He woke several times during the night. Once his mind remained empty. Another time he asked himself softly, oh God, why aren’t things simpler? Towards midnight he started from sleep again. Where am I? he wondered, and then remembered what had happened. I won, he thought drowsily and huddled deeper in his blanket. It’s midnight … Tundj Hata was now a black cat with a fish head between his teeth, racing through a landscape of darkness and confusion. Run with that curious fish, Hurshid Pasha thought, and immediately fell asleep.
3
Between the Frontier and the Centre of the Empire
MEANWHILE, THE CARRIAGE of Tundj Hata the royal courier sped through the bowels of the night. Darkness and nothingness were all around. The plains and the sky had perished, leaving in their place a vast nowhere. Discernible in the gloom was a feeble whiteness, the road, which the carriage followed as if it were a thread that might snap at any moment. From inside his compartment, Tundj Hata could just make out the backs of the two Tatars sitting in front of him. A third was behind him, leaning against the back of the carriage and sheltering it to some extent from the wind. As time passed, Tundj Hata felt that the nothingness and the darkness were severing all his connections to this world. He was overwhelmed by the intoxication he felt on almost every mission of this kind. Amidst the death of everything, he felt free. Waves of elation flowed over him, one after another, breaking against the inside of his chest, filling the space of his lungs with foam and roaring through his swelling veins.
Tundj Hata sensed eyes in the darkness watching him from all directions through the panes of the carriage windows. He cried out. But neither of the guards in front or behind him moved. The cry was inside himself. Tundj Hata felt that his last links to this world were breaking. His frenzy increased, as if he were being sucked into a whirlpool. He had felt the same way one week before, when making this journey in the opposite direction, from the capital to the frontier, with two decrees bound to his body, one hidden under his right arm, one under his left. Both decrees bore the wax of the royal seal and carried the sultan’s signature, but one had been false. The genuine one was the death sentence or katil ferman, as it was known in the archaic jargon of officialdom. On that journey, Tundj Hata had sensed that one of the wax-sealed letters his chest was warming would soon be turned into a head. The transformation took place within a week. The letter had brought death, and he had been its messenger.
Tundj Hata gave a second cry. But still the guards heard nothing. Now he hovered in a void entirely alone, as if catapulted into the outer universe. He was far away in the depths of a black space that nobody had ever penetrated. He was its master, and at the same time its slave. He felt himself swell and bristle and simultaneously shrink and melt. He gave a third cry and at once, with a jerk, he hunched his body over the severed head that he was holding by his side. His face touched its cold curls. He drew his lips close to the ear and whispered, ‘Now we’re on our way. Can you hear the wheels on the gravel? We’re off, we’re off.’ For a long time he muttered disconnected words into the head’s icy ear. ‘Hahaha’ or ‘hehehe’ he went, but thought he was saying more or less this: You are, or rather were, the great Ali Pasha and when you were him, you never knew that a certain Tundj Hata lived in this world. You would have split your sides with laughter, hahaha, hehehe, if anyone had told you that one day Tundj Hata the courier would have any business with you. Hahaha, you would have gone hehehe, you would have put your hands on your hips in gales of laughter until you were out of breath, and the servants would have come running with glasses of water, calling the chief steward, the doctor, the physician-in-chief. Hahaha, hehehe … But look now how night has come and I have your head under my arm. It’s my turn to go hahaha, hehehe. Me and the February wind. Hahaha, hoohoohoo. One winter night like this, years ago, on a tedious tour of duty, my journey took me along the main road near your capital city. It was cold and I was miserable. From my carriage, I glimpsed the lights of your palace in the distance. They were far away, like stars. I did not take my eyes off them for a long time. Pasha, you have risen to a great height, I thought, wrapping my courier’s fleece more tightly round me. And at that moment I felt a kind of dizziness. My entire body cried, you will be mine. Mine, and here you are, hahaha, hehehe. I waited for so many years, like waiting for a fruit tree to mature. Other fruit fell, and I carefully carried them – here, under this arm – while your branches grew higher and higher. But I knew that your own time would come. Your own time, hahaha, hehehe. You lofty state grandees pass by us middling officials, unreachable, with contempt in your half-closed eyes, not deigning even to turn your heads. At state dinners you sit at the top tables in your fine clothes, with your glittering medals, holding your necks straight as only you know how. Whereas we, the middling sort, barely squeeze around the lowest table, near the guards and servers. We watch you from a distance. We watch you, hahaha, hehehe. We wait for you to fall, we wait to carry you like this under our arms, taking you far, far away. Faster, coachman, hahaha …
Tundj Hata went on murmuring into the head’s ear for some time, but eventually grew tired. His exaltation subsided. He felt cold, wrapped himself more tightly in his sheepskin, and rested his head against the back of the seat. He was exhausted, as if by some epileptic fit. He felt a pressure on his temples and a bitter taste in his mouth. This always happened after the first storm passed. Drained and empty, he huddled in a corner of the carriage hoping for a little sleep. But after such agitation, no sleep would come. The higher his rank, the more he craved sleep. The excitement was more powerful to him than the lure of women, and the higher the rank of the head, the more thrilling the sensation was. Now drained, he recalled his first journey with a head, like a famous drunkard telling the story of his first binge to the village inn.
It had been summer. The weather was sultry and stifling. There was no snow to be found anywhere. He stopped now and then to refresh the severed head at cold springs. He was inexperienced. He had been working for one year as a courier for the court’s Third Branch and had carried decrees and orders of all kinds, but never a head. And as if this were not difficult enough, it was the height of summer. At any moment, the head could spoil. As he travelled, he opened the pannier and looked in anxiously. Allah, he said to himself, what have we mortals done to be put to this test, travelling with heads in our hands? A huge moon drowned the world in its light. Now and then he opened the Regulations for the Care of Heads of the Condemned and under the light of the moon read and reread the chapter ‘On the use of salt’. The head sat next to him, a handsome head with strangely calm eyes. The grains of salt on its hair, eyebrows and cheeks glittered under the moon. For a moment, he lifted his eyes from the rulebook and sat entranced by the sight. Without realising it, he had drawn close to the ear and for the first time whispered, ‘My bride.’ More words followed, first dripping like sweat, sometimes cold, sometimes warm, then in an indistinguishable torrent of rage and love.
That had been his first taste of this intoxication. It recurred on his later missions, until it became something he could not live without.
Tomorrow, Tundj Hata said to himself, and his mind wandered, thinking of the route they would take the next day. His imagination raced in front of the carriage, faster than the horses, sliding like the shadow of a cloud over the broad wastelands and wretched villages that looked as if they were perpetually waiting for something. The wheels creaked plaintively and Tundj Hata recalled the night he carried the governor of Tripoli’s head. It had been winter, with gales and fog. The carriage had hit a roadside post and all its windows had shattered. The sleet had soaked Tundj Hata to the bone. He tried to protect the pannier that conveyed the governor’s head, but it was impossible. During the flashes of lightning, the severed head with its drenched and dishevelled hair looked somehow indignant. Tundj Hata, against his custom and against all instructions (couriers transporting heads were forbidden to stop on the way), was forced to take shelter in the first inn he came across. It was one of those hundreds
of ordinary inns on the great highway, and only its name was particular, the Inn of the Two Roberts. On other kinds of missions, he had often spent the night in such refuges. Almost without exception, they consisted of a room with a fire, round whose hearth the guests sat after dinner, especially in winter. In most cases the travellers were officials of different ranks on state business. It was not difficult to distinguish the dignitaries of the capital city, on tours of superior inspection, from the provincial officials who’d been summoned to the capital. Around the wintry fire, guests who were strangers would at first be cautious with one another. But after the initial frostiness, both sides usually talked until late: senior officials liked to impress their audience with stories from the capital, and the provincials were pleased to be included in the conversation at all. Their talk ranged over all kinds of topics, from the recent high-level appointments and dismissals, a subject dear to the hearts of all civil servants, to the private lives of famous people in the arts. Tundj Hata generally sat apart. Although he had never carried an artist’s head in his official bag, to him the fame of artists was just as ephemeral as the splendour of the great offices of state.
On that stormy night, sodden and with his leather pannier in hand, Tundj Hata arrived at the inn in a fury. The terrified innkeeper was unable to judge who this man was or where he had come from. But Tundj Hata couldn’t have cared less. He barged into the main room, where seven or eight guests were stretched out beside the hearth. Almost all of them turned towards the new arrival, ready to welcome him, as one would receive any person coming in from a storm. But Tundj Hata’s face was so wild that it repelled not only their sympathy but questions of any kind. Heedless of them all and without a greeting, he approached the fire and roughly took his place, shouldering in between two guests. Everybody’s expressions changed from surprise to concern, and then under a strenuous silence this stranger thrust his hands in his pannier and drew out by the hair a severed head. Before the startled eyes of the guests, he positioned the drenched head beside the fire, supposedly to dry it.
Tundj Hata did not even want to know who these guests were whom he had treated with such contempt. He realised later that, with the exception of a villager travelling to the capital for the removal of a stomach ulcer and two hashish merchants on their way to Province Six, the other guests were civil servants: two senior clerics on their way to inspect the dervish lodges in the European region of the state, a diplomatic courier, and an important official who some thought was the deputy director of a bank, and others an employee of the Interior Ministry. All these people exchanged glances several times with wide-open eyes and then sat nonplussed, not knowing which of their number should be the first person, by rank, to explode in fury at this newcomer. Finally, almost in unison, the hoarse voices of the two clerics and the deputy bank director or secret police official were heard, and then joined by all the other guests and the innkeeper himself, who approached gripping a stave. Tundj Hata stared at them first with contempt and then loathing. Their voices turned to shouts, and out of the corner of his eye Tundj Hata saw the innkeeper raise the stave threateningly. The courier straightened his back and with a sudden flourish produced the official travel order with the imperial seal. On this was written in black on white that he, Tundj Sar Aksham Hata, courier of the court’s Third Branch, was charged with the duty of carrying to the capital the severed head of the governor of Tripoli, demanded by writ of the sultan on the seventh of December. This letter brandished in front of their faces had a sedative effect, silencing their cries and magically transforming the innkeeper’s stave into a harmless piece of wood. Tundj Hata had no desire to crow over his victory. Wearily he returned the letter to his breast pocket (the crackling of the thick paper was audible in the silence) and, without a glance at his fellow guests, passed his hands two or three times through the still-icy hair of the head almost tenderly, not taking his eyes off it, as if to say: They don’t care for you. What have you done to them, I wonder, to turn them against you?
Silence fell round the hearth, and the flames and embers were the only life. The hair of the head began to steam in the warmth. The vapour rose like a mist straight from the kingdom of death. Behind this haze, the eyes of the guests were dull and glazed, yet with a strange glint, as if this steam were sulphurous incense sending them into a state of religious ecstasy. They sat late into the night. As he watched their eyes fade, Tundj Hata thought vaguely of the line of people outside the doors of the royal theatre. He did not then understand that this association of images was not accidental. In his mind, if dimly, the idea had been born that a severed head could fascinate an audience just as much as a work of art. He thought of the queues for opening-night tickets and their high prices. And for the first time, there by the hearth in that inn with its filthy name, the idea struck him that … in the course of his journey … somewhere … in remote villages … where there had never been a theatre … he, and the severed head … (queue for tickets, queue for tickets, queue for tickets). It was perhaps midnight or later when he abruptly roused himself, drew a handful of white salt out of his bag and sprinkled it on the severed head (rather like an actor putting on make-up before a performance). With an unexpected ‘good night’ to everybody he put the head back in the pannier and departed with it for his own room. Tomorrow, tomorrow, he repeated to himself as he climbed the rickety stairway.
A long time had passed since that night. Tundj Hata’s memory went back again and again to that roadside inn, distorting the shape of the stairs, the windows, and the wooden sign by the gate with the inscription ‘Inn of the Two Roberts’, rendering indistinct the faces of the guests, and retaining only one thing unaltered: those stupefied eyes staring through the vapour that rose from the locks of dead hair.
Now the head of Ali Pasha, who had been a vizier of this world where the February wind blew, was here beside him, and far ahead lay villages without theatres but with plenty of eager eyes. Tomorrow, he said to himself again. You will see it tomorrow, he said for the third time, and tried to encourage sleep to occupy at least a part of his mind. But his riotous thoughts would not obey him. As soon as he suppressed some, others rebelled. This went on through the night until, just after the second change of horses at a post station, his fit came again.
Towards dawn, the carriage still trundled on with the same monotonous sound. The darkness was now less dense and reminded Tundj Hata of a horse stripped of its hair. Day felt closer. Like every new regime, the daylight would turn everything upside down, bring down mountains of shadows and raise new mountains, change the dimensions of things, destroy entire prospects and impose its own signs and symbols everywhere. Only the wind, ready to serve the day as much as the night, remained unaffected in its howling indifference, whatever its direction.
Tundj Hata felt himself become heavier and more squat as day approached. His limbs, which during the elation of the night had grown infinitely longer, had suddenly contracted, his mind was sluggish and his eyesight weak. On the verge of sleep, he brought his face up to the windowpane in a final effort to find out where he was. In front of him was a river swollen by winter, which looked to him like the Ujana e Keqe. It was indeed this river, with the famous three-arched bridge over it. This meant that the Albanian lands would soon come to an end.
The carriage wheels struck the paving of the hump of the bridge, and Tundj Hata trembled, shaken less by the sudden shock to the carriage than by the thought of passing over this cursed structure. This bridge was ancient, almost five hundred years old, and there was a legend about it that made your flesh creep, like all Balkan tales. It was said that they had immured a person in one of the three arches.
Tundj Hata could not tear his eyes away from the swirling water. On his several journeys by this route, he had heard scraps of the ballad: for a long time the spirit of the water had not allowed a bridge to be built over the river (everything that the masons built during the day was destroyed at night), until the builders realised that the water was demanding a sacrifi
ce.
What a repulsive fiction, he said to himself. What was the Central Archive doing, allowing such legends to survive? It was one of the few things in the course of his life that had terrified him. He had written an anonymous letter to the Sheikh-ul-Islam, accusing the Central Archive of dereliction of its duty. But still the legend lived on.
The crossing of the bridge seemed to Tundj Hata horribly prolonged. One arch after another loomed into view. The centuries had darkened the stone of the bridge and encrusted its piers with green moss. The bridge had grown old, and the immured victim had been impossible to discern since long ago. The wind had eroded his features and nobody could tell where his face and neck had been. Anyone ignorant would not have been able to detect the outlines of a human form under this petrified crust.
Ugh, thought Tundj Hata, trying to wrench his eyes away from the final arch. At the end of the bridge on the right-hand side was a mausoleum, as old as the bridge itself. It had been built in memory of the first bloody encounter between Ottoman and Albanian troops, which had happened on this very bridge over the Ujana e Keqe. The inscription at the entrance to the mausoleum explained everything: the date of the incident and its consequences, and the name of the Turkish soldier who was killed, one Ibrahim, whose blood was the first drop of the great rivers of Ottoman blood that were to be shed over this land.