Ismail Kadare - The Siege

“That’s right. I get it all muddled up.”

“Maybe because we are going backwards.”

The carriage shuddered to a stop. Rough voices shouted, “Halt! Give way!”

“What’s going on?” they asked, in fear and trembling. It took them a while to grasp that a military convoy was coming past. Scouts had come ahead to clear the route. Their helmets and packs were soaked right through and slowed their pace. Their tired eyes looked as if they had gone blind.

“They’ve got new equipment,” Lejla whispered. “Do you see their short swords? And the green helmets? It’s the first time I’ve seen ones like that.”

They kept quiet as the seemingly endless line of soldiers went past, leading their pack mules by the bit. Then came long six-wheeled tumbrels, making a hideous din.

“They’re the field canteens,” Lejla explained. “They’re usually the last vehicles in a convoy.” She sighed. “I suppose it’s all over now.”

The harem carriage slowly got back on the road.

“So what are we now? Young widows?” Exher wondered.

“What nonsense!” Lejla exclaimed. “Young widows! Mind you, I wouldn’t object for myself, but …”

“We mustn’t grumble. I feared the worst after he died.”

“What do you mean?”

“They might easily have done away with us all,” Lejla observed. “My blood ran cold when the war council met that morning. I was terrified they would give the command to Old Tavxha. Hasan had heard the sentries on duty at the time saying that if Tavxha was appointed commander-in-chief, he would have us beheaded. He and the Mufti blamed us for all the army’s misfortunes.”

“Idiots!” Ajsel exclaimed.

“Only when the meeting ended and I learned that the high command had been handed jointly to the three senior captains,” Lejla went on, “only then did my blood begin to thaw.”

The conversation petered out, as it had so many times before. Ajsel propped her chin on the ledge of the carriage door.

“Does it still hurt?” Lejla asked Exher as she leaned over the pregnant girl.

She nodded. Her lips were pale and her eyes were clouded.

“I think I’ve started to bleed again.”

They said nothing for several minutes. Eventually Exher seemed to find some relief. Ajsel turned away from the window. Blondie ran her slender fingers through her hair.

“There’s a winter pasture,” Lejla said. “Are there any in your part of the world?”

“I don’t know,” Ajsel replied. “I’ve never been in this kind of country before.”

Now and again they noticed storks’ nests, and shepherds wearing black hoods over their heads. And identical steep, rocky slopes without end.

“Is that what a state is?” Exher asked, pointing to the countryside. “I mean: is a state the same thing as the land, or is there a difference?”

They burst out laughing, but none of them could really answer the question. Lejla said that the State was actually the Empire, whereas Ajsel opined that the difference between a land and a state was that the latter could not be seen by the naked eye.

“Good God!” Blondie suddenly shouted, her eyes bursting out of their sockets. “Just look at the vehicle coming up behind …”

Through the wire-netted porthole at the rear of the carriage could be seen a closed carriage, of a colour and bearing insignia that they knew well.

“Could it be his coffin?” Lejla asked.

“That’s all we need! To be pursued by his coffin!”

The wagon was gaining on them, making a dreadful racket. It was easy to see that it wanted to overtake them. They slumped back into their seats and waited to see what would happen. Their driver and Hasan were also worried, and turned round to look.

For a few moments the two carriages drove abreast of each other. The girls had put their hands over their eyes, save for Lejla, who carried on staring out of the window. What she saw seemed to scare her even more than the idea of having the Pasha’s coffin on her tail.

“Good God!” she wailed. “The architect Giaour!”

The rattling of the wheels was so loud that none of the others heard what she said. She had to wait until the other wagon had pulled some way ahead to describe what she had seen. Hunched forwards and poring over his maps with eyes as bloodshot as Satan’s, Giaour was drawing!

“There’s a rumour that he’s planning the seizure of Constantinople,” Ajsel said.

They kept their eyes on the shrinking black square of the architect’s carriage until it disappeared into the mist ahead, and then gave a sigh of relief.

“There’s a bird that only comes with the snow,” Lejla said. “Tweet, tweet, come here, little bird!” she said in a girlish voice as she tapped on the window. “Those birds are never wrong,” she added after a while. “Winter is coming on.”

“Woe is me!” Exher moaned. She had gone quite livid, and her whole body was shaking. The women looked into each others’ eyes. “This cursed road is killing me. I can feel I am going …”

“Should we ask Hasan to stop for another rest?”

“What’s the point?” Lejla said. “She’s going to have a miscarriage anyway.”

Exher was weeping.

“And he hoped I would give him a son!” she blurted out between her sobs.

“Lie flat for a bit,” Lejla told her. “It might stop the bleeding.”

Exher lay down and raised her legs. She seemed to get a little better after a while.

The carriage shuddered to a halt again.

“Another convoy,” Ajsel said. “Just look at it!”

The unending caravan seemed utterly monstrous. The soldiers were covered in armour — and so were the horses. With just two little eyeholes, their helmeted heads looked terrifying.

Soldiers sat like statues in packed rows on the backs of long six-and eight-wheeled carts, propping their chins on their weapons. Then even heavier vehicles came by. You could make out the black barrels of cannon.

“Every day brings a new invention,” Lejla observed. “Lord, why can’t they just stop with what they’ve got?”

They said nothing more until the entire convoy had passed by. Then they could see out of the window again, and looked at the breast of the mountain passes, a cross standing crooked by the wayside, and trees draped in hoar frost. Here and there they came across signboards nailed to posts, saying “To the capital, 113 miles” or “To Constantinople, 300 miles,” with finger-arrows pointing in the right direction.

“Who will buy us now?” Ajsel wondered aloud.

Blondie raised her eyes. It seemed she was about to work out what to say.

“Can we ever foretell our own fate?” Lejla asked without taking her eyes off the landscape. “If a soldier buys us, maybe we will have to travel this same road again.”

“Ah, give me anything but this journey again!” Exher wailed. “It’s the road to hell!”

Blondie lowered her eyelids and began to hum softly. It was a sad song, with incomprehensible lyrics in the language of her homeland.

“More villages,” Lejla said, to break the silence that had overcome them. “We must have left Europe behind us by now.”

The carriage went on rolling through the rain.

Tirana, 1969–1970

Paris, 1993–1994

In 1968 Soviet tanks overwhelmed Czechoslovakia and put down the liberal government of Alexander Dubček. Albania, the only European ally of Mao’s China, felt the icy breath of the colossus on its doorstep, almost as close to its borders as the decadent bourgeois world of the West. In a mentality of siege, Enver Hoxha, the country’s dictator, ordered the construction of hundreds of thousands of concrete pillboxes across the countryside to defend his tiny country against all imaginable (and imaginary) aggressors. In such a context of national paranoia, Ismail Kadare, then in his early thirties but already a celebrated novelist and poet in his own country and abroad, imagined a novel about a great siege — a siege as evocative of the present as it was radically disconnected from it.