The Traitor's Niche

by Ismail Kadare

  The newspapers were increasingly using this word, which he detested. You left me friendless by deserting me, he thought. You left me alone like a beggar. He knew how the Albanians would reply, if they had a voice: You made yourself a beggar. Just as you abandoned us, we abandoned you. And they would no doubt mention his estate. According to them, he had neglected everything for the sake of his estate. Take away my estate, he might reply. You’ve complained about it for years. I wasn’t going to waste it on myself, I kept it for you. Look how my sons and grandsons betrayed me; I would have passed it on to you. It is land, a piece of Albania, an estate, a farm, call it what you like: it is still land, earth. But the Albanians would not yield. It’s too late, they would say. And they did not even have much sympathy for his age. On the contrary, it infuriated them more than anything. He might moan like four hundred old beggars. His senescence merely showed that he had delayed. Nobody would excuse him his negligence. It was unforgivable to forget Albania for forty days, let alone forty years. Now that circumstances had forced him to remember her, it was too late. He had long been deaf towards her, and now she too was deaf to him.

  How fickle my Albania has been, he thought, staring with bemusement at the distant wintry mountains as if for the first time. How long had he felt like this? He delved deep into his mind. Had he really not loved her? Had he thought only of himself, had he neglected her? But what other land could I love more than her, he exclaimed to himself. Wallachia? Greece? Bosnia? I did everything for Albania, even if I sometimes despaired of her, and who could say that I loved another country more? But at the very moment when he thought that he had silenced these invisible critics (for indeed most of his opponents were in prisons or buried under the earth, though the wind still carried their damned griping), a small voice inside him said: Ali, nobody says you didn’t love Albania, because you’re an Albanian too, but you didn’t love her enough. And in your case not loving her enough is the same as not loving her at all. Albania might have accepted someone else’s casual attentions, but not yours, because she expected a lot from you. His head sank into his beard in a gesture of recognition. Albania did not want just any kind of love. The love she demanded was special, self-effacing, urgent, aching, a love to the death.

  He tried to distract his exhausted mind, but a gnawing doubt remained. Had the Fourth Directorate discovered Albania’s deafness to his appeal? He would tell Vasiliqia that of course it had, because the sultan’s letters were becoming increasingly frosty. Now the salutations at the end, those brilliant peacock’s feathers, were omitted entirely.

  The Fourth Directorate, he muttered to himself. He had despised it for so many years and made fun of it, while quietly it had continued its work. For years, it had been aware of his silent rebellion against the Sublime Porte. He had slipped out of the sovereign’s hands like crumbling soil. His disobedience and even mockery were clearly legible between the polite phrases of his correspondence. He had held talks with the English and with Bonaparte without informing his Padishah at all. He had invited or expelled consuls at whim, and had turned up at great battles with his own army or not, as it suited him. All these facts were well known and discussed openly in high circles, but still the sultan had turned a blind eye. He’s scared of crossing me, Ali Pasha used to boast. Ali enjoyed playing with fire, because this more than anything else gave him a sense of power. Without this game, the last years of his life would have been dull. With every passing day, he more obviously baited the sultan. The sultan often sent him invitations to feasts, but he declined these with derision. He knew what to expect at one of those magnificent dinners: poison in his food, and then, the next day, his head in the Traitor’s Niche.

  Weeks passed, couriers returned from the capital, and it was now evident to everyone that the sultan was fearful of making their rift known. Every week the Fourth Directorate filed copies of reports sent by foreign ambassadors to their governments, informing them that the sultan’s writ counted for nothing in Albania. It was not only the salons, but all kinds of military and even clerical circles that talked openly about the quarrel, in anger or with scorn. Several times the censor was forced to ban the daily newspapers because of poisonous barbs aimed indirectly at the government’s apathy. How long would the capital tolerate the situation?

  Undercover agents prowled the Albanian lands. Their activities were reported in detail to Ali Pasha, who split his sides with mirth. What else will they find? Isn’t it obvious that I no longer obey the Sublime Porte? What else can they look for? These men in the ministries of the capital seem real blockheads. Let them find out all they want about my mischief, he told his loyal followers. Let my Padishah drink this bitter cup to the dregs.

  Ali Pasha did not realise that this same Fourth Directorate, which he had scorned all his life, was digging his grave. It was only in recent months, as his downfall drew near, that he had come to understand what these agents were after as they stalked the land dressed as tramps or gypsies from remote parts of the province. His own insubordination was of no interest to them. They spent their days and nights gauging the possible reaction of the population, if it came to an armed conflict with the capital. And when in the end the work was done, the material gathered and scrutinised, and all possible alternatives assessed (as he learned later from his own spies), there came that terrible letter from the Padishah, like a thunderclap out of a blue sky. ‘I will turn you to ash, ash, ash,’ the emperor wrote. The suddenly outlawed pasha turned this letter over in his hands, reflecting on the sound of this word ‘ash’ that resembled a gust of the sultan’s laughter, or a snake that slithered towards him from the expanses of Asia, to coil itself around his throat.

  Their confrontation was at last out in the open. But it was not its publication that so shocked Ali Pasha, who was rarely shocked, but something else: the discovery that the sultan had delayed his fight with him for so long, not because he was afraid of him, but out of ‘fear of a repetition of unpleasant history’. That was what was written in the Fourth Directorate’s final report, which Ali’s spies had managed to lay their hands on. Wounding words followed: ‘This possibility, in our view, can now be discounted. Albania will not follow Black Ali as it followed the apostate Scanderbeg.’

  So the sultan had issued his declaration of war as soon as it was diagnosed that Albania would leave the old vizier to face his imperial fury alone.

  Ali stared out at the wintry plains for hours. The occasional bird flew over them, looking like a military crest, and, as if to persuade himself that what he saw was real, he muttered under his breath, ‘So this is Albania. Shqi-për-i-a.’ He pronounced its name in the Albanian language, dividing it into four syllables. This name sounded alien. He was used to the Ottoman name, Arnautistan, which had always seemed to him more natural. Now he understood why. It made him feel safe, because with this name the country seemed to belong to him, while this other one, which belonged half to this earth and half to heaven, somehow scared him. ‘Shqipëria,’ he repeated slowly, like a toddler pronouncing for the first time ‘mother’ or ‘father’. It had taken him until the age of eighty to stammer the name of the land that had given him birth. It is too late for me, he almost cried aloud. It was too late for everything. Darkness had fallen all around him. He was, after all, called Black Ali. Ali of the night.

  Sunk in these thoughts, he sat numb and inert for the first few days after his pronouncement as a traitor. Then he slowly came to life again and sent his messengers in all directions to issue another call to arms. But its echo faded and dissolved into the air. Nobody replied except a few crazy old men from a distant province, who, they said, turned up because they were spoiling for a fight of the kind they missed. As soon as they’d had enough – after three or four days, no more – they would go home again.

  The decree proclaiming Black Ali’s treason had no doubt been dispatched already, and that repulsive crawler from the court, the one who coloured his hair with henna like a woman, would arrive in maybe three or four days. Then, a week la
ter at most, the army would begin its march. For some reason, Ali began explaining to Vasiliqia the tiniest details of how a royal army left to crush a rebellion.

  At its head, in front even of the banners and crests, infantrymen carried huge scarecrows on their shoulders. ‘Scarecrows?’ she asked in amazement and horror. ‘Effigies? Why?’ She imagined hundreds of scarecrows in the frozen fields, swaying stiffly in the wind, and her skin crept.

  ‘Why scarecrows?’ she murmured, shuddering from an uncanny horror provoked not by the dark or any fearful sights but merely by a pale light across a plain. She looked away with downcast eyes and wondered why it was that everything connected to her husband’s fate was so unnatural. Things appeared strangely transfigured, immobilised as if at the touch of a thousand witches and warlocks at once, when he talked about Albania. She tried hard to align her own experience of the country with the one he talked about, but she sensed immediately that her Albania was different from his. For Vasiliqia, Albania was quite tangible, with its plateaus and grazing lands rimed with frost, with morning sleep broken by the rhythm of the plunger in the milk churn, impatient hours filled with embroidery for her dowry, patches of sun by the church and the call of the cuckoo. But for her husband it was different: a country frozen as if in a trance, above which the moon and the stars were mere state emblems and crests, horribly lifeless like scarecrows. She had seen scarecrows in the wheat fields with birds circling nearby. But when he talked about scarecrows they were different: they moved through empty space with no wheat or birds, only the winter wind blowing through their rags.

  ‘But why scarecrows?’ she asked for the third time. He prised open his jaw more to grimace than to speak, as he always did when asked to make annoying explanations. He told her that the scarecrows were to show contempt for the enemy, or in this case the rebels. So they represented in a way his premature dethronement. ‘But the sultan doesn’t know,’ he snarled, ‘that when my day comes I will march on his capital not with a couple of hundred scarecrows, but with a thousand, forty thousand …’

  She tried to put the scarecrows out of her mind, but they kept reappearing at the edge of her vision, slowly, coldly drifting towards her as if sliding on snow.

  Meanwhile Ali Pasha waited in the southern tower for his spies to return from the capital city with their road dust and news. First of all he wanted to know who’d be commanding the campaign against him. When a spy brought a reliable report that the counter-insurgency forces would be led by Bugrahan, a third-rank pasha, Ali astonished the informer, who thought this news would delight his master, by raising his hands to his head as if this were a calamity.

  Ali had expected someone else: the Padishah himself, or at least the grand vizier. The threat to him had to be as impressive as possible, the army the biggest, the artillery the most frightening: everything on a huge scale, as befitted an imperial campaign. These things did not scare him. What was important was that he was shown respect. So this news broke his spirit. Two sultans in succession had gone forth against Scanderbeg, and what sultans – Murad the Great and Mehmed the Conqueror. Now this ninny from the military academy, someone he had not even deigned to look upon at state ceremonies, had been chosen to fight him.

  Anger jolted him out of his lassitude. He calmed down a little, recalling that even against Scanderbeg, the campaign had been launched by less distinguished pashas, before the grand viziers and the sultans themselves took up arms in turn. You will come, you will all come, he muttered to himself. In turn, according to rank, as in court protocol … and then in turn the crows will caw over you.

  His messengers and couriers departed again for all parts of Albania. Ali nurtured a hope that now that he had mended his ways, his country might forgive him. Perhaps Albania would take pity on his advanced years and howling loneliness, which was like the solitude of an aged thunderbolt with barely the strength to crack the sky. But again no response came. His hard-hearted country forgave him nothing. The first courier came back with nothing, as did the second, and the third, the fourth, the sixth, the eleventh. ‘What is wrong with my country?’ he grumbled under his breath. Even now, when the forces against him were on their way, the Albanians made no move. Even Greece was taking up arms, he thought despondently. A foreign country was taking advantage of his quarrel with the sultan. The Greeks, thought Vasiliqia, are profiting precisely because they are foreign to you and you are foreign to them. That is why they are profiting. In the last six months, Vasiliqia had learned more about the state than the students of the Royal Institute did in ten years. She understood that the Greeks, who had hated Ali Pasha all his life, were now making use of him, and would cast him aside when the right time came. For the Greeks, he was like a treasure found by the side of the road that nobody had missed. Albania would never have treated him like that.

  Ali had come to accept that Albania would leave him to his fate. He had sworn never to abandon this old crone of a country: the two would go down together, leaving a chaos behind them, like a primordial dust. Now he realised that he would fall by himself. She would remain above ground, and the rains would fall on her as always, the almonds would blossom in April, and the bleating of the sheep and the leaves of the maize stalks would be the same. Her emblems alone might perhaps change … The thought of this abandonment made him want to howl.

  No, Albania will always remember me, he groaned to himself. It will remember me when I am gone, but it will be too late.

  His imagination was so goaded by anger and weighed down by misery that he could no longer think straight. His legend was already taking shape. He knew that he would be remembered, but whether as good or bad, he couldn’t tell.

  His thoughts ran off in all directions like feral cats, but never towards the future. What lay before him was covered by mists and there were precipices on whose brink he had always paused, and turned back dazed. Now he stood for the first time looking out over this ocean, dumbfounded and mercilessly oppressed by its vastness.

  He sat stunned for days on end and Vasiliqia sometimes thought that his grey beard had grown over his mouth and he would never speak again. His insensibility was frightening. Then he came to himself again, overcoming what resembled a frozen wasteland of cloud around him. From deep inside himself, he drew up as if from a well something precious that he had perhaps been keeping for evil days: his own death. This is what he would launch at future generations like some cursed cannonball. ‘I have you and I have death,’ he said to Vasiliqia as soon as his mind cleared.

  The plans for his own death absorbed him for whole days, while the punitive armies of Bugrahan Pasha encircled the castle.

  At first these plans were informed by his envy of Scanderbeg, who had had a quarter-century of glorious rebellion behind him but died an ordinary death in his bed, of a common fever, with wet cloths on his brow and his wife sitting dimly by his head. Ali would not end like that.

  He dragged himself out of the past and stared into the future. He was caught between the past and future, like between two mountains. Ali Pasha the outlaw, without a state, without Albania, confronting a grey abyss in which gales blew the ravens now in one direction and now in another. The thundering vizier. But was this abyss slightly less impressive than the mountains? He thought for a moment. With his death he would ignite over this abyss a great shooting star.

  Not long ago the news had arrived of the death of his friend Napoleon Bonaparte, the little pasha of France, as they called him in these parts. His death too had been muted. He had died in bed like an old lady of Tepelena and, moreover, as a prisoner. At about this time they brought him a new book by that English lord with the limp who had been a guest in his castle. The book was called Childe Harold and in one part the Englishman wrote about Ali Pasha. One of Ali’s scribes read it to him. He listened in silence and then took the book in his hands, looking carefully at the little letters, those crafty ants that were supposed to carry his name on their wretched backs for centuries to come. He threw the book aside. If that was immortali
ty, he spat in its face. He didn’t need books to be remembered. Haxhi Sherreti told him once that the king of Persia had ordered a poet, a certain Ferdowsi, to write a great poem, paying a gold piece for every line. Other kings built pyramids, mosques, temples, mausoleums and shrines to their own posthumous glory. Ali didn’t need pillars and domes. He would plan his own monument. Aged, besieged, and abandoned by everybody, in the few days and nights left to him he would sketch the architecture of his own death.

  All pyramids and monuments, however magnificent, crumbled under the sun and wind, but death, with its interiors, gloomy cupolas, frescoes, portals and perspectives of no return, was a structure that nothing could erode. And so he would project his death into the future. Would any other tomb rival his?

  Intoxicated by this idea, he began to work out the plan. He ignored the nuances and drew a bold line through the grey nothingness of the sky, or let a cataract fall from the middle of the heavens, over there … He knew that from now on he had nothing that might be called a life. What he was now experiencing was more like death than life. It tasted different, and finer, like all rare things. Sometimes it occurred to him that he was suffering from a delusion, what his soldiers from the north would call the work of sprites. But he quickly banished that chill thought.