Ismail Kadare - The Siege

He felt a wet towel on his forehead and when he opened his eyes he saw it was the sergeant wiping his brow. The Quartermaster was leaning over him, looking like his old self, beaming and concerned.

“Don’t worry,” he was saying, “it’s just a bad turn. I’ve sent for the war council’s doctor …”

“Oof! What a crazy day this has been!” the doctor blurted out as he hurried into the tent. “So what’s up, Kurt?”

The chronicler was astounded by the doctor’s familiar tone, but even more by the first name, “Kurt,” that he had never heard uttered before.

“I wouldn’t have troubled you on a day like this for myself,” the Quartermaster said. “But it’s about my friend here … Mevla Çelebi, the army’s historiographer, I imagine you’ve heard of him …”

From the doctor’s lack of reaction to these words and especially from the way he pulled back Çelebi’s eyelids to examine his pupils, the chronicler deduced that historians were not very high on the man’s list of priorities. They’re only accustomed to examining important personages, he thought spitefully. But the good smell of his own body that arose when he’d had his tunic undone to have his chest sounded filled him with some pride.

“It’s due to two kinds of fatigue,” the medical practitioner said, turning round to face the Quartermaster, as if the patient were a mere token. He repeated the words “two kinds” while tapping the side of his forehead.

Çelebi felt mortified again. I’d like to have seen you listening to all those horrors! he muttered to himself.

“He should drink a little of this,” the doctor said to the Quartermaster as he took a vial from his satchel. The two began to confer in a whisper, as if the chronicler were not even present in the tent. Then, in response to a question from the host, the doctor said: “Fine, fine, go on using the balm I gave you. Right-ho. Farewell, Kurt.”

No, I’ll never be one of them, Mevla thought with despair. Right-ho. Farewell, he repeated in his mind as if he were learning a phrase in a foreign language. In fact, he had noticed every now and again a slight foreign accent in the Quartermaster’s diction, but like most people he had put such worries aside … Wasn’t the name “Kurt” quite widespread among the Osmanlis?

Not in a thousand years could he learn to say “Right-ho. Farewell, Kurt” with ease. The Quartermaster had only made a friend of him so as to have someone into whose ear he could drip the poison that people cannot bear to keep inside themselves, just like he had been doing before the doctor’s visit.

In any other circumstance he would have been proud to be the depository of a secret of such magnitude. On first hearing it, he had been scared out of his wits. Now, he thought it was just offensive. But who could know how he would view it over the coming days?

“What were we talking about when you came over queer?” the Quartermaster General asked. His manner was casual but in the man’s eyes Çelebi could see the icy glint of a stalactite.

“I don’t recall very well …” he answered. “About the Balkan peoples, I think. About Skanderbeg.”

“Ah yes, Skanderbeg,” his host said. His face lit up. “You didn’t hear the rest of the story …? So much the better!” he added.

Çelebi felt a wave of relief. His regret at losing the secret entrusted to him wasn’t enough to disturb the peace of mind he had just recovered.

The Quartermaster also seemed relieved and in an excellent mood. He urged the chronicler to rest a while and then let the orderly accompany him back to his tent. In the meantime they could resume their interrupted conversation. Hi-hi! What they’d been saying about … Skanderbeg! The Quartermaster said that one of his friends had actually met him, at peace negotiations that had been held at a secret location. The Albanian leader had refused to go to the Turkish capital, even though the great Padishah, Murad Han, had begun his letter of invitation with the words “My son”.

“What an ungrateful man!” Çelebi remarked.

The Quartermaster went on to say that during the said negotiations, Skanderbeg would speak only Latin, the better to mark his complete break with the Empire.

“The ungrateful man!” the chronicler repeated. “Renegade!”

“Worse than a renegade!” the Quartermaster insisted. “He broke one of the dreams of our empire. You know which one? The most beautiful dream of all: bringing the Albanian Catholics back into the bosom of Islam.”

Their conversion had been a miracle. To be sure, there hadn’t been many of them, only a handful really, but you mustn’t forget they were ancient Christians, they had adopted the faith thirteen centuries ago and since then had been attached to the Church of Rome and under allegiance to it. So it was a sign that Islam was managing to make a breach in Christianity in one of its staunchest bastions. No better news had ever reached the heart of the Empire. But the dream was soon destroyed by that demon with a double name, George Castrioti-Skanderbeg … The chronicler’s jaw dropped in astonishment.

“Everything about him is double. His name, the ram’s horns he puts on his helmet, and the two-headed bird on his banner. And do you know what he did as soon as he had consolidated his power over the other local princes? He ordered the Albanians who had become Muslim to return to their original faith, or else die by the sword. And he kept his word. He forcibly reincorporated into Christendom those new Muslims who had just donned their first thin cloak of Islam. So there, Çelebi …”

“He’s a two-horned devil!” the chronicler exclaimed, then asked what the Albanian leader looked like.

“What he looks like?” the official rejoined. “I remember asking my friend the same question at the time he told me the story. According to him, Skanderbeg appears completely normal. On the day of the talks, his voice was hoarse, he must have caught a cold. All through the negotiations he kept a scarf wrapped around his throat.

“A scarf around his throat,” the chronicler repeated mechanically, almost dropping off to sleep again.

“Normal-looking people are those I fear the most,” the Quartermaster said.

His voice had a different resonance, as if the dimensions of the tent had suddenly altered.

Then came the first pause in the talking since the doctor had left. The Quartermaster’s long fingers counted the beads on his chaplet faster than usual. One bead in particular seemed to have lost its brilliance.

“In the report I wrote, I reckoned the Albanians should be put alongside the Greeks and the Jews as the first peoples we should integrate.” Unlike his hands, the Quartermaster’s voice was slow and calm. “Only there’s this Skanderbeg fellow in the way.”

“I understand,” the chronicler said.

In his mind’s eye he could see the plain of Kosovo strewn with uncountably many corpses and Murad Han on horseback, at dusk, riding among them at walking pace … He had to wipe that vision from his mind, sweep it from his memory for ever if he wanted to stave off his own fall.

“Albania has to get rid of Skanderbeg. It’s the only solution,” the Quartermaster went on. “But he’s doing all he can to prevent that happening. He knows full well that he’ll lose the war in the end. But in spite of that, he’s hanging on to Albania.”

Skanderbeg and Albania can go to the devil! the chronicler thought, without daring to say so aloud.

“He’s in the process of achieving an uncommon exploit,” the Quartermaster continued. “An extraordinary exploit … Just now I was telling you about the heavens where peoples put their relics for safekeeping … Well, as from now, that man is aiming for the heavens … I don’t know if you get my meaning. He’s trying to create a second Albania, outside of anyone’s reach, a kind of immaterial Albania. So that when one day this Albania, the terrestrial one, falls to the Empire, that other, ghostly Albania, its shadow-self, will go on wandering among the clouds … Do you see what I mean?” (Actually, the chronicler was increasingly befuddled.) “He’s devoted himself to a task which almost nobody has ever thought of before: how to re-use a defeat. Or, to put it another way, the eternal recycling of defeat in battle …”