Ismail Kadare - The Siege

Many minutes passed as the astrologer turned these thoughts around in his head. Then came another, even longer, phase. The big torches went out one by one. Then the lanterns also expired. And finally the oil and ash buckets ceased giving off their flickering light. Now and again they seemed to burst into life again, casting irregular flashes of bluish light all around, but then even that half-life fell away. Their last bursts lit faces marked by horror and exhaustion, with asymmetric features — eyes, noses and chins — on the verge of liquefaction, of melting like wax. They had all reached the threshold of eternal night.

Prayers and moans once again broke the long silence. Now and again a short scream or a hiccup rang out but was soon muffled by sobs. The astrologer imagined someone was crawling towards him. He suddenly felt hot breath on his cheek. “Do you want me to tell you the story of my life?” the supplicant asked in a whisper. The astrologer did not answer. “Yes, yes, I’m going to tell you the story of my life,” the unknown speaker went on, and began to talk in an even, uninflected tone of a ladder whose rungs he went on climbing, on and on. The astrologer tried to move his ear away from the man, but the unseen speaker found where he had shifted every time. “May your tongue shrivel!” the astrologer said, using a traditional curse from his own language. Then, so as to stop thinking about the accursed speaker, he began thinking about forms of cursing in general. Most had to do with shadows and with earth: “May you smell of earth!” Or else: “May you be without your shadow!” But they had already lost their shadows without being cursed … For the first time in his life, he understood the deep meaning of the expression. I have no shadow, he thought, therefore I am dead.

“I am the alternate,” a voice uttered somewhere close by. The astrologer then became aware of a struggle between two beings who were apparently trying to obtain sole access to his left ear. “What’s an alternate?” one of them asked. “A body double,” the other explained. “A man who for security reasons can take the place of Tursun Pasha.” “Take the place of the Pasha? Where? When?” “Whenever it turns out to be necessary. Mostly during assaults, but also on other occasions, at meetings, for instance … Yes, but he didn’t want to be replaced, and they shoved me down here.” “Who did?” “They did … It seems the Pasha got suspicious, but they did too … and then so did I … One day, they said, you could be useful to us, but for the time being you must not be seen. They shaved off my goatee beard so I would not look like him, and threw me down here …”

“So you were his shadow?” the astrologer exclaimed. “That’s why you were cursing so excitedly just now …”

“He didn’t want me,” the man said, “and that’s why I’m moulding away in this grave. There are a lot of undesirables down here, that’s to say, men who have been sentenced. Hundreds of others are under surveillance. Yet others are under interrogation. Not to mention torture …”

“Have you lost your senses?” the astrologer asked. “Where are all these people?”

“All over,” the man replied. “Half of the field hospital is under Kapduk Agha’s command. Many of the doctors are actually prosecutors. Behind the foundry workshop, on the waste land over there … there’s a reign of terror. As for spies, they’re all over the place, there are even some down here in this hole … I always keep on moving to cover my tracks. So I’m off …”

Yes, you can scamper away as fast as you like! the astrologer thought. But the double’s voice was instantly replaced by that of a few moments before, the man with the ladder. The astrologer strove and strained to escape the voice, but it was no good. Eat me up! he moaned inwardly. Finish me off …! The man spoke smoothly, as if to excuse his own persistence …

“The first time I thought of turning back, I was on the fourth rung,” he was saying. “But I banished the thought and carried on climbing. At the seventh rung, a dead man slid down and landed beside me. At the eighth rung the wish to go back down attacked me once more with even greater force, but still I managed to repel it by thinking of what my soldiers would say about me. At the tenth rung I looked up and saw the scrimmage on the parapet. It was a dreadful sight. I looked around. My men were coming up behind me. They would have to make way to let me go down. So I went on up. At the eleventh rung I smelled burning flesh right under my nose. The nape of the man ahead of me was on fire. At the twelfth rung I reckoned that in such mayhem nobody would notice if I got lost. I pivoted round to the inside of the ladder, and hung on to the rung with my hands alone. With one hand I grasped the eleventh rung, and then swung in to grab the tenth with the other hand. I was on my way down. At the ninth rung my fingers were crushed by the feet of a soldier climbing up. At the eighth rung they were damaged even more. So I let go and fell on to the pack of men huddling at the foot of the wall. I thought no one had seen me. I was wrong. Every move I made had been watched. Nothing was missed. Later on it was all reported back to me, down to the last detail. To be honest, the idea of giving up came to me as soon as I had got on to the second rung. More precisely, by the seventh rung I had decided to climb down, but hadn’t yet worked out how to do so. On the eleventh rung I thought of pretending to be dead and letting myself drop, but the height scared me. That was when I smelled burning flesh … Aren’t you listening to me? Are you crying? Look, I would have told you the story of my life in any case. But I’d still like to add a few more details. Listen to me, but if you find it all too wearisome, I won’t be offended …”

On and on he went, in his flat, even voice. He was still trying to work out exactly on which rung he was standing when he first thought of giving up and at what level he had taken the actual decision to go back down. Hesitantly, forever revising what he had said, trying as hard as he could to be utterly precise, the man seemed to go on for ever, saying again and again that he hoped to be as objective and as sincere as possible in his critical self-examination.

At times the astrologer imagined that a part of the man’s life had now become inextricably tangled up in his own. He struggled like a man trying to run before a rising tide, but it was no use. Now and again the voice paused or else faded, and it grew ever more impenetrable as another sound began to rise over it. Things were quickly coming apart. Some kind of black, viscous ooze was rising inside everyone, or else creeping up on them. The astrologer was no longer sure his urine and sperm had any separate existence, and even his lungs and his spleen seemed to be dissolving. Everything became everything else. So here we are, melted down, in a single body … Skulls were sure to soften before long, and let their brains leak out … And that will be the end, the astrologer thought.

“Actually, the real Pasha is … me!” the voice declared.

“Are you back, you wretch?” the astrologer shouted, but the man pretended not to have heard.

“I suspected it for ages, but now I’m sure of it. I am Tursun Pasha! The other one up there is just my double. But as often happens with alternates, he’s turned out to be the cleverer of us two, and he’s ousted me! In other words, he did to me what I should have done to him!”

“What are you talking about?” the astrologer protested. “You’ve no right to go mad all on your own …! Didn’t we all agree to stay together until the end?”

“Don’t interrupt me! My suspicions have been proved correct … One of us had to fall. But you should not be surprised at my misfortune. It’s more or less the same as what has happened to all of us. We underground are the only real and authentic men. Those who are up there are mere nothings, they’re just … wraiths and spectres … Anyway, I have to move on now … Got spies on my tail!”