The Traitor's Niche

  ‘And besides, in Albania, like in all the Balkans, imposing a state of emergency would suit the nature of the people, wouldn’t it, Elias?’ the Mute said.

  The Jew nodded.

  ‘A friend of mine who works in the First Directorate told me it had been a superhuman task a few years ago to impose a state of emergency in a northern province, somewhere beyond Romania,’ Elias said. ‘It was impossible. They were such a gentle people. Nothing would provoke them … so they decided to obliterate the entire nation instead.’

  ‘But in the Balkans it’s different,’ Lala Shahini said. He touched his leather bag with his thumb. ‘In here, I’ve got all the quarrels among Albanian nobles from the time of Scanderbeg to the present day.’

  The others stared at this hitherto unnoticed bag.

  ‘No end of squabbling,’ he went on. ‘About property, women, the vacant throne, ill-advised jokes, dogs, hunting falcons, and the devil knows what.’

  As he spoke, he rubbed the bag with his hand, as if its leather would yield the facts he needed.

  One of the tasks of the section in which Lala worked was to trace the genealogies of the families, most now extinct, of Albanian leaders. This work had been going on for centuries. The fear that some surviving progeny might revive the famous name of a dead nobleman made a nightmare of the lives of the entire staff, from the director down to ordinary clerks. They knew that if such a thing happened, they would bear the brunt of the official fury, and so, to avert such a catastrophe, they watched with perpetual vigilance. By day they kept their quarry under constant surveillance, and by night they shouted in fitful sleep. Their files contained everything about the great Albanian families – their origins, their marriage ties and their enmities – in a complete chronicle that followed them until they were extinguished. After the episode of Scanderbeg, in which they had all taken part and shared in its stellar glory, the nobles had fled from the conquered country. They had scattered like ravens throughout Europe, and eventually died out. First the Balshajs became extinct in the fifteenth century, even before their lands were occupied. The Kastriots melted away a century later, in Rome. The Muzakajs died out in about 1600, and the Aranits at the same time. The Dukagjins disappeared in the vicinity of Venice in the seventeenth century, and the rest no one knew where.

  Lala Shahini heard the other men’s voices as if from a distance. Whenever the old leaders of Albania were mentioned, his spirits drooped a little.

  Having pored over their stories for so many years, Lala Shahini had slowly, unwittingly, started to feel fond of these aristocrats. And so, whenever the conversation turned to them, he fell silent, so as not to betray himself. In fact, he was enthralled. Their names, a little mangled in his friends’ pronunciation, floated like scraps of cloud under the canopy of the winter tent.

  He had followed them year by year and century by century from the time when some of them, partly under pressure, but more wooed by Ottoman flattery, made small concessions. First they altered their calendar, and then changed their titles of count and duke to pasha and vizier. Sometimes in despair, but more often cheerfully and ironically, the men donned turbans and the women veils, as if they were costumes that might be set aside when the feast was over. And so they connived in their own extinction.

  When they had come to their senses and genuinely wanted to put off these disguises, they found it was not so easy. At the same time they would lose their reputations or even their heads. In fury, and led by Scanderbeg of the Kastriots, they then rose in a terrible rebellion that lasted almost forty years.

  Lala Shahini had traced the defeat of each one of them, and the subsequent flight to Europe of the survivors. Some entered the service of foreign kings and fought in other wars, winning promotion and honours, but these wars were of a different, tepid kind, as was the glory they won.

  Despite the Central Archive’s strenuous efforts to erase these nobles from the face of the earth, their names remained scattered throughout the terrain of Albania. These reckless, impetuous, stubborn people were transformed into valleys, crags, plains, copses and waterfalls. The lands of Balshikia, Karlilija, Shpati, the streams of Skuria, Myzeqeja, the Plain of Dukagjin, Mount Scanderbeg. After so many centuries, they still loomed among the mists in motionless stone, immured, untouched by the perpetual fever of struggles for power, of quarrels and spite.

  Lala Shahini listened to the conversation and gathered that it had moved on from the nobles of the past to those of today. The discussion, like some great dish of pilaff, drew everyone together. People talked in pairs or threes, and their exchanges leapt easily across each other. They mentioned these lords and ladies one by one and compared them first to each other and then to their ancestors. ‘The Greeks have no reason to curse Ali Tepelena in their songs,’ said one man. ‘They profited from him, and now they’ve got the bit between their teeth.’ ‘That’s how stepchildren always behave,’ replied Elias the Jew. ‘Always ungrateful.’ ‘The Albanians won’t be spoilt any more,’ said the Mute again.

  This phrase was being repeated millions of times in every corner of the vast empire, Lala Shahini thought, just like after the fall of Albania centuries before. At that time, decrees had come one after another like thunder in April, but each one was milder than the last until, like lightning in a clear sky, there arrived the Decree of Reconciliation, which began with the words ‘Albania is my joy’. Then, not only were dozens of pashas of the land and sea decorated in the same year, to show that this policy was not going to change again, but Albanians were made prime ministers of the entire empire, not for appearances’ sake, but for almost a century.

  Whenever Lala Shahini remembered the Qyprili family, he would smile to himself and shake his head in admiration. The sultan wears the crown, but the Qyprilis steer the helm of state, everybody said of them, the only family in the world to inherit the post of grand vizier, like a dynasty. Browsing through the files of the Archive, Lala Shahini had unearthed hundreds of letters from senior functionaries, clergy, wizards, prophets, imams and ordinary dervishes, all addressed to sultans, in which they begged the emperors to change this perverse policy of inheritance, warning them and even threatening them with the prospect of divine revenge if they did not. The letters had come from all parts, written in every kind of alphabet, in living and dead languages. Sometimes they were accompanied by mysterious symbols, or beards cut as a sign of grief at this calamity, or doctor’s certificates testifying that worry over this matter had deprived the writer of his sleep or had caused blindness, deafness, asthma, jaundice, melting of the innards like candle wax, swelling of the knees, scrofula, constriction of the neck and so forth. There were letters written in blood, as was to be expected, but the most shocking of all was a short message sent in a state of extreme desperation with the severed hand of the writer. When even this missive had no effect, it was understood that no human entreaty or agency could redress this wrong, and the only hope lay in divine intervention.

  Lala Shahini stifled a sigh. The hand of God had struck at last, and with a heavy blow. Yet an inner voice told him that Albania would not be undone this time either. On the road to Janina, as the storm of malice and vindictiveness against Ali Tepelena broke, he had tried to console himself with the thought that the Albanian nobles of today were totally unlike those of the past, and there was no need to worry so much about them. Of course, they were similar in their furious, foaming rages, but at the first serious setback they would change their turban-clad minds. An Asiatic obscurity, like the stifling steam of a bathhouse that distorts and conceals many things, distanced them from the nobles of the past – remote, alpine, snow-covered, blue-misted, wrapped always in a great cloud of nostalgia – the Balshajs, Topiajs, Dukagjins, Muzakajs and Kastriots. Or so he told himself, but a nagging worry remained. He felt that the world needed folly of this kind: life would be duller without it, and secretly he prayed that these nobles would survive.

  The discussion around him continued as lively as ever, but the expressions of h
ope gradually diminished. Now they were talking again about the files and the surprises they contained.

  They were prepared for anything. Before leaving the capital, they had spent day after day in the reading rooms of the Archive, bent over the thousand files about Albania. These files recorded everything about the country: the cities, villages, heights of the bell-towers, rivers, standing waters, castles, swamps, secret sects, graveyards, bridges, water mills, fairy tales, wind-blown sandbanks, earthquakes, regional dialects, embroidery, avalanches, weddings, laments, genealogies, clans, kinship groups large and small, churches, monasteries, the coldness of the sea, households and families counted by their hearths or chimneys or their maternal origin, the heads of tribes, known as the chiefs of the mountains, the blood feuds, alliances in marriage, patriarchs, inherited diseases, antique theatres, spies, oceans and so forth.

  There were many other halls, every one spacious and cold, with high windows pierced by a light that bore little relation to the season outside and was always grey and chill, as if straight from regions where the weather never changed. The Archive’s staff had toiled throughout December. The massive building was never heated because of the danger of fire, and the workers had suffered greatly from the cold. Everything was icy: the tables, the files and their own fingers, which turned to lead on the pages. No fire was lit in the central hall either: the Top Hall, as it was called because of its height. Only the senior staff worked there, and section heads were rarely summoned. The director of Caw-caw worked there, or the Big Raven, as the staff called him amongst themselves. It was said that the emperor himself received him at a special meeting every three months, but nobody knew when or why.

  The partial or full erasure of the national identity of peoples, which was the main task of the Central Archive, was carried out according to the old secret doctrine of Caw-caw and passed through five principal stages: first, the physical crushing of rebellion; second, the extirpation of any idea of rebellion; third, the destruction of culture, art and tradition; fourth, the eradication or impoverishment of the language; and fifth, the extinction or enfeeblement of the national memory.

  The briefest of all these stages was the physical crushing of rebellion, which merely meant war, but the longest phase was the reduction of the language into Nonspeak, as it was called for short.

  The files on dead languages were stored on a heavy bronze shelf. These files were thick, and most of their pages had been wiped clean with the greatest care. Words had been expunged from dictionaries, rules of grammar and syntax had gradually been erased until they vanished from use, and finally the letters of the alphabet were rubbed out. This was the final spasm of the written language, after which its death was certified. Then began the longer and more laborious task of eradicating the spoken language. This also had its intermediate stages. The final phase was the extinction of the language in its last outposts: old women. It had been shown that, in general, languages survived longer among women, and especially among women who had borne children. Finally, when the language had been wiped from the face of the earth, there came a time when the old women too died out: like ancient goddesses, they preserved the last ashen remnants of the spoken tongue. They were recorded in special notebooks as ‘aged female speakers’ and were under constant surveillance until they died. After this, the extinction of the language and its transformation into Nonspeak was considered complete.

  Centuries of experience was stored in the files of the Archive: schedules for the extinction of languages, their unexpected rallies and their last gasps – in short, everything except the vanished languages themselves. The thousands of pages of files did not contain a single trace of them, not a word, not a syllable. Their total extermination was carried out with the intention of precluding any revival.

  For a long time, there had been conflicting views on whether to preserve the corpses of these languages. Some said that at least one file in the Archive should conserve them in mummified form, but others insisted that this served no purpose and could lead dangerously to their resurrection. The second view held sway in the end. Its supporters had found in old chronicles the case of the revival of a language, which the chroniclers had called in horror a ‘Christ among languages’. Nobody knew, they wrote, how a long-dead language could appear once again on the surface of the earth. People discovered speaking it were hunted down as they fled through the marshlands, clamped in irons and cut up, but still these victims would not or could not say where they had found this forbidden language. Long investigations were conducted in the Archive, and the list of officials who had worked in the Top Hall was checked name by name against their entrances and exits, but without any conclusion. The matter remained a mystery to historians, who lost their sleep and peace of mind. ‘This thing remains inexplicable,’ the chroniclers wrote, and their skin crept with horror.

  With these pages from the chronicle in their hands, the hardliners easily won.

  However, the files on dead languages were few and generally not of recent date. Even at the time when the doctrine of Caw-caw was at its height, the death of a language was considered a rare triumph. Since then, many things had changed. The doctrine of the extinction of nations had remained the same, but many of its features were no longer implemented. The Archive now rested content with small victories, which were still held to be important. Even the partial achievement of Nonspeak was a rare success. The process started with the interruption of a language’s natural development – reducing it to a kind of mush, like the language spoken by a backward child – and then continued with its further erosion. All the stages of its degradation were noted in a special file: an annual comparison of dictionaries, in which words grew rarer like leaves in November; the ruin of grammar, the withering of particles, especially prefixes, and the coarsening of syntax. The language began to thicken and stutter. A language like this was almost harmless, because, like a woman with her womb removed, it lost its ability to give birth to stories and legends. The most that it could do from one generation to the next was pass down some dry recollections whose feeble spirit would never stand the test of time.

  At that point one of the main stages of Nonspeak was considered complete. Next came what was called the ‘cold store’ or hibernation of the language. This was the onset of chaos and unintelligibility, until the language fell into the deep sleep that preceded its ultimate extinction. As they leafed through the old chronicles that described the final dementia of languages, keen young officials dreamed of bringing back such times of great opportunity. However, a few years of work in the Archive showed them that it took entire generations of human lives for a language to grow old, let alone die. They thanked destiny that the state demanded less and less of them, and more often gave up its insistence on the destruction of the language, resting content if the writers and bards of the subjugated country abandoned their own tongue and wrote in the usual language of the state.

  Despite these concessions, work in the linguistic division was the most difficult in the Archive and its staff often applied for transfer to the abolition of national cultures. This was a large section, with innumerable subsections devoted to art, legends, music, mural-painting, costumes, wedding customs, choirs, folk epics and so on. Everything could be found in its stacks. First there was the loss of colour in painting and clothing. The famous scarlet went pale and blue was muddied into something Asiatic. Both tended towards ash grey, the colour of serfdom. Then songs became slower and dances clumsier, until it seemed that the dancers’ feet were shackled. Buildings became less tall, and, of course, writing was forbidden.

  The abolition of national cultures was also the area of the bitterest controversies. Th were still aged veterans who did not want to change a comma of the centuries-old laws. Alongside the cursing of a language’s alphabet (a ritual whose details had been laid down four centuries before), they supported, for instance, the cursing of verse forms, narrative prose, fast dancing and the use of chimneys.

  A fresh gust of wind blew, and s
eemed likely to uproot the tent. They had every right to complain, Lala Shahini thought. It was less than a month since the rebel leader had been beheaded, and the melting snow was still exposing the occasional corpse. Greece was restless and sharpening its weapons, and they themselves had come supposedly in order to destroy the very idea of rebellion, to abolish traditions, to extirpate the language and to erase memory. You had to be slightly dim-witted to believe such twaddle. Just as they had suspected when they were hastily mustered for their departure, the real reason they had been sent was to cool tempers in the capital. Indeed, one friend, half joking, had said outright before they set off: it seems we’re going to banish the idea of rebellion not out there, but here.

  The more Lala Shahini thought of it, the crazier their hurried departure on that morning of torrential rain seemed. With their bags crammed to bursting with files and changes of clothes, and their eyes swollen from lack of sleep, they had run like maniacs to the Archive, by whose gate foreign and local journalists were encamped, waiting. The carriages were lined up, and the staff were loading the final chests with documents and maps, while the director himself, the Big Raven, shouted, ‘Hurry up, hurry up, lads!’

  In their confusion, they did not grasp how totally useless this haste had been. They were embarking on a project that would take about two hundred years. But on the road, as their heads nodded and their haunches ached, and especially when they found they had left behind their shaving tackle or sleeping pills, or someone discovered his wife’s nightdress mixed up with his underwear, they started accusing first themselves and then the world at large.

  During the journey, Lala Shahini had calmed himself by thinking of the larger picture, which was always easy for him. As he drowsed to the creaking of the wheels, events played out in his imagination in different ways, sometimes more dimly, but sometimes in sharp relief. So they were off to quench the spirit of a rebellion. This was no doubt more difficult than extinguishing a volcano. Moreover, rebellions were invisible, he thought, and if they were plugged in one place they would break out in another, like subterranean gases. Would it not be better to let them erupt, especially in remote territories? Otherwise they could flare up where least expected, increasingly close, until they reached the capital city itself.