The Traitor's Niche Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  1: At the Centre of the Empire

  2: On the Empire’s Frontier

  3: Between the Frontier and the Centre of the Empire

  4: The Centre of the Empire. Cloudy Day

  5: The Frontier of the Empire. Cloudy Day

  6: Still on the Frontier

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

  Copyright

  1

  At the Centre of the Empire

  THE UNBLINKING EYES met the stares of the passers-by and tourists who poured into the square from all directions. The tourists’ own gaze, like that of all moving crowds, was mild and unfocused, but people’s eyes suddenly froze as soon as they encountered this sight, as if their astonished pupils struggled to sink back into the depths of their skulls, and only the impossibility of doing this compelled them to stand still and face what they saw. Most went pale, some wanted to vomit. Only a few looked on calmly. The eyes were indifferent, of a colour you could not call bluish or even grey, and which it was hard to name, because it was less a colour than the distant reflection of a void.

  Looking away at last, the clusters of tourists would ask how to get to Hagia Sophia, to the tombs of the sultan-emperors, the bank, the old bathhouses, the Palace of Dreams. They enquired hurriedly and feverishly, yet most did not leave the square but wandered round as if caught in a trap. Although not particularly large, the square was one of the most famous in the ancient imperial capital. Paved with green granite, it appeared to be cast in bronze, and its splendour was yet further enhanced by the metal lions’ heads behind the railings enclosing the Central State Archive. Above the wing of the Archive peered not only the lead-tipped minaret of the Sultan’s Mosque, but also the Obelisk of Tokmakhan, brought over a few centuries ago to commemorate the invasion of Egypt, and decorated with hieroglyphs and the different emblems of the empire all cast in metal, and finally the Cannon Gate, in whose walls was carved the Traitor’s Niche. In the language of the country, this niche was called the stone of ibret, a word which might loosely be translated as ‘deterrence’.

  It was not hard to imagine why this square had been chosen for the niche where the severed heads of rebel viziers or ill-starred senior officials were placed. Perhaps nowhere else could the eyes of passers-by so easily grasp the interdependency between the imposing solidity of the ancient square and the human heads that had dared to show it disrespect. It was clear at once that the niche had been sited in the wall to convey the impression that the head’s lifeless eyes surveilled every corner of the square. In this way, even the feeblest and least imaginative passer-by could visualise, at least for a moment, his own head displayed at this unnatural height.

  When the head’s hair fluttered forlornly in the wind, the contrast between those soft wisps and the solid monuments of the square, especially the lions’ manes, was a sight beyond endurance.

  The square had an extraordinary solemnity, metal and stone coming together everywhere. Even on the terrace of the café opposite, metal was present in the copper utensils used for the fragile and human act of drinking coffee.

  The former government news-criers who had now retired due to age or professional incapacity, having lost their voices, were among those who usually came here to drink coffee. The café owner told Abdulla, the keeper of the Traitor’s Niche, how their conversation was restricted entirely to old news and the decrees they had once proclaimed to every corner of the state.

  In the morning, before the square came to life, Abdulla liked to observe the café. After his working hours, he also liked to sit at one of the little tables, but rarely did so, because the doctor had told him that coffee was bad for his health. Abdulla was thirty-one years old, but there was no strength in his lanky limbs. At times, a ringing in his ears drained him of all energy. Like everything else on this square, the coffee was too potent. Despite this, Abdulla risked a cup now and then. On these occasions he preferred to join the table of the old news-criers. In the past their voices had made glass windows shake, but now only a pitiful squeak emerged from their throats. The café owner said he could easily understand why they considered the decrees of yesteryear more impressive than those of today, just as they themselves had outshone the modern criers. The café owner said that the criers, almost without exception, could remember the day they had lost their voices, and not just the day, but the decree they were issuing, and the very phrase at which their vocal cords had given out forever. ‘That’s what people are like,’ he went on bitterly. ‘They never forget anything.’

  Watching the swarm of people, Abdulla felt sure that the café owner was right and that people deserved the shock that the niche gave them. He knew that the sight of a severed head was not something everybody could stomach, but Abdulla always found that the horror and distress in the spectators’ faces went beyond all expectation. It was the eyes in the head that seemed to strike them most, and not because they were dead eyes, but perhaps because people were accustomed to human eyes making an impression on them when connected to a human body with arms and legs. Abdulla thought that the absence of a body made the eyes larger and more significant than they really were.

  Indeed, it seemed to Abdulla that people in general were less significant than they thought themselves to be. Sometimes, when dusk drew near and the moon cast its light prematurely on the square, he even thought that human beings, himself included, were only a pollutant that spoilt the splendour and harmony of the imperial square. He could not wait for the square to empty entirely so that, although his official working hours were over, he could observe everything in the calm, icy moonlight. Sometimes the light fell at a certain angle on the niche and for an instant the illuminated head would assume a derisive or disdainful expression. The head, now free of human limbs, seemingly useless appendages, appeared slightly worthier of taking its place among the ancient symbols and emblems of the square. At these moments, Abdulla would be seized by a thrilling paroxysm of self-destruction, an obscure subconscious desire to throw off the ungainly tangle of his limbs and become only a head.

  During the day, Abdulla’s face wore a permanently rigid expression. This was fitting as long as he was on duty. In a way, he was forced to adapt himself to the stony aspect of the square. He was the keeper of one of its most important symbolic sites, and he had to look the part. However, although Abdulla stood only a few paces from the niche and it was obvious that he and he alone was in charge of it, nobody took any notice of him. Everybody’s eyes were fixed in wonder on the niche. Abdulla felt a faint spasm of jealousy, as if this feeling were mixed in a huge pot with all kinds of other emotions.

  For the thousandth time he looked at all the features of the square in turn, as if to measure, should he be counted as one of them, how far he fell short of the necessary perfection. Only the hieroglyphs on the Egyptian obelisk were on a similarly diminutive scale and less than majestic. They resembled insects that had become petrified while crawling up the pillar. Sometimes, when he did not feel well, it seemed to Abdulla that the hieroglyphs had suddenly come to life and started to move, as if trying to wriggle free from the grip of stone and metal and set off like nomads towards the desert. But this happened rarely, and only when he was particularly exhausted. Still more rare were his moments of extreme weakness when he thought of escaping in the same way, like a beetle, out of this granite vice.

  It was morning, and crowds of pedestrians and tourists flooded the square from all directions, from the Avenue of Islamic Arms, the crossroads where the Obelisk of Tokmakhan stood, and the adjacent Crescent Square. Abdulla carefully studied their behaviour. One bold tourist came very close to the niche. His furrowed brow and the strained concentration in his eyes suggested that he
was trying to read the inscription underneath, which Abdulla knew by heart: ‘This is the head of the vizier Bugrahan Pasha, condemned by the Sovereign Sultan, dishonoured in war and defeated by Ali Pasha Tepelena, former governor of Albania and traitor to the Empire.’

  The clock in the neighbouring Crescent Square struck ten. Abdulla walked a few paces towards the niche and leaned a wooden ladder against the wall. He felt the crowd behind his back go still in expectation as he slowly climbed its rungs. The spectators broke into a murmur of horror and wonder. There were whispers: ‘What is he doing? What is he doing?’ This was one of the finest moments of the day, when at last he became the centre of attention. He had no right to do anything to the head, not even to touch it. His task was merely to inspect its general condition, and to inform the doctor at once of anything unusual.

  Avoiding the head’s eyes as always, Abdulla spent a few moments studying the shallow copper dish on which the head stood, its neck resting in a layer of honey. The cold was tightening its grip, and the honey had frozen. Abdulla, with his back turned to the crowd, carefully descended the ladder. The whispers of ‘What did he do? What did he do?’ gradually subsided, and he resumed his place. The passers-by and tourists looked at him with respect, but not for long; soon a new wave of people came who had not witnessed his inspection, and Abdulla was again ignored. This routine was repeated at four o’clock in the afternoon. According to the regulations, the head had to be examined twice a day in winter and four times in summer. It was more difficult in the hot weather, when he had to scatter chunks of ice and salt in the copper dish and report to the doctor each day, instead of twice a week as in the winter.

  At the end of the previous summer, the difficult first summer of his duty, there had been a general inspection of the square. Those had been days of real anxiety for him. Several times he’d thought he was on the point of losing his job, or worse. The commission of government inspectors was strict. The keeper of the Obelisk of Tokmakhan had been sentenced to life imprisonment because a rust stain was found on the left side of its western face, an inch above the ground. Three other keepers were dismissed, and the cleaner of the iron lions was sentenced to have his right hand broken because the granite slab beneath the lions was encrusted with mould. The commission had stood for a long time in front of the Traitor’s Niche, which at that time held the head of the rebel vizier of Trebizond. They tried to find some pretext to accuse the doctor and the keeper of not complying with the Regulations for the Care of Heads, and asked devious questions about the unnaturally yellow tinge of the vizier’s face and the lack of eye colour. Abdulla had been struck speechless, but the doctor courageously defended himself, and said that the vizier’s complexion, even in life, had been sallow, as is typical of men with rebellion and treason in their blood. As for the lack of colour in the eyes (which had in fact obviously begun to decompose), the doctor quoted the old saying that the eyes are a window to the soul: it would be useless to look for colour in the eyes of a man who had never had a soul. The doctor’s explanations were hardly convincing, not to say vacuous, but for this very reason they were hard to argue with. The inspectors were obliged to withdraw their remarks and the matter concluded with a mere reprimand and a warning of dismissal for Abdulla.

  The business with the vizier of Trebizond’s head seemed to Abdulla a bad omen for his career, and he was only heartened when the head was removed from the niche and replaced with that of the thirty-seven-year-old governor Nuri Pasha – or the ‘blond pasha’, as he had been known in his lifetime, due to the slightly pale colour of his hair and skin. After his working hours that evening, Abdulla had sat down in the café opposite for the first time. The proprietor, who recognised him and welcomed him with respect, had a slightly yellowish complexion, with narrow eyes and veins in his temples that swelled whenever he approached with the coffee pot in his hand. His conversation flowed as naturally from his mouth as the coffee trickled from the spout of the pot. ‘People are villains, there’s no improving them,’ he said to Abdulla, pouring the coffee. Later Abdulla heard him use the same words to open conversation with almost everyone. Some people indicated they didn’t want to listen or gave him such a frosty expression that the café owner said no more. But others encouraged him with some remark, and he would continue. The stream from the copper spout ceased, but not the one from his mouth. He went on talking to Abdulla: ‘People are villains. They look at the severed head as if the sight of it has put them off ever committing a crime again, but as soon as they turn their backs on it, it’s clear they can hardly wait to get back to their dirty tricks.’

  Ever since that first evening, Abdulla had noticed a kind of congruence between the copper pot and the café owner’s physiognomy. The pot reflected something in his face, either the colour of his skin or the arch of his nose. Or perhaps it was the other way round, and his face over the years had begun to resemble the copper coffee pot. Encouraged by a glance from Abdulla, the café owner continued: ‘Otherwise, people would have learned a lesson from all those heads in that niche of shame.’ The café owner sat down for a while at his table, and said that he had been friendly with Abdulla’s two predecessors. Abdulla knew that the niche had been inaugurated only a few years before, and the café owner remembered the precise day and hour. He even recalled exactly when the imperial palace staff had first appeared in the square, bustling about, taking measurements and setting up markers. He remembered the arrival of two masons and their first mallet blows against the Cannon Gate’s ancient wall. At that time nobody, not even the workmen themselves, knew why they were gouging out this cavity. The secret was kept even after the work was finished, and indeed until the morning of that unforgettable winter day (it was December, just like now, the café owner added) when dawn broke to reveal a human head in the stone niche. It was December, the café owner repeated, and snow was falling. The head had grey hair. The snow swirled round the square and it seemed as if the head and the sky were tossing flakes to and fro.

  Abdulla remembered that it was precisely at this time that he had first heard the word ‘independence’. The word had now become fashionable, and he even noticed it in the rapid speech of foreign tourists. The niche had been inaugurated at a time when independence attempts had redoubled. The old chronicles in the State Archive were full of provincial rebellions, but these had become particularly frequent in recent years. The empire was the most powerful state of the time; a ‘superstate’, as its enemies called it, encompassing three continents, twenty-nine peoples, six religions, four races and forty languages. With such a jumble of tongues it was natural for entire areas of the state to be in rebellion, like that old troublemaker, Albania, which had been up in arms for the past year. Its governor, Ali Tepelena, the most powerful of all imperial viziers, had finally thrown off his mask and gone to war after a quarter-century of covert disobedience to his sovereign. Abdulla had often overheard and even shared stories about rebellions, but it had never crossed his mind that the day would come when he would be appointed the keeper of the Traitor’s Niche, which symbolised in an extraordinary way everything that could be said or thought about the independence of peoples, and which inspired such horror.

  The nearby clock struck eleven. The square was almost full, and among the crowd, whose continual eddying made one dizzy, Abdulla made out the doctor advancing towards him with vigorous strides. It was the day of his regular weekly visit.

  ‘Good morning, Abdulla!’ the doctor said cheerfully.

  ‘Good morning!’

  ‘How are things?’ the doctor asked, raising his eyes to the niche. ‘When’s the wedding?’

  ‘Next week,’ Abdulla said, feeling himself blush.

  ‘Oho,’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘Not long now.’ He rubbed his hands together with glee. ‘Shall we take a look at this lover boy?’

  ‘As you wish,’ said Abdulla, and went to fetch the wooden ladder. The guards, with spears in their hands, observed the crowd out of the corners of their eyes. The doctor nimbly climbed
the ladder, set down his bag in a corner of the recess, and inspected the head. He pressed it with deft fingers: first the temples, then under the eyes and on the throat, while whistling all the time under his breath. Then he opened his bag, took out a bottle and a piece of cotton, moistened the cotton with the liquid from the bottle, and carefully dabbed the head in all the places where he had touched it. Then he took out a smaller bottle, and with the help of a pipette squeezed several drops of liquid into the corners of both eyes. When he had finished, he returned the bottles and the remaining cotton to the bag and, after wiping away the last drops of moisture and fragments of cotton from one hardened cheek, patted the other lightly, almost affectionately, as if to say, amazing, no problems here at all.

  ‘A miracle,’ he said aloud, cheerfully waving his hand as he descended. ‘Goodbye for now, Abdulla.’

  Abdulla followed him with his eyes as he vanished among the crowd of people. The grimmest and most doleful expression in the world would have surprised Abdulla less than this levity of the doctor.

  The drowsy hubbub of the square filled Abdulla’s ears, and now and then there rose, like flecks of foam to the surface of the sea, fragments of words and phrases. Abdulla stood like a rock washed by this chatter, which flowed into the hollows of his eyes, down his cheeks, through his beard, drenching him like a rainstorm … Whose is this head? … head … whose … this head … it belonged to General … Gen … Bugrahan Pasha … Gen … defeated by Ali Pasha … and why have they put it … why … put … why in … of the Traitor’s … Niche … how … because he lost the war … But this Ali … this pasha … Ali Tepelena … what did you say? The rebel pasha of the province of Albania? … Where is this province? … Oh, a long way … Haven’t you read the newspapers? On the edge of the empire … the edge … the cursed frontier of the empire … What do they call it in their own language? … Shqi … Shqip … Shqipëria … I can’t hear you because of the noise … What a name …