Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“Off you go! Go underground!”

The sounds of mumbling and praying grew more muffled. Occasionally, sobbing broke their even hum. Piercing screams became less frequent. The last one he heard came from far away, or so it seemed, from the very end of the tunnel. “I don’t want to hear the story of your life!” someone was bawling. “I don’t want to! My life is petering out. So why should I hear all about yours? No, I do not want to listen! I’m telling you, go away. Why are you clinging on to me like that? I do not want you, do you hear? I don’t! I don’t!” The speaker lost his temper, then was suddenly convulsed by violent sobbing. In a flash the weeping spread to everyone. Some added their own dirge: “Unhappy that we are!” Then in the midst of the moaning and wailing came a sudden cry: “The commander-in-chief!”

Tursun Pasha had indeed come down from the world of the living. By the light of a pit lantern that someone had somehow managed to get going again the astrologer recognised the commander-in-chief. He had the same voice as his alternate, and he had had time to let his beard grow back. How long have we been down here, O Lord? he wondered. Time enough for a beard … he answered himself. Up above everyone would have been terrified to hear such thoughts. Provided they reached all the way up … The Pasha greeted each in turn, showing more feeling for those he already knew. He asked Ulug Bey if there was a message he could take back to his mother and wife. He gave news of relatives to another man. Then as the light flickered out he said to nobody in particular, “Peace be with you!” They all answered: “May we meet again in heaven!”

Between his fingers the astrologer gripped his brass tag with its sign of the three stars. He tried to push himself through the earth and up into the light by the force of thought alone, but it wasn’t possible: the darkness and the earth had already made him part of their empire. He began to cry. Images of friends, women, crowded noisy streets and doors he had bumped into struggled to form a more or less coherent sequence in his mind, but to no avail.

Among the wailing the laughter of a man demented fluttered about like a blind bird. Go on, the astrologer ordered his mind, leave this body, you are no use to it any more. Some spoke in drunken voices of the remorse that the people up above must be feeling. Others sobered up in a flash and burst into tears. But there were some men who refused to be downcast. They imagined themselves as conquerors of the Void, which made them stronger than anything else on earth. “We have Absence, the Queen of the Universe, on our side!” they said. The astrologer only just stopped himself from shouting out loud: “I am a foreigner in these parts, so leave me alone!” And he waved his identity tag in front of him … Admittedly, he had committed errors, but the celestial empire could surely have shown him more mercy. His only salvation now lay in madness. For pity’s sake, he appealed to his mind, you have exhausted me, so now get out of my skull! But his mind would not go.

On July 26 we decided to make the tunnel collapse. We first made sure they had stopped digging. That meant that they were going to attempt to break out that night, or the next day at the latest. We chose to set off the landslip as close to the foundations as possible, at a spot where the tunnel was deepest underground, so that the greater weight of earth above it would ensure the fullest possible destruction of the enemy below .

After the collapse we carried on watching the surface over the whole length of the passage. But the men who had been buried alive didn’t even try to cut a relief shaft, and no one came to their rescue from the outside either. In any case it would have been pointless to try anything of the kind .

To begin with we heard no noises at all, and we could hardly believe that dozens of sappers and soldiers armed to the teeth were right beneath our feet, no more than two fathoms down. But the silence lasted only a few days. Thereafter, and especially at night, when we put our ears to the ground, we could hear screams and wailing. But nobody will ever be able to say what really happened down there .

We considered that our best course was to let them die where they were. If we had got them out, we would not have had the means to keep them imprisoned, because even without them, we had limited supplies of food and water. In other circumstances we might have asked to exchange them for our own casualties who were in the enemy’s hands and possibly still alive. Or else they might have surrendered our prisoners for a ransom. But after the horrors inflicted on those of our women that they captured, our men are outraged. Not only have we changed, it is likely we will never go back to the way we used to be. Most of us have been made bitter by death and have lost all inclination for forgiveness and mercy .

When their groans began to fade away our brothers nonetheless prayed for the souls of those unfortunate men. For several nights in a row we lit candles and burned incense over the path of the tunnel. Despite this we all lost our sleep, and even those who did manage to drop off woke up more exhausted than insomniacs, because of the horrors they had seen in their dreams. Some even began to suspect the Turks of having invented the tunnel with the sole aim of storing their own dead beneath our feet .

They were reclining on their camp-beds, leaning on their elbows. It was suffocating inside the tent. Despite their light garb, they found the heat unbearable.

“It must be cooler outside than in here,” Lejla said. “It’s always either hotter or cooler inside a tent than outside.”

She was the only one of the women to have been on a campaign before. She had been taken by her master, a vizier, on the Thessalonian campaign, where he had been killed. Her first act as a young widow had been to disperse the harem, as custom required. She had sold the girls with unusual haste, and, as if that had not been enough to express her spite towards them, she set a price that was more or less equivalent to that of a she-goat.

Lejla had told the story to her younger companions on her first night in her new harem, which led some of them to call her “Goat Lady” or else “Nanny,” depending on the warmth of their relations. In recent weeks, presumably because of the hostility all around them, the women had grown closer to each other.

“Phew! This heat is stifling!” said Blondie (so named for the colour of her hair), who was slouching next to Lejla. “Where’s Hasan? Him to get fetch little water to fresh up!”

The others all laughed at Blondie’s broken Turkish, knowing full well they would not find even that very amusing for long.

The youngest, Exher, said nothing and sat outside the circle, which was unusual for her. She was pale and hadn’t put up her plaits very neatly.

“Are you already feeling queer?” Lejla asked.

“Yes.”

“It must be that.”

Exher stared hard at her.

“I had a hard time of it too,” Ajsel said. “Oh! I miss my little daughter so! She’ll be nearly two when autumn comes. Will we be back by then?”

“I don’t think so,” Lejla answered. “To judge by the way it’s gone so far, this siege is going to last a long time.”

“I had a difficult pregnancy, too,” Ajsel said.

“But you got better looking after you’d given birth,” Lejla pointed out. “When you were pregnant, we all thought, when we looked at you, that he would sell you afterwards. We were making a big mistake.”

Ajsel laughed dreamily, looked around at each of her comrades in turn, then said, in a softer voice:

“Do you want to know why he loved me?”