength to ring up Danglard and talk about it. He sent him two short text messages instead. Danglard pedantically insisted on using Latin for the plural of text messages, texti, since the usual word in French is texto. The first message read: ‘Ancestor is Peter Plogojowitz’, and the second: ‘†1725’.
Danica, who on closer inspection was buxom and pretty and probably no more than forty-two, knocked on his door, waking him up a little after eight, according to both his watches.
‘Večera je na stolu,’ she said with a broad smile, indicating with gestures that she meant ‘come’ and ‘eat’.
Sign language easily dealt with most basic functions.
People seemed to smile a lot here in Kisilova and perhaps that was the explanation of the ‘sunny disposition’ shared by Uncle Sladko and his grandson Vladislav. Family ties made Adamsberg remember his own son. He sent a few thoughts towards little Tom, on holiday somewhere in Normandy, and lay back on the eiderdown. He had immediately taken to it: pale blue with cord piping and worn at the corners, it was nicer than the bright red one his sister had given him. This one smelt of hay, dandelions and possibly even donkey. As he went down the narrow wooden stairs, his phone vibrated in his back pocket like a nervous cricket tickling him. He looked at Danglard’s reply: one word – ‘Irrelevant’.
Vladislav was waiting for him at the table, his knife and fork poised for action. ‘Dunajski zrezek, Wiener schnitzel,’ he said, pointing to the dish impatiently. He had put on a white T-shirt and his dark body hair looked even more striking. It stopped at his wrists like a wave that has run out of strength, leaving his hands smooth and pale.
‘Been looking at the scenery?’ he asked.
‘I went down by the Danube and then to the edge of the forest. A woman came along and tried to stop me going there. Towards the woods.’
He tried to see the expression on Vlad’s face, but he was busily eating, looking down at the food.
‘But I went there all the same,’ Adamsberg continued.
‘Wow.’
‘What’s this mean?’ asked Adamsberg, putting on the table the paper on which he had copied the inscription from the grave.