The Traitor's Niche

by Ismail Kadare

  After the first attack, the intoxication came back to him twice more, before and after midnight. Totally crushed, he detached himself at last from the severed head with a painful groan. ‘We’re getting close,’ he whispered to it. ‘Can you tell we’re getting close?’

  During lucid moments when he was capable of thought, he recalled the square in the capital city where the ‘stone of deterrence’ stood. The niche was currently vacant and he almost cried aloud: The square’s empty, waiting for us. We must hurry.

  A thousand times he asked himself, what is the point of that square without a head? What wakes up the square in the mornings, and how does it pass the afternoons? And he urged the Tatars to drive faster, as if they were hurrying to reach a person who would give up the ghost if they were even slightly late.

  The darkness was thinning, and here and there the sleeping land was visible behind a scant veil of mist. It sprawled out, with its provocative undulations bursting with desire, and who knows how this shameless whore would sport herself in freedom, if the imperial capital were not on the far horizon, like some lion crouching on its front paws, snarling and spreading fear throughout the world.

  What would the world be like without this city? The thought was so monstrous and terrifying that he instantly wondered if such a thing were possible. God forbid, he almost cried aloud, and shook his head.

  The capital was drawing closer. There was no sign to indicate it, no arrow pointing towards it, no chimney smoke, but its chill presence could be felt. Everything around it was shrouded in a solemn silence. The city is still asleep, Tundj Hata thought. His teeth chattered.

  There! He did not know what it was he saw: the tip of some tower, the point of a minaret, or perhaps a bird gliding in that motionless flight peculiar to birds hovering above domes. He straightened his back in fear. His limbs, loose and yielding after his night-time ecstasy, snapped back into their usual positions. He felt weight returning to his body, his veins knitting his reluctant members together, as if binding them in fetters, shrinking and compressing them into human shape.

  Finally the towers of the capital appeared on the cold horizon. Distant, frigid in eternal drabness, they loomed one after another, according to their hierarchy of height: the leaden dome of the Temple of the Ottoman Spirit, the pinnacles of the minarets of Hagia Sophia, the Obelisk of Tokmakhan, the Central State Archive, the Sublime Porte, the pillars of the Imperial Bank, the pale blue domes of the Palace of Dreams, the centuries-old Palace of Psst-Psst and the Palace of Seals and Decrees. There was the flag above the War Ministry. They all seemed to be waiting for him.

  Tundj Hata could not tear his eyes from the vision into which the carriage was now sucking him, as if into a dream.

  The sentries of the Seventh Gate saw the carriage from a distance. One of them raised a spyglass to his eye.

  ‘The imperial courier,’ he said, keeping the spyglass clamped to his right eye.

  The other two guards also watched the black rectangle gradually grow in size, imagining the state emblem on its doors and box, which their colleague could now clearly discern through the lens.

  It was still early. The barren plain surrounding the capital was blotched with mist. The guard watched the moving coach. In the semi-darkness, it might have struck an observer that he was not holding a spyglass but trying in vain to remove an iron bar that had been driven into his eye. With awkward steps the other two descended the stone stairway to open the gate. A squeal of iron was heard, and then the carriage wheels, very close. The guard removed the spyglass from his eye and leaned over the stone parapet to see the new arrival, who descended from the carriage and showed the other sentries his travel papers. The guard rested his chin on his fist and studied the movements of the small group. When the new arrival suddenly raised his head, the guard shivered. He had never seen a more repulsive face. Below a scarred brow, the eyes seemed stuck on from outside. A red triangular beard contrasted with the yellow wax of his skin. The guard reluctantly turned his eyes away to the inscrutable wasteland whose February mist had spawned this creature.

  After the carriage wheels had rattled through the gate, the other sentries rejoined him above.

  ‘The head of Ali Pasha of Albania,’ said one. The guard with the spyglass jerked round.

  ‘Impossible,’ he said.

  ‘We saw it with our own eyes, it was in the leather pannier, with the ears poking out of the ice.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ the first guard insisted.

  ‘You never believe anything.’

  The guard with the spyglass kept his eyes fixed on the road. Really, there was nothing not to believe. The sentries of the Seventh Gate were always the first to learn of the arrival of a governor’s head from the empire’s European territories. Heads from Asian provinces entered the capital by the First Gate.

  Of course, he said to himself, instantly forgetting why it should be so obvious. Of course, he remembered again. This man’s head was bound to arrive at this gate one morning. As everybody knew, diplomatic bags, important delegations and the heads of executed men entered the capital through only the Seventh and First Gates. This had been established by a special decree and there could be no confusion. No confusion, he repeated to himself. There was no way messengers with state correspondence or heads could pass through the Second or Fourth Gates, which were used for meat and vegetables and other supplies for the capital, and by foreign tourists. There were regulations and even precise schedules for all these things, in order to avoid congestion. The Seventh and First Gates were both opened very seldom. Indeed, they were not opened at all for days on end, and during heavy frost, as in the previous month, their hinges and bolts froze and hot water had to be thrown at them before they would move. Of course, he said to himself for the third time. It wasn’t the same as bringing cabbages. Yet in a way, he thought as he looked out at the infinite wilderness, barely visible in the February light, these heads resembled large vegetables.

  The sound of the carriage had faded some time ago. Now the head must be nearing the centre, he thought, and turned round to face the city. Its tall towers and the bronze and leaden needles of the minarets shone with an inner light. The head has arrived, the guard said to himself. The capital city had been waiting for that little bundle packed in snow and salt for a long time. The other gates stuffed the city with meat, cheese and vegetables, but still couldn’t satisfy its hunger. More than anything, it needed to have that head.

  4

  The Centre of the Empire. Cloudy Day

  ALI TEPELENA’S HEAD had been placed in the Traitor’s Niche two hours ago. Abdulla, looking pale in a new dark suit cut for his wedding day, stood in his usual place with his hands behind him, looking at the crowds milling about the square. Bugrahan Pasha’s head had been removed five days before, and the niche had remained empty. Without a head on display, the square seemed perplexed, confused, distracted. The crowds wandered blindly, and scattered in all directions. The square lost its focus. Now that it had a head again, everything fell back into place. The square recovered its usual bustle. The streams of people flowed with a regularity that reminded Abdulla of the tides of the sea drawn by the moon. The head placed on the side of the square exerted a pull like some heavenly entity.

  Even when the square had been without a head, Abdulla’s rules of service had required him to remain in his place. This was for two reasons. First and foremost, although the niche might be empty, people should not have the impression that punishments had stopped, and Abdulla’s presence in his usual position suggested that a severed head might appear in the niche at any moment. The second reason was simple: Abdulla had to keep an eye on the niche to prevent anyone defiling it, whether as a provocation against the state or simply in an act of madness. Two years ago, some unidentified delinquents had left a frozen skylark on its ledge.

  During those days when the niche had been empty, one could discern a question in the eyes of the people passing by. Whose head would be next – Ali Pasha’s or Hursh
id Pasha’s? A similar question had been asked before: Ali Pasha’s or Bugrahan Pasha’s? Most people expected Hurshid to follow the fate of Bugrahan, and no doubt bets had been made in secret. However, the reverse turned out to be true, and Ali the victorious was now vanquished.

  His head had arrived in the capital city in total secrecy more than twenty-four hours ago, before dawn, but the news had spread in whispers an hour before the official proclamation. Crowds hurried to the square in the hope of seeing the head of the most powerful man in the empire, after the sultan, but all day the niche had remained empty. Questions came thick and fast – what was going on? why weren’t they bringing it? when would they? what? – and it seemed to Abdulla that such speculation had filled the square since the beginning of time. He knew that there was every reason for the delay in bringing the head. At ten o’clock, after receiving the customary cosmetic attention, it had been presented to the sultan-emperor. Nobody yet knew for certain how long the silver dish had remained in front of the sultan, what the ruler had said and whether he had expressed any general opinion on the subject of separatism. All that was known was that at eleven o’clock the head was presented to the most senior state and religious dignitaries in the building of the Council of State. At half past twelve, foreign ambassadors were summoned to view the head, and at one o’clock the grand vizier announced at a short press conference that in spite of the uprising of the province of the Albanians, the empire’s unity was now stronger than ever. However, he announced, the government would continue to punish with the greatest severity any separatist tendencies displayed by anybody in whatever corner of the realm.

  Clearly, the grand vizier’s speech threatened every region of the mighty state, especially those provinces that enjoyed a degree of autonomy, as Albania had done until recently. In severe tones, the grand vizier stressed that the Sublime Porte would henceforth not permit any misinterpretation of this autonomy, and still less its abuse. Foreign observers were particularly struck by the part of the speech in which the vizier, in the name of the government and the sultan-emperor, laid down a new definition of the autonomy of the provinces. For years, the official press had glorified the benefits of this autonomy as the clearest expression of the flourishing state of the peoples of the imperial family. On this point, the vizier said that even though the great Ottoman state consisted of nationalities with different names, in fact these peoples, before they were Turks, Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Bosnians, Tatars, Caucasians and so on, were members of a common Islamic nation. History provided many examples of the fate of anyone with a different conception of this subject, the grand vizier said, and this, he concluded, pointing to the silver dish with the head of Ali Pasha Tepelena, was merely one more.

  All afternoon, the square swarmed with crowds who hoped that the head, after its inspection by the members of the government, would finally be installed in the niche. They were still waiting in the evening. Apparently, the head required a prolonged medical examination.

  Journalists, who had not been permitted access to the presentations of the head at either the Council of State or the Foreign Ministry, spent the entire night in the square, hoping to be present at the moment of its arrival. Abdulla knew most of them by name. Others returned to the square in the morning with swollen, sleepless eyes, to gather additional material for detailed features in their centrefolds. Foreign embassy employees darted through the crowd, evidently collecting data of a political nature, which was very easy to do on a day like this. Abdulla overheard snatches of careless conversation dropped by people without the slightest sense of responsibility. One said that no Albanian officials would be dismissed from their posts. ‘I don’t believe it,’ someone replied. ‘After all that has happened, they’re in serious trouble.’ ‘Still, there won’t be any dismissals,’ another man insisted. ‘Perhaps not,’ replied the first. ‘The state takes a longer view.’ Blah-blah, thought Abdulla. Couldn’t they hold this kind of conversation somewhere else? His eyes discerned among the crowd the deputy director of one of the capital city’s leading banks. Abdulla recalled that the price of bronze had fallen yesterday, after news of the end of the war and the head’s arrival in the city. At noon, they said, copper stocks would fall again. In recent years, Abdulla had noticed that it was easier to follow the fortunes of war in the fluctuating price of bronze than in the newspaper reports.

  ‘What will happen to Albania now?’ said someone under the very nose of the Keeper of Heads. Indeed, wondered Abdulla, what would happen to Albania? The question had been on everybody’s lips recently, but was even more urgent for him, because it involved the fate of his elder brother, whose first letter had arrived at last. The letter was long, and described in detail the country in which he had been posted. There was a great plain in the northern part of Albania called the Plain of Kosovo, where, many centuries ago, the Ottoman army had conquered the insane peninsula of the Balkans in ten hours. According to his brother, on that June day the field was drenched with so much blood that its vegetation was changed for many years, either growing rampant or withering and dying. It was here, alas, that Sultan Murad I had been killed after the battle. Now, Abdulla’s brother wrote, he himself was guarding the shrine that contained the sultan’s tomb. In fact the emperor’s body was not buried there, only his intestines. His body, without the innards, had been loaded on a camel armoured with bronze plate and dispatched to the capital, deep in the heart of the kingdom. It is said that during a storm on the journey, lightning struck the camel carrying the dead sultan several times, but did no harm to either the camel or the body, because the bronze plates conducted the lightning into the earth in fiery forks like scarlet tassels.

  So the martyred sultan also had two graves. Abdulla turned his head towards the niche. Just like you, he thought. They all had multiple graves and … multiple wives. But he himself, a week ago … his first wife … no doubt his last … and what was worse, not even with her … not even with her …

  ‘What will they do to Albania now?’ the same voice asked next to him. Poor people, Abdulla said to himself. Rather, what will they do to us? He stood for a moment as if numbed. It was one of those rare moments when he felt detached from himself, so that one part of him could judge the other. Since when do you think like this, he wondered. Since when have you changed sides? But his awareness of a divided self was fleeting, like his moment of rebellion. He soon became himself again, as listless and biddable as ever.

  A few paces from the Traitor’s Niche, Sefer the palace artist was hurriedly painting a picture of the severed head. The Islamic faith strictly forbade portraits of people, but Abdulla knew that the Court Protocol Section, after numerous applications to the Sheikh-ul-Islam, had finally obtained a licence to depict severed heads. It had reasoned that these heads, as soon as they were placed in the niche of shame, were mere objects, and drawing them was no different to assembling a mosaic.

  As always, people clustered round the painter. They stretched their necks in curiosity to look at the canvas and the colours, they whispered to one another and sometimes accidentally knocked the legs of the easel, but this did not bother the artist, who worked quickly, as if at any moment the cold might freeze his paints.

  Eleven o’clock had still not struck, but Abdulla instinctively glanced towards Crescent Street, from where the doctor would arrive. It was the new head’s first day and, according to the regulations, the doctor was obliged to inspect it and record its condition in a short report, in order to provide evidence should any complications arise later. It was also the doctor’s duty to give his opinion on how long the head could remain in the niche.

  He appeared at the crossroads at the precise moment when the clock on the tower of the Temple of the Ottoman Spirit struck eleven. He appeared as vivacious as ever, with a rolling gait and the usual smile, which was so constant that Abdulla was coming to believe that it was less an expression than a facial feature.

  ‘Meetings,’ said the doctor while still some distance away. ‘Meetings all mo
rning. Some people will not be persuaded that medicine makes progress like any other science. Good morning, Abdulla.’

  ‘Good morning, doctor,’ Abdulla said, bowing his head slightly.

  ‘They start by opening old chronicles: this is how the glorious Timurtash was embalmed in the year such and such, this is how the blood was drained from the body of the Sheikh-ul-Islam in some other year, and so on. And the worst of it is, when you try to tell them about up-to-date methods, they turn on you with all kinds of political twaddle: doesn’t Ali Pasha’s head deserve a different kind of treatment to the head of the traitor Demirdag, a century ago? What answer is there to stupidity like that?’ the doctor snorted. ‘Ah, here is our new friend,’ he burst out cheerfully, turning to the niche.

  As Abdulla brought over the wooden ladder, their glances met.

  ‘And what about you?’ the doctor said, as if remembering something. ‘How’s it going?’

  Abdulla blushed and lowered his eyes.

  ‘The same,’ he said.

  A few weeks before, overcoming his terrible shyness, Abdulla had told the doctor the secret of the first nights of his marriage. It was a melancholy story. He was not having success with his young bride. The doctor had listened without the slightest surprise and this had encouraged Abdulla. ‘These things happen,’ the doctor had said. ‘You’re neither the first nor the last.’ Then he’d asked Abdulla some questions.

  Abdulla had found it difficult to answer them, especially the ones about his wife’s body. The doctor had given him some advice and assured him that it was only temporary, caused mainly by the absence of women from everyday life.

  ‘Hmm,’ the doctor said, setting his foot on the ladder. For a moment he screwed up his eyes, and then, looking straight at Abdulla, said, ‘Listen, you must try something else. You know what?’