Ismail Kadare - Elegy for Kosovo

The news about the churches was unclear and contradictory. Some said that only the Serb Orthodox churches had been torn down, while the Catholic churches, those of the Albanians, had been spared. Others insisted that all the churches. Catholic and Orthodox, had been destroyed, and others again claimed the opposite, that not a single church had been touched, and that it was the languages and not the faiths that were under attack.

The people listening clasped their heads in despair. What a calamity! How could people live without their language? How were they to understand each other?

The new arrivals shrugged their shoulders. They had spoken so little during their flight that it seemed they did not see the loss of their language as a big problem. There were even some who felt that it might be better this way. They had said what they had to say in this world, and now that everything had come to an end it was better to be silent.

Others shook their heads doubtfully. The language question was still somehow unsettled, they said. They had heard with their own ears how heralds proclaimed other prohibitions from village to village, prohibitions having to do with chimneys and with women showing their faces.

“No, no!” protested the men, who could not believe what they were hearing. “Prohibiting chimneys and covering women’s faces is incredible — it doesn’t make sense!”

“Sense or nonsense, call it what you want, but things have changed back there. What’s there now is slavery! Do you understand what I am saying? S-l-a-v-e-r-y! I am telling you, there is no more Bosnia, nor Greece, nor Serbia, nor Albania, nor Walachia — only a ‘region.’ That is what the Turkish officials call the world in their language. For them there are two kinds of regions — good and bad. The good or proper region is the Islamic region. The other is perverse, foreign.”

As they spoke they turned to Ibrahim, the Turk they had lost sight of for a few days, who had reappeared the night before.

To their surprise they saw him bowing down, prostrating himself, as they had heard that Muslims do,

“What are you doing there, Ibrahim?” they called out to him. “You want to become a Christian, and yet you continue to pray like a Muslim?“

The Turk motioned them not to disturb him. He finished his prayers and then got up with a lost look on his face, as if he had returned from another world.

The people stared at him wildly. Whispers were heard: “Accursed Turk!” — “You deceived us all! — “Right from the start I didn’t trust him!“

The Turk looked at them one by one, his eyes surprisingly bright.

“What is wrong?” he asked in a low voice.

“What is wrong?” someone in the crowd shouted. “This morning you made the sign of the cross, and now you pray like a Turk! Are you making fun of us?“

“No, I am not,” he answered. “I am not making fun of you. I have an honest heart.”

With jumbled words he began telling them his predicament. He wanted to become a Christian from deep within his heart, but at the same time he was unable to expel his other belief. For the time being, both lived within him. Especially at night, he felt them moving, jostling each other, gasping, trying to take over by fair means or foul. So while everyone else was sound asleep, Ibrahim was tortured. He felt that soon enough one of the two faiths would be broken and driven out of him. But he would not pressure or trick either one of them. He was waiting impartially for the result, hoping that in the end the faith of the cross would triumph.

They listened intently, and then a Bosnian man asked him, “In other words, you are waiting for your body to shed one of the faiths like a reptile sheds its skin? Speak frankly, Turk, are you a snake?“

The Turk’s eyes filled with deeper sorrow.

“I am not a snake, no! I am an orphan like the stars, a soldier lost like the sands of Yemen, but I am not a snake.”

One after the other they turned their backs on him and left. Only a Jew by the name of Heiml stayed back, eyeing him as if he were trying to figure out from which part of the Turk’s body one of the two faiths would be expelled.

Now they were so far away that hardly any news reached them anymore. Even when news did come, it was so altered by the distance that they were not sure what to make of it. It was as if one were to believe a courier who had grown old — even died — traveling down an endless road; had still managed to somehow get through and deliver his message.

This was how the news came to them that their new monarchy who initially had been called “Emir” and then “Sultan, had been given the new title “Yildirim” — “Lightning Bolt.”

The fugitives were deeply pained. Under the title of Sultan, he had brought the Balkan and the Byzantine princes to their knees. With his new title he might well bring all of Europe to its knees. They could get as far away as they wanted; he was bound to follow them. Their souls would be plunged into terror every time the sky darkened and a lightning bolt came tearing through driving rain.

A second message specified that Lightning Bolt was only the nickname of Bayezid, the new monarch who had mounted the throne after his father’s death on the Plains of Kosovo. But this new message, instead of erasing the first one, gave it even more weight.

The Turks, before they ground the world under their heel, would conquer the skies. They had put the crescent moon on their banners and then made thunder and lightning their own — and tomorrow God knows what they would attack: the stars, the winter clouds, perhaps time itself.

For a few days the fugitives stayed in a friendly region. The villagers gave them bread to eat and listened to their tales with compassion even though they did not understand their language, and at night they let them sleep in the porches of their churches. The villagers feared only one thing: that the refugees might have brought the plague with them. The rest did not matter.

They had heard talk about the Turkish peril, but only vaguely. And for some time now there had been talk of a new crusade being summoned against the Turk. All the Christian states were to rally together. The pope of Rome himself was to head the crusade.

The fugitives rejoiced at these words. The farther north they went the higher the cathedrals and the towers of the castles became. Black iron crosses dominated the skies. One stifling night, two solitary lightning bolts, instead of sending shivers through the crosses as one would expect, seemed to turn in terror and dash away.

God be praised — Christianity was still mighty in all its lands. The Balkans had been defeated on the continent’s borders, but here, in its heart, things were quite different. The fugitives were soothed by the city gates and walled towers, the princely titles and emblems and coats of arms, and the Latin inscriptions in the bronze and marble of the churches.

While the fugitives were awaiting permission to enter one of the somber little cities (at times their very lack of size seemed to make them all the more dismal), guards came and dragged Ibrahim the Turk away and clapped him in irons.

At first they were not particularly worried. They had often run into trouble on account of the Turk. But this time things looked bad. All the explanations about how he had deserted his own army and how he had two faiths were of no avail. Quite the opposite. Every time his two faiths were mentioned, the guards’ eyes flashed with scorn. In the end, the Balkan fugitives were told that they were wasting their time: the Turk would be submitted to a secret investigation by the Holy Inquisition.

“If he is innocent,” they told each other, “then he will be set free like all the other innocents, but he might well be a spy, and we in our foolishness may have been gullible.” Others recalled that it was not the Holy Inquisition that dealt with spies but the town court. “If you ask me, I never really liked this business of his two faiths,” one of the Walachians said. “A man cannot have two faiths, just as no creature of God can have two heads. There might be two-headed vipers, but no two-headed men.“