They kept quiet as the seemingly endless line of soldiers went past, leading their pack mules by the bit. Then came long six-wheeled tumbrels, making a hideous din.
“They’re the field canteens,” Lejla explained. “They’re usually the last vehicles in a convoy.” She sighed. “I suppose it’s all over now.”
The harem carriage slowly got back on the road.
“So what are we now? Young widows?” Exher wondered.
“What nonsense!” Lejla exclaimed. “Young widows! Mind you, I wouldn’t object for myself, but …”
“We mustn’t grumble. I feared the worst after he died.”
“What do you mean?”
“They might easily have done away with us all,” Lejla observed. “My blood ran cold when the war council met that morning. I was terrified they would give the command to Old Tavxha. Hasan had heard the sentries on duty at the time saying that if Tavxha was appointed commander-in-chief, he would have us beheaded. He and the Mufti blamed us for all the army’s misfortunes.”
“Idiots!” Ajsel exclaimed.
“Only when the meeting ended and I learned that the high command had been handed jointly to the three senior captains,” Lejla went on, “only then did my blood begin to thaw.”
The conversation petered out, as it had so many times before. Ajsel propped her chin on the ledge of the carriage door.
“Does it still hurt?” Lejla asked Exher as she leaned over the pregnant girl.
She nodded. Her lips were pale and her eyes were clouded.
“I think I’ve started to bleed again.”
They said nothing for several minutes. Eventually Exher seemed to find some relief. Ajsel turned away from the window. Blondie ran her slender fingers through her hair.
“There’s a winter pasture,” Lejla said. “Are there any in your part of the world?”
“I don’t know,” Ajsel replied. “I’ve never been in this kind of country before.”
Now and again they noticed storks’ nests, and shepherds wearing black hoods over their heads. And identical steep, rocky slopes without end.
“Is that what a state is?” Exher asked, pointing to the countryside. “I mean: is a state the same thing as the land, or is there a difference?”
They burst out laughing, but none of them could really answer the question. Lejla said that the State was actually the Empire, whereas Ajsel opined that the difference between a land and a state was that the latter could not be seen by the naked eye.
“Good God!” Blondie suddenly shouted, her eyes bursting out of their sockets. “Just look at the vehicle coming up behind …”
Through the wire-netted porthole at the rear of the carriage could be seen a closed carriage, of a colour and bearing insignia that they knew well.
“Could it be his coffin?” Lejla asked.
“That’s all we need! To be pursued by his coffin!”
The wagon was gaining on them, making a dreadful racket. It was easy to see that it wanted to overtake them. They slumped back into their seats and waited to see what would happen. Their driver and Hasan were also worried, and turned round to look.
For a few moments the two carriages drove abreast of each other. The girls had put their hands over their eyes, save for Lejla, who carried on staring out of the window. What she saw seemed to scare her even more than the idea of having the Pasha’s coffin on her tail.
“Good God!” she wailed. “The architect Giaour!”
The rattling of the wheels was so loud that none of the others heard what she said. She had to wait until the other wagon had pulled some way ahead to describe what she had seen. Hunched forwards and poring over his maps with eyes as bloodshot as Satan’s, Giaour was drawing!
“There’s a rumour that he’s planning the seizure of Constantinople,” Ajsel said.
They kept their eyes on the shrinking black square of the architect’s carriage until it disappeared into the mist ahead, and then gave a sigh of relief.
“There’s a bird that only comes with the snow,” Lejla said. “Tweet, tweet, come here, little bird!” she said in a girlish voice as she tapped on the window. “Those birds are never wrong,” she added after a while. “Winter is coming on.”
“Woe is me!” Exher moaned. She had gone quite livid, and her whole body was shaking. The women looked into each others’ eyes. “This cursed road is killing me. I can feel I am going …”
“Should we ask Hasan to stop for another rest?”
“What’s the point?” Lejla said. “She’s going to have a miscarriage anyway.”
Exher was weeping.
“And he hoped I would give him a son!” she blurted out between her sobs.
“Lie flat for a bit,” Lejla told her. “It might stop the bleeding.”
Exher lay down and raised her legs. She seemed to get a little better after a while.
The carriage shuddered to a halt again.
“Another convoy,” Ajsel said. “Just look at it!”
The unending caravan seemed utterly monstrous. The soldiers were covered in armour — and so were the horses. With just two little eyeholes, their helmeted heads looked terrifying.
Soldiers sat like statues in packed rows on the backs of long six-and eight-wheeled carts, propping their chins on their weapons. Then even heavier vehicles came by. You could make out the black barrels of cannon.
“Every day brings a new invention,” Lejla observed. “Lord, why can’t they just stop with what they’ve got?”
They said nothing more until the entire convoy had passed by. Then they could see out of the window again, and looked at the breast of the mountain passes, a cross standing crooked by the wayside, and trees draped in hoar frost. Here and there they came across signboards nailed to posts, saying “To the capital, 113 miles” or “To Constantinople, 300 miles,” with finger-arrows pointing in the right direction.
“Who will buy us now?” Ajsel wondered aloud.
Blondie raised her eyes. It seemed she was about to work out what to say.
“Can we ever foretell our own fate?” Lejla asked without taking her eyes off the landscape. “If a soldier buys us, maybe we will have to travel this same road again.”
“Ah, give me anything but this journey again!” Exher wailed. “It’s the road to hell!”
Blondie lowered her eyelids and began to hum softly. It was a sad song, with incomprehensible lyrics in the language of her homeland.
“More villages,” Lejla said, to break the silence that had overcome them. “We must have left Europe behind us by now.”
The carriage went on rolling through the rain.
Tirana, 1969–1970
Paris, 1993–1994
AFTERWORD
In 1968 Soviet tanks overwhelmed Czechoslovakia and put down the liberal government of Alexander Dubček. Albania, the only European ally of Mao’s China, felt the icy breath of the colossus on its doorstep, almost as close to its borders as the decadent bourgeois world of the West. In a mentality of siege, Enver Hoxha, the country’s dictator, ordered the construction of hundreds of thousands of concrete pillboxes across the countryside to defend his tiny country against all imaginable (and imaginary) aggressors. In such a context of national paranoia, Ismail Kadare, then in his early thirties but already a celebrated novelist and poet in his own country and abroad, imagined a novel about a great siege — a siege as evocative of the present as it was radically disconnected from it.
The Siege tells the story of a generic siege of an unidentified Albanian fortress by the Ottoman Army in the earlier part of the fifteenth century. The siege fails. As a result, Kadare’s story had at least two meanings when it appeared in the last days of 1969. It could be read as a politically correct assertion of Albania’s impregnability; but because everyone knew as a matter of historical fact that Albania had been overrun by the Turks and incorporated into the Ottoman Empire by the end of the fifteenth century, Kadare’s novel is also the story of an insignificant victory which only delaye
d the inevitable breaching of the walls. Critics were therefore not too sure what to make of this double-edged sword.
Kadare does not count The Siege as a historical novel, a kind of writing which in his view does not really exist. His imagination of the past was nonetheless fed by a well-known source, the Latin chronicle of the 1474 siege of Shkodër (De obsidione Scodransi, Venice, 1504) by Marin Barleti, one of the earliest works to come out of Albania, prior to any surviving literature in Albanian. Barleti’s first-hand account implies that chronicles of earlier sieges had been written in the vernacular, and Kadare reproduces imaginary fragments of just such a lost chronicle in the “inter-chapters” of The Siege, which seem to come from the pen of a cleric within the besieged community.
Barleti was also the historian of George Castrioti, known as Skanderbeg (or “Lord Alexander,” in Ottoman dress, Iskander Bey), who led Albanian resistance against the Turks until his death in 1468. In The Siege, Kadare does not portray Skanderbeg directly, but by alluding to his presence in the mountains, he sets his novel in a time which Barleti could only have known from Albanian chronicles. Skanderbeg defended Albania against the Ottomans in the name of Christendom. Credited with having saved Western Europe from Islam (in part thanks to Barleti’s biography, which was translated into every European language), Skanderbeg was treated as a hero in Rome, where he still has his statue in a piazza bearing his name. From the time of the rilindja, the Albanian national renaissance in the late nineteenth century, and throughout the pre-war monarchy of King Zog, Skanderbeg was promoted as a national hero, and the cult persisted even under the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha. Tirana’s central square was renamed Skanderbeg Square, and the fortress at Krujë where the warrior made his last stand was rebuilt as a national museum. This explains why Kadare stops short of portraying Albania’s national hero in a novel set in Skanderbeg’s time. The only acceptable portrait of the Dragon of Albania would have been an encomium, a genre entirely alien to Kadare’s repertory.
The Siege was first called Duallet e shiut, “The Drums of Rain,” but the Albanian publishers decided on a more heroic title, Kështjella, “The Castle,” which also served to redirect attention to the Albanian side in the struggle. When the novel appeared in French in 1971, in a fluent translation by Jusuf Vrioni, the original title reappeared “as if by chance,” according to Kadare. The name of Les Tambours de la pluie, “The Rain Drums,” has thus remained attached to the book in France, but not elsewhere. The third of Kadare’s longer works to reach a wide international audience through the medium of French, after The General of the Dead Army and Chronicle in Stone, The Siege confirmed Kadare’s rising reputation as a universal storyteller.
Kadare left Albania for France in 1990 and set about revising all his novels for republication in a bilingual Complete Works, of which sixteen volumes have appeared to date. The Siege was partly rewritten for this definitive publication. Many references to the Christian beliefs of the Albanians, cut by the censors in 1969, were restored, some politically motivated passages were deleted, and the dialogue and descriptions were tightened up in many places and in other parts expanded. This new English translation is of the Complete Works text. (An earlier translation by Pavli Qesku, published in Tirana in 1978, reflects the Albanian text of 1969.)
Ismail Kadare asked me to invent an English title that would collectively signify both the besiegers and the besieged. Alas, despite its huge vocabulary, the English language cannot oblige. Like The Castle and The Rain Drums, “The Siege” is not exactly what the author wants this book to be called: it is just the least unsatisfactory name that he and I could find.
Kadare’s story is more focused on the world of the besiegers than on the vestigially pagan mindset of the Catholic population of the city under siege. It is the first room in the sumptuous wing of Kadare’s own castle of stories devoted to the Ottoman past of his native land (The Three-Arched Bridge, The Blinding Order and The Palace of Dreams are not sequels to The Siege, but other rooms in the same wing). Kadare provokes wonderment at the coloured ceremonials of the Ottoman Army at the peak of its splendour, and also horror at its “oriental” inhumanity, especially towards its nameless foot-soldiers and the women of the harem and of the surrounding countryside. Using a central character whose role of chronicler provides a writerly perspective on events, Kadare assembles a cast of the Ottoman elite, from the Pasha to experts in logistics, artillery and medicine, who slowly come to resemble figures out of modern rather than medieval history. The intentional anachronisms in tone seek to achieve a two-sidedness characteristic of all Kadare’s fiction. The use of show trials, of banishment to “the tunnel,” the unquestioned authority of the Pasha and the shifting chain of command beneath him — all these details make the Ottoman world, ostensibly the very image of Albania’s Other, merge into an evocation of the People’s Republic that Kadare could not possibly tackle directly. In a magical way that perhaps only great writers can achieve, Kadare’s Turks are at one and the same time the epitome of what we are not, and a faithful representation of what we have become. The Siege is therefore not a simple transposition or blending of medieval and modern history, but a complex symbol of a divided and suffering nation besieged by itself. The miracle is that this exotic tale, translated twice over from an obscure Balkan tongue and dealing with a far-off and largely forgotten past, echoes on every page with the clashes and issues that burden us today. Kadare’s chronicle of ancient battle is not a historical novel, as he rightly claims. It is an anti-historical one.
David Bellos
Princeton, NJ
11 September 2007
Copyright © 2001 Librairie Arthème Fayard
English-language translation copyright © 2008 David Bellos
Anchor Canada edition 2009
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks
First published in Albanian in 1970 as Kështjella. Roman, by Shtëpia Botuese Naim Frashëri, Tirana.
This translation made from the definitive edition of the text published as Les Tambours de la pluie in Ismail Kadare, Oeuvres complètes, t. II. Paris: Fayard, 1994, translated from the Albanian by Jusuf Vrioni.
Amendments (2008) translated from the Albanian by Elidor Mehilli and David Bellos.
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kadare, Ismail
The siege / Ismail Kadare.
Translation of: Kështjella.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37377-9
1. Albania–History–Turkish Wars, 15th
century—Fiction. I. Title.
PG9621.K3K4713 2009 891′.9913 C2009-902815-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in Canada by Anchor Canada,
an imprint of Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited
Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca
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Ismail Kadare, The Siege
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