Ismail Kadare - The Siege

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 snags 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 …”