Elegy for Kosovo Read online

  The Serb’s eyes were filled with the same tragic lament. Both men were prisoners, tied to each other by ancient chains that they could not and did not want to break.

  III

  Every time they set out to return to the Balkans, they came across people fleeing from there. “Are you out of your minds?” the people said. “We barely got out alive, and you are trying to return? Down there death is everywhere!”

  The fleeing people were covered with so much dust that their faces looked more anguished and lifeless than the faces of the saints on the icons they were carrying with them. The news they brought was no less somber: Serbia, it seemed, was in utter disarray. Nobody knew what had become of Walachia or Bosnia. Only half of Albania was still holding out, the western region with its Albano-Venetian castles. And the lands of the Croats and the Slovenes had not yet fallen. But all the Balkan princes, both those in power and those overthrown, had bowed their heads before the Turkish sultan.

  “What about Kosovo and its plains?” some of the men asked eagerly.

  “Don’t ask! Even the grass is gone. Even the blackbirds have fled. Even the name is said to have been changed — it is to be called Muradie from now on, in honor of Sultan Murad, who died there.”

  “What about the churches?” somebody asked.

  “They have been torn down, and temples have been built in their place — they call them mosques, or . . .”

  The news about the churches was unclear and contradictory. Some said that only the Serb Orthodox churches had been torn down, while the Catholic churches, those of the Albanians, had been spared. Others insisted that all the churches. Catholic and Orthodox, had been destroyed, and others again claimed the opposite, that not a single church had been touched, and that it was the languages and not the faiths that were under attack.

  The people listening clasped their heads in despair. What a calamity! How could people live without their language? How were they to understand each other?

  The new arrivals shrugged their shoulders. They had spoken so little during their flight that it seemed they did not see the loss of their language as a big problem. There were even some who felt that it might be better this way. They had said what they had to say in this world, and now that everything had come to an end it was better to be silent.

  Others shook their heads doubtfully. The language question was still somehow unsettled, they said. They had heard with their own ears how heralds proclaimed other prohibitions from village to village, prohibitions having to do with chimneys and with women showing their faces.

  “No, no!” protested the men, who could not believe what they were hearing. “Prohibiting chimneys and covering women’s faces is incredible — it doesn’t make sense!”

  “Sense or nonsense, call it what you want, but things have changed back there. What’s there now is slavery! Do you understand what I am saying? S-l-a-v-e-r-y! I am telling you, there is no more Bosnia, nor Greece, nor Serbia, nor Albania, nor Walachia — only a ‘region.’ That is what the Turkish officials call the world in their language. For them there are two kinds of regions — good and bad. The good or proper region is the Islamic region. The other is perverse, foreign.”

  As they spoke they turned to Ibrahim, the Turk they had lost sight of for a few days, who had reappeared the night before.

  To their surprise they saw him bowing down, prostrating himself, as they had heard that Muslims do,

  “What are you doing there, Ibrahim?” they called out to him. “You want to become a Christian, and yet you continue to pray like a Muslim?“

  The Turk motioned them not to disturb him. He finished his prayers and then got up with a lost look on his face, as if he had returned from another world.

  The people stared at him wildly. Whispers were heard: “Accursed Turk!” — “You deceived us all! — “Right from the start I didn’t trust him!“

  The Turk looked at them one by one, his eyes surprisingly bright.

  “What is wrong?” he asked in a low voice.

  “What is wrong?” someone in the crowd shouted. “This morning you made the sign of the cross, and now you pray like a Turk! Are you making fun of us?“

  “No, I am not,” he answered. “I am not making fun of you. I have an honest heart.”

  With jumbled words he began telling them his predicament. He wanted to become a Christian from deep within his heart, but at the same time he was unable to expel his other belief. For the time being, both lived within him. Especially at night, he felt them moving, jostling each other, gasping, trying to take over by fair means or foul. So while everyone else was sound asleep, Ibrahim was tortured. He felt that soon enough one of the two faiths would be broken and driven out of him. But he would not pressure or trick either one of them. He was waiting impartially for the result, hoping that in the end the faith of the cross would triumph.

  They listened intently, and then a Bosnian man asked him, “In other words, you are waiting for your body to shed one of the faiths like a reptile sheds its skin? Speak frankly, Turk, are you a snake?“

  The Turk’s eyes filled with deeper sorrow.

  “I am not a snake, no! I am an orphan like the stars, a soldier lost like the sands of Yemen, but I am not a snake.”

  One after the other they turned their backs on him and left. Only a Jew by the name of Heiml stayed back, eyeing him as if he were trying to figure out from which part of the Turk’s body one of the two faiths would be expelled.

  IV

  Now they were so far away that hardly any news reached them anymore. Even when news did come, it was so altered by the distance that they were not sure what to make of it. It was as if one were to believe a courier who had grown old — even died — traveling down an endless road; had still managed to somehow get through and deliver his message.

  This was how the news came to them that their new monarchy who initially had been called “Emir” and then “Sultan, had been given the new title “Yildirim” — “Lightning Bolt.”

  The fugitives were deeply pained. Under the title of Sultan, he had brought the Balkan and the Byzantine princes to their knees. With his new title he might well bring all of Europe to its knees. They could get as far away as they wanted; he was bound to follow them. Their souls would be plunged into terror every time the sky darkened and a lightning bolt came tearing through driving rain.

  A second message specified that Lightning Bolt was only the nickname of Bayezid, the new monarch who had mounted the throne after his father’s death on the Plains of Kosovo. But this new message, instead of erasing the first one, gave it even more weight.

  The Turks, before they ground the world under their heel, would conquer the skies. They had put the crescent moon on their banners and then made thunder and lightning their own — and tomorrow God knows what they would attack: the stars, the winter clouds, perhaps time itself.

  For a few days the fugitives stayed in a friendly region. The villagers gave them bread to eat and listened to their tales with compassion even though they did not understand their language, and at night they let them sleep in the porches of their churches. The villagers feared only one thing: that the refugees might have brought the plague with them. The rest did not matter.

  They had heard talk about the Turkish peril, but only vaguely. And for some time now there had been talk of a new crusade being summoned against the Turk. All the Christian states were to rally together. The pope of Rome himself was to head the crusade.

  The fugitives rejoiced at these words. The farther north they went the higher the cathedrals and the towers of the castles became. Black iron crosses dominated the skies. One stifling night, two solitary lightning bolts, instead of sending shivers through the crosses as one would expect, seemed to turn in terror and dash away.

  God be praised — Christianity was still mighty in all its lands. The Balkans had been defeated on the continent’s borders, but here, in its heart, things were quite different. The fugitives were soothed by the city gates and walled
towers, the princely titles and emblems and coats of arms, and the Latin inscriptions in the bronze and marble of the churches.

  While the fugitives were awaiting permission to enter one of the somber little cities (at times their very lack of size seemed to make them all the more dismal), guards came and dragged Ibrahim the Turk away and clapped him in irons.

  At first they were not particularly worried. They had often run into trouble on account of the Turk. But this time things looked bad. All the explanations about how he had deserted his own army and how he had two faiths were of no avail. Quite the opposite. Every time his two faiths were mentioned, the guards’ eyes flashed with scorn. In the end, the Balkan fugitives were told that they were wasting their time: the Turk would be submitted to a secret investigation by the Holy Inquisition.

  “If he is innocent,” they told each other, “then he will be set free like all the other innocents, but he might well be a spy, and we in our foolishness may have been gullible.” Others recalled that it was not the Holy Inquisition that dealt with spies but the town court. “If you ask me, I never really liked this business of his two faiths,” one of the Walachians said. “A man cannot have two faiths, just as no creature of God can have two heads. There might be two-headed vipers, but no two-headed men.“

  The trial that began two weeks later confirmed what the Walachian had said. It was his double faith, even his triple faith — brought to light under torture — that cost the Turk his neck. During the trial, he asserted that he had wanted to become a Christian upon seeing the cross above the Plains of Kosovo. But the Islamic faith was not prepared to leave his body without a struggle, which was why he continued praying to his prophet. “And why are you drawn to the Jewish faith? Are not the other two enough for you, eh?” the judge yelled.

  A faint murmur rose from the crowd.

  The Turk tried to explain that he had only listened to Heiml the Jew out of curiosity, but the crowd was already growing wild.

  He was to be burned at the stake, for it was certain that he had entered into a pact with the devil. “Had he kept to his Muslim belief, he would have remained unscathed,” the judge pronounced. “And had he converted to our faith, we would have welcomed him with open arms, like a brother. But he did neither the one nor the other,” the judge continued. “He has attempted to do the impossible, to waver between two faiths, doubtless following the devil’s counsel.”

  The judge spoke at length of the holy and immutable principles of the church. The antichrist was attacking from all sides, but the church was unshakable. The creation of men of two faiths was only the most recent of Satan’s inventions.

  The judge glared menacingly at the small group of Balkan men who were huddling together like sheep, and spoke harsh words of warning to those who undertook to turn Europe’s Christian traditions into pagan infamy.

  The Turk was burned in front of the cathedral the following day at noon. As the smoke began to envelope the convicted man, the others remembered the day before the battle, back on the Plains of Kosovo, when both sides had unleashed curtains of smoke so that they would not have to look at each other.

  The Turk’s first cries came from within the smoke. Incomprehensible words, it seemed, in his language. The crowd tried to detect the word “Allah,” the only word they knew, but the convicted man did not pronounce it.

  The inquisitor who had prosecuted the burning man craned his neck so he could hear better. “I think he said ‘Abracadabra,’ “he whispered to his deputy.

  The other man nodded, “I believe he did.” And he raised his iron cross like a shield.

  “The poor Turk!” one of the Bosnians said to his friends. “He is crying for his mother, Remember when he told us that mama in his language is abllà?”

  “No, I don’t remember a thing!” The other man cut him short,

  The Turk’s shouts turned into stifled moans; then he emitted a sudden and terrible “NON!” It was an isolated shout, completely different from his previous cries, although that might only have been because it was the only Latin word he said. It was probably the first word he had learned in the Christian world, and in leaving that world, which had not accepted him, he expressed his regret in that final shout.

  V

  After the Turk was burned, the Balkan fugitives left immediately and headed north, out of fear that the Inquisition would pursue everyone in any way connected with him. The principalities they crossed became increasingly small and austere. It was as if an ancient fury had shriveled their lands and towers, while the swords of the guardsmen seemed increasingly sharp.

  There were more and more searches. The fugitives were searched for hidden icons, for symptoms of the plague, for counterfeit currency. Most of the people had never heard of the Battle of Kosovo, so when the fugitives spoke of it, they aroused suspicion instead of compassion. Quite often they were told that if they were really soldiers, they should enlist as mercenaries in one of the many local regiments. There was no lack of wrangling princes and counts. The counts in particular were, more often than not, extremely belligerent and ever ready to hire ruthless warriors.

  The fugitives listened in bewilderment. After the calamity of Kosovo, they could not face another war of any kind. They would rather work for blacksmiths or cheese makers. They knew how to make a type of cheese that, from what they could tell, was unknown in these parts. They also knew how to turn milk into yogurt, which was tangy, fresh, and did not spoil for days.

  In the beginning, the villagers were amazed at this yogurt but then suddenly became terrified that they might find themselves burned at the stake. They quickly poured the “diseased” milk out of their jugs, and with tears in their eyes begged the Balkans not to breathe a word of this to anyone, as it would mean certain death for all concerned.

  They passed through villages where different languages were spoken. One day Hans, a simpleton who tagged along part of the way, eyeing Gjorg’s lahuta, asked him, full of curiosity, what that “thingamajig” slung over his shoulder was, Gjorg was about to explain, but Hans shook his head slyly — “I know what it is! It is the instrument with which you turn milk into yogurt, ha, ha, ha!“

  Gjorg laughed too, but Vladan, who had heard Hans, looked at them sullenly.

  “You must throw that lahuta away, or you might well end up burned at the stake.“

  “I will throw it away,” Gjorg said. “I will find a faraway, secluded spot, I shall play it one last time, and then I will throw it away.”

  And he would surely have thrown it away, had not something extraordinary happened at the end of that week. Gjorg, Vladan, and Manolo, a Walachian storyteller, were summoned to a castle. The messengers who brought them the invitation told them that their lord always invited French and German minstrels to his banquets, and that he had heard about them and was interested in listening to their songs.

  Gjorg was deep in thought; Vladan was on the verge of tears because he no longer had his gusla. As for Manolo — his face turned yellow and he wanted to run away, but the others managed with great difficulty to persuade him not to disgrace them.

  Somehow Vladan succeeded in making a gusla by the day of the banquet. “Don’t worry!” the others said to him. “If worse comes to worst, you can use Gjorg’s lahuta.”

  They placed all their hopes on this banquet. Now respect for them was bound to grow. People would see that they were good for more than just making war and cheese and “diseased” milk, that they could also sing of great deeds, just as their ancient clansmen had. Their situation would perhaps improve, suspicions would be dispelled, and perhaps they would even be granted permission to settle down in this place.

  The Balkan fugitives escorted the minstrels part of the way and bade them good luck. Bathed and combed, their faces tense with agitation, the three of them, together with a Croat who could mimic the calls of birds and wolves, disappeared through the castle’s heavy portal.

  The Balkan fugitives crossed themselves three times; some of them fell to their knees; o
thers prayed with burning fervor: “Do not abandon us, Holy Mary, Mother of God!”

  VI

  Adozen minstrels waited in a row for their turn. The French sang of Roland, their hero who had blown his horn before dying, and the Germans sang of the ring of their lord whose name was Siegfried. Another minstrel, who seemed to be neither German nor French, sang of a Vilhelm who had shot an arrow at an apple he had placed on his son’s head.

  When their turn came, the lord of the castle announced to his company that they were going to hear the Balkan minstrels who had come straight from the Battle of Kosovo, where the Turks had dealt Christendom a bitter blow. “Let us all hope and pray that this blow will be the last!”

  One after the other, in the heavy silence, they sang their songs, ancient and cold as stone, each in his own language: “A great fog is covering the Field of the Blackbirds! Rise, O Serbs, the Albanians are taking Kosovo.” “A black fog has descended—Albanians, to arms, Kosovo is falling to the damned Serb.”

  The guests, who had been listening with sorrowful faces, asked the Balkan minstrels to explain what their songs were about. At first the nobles sat speechless, not believing what they were told. Then they became angry — the Balkan lands have fallen, and these minstrels continue singing songs that keep the old enmities alive?

  “It is true that there is dissension everywhere, but dissension like yours is really unique in the world!” one of the guests said contemptuously.

  “What wretches you are!” the lord of the castle shouted.

  They stood with bowed heads as the guests denounced them. They would have tried to explain, as they had that evening long ago, but they realized that their words would fall on deaf ears. “It would have been better for us to have died on the battlefield than end up at this cursed banquet,” Gjorg thought.