The Traitor's Niche Read online

  This province must really be far, Abdulla thought. His elder brother had been sent there on duty this past summer, and still no letter had arrived from him. Whenever the name of Albania was mentioned on the square, which happened often because of the current head, he involuntarily thought of a bloody rib of horsemeat he had once seen in a market when he was a child. A long way, he said to himself again. Distant and unruly. Tavdja Tokmakhan, the legendary hero of the Janissaries, in whose memory the obelisk had been raised in the square, had also been killed there four hundred years ago. It was truly a cursed country.

  The muffled roar of the square engulfed him. Neither fear nor the bitter winter cold ever stopped people’s talk. Words, wreathed in vapour, as if trying somehow to veil themselves, blithely flew from human mouths. Then these same mouths, which had committed such dangerous sins, blew on red, chilblained hands, while the eyes assumed an innocent expression. These people talked about the cursed frontier of the empire. Some believed it was to the west and some to the north, while most had no idea where it might be. Some people expressed the view that everything that happened on the state’s periphery was always bad, and there should be no mercy for anybody. ‘Certainly there will be no mercy,’ a man replied, pretending to be in the know, and another man asked if this meant the sultan himself would go … like when … ‘I didn’t say anything of the sort and never mentioned the sultan,’ the first man retorted. ‘I was only talking about mercy.’ But the other man insisted: ‘When you talk about the sultan, you inevitably think of mercy.’

  Stark mad, Abdulla thought to himself. To block his ears to their ramblings, he tried to catch other voices. There was talk about fluctuations in the stock exchange and the falling price of gold, tests of new weapons that were expected to take place during this very conflict, and a predicted reshuffle in the War Ministry. A tourist was saying to his friends that the Imperial Bank’s exchange rate, and even the number of tourist visas issued by the embassies, depended directly on the outcome of this war.

  Abdulla suddenly sensed that a gap had opened up in the usual din of the square. It held for a few moments before it was filled by whispers and murmured enquiries of ‘Who’s this?’ that flowed into it like water, and then the rumbling of carriage wheels. Abdulla heard a scatter of voices saying, ‘Halet, the high official,’ ‘Halet is passing through,’ and he stood on tiptoe for a better view. The carriage of the senior state dignitary passed by a few paces from him.

  Abdulla could not tear his eyes away from that long face, under whose fine skin bluish veins were visible. The official’s eyes, veiled behind a curtain of total indifference, and the way he leaned against the back of his seat set him entirely apart from the crowd, all curiosity, which swarmed around him.

  Abdulla remembered what the doctor had once said, that there were some people whose blood did not clot easily. In these cases, you have to add special substances, not exactly defined in the regulations, to the honey in which the head is placed. The doctor complained about the regulations. He kept saying that it was time to reconsider them in the light of recent medical knowledge.

  To have to deal with heads like that would be the last straw, Abdulla thought as he watched the carriage disappear on the opposite side of the square. He felt almost certain that the blue-veined head of Halet the official was one of this kind.

  ‘He was the one who collected the complaints against Ali Pasha of the Albanians and drew up the final report for the sultan,’ said a voice close to Abdulla’s right ear.

  Abdulla remembered well the public announcement of the uprising of the Albanian pasha and the effect of the news on the capital city. That same day, a proclamation changed Ali Pasha’s name to Kara Ali, meaning ‘Black Ali’, and an imperial order to crush the rebellion was issued. He remembered the whispers in the streets and the cafés, especially among artists and intellectuals, with that light in their eyes, a feverish glitter that appeared whenever there was trouble in the empire.

  Shortly after Halet passed by, Abdulla sensed that the crowd in the square had changed, as new voices repeated the same questions: Whose head is that? Why? Where is Albania? Hurshid Pasha is fighting there now. The price of bronze, tourist visas …

  The square was like a swimming pool whose water changed every half hour. Its churning noise was narcotic: Halet the official … he was a real troublemaker. The bronze price will go up again … bronze, nz, z … zz …

  Abdulla turned his eyes to the niche. The head of Ali Tepelena, the pasha of Albania, would have to go there soon. The glorious Hurshid Pasha had set off to capture it. All the newspapers were writing about him. He had either to bring back the rebel’s head or relinquish his own, like the ill-fated Bugrahan, two months ago. When Bugrahan Pasha left for Albania, the niche had been empty. The first winter frosts appeared. The hole that gaped in the wall seemed hungry. It had been waiting for Ali Pasha, that rare visitor to the capital, but in its place had come the head of the defeated Bugrahan, cut off by order of the sovereign. The niche now waited again, indifferently, for either Black Ali or the glorious Hurshid, the sultan’s favourite.

  Perhaps for the thousandth time, Abdulla looked at the head. Because of a slight angle of the sword at the moment of execution, or because of the physical build of the victim, it seemed a little slanted to one side. Abdulla clearly remembered Bugrahan Pasha setting off for war. Now it seemed to him that even then the vizier, astride his magnificent horse, had held his head at a slight angle. The military music echoing round the square, the banners above the Cannon Gate and the Obelisk of Tokmakhan, the high state dignitaries who had come out to see off the vizier, the pupils of the religious schools with flowers in their hands, the farewell speeches – all these things were fixed in Abdulla’s memory. But above all he could not put out of his mind the last moment before Bugrahan departed, when, waving his hand to the cheering crowds, he had turned his head towards the niche and averted his eyes at once. It had seemed to Abdulla that the vizier’s features had clenched in a grimace. Two months later, before dawn on the first Wednesday of December, when the doctor and two protocol officials brought the head of the defeated Bugrahan, the first thing to flash through Abdulla’s mind was the image of that brief glance towards the empty niche.

  The clock on the neighbouring square struck noon. The café opposite was full of people. The cold was tightening its grip. Abdulla thought that from where he stood he could sense the melancholy mood of the section of the clientele described by the doctor as ‘the old state criers in their grief’. Abdulla knew that if he drank a strong coffee there, with a little hashish, his eyes would view differently this crowd that endlessly whirled and seethed within the square’s granite perimeter. He had tried this several times. Before his eyes, the crowd had turned into a mass of heads and bodies, whose furious gestures suggested that they were impatient to cut themselves asunder from one another. Their quarrel must be as old as the world itself. At such moments Abdulla was thankful for the invention of all the necklaces and chains, scarves and helmet straps with which people kept their heads firmly fastened to their bodies. All these had been devised to prevent heads from being detached. But he noticed that the more splendid this neckwear appeared, and the thicker its gold embroidery (depending on its wearer’s position in the state hierarchy), the more the head and body were inclined to come apart. Usually when his train of thought reached this point, Abdulla’s hand went involuntarily to his own neck with its ordinary shirt collar, and this movement of his hand was accompanied by a feeling of despair as shallow and insipid as everything else in his life.

  2

  On the Empire’s Frontier

  MOST OF ALBANIA’S rebellious southern pashadom was under snow. Yet the landscape was not uniformly white, but broken up by dark patches and cracks caused by the jagged terrain. The lowlands lay black under the freezing wind. The snow and the land were both old, and knew each other’s wiles.

  The land of the Albanians had been part of the Ottoman Empire for four hundred year
s. The empire had ancient territories dating back almost eight hundred years, as well as very recent additions. Now winter had come to all of them: to the old domains of the imperial heartland, or Dar-al-Islam, as they were called, and to the new possessions – known as Dar-al-Harb, which might be translated as ‘foreign lands’ or ‘lands of war’; to the great renegade pashadoms, to the regions put to sleep after losing their nationhood, to the regions that enjoyed privileges – or the halal lands, as they were once called; to the snowfields, to the treacherous shadowlands where the sun never penetrated, and to the marshes made all the more desolate by the clamour of geese. In short, to all the provinces whose stations and destinies had been laid down in the recent special decree, ‘On the Status of the Empire’.

  Only clouds, mists, rainbows, winds, rains and the royal messengers on the muddy highways roamed freely from one part of the mighty state to another. As winter approached, there had been more couriers than ever.

  The winter was harshest on the frontier of the empire, and especially in the land of the Albanians. Or perhaps it seemed this way because of the rebellion. It had been apparent for many years that conflicts increased the heat when they occurred in summer, but had the opposite effect in winter, when the wind cut more sharply than a sword.

  This was Albania’s second major uprising since its subjugation. Throughout the autumn, it was rumoured in the capital city that the sultan-emperor himself would march against the distant territory, just like at the time of Scanderbeg’s great rebellion. This plan was considered to have good and bad aspects. The good was obvious, in that it was clear to everybody that a campaign led by the sovereign himself would quickly suppress the uprising. The bad was that an imperial offensive stuck in the memory and, unlike in previous times, the capital increasingly set store by forgetting.

  It was previously thought that states had so many memorials and monuments in order that nothing should be forgotten. But it was discovered later that a major state had as much need to forget as to remember, if not more. The memories of events and statesmen paled as the years passed. Dust covered them, mud stained them, until they were finally erased as if they had never been. But recently people had come to understand that forgetting was more difficult and complicated than remembering. It was forbidden, for example, to mention the name of Scanderbeg in books or the press, but there was no such ruling regarding the two sultans’ campaigns against him in Albania. Nobody dared say that poems and chronicles could no longer mention the sovereigns’ battles. But at the same time, nobody could advise how to answer bothersome questions: who had the great emperors set off to fight against, and what had they done when they arrived?

  The Central Archive could perform many miracles, as it had done with the Balkans, but it was beyond its skill to hide these looming questions that emerged through the fog like mountaintops and seemed to glint above the entire world.

  Albania had rebelled many times since the death of Scanderbeg, may he never rest in peace, but never like this. This was an extended rebellion that came in waves like the shocks of an earthquake, sometimes overtly, sometimes in secret. It had been started long ago by the old Bushatli family in the north and continued by Ali Pasha Tepelena in the south, and was shaking the foundations of the historic empire.

  During the long autumn, everybody in the capital talked about the Albanian affair. Obviously, the rebel territory would be severely punished, and the era of the great pashadoms in Albania would come to an end. But this was not enough for the old aristocratic and religious elites. They wanted to know why matters had been allowed to go so far, and who was to blame. For years they had opposed the favours shown to Albania. They had written letters and issued warnings. But the rot had not been stopped.

  Instead, something unprecedented had happened. For forty years, the great native pashas of Albania, Kara Mahmud Bushatli in the north and Ali Tepelena in the south, had kept the country beyond the reach of the Sublime Porte. They said that Kara Mahmud, the pasha of the north, rushed out like a tiger from the ravines of his frontier domain at whim and attacked neighbouring states without the permission of the capital, breaking all the alliances, treaties and agreements that had been reached with so much effort, and turning the state’s entire foreign policy upside down. The foreign minister, the Reiz Efendi, appeared before the sultan, rending his cheeks and beard, and demanded that either this rampaging pasha be put in his place, or he himself should be dismissed.

  ‘Kara Mahmud Bushatli, a model civil servant,’ the British consul, famous for his quips, had once said. If he was not mistaken, this pasha had waged war on neighbouring states six times without the sultan’s permission. He had been pronounced a traitor on each occasion and sentenced to death, but was always pardoned. The seventh time he had attacked a foreign country, again without permission, he had been killed there. Oh God, such pashas only existed in the Balkans. And just look at his name: Kara Mahmud, with that handle ‘Kara’, meaning ‘Black’, attached by the official curse. Apparently he’d liked the sobriquet, and besides, he was aware that after every pardon he would be condemned again, so he kept it joined to his name, rather as we hesitate to put down a wet hood when we come in from the rain, knowing that we are going straight out again.

  People laughed at the Englishman, although everyone knew that the European consuls were, without exception, embroiled in the business of both Kara Mahmud and Ali Pasha. Carriages bearing their diplomatic crests swept through the renegade pashadoms like the north wind. But to the consuls’ surprise, apart from its besieged castles the vast province of Albania was to all appearances at peace. With their faces glued to the little windows of their coaches, they expected to see turmoil and bloodshed, but found only silence. They referred to their newspapers, as if trying to confirm from the headlines that there was indeed an uprising, and poked their heads outside, but everywhere there was the same desolation. It was as though the noise and mayhem had been projected to the royal capital, while here at its source everything was frozen in silence.

  Newspaper headlines reported to all corners of the state that Ali Tepelena, governor of Albania, a seven-times-decorated pasha and member of the Council of Ministers, proclaimed by royal decree as Kara Ali, meaning ‘Black Ali’, was besieged in his last fortress. Hurshid Pasha, the army’s rising star and the emperor’s favourite, was suppressing the rebellion, and had refused all meetings with journalists and consuls.

  On the fourth of February, the French consul’s carriage was travelling past the encampment of a unit of the besieging army. From deep inside the camp came the sound of festive drumming. The consul stretched his head out of the window to ask what all this pounding was about. ‘The hayir ferman,’ several voices replied from the semi-darkness. ‘What?’ the consul asked. ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s the decree pardoning Ali Pasha’s life,’ someone replied. ‘The war’s over.’

  How was this possible, the consul wondered, and stretched his head out of the carriage to ask more questions, but around him there was only dusk and spoiled snow. How was this possible, he wondered again. The whole world was waiting for Ali Pasha’s severed head. In the capital, there were people who kept vigil all night by the Traitor’s Niche, and curses against the black vizier had been sung from the empire’s hundred thousand minarets. How could it all come to this ordinary end?

  It was totally dark outside. The snow now looked black and the French consul, wrapped in his fur-lined cloak, racked his brain to think of what he would report to his king.

  They must come now, thought Hurshid Pasha for perhaps the hundredth time. He paced from one end of the tent to another with long strides, and as he walked he shifted his rings from one trembling finger to the next. They must come now, he almost cried aloud. He thought he heard footsteps, and listened. But it was not footsteps, only the rustling of his robe, which stopped as soon as he stood still.

  No more gunshots or shouts of war were audible. It seemed that everything was over, and still they hadn’t come. For an instant, he imagined th
em walking towards him with heavy feet, like in a nightmare. Hurry up a little, for God’s sake, he appealed silently. But their feet stuck as if in dough. The script of the sultan’s decree, which Ali Pasha perhaps held in his hands, flashed in front of his eyes. That decree pardoned the empire’s greatest rebel … but the sultan’s signature strangely resembled a scorpion with its poisonous sting pointing upward. The decree was false. Ali would be beheaded as soon as he surrendered.

  Then why …? He left his thought unfinished. Involuntarily he reached out his arm for support. His knees buckled. They were coming. He could hear their footsteps. They were footsteps of a particular kind, neither hurried nor slow. One could not tell from what direction they came, but it was as if they were descending from some height or climbing from deep down. Their sound gave no indication of what news they brought, joyful or bitter. His arm, still searching for support, flailed in the air like a stork’s wing. At that moment they entered. Hurshid Pasha’s eyes fixed on a point about three feet above the ground, exactly where their hands should be. He did not look at any of their faces. He saw only that white thing that one of them held. The silver basin glittered. There was a head in it. No, it wasn’t a head, but a fairy-tale lantern whose fire illuminated the entire world. Allah, he said to himself and raised his hands to his face, protecting his eyes from this blazing light.

  ‘Pasha,’ the man holding the silver dish broke the silence. ‘Here is the head of Black Ali.’

  Hurshid Pasha stretched out his arms towards it, but instantly pulled them back. His hands would not hold that radiant dish. With an effort, he averted his eyes from it, and with the same awkwardness pointed to the little table in the middle of the tent. The man holding the dish bowed his head in a gesture of obedience, went to the table and placed the dish upon it.