It was while he was under this fever, and after a long and inexplicable delay, that the decree arrived proclaiming him a traitor to religion and the state. The courier with the hennaed beard came before him. Ali’s chief retainers and Vasiliqia were present. They waited for him to say or do something. But Ali faltered. He had anticipated this blow, but still his heart failed him. He cursed himself for a chicken-livered coward. What else had he expected? Finally, with trembling hands, he unwrapped the decree. His eyes were not reading the contents, which he had predicted long ago, but were fixed somewhere remote. Placing the document on the table so that the sultan’s script was plain to see, he folded four fingers into a fist and pressed his thumbnail into the imperial signature in the universal gesture of a man crushing an insect. Everybody around stood motionless.
This was his last grand gesture. Other days came, without gestures but full of everyday cares. In the first week, inspired by fresh enthusiasm, he inflicted two serious defeats on Bugrahan Pasha. The following week it was learned that Bugrahan Pasha had been dismissed and his head was being carried post-haste to the capital city, to be lodged in the Traitor’s Niche.
Ali climbed the highest tower with Vasiliqia and pointed out to her the road on which couriers took important messages or severed heads to the capital. ‘They dream of carrying my head on that road,’ he said and laughed. From the castle walls they could see the besieging army’s multitude of tents. Among them, through his long spyglass, Ali sought the tent of the newly appointed commander-in-chief, the army’s rising star. For the last six months it had been whispered he would become prime minister.
During all those days, while the thirty thousand soldiers of Hurshid Pasha clashed with his two regiments of guards, the Tosk guards from the south and the Gheg guards from the north, Ali dedicated himself to the cult of his own death. He planned it out by himself, far from anybody, and nobody, not even Vasiliqia herself, knew what it would be like, only that it would be glorious … Ali had mumbled something about barrels of gunpowder, which at the last moment would blow up the castle and everything in it. The flames would rise to heaven, and the molten gold of his treasure, his pearls and bloody rubies, would fall on all sides, as if from a coronet of hell.
Make your ablutions. Whenever Vasiliqia thought of his glorious death, these terrible words flooded her mind, a chill torrent that threatened to sweep away his carefully constructed memorial. It was the phrase pronounced to a condemned man just before his beheading: ‘Make your ablutions and prepare for death.’
Since his death, in this first week in a world without him, these words had stuck in Vasiliqia’s mind. She wandered through the countless chambers of the castle and in every corner imagined a voice whispering to her: ‘Make your ablutions.’
There was a rumour that after the katil ferman, which declared her husband a traitor, another decree had arrived, pardoning him. The drums in the Turkish camp, announcing the arrival of the hayir ferman, the Decree of Clemency, could be heard in the deepest recesses of the castle. Ali’s spies in the enemy camp reported seeing this decree with their own eyes when Hurshid Pasha himself had unrolled it in front of all the nobles. Ali summoned Vasiliqia to his rooms. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I had prepared for a great death, not for my own sake, because our deaths do not belong to ourselves alone, but for yours. Now the sultan is pardoning me. Why should you deserve this pretty spectacle?’ This was the first time that she had heard him talk with such disdain. ‘I will go as governor to some dull province, where there’s nothing to worry about, and no glory. The empire is vast, and they tell me there are provinces where nothing has happened for a hundred years. I’ll be sent somewhere like that.’
She listened to him, wide-eyed. As she stared, the mountain crumbled abruptly, like in a nightmare, and the thunderclaps turned into faint tinkles … What a wicked wife I am to him, she thought. He is eighty-two years old, white-haired. He makes the entire empire tremble, and this isn’t enough for me. Do I want him dead too? What a wicked wife.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he said to her. ‘If the order is false, which I think it might be, then you’ll see what I will do.’
Perhaps she was the first to realise that the decree was a trick. The couriers bearing it approached with an unnatural gait, as if on wooden legs, and their faces were pale.
‘Wait there,’ he called to them when they were twenty paces off. ‘What is your news?’
The courier raised high the decree in his hand.
‘Death, Ali. Make your ablutions and …’
Gunfire blazed on both sides and all was confusion. Amidst the mayhem she saw someone drag Ali down the stairs. Her eyes were still wide. ‘Now you see his death,’ said a gentle voice by her temple. There it is: seven wooden stairs and the sound of a head hitting them … and then, a moment before she lost consciousness, she saw the scarecrows advancing with their stiff movements across the wintry plain. ‘No,’ she screamed, ‘not them …’ and fell to the ground.
Ali’s widow led her entourage out into the clean air high at the top of the northern tower. She went to the parapet and gazed at the icy continental waste that stretched beyond the open plain. Perhaps because of its endlessness, this wide expanse, above which blackbirds flew, brought to mind her own loneliness.
In the midst of this solitude a carriage drawn by horses with manes cut in mourning had stopped by the roadside. The carriage was ready for a journey and stood waiting for Ali’s widow. So often her husband had promised to take her to the capital city for the royal celebrations, but he had never done so. Now she was going there by herself.
She was alone in the world, in February.
The desolate highway connecting two continents lay before her. The previous week, his head had set off along it. His body had been buried here, and as she’d walked with bowed head at the front of the funeral cortège, her mind had revolved round a single thought seemingly pinned down by a nail: that she was accompanying only one half of her husband to the grave, and indeed that half which had been totally alien to her.
She had hardly got to know his body in their rare marital relations. It had never occurred to her before, but when she heard that his head had departed, it struck her that, for her, this man had existed only from the neck up. The other part of him was merely a gorgeous robe, with the insignia of a ruler embroidered on it, and nothing else.
She went on staring at the plain and her two escorts glanced at each other, as if to say, will we have to look for treasure in the fields too?
Nothing had been clear to her when Ali’s relationship with the sultan had begun to cool. She looked at this broad landscape filled with cottages, trees trembling in the wind, haystacks and barns, like every plain in the world, and imagined it shaken and stripped of all these things, and filled with secrets, horsemen in the night, and mysterious dervishes and monks. It was as if the land were giving birth to ghosts conceived long ago.
Now that nightmare was over, the plain had become a plain again. The carriage with its horses with trimmed manes stood waiting and she, the widow of Ali Pasha the Black, was setting off across that flatland, on the road which had brought the winds of his final autumn, the couriers, the letters, and in the end the scarecrows.
She was still surrounded by her solitude. The carriage would leave and then she would slowly enter the continent of grief. All that space would close in on her and her loneliness would be spread in a thin layer across the immensity of Eurasia.
6
Still on the Frontier
FROST MUST HAVE settled on the great tent in the night, to judge by the cracking sounds of the canvas in the blustering wind. They sat or half reclined on camp beds, most blowing on their cold hands and cursing the fumes from the stove, which the gale sent back inside. Some pulled at pipes and brooded, tapping the ash onto the mats and watching the curling smoke in surprise. Two were playing chess, a couple were reading, and a few others in the corner next to the stove listened to the Jew Elias, who was tell
ing a story. A soldier came and went, bringing coffee and removing empty cups.
‘Soldier, bring me another coffee. There’s no way I can sleep at night anyway,’ said a slight man with a brittle, glassy sheen to his thin face.
They had arrived three days ago, and still couldn’t start their duties as a special unit sent from headquarters should, but were spending many idle hours recalling incidents that had happened on other missions of this sort, making comparisons and jokes and complaining about shortcomings of every kind, as administrators from central offices usually do when they go on missions to the back of beyond.
Lala Shahini entered, with a sour expression in total contrast to the cheerful curls falling over his brow.
‘What’s going on outside?’ someone asked from the corner, without raising his head.
‘Nothing. Cold. Wind … soughing … is that what you call the wind off the lake in your parts? I saw that swine with a bell, the pronouncer of curses.’
‘And what was that scumbag doing?’ asked the first voice.
Lala Shahini pursed his lips and grimaced in disdain.
‘It drives me wild to see bastards like that,’ he said. ‘They make my blood boil. A character like that comes out, curses the fortress at the start of the war, a job done in the blink of an eye, and draws a salary for an entire year.’
‘Hehe,’ laughed Elias the Jew. ‘Why get upset, Lala? Cursing obstacles in the path of the glorious troops is one of the oldest army regulations. An army can do without a cook, but a curse-giver? No way.’
The glassy-faced man’s laugh resembled the tinkling of glasses. His cheeks and forehead shook and then his face went rigid.
‘Do you know,’ someone butted it, ‘another group’s coming soon from headquarters, to survey Ali Tepelena’s estate.’
‘And what will happen to this estate?’
They went on to talk about the dead pasha’s lands.
‘Are the news-criers still reading the decree?’ asked one of the chess-players.
Lala Shahini nodded.
The other man swore under his breath.
‘The decree alone is enough to crush all hope, never mind the curse-giver. Mouldy decrees copied by doddery old codgers who don’t know where Albania is. In this case, better not to send units like ours at all.’
‘There’s no way the decrees can be specific if there’s been no decision about Albania yet,’ Lala Shahini said.
For a while they speculated about the expected decree. In the last four hundred years, Albania’s status had fluctuated many times: low, abysmal, medium, high, low again, then sort of high and low, and so on. Precedents could be found for anything that happened, and just as well for anything that didn’t happen.
‘Then why did they send us so urgently, and in the middle of winter?’ whinged the glassy-faced man.
They’d asked this question many times since that bitterly cold morning when they received the order to leave at once for Albania. Oh God, why this hurry? they had wondered as they bade farewell to their appalled wives at the gates of their houses, as they collected their mission documents, and finally, on the endless road leading to the Balkans. The process of stripping a land of its national identity – Caw-caw as it was called – took a century, and there could be no reason to hurry.
‘Seriously, why did they send us out so quickly?’ somebody said, echoing the thin man.
‘Perhaps to placate the party that wants revenge on Albania,’ said Elias the Jew. ‘Do you remember the commotion in the newspapers when we left? Do you remember the headlines? The Ravens Leave for Albania … Albania’s Erasure Begins … Albania – Year Zero.’
‘It might be as Elias says,’ someone spoke up. ‘We’ve probably come for no reason, just to give them a fright. Like that scarecrow business.’
‘That means neither bloodshed nor Caw-caw,’ Lala Shahini said. ‘So what other consequence is there?’
‘There’s only one status that Albania hasn’t been through, as far as I know,’ one man said. ‘Or only for a short time. A state of emergency.’
‘Ouch,’ went Lala Shahini, hunching his shoulders.
‘They’ve been relying on that more and more often recently.’
They recalled situations and provinces in which a ‘state of emergency’ had been imposed. In archaic language, these provinces were called lieux of strife or loci of conflict, which the consuls usually translated as ‘trouble spots’. A ‘state of emergency’ would be devised by the First Directorate of the Interior Ministry to stimulate internal divisions on the basis of religion, regional and feudal allegiances, castes and traditions. The experts responsible for this collaborated with the Central Archive, exploiting its documentation.
‘We once travelled through a province of that kind,’ Lala Shahini said, ‘and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.’
The slight, glassy-faced man listened to them abstractedly. His mind was elsewhere. He thought that in both cases, if Albania were declared a ‘cursed land’ or ended up as a ‘trouble spot’, the result would be the same. In the first case, the army would take control and the specialists in repression would come with their files, rulebooks and toolkits. They would open all the old chronicles of terrible slaughter, which recorded all the tortures that had ever been inflicted on the human race anywhere in the world: crucifixion, impalement on stakes, the smashing of bones, sawing in two, burial alive, tearing apart with horses, crushing by camels, skinning alive, roasting in ovens, boiling in cauldrons and so on. All these things would happen here, while they, the staff of the Central Archive, would be far away, over there. As far away as possible, he thought. It was several days’ journey to the capital city, with its daily working routine, its frosty mornings when thousands of civil servants hurried to their desks to keep to the official working day, the long hours hunched over files, numb hands, failing eyesight. Yet, as spring drew closer, the days would be clearer and warmer, and besides, in spring he was getting married.
His friends teased him about it. He was an expert in wedding customs, funeral rites and different traditions – work that was considered of secondary importance compared to the main fields such as the ideology of rebellion, which was the preserve of the team leader, and national mentality, which was Elias the Jew’s subject. National memory was Lala Shahini’s speciality, and language belonged to the Mute, the oldest among them, whose real name was long forgotten. But still there were occasions when wedding customs counted for something. Although they teased him about it, they knew that if the terrible decision of Caw-caw were taken, and a country was to be stripped of its national identity, then he, like the others, would be ready to organise, with figures and precise deadlines, all the possible ways to debase, distort or eliminate entirely the wedding rites of the newly subjugated people. This was considered an important matter in the capital city because research had shown long ago that weddings had been the origin of theatre, one of the most diabolical of Christian inventions.
Teasing him about his protracted bachelorhood, they often said to him, ‘It’ll be a strange day when you get married, Harun, after all the weddings you’ve ruined.’ He laughed in his special way and said to himself, it really will be a strange day. In their big house in the capital city, his many aunts and uncles frequently talked about his future wedding. Although these conversations were cheerful, he felt that their good spirits sometimes concealed a small element of sorrow, like a shard of glass. He had been the only child, always delicate, and the darling of a great household whose official connections went back many generations. It was a disappointment to the whole family when, instead of choosing a religious or diplomatic career, he had preferred to become a staff member of the Central Archive. Even now, after so many years, they mentioned his choice with bitterness, while he chuckled to himself and knew they would never understand what extraordinary expertise his job involved.
Whenever in his research he discovered ancient decrees mentioning royal titles, such as the glorious Padishah Selim
the Grim, scion of scions of sultans, king of kings, emperor above emperors until the day of doom, conqueror of territories beyond measurement and augmenter of the lands of Islam, subjugator of two empires, conqueror of eight kingdoms, destroyer of three hundred cities, king of the Arabs, Persians and Rumelians, etc., etc., he would automatically think of himself: Harun Ibra, diminisher of happiness on this earth, who turns brides pale, dulls the glitter of their dowries and withers their sex, the shrinker of testicles, spoiler of a billion weddings until the day of doom. Sometimes this thought horrified him. He tried to put it out of his mind, but even when he succeeded, he still baulked at the idea that his own wedding was imminent. Soon, next spring, perhaps in autumn, his wedding day would come … and then … what then? An obscure fear of retribution fluttered deep inside him. For as old people said, disrupting a wedding is worse than destroying a bridge. But he quickly reassured himself. After all, these were the weddings of rebels. Harun Ibra had spoiled the joy of Albanians, Hungarians, Greeks, Serbs, Jews, Bulgarians, Czechs, Poles, Macedonians, Croats, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Montenegrins, Palestinians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Moldovans and Romanians. And besides, this was a slow massacre, the protracted grief of centuries. It was a cinch compared to the work of experts in ruthlessness, who, for research purposes, spent hours on end by cauldrons in which people boiled, or scaffolds where rebels were skinned.
Around him they were still talking about Albania.
‘Yes, yes, you’re right,’ the Mute was saying to Elias the Jew. ‘It won’t be stripped of its nationality, or put to the sword. Caw-caw is a thing of the past, and it’s impossible to use force in a country that has filled nearly a quarter of the empire’s high offices. The Albanians have served the state faithfully for years. None of them want to see their country soaked in blood.’
‘You think a trouble spot doesn’t involve bloodshed?’ Lala Shahini asked.
‘Oh, that’s different,’ said Elias the Jew. ‘In that case, they themselves will be at each other’s throats. That’s something else.’