Ismail Kadare - The Siege

They were relaxed and ready to drop off to sleep after their bath, but that didn’t stop the eunuch from prattling on. Silence even seemed to stimulate him. He told old stories about his former mistresses. He had fond memories of them all.

“In Izmir,” he said, “I had one who was without compare. Her voice was as sweet as the rahat loukoum between her thighs. Anyway, I can read my mistresses’ hearts the way I can read their sex, it’s all the same to me. All of them were either completely angry with their eunuch, or else they had nothing but smiles for him. ‘Bow, bow, Black eunuch, you son of the night,’ I used to say to myself. The masculine power all around us was so implacable that I felt a perverse kind of pleasure in being mistreated by the women of my harem. ‘Hit me, ladies,’ I used to say, ‘flay me, piss on my head while you chatter to each other!’ It seemed to me that they would draw some comfort from doing so, that it would console them for their own fate. ‘Why are you so sad, Hasan?’ they would sometimes ask. That’s what my ladies were like. They would notice if a passing cloud in the sky felt unhappy! Some of them now lie in their graves. Sometimes I go and visit them in the cemetery of the Lower Plain. And I would weep for them aloud if the whole place wasn’t under surveillance. Because the world and its men are getting harder and harder. But God’s punishment is also drawing nearer. In the camp no one sleeps peacefully at night any more. You can hear groans that are supposed to be coming up from underground. Last Sunday, towards dawn, the earth began to shake as if they were all going to come scrambling out, all covered in mud, out of the hole where they were buried alive. After forty days, forty more must pass, then forty weeks, for the earth to calm down again. Because everything happens at a slower pace for the earth than for men. True peace will only come back to it after forty years.”

A blinding sun streams down, as if it had suddenly been aimed at us. No cloud to protect us, not even a smear of mist in the sky. It seems we have been abandoned entirely; our sentries no longer even see fairies or sprites. Maybe they are resting on a hill somewhere? From daybreak the sky seems to have been emptied of its heavenly substance .

Down below, on the plain, they are reaping the early wheat. Scythes and sickles sparkle in the far distance with a fierce and threatening glare, as if they were felling not ears of wheat but the heads of men. We who planted the seeds we were fated never to harvest are much downcast. For herein is that saying true, as is written in the Gospel According to St John, that “one soweth and another reapeth”. The scythe we do not use ourselves has really fallen on the world as on the Day of the Apocalypse .

The plain all around our citadel is now pocked with holes and dark trenches dug in the search for the aqueduct. The leader of the search, an architect they call “The Christian,” is sufficiently cunning to have guessed straight away, when on the third day they came on an aqueduct, that it was the old one, no longer in use, and he ordered the work to continue until the other one, the right one, had been found .

But nobody knows where the right one runs, not even we ourselves. All we know is that one of George Castrioti’s first concerns was to build new aqueducts to serve all his fortresses. To keep their location secret, the trenches were dug by prisoners. Last year they ended up making such a labyrinth of ditches and tunnels that no one could tell which of these courses actually brought water into the citadel. And it is entirely possible that none of them does, that the one that fulfils the function is a completely different one, that cannot be seen. The enemy has placed all its hopes in discovering the true source of our water. But as we ourselves do not know where our water comes from or how it reaches us, we believe nobody else can find out either. The fearsome Christian appears in our dreams nonetheless, and so we have started to dig a deep well beneath the dungeons of our citadel, in case we have to face even harder times than these .

The siege has been upon us for nearly two months. The sight of the enemy has tired our eyes. They wander around in their tens of thousands all across the plain down below — an endless throng that is constantly on the move. Where can this vast horde come from? How do they manage to communicate with each other and act in concert? Where are they going? For what reason? People who have visited their land say that women are scarce in those parts, and are hardly ever seen. So who gives birth to them? Are they children of the desert?

Çelebi was jealous of the half-undressed men lying outside their tents. It was suffocatingly hot, and, if dignity and propriety had not forbidden it, he too would have liked to take off his clothes. In practice, none of the soldiers knew who he was. They were surely just as ignorant of the fact that among them was a historian whose task was to make the campaign immortal. Because of his costume he was sometimes mistaken for a doctor and sometimes for a soothsayer, but that was hardly surprising since most of the soldiers did not even know the word “history”.

“What do those drums mean?” he asked a group of soldiers.

“A beheading,” they answered without even looking up at him.

Men were crowding around the open space left between the tents where executions usually took place. Since he had nothing better to do, Çelebi joined the crowd. That morning he had been for a walk in the plain around the camp. The landscape was beautiful, but the ditches and trenches pitting the ground had spoiled his walk. Here and there in the grass he came across arrows, which had apparently come down in recent battles. He stooped to pick one up. He had never held a weapon in his hand before, and it seemed odd to him that a mere stick of wood with a little iron tip could cause anyone’s death.

“Who is going to be beheaded?” he asked another soldier a little further on.

“No idea,” the trooper replied with a shrug. “A pair of spies, I think.”

The drum kept on calling men to assembly. The herald’s voice could be heard in the distance. Çelebi noticed the tall shape of Sirri Selim coming towards him with someone else. The doctor greeted him.

“Well, how are you, Mevla? How’s the chronicle going?”

The chronicler bowed down low.

“Don’t you know each other?” Sirri Selim said with a broad gesture towards Mevla and the other man. “This is Mevla Çelebi, our historiographer.”

The unidentified man gave the chronicler a supercilious look.

“And this is our new astrologer. He’s just come in from Edirne.”

Çelebi looked at him with the same curiosity he had for anyone coming from the capital.

“Any news from Edirne?” he asked in a gentle tone, pretending not to have noticed the newcomer’s haughty air.

“No,” the astrologer said. “It’s hot.”

The chronicler could see the new man wasn’t keen on talking. In his mind’s eye he glimpsed the old astrologer’s corpse all covered in mud and rubble, and he thought better of giving way to his feeling of irritation with the new one. If he takes himself too seriously, he’ll end up in the same state, Mevla thought.

“What’s this crowd for?” the doctor enquired.

“Apparently they’re going to execute a pair of spies.”

“Really? Spies?” a passing janissary asked.

“And what did they spy on?” Sirri Selim asked as he moved towards the place where the drum-roll was coming from.

The other two followed in his footsteps.

“I don’t know,” the chronicler answered.

“I can tell you!” a dervish shouted out from behind them. “They are two spies who tried to steal the secret of our big guns!”