The Traitor's Niche

by Ismail Kadare

‘Leave now,’ Hurshid Pasha said in a voice like the slenderest of threads. Two or three more words and it would snap.

  The men went out in silence. Hurshid Pasha stood petrified in the middle of the tent, waiting for movement to come back to his body. Life returned first to his legs. Like the legs of a small child, they carried him unsteadily towards the table. For a while he stood numb beside the table, and then bent down over the silver dish and, holding it carefully in trembling hands, kissed the severed head. His shoulders heaved with sobbing. His hands, with cramped fingers frozen, stroked the woolly curls. Feverishly he watched the gems of his rings as they dived and surfaced among the white locks as if through winter clouds, and again his shoulders shook.

  ‘My pasha,’ he said. ‘My guiding star.’

  He bent down and kissed the head again, then stepped back to examine it more carefully. Here it is, he thought, on this dish, on this table, in my tent. It was really there, two paces from him. For months it had been as far from his grasp as a clap of thunder.

  For entire days and nights during those grim weeks as the war and the siege continued, he had thought of this head. Like all things to do with infinity, its image would not settle in his mind. It was always distant, sometimes brooding or threatening, but mostly inscrutable.

  He stroked the head again, but the glint of his rings next to the lifeless eyes was so frightening that he drew back his hands.

  ‘My saviour,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘My destiny.’

  Ever since he had been appointed commander-in-chief of the troops to suppress the rebellion, it had seemed to Hurshid Pasha that the head of Black Ali hovered above the horizon of his life like a star in the sky. It was his duty to quench its light or be snuffed out himself. The heavens could not contain them both. One of their suns had to sink.

  Throughout those weeks of war, the possibility of losing his own head had tortured him. On overcast mornings, every ache in his neck struck him as an ominous sign. Whenever he looked in the mirror, he could not help thinking of what would happen to his head, or to the other head, that of his double. This head too had teeth and a beard, and made speeches and issued orders like every head that commands an army. They had many things in common, but not their fate. One of them would inevitably fall. At moments of exhaustion and weakness, when it seemed that it would be difficult to defeat the legendary pasha of the Albanians, he had been haunted by listless fantasies. How good it would be if customs could change and become gentler, so that the world would accept both of them, the victor and the vanquished. But even in his sluggish dreams this seemed impossible. It was easier to imagine himself with two heads on his shoulders, his own and Ali’s – or worse, their heads at either end of his body, one below and one above. In fact it was easier to imagine any kind of monstrosity than to consider the prospect of them both living on the same earth.

  All these fantasies now belonged to the past. This head was in front of him, its light extinguished forever on that February afternoon. So why did he feel no joy at all? The exultation was all around him, and he had only to reach out to share in it, but something stopped him. What’s wrong with you, he said to himself. His star has set, yours is rising. What more do you want?

  Nothing, he thought after a moment, but then the reason why he couldn’t rejoice occurred to him. He was afraid. It was no longer the authentic fear for his own head that had been so familiar to him in the past few weeks. It was a more pervasive, mute terror that went down to the foundations of the earth. He had witnessed with his own eyes a mighty fall. He had seen majesty brought low. Yet his own joy squirmed like a squashed worm. His feelings were cold. The worm went still. Why did it have to happen like this?

  The chill penetrated his bones. It was the same iciness that he had felt the previous night, when, having withdrawn to his tent, he’d listened to the din of the drums. They were celebrating the arrival of what they took to be the royal hayir ferman, pardoning Ali Pasha. Half-crazed dervishes, with faces blue, danced and fell prostrate, foaming, while round them thousands of soldiers, elated at the end of the campaign, clapped their hands. Nobody knew that the ferman was false. The true decree, the katil ferman, which the messenger kept sewn into his jacket, would be revealed to Ali only at the last moment before his death.

  All this was over. Hurshid Pasha walked slowly to the entrance of his tent. Dusk was falling. The February wind whistled in a thousand languages across the plain darkened by winter and war. It is February in all the infinite lands of the empire, he groaned to himself. Why should he think there might be a fragment of March somewhere, or even a scrap of April? A little March for the empire’s chosen sons, he thought. But it was February for everyone.

  This was nearly the last of the imperial territories. Two months before, travelling towards this country to take command of the troops after the defeat of Bugrahan, he had noticed that the further he went from the centre and approached the frontier, the minarets were lower, as if they were plants stunted by the increasingly harsh climate. He had been saddened to see those pitiful stumps in the wintry expanse. A little further, and they no doubt disappeared entirely. There the European plains began, under the sign of the cross. He had never once passed beyond the state borders and had no desire to do so. Some people said that the soil there was saline, and nothing grew but deadly nightshade. Others described it as paradise.

  I’m not in my right mind. Why am I doing this, he thought and shook himself. Why am I doing nothing? He raised his head with a jerk, as if to shake off the sleep creeping over him, and clapped his hands. His adjutants, who stood waiting at a small distance and whom he had not noticed until then, rushed towards him. He motioned his arm as he did before issuing an important order, and began to speak in a voice that to him seemed to come from his temples.

  A few moments later, clamorous voices filled Hurshid Pasha’s tent. Pashas, battalion commanders, clerics, adjutants and liaison officers of all kinds ceaselessly came and went, carrying orders, commendations or reprimands, which they hastened to communicate in exaggerated form to every corner of the vast military camp. Soon the entire besieging army had been informed of the end of the war. News-criers on horseback stopped in front of tents and shouted, ‘Great news, great news! Ali Pasha has been beheaded. The war is over!’

  The whole field buzzed. The wind, which had not died down all day, diminished the human voices, the clatter of horses’ hooves, and the clanging of the pots cooking halva for the army, to a dull hum.

  At the entrance to Hurshid Pasha’s tent, dressed in an official gown with a shaggy cloak thrown over it, appeared the field courier, Tundj Hata. Their eyes met calmly for a moment. The pasha’s gaze seemed to say, so you’ve come? The courier stood there, his face yellow and his beard freshly hennaed, as it usually was before important missions. The henna emphasised even more shockingly the sallowness of his skin.

  ‘So you’re ready?’ the pasha asked.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Tundj Hata replied.

  Behind his back stood two assistants with bare arms. They held in their hands various strange panniers and pails which no doubt contained the honey and the chunks of ice and salt necessary for the transport and preservation of the head on its long journey.

  ‘Wait outside for my order,’ said Hurshid Pasha.

  The courier bowed. As he went out, their eyes met again. The light of triumph shone in the pasha’s eyes. For the past week, Tundj Hata had been wandering about the camp. The very sight of this man, with his awkward limp and muddy face that ended in a short greying beard, had set Hurshid Pasha’s stomach churning. But everyone knew that Tundj Hata wouldn’t look like this for long; as soon as the order for a head came from the capital, he would collect himself and dye his beard with henna. With the severed head in his pannier, he would leap onto a horse and race through winter and darkness over rough roads or off the highway entirely in order to reach the city as soon as possible. The thought that it could be his own cold head had made Hurshid Pasha shiver, as if he could already
feel the handfuls of snow the courier’s assistants would carefully pack round it. He had never before been so on edge. He’d lost his temper over everything and nothing. When one of his adjutants had brought him his lunch a few days before, he had thrown the honey-flavoured dish in the man’s face, screaming, ‘You dog, who told you I wanted honey? The sight of it makes me sick.’ And indeed recently he could not bear the sight of honey or salt or ice, and least of all the sight of Tundj Hata, whom he would surely have got rid of, if the courier had not been one of those officials who, despite having no particular rank in the state hierarchy, are inviolable and eternal, like the pillars of government buildings.

  The pasha sometimes thought that the courier sensed his aversion. He noticed in Tundj Hata’s eyes a glint of contained derision, like the play of light at the bottom of a well, as if his eyes were saying, one day I might have your head under my arm, but you’ll never have mine. The thought of this truth had nagged at the pasha’s mind. More and more often, he remembered a neighbour’s cat which, many years ago when he was a boy, had stolen a fish head from the family kitchen as the women shouted and bustled. It seemed to Hurshid Pasha that, in just the same way, Tundj Hata was merely waiting for the moment when, amidst the tumult of war, he would seize a head, his own or Ali Pasha’s, and gallop with it towards the capital city.

  But now all these worries were over. The blade of destiny had harvested its crop, and it was there on the table, this white cabbage from the gardens of hell. The joy that had so far only trickled through in drops now flooded Hurshid Pasha’s entire being. His lethargy vanished. I defeated this old man, he said to himself. I am the one left on this earth.

  Voices around him, some faint and others raucous, discussed the best time to set off with the head. Some people said that Tundj Hata should waste no time and leave at once, because the journey was very long. Others shook their beards doubtfully. It would be better to send the head late at night when the world was asleep, to avoid anything unexpected. Two years ago, the couriers transporting the head of the pasha of the sea, Admiral Kara Kiliç, had been attacked. Now in front of them was the head of the empire’s most famous vizier and there was every reason for the sultan’s enemies to seize it. In fact, Hurshid Pasha’s secret wish was that Tundj Hata would lose the head on the road. This was the only chance of the courier losing his own head in turn. But Hurshid Pasha knew that such a thing would never happen. He remembered well the kitchen women striking the thieving cat with their pokers and ladles, but the cat had refused to surrender its trophy. Even if Tundj Hata’s hands were cut off, he would carry that head to the Traitor’s Niche.

  Hurshid Pasha listened to their arguments for a while. He knew that if the head were lost, a government commission would find out why, to the last detail.

  ‘The head will leave at night,’ he said calmly. ‘When the world is asleep.’

  Elation now poured over him in torrents. The storm passed, and infinite rainbows of glory arched above his head. I have been left alive, he almost cried out loud with a flippant laugh.

  He heard the sounds of life around him. Tundj Hata had been summoned to the tent again to be informed of the hour of departure, and his assistants were taking charge of the head. As the pasha’s scribe drafted the accompanying report to be handed in to the relevant office, they discussed Tundj Hata’s route. Someone pointed out on a map the places where fresh snow could always be found. Somebody suggested ‘honey from Morea’. Someone else noted that in this wintry weather there would be no need to change the ice at all. Then someone asked, ‘What about the body?’

  Everybody turned round in surprise. After an initial bewilderment, the question gradually took shape in their minds. Indeed, what would they do with the body? Hmm, Hurshid Pasha said to himself. Until then, Ali Pasha had been nothing but a head to him. He had totally forgotten the menial body that had carried this head for eighty years.

  ‘The body,’ Hurshid Pasha said, touching his beard with two fingers. There was something childish in his gesture. ‘Hmm, the body,’ he repeated, and smiled, as if to say, amazing, how nature works. But soon he pulled himself together. ‘Of course we must deal with the body too,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

  They put forward different opinions, but all agreed on the main point that the body must be buried. Unlike their carefully chosen expressions about the head, their language about the body was coarse and plain. They spoke of it with contempt, as if talking about an annoying servant. They soon decided that the body would be buried early in the morning in a simple ceremony on the outskirts of the city, with the honours due to a vizier after his death, albeit a traitorous one.

  ‘And now leave me in peace,’ Hurshid Pasha said. ‘I want to rest.’

  In vain the war correspondents begged him to answer their questions for the newspapers of the capital city.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. His eyes drooped, as if the laughter that had enlivened them in the last half hour had exhausted them more than all those sleepless nights.

  The journalists left, but the pasha, instead of lying down, paced his tent. What a day, he repeated to himself. It was Tuesday. The February wind whistled outside. He saw the pile of newspapers in the corner, his name in black among the headlines, and for a moment he imagined Tuesday as a creature with a trailing black beard ruffled by the wind. Allah, how can you have created days like this? he said to himself.

  Two months ago, he had departed from the capital on a day with just such a whistling wind, but before leaving he had entered the cold and lofty halls of the Central Archive to read the file on Ali Pasha. For hours he had studied the correspondence between the sultan and the vizier of Albania. The dates showed the letters becoming less and less frequent. It seemed fitting to read the final ones under the desolate blast of the wind shaking the glass in the high windows of the Archive. ‘This is my last message to you,’ the sultan wrote. ‘If you do not obey me this time, know that you will be consigned to the flames. I will turn you to ash, ash, ash.’ This was the actual last letter. No reply came from Ali. The couriers had covered the distance between the two continents at incredible speed, their pouches empty. Winter was approaching. The correspondence ceased. After the letters, there would come only ravens and the clouds of war.

  I won the war, Hurshid Pasha almost said aloud. I survived. He heard the gale howl again and it seemed to him that he had stumbled and fallen, ensnared by the wind.

  The army had gone to bed. The infantry battalions, soldiers and wounded officers, the Anatolian corps, the assault troops, the elderly pashas who suffered from asthma and expected their pensions after this last campaign, and the young pashas, for whom the campaign was the first step in their careers, all lay in rows. Stretched out next to each other were the ensigns, the sheikhs of the death squads, dervishes, spies of the Fourth Directorate, tetanus patients, assistant pronouncers of curses … More than half of them were asleep. Their heads rested on the hard pillows, like dying fires in which life sporadically glowed. None of them felt any joy. On the contrary, they were afraid. They had taken part in a huge act of destruction. Their hands had touched the foundations of the state. Deep inside, they sensed that they had tampered with things they should have left alone, and for this they or their offspring could be punished. Their stomachs were heavy with ill-digested halva distributed to mark the victory. Some of them emerged like somnambulists from the tent doors and threw it up, their faces as pale as wax from stomach cramps. The wind still howled from the furthest distances. Beyond this gale there was more wind, and more beyond that.

  Even those who slept were not at peace. Some talked in their sleep. Others writhed and thrashed, groaned and fought for breath as they grappled with the void of the night. The wheels of a carriage were heard far away, and someone whispered, ‘Ali Pasha’s head has left.’ In one of the infantrymen’s tents, a soldier moaned in his sleep: ‘Put the head back on, for God’s sake, put the head back on, and stop all this.’ One of his neighbours whispered to a comrade alongsi
de, ‘I’ve heard that in a remote village of Trebizond there’s an old barber-surgeon who can fix a severed head. I wrote his name on a bit of paper and stuck it in my army card.’ His friend listened in silence, and then in horror said, ‘No, no! That would be too much, if they came back with their heads stuck on, crooked, any old how, in some botched job, and …’ ‘What?’ asked his friend. But the other soldier had fallen back to sleep. ‘With heads stuck on crooked,’ his comrade repeated. Crooked? Why crooked, for God’s sake?

  The distant sound of wheels reached Hurshid Pasha’s ears. He’s gone, he thought. Wrapping his shoulders in a woollen blanket, he closed his eyes for the tenth time, but still he couldn’t sleep. He felt a constant pressure in his temples. The hissing wind, racing low over the surface of the land, seemed to penetrate his skull. The head has set off for Asia, he thought, but the body remains in Europe. His imagination conjured up some sticky, ectoplasmic creature, pulled by both continents, endlessly lengthening and becoming thinner and more transparent, as if at any moment it might turn into some ethereal substance, something between a cloud and the tail of a comet.

  The carriage is heading for Asia, he thought wearily. He is stretching, changing his shape continually, wrapping himself around me. Lying down, Hurshid Pasha felt weak. He propped himself up on his elbow. The thought swept through him, sometimes clearly, sometimes obscurely, that his glory would rise above the other man’s ruin. Ali Pasha had been above him for so long, like rolling thunder. Now, under the earth, he would be like some mute crevasse opened by an earthquake. Enough, he said to himself. He has gone. I am still here. It was simple. And indeed for a few moments his mind was clear. But then an old, forgotten phrase came to him from somewhere: ‘spurned by the grave’. So such horrors had been known before.

  This thought calmed him a little, and his mind drifted, but then it occurred to him that Ali Pasha would have two graves. Two graves, he repeated to himself. With his entire being, he suddenly yearned for a single grave for himself. He longed for rest, and almost groaned audibly. Wrapping himself again in his woollen blanket, he drowsed for a few moments. He was lying down, at the centre of the earth, whole and entire … while nearby him were muffled voices. There were plains, with gentle hills, like dough, and apparently a quarrel among them … ‘grr grr … give me the head … you take the body … grr grr …’ It was Europe and Asia, quarrelling over him …