The Siege

by Ismail Kadare

  “What do you mean, ‘Why so?’” a middle-aged azab answered. “That’s what always happens when there’s only a handful of girls. They last until the evening. At best, until midnight.”

  “Do you reckon everyone will get a turn?” Tuz asked.

  “Of course we will. As usual.”

  Tuz Okçan noticed the eunuch standing not far off. He was on his way back from the river but had stopped to take a look at the akinxhis, or so it seemed. He had put his pitchers, now full, down on the ground, and with fearful eyes watched the captive women being led to market. The janissary was struck by the pleasant smell of perfume coming from the eunuch’s body.

  The chronicler also turned his head to look at the source of such an agreeable odour, then felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Effendi,” someone said softly to him.

  He looked round. It was one of the Quartermaster General’s orderlies. He whispered something in Çelebi’s ear, then the chronicler turned back towards Tuz Okçan.

  “Please excuse me,” he said. “A highly placed friend of mine wants me to go to his tent. I’ll be back.”

  Çelebi felt new energy in his stride as he walked towards the tent where, in a few minutes’ time, he would, almost unbelievably, be sitting on a soft divan beside his eminent friend, drinking pomegranate syrup, and discussing elevated, agreeable topics far away from the fear and frost of mountain nights. In fact, he hadn’t talked to anybody for several days. His tongue had gone dry. But now Allah was compensating him for all that suffering. Suddenly the world around him, from the cropped grass beneath his feet on the side of the road to the rumble of a chariot rolling somewhere behind him, seemed more magnificent than ever.

  “Heavens! You’ve lost weight!” the Quartermaster General exclaimed when he saw Çelebi come into the tent.

  The chronicler recognised compassion in his friend’s eyes and felt comforted by that.

  “Sit down. You look shattered. Maybe you would like a bath?”

  Çelebi could feel himself blushing. He must surely smell of sweat, and the surge of warmth prompted by his interlocutor’s kind words must have made the smell even worse.

  “How can I say … Excuse me … for turning up in this state …” he mumbled.

  But his host interrupted him. “No, excuse me for having had you brought here before you even had time to take a rest. I wanted to see you as soon as I could to find out how the expedition went. And then, I was worried about you, too.”

  The chronicler felt almost happy.

  “The friendship you grant me is like a jewel in my life.”

  The Quartermaster gave one of those special smiles that lit up his face every time anyone mentioned money or precious stones.

  “Go and have a bath,” he told Çelebi. “It’ll cleanse your spirit even more than your body.”

  The chronicler stood up and with lowered head went towards the sergeant who was holding out a bathrobe for him. The hammam had been fitted into a tiny area, but it was fully equipped. The chronicler was over the moon.

  After taking a bath, he was confronted with a jug of pomegranate syrup and a silver platter of halva placed before him by the sergeant. It was like a dream come true!

  “So, how did it go up in the mountains?” the Quartermaster finally asked.

  Before answering, the chronicler raised his weary eyes and looked straight at his friend.

  “You can tell me the whole truth,” the Quartermaster reassured him. “Chronicles are for future generations or for the good ladies of Edirne.”

  There was a pause. Then without taking his eyes off Çelebi he asked again:

  “How was it?”

  “Awful,” the chronicler replied with a sad shake of his head. The Quartermaster then asked questions about the mountains, and Çelebi replied by repeating almost word for word the passages he had already drafted for his chronicle.

  The senior officer seemed distracted, but then suddenly resumed his interrogation.

  “Did you see any Albanians?”

  “Of course we did.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  Çelebi half closed his eyes before answering.

  “Physically, they are slightly taller and slimmer than we are. They have light hair, as if it had been faded by sunlight. And unlike our children, theirs are almost all blond.”

  “What else? I already know what they look like.”

  “How can I say?” the chronicler muttered. “They’re highly-strung, very fierce. You would never think such wishy-washy hair topped such hard heads.”

  “Are they brave?”

  “I am planning to put in my chronicle that they are so resistant to any kind of domination that they rage like tigers at the clouds passing over their heads and spring up to claw at them …”

  “Listen to me, Mevla Çelebi. If I told you I wanted the truth from you, not fancy phrases, it was for a specific reason …”

  A lump came into the chronicler’s throat.

  “You mustn’t hold it against me,” he said in a squealing tone. “I am just a humble chronicler. I don’t have … I don’t know … In a nutshell, there are so many things I don’t properly understand.”

  “Come on, help yourself!” the Quartermaster said, pointing to the halva.

  Çelebi started giving a detailed account of the raid. He described in particular the mountain chill, the pillage, the slaughter on both sides, the stake. When the chronicler reached the end of his story, the Quartermaster offered him more halva. Çelebi was hungry but he would never have allowed himself to eat anything without being expressly invited by his host, especially as the Quartermaster ate almost nothing and just stared with his light, cold eyes at the reddish gleam of his pomegranate juice.

  Çelebi realised he had perhaps gone on too long about the violent and bitter side of the story. Thinking his friend would perhaps prefer to hear more refined and philosophical reflections, he mentioned the language of the Albanians, which he had frequently heard spoken during the raid.

  “Theirs is a strange dialect,” he explained. “It’s as if Allah had cast on it a cloak of fog to make it impossible to separate one word from the other, whereas in our language the divisions are so clear.”

  He was holding forth about the sounds of Albanian when he noticed that his friend had stopped listening.

  “With a people of that kind we are not going to have an easy time,” the Quartermaster concluded. “With them, or with any of the other Balkan tribes.”

  “We shall smite them and destroy them without remission until they are wiped from the face of the earth,” the chronicler replied.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” the Quartermaster riposted. “But the question remains, how do we smite them, and where do we smite them, and, above all, to what purpose? You talked of annihilating them. But let me ask three questions. One: is it possible to wipe out an entire people? Two: if the first answer is yes, then by what means? Three — and remember this, Çelebi, third questions are usually the trickiest — I ask you: is it desirable to do so? Or to be more precise: do we still need to do it?”

  Çelebi now had a sharp pain in the back of his neck from concentrating so hard on following what the Quartermaster had said. In all current ways of talking as well as in all of the ancient chronicles, exterminating the enemy was considered the crowning glory of victory. Whereas he was now being told the opposite! If the Quartermaster had not been such an important personage, Çelebi would have walked away without looking back. Now he had got aches in all his joints again and his arms felt as if they had been crushed by bludgeons.

  “I can see I’ve startled you,” the Quartermaster said without hiding his satisfaction. “But let’s take a proper look at the points I’ve raised. So, the first is the issue of extermination, to which you seem so attached.”

  Good Lord! What a hornet’s nest I’ve stirred up! Çelebi thought. As if all the paths and boulders that had torn him to pieces weren’t enough, now he had to face a conversation fraught with sna
gs and brambles.

  “I didn’t say I was attached to it …” he objected, timidly. “But …”

  “Let me finish saying what I have to say,” the Quartermaster butted in. “Let’s consider the proposal to exterminate an entire people. Is it achievable?” He shook his head back and forth. “It’s difficult, my good friend, very difficult to do … And you certainly can’t ever do it by war. It’s quite ridiculous to think that you could … Don’t put on that bewildered face, Çelebi. I’ll explain it all to you. Go on, have some more halva.”

  The Quartermaster General took just a few sips of pomegranate syrup. As for the chronicler, he’d lost his appetite.

  “Now listen to me! Every people in the world goes on increasing at a greater or lesser rate. The annual increase is usually around twenty or thirty people per thousand.”

  It was the first time Çelebi had heard figures of that sort. The books he read didn’t generally contain that kind of information.

  “A rough calculation on that basis means that in five hundred years’ time there will be around ten million Albanians.”

  The chronicler furrowed his brow as if he had a bad toothache.

  “And that’s a figure that could easily stop us from sleeping, my dear friend,” the Quartermaster continued. “Do you now grasp what it means to halt the natural increase of the population of a given land? Numbskulls like Old Tavxha or Kurdisxhi, or even the Mufti who pretends to be cultivated, think that a war and a massacre suffice to eradicate a nation. But it’s not possible! Let’s suppose we have a great battle and leave twenty thousand dead on the field. That would count as a brilliant victory for our army, wouldn’t it? Well, it’s really depressing, isn’t it, to have to say that a battle so carefully and strenuously prepared would chop off just one year’s population growth, and no more!”

  Çelebi felt like putting his head in his hands.

  “In other words, their womenfolk can give birth to more men than our army can slaughter, even with Engineer Saruxha’s famous cannon!”

  Despite his revulsion the chronicler recalled the litany of vulgar expressions referring to a woman’s sexual organ that he’d heard during the raid into the mountains. The soldiers often drew images of it in chalk or charcoal, never forgetting to show alongside it a man’s sabre, as they called it, and it did indeed remind you of a yatagan or sometimes of the barrel of a gun.

  “So we should not get drawn into such unrealistic dreams, and be satisfied with restraining population growth. With punitive raids and massacres, by laying waste whole cities and expelling or deporting their inhabitants, by kidnapping their children to make janissaries of them, we will also reduce a people’s desire to multiply, to some extent. Yet that is not enough. Nations are like grass, they grow everywhere. So we have to invent other, more stealthy means. I’m only in charge of the accounts. The great Padishah has other men working for him on problems of this kind. They’re all specialists in denationalisation, like Saruxha is an expert in the destruction of castles …”

  For a second he lost the thread of his argument. Çelebi found it a burdensome moment, for he feared that a halt in the conversation, a sneeze, a spilled glass, or just a longer pause than normal would be laid at his door.

  “Yes … Craftsmen in the rotting and corroding of nations, if I may say. But, my friend, you should know that peoples don’t only dilate, they also contract. When they receive a great blow from the outside, from us, in this particular instance, they don’t necessarily go into decline, they can also emerge from it with added strength. On the other hand, damage from the inside, damage secreted from inside their own ranks, well, yes, that is the evil that can bring them to their knees … Do you grasp what I’m saying, Çelebi? On your raid into the hills, you had occasion to see large excavations ringed with stone steps and columns. Those are the famous theatres of long ago. And do you know why thousands of people sat for hours on those stone steps? To watch and hear four or five individuals, who were called actors, recite the reasons why men kill each other and how they had to kill each other … And how the man who performed such abominations the best even had a crown placed on his head, as a sign of general esteem … Now those are customs that can teach us an important lesson. They explain why those peoples never grew much in number but kept a more or less stable population, like those species of dogs which are always small — the hanums of the giaours in Edirne usually have them as pets. But do have something more to eat!”

  It was the first time the Quartermaster General had spoken to him at such length and on such a sensitive subject. Thank God that he wasn’t asking him to respond. Çelebi even got the impression that his host had forgotten about him entirely.

  “But even that is not sufficient,” he thundered, as if riposting in a debate. “We slave away down here spreading death and desolation, but the real fight is going on up there.” He raised his hand. “You cannot call a country conquered until you have conquered its Heaven. What I’m saying might seem hermetic to you, like some nebulous declaration of a poet … But it’s nothing of the kind!”

  Çelebi felt the blood rushing to his face, because exactly that thought had been in his mind, but fortunately the high official went back to his peroration without taking the slightest notice of what his guest might actually be thinking. Rudeness has at least one virtue, the chronicler thought.

  “So the fiercest battle happens up there, in heaven,” the Quartermaster resumed. “Because, just as folk hide their treasures in places that are hard to get at, so peoples and nations store their most precious assets in the heavens — their divinities, their faith, all that they hold to be sublime and that nothing can alter. By that I mean things of a higher order, things that transcend the limits of human life, things that are sometimes roughly called apparitions, in a word, everything that has to do with the soul. One day or another we’ll take possession of their castles; we’re sure to overcome them in the end. But that won’t be enough. In the final analysis they’re just heaps of stones that can be taken from us in the same way we will take them ourselves. But victory in war is something altogether different … I’m not sure if you’re following me?”

  Not only had Çelebi stopped following the thread, he was no longer able to make anything at all from the tangled skein of the Quartermaster’s speech. But he nodded his head nonetheless, thinking of his own tent, the tent he had so often cursed but which now seemed to him like a corner of paradise.

  “Have you ever wondered about how something to which you’ve never attached much importance can be fearsome — let’s say, a song? The war that took place a month ago, for instance, has become the subject of a song. All over the world people know the ancient art of extracting a handful of verses from a pile of events and struggles, including those that happen in royal palaces, just like you extract wine from a bunch of grapes. The grape and even the vine die in the end, but the wine never goes off, quite the opposite in fact: it gets better and better as time goes on. Same thing for war. The war comes to an end, but the song made in its honour moves on from generation to generation. It moves on like a cloud, like a bird, like a ghost, whatever you prefer. And it engenders a new war. How can we kill that black bird …? Or else, we could take their language. I don’t know if you’ve ever reflected — but as a man of learning, you must have — that a language is a creation as magnificent as it is mysterious. Well, it is, and to such a degree that I’ve often thought — may Allah forgive me! — that many things in this world would be a lot quieter if language simply didn’t exist. A part of the heaven that I mentioned just now is connected to it, because, more than any other faculty, language is in communication with Heaven. Have some more halva! When you told me a while back about their habit of speaking in a slightly nasal tone, it struck me how hard it is to change anything at all, even just the nasal tone you mentioned. That’s something really difficult, Çelebi, much more difficult than knocking down gates or demolishing ramparts. And to do it you can’t call in the cannon or architect Giaour’s
ground plans to help you out!”

  To the chronicler’s amazement his host now began to eat ravenously. It seemed his exhausting tirade had made him famished.

  “In higher places there are two attitudes to this sort of thing,” he went on after wiping his mouth on a napkin. “But apparently our side is winning the argument at the moment.”

  Çelebi was now even more bewildered. What were these two attitudes and these two sides? He was, moreover, unclear about where the “higher places” were.

  “We had a long debate on the issue,” the Quartermaster said. “What would we leave to the Balkan peoples, and what would we take away from them: their religion, or their language? Some thought we should take both away, others reckoned we had to leave them one or the other. Naturally, all sorts of arguments were put, until, in the end, our camp seemed to have won. Which means we will leave these peoples their faith. As for their language, for the time being we will only prohibit it being written down. It’s too soon to ban the speaking of it.”

  Çelebi must have raised his eyebrows because the Quartermaster General bent over and brought his perfumed head close to his ear:

  “I must have worn you out a bit, but I took the liberty because you are my friend, and it’s a long while since I had a chance to get things off my chest. Now I’m going to tell you a secret which I hope you’ll keep to yourself.”

  The chronicler felt so shaken up already by what he had heard that he thought that his beleaguered brain could hardly bear an extra burden.

  “Well, here it is, my dear Mevla. I have to inform you that my job as Quartermaster General is for me only a secondary occupation. In reality …”

  Allah! the chronicler muttered to himself. A suspicion of that sort had indeed passed through his mind, but he had banished it from his thoughts so as not to sink and drown. Throughout the camp there had long been speculation as to who was the real head of the army. All sorts of crazy ideas went around. Some said the real commander-in-chief was a ragged dervish, others thought the role belonged to deaf-mute Tahanka, who was of course only pretending to be deaf but in reality heard everything. Another group was convinced that it was neither of the above, but the Black eunuch who looked after the Pasha’s wives. But the truth turned out to be something else.