Ismail Kadare - The Siege

A rich, thick smell of earth wetted by rain after a long drought rose from the ground. The sky was entirely overcast by heavy, stationary, grey-black clouds releasing a steady, even stream of rain. Regular autumn weather.

Dawn was breaking.

He gazed at the dark sky, then at the huge camp with its thousands of grey, triangular tents looking like funeral mounds erected over thirty thousand sleeping soldiers. He turned his back on all that and went inside. Then he woke one of his orderlies. The man was shaking.

“Fetch Hasan,” the Pasha told him.

A moment later Hasan was beside him. He was shaking as well.

“Bring me Exher.”

The eunuch bowed and left. He was back a moment later, holding the Pasha’s young wife by the hand. She had puffy eyes with horrible black bags underneath.

“Listen,” he said. She wasn’t properly awake and he had to shake her roughly by the shoulder. “Listen!” he said again, pulling hard on one of her plaits to bring her terrified face closer to his. “If it’s a boy,” he said, jabbing a finger at the belly beneath her fine chemise, “if it’s a boy, you will name him after me.”

The girl stared at him in terror.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes, sire.”

“Now go away.”

The eunuch came in and took the girl out.

The Pasha stood still for a moment in the half-light. Then he asked his orderly to bring him a glass of water, which he did.

“I’m going back to bed,” he said.

He took a vial of sleeping draught from a casket by the head of his bed and poured it into a goblet.

He thought how the powder, when it dissolved, would make the water go cloudy like a section of sky. There was sleep in that powder that would last one night, maybe two. He emptied another vial into the goblet. A thousand nights, he thought, a thousand years. He brought the goblet to his lips and drank its contents in a single gulp.

He was still standing upright. Far away outside, the rain drums carried on with their mortal pounding. When he started feeling dizzy he reclined on the cushions and closed his eyes. Thoughts crowded into his mind untidily. He would have liked to have thought a sublime thought, but he could not. So that’s it, then, Ugurlu Tursun Tunxhaslan Sert Olgun Pasha! he said to himself. Then, before asking God for his mercy, he reflected on his life and wondered if it was really necessary to invent such a long name for a life that was so short, then he thought of the man for whose greater glory he had worked so hard — but in vain, alas, in vain! — and then, as if in a feverish delirium, he thought of this noisy world standing well back while his own soul wandered off in the rain.

It began to rain at dawn on the first day of the month of Saint Shenmiter. I was about to relieve the sentries when the first drops began to fall, as heavy as tears .

Day was breaking. I wanted to shout out loud, ring all the bells, wake up all our men, but I only thought about doing such things. All I did was lean my head on the stone wall and stay still in that position for a while. As they wettened, the granite blocks sweated out all the heat they had stored up through the summer and they also seemed to release, so to speak, all the anguish of that long season. They seemed to be coming alive, and it struck me that at any minute they would begin to breathe, moan and sigh .

Somewhere in the heart of the Turkish camp the drums that speak of rain are beating. From up here we can see soldiers wrapping equipment in oilskins. Thousands of lances and emblems stick up like the spines on a hedgehog’s back from that huge dark camp that stains the land as far as the eye can see. Unusual activity can be seen around the tent of the commander-in-chief. Torch-bearers go in and out incessantly. It surely signals some important event: an urgent meeting, a sacking, or a death .

O Heavens! Do not let up too soon! I hear myself praying. Thou who art ending this season of war, do not abandon us now, great Heaven of ours!

The closed carriage transporting the women of the harem moved along the road on its own. At the start of the journey it had travelled almost in convoy with another vehicle loaded with the deceased commander-in-chief’s arms and chattels, but after two days on the road the harem carriage had had to slow down because one of the women, Exher, was in pain, and so it fell back.

It was drizzling. The women gazed dreamily at the muddy track dotted with the first puddles.

“Look,” Ajsel said as she pointed to the right. “Up on the mountainside, you can see the small villages we noticed on our way here. Can you make out the church and its bell-tower?”

“What a god-forsaken hole!”

“What about the fortress? It can’t be far from here. Do you remember when we saw it? It was dusk, and the flag on top looked completely black.”

“The fortress is a long way yet.”

“Do you think so? I remember it being very near those villages,” Blondie said.

“You’re getting it all muddled up. Let’s ask Lejla. She’s doing this trip for the second time.”

“Don’t wake her up!”

The carriage wheels kept up their monotonous creak and screech. Through the gently fluttering silk curtain they could see the silhouettes of Hasan and the driver.

Ajsel carried on staring at the empty road and the dreary autumn landscape. Lejla was asleep and each time there was a bump in the road her head lolled so far to the side that it looked like it was about to come off her shoulders.

“Look! Sappers!” Ajsel exclaimed. “They’re making a new bridge.”

“They’re setting things up for the retreat,” Lejla blurted out.

For a few minutes they watched men working in the rain.

“Yet he will never go home!” Ajsel said.

“ He must have been buried today.”

“Yes, that must be so. And now all this rain is falling on him .”

Blondie raised her head slightly and then let it fall back. It was the first time they had spoken of their master after the event. They could still not quite get their tongues round it.

“It was you who spent the last night with him, wasn’t it?” Ajsel asked. “Tell us, did he speak in his sleep?”

“Yes,” Blondie said without moving.

“And what was he saying?”

“I couldn’t make it out. I don’t speak Turkish very well.”

“Didn’t you catch anything at all? Perhaps he hinted at the reason for his act. Did you talk about Skanderbeg?”

“I can’t really remember. Maybe he did mention that name. But he was constantly talking to the Sultan. He was explaining himself, awkwardly. He was saying he was innocent. He also spoke of Skanderbeg, but under his other name, the name of …”

“The fearsome name of Geor-ge Cas-tri-ote?”

“Yes, I think that was it.”

“ He always used to speak in his sleep,” Lejla mumbled.

Blondie was about to say something more, but she changed her mind and lowered her gaze to the floor.

“Girls! Look at the hanged men!” Ajsel shouted as she pointed out of the little carriage window.

They all leaned over to get a look.

“Are they the ones we saw on the journey out?”

“Yes, the same.”

“They’re nothing but skeletons now.”

A flock of crows startled by the noise of the carriage flew off down the road.

“When we came the other way, their bodies were still whole, so they must have just been hanged.”

“How long will they be left up?”

“Who knows?”

“Further on we’ll see heads on stakes.”

“No, we won’t, we must have gone past them during the night. The next landmark is the monastery with the three crosses.”