Ismail Kadare - The Siege

He set aside the two longest reports, to read carefully later. The first was from the Quartermaster General and dealt with the state of the reserves of food and cash. The second was the work of the Alaybey. It gave a picture of morale among the troops. It was detailed, and was based on a wide range of information provided by the numerous underlings of Tabduk Baba. Together with the Alaybey’s own suggestions and conclusions, the report contained dozens of accounts of everyday events, and snatches of conversations overheard among soldiers gave substance to the Alaybey’s views. There was even an appendix with the lyrics of a song recently heard around the camp. As he glanced through the report, the Pasha saw that this endless recitation of mundane actions and utterances expressed a lukewarm and resentful attitude that was utterly incompatible with the straight lines, rules, ranks, standards, cornets and everything else that constituted the grandeur of war. It was like rising damp, permeating and rotting the great edifice of his army. And although the Alaybey put it indirectly and with a great deal of circumlocution, the situation was obvious. His experience as a leader had taught him that during a siege such a state of mind always arises in the end if after a defeat men are left without anything to do. The besieged fortress towered over his huge camp every day, his men saw it at reveille every morning just as they saw it at dusk every evening. He knew it would weigh on their spirits ever more heavily. He also knew that in such circumstances faint hearts can be rallied by creating imaginary dangers, by launching allegedly secret inquiries (like the one targeting the caster of spells, which had everybody trying to divine what the man’s fate would be), by setting up trials and by holding spectacular executions, or by prompting disagreements among the generals, to which most soldiers and officers were already accustomed. He was certainly able to do all those things, and he would have done them if there was not, deep down beneath the ground, the foundation of all his hopes — a tunnel snaking forwards every day. A quick victory on a calm night, without too much bloodshed or toil, would be doubly precious in the present apathy, now that the bulk of his troops were giving way to the insidious disease of war-weariness.

He skimmed through the Alaybey’s report a second time and stopped to read the passages quoting soldiers’ conversations verbatim. A distant rumble rising like sea-swell from a thousand tents sounded in his ear. It was his habit never to talk to his men. During their exhausting march he had watched regiment after regiment file past, with heavy packs on their backs and covered in the dust of two continents, but he had never even bothered to ask himself what might lie beneath those identical, indistinguishable shaven skulls. He would have been inclined to think there was nothing there, save a handful of ash, and maybe a few names, of a mother, a father, a family, except for the janissaries, who were not allowed such things … Nonetheless, on the first day of the assault, when he watched the men scaling the ramparts, with blood and ash dripping from their backs, he had felt curious for the first time in his life about what might have been going on in their minds. “You are a great leader,” Tabduk Baba told him when summoned to have this task entrusted to him. No previous Pasha had ever bothered to find out what his men were thinking. That was perhaps the main reason why they had all fallen in the end.

And now he could hear their rumbling. He recalled that long-past summer when for the first time the sea had come into his view. This buzzing of the soldiery was a bit like the noise of the sea, except that waves made a sound that was heart-rendingly beautiful. If that noise goes on for very long, however, an army that seems flawless will lose its will and go to pieces.

He was still lost in thought, wondering whether he should act now or wait until the tunnel was finished, when one of his orderlies came in to tell him that the doctor, Sirri Selim, wanted to see him on urgent business.

The Pasha found this late-night call surprising. He put the report down and waited for the doctor to come in.

The epidemiologist came in bent double, not just because he was too tall to enter the tent standing straight, but also from a long habit of obsequiousness.

“Pardon me, Pasha, for disturbing you at such an hour,” he said in a baritone voice that made a strange contrast with the long, thin body that he could not straighten up beneath the tent roof.

“It is very late, indeed,” said the Pasha. “What is the matter?”

“There is urgent business I have to report to you,” the doctor replied.

His eyes met the Pasha’s quizzical glance. He raised his hand and pointed his index finger towards the tent door, and after a short pause, he asked:

“Can you hear them?”

The Pasha pouted. “What?”

“The barking.”

The Pasha nodded.

“That’s what I have come about.”

Tursun Pasha scowled as if he thought this was a ridiculous joke to bring him so late in the night. This scarecrow is so tall, he thought, that I can’t even have him sent down to the tunnel. The Alaybey had told him that not only the sappers, but the janissaries who had been infiltrated under the citadel had been selected for shortness.

Seeing that the Pasha’s patience was very limited, as with any great leader, the doctor hastened to explain.

“The day before yesterday, the dogs you can hear barking and sometimes wailing even here dug down into one of the mass graves where our dead are buried.”

The Pasha grimaced.

The doctor went on: “They’ve clawed up and dismembered the cadavers. A plague could break out.”

The shadow of terror passed across the Pasha’s face at the word “plague”.

“Sire, the sappers did not do their job conscientiously. The graves were hastily dug, and when I went to inspect them just now I observed that in some places there is less than one foot of earth covering the bodies.”

The Pasha cursed under his breath. He clapped his hands.

An orderly appeared at the tent door.

“Get Ulug Bey! I need him here this instant!”

The orderly vanished. The Pasha said nothing for a while. The doctor stood as if rooted to the ground. From afar, somewhere over on the left, came muddled sounds that sharpened into the barking of dogs.

“They barked all last night, too,” Tursun Pasha observed.

“Yes, they did, Pasha. But nobody knew why. One of my men told me this evening, he’d got it from a carter during the afternoon.”

The tent fell silent once again and the sound of barking seemed to them both to grow nearer. Then came the footfall of a man running. Ulug Bey, the captain of the sappers, burst in, panting heavily. Before he had even finished bowing low, as regulations required, the Pasha yelled:

“Can you hear them? Can you hear, you wretched man?”

Ulug Bey couldn’t say a thing.

“The dogs are unburying our dead,” the Pasha resumed, in a grating tone.

Ulug went pale. He had understood.

“Our heroes give their lives for the glory of the Osmans, whereas you can’t even be bothered to put a spadeful of earth over their bodies!”

The commander’s voice, broken by a kind of hiccup, fell mercilessly on Ulug Bey. The Pasha went on to call him a cur, even insinuating that the sapper had purposely left the graves in that woeful state so as to give the other members of his pack something to eat, and so forth. But Ulug Bey did not feel offended. He thought: It serves me right. Or else: May God protect me. He would have liked the Pasha to insult him even more gravely, to call him a jackal, a hyena, or even to whip him — anything to put a stop to the terrible barking of the dogs.