Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“I’d rather dig holes than lose my balls,” the sapper shouted back, apparently taking their strange dress to mean they were eunuchs.

Men laughed in the half-light.

“Come and find out if I’ve got any, you cow-pat.”

Mevla Çelebi began to pull at Sadedin’s sleeve.

“Come on, you’re not going to get into a fight with a peasant.”

“Quite right, let’s get out of here,” the astrologer said.

From further off came again the sound of horses’ hooves, and an order: “Shut your filthy mouth!”

Apparently the fighting had flared up again.

“They’re taking a real hiding!” someone shouted out. “They’re being fried alive!”

“Let’s move on,” the astrologer repeated.

They left without looking round.

The full moon had now risen high in the sky and dimmed the brilliance of the bonfires. The whole camp was humming and brimming over with life. Soldiers bumped into each other as they walked this way and that. Some had grown tired of listening to the hoxhas’ prayers and were watching the dervishes dance, while others, having had enough of the show, had gone to listen to a pep-talk by a sheh . Sadedin stopped in front of a knot of men and then, all of a sudden, with shaking hands and eyes burning like coals, he began to declaim, or rather to bawl, his poem.

“Did you like it?” he asked his comrades as soon as he had finished.

“A lot,” the janissary replied. “It warms your blood.”

“That’s exactly what I am after,” Sadedin said. “I want to inflame our soldiers.” He emptied the gourd. “On the one hand, there are poets who lisp tearful doggerel about pretty birds and paradise. On the other hand, I am a poet who seeks only to serve the great Padishah. My heaven is the hell of war!”

They weren’t sure where they were any more. The camp area they had reached was occupied by a sizeable unit whose men spoke a language they could not understand.

“Caucasian troops,” Çelebi whispered.

“What was that? Louder!” Sadedin shouted.

“Let’s go back,” the astrologer suggested. “We’ve gone quite far enough as it is.”

They turned about and retraced their steps, making their way through the crowds with difficulty. Around the great campfires veterans were telling young recruits about past wars and tales of derring-do.

In the shadow of a large tent, set back from the milling throng, they saw some men lying on the ground. They had propped their heads on short-handled axes and were singing the same sorrowful chant that they had heard once before. Apparently it was a recent composition, originating in the marches of the Empire, which is where the saddest dirges usually came from. The astrologer turned towards the source of the singing, but the soldiers’ faces could not be made out in the dark. The beating of the drums and the thousand other noises of the camp also prevented him making out the words. But as he moved off, he did catch a line:

“O Fate, O Fate, O cursed Fate …”

They wandered for a long while among the noisy crowds, speaking barely a word, which they could hardly hear above the tumult.

“Listen! I think that’s a priest talking about the local women!” the janissary said, drawing the poet closer to him. They slowed their pace. It was true. A sheh was thundering on about Albanian women. It was the same man they had heard a little earlier speaking about flags.

“We shall strip their wives and daughters of their shameless white garments and dress them in the noble black mantle blessed by our faith. We shall cover their faces with a veil and stop their sly eyes from casting licentious glances at men while offering themselves just as scabrously to their sight.”

Tuz Okçan still had in his mind Sadedin’s words about these women’s bellies. He had never before felt such burning desire. Apparently, approaching battle heightened the desire for sensual pleasure like nothing else.

“The most bewitching, the most lascivious parts of a woman,” the sheh bawled on hoarsely, “are the eyes, alongside hair. The unveiled eyes of a woman are more entrancing than her naked body …”

Tuz Okçan suddenly felt like bursting into tears, for no reason he could fathom. He had never heard so many obscenities in his life. But nothing had stirred him up more than Sadedin’s words.

“… By tearing them from their barbaric customs and endowing them with our own grandiose costumes, we shall turn their souls away from the evil path, in whose wake their bodies will follow …”

The janissary was overcome once again with a need for tears. He almost leaned on Sadedin’s arm and asked him: “So what will come of the swallows’ nest?” The image of curly pubic hair was sucking up his whole mind like a whirlwind.

“Won’t make a bit of difference,” Sadedin said, putting his lips to the janissary’s ear.

“What?”

“Changing customs … Bit by bit, with the passing years, their traditions will wilt and fall like apple blossom. They’ll get used to our ways. So used to them, in fact, that if, God forbid, we ever had to leave these lands, they would find it very hard to readjust.”

The poet continued to soliloquise for a long while. He had a fine deep voice, but the general racket and the noise of the drums made it hard for Tuz Okçan to grasp all that he said. The faces of the dervishes darkened and brightened in alternation. Fascinated soldiers stood round them in circles, clapping in time with the drums and screaming in unison with the dancers.

A number of the dervishes fell to the ground. Only some pulled themselves up to a squatting position, panting for lack of breath; the others stayed flat on the ground, as if in a cataleptic fit. Soldiers dripping with sweat started sobbing. Other men ran round and round.

“What a marvellous night!” Sadedin exclaimed, as if he had been blinded by it. He lifted his gourd to his lips for the last time, and then threw it at the feet of the crowd.

What we were given to witness on the eve of the attack was more horrible than any battle, worse than any carnage. When we heard their drums roll at dusk, we first thought that, contrary to all known principles of modern war, they were perhaps about to launch a night raid. But we soon saw that what they were trying to do, once they had got their equipment ready for the assault, was to raise their soldiers’ morale .

At the first beats of their drums, the sight that greeted our eyes was unbearable. Such madness we had never imagined — neither in the orgies of ancient times, whose memory has come down to us through the generations, nor in the wildest carnival nights in our own villages. Shouting, screaming, praying and dancing, men offered themselves up for sacrifice, made exhibitions of themselves in which, as we were to learn later on, severed heads carried on talking as if still in delirium; soldiers wailed as if they were night owls and banged their drums dementedly. All those noises wafted up to our castle like stinking vapours .

The light of the moon seemed to trouble and excite them at the same time. What we saw spread out beneath us was Asia in all its mysticism and barbarity, a dark grave getting ready to swallow us all .

A putrid wind was blowing up from the plain. Despite going to pray before the icon of the Virgin, our hearts sank. The cross that rises above our chapel seemed very pale, as if it had gone white with fear. But these feelings did not weaken in the slightest our determination to fight to the end. On the contrary, never before had we felt so convinced that death would be far sweeter than the gloom and treachery laid out down below in plain sight .

Our low spirits had another cause as well. There were so many of them! As many as the pebbles on a beach. And they were trying to extend their empire so the sun would never set on it, that’s to say, so that night and day would be perpetually and simultaneously contained within its boundaries. They believed that when they had achieved that objective (when they had “tied the yellow tigress and the black wolf to the same chain”), they would also rule over time itself .