married Doruntine to a foreign knight. Alas, a harsh winter soon came, with a bloody war; all nine sons fell in battle and the mother was left alone with her grief.
‘I don’t remember any of that!’ my listener exclaimed.
‘Of course not. They cut it all out!’ I said, in a menacing tone, as if Bürger and Zhukovsky were horse thieves.
She couldn’t take her eyes off me now.
‘Kostandin’s grave was nothing but mud,’ I went on, ‘because he had broken the besa. In our land a promise is sacred, and breaking it is the deepest shame that can befall anyone. Do you understand? It’s said that if even an oak tree betrays a secret, its branches will wither and die.’
‘How enchanting!’ she cried.
I went on with my story. One Sunday the mother went as she usually did to visit the nine graves of her sons, lit a candle for the first eight and two candles for her youngest. Then she called to Kostandin: ‘Kostandin, have you forgotten the promise you made to bring my daughter back if there should be a wedding or a funeral?’ And then she did something that Albanian mothers do very rarely indeed: she cursed her dead son. ‘O you who have failed to keep your word, may the earth disgorge you!’ And when night fell . . .
Scarcely had I uttered those words than my companion grasped my hand and exclaimed, ‘How terrible!’ Then, after a pause, as if she wanted to bring the conversation down to earth, she pointed out that none of what I had just told her was to be found in ballads in this part of the world.
‘Don’t mention those thieves to me ever again!’ I blurted out almost angrily. ‘So, when the night was deep and the graveyard lit by the moon, the lid of Kostandin’s tomb rose, and from the grave, his face quite white and his hair a muddy tangle, the Dead Man cursed by his mother came.’
Her hand was shaking but, regardless, I went on, ‘Kostandin rose from his grave, because, as it is said in our land, the given word makes Death step back . . . Do you understand?’
The quivering had moved up from her hands to her shoulders, so I told her then about Kostandin’s moonlit ride to the far country where his sister had married. The young man found Doruntine in the middle of a feast and hoisted her onto his horse to take her back to her mother. On the way she kept asking, ‘Brother, why are you so pale? Why do you have mud in your hair?’ And he replied every time: ‘It’s from weariness and the dirt of the road.’ They rode on together on the horse, the Dead Man and the Living Girl, until they got to the village where their mother lived. Kostandin brought the horse to a standstill outside the church. Behind the surrounding wall, with its iron gate, the church was almost entirely dark. Only the nave was faintly lit. Kostandin said to his sister, ‘You go on. I have something to do here.’ He pushed open the iron gate and went into the graveyard, never to emerge from it again.
I stopped.
‘How gripping!’ she said.
‘Did you really like that version of the legend?’ I asked.
‘Yes, a lot. It’s so different from the one we learned at school!’
‘So don’t mention those wretches to me again!’
We had walked quite a distance as I told the tale and now we could hear a band.
I felt astonishingly unburdened by having at last told the story of Kostandin and Doruntine. As I was glad she had liked it, I was tempted to tell her the other great Albanian legend, the one about the man who was buried alive in the pillar of a bridge, but I held back for fear of overdoing the folklore.
We were walking towards the source of the music and soon we found ourselves in front of a restaurant’s illuminated sign.
‘The Lido,’ I read aloud. ‘Shall we go in?’
‘Wait’, she said. ‘It must be expensive. And I don’t like the look of it.’
I stuck my hands into my pockets and pulled out all the change I had. ‘I’ve got a hundred and ten roubles. Maybe that’ll be enough.’
‘No, no. I really don’t like the look of this place. Let’s go somewhere else.’
I knew my resources wouldn’t be adequate for the Lido, so I didn’t insist.
Further on we heard more music. We wandered towards another place where a dance night had been organised by the veterans’ and workers’ holiday resorts. Nobody stopped us at the door. We went in. People were dancing. Others sat drinking at tables set around the dance floor. In the lamplight my companion looked even prettier and we found nothing better to do than to dance. There was a lot of noise. Now and again customers who were drunk were shown the door. In an environment where we were both outsiders, we felt closer to each other. She was serious yet casual, which I liked. We went up to the bar and ordered two brandies. She had style, and drank with confident movements. At a nearby table three middle-aged men were talking in Latvian. They looked at us inquisitively, and one of them, the oldest, asked my companion a question. I didn’t understand a word of the language, but I grasped that he wanted to know what nationality we were. Obviously they’d guessed I was a foreigner, and when she answered them, they showed some interest, smiled at me, and one got up to fetch two more chairs.
So, we made their acquaintance. They were veterans of the Russian Revolution, and we started a conversation, my girlfriend acting as interpreter. All three seemed relatively well informed about Albania but they had never met an Albanian before. They kept repeating that they were very happy to have the opportunity of meeting me. I was pleased that at least they didn’t imagine every Albanian had a bulbous nose and a Zapata moustache. However, for some reason they thought we were all plump and round, which my own figure certainly did not bear out.
‘Are you two engaged?’ the oldest of them asked.
We shook our heads, then looked at each other, and from that point on she seemed even closer to me, for we were now connected by a small secret, our first, that these three men didn’t know we had only just met or that we were still using the formal ‚˚ to say ‘you’ to each other.
They’d been soldiers in a Latvian regiment that had had the task of defending the Kremlin after the Revolution. I’d heard a lot about the ‘Latvian Guards’, as they were called. A few days before, I’d seen the impressive cemetery in Riga, with its hundreds of graves laid out in straight lines beneath a huge fresco showing Nordic horses and horsemen leaning over the dead. It hadn’t occurred to me then that I would ever meet survivors of that regiment, let alone sit down at their table with a girl and share a drink.
Now and then they spoke to me in Russian, but it was very odd Russian. I guessed if you learned a language in a fortress of the Bolshevik Revolution, subjected to alerts and White Russian plots, kept at your post by hatred of the old regime, it was bound to turn out rather strangely.
‘Did you know,’ one asked, ‘that near here, on the Riga coast, at Kemeri, if memory serves me right, one of your kings bought a villa and lived in it for a few months?’
‘An Albanian monarch?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘I remember reading it in a newspaper, in 1939 or 1940, I think.’
‘We’ve only ever had one king,’ I said. ‘He was called Zog.’
‘I don’t recall the name, but I remember very well that he was King of Albania.’
‘How odd,’ I said, feeling the irritation that arises when you bump into a tiresome acquaintance in some foreign land. His two friends were also aware that an Albanian royal had bought a beach villa at Kemeri. The girl’s curiosity was aroused and she began talking to them excitedly.
‘Oh! So it’s true!’ she said, clapping her hands. ‘How interesting!’
For the first time that night I thought I saw her face go dreamy, and I scowled. Ahmet Zog, I said inwardly, why did you have to come all this way to mess things up for me?
‘Are you upset?’