The Siege

by Ismail Kadare

  A noise of wheels came nearer. All the chariots carried little torches fixed to the rear. Hundreds of them filed past, each with a flickering light that ravaged the heart.

  A detachment of foot-soldiers followed behind. Çelebi noticed with surprise that they weren’t carrying lances, as he had initially thought, but spades and picks.

  “Sappers,” the Quartermaster General said. “They’re going to dig the graves to bury the dead.”

  “Will they be buried this night?”

  “Looks like that’s what’s been ordered. In these circumstances burial is immediate, even at night.”

  Soon after, another detachment of sappers went by.

  “How many do you think we have lost?” the chronicler asked timidly.

  The Quartermaster General was deep in thought and didn’t answer straight away. He was thinking that the two or three next days would, as usual, be days of cheating, false accounting and other kinds of fraud. Every day the deaths of thousands of wounded would change the total size of the army. In the general confusion and distress, nobody would remember the exact date of the death of each soldier, so that in the coming days the captains would collude with their units’ quartermasters to produce fictional musters with such cleverness that even the great Ali Ibn Sin would never be able to get to the bottom of it.

  “What were you saying?”

  “How many do you think we have lost?”

  The Quartermaster General pondered.

  “To judge by the violence of the attack and its duration,” he said matter-of-factly, as if he was talking about a quantity of money, “I think this business must have taken around three or four thousand men.”

  Another unit of sappers went by.

  “We’ll get a precise report tomorrow,” the Quartermaster General added. Then, after a pause, he went on: “The only thing that’s sure this evening is that we have suffered a major defeat.”

  The army had returned to camp. Paths, tents and pavilions slowly filled with its heavy, weary breath and with the dreary sound of thousands of trudging feet and countless groans. The two observers stopped by the side of a thoroughfare to watch the horde of shadows slowly moving through the darkness. At that point the moon appeared on the horizon. Its light first swept over the citadel’s turrets, then bathed its high walls, then, like some great cloud of steam, enveloped everything, the plain, the camp, the crowns of the tents, and finally the Quartermaster General and the chronicler themselves.

  Soldiers went on trudging past. Many had their arms round wounded comrades, others carried a man on their backs. Most of them moaned softly as they walked, and now and again let out a heart-rending shriek. In the moonlight it was hard to distinguish bloodstains from the marks made by hot pitch. Everything merged on bruised heads and shoulders, giving off a smell of oil, charred skin and scorching. Some fell down flat on their stomachs from sheer exhaustion as soon as they got to their tents, others — the most seriously wounded — were taken to field hospitals.

  The Quartermaster General slowed his pace. The chronicler guessed he was doing a sum in his head. He could see the pale and evil glint in his eye that he had seen before.

  “Some units must have lost about a third of their strength.”

  The chronicler did not know what to answer.

  “Others seem to have been halved,” the Quartermaster went on, staring at the long-drawn-out procession of returning men. Çelebi thought he saw the dalkiliç go by. Never before had he seen these previously unbeaten soldiers after a defeat, and he found them almost unrecognisable after such a terrible trial.

  “The serden geçti!” the Quartermaster General exclaimed in a weird voice.

  The chronicler shivered as if he had heard speak of ghosts. How is it possible? he thought. They are not supposed to return except as victors. They are surely going to be put to death.

  “Where?” he asked, almost choking on his words.

  The Quartermaster General had already stretched out his arm towards a cart. The chronicler’s eyes bulged. There were many pale, sky-blue flags heaped up in the back. There was nobody following the cart.

  Mevla Çelebi guessed what it meant. The brides of death, as they were called in the old chronicles, had kept their word. As the cart went by he saw that the standards were stained with blood and burns. He felt a lump rise in his throat and stifled a sob.

  They had been watching the soldiers go by in silence for a long while when they saw the astrologer coming along, looking worried. The chronicler was tempted to hail him, but since he noticed a glint of scorn in the Quartermaster General’s eyes he looked down, so as not to have to respond to any greeting from the magician. He knew the Quartermaster’s hostile attitude towards the latter, and didn’t want to witness their enmity.

  A horse drew up behind them.

  “Gazi,” someone said.

  They turned around. It was one of the Pasha’s messengers.

  “What is it?”

  “The war council is to meet immediately. You are summoned.”

  The messenger bowed respectfully and got back in the saddle.

  “Mevla, I must leave you. What are you going to do now?”

  “I’ll hang around for a bit and then go to bed.”

  As soon as the Quartermaster General had gone, the chronicler plunged into the crowd and looked for the astrologer. He was glad to have relations in high places, but there were times like tonight when he needed close friends, people he could talk to naturally, without having to choose his words, without fearing that their faces would suddenly freeze into angular shapes like ancient inscriptions. Mevla Çelebi eventually caught up with the astrologer.

  “So, how are you? Where were you going?”

  The astrologer looked at him distractedly.

  “I saw you a while back,” the astrologer said, “but you were with the Quartermaster General. I imagine he’s not too fond of me.”

  The chronicler shrugged his shoulders as if to say: That may well be, but what can I do about it?

  They wandered around together for a while.

  “What a wonderful evening it was yesterday,” the astrologer said. “This evening everything is mournful.”

  “Allah chose not to grant us victory.”

  “If only He had not punished us with such a great defeat!”

  “Accursed citadel!”

  They watched the seemingly endless line of returning soldiers trudge past. The men passing by at that moment seemed particularly worn out. They must have been the ones who had carried the ladders and broken down the main gate with the battering rams.

  “Look, there’s Tuz, the janissary!” the astrologer cried out.

  The young man looked up. He didn’t seem to be wounded or marked with tar. Just a scratch on his forehead. He was holding up a comrade by the arm.

  “God be praised, you are alive!” the chronicler exclaimed. “And who’s the poor fellow with you?” he added, nodding towards the wounded man whose eyes were bandaged with a piece of turban. His face was blackened by pitch and his hair was scorched. “By Allah, is that not Sadedin?” he asked in a voice that broke.

  Tuz Okçan nodded.

  “He’s lost his sight. His eyes were burned.”

  They bit their lips. The janissary spoke as if Sadedin couldn’t hear them.

  “I noticed him by chance in the crowd that rushed into the inner yard as soon as we’d broken down the main gate,” the janissary explained. “He was among the first to get inside.”

  They could not help staring at the bandaged eyes.

  “Then I saw him again in the thick of the fight with his hand over his forehead. It was hell in there. Everyone else was running for his life, but this fellow was just turning round and round in the smoke …”

  The janissary’s voice was weary and hoarse. He must have done a lot of shouting during the assault.

  “When I saw him again, he still had one hand over his eyes but his other hand seemed to be seeking something in the air. He was be
ing shoved about …” Tuz Okçan sighed deeply. “What was I saying?” he asked in a dull voice.

  “That Sadedin was being shoved about … And that you saw him …”

  “Ah, yes. He was being pushed around while he was waving one arm towards me, and I don’t know why, but I suddenly recalled one of my aunts who when she wanted to curse someone never said ‘May you go blind!’ but ‘May you look for the wall with your hands!’ That’s when I guessed what had happened to him,” the janissary went on blankly. “When I got closer I saw molten pitch dripping down his cheeks. So I took him by the hand and struggled long and hard but finally managed to lead him out of that hell-hole.”

  Sadedin just stood there like a statue. If he hadn’t been standing up he would have been taken for dead.

  “I’m taking him to the doctors,” the janissary said. “I know, there’s little hope of saving his eyes, but maybe they’ll be able to relieve him of some of the pain.”

  “We’ll come along with you.”

  The hospital tents had only been set up the day before but they had already turned into slaughterhouses. Ragged soldiers were stacked right next to each other on sloping pallets, to allow the blood and gore to drain away. Dying groans mingled with entreaties — “Brother, finish me off!” “Dig the scalpel into my liver!” — which were themselves interrupted by gruff reproaches: “Shut up, you milksop!” The old hags from Rumelia were nearby, emptying bucketfuls of their potion on to the wounds. Further on, groans and exclamations came louder and sharper: “Water! Mamma mia!” “Kill me!” “Shut your trap!” “An Ottoman soldier does not snivel!”

  It made the chronicler want to retch. He turned away so as not to see these bloody bodies, but the knot in his stomach grew ever tighter.

  They had to wait for a long time until any attention was paid to the poet. He was treated summarily. He didn’t yell or moan. When his eyes had been bandaged again, his friends took him by the arm and led him to his tent. They laid him down and he fell instantly into a deep sleep.

  They went outside and wandered for a while among the innumerable silhouettes without saying a word.

  “You were there,” the chronicler said, waving towards the citadel that was now lost in darkness. “Tell us.”

  The janissary looked at him with wild eyes. His answer was long in coming. Only after walking along for a while in complete silence did he mumble, as if he was talking to himself: “Dreadful.”

  “What was dreadful?”

  “Over there,” he replied, waving towards the same place the chronicler had gestured at a few minutes before.

  “I’m thinking of the wonderful evening we had yesterday,” the astrologer said.

  Shapes of soldiers moved around them in every direction. None spoke. There was nothing but low mumbles and evasions.

  “I can’t get his look out of my mind!” Tuz Okçan suddenly cried out. “Last night, when he was talking, how his eyes sparkled!”

  “He was planning on writing a great poem about this campaign,” the chronicler blurted out, thinking of his own work.

  “That is perhaps why he was the first to come forward, so as to be in the front row when the door came down,” the astrologer surmised.

  “It’s really sad,” Çelebi said. “He was talented — and courageous.”

  “God! How his eyes sparkled last night!” the janissary said again, softly.

  “Yes,” Mevla Çelebi chimed in melancholically. “They shone as if they guessed they were looking on the world for the last time.”

  “The fallacious world,” the astrologer corrected him.

  “Pitch has covered that gleam with a black veil for ever.”

  Who had said something last night about a black veil? The chronicler was tired, and his memory was getting confused.

  The astrologer looked at the sky.

  “What fate do the stars foretell?” the janissary asked.

  Since he had taken part in the assault, the janissary had lost his shyness and he now spoke to them like old friends.

  “Sad prophecies!” the astrologer answered. “Some crazy wind seems to be swirling them around all the time.”

  In fact the astrologer had a migraine and a temperature, so that the stars really did seem to him to be on the point of falling out of the sky. “Do not fall, my star …” Had he not read that somewhere? He had banked heavily on this campaign. If his predictions turned out right, he would be able to see about getting a much better position, even an eminent one, on his return to the capital. Palace astrologer, why not? It was the most important campaign for years. The whole empire had its eyes on these misty mountains. He was bored with his life in the muddy backwater where he had spent the last two years going to see the portly wife of the wali every Friday to predict when the next letter from Akhashir would come. He liked the liveliness of the capital, its crowded streets, days packed full of things to do, fashion, women. Heaven may make him a gift of all that, but it could turn him down too. “Stay by me, my star …” When he had seen the burned-out ladders crashing to the foot of the ramparts he saw his own future fall. Ill-starred: all afternoon that word had been pressing like a rusty nail into his soul.

  The only things that came into his mind now were curses of every kind, and it began to frighten him.

  “Tuz Okçan, what did you say a moment ago? ‘May you look for the wall with your hands?’ Our curses are different. For example, we say: ‘Go cold!’”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” the janissary answered. “What is this business about cursing? Why do you want to involve me in that kind of thing?”

  The janissary was starting to weep. The chronicler grabbed the astrologer by the sleeve.

  “Stop it,” he whispered. “Can’t you see he’s in distress?”

  “Actually, he needs taking care of. Maybe even more than Sadedin does …”

  During his long saunter through the camp Mevla Çelebi had heard about a special unit in the army, consisting of priestly men who were part healers and part sorcerers, and whose task it was to calm soldiers afflicted with mental disturbances after battle. In the old days they were killed, like any man who could not hold back his tears, but in the course of the last year the rules had been made less harsh.

  “Yesterday evening there were four of us,” Mevla Çelebi observed thoughtfully. “Tonight we are only three.”

  Cartwheels could be heard creaking not far away. It wasn’t the same sound as had been heard earlier on, when the carts were making their way towards the citadel. The lower, duller noise of the axles suggested that the carts were now fully loaded.

  “Let’s go and see our dead being buried,” the chronicler said. They walked a long while in silence before they caught up with the tumbrels. Heaped-up corpses were lit by the pale rays of the moon. One of them slipped and fell to the ground. The following vehicle halted, then someone came to pick up the body and heaved it into the back.

  Empty wagons passed by in the opposite direction, on their way to collect another load. Their floorboards were stained red and black by the blood. The three men looked at the ground and saw that it too was soaked in blood.

  “Are you alright?” the astrologer asked the chronicler. “You’re as pale as a ghost. Do you want us to go back?”

  “No! I must see the burial of our dead. I have to describe it in my chronicle.”

  That was all they said to each other for the entire journey. From afar they heard the lugubrious, drawn-out murmur of hoxhas praying. As they drew nearer the voices became more distinct and drowned out the sounds of spades and picks.

  When they got to the burial ground sappers had already dug out three large rectangular pits, and were working on four others. Tumbrels drew to a halt at the edge of a pit, the bodies were given a cursory inspection by a doctor, and were then thrown into their grave. The first was already full and sappers had started covering it. The hoxhas bowed again and again, casting clumps of earth into the mass grave as it was being filled in. Bodies were now being
piled up in the second grave. Shirtless dervishes with bloodstained forearms grasped corpses by their hands and feet and swung them energetically over the edge. The tumbrels were emptied one by one. Horses snorted and stamped at the smell of blood, which disturbed them. Hoxhas went on reciting prayers. Now and again a doctor would have a body taken out of the heap — a survivor put among the dead by mistake.

  The astrologer and Tuz Okçan glanced from time to time towards their companion to see if they were required to stay any longer. Aware of being the object of attention, at least at those moments, Çelebi took his time.

  At last he turned on his heels and the others followed on behind him. They walked back over blood-soaked ground where the tumbrels were almost at a standstill. Some of them bore only one or two bodies, presumably those of officers. The torch of one of these carts had fallen on to the floor right next to the victim’s head, and the spilled oil flared up in strange forms. A distorted reflection of the dead man’s face could be seen in the smooth surface of the oil spill. Covered in hellish sweat, in glinting lamplight, the face seemed to be grappling with a cruel dilemma — to wake, or to sleep for ever.

  The janissary grabbed Çelebi by the sleeve.

  “That man’s going to catch fire,” he whispered. “My God! I think it’s my commander, Suleiman!”

  The burning oil had in fact almost reached the man’s body, but the chronicler insisted that even if it did catch fire, it would not be a great misfortune. The ancients, he added, considered it a duty to incinerate their dead.

  Tuz Okçan turned his head away so as not to have to see the spectacle. He was sure the body had begun to burn.

  “What can I hear now?” the astrologer asked. “Am I having hallucinations?”

  “No. The watch has been reinforced,” the janissary answered.

  When they got back to the centre of the camp, the prevailing mood of anxiety seemed to have grown more intense. A few shapes moved about in the distance. Two horsemen with the insignia of the messenger corps on their tunics galloped past.