Ismail Kadare - Agamemnon's Daughter

It was a starless night, but the moonlight gave off such a strong sense of indolence that you could believe that in the morning everyone would abandon all activity — that nomads, birds, and even states would lie flat out, exhausted, as lifeless as corpses laid out beside each other, as we two then were.

We have at last learned the name of the nomad chief: he is called Timur i Leng, which means Timur the Lame. He is said to have waged a fearsome war against the Ottomans, and after having captured their king — called Thunder — had him paraded from one end of the vast steppes to the other.

Apparently, before long he’ll be going after us next. Now it is all becoming clearer — the order for the rebuilding of the Wall, as well as the temporary calm which we all hastened to describe as a “puzzle,” as we do for anything we can’t understand in the workings of the state. While he was dealing with the Turks, the one-legged terror did not constitute a threat. But now. .

A returning messenger who stopped here last night brought us disturbing news. In the western marches of our Empire, right opposite our Wall and barely a thousand feet from it, the Barbarians had built a kind of tower, made not from stone but from severed heads. The edifice as it was described to us was not tall — about as high as two men — and from a military point of view it was no threat at all to the Wall, but the terror those heads exude is more effective than a hundred fortresses. Despite the meetings with soldiers and stonemasons, where it was explained that the pile was, in comparison to our Wall, no more significant than a scarecrow (the crows that nonetheless swarmed around it had actually suggested the comparison), everyone, soldiers included, felt the wind of panic pass through them. “I’ve never had so many letters to take to the capital,” the messenger declared as he patted his leather saddlebag. He said most of the epistles had been penned by officers’ wives, writing to their aristocratic lady friends to report intolerable migraines and so forth, which was a way of asking them to please see if they could get their husbands transferred to another posting.

The messenger also said that the pestilential air that this pile of heads exhaled was so unbearable that for the first time in its existence the Wall had apparently contracted, and the messenger had prayed to God that the rebuilding work which had been launched at such an opportune moment should be completed as quickly as possible.

The messenger’s tale left us all utterly depressed. Without admitting it to ourselves, we were aware that we would henceforth cast a quite different eye on the Wall’s damaged parts, on its cracks and crumbly patches. Our minds obstinately kept turning toward the pile of severed heads. Once the messenger had left, my deputy pointed out that the wise old saying “Skull on stone breaks nothing but bone” — a phrase whose brushstrokes we mastered at primary school thanks to our teacher’s liberal use of the rod — had become obsolete. The way things looked now, heads seemed more likely than anything else to be the weapon of choice against the Wall.

No troop movements on the border. A brutal earthquake has shaken everything except the Wall, which has long known how to cope with seismic disturbances. The silence that reigned after that last shock subsided seemed deeper than ever. . I have the impression that the rebuilding work is being done none too carefully and just for show. The day before the quake, the building used as a watchtower, on our right, collapsed again, after having already been erected twice. It all leads me to think that treason has crept into the imperial palace. My deputy has a different view. He has long been convinced that people in the capital are so deeply immersed in pleasure and debauchery that few of them ever think of the existence of nomads and frontiers. Only yesterday he was telling me that he’d heard people say that a new kind of mirror has been invented — mirrors that more than double the size of a man’s penis. Ladies take them into their bedchambers to arouse themselves before making love.

Our only comfort is that there doesn’t seem to be the slightest movement on the other side of the Wall, except for a few scouts who flash past on horseback now and then, and sometimes we also see small groups of ragged Turkish soldiers. When, toward the end of summer, the Turks first appeared, our lookouts were terribly alarmed. Our first thought was that they might be attack units disguised as defeated Turks, but then we got reports from spies who had infiltrated them that they were in fact the remnants of the Ottoman army Timur had routed at Chubukabad. They’ve been wandering up and down the frontier for a long time now. Most of them are old men, and, when evening comes, their thoughts go back to those distant lands with fearsome names where they fought, and also presumably to their Sultan Bayazed, whose memory trails with them across the steppe like a dead flash of lightning.

More than once they asked for work on the Wall restoration project; after the repeated collapses of the right-hand tower, one was so persistent he actually got to see me personally and told me in bad Chinese that he’d once seen in a far distant land a bridge in one of whose pillars a man had been immured. He pointed to his eyes as he swore that he had really seen it, and even asked for a scrap of cardboard so he could draw the shape of the bridge for me. It was only a small bridge, he said, but to stop it from collapsing a sacrifice had to be made. How, then, could this huge Wall of China remain standing without an offering of the same kind?

He came back to see me a few days later and told the same story once more, but this time he made a lavishly detailed drawing of the bridge.

When I asked him why he’d pictured it upside down, he turned pale. “I don’t know,” he replied, “perhaps because that’s the way it looks in the water. . Anyway, the night before last, that’s how I saw it in my dream. Upside down.” After he left, we took some time to look at his bizarre sketch. He explained that the symbol † marked the place of the sacrifice. After I stared at it hard for a long while, I thought I could see the bridge beginning to quiver. Or was that because the Turk had told me that he remembered the bridge’s reflection in the river better than the bridge itself? If I may say so, it was a way of seeing things from an aquatic point of view — a perspective, the Turk had explained, thought to diverge completely from a human point of view, for instance, or from a so-to-speak terran perspective. It was the waters that had demanded the sacrifice of immurement (at least, that’s what the legend said) — that is to say, sentencing a man to death.

Late that night, slanting beams of moonlight falling on the masonry made human shapes appear here and there on the side of the Wall. “Accursed Turk!” I swore under my breath, believing it was he who had stirred up such morbid images in my mind. It then struck me that the upturned bridge was perhaps the very model of the way tidings good and bad move around our sublunar world. It was very likely that nations did indeed pass messages to each other in that way — signals announcing the coming of their official delegations, with their letters sealed with black wax, a few hundred or a few thousand years in advance.

The chiefs have gathered at the kurultai, and Khan Timur’s yarlik has come: “Never venture over the other side,” it says, “for that ways lies your perdition.” But the more I’m told not to, the more I want to step over and see the cities and the women who are doubled in burnished glass, wearing nothing but a gauze they call mend-afsh (silk), women with a pleasure-slit sweeter than honey, but this damned rock heap won’t let me, it obstructs me, it oppresses me, and I would like to stab it with my dagger, though I know steel has no power over it, for it even withstood the earthquake only two days ago. When the shuddering earth and the masonry were wrestling with each other, I screamed aloud to the quake, “You’re the only one that can bring it down!” But it made no difference, the Wall won out, it smothered the quake, and I wept as I watched the earthquake’s last spasms, like a bull who’s had its throat cut, until, alas, I saw it expire, and my God, did I feel sad, as sad as that other time in the plain of Bek-Pek-Dala, when I said to the commander, Abaga, “I don’t know why, but I feel like screaming,” and he said, “This steppe is called Bek-Pek-Dala, the steppe of hunger, and if you don’t feel your own hunger, you’ll feel the hunger of others, so spur your steed on, my son.” That’s what they all tell me: spur your steed on, never let it stop, son of the steppe, but this lump of stone is stopping me, it’s in my way, it’s rubbing up against my horse, it’s calling to its bones, and I myself feel drawn in to its funereal mortar, I don’t know how, but it’s made my face go ashen, it’s making me melt and blanch, aaah. .