“I see,” repeated the other uncle. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand. You mentioned Albanian rhapsodists, didn’t you? If you’re talking about the epic we all know, what have Albanian rhapsodists got to do with it?”
Kurt Quprili looked him straight in the eye but didn’t answer. Debate about the family epic was as ancient as the priceless antique vases, the gifts of various sovereigns, that were piously handed down from one generation of Quprilis to the next. Mark-Alem had heard his relations talking about the epic since his earliest childhood. At first he’d imagined the epos, as they called it, as a long thin animal, midway between a hydra and a snake, which lived far away in some snowy mountains, and which, like a beast of fable, carried within its body the fate of the family. But as he grew older he gradually realized what the epic really was, though still in a confused sort of way. He couldn’t quite see how it was that the Quprilis lived and lorded it in the imperial capital, while people recited an epic about them in a faraway province called Bosnia in the middle of the Balkans. Why in Bosnia and not in Albania, where the Quprilis originally came from? And above all, why was it sung not in Albanian but in Serbian? Once a year, during the month of Ramadan, some rhapsodists would come from Bosnia. They would stay with the Quprilis for several days, reciting their long epics to their own plaintive musical accompaniment. It was a custom that had lasted for hundreds of years, and recent generations of the Quprilis hadn’t dared to drop or even modify it. They would gather in the great guest hall and listen to the dronings of the Slav bards, not understanding a single word except Tchuprili, the visitors’ pronunciation of the family name. Then the rhapsodists would receive their usual reward and go home again, leaving behind them an atmosphere of emptiness and unsolved mystery, in which for several days their erstwhile hosts would heave vague sighs, like those provoked by a sudden change in the weather.
Rumor had it, however, that the Sovereign was jealous of the Quprilis because of the epic. Dozens of diwans and poems had been written in his honor by the official poets, but nowhere had anyone composed an epos about him like the one the Quprilis had inspired. It was even said that this jealousy was one reason for the thunderbolts the Sovereign regularly unleashed upon the Quprilis.
“Why don’t we just give the epic to the Sultan and avert such troubles once and for all?” little Mark-Alem had suggested one day after hearing the grown-ups repining.
“Hush!” said his mother. “An epic isn’t something you can present to someone else. It’s like a wedding ring or the family jewels—something you can’t give away even if you want to.”
“He said it was in the same class as the Nibelungenlied,” repeated Kurt pensively. “And for days I’ve been pondering the question we’ve all asked so often: Why have the Slavs composed an epic in our honor, while our compatriots the Albanians don’t mention us in their epic?”
“Nothing simpler,” said one of the cousins. “They don’t say anything about us because they expected something of us and they were disappointed.”
“So you think they ignore us out of resentment?”
“If you like.”
“I can understand it quite easily,” said the other cousin. “It’s an ancient misunderstanding between our family and the Albanians. They can’t get used to our imperial dimension, or rather they don’t think it’s of any consequence. They care little for what the Quprilis have done and continue to do for the Empire as a whole. All that matters to them is what we’ve done for the small part of the Empire that is Albania. They’ve always expected us to do something specially for them.”
He threw out his arms as if to say, “So there you have it!”
“Some people think Albania is doomed; others think it was born under a lucky star. I think the question’s more complicated than that. Albania is rather like our family—it has experienced both favor and severity at the Sultan’s hands.”
“And which of the two has counted most with them?” asked Kurt.
“Hard to say,” answered the cousin. “I remember what a Jew said to me one day: ‘When the Turks rushed at you brandishing spears and sabers, you Albanians thought they’d come to conquer you, but in fact they were bringing you a whole Empire as a present!’ ”
Kurt laughed.
The cousin’s dim eyes seemed to emit a last spark.
“But like all madmen’s gifts,” said the other cousin, “it brought with it violence and bloodshed.”
Kurt laughed again, more loudly this time.
“Why do you laugh?” asked his brother, the governor. “The Jew was right. The Turks have shared power with us—you know that as well as I do.”
“Of course,” said Kurt. “Those five prime ministers prove it,”
“That was only the beginning,” said the governor. “After them there were hundreds of senior officials.”
“That wasn’t what I was laughing at,” said Kurt.
“You’re a spoiled brat,” muttered the other.
A glint came into Kurt’s eye.
“The Turks,” went on the cousin, trying to attract attention again, “gave us Albanians what we lacked: the wide open spaces.”
“And wide open complications too,” said Kurt. “It’s bad enough when an individual life gets caught up in the mechanisms of power—when a whole nation is drawn in it’s a million times worse!”
“What do you mean?”
“Weren’t you just saying the Turks shared power with us? Sharing power doesn’t just mean dividing up the carpets and the gold braid. That comes afterward. Above all, sharing power means sharing crimes!”
“Kurt, it’s not right to talk like that!”
“Anyhow, it’s the Turks who helped us to reach our true stature,” said the cousin. “And we just cursed them for it.”
“Not us—them!” said the governor.
“Sorry—yes … Them. The Albanians back home in Albania.”
A tense silence followed. Loke brought in trays of cakes.
“One day they’ll win real independence, but then they’ll lose all those other possibilities,” continued the cousin. “They’ll lose the vast space in which they could fly like the wind, and be shut up in their own small territory. Their wings will be clipped, and they’ll flap clumsily from one mountain to another until they’re exhausted. Then they’ll ask themselves, ‘What did we gain by it?’ And they’ll start looking for what they’ve lost. But will they ever find it?”
The governor’s wife heaved a deep sigh. No one had touched the cakes.
“Anyhow,” said Kurt, “for the moment they don’t say anything about us.”
“One day they’ll understand us,” said the governor.
“We ought to listen to them too.”
“But you just said they don’t say anything.”
“Then we should listen to their silence,” said Kurt.
The governor guffawed.
“Still the same old eccentric!” he laughed. “As I said, life in the capital has spoiled you. It would do you good to spend a year working for the government in some distant province.
“God forbid!” breathed Mark-Alem’s mother.
The governor’s laughter had relieved the tension, and forks were stretched out to spear the cakes.
“I invited the Albanian rhapsodists to come because I wanted to hear the Albanian epic,” said Kurt. “The Austrian ambassador has read parts of it, and he thinks Albanian epics are much finer than the Bosnian ones.”
“Does he indeed?”
“Yes,” said Kurt. He blinked as if blinded by sunlight on snow. “They talk about hunts through the mountains; single combats; the abduction of women and girls; wedding processions to marriages full of danger; khroushks* rooted to the spot with fear lest they’ve made some mistake; horses drunk on wine; knights who’ve been treacherously blinded riding on blinded steeds through mountains holding their breath; owls foretelling woe; knockings at the gates of strange manor houses at night; a macabre challenge to a duel, issued to a dead man
by a live one lurking around his grave with a pack of two hundred hounds; the moans of the dead man unable to rise from his grave to fight his enemy; men and gods quarreling, fighting, intermarrying; shrieks, battles, horrible curses; and over all, a cold sun that sheds light but never warms.”
Mark-Alem listened as if bewitched. He was filled with a strange homesickness for the distant winter snow on which he had never trod.
“That’s what it’s like, the Albanian epic from which we are absent,” said Kurt.
“If it’s anything like what you describe, no wonder we’re not in it!” observed one of the cousins. “It sounds more like a melodramatic frenzy!”
“But we are in the Slav epic,” said Kurt.
“Isn’t that enough?” asked the cousin with dull eyes. “You said yourself we’re the only family in Europe and perhaps in the world that’s celebrated in a national epic. Don’t you think that’s sufficient? Do you want us to be celebrated by two nations?”
“You ask if that isn’t enough for me,” said Kurt. “My answer is no!”
The two cousins shook their heads indulgently. His elder brother smiled too.
“You haven’t changed,” he said. “Still the same eccentric.”
“When the rhapsodists come,” said Kurt, “I invite you all to come and hear them. Among other things they’ll sing the old ‘Ballad of the Bridge with Three Arches,’ about the bridge from which our family name derives… .”
Mark-Alem was listening openmouthed.
“But they’ll be singing it in the Albanian version,” Kurt went on. “I haven’t said anything about it yet to the Vizier, but I don’t think he’ll object to our putting them up. They’ll have had a long journey—not to mention the trouble of hiding their instruments. But it’s worth it… .”
Kurt went on for some time, speaking with passion. He spoke again of the link between their family here and the Balkan epic there, and of the relations between government and art, the evanescent and the eternal, the flesh and the spirit… .
His elder brother’s face had clouded over.
“Be that as it may,” he said, “talk about it as much as you like between these four walls, but be careful not to do so anywhere else.”
Silence fell around the table. The last clink of forks against plates only made it more tense.
To lighten the atmosphere the governor turned to Mark-Alem and said in a sprightly tone:
“We haven’t heard anything from you lately, nephew! You seem to be up to your neck in the world of dreams!”
Mark-Alem felt himself blushing again. Everyone’s attention was once more concentrated on him.
“You work in Selection, don’t you?” his uncle went on. “The Vizier was asking me about you yesterday. A person’s real career in the Palace of Dreams, he said, begins in Interpretation—that’s where the genuinely creative work is done and where people’s individual talents have a chance to shine. Do you agree?”
Mark-Alem shrugged as if to say he hadn’t chosen the section he was sent to work in. But he thought he detected a secret gleam in his uncle’s eye.
And though the governor had swiftly looked down at his plate, that strange gleam hadn’t escaped the notice of his own sister. It was with some uneasiness that she followed the discussion about the Tabir Sarrail, in which everyone except her son was now taking part.
Yes, everyone except Mark-Alem, though he now spent his days in the very heart of the Tabir … His mother’s mind worked feverishly. Had she spent all that time watching over her son only to throw him in the end into a cage of wild beasts? A place that, despite the honor of his appointment, was really only the blind, cruel, even fatal mechanism they’d all been describing?
Out of the comer of her eye she looked at his emaciated features. How was her Mark-Alem going to find his way in that chaos of dreams, those misty fragments of sleep, those nightmares from the brink of death? How had she ever come to let him enter such an inferno?
All around him the conversation about the Tabir Sarrail continued, but he felt too weary to listen. Kurt and one of the cousins were discussing whether the revival of the Palace’s influence was related to the present crisis in the Ottoman Superstate or merely the result of chance. Meanwhile the governor kept saying: “Come, come—let’s talk about something else… .”
Finally the visitors rose to go and have coffee in the drawing room. They didn’t go home till quite late, around midnight. Mark-Alem went slowly up to his room on the second floor. He didn’t feel at all like sleeping, but that didn’t bother him unduly. He’d been told newcomers to the Tabir usually suffered from insomnia for the first couple of weeks. After that they were all right again.
He stretched out on the bed and lay there for some time with his eyes open. He felt quite calm. It was a painless kind of insomnia, cold and smooth. And it wasn’t the only thing about him that had changed. His whole being seemed to have undergone a transformation. The great clock at the corner of the street struck two. He told himself that at about three, or half past three at the latest, he would eventually fall asleep. But even if he did, from which file would he choose his dreams tonight?
That was his last thought before he dropped off.
* Members of the procession escorting a bride.
INTERPRETATION
Muck sooner than he expected, even before there was any sign of spring—and he’d thought he’d spend spring at least in Selection, and possibly even summer as well—Mark-Alem was transferred to Interpretation.
One day, before the bell rang for the break, he was told the Director-General wanted to see him. “What about?” he asked the messenger—though, thinking he saw a sardonic smile on the man’s face, he immediately regretted it. Clearly you didn’t ask that kind of question in the Tabir Sarrail.
As he went along the corridor he was assailed by all sorts of doubts and surmises. Could he have made some mistake in his work? Could someone have appeared from the depths of the Empire and come knocking at every door, going from office to office and vizier to vizier, claiming that his valuable dream had been thrown in the wastepaper basket? Mark-Alem tried to remember the dreams he’d rejected recently, but couldn’t recall any of them. Perhaps that wasn’t it, though. Perhaps he’d been summoned because of something else. It was nearly always like that. When you were sent for, it was almost invariably for some reason you could never have dreamed of. Was it something to do with breaking the secrecy rule? But he hadn’t seen any of his friends since he’d started working here. As he asked his way through the corridors he felt more and more strongly that he’d been in this part of the Palace before. He thought for a while this might be because all the corridors were identical, but when he finally found himself in the room with the brazier, where the square-faced man sat with his eyes glued to the door, he realized it had been the Director-General’s office he had knocked at on his very first day in the Tabir Sarrail. He’d been so absorbed in his work since then that he’d forgotten it even existed, and even now he had no idea what the square-faced man’s job was in the Palace of Dreams. Was he one of the many assistant directors, or the Director-General himself?
Mark-Alem stood in front of him, almost petrified with apprehension, and waited for the other to speak. But the official continued to contemplate the door, at about the height of the doorknob. Although he was by now familiar with this mannerism, Mark-Alem did wonder for a moment whether the man was waiting for someone else to arrive before he explained why he’d sent for him. But finally the man did tear his eyes away from the door.
“Mark-Alem …” he said in a very low voice.
Mark-Alem broke out in a cold sweat. He didn’t know what attitude to take. Should he say, “At your service,” or use some other polite formula? Or just stand and wait for the ghastly news to be revealed to him? He was now convinced he could only have been summoned about something disagreeable.
“Mark-Alem …” reiterated the other. “As I told you on your first day here, you suit us.”
&nbs
p; My God! thought Mark-Alem. That strange phrase … I never thought I’d hear it again… .
“You suit us,” the senior official went on, “and that’s why from today you’re being transferred to Interpretation.”
Mark-Alem felt a buzzing in his ears. His eyes shifted involuntarily toward the brazier standing in the middle of the room. The embers were almost buried in ash, and seemed to be wearing a sardonic smile—the kind that appears on some people’s faces accompanied by half-closed eyes. It was these embers that had consumed Mark-Alem’s letter of recommendation on the memorable day of his arrival. They now seemed to be assuming an air of indifference.
“You’re quite right not to show any satisfaction,” said the voice.
And Mark-Alem wondered, How am I reacting?
As a matter of fact he didn’t feel any pleasure, though he knew he ought to be grateful, the more so as he’d been half dead with anxiety up till a few moments ago. He opened his mouth to say something, but the official’s voice interrupted.
“I understand. If you don’t express any pleasure it’s because you’re so conscious of the responsibility attaching to your new duties. Interpretation is rightly known as the nerve center of the Tabir. The salaries there are higher, but the work is more difficult—you’ll often have to do overtime—and above all the responsibility is greater. Nevertheless, you must realize you’re being done a favor. Don’t forget that the road to the heights in the Tabir Sarrail passes through Interpretation.”
For the first time he actually looked at Mark-Alem. Not at his face, but at his midriff—where the door handle would have been if he’d been a door.
The road to the heights in the Tabir passes through Interpretation, thought Mark-Alem to himself. He was about to say he might not be up to the requirements for so difficult a task as deciphering dreams when the other, as if he’d read his thoughts, got in first.