Ismail Kadare - Elegy for Kosovo

A courtyard with an unhinged door, a Mongol spear, and a map of the continent sent recently from Amsterdam struggled to connect with each other.

The old lady finally got out of bed, threw something over her shoulders, and walked over to the window. The thought that had repelled her sleep was still sparkling in her mind, formless and without a protective crust, free and lethal.

Standing by the big window, she finally managed to calm somewhat the foaming fury. She coaxed it tenderly, in the hope that it would rise from the fog.

And that is exactly what happened. The map and the barbarian spear with its tufts of fur and the mysterious inscriptions on its shaft connected with each other. The whole European continent was there: the lands of the Gauls, the German regions, and, farther up, the Baltic territories and the rugged Scandinavian lands sprawled out like a sleeping lion. Then, below the central flatlands, the peninsulas of the Pyrenees, the Apennines, and the third peninsula, which had initially been named Illyricum and Byzantium and now was being called “Balkan.” She saw clearly the regions from which the poor wandering fugitives had come: Croatia, Albania, Serbia, Greece, Bosnia, Walachia, Macedonia. From now on they would have to carry this new name, fossilized and ponderous, on their backs like a curse as they stumbled along like a tortoise in its shell

The barbarian spear had always been like a sign at the borders of the continent, but they had been quick to forget, like a nightmare that scatters with the approach of dawn. This is how they had all forgotten Attila and Genghis Khan, and this was perhaps how they were going to forget the Ottomans.

“Your apprehension is a great surprise to me,” Baron Melanchthon had said to her a few months earlier. “You are worried about something that does not exist, and therefore cannot be threatened. Europe — Asia — are but entities in the barbarians’ minds, or on their parchments. They are figures of legend, half woman, half God knows what.”

She had taken offense and made no reply.

“How dreadful,” she said to herself, her eyes fixed on the darkness as if she were speaking to the night. “The Ottomans have burst into the outer court of their mansion and they look the other way. They are reinforcing the gates of their castles, posting more guards on their towers, but when it comes to looking farther, their eyes are blind.”

“Europe,” she said to herself, as if she were trying to seize this word transformed by ridicule and neglect. She had watched words wilt away and die when they were neglected by the minds of men. “Europe,” she repeated, almost with dread. Twenty-odd empires, a hundred different peoples. Some jammed against each other, others far apart. Which was Europe’s true mass — constricted or distended? As learned friends of hers had explained, Europe had started out as a dense galaxy in the middle of a void, but in recent years, particularly with the great plague, it had turned into a void itself, besieged by great hordes.

The barbarians had again burst through the defending barriers. They brandished their spears right under Europe’s nose without clarifying the meaning of their sign: death or goodwill.

One by one she brought to mind her powerful connections: princes, cardinals, philosophers, even the pope of Rome. She tried to recollect their faces, their eyes, particularly the lines on their foreheads, where the worries of a man are drawn more clearly than anywhere else. Were they racking their brains how to rally together to defend themselves, particularly now that their southern barrier had been breached, or were they thinking no further than their next banquet?

Her weary mind found calm. Then, in her thoughts, she saw a long rope, an exceedingly long rope, uncoil as if it had been randomly thrown. “Greece!” she exclaimed, as if she had had a revelation. Her friend Wyclif had told her that this had been how the ancient Greek world had measured itself: an endless strip of land, a thousand five hundred miles long, stretching from the coasts of Asia Minor to the Greek peninsula and the shores of Illyria, and from the southern beaches of Gaul down to Calabria and Sicily. This rope was delicate, brittle, cut in places by waves of fate, and yet it had managed to hold out and penetrate the depths of the continent.

Now the Greeks, like the other peoples of the region, had been toppled. The eleven peoples of the peninsula had to stumble along within a communal shell named Balkan, and it seemed that nobody gave them a second thought, unless to anathematize them: “You cursed wretches!”

She could not blot out the eyes of the poor destitute fugitives who had sung and spoken at the banquet. In their black sockets she saw a Europe that had died, transformed into a doleful memory. “Great Lord in Heaven! Why have you wrought these things in those lands?” she thought. “One has to lose a thing in order to cherish it!”

Everything they had narrated unraveled slowly in her mind: the sacrifices at the foot of bridges, the Furies in the guise of washerwomen on the banks of a river, the idlers in the village coffeehouses, the killer forced to attend the funeral feast of his victim. “It is all there, O Lord!” she gasped. “Fragments of the great ruins that gave birth to everything.”

“We must not abandon our outer court!” she almost said aloud. “If it falls, we shall all fall!“

Her mind tumbled once more into an unbearable whirl. Her head and temples ached viciously. She tried to rise; she even thought she had risen, found paper and pen to write to princes, to her friend Wyclif, even the pope of Rome. And she felt much lighter, not only able to write but ready to deliver her message with her own hands across the sky.

In the morning she was found dead and cold. A whiteness, which one only finds in the darkness of nonexistence, had settled on her face like a mask.

All the banquet guests of the previous night attended her majestic funeral, which took place in the neighboring principality from which she had come. After the mass and the ringing of the bells, someone remembered to summon the foreign minstrels. It seems that during the banquet she had said that she would like them to sing something at her grave.

They numbly took out their musical instruments and, with the same numbness, sang a song for hen “A black fog has descended, the great lady has died. Rise, O Serbs, the Albanians are seizing Kosovo!” — “A black fog has descended upon us, the great lady has died. Rise, O Albanians! Kosovo is falling to the pernicious Serb!“

They sang, and even though the mourners at the funeral did not understand the words, they listened with full attention, their eyes blank, sorrowful, and filled with incomprehension.

As the army prepared to set out on its homeward march with my body, leaving behind only my blood gathered in a leaden vessel, I felt for a while that the world had fallen silent forever. But then I heard the rumbling of the iron chariots and the trampling of hooves growing fainter in the distance, and I realized that I had been left here on my own.

I had heard my father say, as he had heard his father say, that all aberration, memory, fury, and vengeance are imprinted in a man’s blood. And yet it seems that I was the first monarch whose blood was so violently pressed out of his body on these cursed plains.

My corpse — limbs, crowned head, hair, my gray chest with the wound in its center — was carried to Anatolia, taking nothing with it. Everything remained here, and I have come to believe that my viziers did this to elude the shadow of my blood.

Thus they left, abandoning me here in this tomb, with an oil lamp above me burning day and night. I thought they would be quick to return, to attack Europe, now that the road lay open, or at least to pay homage to me, to show that they had not forgotten me. But spring came and went, as did summer, and then another spring, but no one came.