The Traitor's Niche. Ismail Kadare
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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.
“Leave now,” Hurshid Pasha said in a voice like the slenderest of threads. Two or three more words and it would snap.
The men went out in silence. Hurshid Pasha stood petrified in the middle of the tent, waiting for movement to come back to his body. Life returned first to his legs. Like the legs of a small child, they carried him unsteadily towards the table. For a while he stood numb beside the table, and then bent down over the silver dish and, holding it carefully in trembling hands, kissed the severed head. His shoulders heaved with sobbing. His hands, with cramped fingers frozen, stroked the woolly curls. Feverishly he watched the gems of his rings as they dived and surfaced among the white locks as if through winter clouds, and again his shoulders shook.
“My pasha,” he said. “My guiding star.”
He bent down and kissed the head again, then stepped back to examine it more carefully. Here it is, he thought, on this dish, on this table, in my tent. It was really there, two paces from him. For months it had been as far from his grasp as a clap of thunder.
For entire days and nights during those grim weeks as the war and the siege continued, he had thought of this head. Like all things to do with infinity, its image would not settle in his mind. It was always distant, sometimes brooding or threatening, but mostly inscrutable.
He stroked the head again, but the glint of his rings next to the lifeless eyes was so frightening that he drew back his hands.
“My savior,” he said, his voice breaking. “My destiny.”
Ever since he had been appointed commander-in-chief of the troops to suppress the rebellion, it had seemed to Hurshid Pasha that the head of Black Ali hovered above the horizon of his life like a star in the sky. It was his duty to quench its light or be snuffed out himself. The heavens could not contain them both. One of their suns had to sink.
Throughout those weeks of war, the possibility of losing his own head had tortured him. On overcast mornings, every ache in his neck struck him as an ominous sign. Whenever he looked in the mirror, he could not help thinking of what would happen to his head, or to the other head, that of his double. This head, too, had teeth and a beard, and made speeches and issued orders like every head that commands an army. They had many things in common, but not their fate. One of them would inevitably fall. At moments of exhaustion and weakness, when it seemed that it would be difficult to defeat the legendary pasha of the Albanians, he had been haunted by listless fantasies. How good it would be if customs could change and become gentler, so that the world would accept both of them, the victor and the vanquished. But even in his sluggish dreams this seemed impossible. It was easier to imagine himself with two heads on his shoulders, his own and Ali’s—or worse, their heads at either end of his body, one below and one above. In fact it was easier to imagine any kind of monstrosity than to consider the prospect of them both living on the same earth.
All these fantasies now belonged to the past. This head was in front of him, its light extinguished forever on that February afternoon. So why did he feel no joy at all? The exultation was all around him, and he had only to reach out to share in it, but something stopped him. What’s wrong with you, he said to himself. His star has set, yours is rising. What more do you want?
Nothing, he thought after a moment, but then the reason why he couldn’t rejoice occurred to him. He was afraid. It was no longer the authentic fear for his own head that had been so familiar to him in the past few weeks. It was a more pervasive, mute terror that went down to the foundations of the earth. He had witnessed with his own eyes a mighty fall. He had seen majesty brought low. Yet his own joy squirmed like a squashed worm. His feelings were cold. The worm went still. Why did it have to happen like this?
The chill penetrated his bones. It was the same iciness that he had felt the previous night, when, having withdrawn to his tent, he’d listened to the din of the drums. They were celebrating the arrival of what they took to be the royal hayir ferman, pardoning Ali Pasha. Half-crazed dervishes, with faces blue, danced and fell prostrate, foaming, while around them thousands of soldiers, elated at the end of the campaign, clapped their hands. Nobody knew that the ferman was false. The true decree, the katil ferman, which the messenger kept sewn into his jacket, would be revealed to Ali only at the last moment before his death.
All this was over. Hurshid Pasha walked slowly to the entrance of his tent. Dusk was falling. The February wind whistled in a thousand languages across the plain darkened by winter and war. It is February in all the infinite lands of the empire, he groaned to himself. Why should he think there might be a fragment of March somewhere, or even a scrap of April? A little March for the empire’s chosen sons, he thought. But it was February for everyone.
This was nearly the last of the imperial territories. Two months before, traveling towards this country to take command of the troops after the defeat of Bugrahan, he had noticed that the farther he went from the center and approached the frontier, the minarets were lower, as if they were plants stunted by the increasingly harsh climate. He had been saddened to see those pitiful stumps in the wintry expanse. A little farther, and they no doubt disappeared entirely. There the European plains began, under the sign of the cross. He had never once passed beyond the state borders and had no desire to do so. Some people said that the soil there was saline, and nothing grew but deadly nightshade. Others described it as paradise.
I’m not in my right mind. Why am I doing this, he thought, and shook himself. Why am I doing nothing? He raised his head with a jerk, as if to shake off the sleep creeping over him, and clapped his hands. His adjutants, who stood waiting at a small distance and whom he had not noticed until then, rushed towards him. He motioned his arm as he did before issuing an important order, and began to speak in a voice that to him seemed to come from his temples.
A few moments later, clamorous voices filled Hurshid Pasha’s tent. Pashas, battalion commanders, clerics, adjutants, and liaison officers of all kinds ceaselessly came and went, carrying orders, commendations, or reprimands, which they hastened to communicate in exaggerated form to every corner of the vast military camp. Soon the entire besieging army had been informed of the end of the war. News-criers on horseback stopped in front of tents and shouted, “Great news, great news! Ali Pasha has been beheaded. The war is over!”
The whole field buzzed. The wind, which had not died down all day, diminished the human voices, the clatter of horses’ hooves, and the clanging of the pots cooking halva for the army, to a dull hum.
At the entrance to Hurshid Pasha’s tent, dressed in an official gown with a shaggy cloak thrown over it, appeared the field courier, Tundj Hata. Their eyes met calmly for a moment. The pasha’s gaze seemed to say, so you’ve come? The courier stood there, his face yellow and his beard freshly hennaed, as it usually was before important missions. The henna emphasized even more shockingly the sallowness of his skin.
“So you’re ready?” the pasha asked.
“I’m ready,” Tundj Hata replied.