An Uncertain Place

XXXI

FIRST, ADAMSBERG WALKED ROUND THE VILLAGE THREE times, his eyes wide open to absorb the new sights. By following his instinctive sense of orientation, he quickly grasped the layout of the streets and lanes, the main square, the new cemetery, the stone staircases, the village fountain and the market hall. The decoration of the buildings was unfamiliar, with notices in Cyrillic script, and red-and-white bollards. The colours, the shapes of the roofs, the texture of the stones, the weeds by the wayside, everything was different, but he could make his way around and even feel at home in these remote places. He worked out the paths leading to other villages, towards the woods and fields as far as the eye could see, and towards the Danube, where a few ancient boats were pulled up on the bank. On the other side, the blue fortresses of the Carpathians cascaded abruptly down towards the river.

He lit one of Zerk’s remaining cigarettes, using the red-and-black lighter, and set off westwards, in the direction of the woods. A village woman was pulling a little go-cart along, and as he passed her, he involuntarily shivered at the memory of the woman on the train. They were nothing alike, this one having a rather wrinkled face and wearing a simple grey skirt.

But she did have a wart on her cheek.

He consulted the back of his hand.

‘Dobre veče,’ he said. ‘Bonjour. Francuz.’

The woman neither replied nor did she move on. She ran after him, pulling her cart, and caught him by the arm. Using the universal language of yes and no, she explained that he shouldn’t be going that way, and Adamsberg made it clear to her that he did intend to head that way. She insisted at first, but finally let him go, looking distressed.

The commissaire carried on. He walked into the outskirts of the wood where the trees were still far apart, then made his way across two clearings containing ruined huts, and after a further two kilometres came to a denser band of trees. The path stopped there, on a final space covered with wild flowers. Adamsberg sat on a tree stump, perspiring a little, listening to the wind rising in the east, and lit his last-but-one cigarette. A rustle made him turn his head. The woman was standing there, having abandoned her cart, and was staring at him with a mixture of despair and anger on her face.

‘Ne idi tuda.’

‘Francuz,’ said Adamsberg.

‘On te je privukao! Vrati se! On te je privukao!’

She pointed to a spot at the end of the little clearing, where the trees started, then shrugged her shoulders in discouragement, as if she had done all she could and it was a lost cause. Adamsberg watched her go, almost at a run. Vlad’s advice and the woman’s persistence drove his determination in the other direction, and he looked over at the end of the clearing. Where the trees began in the spot she had indicated, he could see a little mound covered with stones and sawn-off rounds of wood. Where he came from, that might have been the remains of a shepherd’s hut. This must be where the demon lived, the one Uncle Slavko had talked about to the young Danglard.

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.