Among the hosts sat an old woman, who peered at them intently. From her attire and her position at the table, it was obvious that she was a great lady. Her eyes were fiery, but her face was white and cold, as if it were from another world.
“You must sing of other things,” she said in a kindly voice.
The minstrels held their peace.
“What songs do you expect from them?” one of the guests at the end of the table asked. “Hate is all they know!”
“They corrupt everything, the way they corrupt the milk,” a guest shouted through the mocking laughter.
“Do not insult them,” the old woman said, her eyes fixed on Gjorg’s hand, which was clenching the hilt of his dagger. “In their land,” she continued, “insulting a guest is a black calamity, blacker than a lost war.”
Silence descended on the banquet.
“Take your hand off your dagger,” Vladan whispered. “This can cost us our necks.” Entreaties and pleas rained down on Gjorg’s head like an avalanche of rocks: “Don’t do anything foolish that will cost us all our necks!” On the verge of tears, he pulled his numb fingers from the hilt of his dagger,
“At our table no man shall offend another!” the lord of the castle said.
The old woman’s eyes became even kindlier.
“If you cannot sing or do not want to, then why do you not tell us a tale?” she asked. “I have heard that there is much of interest in the lands from which you come. Tell us of the living, of the dead, of those hovering in between.”
Vladan looked at Manolo and then at the Croat, as if he were seeking help, but both men shrugged their shoulders. It was not surprising that they wavered — the one could only tell folktales, the other only mimic the calls of birds and wolves. To ask these minstrels to talk of their lands was like asking a cavalryman to take a broom and sweep the road. And yet, a large crowd of Balkan fugitives outside the castle gates had placed all their hope in them.
Vladan began speaking spontaneously. He himself was amazed that he could. It was the first time that he did not sing before listeners, but speak. It seemed ridiculous, shameful, and sinful, all together. Two or three times he felt that his mouth was about to dry up. “Do not stop, brother!” the others urged him with their eyes, but he signaled to them that he was at the end of his tether. The others came to his rescue. The first to speak was Manolo the Walachian, then the Croat, and finally Gjorg, who, after the insult he had suffered, had seemed determined not to open his mouth, even on pain of death.
Their tales were wondrous, at times cruel and chilling and at times filled with sorrow. Everyone listened, but the great lady most intently. Her face was still a mask, but her eyes were on fire. “These tales bring to mind the Greek tragedies,” she said in a low voice. “They are of the same diamond dust, the same seed.”
“What are these Greek tragedies?” the lord of the castle asked.
She sighed deeply and said that they were perhaps the greatest wealth of mankind. A simple treasure chest, like the one in which any feudal lord hides his gold coins, was big enough to hold all these tragedies. And yet, not only had they not been preserved, but over the centuries they had been scattered, these tragedies that would have made the world — in other words, its spirit — twice as beautiful.
The lord of the castle shook his head, dumbfounded at the thought of such negligence. The old lady smiled sadly. How could she explain to him that she, too, had always felt the same way about the negligence of the erudite men, the monastic librarians, the scribes and abbots? She had written countless letters to princes, cardinals, even to the pope. The responses she received had been increasingly cool, until finally she was openly reproached: instead of devoting herself to Jesus Christ, she, an erudite lady, possibly the most erudite lady of all the French and German lands, was obsessed with pagan gods.
For days in a row she had swept through her vast library like a shadow. But it became rapidly clear that there was no place in heaven for ancient deities.
Now, after so many years, she had heard as if in a trance these thunderclaps from that distant world, brought by these destitute fugitives with faces wild from war. Thunderclaps like fragments of the crown fallen from the ancient sky. Rites of death, changes of season, sacrificial customs, tales of blood feuds — all carrying the malediction for a thousand years, more immaculately than any chronicle.
Now, in those lands from which these poor destitute men had come, there were no ancient theaters left, no tragedies. There were only scattered fragments. Now that night had descended on all those lands, perhaps the time had come for her to resume her letters. That region, which seemed to be but a distant forecourt of Europe, was in fact its bridal chamber. The roots that had given birth to everything were there. And therefore it should under no circumstances be abandoned.
The Balkan minstrels continued to tell their tales, now interrupting each other. In their desire to be accepted they had forgotten the insults, and humbly, almost awkwardly, begged: We want to he like you. We think like you. Don’t drive us away.
The old lady sensed that there was something missing from their tales.
“Could you sing the things you have been telling us?” she asked.
They were shaken as if they had been dealt a blow. Then, tearing themselves out of their stupor, one after the other, each in his own language, and finally in Latin, said “No.” Non.
“Why not?” she asked kindly. “Why do you not try?”
“Non, domina magna, we cannot under any circumstances. We are minstrels of war.“
She shook her head and then insistently, almost beseeching them, repeated her request.
The Balkan minstrels’ faces grew dark. They broke out in cold sweats, as if they were being tortured. Even the words they uttered were uttered as if in a nightmare. They were martial minstrels. They were filled with fervor and hatred, but there was something vital missing. They could not break out of the mold. Besides which, they would first have to consult their elders. Consult the dead. They would have to wait for them to appear in their dreams so that they could consult them. No, they could not, under any circumstances. Non.
VII
The last sounds dissolved into the night, the barking of the dogs thinned out, but the great lady could not fall asleep. After a banquet, sleep always came either far too easily or with too much difficulty. And yet, her insomnia that night was of a different kind. Among the thoughts that always came to plague her, a new one appeared — solitary, foreign, and dangerous as a winter wolf. This thought, alien to her mind, to the whole world perhaps, tried to take shape but immediately disintegrated, thrashing around as if in a trap, tearing out of its confines, but then, on gaining its freedom the thought fled, rushing back into its snare, the skull from which it had escaped.
A courtyard with an unhinged door, a Mongol spear, and a map of the continent sent recently from Amsterdam struggled to connect with each other.
The old lady finally got out of bed, threw something over her shoulders, and walked over to the window. The thought that had repelled her sleep was still sparkling in her mind, formless and without a protective crust, free and lethal.
Standing by the big window, she finally managed to calm somewhat the foaming fury. She coaxed it tenderly, in the hope that it would rise from the fog.
And that is exactly what happened. The map and the barbarian spear with its tufts of fur and the mysterious inscriptions on its shaft connected with each other. The whole European continent was there: the lands of the Gauls, the German regions, and, farther up, the Baltic territories and the rugged Scandinavian lands sprawled out like a sleeping lion. Then, below the central flatlands, the peninsulas of the Pyrenees, the Apennines, and the third peninsula, which had initially been named Illyricum and Byzantium and now was being called “Balkan.” She saw clearly the regions from which the poor wandering fugitives had come: Croatia, Albania, Serbia, Greece, Bosnia, Walachia, Macedonia. From now on they would have to carry this new name, fossilized and
ponderous, on their backs like a curse as they stumbled along like a tortoise in its shell
The barbarian spear had always been like a sign at the borders of the continent, but they had been quick to forget, like a nightmare that scatters with the approach of dawn. This is how they had all forgotten Attila and Genghis Khan, and this was perhaps how they were going to forget the Ottomans.
“Your apprehension is a great surprise to me,” Baron Melanchthon had said to her a few months earlier. “You are worried about something that does not exist, and therefore cannot be threatened. Europe — Asia — are but entities in the barbarians’ minds, or on their parchments. They are figures of legend, half woman, half God knows what.”
She had taken offense and made no reply.
“How dreadful,” she said to herself, her eyes fixed on the darkness as if she were speaking to the night. “The Ottomans have burst into the outer court of their mansion and they look the other way. They are reinforcing the gates of their castles, posting more guards on their towers, but when it comes to looking farther, their eyes are blind.”
“Europe,” she said to herself, as if she were trying to seize this word transformed by ridicule and neglect. She had watched words wilt away and die when they were neglected by the minds of men. “Europe,” she repeated, almost with dread. Twenty-odd empires, a hundred different peoples. Some jammed against each other, others far apart. Which was Europe’s true mass — constricted or distended? As learned friends of hers had explained, Europe had started out as a dense galaxy in the middle of a void, but in recent years, particularly with the great plague, it had turned into a void itself, besieged by great hordes.
The barbarians had again burst through the defending barriers. They brandished their spears right under Europe’s nose without clarifying the meaning of their sign: death or goodwill.
One by one she brought to mind her powerful connections: princes, cardinals, philosophers, even the pope of Rome. She tried to recollect their faces, their eyes, particularly the lines on their foreheads, where the worries of a man are drawn more clearly than anywhere else. Were they racking their brains how to rally together to defend themselves, particularly now that their southern barrier had been breached, or were they thinking no further than their next banquet?
Her weary mind found calm. Then, in her thoughts, she saw a long rope, an exceedingly long rope, uncoil as if it had been randomly thrown. “Greece!” she exclaimed, as if she had had a revelation. Her friend Wyclif had told her that this had been how the ancient Greek world had measured itself: an endless strip of land, a thousand five hundred miles long, stretching from the coasts of Asia Minor to the Greek peninsula and the shores of Illyria, and from the southern beaches of Gaul down to Calabria and Sicily. This rope was delicate, brittle, cut in places by waves of fate, and yet it had managed to hold out and penetrate the depths of the continent.
Now the Greeks, like the other peoples of the region, had been toppled. The eleven peoples of the peninsula had to stumble along within a communal shell named Balkan, and it seemed that nobody gave them a second thought, unless to anathematize them: “You cursed wretches!”
She could not blot out the eyes of the poor destitute fugitives who had sung and spoken at the banquet. In their black sockets she saw a Europe that had died, transformed into a doleful memory. “Great Lord in Heaven! Why have you wrought these things in those lands?” she thought. “One has to lose a thing in order to cherish it!”
Everything they had narrated unraveled slowly in her mind: the sacrifices at the foot of bridges, the Furies in the guise of washerwomen on the banks of a river, the idlers in the village coffeehouses, the killer forced to attend the funeral feast of his victim. “It is all there, O Lord!” she gasped. “Fragments of the great ruins that gave birth to everything.”
“We must not abandon our outer court!” she almost said aloud. “If it falls, we shall all fall!“
Her mind tumbled once more into an unbearable whirl. Her head and temples ached viciously. She tried to rise; she even thought she had risen, found paper and pen to write to princes, to her friend Wyclif, even the pope of Rome. And she felt much lighter, not only able to write but ready to deliver her message with her own hands across the sky.
In the morning she was found dead and cold. A whiteness, which one only finds in the darkness of nonexistence, had settled on her face like a mask.
All the banquet guests of the previous night attended her majestic funeral, which took place in the neighboring principality from which she had come. After the mass and the ringing of the bells, someone remembered to summon the foreign minstrels. It seems that during the banquet she had said that she would like them to sing something at her grave.
They numbly took out their musical instruments and, with the same numbness, sang a song for hen “A black fog has descended, the great lady has died. Rise, O Serbs, the Albanians are seizing Kosovo!” — “A black fog has descended upon us, the great lady has died. Rise, O Albanians! Kosovo is falling to the pernicious Serb!“
They sang, and even though the mourners at the funeral did not understand the words, they listened with full attention, their eyes blank, sorrowful, and filled with incomprehension.
The Royal Prayer
As the army prepared to set out on its homeward march with my body, leaving behind only my blood gathered in a leaden vessel, I felt for a while that the world had fallen silent forever. But then I heard the rumbling of the iron chariots and the trampling of hooves growing fainter in the distance, and I realized that I had been left here on my own.
I had heard my father say, as he had heard his father say, that all aberration, memory, fury, and vengeance are imprinted in a man’s blood. And yet it seems that I was the first monarch whose blood was so violently pressed out of his body on these cursed plains.
My corpse — limbs, crowned head, hair, my gray chest with the wound in its center — was carried to Anatolia, taking nothing with it. Everything remained here, and I have come to believe that my viziers did this to elude the shadow of my blood.
Thus they left, abandoning me here in this tomb, with an oil lamp above me burning day and night. I thought they would be quick to return, to attack Europe, now that the road lay open, or at least to pay homage to me, to show that they had not forgotten me. But spring came and went, as did summer, and then another spring, but no one came.
Where were they; what were they doing? Three years passed, seven, thirteen. Here and there a lone traveler stopping at my tomb brought me smatterings of news from the world. I wanted to shout, “Serves you right, Bayezid my son!” when I heard that Tamerlane had battled his way into Ankara and locked him in an iron cage like a savage beast.
So this was the reason why they had stayed away so long. My curse had struck my son who had killed his brother, Yakub, and perhaps even me, to seize my throne.
When there is no hope, time passes so much more slowly than when hope exists. Blood does not lose its power as it congeals. Even dry, powdered over the sides of the leaden vessel, it grows only wilder.
A curse upon you, people of the Balkans, who charged me to set out in my old age and lay down my life on these plains! Above all, a curse upon you for my solitude!
The twentieth year passed, and still there was no news. The twenty-fifth year. The fortieth. I had begun to believe that all had been lost forever, when I heard a familiar rumbling clatter. When peoples are preparing for battle against one another there is no mistaking the signs. “Here they come!” I said. “Here come my Turks!” New commanders will have arisen, new viziers, and, needless to say, a new generation of men. I was ready to offer my death to my people, to give them my blessing, when I realized that these were not Turks approaching.
The Balkan peoples were out to slaughter each other on the Plains of Kosovo. This time Serbs and Albanians had hoisted their emblems: the Albanians the Catholic cross, the Serbs the Orthodox.
“Butcher each other, you Balkan savages!” I muttered, renewing my
curse on them.
But even without my curse they were determined to trample one another into the ground. They had set out on this course of destruction six hundred, seven hundred years before my campaign. They had reached a temporary truce in these flatlands only to resume their terrible slaughter even more viciously than before.
I must say I felt great joy at hearing them taunt each other. But soon enough my joy began to fade. Their fury was so protracted that even I, an outsider, grew weary.
Many years passed this way. Seventy, then a hundred and seventy. The oil lamp with its dim flame burned and burned in my tomb. New-sultans with ancient, ever-recurring names appeared — Mehmet, Murad, Sulejman, Ahmet, Murad, Mehmet — only to fall, one after the other, into oblivion. They had managed to bring half of Europe to its knees, but now, weary, they began to fall back. The Christian cross turned out to be more powerful than it had seemed. Our crescent withdrew from Vienna, the Hungarian flat-lands, somber Poland, Ukraine, Crimea, and finally the Balkan lands, which I believe we had loved the most. Perhaps we picked up the Balkan people’s madness and they picked up our sluggishness. In the end we parted forever, each to our own destiny.
I remained more solitary than ever, with the pale flame of the oil lamp above me, a sorrowful crown.
And the Balkans, instead of trying to build something together, attacked each other again like beasts freed from their iron chains. Their songs were as wild as their weapons. And the prophecies and proclamations were terrible. “For seven hundred years I shall burn your towers! You dogs! For seven hundred years I shall cut you down!” the minstrels sang. And what they declared in their songs was inevitably done, and what was done was then added to their songs, as poison is added to poison.
Time has flown. Five hundred years passed since the day I fell. Then five hundred seventy. Then six hundred. I am still here, alone in my tomb with the flame of the charred oil lamp, while their din, like the roar of the sea, never ends.