And now the house is near. She is so agitated that she has no time to invent a new lie even if she wanted to. She will say that the dead man brought her back. And so she finally knocks at the door. She tells her lover to stay off to one side, to be careful not to be seen; perhaps she arranges to meet him somewhere several days hence. From within the house her mother asks the expected question: With whom have you come? And she answers: With Kostandin. Her mother tells her that he is dead, but Doruntine already knows it. Her lover insists on one last kiss before the door opens, and takes her in his arms in the half-darkness. That is the kiss the old woman glimpses through the window. She is horrified. Does she believe that her son has risen from the grave to bring her daughter back to her? It is a better bet that she assumes that it is not her son, but someone unknown to her. However that may be, whether she thought that Doruntine was kissing a dead man or a living one, the horror she feels is equal. But there’s a good chance that the mother thought she saw her kissing a stranger. Her daughter’s lie seems all the more macabre: though in mourning, she takes her pleasure with unknown travellers like a common slut.
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 traveller 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 neighbouring 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. 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.”
“Really? 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.”
“Really?” Stres said again, smiling without looking at the man. “Goodbye, 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 what?” 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 all their recent days. 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, bringing them physical warmth, as now, or else an icy chill.
He made love to his wife with heightened sensuality. She too was, so to speak, at fever pitch. She offered herself to him by pushing her pelvis as high as it would go, and he entered her as deeply as he could, as if he were seeking out a second passageway inside her. He managed to get close to it, he felt, to a place where a different kind of damp darkness began, then the lips of the inner vagina drew him in further and invited him to an apparently inaccessible realm. An inhuman aah escaped him as his seed managed to spill, or so it seemed, into that other place, the dark kingdom where he would never go. Good God, he mumbled involuntarily as the tension subsided and he could feel himself collapsing all at once.
A few minutes later, lying beside his wife, whose blushing cheeks were lit by a smile, he heard her whisper words which, despite their long intimacy through many years of marriage, she had never dared say to him before. She confessed she had rarely had such strong pleasure and that his organ had never before been so … hard …
In other circumstances her lack of modesty would have taken him aback, but not today.
“It seems to me,” he said without looking at his wife, “that you’ve got something else to say.”
She smiled.
“Well, yes,” she replied, “it’s a curious sensation … I was thinking that it wasn’t just very hard … but also, how can I put it … very cold.”
Now it was his turn to smile. He explained that it was a feeling a woman has when she herself is at fever pitch.
As their breathing slowed they lay silent, gazing alternately at the carved wooden ceiling and through the half-shuttered window at the 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 return. Caressing a lock of 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, before summoning his deputy to get his report on the Vranaj archives, Stres glanced at the files on crimes committed in the last seven days. One burglary. Two murders. One rape.
He ran through the report on the murders. Both of them honour killings. Presumably taking advantage of all the commotion about Doruntine, the killers had seized an opportunity to take back the blood in accordance with the ancient kanun. Even so, you won’t get away with it, Stres muttered. When he reached the sentence, “The marksmen have been arrested,” Stres crossed out “marksmen” and replaced it with “murderers”. Then he added in the margin: “Put them in chains like ordinary criminals”.
“You thought you would get treated as special one more time”, he grunted. After lying dormant for many years, the kanun seemed for some reason to have come back to life and to be rising from its own ashes. Despite repeated and unambiguous warnings from the prince, who was adamant that only the laws of the state and not those of the kanun now held sway, family killings had gone on increasing in number.