The Siege

by Ismail Kadare

  On and on he went, in his flat, even voice. He was still trying to work out exactly on which rung he was standing when he first thought of giving up and at what level he had taken the actual decision to go back down. Hesitantly, forever revising what he had said, trying as hard as he could to be utterly precise, the man seemed to go on for ever, saying again and again that he hoped to be as objective and as sincere as possible in his critical self-examination.

  At times the astrologer imagined that a part of the man’s life had now become inextricably tangled up in his own. He struggled like a man trying to run before a rising tide, but it was no use. Now and again the voice paused or else faded, and it grew ever more impenetrable as another sound began to rise over it. Things were quickly coming apart. Some kind of black, viscous ooze was rising inside everyone, or else creeping up on them. The astrologer was no longer sure his urine and sperm had any separate existence, and even his lungs and his spleen seemed to be dissolving. Everything became everything else. So here we are, melted down, in a single body … Skulls were sure to soften before long, and let their brains leak out … And that will be the end, the astrologer thought.

  “Actually, the real Pasha is … me!” the voice declared.

  “Are you back, you wretch?” the astrologer shouted, but the man pretended not to have heard.

  “I suspected it for ages, but now I’m sure of it. I am Tursun Pasha! The other one up there is just my double. But as often happens with alternates, he’s turned out to be the cleverer of us two, and he’s ousted me! In other words, he did to me what I should have done to him!”

  “What are you talking about?” the astrologer protested. “You’ve no right to go mad all on your own …! Didn’t we all agree to stay together until the end?”

  “Don’t interrupt me! My suspicions have been proved correct … One of us had to fall. But you should not be surprised at my misfortune. It’s more or less the same as what has happened to all of us. We underground are the only real and authentic men. Those who are up there are mere nothings, they’re just … wraiths and spectres … Anyway, I have to move on now … Got spies on my tail!”

  “Off you go! Go underground!”

  The sounds of mumbling and praying grew more muffled. Occasionally, sobbing broke their even hum. Piercing screams became less frequent. The last one he heard came from far away, or so it seemed, from the very end of the tunnel. “I don’t want to hear the story of your life!” someone was bawling. “I don’t want to! My life is petering out. So why should I hear all about yours? No, I do not want to listen! I’m telling you, go away. Why are you clinging on to me like that? I do not want you, do you hear? I don’t! I don’t!” The speaker lost his temper, then was suddenly convulsed by violent sobbing. In a flash the weeping spread to everyone. Some added their own dirge: “Unhappy that we are!” Then in the midst of the moaning and wailing came a sudden cry: “The commander-in-chief!”

  Tursun Pasha had indeed come down from the world of the living. By the light of a pit lantern that someone had somehow managed to get going again the astrologer recognised the commander-in-chief. He had the same voice as his alternate, and he had had time to let his beard grow back. How long have we been down here, O Lord? he wondered. Time enough for a beard … he answered himself. Up above everyone would have been terrified to hear such thoughts. Provided they reached all the way up … The Pasha greeted each in turn, showing more feeling for those he already knew. He asked Ulug Bey if there was a message he could take back to his mother and wife. He gave news of relatives to another man. Then as the light flickered out he said to nobody in particular, “Peace be with you!” They all answered: “May we meet again in heaven!”

  Between his fingers the astrologer gripped his brass tag with its sign of the three stars. He tried to push himself through the earth and up into the light by the force of thought alone, but it wasn’t possible: the darkness and the earth had already made him part of their empire. He began to cry. Images of friends, women, crowded noisy streets and doors he had bumped into struggled to form a more or less coherent sequence in his mind, but to no avail.

  Among the wailing the laughter of a man demented fluttered about like a blind bird. Go on, the astrologer ordered his mind, leave this body, you are no use to it any more. Some spoke in drunken voices of the remorse that the people up above must be feeling. Others sobered up in a flash and burst into tears. But there were some men who refused to be downcast. They imagined themselves as conquerors of the Void, which made them stronger than anything else on earth. “We have Absence, the Queen of the Universe, on our side!” they said. The astrologer only just stopped himself from shouting out loud: “I am a foreigner in these parts, so leave me alone!” And he waved his identity tag in front of him … Admittedly, he had committed errors, but the celestial empire could surely have shown him more mercy. His only salvation now lay in madness. For pity’s sake, he appealed to his mind, you have exhausted me, so now get out of my skull! But his mind would not go.

  On July 26 we decided to make the tunnel collapse. We first made sure they had stopped digging. That meant that they were going to attempt to break out that night, or the next day at the latest. We chose to set off the landslip as close to the foundations as possible, at a spot where the tunnel was deepest underground, so that the greater weight of earth above it would ensure the fullest possible destruction of the enemy below.

  After the collapse we carried on watching the surface over the whole length of the passage. But the men who had been buried alive didn’t even try to cut a relief shaft, and no one came to their rescue from the outside either. In any case it would have been pointless to try anything of the kind.

  To begin with we heard no noises at all, and we could hardly believe that dozens of sappers and soldiers armed to the teeth were right beneath our feet, no more than two fathoms down. But the silence lasted only a few days. Thereafter, and especially at night, when we put our ears to the ground, we could hear screams and wailing. But nobody will ever be able to say what really happened down there.

  We considered that our best course was to let them die where they were. If we had got them out, we would not have had the means to keep them imprisoned, because even without them, we had limited supplies of food and water. In other circumstances we might have asked to exchange them for our own casualties who were in the enemy’s hands and possibly still alive. Or else they might have surrendered our prisoners for a ransom. But after the horrors inflicted on those of our women that they captured, our men are outraged. Not only have we changed, it is likely we will never go back to the way we used to be. Most of us have been made bitter by death and have lost all inclination for forgiveness and mercy.

  When their groans began to fade away our brothers nonetheless prayed for the souls of those unfortunate men. For several nights in a row we lit candles and burned incense over the path of the tunnel. Despite this we all lost our sleep, and even those who did manage to drop off woke up more exhausted than insomniacs, because of the horrors they had seen in their dreams. Some even began to suspect the Turks of having invented the tunnel with the sole aim of storing their own dead beneath our feet.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They were reclining on their camp-beds, leaning on their elbows. It was suffocating inside the tent. Despite their light garb, they found the heat unbearable.

  “It must be cooler outside than in here,” Lejla said. “It’s always either hotter or cooler inside a tent than outside.”

  She was the only one of the women to have been on a campaign before. She had been taken by her master, a vizier, on the Thessalonian campaign, where he had been killed. Her first act as a young widow had been to disperse the harem, as custom required. She had sold the girls with unusual haste, and, as if that had not been enough to express her spite towards them, she set a price that was more or less equivalent to that of a she-goat.

  Lejla had told the story to her younger companions on her first night in her new harem, which led so
me of them to call her “Goat Lady” or else “Nanny,” depending on the warmth of their relations. In recent weeks, presumably because of the hostility all around them, the women had grown closer to each other.

  “Phew! This heat is stifling!” said Blondie (so named for the colour of her hair), who was slouching next to Lejla. “Where’s Hasan? Him to get fetch little water to fresh up!”

  The others all laughed at Blondie’s broken Turkish, knowing full well they would not find even that very amusing for long.

  The youngest, Exher, said nothing and sat outside the circle, which was unusual for her. She was pale and hadn’t put up her plaits very neatly.

  “Are you already feeling queer?” Lejla asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It must be that.”

  Exher stared hard at her.

  “I had a hard time of it too,” Ajsel said. “Oh! I miss my little daughter so! She’ll be nearly two when autumn comes. Will we be back by then?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lejla answered. “To judge by the way it’s gone so far, this siege is going to last a long time.”

  “I had a difficult pregnancy, too,” Ajsel said.

  “But you got better looking after you’d given birth,” Lejla pointed out. “When you were pregnant, we all thought, when we looked at you, that he would sell you afterwards. We were making a big mistake.”

  Ajsel laughed dreamily, looked around at each of her comrades in turn, then said, in a softer voice:

  “Do you want to know why he loved me?”

  They all turned round to look at her, with curiosity in their eyes. Even the blonde girl stopped staring at the carpet and cupped her chin in her hand.

  “Well, it’s because I had a lot of milk, and when he hugged me, he got a thrill from feeling his chest getting wet.”

  “Is that so?” Exher asked in wide-eyed astonishment.

  “Yes, it is. On evenings when I was down to lie with him, he had me instructed not to breastfeed my daughter so that …”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about this before?”

  “I was embarrassed.”

  “Embarrassed? Among us?”

  Ajsel shrugged.

  “Will I have a lot of milk as well?” Exher asked.

  They all laughed.

  “Who knows?”

  “You don’t hook a man by your milk,” Ajsel observed.

  “So what do you think the trick is?”

  “God alone knows …”

  They looked at Lejla. Not only had she already been on a campaign, she was also the only one of them to have known another man. So she seemed to them all to be the wisest, in all circumstances.

  “Men are the greatest enigma in the world,” she said. “I … I … Honestly, my greatest dream has always been to talk to a man … To have a chat, I mean. Not to sleep with him, but to talk, for hours on end, until dawn … until you just can’t talk any more …”

  “What are you going on about?” Ajsel objected. “Didn’t you ever talk to your first husband?”

  “Never! He was as grim as night. As for this one, he’s only ever spoken to me once. And do you know what it was about? I’m horrified even when I just think back on it. Well, what he asked was: ‘Tell me how the other man did it with you.’”

  “Really? Did you tell him?”

  “Of course I did. I was shaking with fear. I thought he would kill me afterwards, but oddly enough, the opposite happened. He got more affectionate. Or maybe I just thought he was being kinder because I expected him to be angry.”

  “Fine,” Exher said after a pause. “Tell us something else.”

  “What would you like me to tell you? I’ve already said all I know.”

  And indeed she had already told them everything, and more than once, especially about men’s organs, which were sometimes as straight as a Christian’s sword, and sometimes as slant as a Turkish yatagan.

  They chatted on about other episodes in the life of the harem and were surprised to feel homesick so soon for their house in Bursa. They recalled their last night there; most of them hadn’t got a wink of sleep. Some at home were sad to see friends leave, others disappointed at not having been chosen to go on the campaign.

  “I knew it was war we were going to,” Lejla said for the benefit of Exher and Blondie, “but I didn’t want to spoil your joy. Exher, you were really over the moon. You kept on asking me, ‘What’s war like, then?’ And you just couldn’t wait for it to be morning.”

  “Maybe it’s because he is born in pain and blood that man has a natural inclination to make his whole life a blood-soaked affair.”

  “What will you come up with next, Ajsel!”

  “Who can say how this war will end?”

  “How can you know?” Lejla answered. “May Allah’s will be done. But whatever the outcome, it won’t change things much for us. If he is victorious, he’ll get promotion and acquire new riches, he’ll buy more wives, and we’ll have new friends.”

  “Ah! That would be fun!” Exher exclaimed.

  “But if he loses, we’ll be sold as well, and who knows what our fate will then be. Perhaps better, perhaps worse.”

  “Ah! That would be fun!” Exher said again. “I’d love to change master.”

  “Be quiet, you silly woman,” Lejla said. “The eunuch might hear you.”

  “And where has Hasan got to?” the blonde girl wailed. “If he could bring us some water!”

  “I think they’re preparing to cut off the citadel’s water,” Ajsel said. “I heard Hasan talking about it with one of the sentries yesterday.”

  “Really? Then the war will soon be over,” Lejla concluded. “In this heat, who can hold out without water?”

  “But how are they going to cut it off?” Exher asked.

  “How? They usually look for the watercourses, and when they find the channel, they destroy it,” Lejla answered.

  “That’s right,” Ajsel said. “They were talking about an aqueduct that they couldn’t manage to locate.”

  “Thank goodness we have Hasan to bring us news from outside every so often.”

  “The day before yesterday, when he was walking around among the troops, he heard men say that the Mufti objects to us,” Ajsel remarked.

  “The Mufti? What has he got to do with us?”

  “He claims we bring bad luck.”

  “That’s typical!” Lejla exclaimed. “Soon they’ll say it’s our fault the citadel hasn’t fallen!”

  “Oh God, let us get away from here as soon as possible!” the blonde girl blurted out in exasperation.

  “You’re only yearning to get back to your Gyzel!” Exher said spitefully.

  The blonde girl didn’t react. She blushed slightly, and then turned away in embarrassment.

  “Avoid making jokes of that kind,” Ajsel said. “Hasan could hear you. Do you remember what happened when Kekike and that Greek girl were caught kissing?”

  “I hadn’t joined you yet,” Exher said. “What’s the name of the marsh where they were drowned?”

  “Avdi Batak. That’s where adulterous wives are usually dealt with. Apparently you can hear them screaming all night long.”

  “Adulterous …” Exher repeated thoughtfully. “What an odd word!”

  “I shall never forget that night,” Ajsel repeated.

  “And I’ll never forget this tent, where we are being cooked alive!” Exher shouted.

  “Don’t complain. There is worse,” Lejla retorted.

  “And what could be worse than this tent?”

  “Oh! There are things that are much worse,” Lejla insisted. “Being captured by the enemy, for example.”

  Exher’s face lit up.

  “I’ve never been a captive …”

  “Be quiet, you nitwit,” Ajsel scolded. “What if the eunuch heard you?”

  “Would you really like to be taken prisoner?” Lejla remonstrated. “Have you forgotten what Hasan told us about the Albanian girls the akinxhis brought back two weeks ago?
They only lasted one night in our camp. By dawn they were in the ground.”

  Exher lowered her head.

  “Hasan saw them,” Ajsel went on. “He’d got up before dawn and gone out for some air. As he came back in, he tripped over a basin and woke me up. He came up to me and said: ‘Ajsel hanum, I saw them, they were all white, as white as sheets.’”

  “Poor Hasan! His heart can’t bear to see a woman in pain.”

  Exher suddenly burst into tears.

  “That’s enough, Ajsel,” Lejla said. “In her state, Exher shouldn’t hear that kind of story.”

  They fell silent while the younger among them went on weeping. Then the blonde woman spoke up:

  “Ooof! I’m bursting!” she said as she put her hand through her hair.

  The two other women were fanning themselves as hard as they could.

  “Hasan told me other horrors,” Ajsel whispered in Lejla’s ear. “The next night the soldiers wanted to reopen the graves. Have you ever heard of men who enjoy raping corpses? I’ve forgotten what the word for it is. Well, in the middle of the night …”

  “I think Hasan is coming back, I can hear the sound of his footstep,” Exher said.

  And the eunuch did indeed appear.

  “Where have you been?” they all said, almost in unison. “How can you leave us alone in this oven?”

  “I was watching our engineers trying to find the water line,” Hasan said. “They’ve covered the plain with little holes, but the aqueduct is still in hiding.”