“Who are you?” asked Stres icily.
The prisoner looked up. His expression, like his lips, seemed foreign to the setting. Seducer’s eyes, Stres said to himself.
“I am a traveller, officer,” the man answered. “An itinerant seller of icons. They arrested me. Why, I don’t know. I am very sick. I shall lodge a complaint.”
He spoke a laboured but correct Albanian. If he really was a seller of icons, he had apparently learned the language for his trade.
“Why did they arrest you?”
“Because of some woman I don’t even know, whom I’ve never seen. Someone called Doruntine. They told me I made a long journey on horseback, with her behind me, and all sorts of other rubbish.”
“Did you really travel with a woman? More precisely, did you bring a woman here from far away?” Stres asked.
“No, sir, I did not. I have travelled with no woman at all, at least not in several years.”
“About a month ago,” said Stres.
“No. Absolutely not!”
“Think about it,” said Stres.
“I don’t have to think about it,” said the shackled man in a booming voice. “I am sorry to see, sir, that you too apparently subscribe to this crazy idea. I am an honest man. I was arrested while lying on the roadside in agony. It’s inhuman! To suffer like a dog and wake up in chains instead of finding help or care. It is truly insane!”
“I am no madman,” said Stres, “as I think you will have occasion to find out.”
“But what you’re doing is pure madness,” the man in shackles replied in the same stentorian voice. “At least accuse me of something plausible. Say that I stole something or killed someone. But don’t come and tell me, You travelled on horseback with a woman. As if that was a crime! I would have done better to admit it from the outset, then you would all have been satisfied: yes, I travelled on horseback with a woman. And what of it? What’s wrong with that? But I am an honest man, and if I did not say it, it is because I am not in the habit of lying. I intend to lodge a complaint about this wherever I can. I’ll go to your prince himself. Higher still if need be, to Constantinople!”
Stres stared at him. The fettered man bore his scrutiny calmly.
“Well,” said Stres, “be that as it may, once again I ask you the question you find so insane. This will be the last time. Think carefully before you answer. Did you bring a young woman named Doruntine Vranaj here from Bohemia or from any other far-off place?”
“No,” the prisoner replied firmly.
“Wretch,” said Stres, turning his eyes from the man. “Put him to the torture,” he ordered.
The man’s eyes widened in terror. He opened his mouth to speak or to scream, but Stres charged out of the dungeon. As he followed a guard carrying a lantern up the stairs, he quickened his pace so as not to hear the prisoner’s cries.
A few minutes later he was on his way home, alone. The rain had stopped, but the path was dimpled with puddles. He let his boots splash in the water as he strode along distractedly. It’s dark, you know, I can’t see anything, he muttered to himself, repeating the words of the seller of icons.
He thought he heard a voice in the distance, but it was a barking that moved farther away and faded little by little, like ripples on water, in the expanse of the night.
It must be foggy, he thought, or the shadows would not be so deep.
He thought he heard that voice again, and even the muffled sound of footsteps. He started and looked back. Now he could make out the gleam of a lantern swaying in the distance, lighting the broken silhouette of a man in its wan glow. He stopped. The lantern and the splashing of the puddles, which seemed to rise up from a nightmare, were still quite far off when he first heard the voice. He cupped his hand to his ear, trying to make out the words. There were uhs and ehs, but he heard nothing more distinct. When the man with the lantern had finally come closer, Stres called out.
“What is it?”
“He has confessed,” the man answered, breathless. “He has confessed!”
He has confessed, Stres repeated to himself. So those were the words that had sounded to him like uhs and ehs. He has confessed!
Stres, still motionless, waited until the messenger reached him. He was breathing hard.
“God be praised, he has confessed,” the messenger said again, waving his lantern as if to make his words more understandable. “Scarcely had he seen the instruments of torture when he broke down.”
Stres looked at him blankly.
“Are you coming back? I’ll light the way. Will you question him now?”
Stres did not answer. In fact, that was what the regulation called for. You were supposed to interrogate the prisoner immediately after his confession, while he was still exhausted, without giving him time to recover. And it was the middle of the night, the best time.
The man with the lantern stood two paces away, still panting.
I must not let him recover, Stres said to himself. Of course. Don’t allow him even an instant of respite. Don’t let him collect himself. That’s right, he thought, that’s exactly right as far as he’s concerned, but what about me? Don’t I too need to recover my strength?
And suddenly he realised that the interrogation of the prisoner might well be more trying for him than for the suspect.
“No,” he said, “I won’t interrogate him tonight. I need some rest.” And he turned his back on the man with the lantern.
The next morning, when Stres went down to the cell with his aide, he detected what he thought was a guilty smile on the prisoner’s face.
“Yes, truly I would have done better to confess from the start,” he said before Stres could ask him a single question. “That’s what I had thought to do, in any case, for after all I have committed no crime, and no one has ever yet been condemned for travelling or wandering about in a woman’s company. Had I told the truth from the beginning, I would have spared myself this torture, and instead of lying in this dungeon, I would have been at home, where my family is waiting for me. The problem is that once I found myself caught up in this maelstrom of lies — unwittingly, quite by chance — I couldn’t extricate myself. Like a man who, after telling some small, inoffensive lie, sinks deeper and deeper instead of taking it back right away, I too believed that I could escape this vexed affair by inventing things which, far from delivering me from my first lie, plunged me further into it. It was all the ruckus about this young woman’s journey that got me into this mess. So let me repeat that if I did not confess at once it was only because when I realised what a furore this whole story had caused, and how deeply it had upset everyone, I suddenly felt like a child who has shifted some object the moving of which is a frightful crime in the eyes of the grownups. On the morning of that day — I’ll tell you everything in detail in just a minute — when I saw that the homecoming of this young woman had been so, so — how shall I put it? — so disturbing to everyone, especially when everyone suddenly started running around so feverishly asking ‘Who was she with?’ and ‘Who brought her back?’, my instinct was to slip away, to get myself out of the whole affair, in which my role, after all, was in any event quite accidental. And that is what I tried to do. Anyway, now I’ll tell you the whole story from the beginning. I think you want to know everything, in detail, isn’t that right, officer?”
Stres stood, as if frozen, near the rough wooden table.
“I’m listening,” he said. “Tell me everything you think you ought to.”
The suspect seemed a little uneasy at Stres’s indifferent air.
“I don’t know, this is the first time I’ve ever been interrogated, but from what I’ve heard, the investigator is supposed to ask questions first, then the prisoner answers, isn’t that how it works? But you …”