The Traitor's Niche

by Ismail Kadare

  No. It won’t happen. Besides, on the day of the Last Judgement, when the trumpet of Allah sounds and all rise from the grave, where would he find his head, removed thousands of miles away? What would he do without it? He imagined himself standing paralysed and headless at a crossroads, pushed by the crowds of the dead, each running to their own place, and again he said to himself, no, Tundj Hata, you won’t get me.

  Now it all seemed simple to him. With brisk steps he went back to the tent, took ink and paper out of the chest, and started writing his last wishes. The first and most important was that he must be buried at once on the morning of the next day, before dawn, and without a funeral ceremony. Next, his grave must be five fathoms deep and not an inch less. His third instruction was about the division of his wealth. He spent a long time not on the portions to be left to his family, which were easily settled, but on bequests for the salvation of his soul. For some reason he remembered a mausoleum he had seen in his youth on the Albanian coast near the old naval base of Pashaliman, among some desolate sand dunes. Since then he had seen many magnificent graves and tombs all over the empire, but nothing had erased the impression of that forlorn mausoleum and its lamp, burning day and night for the salvation of the soul of a certain Mirahor Pasha, a former commander of the base. So he left instructions in his will for such a mausoleum to be built for the benefit of his soul. He started writing down the sums of money required for its construction, the daily wage of the keeper, the lamp oil … but ground to a halt in this last calculation of his life. What proportion of his wealth should be set aside for the maintenance of his tomb and for lamp oil for two hundred and eighty, three hundred and twenty, four hundred and ninety, six hundred and sixty years? The time he would spend dead was long, subject to different and totally confusing measurements. He tried to make some kind of approximate forecast, and several times wrote and erased the figures at the end of his will, but still he did not feel sure. Indeed, when he sealed the letter and prostrated himself on the little prayer rug, he was haunted by that little wick in the desolate mausoleum in the first chill of autumn. Two or three times he made as if to stand up to make a correction, but he was too tired.

  Towards dusk, the guards on duty outside the tent heard the gunshot and rushed inside.

  The courier arrived on Sunday afternoon, three days after leaving the capital. As if urged on by a premonition of disaster, Tundj Hata had covered the distance at incredible speed. Even so, when he arrived, Hurshid Pasha had already been buried for nearly forty hours.

  The carriage had not yet stopped when from behind the horses’ straining muscles, flexing joints, foaming mouths and flaring manes, the newly hennaed beard of Tundj Hata could be seen, wavering like a flame.

  ‘Where is he?’ he wailed.

  Even from outside, he could sense the tent was empty.

  ‘Hey, guard! Is there a guard here?’

  One of the pasha’s guards came out.

  ‘Where is your master?’ cried Tundj Hata.

  The guard’s eyes were calm. He pointed to the sky.

  ‘He is there, sir, have you still not heard?’

  I suspected as much, Tundj Hata groaned to himself. You miserable creature. So this is what you wanted to do to me after your death. For a few moments, Tundj Hata went berserk with his whip, striking the guard and the horses, which barely remained on their feet, and then his Tatars, raising a cloud of dust from their backs.

  He calmed down a little and took out the Regulations from his saddlebag, leafing through it many times before he found what he wanted. It was Chapter Four: ‘Cases in which the person condemned by decree lays hands upon himself, before the Sentence of Death is delivered.’ He read this ten times until he thought he understood it.

  ‘Take me to his grave,’ he cried.

  They led him to it. He walked crazily in a circle round the grave, as if looking for a secret entrance, and gave the order to open it.

  Hehehe, he chuckled to himself, as the sextons threw the soil to each side. You thought you had got away from me, hehehe.

  The exhumation took a long time. There was no sign of the body. ‘It’s been stolen,’ he kept crying out, ‘you wretches.’ They explained to him that they had buried him deep, because that’s what he had wanted. They had been surprised. What was this strange request? Five fathoms deep, but now, ah now, it was obvious why … ‘There’ll be trouble for you if you don’t find him,’ he persisted, paying them no attention. ‘A curse on the mothers who bore you!’

  At a depth of precisely five fathoms, the diggers struck the wood of the coffin. It was still day when they pulled the body out with the help of a rope, which was tied to an iron ring with three hooks. One of the hooks had run through the dead man’s back, piercing his cloak. They dumped the muddy body, almost folded in two, on the pile of earth beside the grave. Tundj Hata decapitated the corpse with two blows of his yataghan, taking no care not to soil himself or the head.

  He set off for the capital city that same night.

  7

  Neither Frontier Nor Centre, Caw-Caw. Then the Centre and the End

  THE ROYAL COURIER’S carriage devoured the miles at a crazy speed. Now and again, Tundj Hata poked his head out of the small window to remind the Tatars how late they were. He wanted to make up, at any cost, at least half of those lost forty hours which the head of Hurshid Pasha had spent under the earth attached to his corpse and without medical supervision.

  As he studied the continental plain that stretched desolately in front of him, Tundj Hata tried to work out how much time he would gain by not showing the severed head. This was not easy, because quite apart from his exhaustion, he couldn’t determine where he was. The road they had been following for many hours, like all the roads that passed through terrain with no identity, had milestones without numbers.

  They were still in Provinces Two, Six and Seven. Organised on the principle of Caw-caw, the territories had no other names and these numbers denoted them in official documents and in the press. The royal road passed fastidiously through these regions as if in disgust, passing stupefied villages and towns on whose streets wandered people clad in grey, stammering in their clumsy tongue as if they had suffered strokes.

  These people no longer had their own languages, customs, colours, weddings, scripts or calendars. Their memory had been slowly worn away and everything had been expunged from it. Their lives came to resemble those plains, whipped by the wind for a thousand centuries on end and finally reduced to a forlorn nothingness where there were only sand dunes, whose interminable undulations stretched monotonously into the distance, always the far distance.

  Indeed these people’s entire lives were strangely bound in a noose that led them nowhere yet never let them go. Long ago they had lost all sense of time and space, concepts which had become like some shapeless and useless pulp.

  Everything about these people was soft and mushy, from their clothes – for not only were colours forbidden but also the use of buttons, collars, belts and anything that tightened a garment (according to Caw-caw the clothing in this terrain had to resemble the shape of a stripped animal skin) – to their speech. After the death of their language, they used a kind of debased version of the usual language of the state. It was an impoverished patois of only two or three hundred words. Because of the blurring of particles and prefixes, the words were not linked to one another but merely arranged like beads on a string that could be put together in any order. To say ‘I’m going to the fold to milk the sheep’, they might say ‘go fold milk sheep’ or ‘fold sheep milk go’ and so on. In this way the language crumbled like pumice or loose gravel, always changing its shape.

  When a terrain entered its deep slumber, its institutions, police, courts, postal services and record offices were abolished and only a few semi-religious, semi-financial civil servants were left, dealing mainly with tax collection. Like their subjects, with the passage of time these officials forgot dates and years until even the harvesting of taxes and all the oth
er tasks of government were performed like bodily functions. From one year to the next, weights and measures were forgotten, so that people said ‘a cartload of corn’ for a quantity of grain or ‘as far as a mare can gallop’ for a distance. ‘A bellyful of bread’ expressed the quantity of food that could fill a person, and so forth.

  The police and other institutions were abolished so that this slumber would not be disturbed by any memory of power. Indeed, the capital considered it necessary to brainwash its officials, because only if they shared the collective trance could it be ensured that they would not rouse the population from their sleep with some sudden motion or thought.

  Tundj Hata had been passing through Provinces Two, Six and Seven for the last four years without anybody finding out about his performances. Sometimes, as he looked out through the carriage windows at that sequence of villages and settlements, some close and others distant, he felt attracted by their deathly calm. People said that there were many high officials, weary of political scheming and infighting, who felt the lure of these degraded territories. In some cases they left everything behind and departed for them, and were mourned in their lifetimes by friends and relatives. They never came back, or in the rare cases when a few did return, they were less than ghosts of their former selves and so entirely altered (not even bodies left under the earth in the solitude of death underwent such a transformation) that they were merely objects of pity. Even this pity was of a different kind, a sly, treacherous sort of sympathy. These returnees were neither of sound mind nor mad, neither entirely present nor absent. They were more than corrupted: they had made a kind of down payment on death, and had a kind of intimacy with death that nobody else possessed. They were like carriers of some mysterious disease that might infect everything – people and buildings – causing sores and troubled sleep.

  As he travelled, Tundj Hata never took his eyes from the carriage window. He was one of those few people who entered and left these desolate regions on business. He was familiar with this death manifested in the arable fields, haystacks and chimneyless dwellings. He had never understood why the first step should be the destruction of chimneys, but the ancient chronicles related that when a village or town woke to find its chimneys destroyed, the inhabitants would shriek in horror: ‘Caw-caw.’

  Whenever he passed through this somnolent region of the state, Tundj Hata involuntarily recalled other regions that were the total opposite: the provinces in a ‘state of emergency’. Whenever his duties took him through these parts, not only did it not occur to him to show his severed heads but, although he was escorted by a guard, he did not dare stop anywhere or even stretch his head out of the carriage.

  These were dangerous regions, which, for different reasons, could not be handed over to the army to be subdued by brute force, nor subjected to Caw-caw. Because neither of these solutions was possible, these provinces were placed under the responsibility of the First Directorate of the Interior Ministry.

  In the coffee-coloured ministry building, innumerable civil servants worked day and night on the problem of these areas. Here they brewed major conflicts within nations, centuries-old enmities, feuds and hatred. Here they stoked religious discord, linguistic quarrels, provocations by plainsmen against mountain-dwellers, mainlanders against islanders, northerners against southerners, and everyone against everyone else.

  In these regions, there was no end to the turmoil and terror. Everything was in a perpetually flushed and excited state, from the colours of people’s clothing, which never matched, to the language, which was always spoken differently in every province according to whim, sometimes nasally, sometimes gutturally, or with word order reversed. The populations fought all the time about everything, quarrelling over pastures, the shape of roofs, the style of cloaks, the names of the seasons, and especially customs. Some people, to spite their neighbours, turned marriage rites into funeral rites, and others, out of malice, did the opposite.

  The orgy of fury knew no limits, especially on festival days. Travellers passing through these parts would be terrified out of their skins. It was not for nothing that old people referred to these regions as ‘smouldering fires’. That new word ‘hotbed’, which the bright sparks of the capital city uttered so proudly, as they did all words borrowed from Europe, was only a translation of this.

  It was believed that after twenty or twenty-five years of this treatment, these provinces would be totally exhausted and would beg for the respite of sleep. Then the Directorate would hand them over to the Central Archive, to be put under the rule of Caw-caw.

  Tundj Hata was one of the few people in a position to compare these smouldering regions to the Caw-caw territories. Last time he had passed through, the people had bitten his carriage with their teeth, and then, failing to overturn it, had thrown acid at it from a distance.

  Never again by that route, he muttered to himself whenever his carriage covered the final miles. A hundred times better by this road, he thought again as his head nodded in sleep. They make me welcome here. Perhaps I am the only person they ever welcome.

  Indeed, the villages and settlements, stretching miserably in their winter lethargy, had been waiting weeks and months for his henna-stained beard to appear, red against the snow. And as they waited, the image of a severed human head was like a kernel, like some long-unfertilised cell planted inside them.

  On some kind of afternoon in some sort of month but in no season, and of course in no year (it was remembered that it was cold, no more), a man from far away, a strange courier with the royal emblems on his chest, had stopped just to show them something, for free. And because they had eyes to see, they turned them towards this thing, which was a human head. Then the courier had gone, without a word to them and without listening to anything they said. After a while, for reasons they did not understand, they felt troubled in their minds. It was a feeling of expectation, something they had never experienced in their lives, and for which there was not even a word in their language.

  This head had set in motion something inside them. Something stirred weakly, faintly, deep in the dark corners of their memory, but without surfacing.

  On the second occasion, the courier showed them the head for only a very short time, but gave them an explanation for it. This was the head of a pasha, he told them, but they understood nothing of what he said. It took a long time to convince them that a pasha might be without a head.

  The third time, when he noticed their eyes fixed impatiently on his leather saddlebags, he asked them for money.

  From then on, the severed heads became events of a kind, which drew together the threads of their lives. They became markers, dividing lines, and in the end a kind of calendar. The habit began of remembering incidents in relation to them: this or that happened round the time of that elderly head, or a little after that frost-covered head. Later, head sightings were remembered like heavenly signs, like eclipses, comets or meteorological disasters. There were heads that separated two seasons (for these people thought they needed something to mark the division of the seasons), there was the head of the second snowfall and, finally, the head of the gales.

  There were women who fell in love with them, as happened with the head of the ‘blond pasha.’ They mainly asked, ‘Where was this head cut?’ The question of why came only later, much later. There was no way they could understand what rebellion meant, still less a general insurrection, but Tundj Hata was careful to give them some sort of story, to make his show more attractive. He found it difficult to come up with a simple way to explain the state hierarchy to them, so that he could take payment for the heads according to their importance. They grasped the idea finally, and even started demanding heads of higher rank. But he knew how to play to them: he would vanish for whole weeks or threaten to suspend the shows, wildly spurring on his horses on the black highway, leaving the villagers behind with their lanterns casting yellow patches of light on the snow.

  For days and weeks, people who had not known what it meant to wait found
themselves trapped in suspense. Like a hook lowered into the depths of a well, the severed head dangled near those things that had perished in the distant past: stale ballads, neglected heroic songs, long-forgotten wars. The head disturbed these things at the bottom of this well, but could not catch hold of them and draw them to the surface. The people, when they stood frozen and wide-eyed in front of the head, felt this muffled and mysterious struggle deep within themselves as a form of anguish, like some rare mineral buried in the depths of the earth, a groan of misery tinged with a bitterness that surfaced in their daily lives only in dreams.

  After Tundj Hata’s departure, they fell into a stupor for days on end. A terrifying blankness settled over entire villages, as if they had been struck by epilepsy. The head was far away in Tundj Hata’s carriage, but the memory of it remained with them for a long time. It was planted in their thoughts, like some sort of cabbage thrown into the black earth. There were countries where heads rose up and were then cut down. There were disturbed countries. There was a country called Shqipëria, a name that could be translated more or less as a convocation of eagles with bloodstained plumage scattered by the winds and storms.

  One morning, a peasant of Province Six was found face down on the rush matting of his own hut, his clothes shredded, his hair torn out, and wounds on his face from his own fingernails. He was still alive, but unable to give any explanation of why he had done this. After a while, he tried to express himself, but his story, confused in itself, reached listeners’ ears in an even more garbled form. The gist was that he had wrestled with himself all night. It had been a dreadful struggle, as if his enemy had been his own lungs, nerves and veins. The man tried to explain how he had grappled with the words of the language. They had been heavy and so stubborn, and he had wanted to dislodge them from their old masonry to realign them in a new order, but this had been difficult, so difficult, he groaned, showing his bloody and broken nails. ‘Oh, it was impossible, they almost strangled me,’ he said, showing the marks on his throat.