Beneath the niche, its new keeper stood motionless. He was short, with thick eyebrows, and with a commonplace jaw whose square shape seemed duplicated by his shoulder blades and his entire body, also square under its cloak. His inspecting eyes ceaselessly surveyed the multitude. He had to stand on tiptoe to see what was happening in the middle of the crowd.
The café was full, as usual on such days. The proprietor, who reckoned according to ‘head days’ and plain ‘days’, went back and forth among the tables with his coffee pot, whose gleaming copper seemed to smile as discreetly as the man himself.
‘What strange villains people are,’ he said, pouring a black trickle of coffee into the cup of a redheaded man who seemed inclined to conversation. The trickle paled and petered out into tiny drops, and the café owner, seeing his customer show no irritation, went on: ‘I’ve always said, ever since the government opened this hole in the wall, that it will never be left empty. For people are villains and there’s no improving them.’ The proprietor again studied the face of his customer, who had started to sip his coffee. ‘People will always be rising up in rebellions. That’s why we have the word hothead, and their heads will be cut off, and the crowds seeing them in the Traitor’s Niche will say to themselves, no, I’ll never do a thing like that. That’s what they’ll say … yet, as if the devil is at their elbow, the first thing they think of doing is precisely what they shouldn’t. For instance, do you see that midget of a supervisor? He was appointed only a few days ago. Before him there was another one, called Abdulla.’
‘Really, and where did he go?’ said the redhead, lifting his eyes to the proprietor. ‘He was tall and thin, if I’m not mistaken. He looked rather dignified.’
‘That’s right,’ the café owner said. ‘I’ve known all the keepers of the niche, that one too. He sometimes used to come for a coffee after work, over at that table in the corner. He looked wise and, as you put it, sir, dignified, but one day, only last Saturday, something terrible happened.’
‘Really?’ said the customer, now genuinely interested in what the proprietor was telling him.
‘It was very strange,’ the café owner went on. ‘While he was on duty, this quiet, pale man suddenly turned red in the face. The veins in his temples swelled like leeches, and he totally lost control of himself. He looked dreadful, drunk, and he climbed the ladder by the niche and started shouting at the crowd.’
‘Really,’ said the redhead again. ‘How incredible.’
‘But worst of all were the things he said,’ the café owner continued. ‘People clapped their hands over their ears, not to incriminate themselves with what they heard, and others ran away.’
‘What did he say?’ the other man asked.
‘Oh, sir, the things he said.’ The proprietor lowered his voice. ‘Disgusting things.’
‘Really?’ said the other man.
‘He abused the offices of state, the sacred monuments, everything, and then he yelled: I am a rebel, do you hear, cut off my head, cut it off and put it there. And he pointed to the niche.’
‘Amazing,’ said the redhead. ‘And what happened next, did they really cut off his head?’
The café owner paused a moment and looked at the other man in amazement.
‘No, sir,’ he said in a lifeless voice. ‘Such a thing could never happen. The idea of being beheaded and put in the Traitor’s Niche … that was his own conceited fancy. There was no way that could happen.’
‘So what did they do to him?’ the other man asked impatiently. ‘I doubt they gave him a medal.’
‘Of course not,’ said the café owner. ‘He was punished according to the law. But not beheaded or put in the niche. That would have been against all the rules.’
‘So what happened in the end?’
The café owner smiled.
‘In the end? That’s simple, sir. They carry rebels of this kind, little rebels as they call them, to the swamp of Avdi Batak. Do you know this swamp, west of the city? They garrotted him with wire there, at the edge of that swamp.’
‘Ah, yes, I’ve heard of it, but I thought they took only adulterous wives there.’
‘They take those women there too,’ said the café owner, ‘as well as all sorts of other guilty people. They’re all listed in the official gazette.’
‘Extraordinary, really.’
‘People are villains by nature,’ the café owner continued, but suddenly broke off as if someone had called for him. The voice was a soft squeak, like the creak of an ungreased pulley, which the proprietor’s ear, to the other man’s surprise, had caught at once. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, and with the coffee pot in his hand he turned to the table where the former state criers were sitting as gloomily as ever.
Under the melancholy drizzle, the square was packed. The noise of the crowd echoed from the stone walls, like the roar of dark, heavy water behind a lock, the kind with levers and heavy iron gates below the surface.
As they stared at Hurshid Pasha’s head, many people remembered Ali Tepelena. ‘So what happened to Black Ali’s head? It was there until the day before yesterday, I saw it with my own eyes.’ ‘They say that bronze prices are on the move again.’ ‘Of course, of course, Ali Pasha’s head. A dervish buried it on the outskirts of the city. His treasure was never discovered, or not all of it.’ ‘There’s no way the bronze prices can change so soon. I heard about the hashish prices.’ ‘His treasure was never found, but there was nowhere he could hide his land. Hundreds of people have gone to measure it with rods, ropes, all kinds of tools and equipment. What an estate!’ ‘There’s some waste ground on the outskirts, under the old walls of Byzantium, and they buried the head there, a dreadful place.’
The crowd had evidently knocked the legs of Sefer’s easel again, and the artist’s brush had slipped or his paints had spilt, leaving a fine loop just under the neck of the painted head. The spilt paint was black, and the mark resembled a trickle of dark blood belatedly dripping from Black Hurshid’s severed head.
‘Whose head is this?’ a newcomer asked. Other people turned to him in surprise: ‘Where have you been hiding?’ ‘Don’t you read the papers?’ ‘Don’t you hear the criers? They’ve been shouting themselves hoarse since morning.’ Then the uproar became general. ‘Has the decree against Albania been published?’ ‘No, I don’t know anything. I listened to all the criers today when I came out of the office, but I didn’t catch anything about Albania.’ ‘The army will take the situation in hand there.’ ‘I don’t think so. They say that the military are rather angry. Whereas I heard … bring your ear a bit closer … that a dream arrived at the Tabir Saray yesterday evening, nobody knows where from …’ ‘A dream?’ ‘The interpreters have been analysing it all night. Brr … it gives me the creeps.’ Late that afternoon the rain stopped, and towards evening a rainbow hung over the western part of the capital city.
At that hour of dusk the square was still full. The rumour was that a courier of the Tabir Saray had brought an important dream from the dusty margins of Anatolia. ‘What was that dream about, and what did it mean?’ asked voices scattered throughout the square. Nobody could say. They only knew that the lights in the Palace of Dreams had burned until dawn. Someone said that they would carry the dream to the sovereign tomorrow. Apparently Albania’s fate depended on it.
People turned their eyes in the direction where, they thought, the emperor’s winter palace must be, and shook their heads, as if wondering what this dream, which had arrived from so far away, might foretell.
On the square in front of the Traitor’s Niche, the clamour continued unabated, striking deafeningly against the granite walls. That place again, so far away. Tell me again its name, as they call it themselves. Shq … Shqe … it’s a name you can hardly pronounce. It’s really hard, sticks in your throat. Its meaning is hard to understand too, I’m not really sure myself. Shqip … Shqipre … Shqipëria. A very difficult idea, a kind of convocation of eagles, with bloodstained feathers, that falls from the air, swoo
ping through the storms, I don’t know how to put it, oh Allah.
Tirana, 1974–1976
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Copyright © Librarie Arthème Fayard 1984
English translation copyright © John Hodgson 2017
Ismail Kadare has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published with the title Kamarja e Turpit in 1978 by
Naim Frashëri Publishing House, Tirana
penguin.co.uk/vintage
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Ismail Kadare, The Traitor's Niche
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