Ismail Kadare - The Siege

Çelebi was flummoxed. He didn’t know what attitude to adopt — show interest in Sirri Selim’s incomprehensible utterance, as politeness required, or else pretend not to have heard him thinking aloud. Although he was of a lower rank than the Quartermaster General, the doctor was a figure of some importance, and Çelebi cursed fate for putting him in his presence at such a delicate moment.

“No, no mistake about it,” Sirri Selim added through his teeth, with his mouth in a twisted grin.

Çelebi felt the blood running cold in his veins. He turned towards the astrologer, but he seemed completely indifferent to everything, and just carried on staring at the crowd.

Meanwhile the Quartermaster and Saruxha were well on their way to the Pasha’s tent. They saw the architect rushing into the pink pavilion a few feet ahead of them.

“It looks like he’s gone a bit crazy,” Saruxha observed.

“He certainly has a few things to worry about,” the Quartermaster General commented. “The tunnel collapse was nearly the end of him.”

“And you reckon he won’t have any more luck in the hunt for the aqueduct?”

“I fear not.”

“You’re in clover, you really are!” Saruxha exclaimed. “You just don’t have the same worries as we all do.”

The Quartermaster General smiled.

“Superficially, you’re right,” he answered calmly. “But did you stop to ask yourself why, over the last two days, thousands of men are hurriedly reaping the last of the wheat?”

“That’s true,” Saruxha said. “I meant to ask you, but then it slipped my mind. What is going on?”

“I’ll let you in on a secret only the Pasha and Alaybey are currently aware of.”

Saruxha could barely stifle a cough, which always came to him when he was excited.

“Skanderbeg has attacked and destroyed the Venetian caravans that were bringing our supplies,” the Quartermaster whispered.

“He hit the Venetians? Good Lord …”

“That’s right, it’s tantamount to declaring war on the Serenissima,” the Quartermaster said.

Saruxha looked at him with amazement in his eyes.

“He’s gone out of his mind!”

“Maybe he has,” the Quartermaster replied. “But don’t forget, it may be a desperate act, but it’s the act of a lion in despair.”

“You can call it despair or a lion’s anger, as far as I’m concerned, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Anyway, laying your sabre on a sack of grain or a skin of oil doesn’t seem very leonine to me!”

The Quartermaster burst out laughing and then shook his head as if to make his laughter go away. “I’m of a completely different persuasion. A general who destroys your supply train before attacking you is a true soldier.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to be late,” Saruxha said.

They went into the tent one after the other with bowed heads. The full war council had been assembled. The only empty seat was the commander-in-chief’s. The captains and high officials were chatting quietly. Most of the others were silent, taking sips of syrup from a glass that was constantly refilled from a brass pitcher by a chaouch gliding among the council members like a shadow. Now and again they cast sidelong glances at the architect. But Giaour’s blank face failed to give them the satisfaction they sought in such circumstances, when all the weight of a difficult meeting seems to bear down on one man, and, as they watch him writhing, the others feel immense relief not to be sitting in his place. The man’s impassive appearance not only disappointed the council members who reckoned themselves deprived of a small pleasure to which they felt entitled, but irritated them, and thereby relieved them of all pity.

The Pasha came in and took his seat. Everyone stopped speaking, and only the familiar scratching of the scribe’s writing instruments could be heard, less as a background noise than as a natural part of the silence of the universe.

Then the Pasha spoke. He was brief. He stated that on this day the council must determine whether or not to continue the siege. Then he mentioned the problem of the aqueduct. All efforts to locate it had failed. As everyone must have realised, hopes of finding it were diminishing by the day. He praised the architect for having realised that the aqueduct that was found was a decoy, and especially for not having allowed them all to rejoice prematurely. “As the great architect that you are, you spared us a great disappointment, in other words, you saved us from an evil.” Nonetheless he refuted Giaour’s hypothesis that there was no other aqueduct.

“You said yourself that the one you discovered was only a false lure, but now you tell us that there is no other. Well then, architect, tell us what the truth of the matter is. Is there a real aqueduct or not? I am asking you!”

Giaour’s lips started mouthing words straight away.

“Aqueduct is real, aqueduct is semblance, yes and no.”

The Pasha held both his hands to his forehead and motioned to the architect to stop talking. Looking at the man with his cold and weary eyes he begged him to wait until he had finished thinking. The architect closed his mouth.

“I praised you for those things in which you are praiseworthy, but all the same I am displeased with you,” the Pasha continued in a serious tone.

As was to be expected, but only after hesitating for a while, he alluded, although not too insistently, to the tunnel. Without taking his eyes off Giaour, he observed that as far as the tunnel was concerned the architect, at a pinch, could be held to be not responsible for the collapse, since the sappers who were perhaps the reason why the tunnel was discovered were now, together with their captain Ulug Bey, buried under the ground, peace be to their souls, and could therefore not defend themselves; the failure of the search for the aqueduct, on the other hand, could only be imputed to him, and he had to answer for this to the war council. To finish off his speech, Tursun Pasha expressed the sour hypothesis that the architect Giaour had perhaps, “for some reason,” lost his ardour to cut off the supply of water to the Christians.

The Pasha had spoken. In the utter silence that ensued all that could be heard was the scratching of the secretary’s quill as he put down on paper everything that had been said. They were all accustomed to this sound which was always identical, whether the words being transcribed were sharp or smooth, scorpion bites or soft summer wind. Those among the council members who were familiar with administrative accounts realised that the secretary was making his quill squeal more than was actually necessary. To judge by the serious face he made at such times, it wasn’t hard to guess that these silent pauses in which his pen scratching was the overriding sound gave him his sole opportunity in life to assert his own importance. Once someone started talking again, his very presence would be forgotten.

The architect stood up. He began to speak, in truncated words strung together without pauses or intonation. His tiresome, toneless diction was somehow reminiscent of the desert. As they listened to him members of the council imagined that this man had been specially created to dry up rivers and springs, as he had done in fact, and to great effect, in the many previous campaigns that had won him considerable glory.

He gave an account of his search. He explained to the council how he had based his work on a scrupulous examination of the surrounding terrain, noting the gradients of all the slopes, their degree of forestation, the composition of the subsoil, its level of humidity, and many other factors. This detailed survey was the basis for his orders to dig here rather than there (“dig where dig need, not dig where dig not need”). When these investigations led to the unearthing of a conduit which he immediately identified as a decoy (the trickle of water in it was so tiny that it would not have fooled anybody), he had insisted on going on until they located the real aqueduct. He had given orders for the river bed to be surveyed yard by yard so as to find some trace of it. His divers had been down, over a length of several leagues, but they found nothing. After that, and especially after Albanian prisoners had confessed under torture and until their dying breath that they did not know of any other pipe, he became convinced that the aqueduct they had unearthed was both the real one, and a false one.