Ismail Kadare - The Siege

The sound of hooves above their heads became a terrifying din. He put his hand into his hair to shake out the earth he thought must have fallen into it and mumbled prayers until the thunder moved away once again.

Someone sighed deeply. Çelebi was relieved and was about to raise his voice when from the far distance the sound of trampling became faintly audible, and then grew steadily louder.

“Another wave,” the azab said.

They all held their breath. The noise got so loud they thought the ground over the roof of the tunnel would collapse on them.

“Skanderbeg!” a voice cried out.

The chronicler thought that the latest wave would go on breaking for ever; worse still, it seemed to be besieging him ever more tightly, as a fever narrows a throat. Then when the noise abated and finally disappeared, allowing him to assume that there would be no further assault, Çelebi became aware of the calm and steady voice of the azab , who had probably been speaking for a while already without worrying whether anyone was listening to him or not.

“Eleven years in uniform. You reckon that’s a lot, don’t you? And who knows how much longer I’ll have to serve? We’re veterans, and it’s about time we were given the land that was promised us. Before we left for this campaign we were told we’d be allocated the land around the fortress when we’d taken it. I come from Anatolia, but I’ve been far and wide. I’ve fought in the plains of Karabogdan, at Stara Planin and Tarabullur, in Bulgaria and Bosnia, and I’ve even been as far as Szemendre, in Hungary. There’s good land everywhere, and each time we pitch camp, I wonder what could be grown in the area and what the soil is like, compared to the other places where we’ve fought. You’re a sapper, so you shouldn’t be surprised by all that. You’re a man of earth and mud too, aren’t you, except that you don’t honour the land, you make it submit to outrage, like people say, and then you grumble when it takes its revenge, like it did in this tunnel when it caved in on your comrades. Anyway, what was I saying? Ah, yes, about land. So they promised us we’d be given plots around the fortress, and when we got here the first thing I did was to look carefully at the soil. I scooped it up in my hand, crumbled it and smelled it. It’s good earth. Wheat ought to grow easily here. But what’s the use? It’s foreign soil. I don’t know why it doesn’t cheer my heart, but it doesn’t, and it leaves a feeling of emptiness in my breast. It’s foreign soil, after all. You know what I mean? It even smells different.”

The sound of dragging feet could be heard coming from the entrance. Someone was climbing down the ladder. The azab stopped chatting. Everyone held their breath. A man was groping his way into the tunnel.

“Careful, chum, or you’ll trample us,” the azab said.

“Ah!” said the newcomer, scared out of his wits.

“No point moaning, sit down, you’re fine just where you are,” the azab said. “Where are you from?”

“Ninth eshkinxhi battalion,” the man replied in a voice strangulated by fear.

“What’s going on up there?”

“Better not ask.”

“It seems the Albanians have tried to break out. Do you know anything about it?”

“No. All I know is that people are slaughtering each other.”

“I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t. It’s worse than anything you could imagine.”

“How can it be worse?”

“Oh, trust me. It is worse.”

He fell silent, but from his heavy breathing you could sense he wanted to say something more.

“Come on, spit it out,” the azab said. “Why is it so bad?”

“Because … As far as I could tell … there is no attack going on up there.”

“You’re crazy. If we haven’t been raided, what the hell is going on?”

“I have no idea. Maybe it’s a fake alarm. Or a mistake. At any rate, it’s a total mess, and nobody understands anybody else.”

“And why would that be worse than a night raid?”

“Because … when you’re attacked, you know what you’re up against. But this … it’s impossible to give a name to it. It’s like fever, delirium. No Skanderbeg! That’s what people are saying. He hasn’t been here for a while. Somebody else named Gjergj has taken his place. And he is quite something.”

“You are really crazy. But I am even crazier for listening to you. Got that? So why don’t you say something, you jerk?”

The stranger had left. What a bloody jerk he was, the azab thought. He even pretended to be an eshkinxhi ! How could they have put such soldiers in a hole like this? Sod that!

There was another long pause. More thunder could be heard, but this time it did not grow any louder. It was whirling around somewhere on the outskirts of the camp, getting fainter, then getting clearer, then fading away entirely. These ebbs and flows of the tide of sound went on for an interminably long time.

“I’m going up for a bit to see what’s happened,” someone said.

He could be heard trudging through the loose earth and then climbing the rungs of the ladder. The others waited for him to return. He came back.

“Well?”

“Looks like it’s calming down. It’s not yet dawn.”

Someone else moved in the dark.

“Are you leaving?” a voice asked. “As you like. I’m staying put a bit longer. We’ll meet again. As soon as the alert is given, run back here, you’ll find us where you left us.”

Çelebi wanted to stand up, but overwhelming weariness kept him still. The thought that he might not find his own tent standing, that his present shelter was likely to be the best he would ever find henceforth, made him want to close his eyes. He couldn’t have said whether he really was dropping off to sleep, or just seeming to do so. He could not stop seeing a white horse running round in his mind’s eye but he no longer knew which one it was, whether it was the horse of noon or the ancient horse of Murad at Kosove Polye. It seemed as if an entire season had elapsed since the early afternoon. He thought of the sheets of his manuscript trampled by horses’ hooves. But even they could not be more distressing or destructive than the Quartermaster’s account of the murder of the monarch. He’d tried to forget about it, but it was no good. He first tried to coax the thought away, then he tried to order it to leave his mind, but neither method worked. Then he sought to transform the story to some degree and to soften it, but it serried its ranks into an impregnable position … The great Sultan, Murad Han, was not killed by Christians but by his own viziers … A trickle of molten lead in his ear would probably not have hurt him more. It was a horror, a space slashed open, and an intoxicating doubt all wrapped in one.

He couldn’t work out why on a night like this his mind remained for no obvious reason firmly fixed on this vision. Then he thought he understood: he was on his own in the dark, in a quite unnatural place that was neither the ground, nor a tent, nor an office. A kind of nowhere place, a place truly beyond the reach of law, outside the world and the Empire. Maybe this was the first opportunity he had ever had to ponder at length on something he would never dare write down: the truth about the Battle of Kosovo! Hurry up! he told himself. Dawn will soon be breaking.

And that was how, in the bowels of the earth, he meditated the first canto: Sultan Murad Han on his white horse, when battle was done, towards dusk, inspecting the dead. Suddenly, a ragged Balkan with running sores rises up from the ground and tries to come close, supposedly to kiss his hand. The guards hold him back, but strangely the Sultan tells them to leave him be. Now the man approaches and, instead of kissing the proffered hand, he extracts from beneath the rags covering his otherwise naked body an even barer blade, then leaps up like a wild cat and plunges it straight into the Sultan’s heart. That’s the story you read in all the chronicles, but the Quartermaster cries out: Lies! How could you believe, you idiot, that on such a bloody day any infidel could have got so close to the Emperor? And how could you assume in addition that a wounded man could spring from the ground to the full height of a rider on horseback, and with a single blow get a knife through the Sultan’s breast-plate?