The Keeper of Heads smiled sourly to himself. The hero of the hour, he thought. In the smart cafés, young men had started to wear their beards in ‘Hurshid style’. Ladies of distinction no doubt dreamed of him. Perhaps Abdulla’s wife did too. For a while Abdulla’s eyes stared blankly, and then a strange light flickered across them, as swift as a marten.
5
The Frontier of the Empire. Cloudy Day
A SLOW FIELD cart drawn by oxen wandered erratically across the half-frozen mire. Here and there depleted haystacks, consumed by passing army horses or rotting in the rain, seemed to have drawn silently closer together, resembling ragged ghosts taking refuge now that the battles and mayhem were over. After a day of tumult the wind had dropped and fat sodden clouds now hung in the sky. The occasional rumble of thunder boomed, gone as soon as it was perceptible, like some drowned corpse.
Under the leaden sky, in all the villages and towns of the newly subjugated territory, news-criers read out the sultan’s decree that had arrived from the capital city: ‘To all slaves and bondsmen of the great sultan, subjects of the province of Albania, governed until recently by Black Ali. Your lives are spared. You will eat in peace the bread of slavery, if you surrender your weapons immediately. You are ordered to take off all clothes of bright colours and to dress only in black or grey homespun. Do not let your hair grow, and cover your heads with a fez of black ox-skin. Do not ride on stallions, mares or mules. Block up your chimneys, so that your smoke no longer rises to the sky but leaves your houses through the doors and windows, having first blackened with soot your chattels and livestock and children. All these punishments will be lifted only when you prove to the great sultan by your deeds that you have banished from your souls the demon of rebellion and put aside all memory of Black Ali.’
People standing by house gates, beside fields and at inn doorways listened in bewilderment and said nothing. They did not speak even when the news-crier turned his back and set off for the next village. With tight lips, they turned their heads towards the fields, left barren by the war, as if they might find there some further explanation of this new decree. Flocks of ravens and magpies swirled over the dark earth pocked with shell holes, here and there forming crazy patterns. It was sufficient for people to look at the vast expanse of soft, black, tormented soil with its blighted crops. Everyone knew what a wife’s miscarriage meant, and so could easily grasp the disaster of a miscarriage of the harvest. The mere sight of this neglected land was enough to show that a calamity had already happened. This decree added nothing to it, just as the jabbering of magpies added nothing to the grief of the winter earth.
Some decrees were old, drawn from the ancient files of the Central Archive or copied from them almost word for word. Others were sloppily drafted by seventy-year-old officials, haphazardly adapted to the times and the different provinces of the immense state. People were used to these sorts of decrees. For centuries, news-criers had come and gone, but little had changed in the Albanian territories. The sky and the earth were there, sometimes in harmony with each other and sometimes not, bringing fat years or lean years. The sun played its part and so did the moon, always remote from everything, and finally there was the sultan, somewhere far away at the centre of the world, who sent all serious catastrophes and turned upside down the earth beneath your feet and the sky above your head. For this reason the rancour against him was age-old and instinctive, as if he were an aspect of the weather or of the mountain crags and the clouds above them. The British consul liked to say at receptions that unexpected things might happen if someone discovered how to gather these clouds of wrath. Reportedly, Halet the official answered that it was not as easy as gathering cotton.
At that time Ali Pasha’s rebellion had not yet been overt, although there were rumours everywhere of its imminent outbreak. Clearly the British consul was trying to measure the pulse of the government, thinking of the storms to come.
The approach of thunder was palpable. The government met every day. The ancient Palace of Psst-Psst, the War Ministry, the Fourth Directorate of the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the Palace of Dreams, all these ponderous mechanisms of the state, worked overtime. Everyone was on tenterhooks.
But the most recent communiqués from the province indicated that, against all predictions, that old lion Ali Pasha had not succeeded in concentrating Albania’s ancient resentment. He had risen against the sultan purely out of a personal grudge.
‘Hear ye, all slaves and bondsmen of the sultan,’ the news-criers still called, their throats hoarse in the icy air. ‘Now that the war is over …’
Ali Tepelena had risen up alone against his sovereign, like Kara Mahmud Bushatli and other crazy pashas of Albania before him. These pashas were insanely audacious; the Venetians said that they had the devil in their belly and merely itched to enter battle, for any reason. So when the sultan failed to summon them to the ‘great field of arms’, they lost their tempers and took up arms against him or, not knowing what else to do, launched confused attacks on neighbouring foreign states, Venice, Austria, or whoever stood in their way.
Ali Pasha resembled them in many ways, but was greater in every respect, and was also wise instead of mad. Yet the Albanians did not take him into their hearts. Although he was of their blood, he had oppressed them for years, like some Turkish vizier or worse. He had ordered them to hang, forced them to dance on thorns, put them in irons, humiliated and impaled them. So when he confronted the sultan and was forced to call on their aid, they made no move. They had gone to wars all their lives as easily and naturally as to weddings in autumn, but they did not respond. Let these tyrants quarrel with one another. They can gouge out each other’s eyes and pull out each other’s beards. Why should we care?
War drew closer. The messengers of the vizier (still known to his own people as Ali Pasha but to his enemies as Black Ali, as though night for him had already fallen) struggled blindly through the winter dusk. In their saddlebags they carried official seals, shackles and gold sovereigns, but none of these were of any use. People paid no attention.
Then appeared the first carts of the campaign, the infantry caravans and wet artillery, the staff headquarters with flags with the crescent moon and quotations from the Qur’an, the logistics units behind the lines, the musicians, executioners, pedlars. For the last four hundred years, they had been coming again and again like a recurring nightmare.
When this rabble had wrapped itself round the walls of his castle, Ali Tepelena issued a final appeal to his fellow countrymen: look, they are here. But still no response came. The Albanians began to forget about him. They were more worried about the shell holes and cart ruts in the fields, the haystacks nibbled by passing mules of the artillery, than by the fate of Ali Pasha. And so they left him to himself with his personal guards and cannons.
Even when it was clear that Ali’s end was near, the usual time for remorse, the Albanians’ regrets were of a mild and general nature. They felt some sympathy for him because of his great age, for neither the country’s epics nor the state chronicles recorded another rebellious vizier of eighty-two, and also because of the painful desertion of his sons and grandsons, all pashas and noblemen themselves, who rallied to the sultan. However, they felt pity less for him than for themselves and their land, and disappointment after a quarter-century of hope. The land slowly but relentlessly began to make its own reproaches, filling the shell holes and trenches this war had gouged in its surface, and the Albanians too began to repair whatever they could in their fields, and within themselves.
The news-criers were still travelling the rime-covered roads, but people were familiar with their old stories. Nobody would seriously be forced to change their clothing. The Albanians would mount their horses as before, wear their hair as they liked, and smoke would climb from chimneys straight or crooked, as it pleased.
They were less surprised by the news-criers than by the wild ducks that came in March, and which this year were very early. But this war
had also come at an unusual time, in the depths of winter.
After the suppression of the rebellion the world seemed deadened. The croaking of ravens sounded louder, especially to the ears of the army’s sappers who studied their flight, in the hope that the birds might point them towards unburied corpses under the layer of frost.
The young woman’s long black skirt rustled on the ground, and as it passed it gathered dust, pebbles and sometimes half-burned cartridges. Ali Pasha’s twenty-two-year-old widow wandered through the vaults of her occupied castle, followed by her two women-in-waiting, an architect, and an employee of the Interior Ministry dressed as a dervish. The entourage walked in total silence behind her long shadow, slackening or quickening their pace according to hers, stopping when she did and setting off again as soon as she moved on. Throughout this silent progress the whole party, except for the Ministry’s employee, maintained the same distance.
They were looking for the rest of the treasure of the defeated vizier, which remained undiscovered. They accompanied the widow through the chambers and crypts in the hope of prompting a recollection of suspicious repairs or traces of unexpected plasterwork.
Immediately after Ali’s head had been sent to the capital, his treasure had followed, escorted by a nine-hundred-strong guard. But in response, instead of any expression of thanks or even pleasure at the gold and jewels, there arrived, in haste, a deputy director of the Imperial Bank. People who saw him descending from his carriage were astonished first to see certain long shapes emerging from the door of the vehicle, followed by a person. These elongated objects turned out to be his legs, followed by his torso, and at last his head. The banker demanded to be taken at once to Hurshid Pasha in order to inform him that long and complicated calculations (Allah, said Hurshid Pasha to himself, when had they found the time for these calculations?) had shown that not all of Black Ali’s treasure had been rendered, and the capital city demanded the remaining part at once. Hurshid Pasha’s hands turned cold. Then, when he had collected enough saliva to speak, he declared to this contemptible scrivener that he would issue a special order for the rest of the treasure to be found without fail, if it really was incomplete. As he pronounced these few words, a question crawled through one of the lower strata of his brain. Why were such spindly creatures as this sinister banker allowed to wander the surface of the earth, and even deliver state communiqués? Distractedly, he thought that all the evils of the world were caused by people who were either very short or very tall. Then, when this man had left, Hurshid Pasha gave an order for all the prisoners of the castle to be put to torture, and he asked for the widow of the defeated pasha to be brought to his tent. On the direct instruction of the Sublime Porte, she was to leave for the capital that same day.
Hurshid Pasha had heard about Vasiliqia, but had never seen her. Black Ali had never attended any state dinners after he married her. She was pretty, but not as beautiful as he had imagined. Nevertheless, he would have taken her with pleasure into his harem, or even as his wife, for who had more right to do this than the man who had made her a widow? However, the mighty Directorate of Protocol had stretched out its hand to seize her.
Vasiliqia looked him straight in the eye, frankly and without the hatred or even the awe that the sight of her husband’s conqueror might be expected to inspire in her. At any other time, Hurshid Pasha would have known how to reward this indifference, but his thoughts were elsewhere. There was no thrill to their confrontation. For him, it was no longer ardent or arousing, for the simple reason that he, her husband’s vanquisher, was also his successor and lord over everything that was his, including Vasiliqia. Hurshid Pasha set aside this aspect, as well as his own youth, for he was a pasha of only forty-two, and said to her in a voice that seemed strange even to himself, ‘Listen, sister … my daughter …’
He spoke gently about general matters, including the treasure, but without threats or entreaties, and without pity, in the tones of an equal. The widow sometimes nodded assent, and at the end of the meeting added nothing but a final ‘yes’.
The carriage that was to carry the woman to the capital had been waiting outside the fortress gates since morning. Whether the treasure was found or not, the carriage would set off on its long journey that afternoon.
Wandering the labyrinth of the castle, Vasiliqia thought of Hurshid Pasha’s trim beard with its pale, bronze-coloured glint, like a lamp emitting its last gleams before it is quenched. This beard glittered all the more when its owner spoke of gold, silver and bronze coins. ‘You are young,’ he had said, ‘and when you go to the capital, you will surely have prompt offers of marriage from eminent men of religion and the state. Yes, yes, plenty of them,’ he continued, studying his fingernails. At this moment she thought that he was about to make his own proposal. But he did not. He repeated that she was young and said that her husband’s bad name did not stain the reputation of his wife. On the contrary, his character, reflected in his wife, was purged of its coarser features and regained its true brilliance.
Vasiliqia paused at a wide embrasure in one corner of the castle and stared out at the frost-covered plain. This winter had frozen the whole world. For an entire week, not a ray of sunlight had penetrated the heavy grey dough of the sky. She couldn’t believe the sun would ever shine again. Had they cut off the plain at the horizon, just as they had severed her husband’s head at the shoulders?
She shut her eyes but opened them again at once, because closing her eyes put her in greater danger. She started walking again and the entourage followed her rustling skirts in total silence. The corridors were as cold as ice, and the alcoves and walls patched with damp as if an entire army of snails had crawled over them. Occasionally she examined one of these patches, and the eyes of the Interior Ministry employee and the architect followed hers. The two men behind her moved aside and made notes on a sheet of paper.
Vasiliqia’s eyes were large, and through them, as if through some crevice, one could see her mind straining to remember. Sometimes the pupils swung to one side, as if they would dive into her head and not reappear again, leaving the hollows of her eyes a blank and lifeless white. Then they would turn back at the last moment and slowly straighten. When this happened, the architect made a special note on his paper, and the two men’s hopes of finding the rest of the treasure increased.
In fact, Vasiliqia was not looking for the lost part of the treasure but for her murdered husband. It seemed to her that somewhere in the walls and corners she would discover the hidden part of him.
They hadn’t been married for long and she hadn’t known him well. He had spent a lot of time with her recently, during the siege. Otherwise she might not have got to know him at all. But in these past months, when Hurshid Pasha’s army had encircled them as if they were in a pit, she had been alone with him for days. She had heard that it had been like this at the beginning of Ali’s life, when he was only eighteen and his mother married him to the kittenish little Um Gulsumi, who was even younger than himself. The young couple had sat alone together for hours on end. But between these wives lay sixty years of his life that belonged to no one. On occasion Vasiliqia had tried to encroach on this territory, but she felt lost as soon as she took her first steps into it, as if in a temple belonging to another world. Terrified, she had turned back. But in the last few months, the sphinx had begun to talk.
That late-autumn night had been moonless, with only a few distant stars, scattered by the wind across the empty sky. Ali and his wife were lying together in one of the chambers of the castle’s western tower, from which a part of the autumn sky could be seen.
‘I’ll go to war against the sultan,’ he said to her in a pensive voice.
At first she said nothing. Only after a pause, not taking her eyes away from the distant shimmer of the stars, she asked softly, ‘Against the sultan and emperor?’
He nodded more with his beard than with his head.
‘The sultan is the light of the world,’ she said, and at that moment felt his
breathing grow faster.
‘I’ll put out that light.’
He seemed to puff out these words, rather than pronounce them.
She half closed her eyes. How wonderful, she thought, not knowing why it should be so fine. She listened to his breathing and slowly the reason dawned on her. It was a horribly wonderful thing for a woman lying in the marital bed one autumn night to hear her husband say not ‘I’ll put out the light’, as hundreds of thousands of husbands do before lovemaking and sleep, but, just as calmly and naturally, ‘I’ll put out the light of the world.’
‘It will be dark,’ she said, more to encourage him to speak than to object.
‘I know,’ he said shortly. She calmly stroked his beard and whispered, breathing into his ear, ‘But why will you do this?’
At first he remained silent. In the low light shed by the candle in its copper sconce, she noticed that his beard, eyes and eyebrows were caught in a grimace, and the reasons for the war lay in that distorted expression. He was trying to express these reasons, but apparently could not do so, and so he replied simply, ‘You won’t be able to understand.’
She was not at all offended. Her hand continued gently stroking his beard, the way he liked. ‘Why do you want to climb higher?’ she whispered as she caressed him. ‘Why not climb down a little? Wouldn’t it be more natural to yield, to be more human, rather than overreaching to become more than a man?’ Of course, it was wonderful to lay your head beside a husband’s head that contained reasons for war, and even the decision to start one, and yet, and yet, wasn’t it a totally insubstantial kind of pleasure?
Sometimes she caught herself thinking it was her own fault when, lying on their soft bed, she felt she was merely an unconsidered woman rather than his wife. You’re married to him, she told herself, the most powerful man after the sovereign in this empire that stretches across three continents. Never forget this. But the thought of being his wife gave her only a cold and distant joy that she could not grasp, a glittering but slippery joy, like a crystalline mineral in a dream. The vizier growls like thunder … a song about him started. How well these words described him, she thought. More than a pasha, a minister, a man of flesh and bone and grey hair, he was a thunderclap. Sometimes she thought that she had married a mountain laden with an entire winter’s burden of snow. Lightning, thunder and the silvery light of snow had become her jewellery, but could she hang these round her neck? She yearned for an ordinary wedding with guests from some mountain valley in black trousers, with red tassels bobbing like little flames on their sandals, white horses and rifle fire, and the Roma with their wedding tambourines. Her longing grew and entwined itself round the towers of the castle. She thrust it away, telling herself that fate had given her a different life at the side of a mighty husband. She was the wife of this thunderbolt, ruling over men just as the weather governs the world.