The Traitor's Niche

  But had he really been so powerful? She had not asked herself this question during the week after his death, even in her most secret thoughts. The question arose of its own accord, or a pale suggestion of it secretly crept up on her, calmly gleaming and biding its time. With it came the memory of his body dragged down the staircase, his back arched, his arms useless behind him, his head striking the treads, and then his arms, his back falling onto the next tread, and then his head, and his arms behind him hitting the stairs in their turn. What a long time his descent took until, on the final stair, the great stroke of a shining yataghan cut the world in two.

  She had watched all this from ten paces away, unable to shut her eyes. A curse on you for not closing, she had thought in the days that followed, addressing her own eyes in the mirror. Why had they stayed open, when the sky itself should have gone dark to hide the sight of that calamity?

  So this is how you die, she thought when his head fell on the next stair while his arms still trailed behind. You wanted to amaze the world with your death. She had stared at him, sure that a miracle would happen and he would stand up again to keep his promise, but his back fell on another stair while his head thudded against the next and an arm flailed over his face. ‘I trust you and I trust death,’ he had often said in the last few weeks, when he had lost all hope. ‘They can’t take you or death away from me.’ She had sat totally naked in the cold light of the moon, and he had stared at her, repeating over and over for hours: ‘Neither of you.’ She expected him to stand up on the second-to-last stair, and thought she saw his arm leaning against the tread for support, but then the head fell and everything, body and arms, crumpled in a heap and it was all over. Her last thought before she fainted was that he’d been left with nothing, not with the death he wanted, not with her … nothing …

  The widow stared at the patches and trails of damp, some large and others small. There was no end to the castle’s chambers and the cold froze her to the marrow. So part of the treasure is missing, she thought vaguely. Something was always missing. She was looking for her husband. There had always been a part of him missing.

  Soon they would come to the great hall of arms. She had found him there one day as he sat brooding, absorbed by some copper trinkets. His architect and one of the most famous painters of Janina had just left the hall. ‘What are these things?’ she had asked him, noticing the discs that did not resemble either women’s jewellery or men’s medals. He laughed, but coldly, in the style of the unresponsive discs. ‘It’s just as you say,’ he said, ‘they aren’t jewellery or medals. They’re the state emblems.’

  ‘State emblems?’ She stared at him in puzzlement. ‘But we already have those. They were decided by the great sultans long ago.’ Then he told her that these would be the emblems of the new state. He talked slowly and gravely and she listened open-mouthed. Then she understood: he wanted to found an Albanian state. Creating a state was to her mind a terrible, unimaginable thing, like giving birth to an entire world. Just as they say that new heavenly bodies are fashioned from old cosmic dust, so the new world of Albania was to be formed from the dust of the old Ottoman universe, from that constellation of terrors and crimes, postprandial poisonings, night-time assassinations, monks holding lanterns in the rain, dervishes with knives and messages hidden in their hair, from that profusion of rebellious pashas, bureaux with thousands of files, informers, outlawed viziers and ‘black’ pashas with a price on their heads who swarmed like ghosts before or after death – all the rotting debris of empire.

  ‘Created?’ she interrupted him gently. Hadn’t it once existed? Didn’t Scanderbeg create such a thing? (She pronounced his name very softly, like any word one was forbidden to utter in public.) Still he frowned, as he always did when he heard this name. He continued as gloomily as before. Although Albania had existed at one time, it had been destroyed, and had crumbled away four hundred years ago. Now he wanted to recreate it in the midst of this present hell.

  He cracked his fingers repeatedly. Unlike on other occasions when they had talked about his fame, this conversation annoyed him beyond measure.

  ‘It’s so difficult, so hard,’ he said at last and, unusually for him, sighed, staring at the book by Machiavelli that lay on the oak table and which had been read to him recently at dinner.

  The hall of arms was as cold as ever, with that dazzling northern light. Why didn’t he succeed, she wondered. Who was stopping this man who stopped at nothing? The sultan? Hadn’t he said how easily he would crush the old scoundrel?

  ‘So who’s stopping you?’ she finally asked, timorously.

  He turned round abruptly, as if that ‘who’ were a mouse that had scuttled out of the corner of the room and had to be crushed at once.

  The northern light was now behind his back, feeble, as if filtered and through the fringe of a blanket.

  ‘Who’s stopping me?’ he said. ‘Who’s stopping me? Nobody.’

  These last words, although uttered in a low voice, came out in a howl. This was typical of his speech, which sounded so placid on the surface, but concealed an inner roar.

  ‘Albania itself is stopping me,’ he murmured. ‘Nothing else.’

  Vasiliqia understood very little of what he said. She sensed only that the conversation should be brought to an end at once. But later, when he began talking again, Vasiliqia began to grasp what he meant. He groaned and complained that Albania itself crumbled in his hands. He couldn’t get hold of it. It was like those glow-worms that leave a phosphorescent gleam on your fingers if you touch them, but nothing else.

  She had seen wandering gypsies who, with a magic piece of iron called a magnet, compelled fragments of metal, nails and filings. Apparently, in a similar way, these mountains, muddy fields, rains, words, people and clouds would have to be drawn together and transformed from the raw dough of a world into something called ‘the Albanian state’. But he did not possess the magic to do this. His power had extended to everything – terror, palaces, bridges, wars, diplomacy – but not his mother country.

  The sketches of the flag and the state emblems lay in the hall of arms, but it seemed that no state would come together there.

  This became clearer to Vasiliqia as she drew closer to her husband in the weeks that followed. Her husband secretly envied Scanderbeg of the Kastriots, the creator of the Albanian state of long ago. Four hundred years before, at the age of thirty, Scanderbeg had done something that now seemed impossible: on the ruins of an old Albanian state, destroyed by the quarrels of its princes and the Turkish onslaught, he had rebuilt his country. But for Ali Pasha it was too late. He was over eighty, and the rebuilding of Albania was still a long way off. He envied still more keenly the future statesman who would accomplish this impossible task. Scanderbeg was in the past, and this statesman was in the future, and he himself stood between them, a thundering vizier whose place in history nobody could predict. How fine it is when the skies resound to your thunder, as the song said about him. But he would retort that thunderclaps didn’t last long and came only at the turn of the seasons. He wanted something more.

  He had first talked to Vasiliqia about immortality after an English poet called Byron visited their castle. This was the first and only man with whom she had betrayed him. It was a betrayal without shape, words, sight or substance, like the setting of the moon. He was handsome, with a limp, and nearer her own age. He was a pasha in his own country (there called lords) and he wrote verses like Haxhi Sherreti. He stayed two days in the castle of Tepelena and on the third he set off on the road to Greece. All this time, the wind hissed like a snake and crawled on its belly, before lifting its head at some distant crossroads. Vasiliqia had sat miserably by one of the south-facing windows and caught herself thinking about the poet. Oh God, look after him, she said to herself. He was so young and good-looking, and his poetry made him appear almost transparent, whereas down south, where he was headed, there were so many coarse, bearded men sunk in bloody crime. Her husband found her like this, with ey
es fixed on the distance. He could tell what she was thinking. ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘he set off late, but nothing will happen to him. He’s one of the immortals.’ He uttered these last words with sarcasm; he refused to believe that poems could make anyone immortal. Verses were like the herbs of embalmers: useful in preserving the bodies of great men. They had no value in themselves.

  One day (after he had proclaimed the uprising and also declared an Albanian state), as if remembering her question in the hall of arms, he took her down to the castle dungeon, to show her his enemies. In just this way, at the beginning of their marriage, he had shown her his property, his stables of thoroughbred horses, the little fortresses on the sea coast, the ring sent by Bonaparte, and his mother’s will. As she walked behind him, she said, ‘So we’ll see the secret chambers of the state.’ Why hadn’t she realised before that beneath where they lived there were people bound in irons?

  The dungeon was a pit roofed by a stone vault, which appeared to sway and shake in the light of the torches with their choking stench. When their eyes cleared they saw the chains fixed to the wall a little below the height of a man. They were short, and did not allow a prisoner to stretch out on the ground. The men hung half suspended, with knees slightly bent and backs leaning against the wall, or turned to the sides. Some had their heads and chests jutting forward, their waists restrained by iron bands. One, entirely fastened to the wall, looked like a bas-relief.

  Ali Pasha stopped in front of this last man.

  ‘Do you understand now that you were wrong?’ he said to him. In the airless cellar, words fell to the ground as soon as they left a human mouth.

  The bas-relief didn’t move. The guard brought the torch close to its head and Ali Pasha called out:

  ‘Speak, or are you dead?’

  Still the bas-relief didn’t move.

  ‘No, he’s not dead,’ the guard said.

  ‘Up above, I’ve made Albania an independent state,’ Ali Pasha said, ‘but you won’t see it.’

  Ali Pasha did not take his eyes off the human form, pressed against the dungeon wall as if against an anvil. He waited a few moments until the bas-relief moved. First one shoulder, then a part of the man’s back and finally his head detached themselves from the stone and mortar. The shape slowly turned to face the pasha and stared rigidly at him.

  ‘So,’ Ali Pasha said, ‘do you understand now?’

  ‘Hahaha,’ went the prisoner. In the open air it might have been a laugh, but down here it was only a muffled fall of dust.

  ‘Hahaha,’ the prisoner went again. ‘You’ve done nothing up there.’ He paused for a moment. As he talked, he indeed shook dust and mud from his hair.

  ‘You’ve done nothing,’ he repeated, ‘for you’re still a pasha.’

  ‘But how do you know that I’m still a pasha? I’ve become what you call a leader.’ He uttered the word with contempt, with a protracted ‘ea’. ‘A leader,’ he repeated. ‘Do you hear?’

  Instead of answering, the prisoner rattled his chains.

  ‘Pasha,’ he muttered between his teeth. ‘My hands can tell what you are. This is not the way to make Albania.’ His words came in fragments, from the grave, covered in earth. ‘You might create a fief, but not a state … Albania won’t follow you … No. You’ll be all alone …’

  ‘Shut up,’ Ali cried.

  ‘You’ve climbed onto a blind horse, Ali.’

  ‘Shut your mouth!’

  ‘Albania isn’t your mother Hanko.’

  ‘Beat him,’ Ali shouted.

  The guard, thinking it would take too long to pass the torch to his left hand and take out his pistol with his right to hit him with its butt, struck him on the face with the torch instead. The flame flared, and sparks and ash fell to the ground. There was a smell of burned hair. The head fell back, and the body slumped and flattened itself against the wall. The prisoner became a bas-relief again.

  Vasiliqia wanted to throw up.

  This prisoner had said these very words at a meeting of the vizier’s council: ‘Our Albanian state, if we create it, will be made by an Albanian leader and not a pasha.’ ‘What do you mean by this?’ Ali had interrupted. ‘Are you going to lead the state yourself, since I’m a pasha?’ ‘Not at all,’ the man replied. ‘My liege, you may put yourself at the head of the state, but you’ll have to turn yourself from a pasha into a leader.’ ‘But I am a leader, among other things,’ Ali butted in. ‘No, my liege,’ the other man went on, again addressing him with this archaic word used by the first counts and princes of Arbëria. ‘Right now you’re only a pasha, and to become a leader you must cease to be a pasha.’ ‘Hahaha,’ Ali laughed, ‘what sort of riddle is this?’ ‘It’s not a riddle, my liege, I’m telling you the simple truth. Leave off being a pasha, become a leader, and all Albania will love you. Do it before it’s too late, my liege. Otherwise Albania won’t follow you.’ ‘Enough,’ Ali howled. ‘Put him in chains.’

  It was the words themselves that had been clamped in irons.

  Emerging from the prison into daylight, Vasiliqia felt faint. You’ve climbed onto a blind horse, she repeated to herself as her knees gave way. Albania won’t follow you, no.

  Ali Pasha’s face was lemon yellow. Vasiliqia knew that the prisoner had opened an old wound. Despite her husband’s efforts to conceal it, his envy of Scanderbeg was obvious. Albania had followed Scanderbeg, and not for one year or two but for twenty-five years and more – twenty-five years in his lifetime plus eleven years after his death. And Albania was still ready to follow his ghost, more prepared to follow this phantom than the living Ali Pasha.

  As the months passed, Ali Pasha’s correspondence with the sultan petered out. The sovereign’s letters grew more curt and the final salutations were briefer, like fur coats that had once had a magnificent sheen, and were now dull and moth-eaten. Courtesies were slowly and pitilessly stripped away, and the naked truth, concealed for years on end, was exposed.

  Ali Pasha knew that bad times lay ahead and dispatched couriers to the four corners of the country to summon help from the provinces before the storm broke. But the couriers came back without word, only the clattering of their horses’ hooves. Their dust-covered faces looked blank and smelled of nothing. Nothing from the north or the west. Ali Pasha sent threats, then kind words, then threats again, but this same dusty nothingness came back.

  Albania had not listened. ‘What a feeble country,’ he muttered, pacing up and down the hall of arms. ‘Albania has grown old, deaf, no longer fit to fight.’ But he said this only to ease his grief. It was a very bitter thing to admit that Albania had ears but pretended not to hear.

  ‘I’ve committed crimes,’ he said time and again to Vasiliqia during their long nights together, which were as chill and lifeless as wax. ‘But show me a ruler without crimes on his hands. Hanko, my mother, God rest her soul, pushed me into some of them.’ He talked to her about his mother, and Vasiliqia thanked destiny that her mother-in-law had died before she had even been born. In quiet moments, his crimes crowded upon his mind. He told her about spine-chilling murders, prisons dripping with blood, peasants forced to dance barefoot on thorns, the slaughter at the inn at Valarea. When his cheeks grew tense and his nose sharper (sometimes this nose seemed to stretch in the shape of a coffin down his long face), she could guess which of his exploits he had brought to mind. But crimes were not the most important thing, he explained to her. All the other nobles, the Balshajs, the Topiajs and the glorious Kastriots, had prisons and chains. There must be another reason why Albania had not followed him.

  He thought he could hear horses’ hooves. But almost all the messengers had already come home. There were a few latecomers from the most distant provinces, but the sound of their horses from afar told him that they brought nothing.

  They won’t listen to me. They’ve abandoned me, he said to himself, his jaw clenched. At one time, a simple horn call brought them to battle, but now all my thousand bell-towers won’t rouse them. They’re as deaf
as sacks of wool.

  Then his rage subsided and he judged more calmly. He realised that Albania was taking its revenge. For forty years, addicted to his own power and fame, he had more or less forgotten her. For him Albania had been an estate, with decrees, taxes and laws: not the country of Albania, but a prime dominion of the empire. Before he was a rebel leader, he had been a great landowner, a pasha with vast estates. Better than any bookkeeper, he knew about profits and percentages, currency rates, land rents. No, it was not just the prisons that kept him at odds with Albania. There were other explanations. He had a bigger army than Scanderbeg, more artillery, equipment, money, land. And yet Albania had followed Scanderbeg at his very first summons. What had been his appeal? he brooded, as if Albania were a woman. Nobody dared give him an answer, so he read and reread the secret reports that contained all the grumbling against him. The reports told him that Scanderbeg had possessed less artillery, but had greater ideas. What ideas? Tell me, for God’s sake. And because there was no reply, Ali Pasha went on arguing with himself. Rather tell me I’ve become a burden to the earth. He leafed through the dispatches again, and continued to take issue with them. So Scanderbeg changed the course of history? So he turned Albania toward the West? Was history a cart, and Albania too, to be turned round in the middle of the road? And hadn’t Ali Pasha also risen against the sultan? But a pitiless voice whispered that while he had indeed risen against the sultan, it was for personal reasons, because of a personal offence, because he suspected that the sultan might overthrow him … Besides, he had marched against the sultan by himself, friendless.