Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“What then? What will happen if …” Çelebi didn’t dare add: if we don’t take the citadel.

The Quartermaster looked at him with his calm expression in which the chronicler could never make out the respective proportions of coldness and honesty.

An orphanage for fallen stars : Sadedin’s phrase came back to his mind as if in a dream.

“Then a new expedition will set out next spring,” the Quartermaster replied in a strange voice. “Battalions without number will march in line, with drums rolling and banners flapping in the breeze just like before,” he went on in the same odd tone. “They’ll advance day and night, on foot, on horseback, on camels, in carriages, until they reach these ramparts. Here” — the Quartermaster pointed to the ground — “they’ll see the traces left by our camp, all muddled and muddied by winter, but visible nonetheless. They’ll pitch their tents in the same places, and the same story will begin all over again.”

The Quartermaster’s eyes gleamed evilly as he stared at the chronicler.

“Don’t you want to know what will happen if the citadel doesn’t yield next year either?”

The chronicler was in a cold sweat. He was certainly not crazy enough to ask such a scandalous question, but he also didn’t dare contradict his illustrious friend.

“If the citadel does not fall next spring,” the Quartermaster said, “then another expedition will be launched in the spring of the year after next.”

Çelebi didn’t know where to look. Sadedin — may the poor man go to the devil! — would have had an easier time with his glazed sockets!

“Only this time it will be a much bigger army, and maybe the great Padishah himself will lead it.”

The chronicler could feel sweat dripping from his brow.

“The expedition,” the Quartermaster went on, “will be far more imposing, as is fitting for one led by the Emperor himself. It will have many more units attached to it and their commanders will be of higher rank. Our war council will be replaced by an assembly of viziers, pashas and emirs, Kara-Mukbil and Kurdisxhi will disappear in favour of the beylerbeys of Rumelia and Anatolia, Old Tavxha’s seat will go to the Grand Agha of the Janissary Corps, the Shehul-Islam will take the Mufti’s place, the astrologer who was flayed today will be supplanted by the astrologer of the Porte, and in your place, Mevla Çelebi, there’ll be the famous Ibn-Suleiman himself.”

After a short pause the Quartermaster resumed his speech.

“The thing is, the men will be the same and so will those walls. And death will still have the same colour and the same smell.”

Çelebi’s blood ran cold. What if the Quartermaster started answering another question of his own making which his partner never had the slightest intention of asking? He waited in terror for a moment; then, as his host seemed disinclined to resume the conversation, he drew the conclusion that even highly placed people, however powerful they may be, know there are boundaries that may not be crossed.

Gradually the cruel and candid look in the Quartermaster General’s eyes blurred and softened, and his face slipped back into its customary expression, save that it now betrayed a little weariness.

The orderly brought in two glasses of syrup.

“This war will go on for a long time,” the Quartermaster said. “Albania will be drained of all its energy. This is only the beginning.”

He took a sip and gave a deep sigh.

“Every spring,” he continued, “when the green shoots reappear, we will return to these parts. The ground will shake under our troops’ marching feet. The valleys will be burned and everything that grows or stands in them will be reduced to ashes. The prosperous economy of the country will be ruined. Thereafter the people round here will use the word ‘Turk’ to scare their children. And yet, as I’ve already told you, Çelebi, if we don’t overcome them on this first campaign, then we’ll need twice as many men to win at the second attempt, and three times as many at the third attempt, and so on. If they escape from this hell, then it will be very hard to annihilate them later on. They’ll become accustomed to sieges, to hunger and thirst, to massacres and alerts. Meanwhile their first-born will be children of war. And the worst of it is that they will become familiar with death. They will get used to it the way an animal that has been tamed no longer causes fear. So even if we do conquer them in battle, we will never overcome them. In attacking them, in striking at them without mercy, in throwing our boundless army at them without succeeding in laying them low, we are unwittingly doing the Albanians a great service.”

The Quartermaster shook his head in bitterness.

“We thought we were putting them to death. But in fact, we are making them immortal, and by our own hand too.”

Çelebi was dazed.

“Once, if I am not mistaken, I told you about Skanderbeg,” the Quartermaster went on. “He’s much talked about. He’s said to be the greatest warrior of our era, and he’s been called at one and the same time a lion, a renegade, a traitor to Islam, a champion of Christ, and who knows what else. As far as I can see all these epithets do apply to him, but I would prefer to describe him differently. To my mind he’s a man ahead of his time. We are striking at his visible part, but there is another part we can do nothing about, absolutely nothing, because it has escaped us already. For the moment he is dragging Albania into the abyss, believing that he is making his nation unattainable, in his own image, by making it also pass out of its own time into another dimension. He may well be right. It would be pointless for us to try to separate Skanderbeg from Albania. Even if we wanted to we would not be able to do it.”

The chronicler strove as he listened to seize on a pause or a sigh long enough to allow him to change the topic and direction of the conversation. But as the Quartermaster General allowed himself to be carried away on the wings of his own words — a habit Çelebi was now familiar with — the chronicler could not get a word in edgeways.

“What he’s working towards,” the Quartermaster continued, “is to give Albania a cloak of invulnerability, to give it a form which casts it up and beyond the vicissitudes of the present — a metaform, if I may say, which makes it able to resuscitate, or to put it another way, he is trying to prepare his nation for another world. I don’t know if you follow my drift … He is trying to crucify Albania, as their God was crucified, so that like Christ, Albania will be resurrected. He doesn’t care whether it is on the third day, the third century or the third millennium after his death that Albania rises! What matters is his vision of the future …”

The Quartermaster sighed profoundly and lowered his eyelids, as if he too had had a vision.

“Mevla, your chronicle is going to be long and gloomy,” he went on. He looked at the historian’s grey hair, and his glance gave comfort to the chronicler, as it seemed to him to be full of sympathy. “This siege has gone on a long time,” he added. “Autumn is nearly upon us. The assaults will get even more violent.”

They chatted for a while about the change of season. For the moment there was no telltale sign of autumn, which existed only in their minds. But within the next few weeks, the plain would wake one morning and find itself spattered with thousands of puddles, big and small, blinking at the sky like so many worried eyes.

“What’s Saruxha doing? I haven’t seen him for ages,” Çelebi asked, seizing what seemed like a good opportunity for redirecting the conversation.

The Quartermaster stared at him for what appeared to be the time it took him to remember who Saruxha was.