and the national idea of the Serbian people was beginning to wane in the heavy shackles of its slavery’. Some historians hold the position that, with the latter, ‘the great vizier through this decree preserved the Serbian people from final extinction and destruction’. This cannot be far from the truth if one knows to what extent the Serbian people of the time, no longer having their own independent state, lent importance to the only existing replacement for statehood – the Serbian Orthodox church. This is the reason for the widely held qualification that Mehmed-Pasha Sokollu was ‘an unshakeable Moslem and, at the same time... a good patriot who paid his dues to his people with dignity’. He believed that he made peace between Islam and his Bosnian homeland; his Serbian roots and the Orthodox Christian faith.
And that is why (in my mind) it was there, at the hamam, at that particular time, that most popular and controversial contemporary Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk showed up with me – because, if there is any ideology in novel writing, he dedicated his books to the relations between East and West, and thereby continued down the path followed by some of his ancestors. And there is another reason: his masterpiece novel My Name is Red deals with the Ottoman Empire and in part with Mehmed-Pasha’s time, and also with the consequences of that time. For his explanation of that period, Pamuk deserved a virtual (or perhaps for him, Dervish’s) bath – for there is never enough cleanliness and purification. Nor is there enough enjoyment, or akshamluk ‘the Bosnian custom of sitting on the grass in the evening, usually by a body of water, drinking brandy, singing and talking’.
What kind of writers would we be if we did not, sometimes, next to the hamam, enjoy a bit of akshamluk ourselves? While understanding this word’s hedonistic and philosophical meaning.
One of the writers’ main problems, is that they often confuse reality and imagination. That is the source of the famous loss of the boundary between what happened and what was experienced. And that is how I began to temporally mix my encounters with people close to me; it is in fact, how I brought those who lived five centuries before me closer to my own time, and transferred myself and my friends (or characters, it makes no difference) with ease into lives centuries older than we are.
It was one of the ways of fulfilling the writer’s dream about the temporal omnipotence of words.
Because of that dream, books come into being.
He wished that someone would kill him. Yes, that is right. Simply – to be killed. In the past year so much that he cared about and so many that he loved had disappeared from his life. This was, of course, no accident. It was all carefully planned and likewise carried out. He had to admit – his opponent executed it all without error, and thus, from the standpoint of the skill and expertise of what had been done, he had absolutely nothing to object to. Except for the very basis of the idea: why had his enemies set the entire machinery in motion and spent so much time, money and energy in order to obliterate everything dear to him, when it would have been much quicker, cheaper and easier to kill him and him alone?
Yet, in fact, he knew the reason. What they really wanted was for him to constantly ask that question and, not finding an answer, to ultimately feel so alone and abandoned that he wished to live no longer. Because watching those near, dear and loyal to him disappearing one by one before his very eyes, that had to hurt, and it went on and on. If they had killed him first and immediately, there would be none of the suffering they wished him to go through. To be honest, after so many decades in authority, at the very top, he had to expect such a decline. So it had been, it seems, from the beginning of the world; one’s rise is most often associated with one’s fall. Whoever reached the top, must also find the bottom, in whatever sequence. But whether everyone actually had to fall to the bottom after being at the top, that is questionable. It did fall to him. Or it was, as they say, his destiny. Or had he actually brought on his own decline.
To be fair, his fall was actually rather literal. No one replaced him, overthrew him or passed him by in a new distribution of authority (even if such things had been planned). He fell from a single, sudden stab of a knife right in the heart and now, there he was, lying in a pool of blood, watching his entire past life as if he were summarising it before death so that he would not forget it.
What more could he ask, his wish was fulfilled: someone had killed him.
Strange, how death can be a relief. Certainly, his murderers had not done this to show him compassion. During his reign, violent death had been a normal, everyday phenomenon; the nuances were just in the type or degree of the morbidity and brutality. The Empire had required violence at all times and in all forms. While he was a grand vizier, taking others’ lives was not in any way characteristic of him as a leader or, God forbid, as a person. It was part of protecting the system; it was not even a matter of safeguarding his own authority. It was a mechanism, centuries in the making, that no single individual, no matter from what position of authority he acted, could disturb, much the less change, even if he wanted to. In the battles, wars, campaigns and conquests, death was commonplace. It occurred frequently in peacetime as well, only just not as widely spread.
After all, was he not famed as a grand vizier also because he ruled during the reign of three sultans! Who else could make such a claim? A rarity was a vizier who could survive the enthronement of one sultan, and no one ever connected three in a row! All death had originated from the highest ruler: did not every sultan, when taking the throne, by an unwritten law, first kill all his brothers (some also killed their own children) so that they did not threaten his reign with their very existence?
It would also not be true to say that he was waiting for his own death. It simply did not surprise him. About Death itself he knew everything: it would be difficult to find someone who could outdo him in his knowledge of its causes and effects, its kinds and types. Perhaps he would not excel at questions of its usefulness: not one of his teachers or rulers had instructed him about such secrets because the question of purpose would never be asked by such people.
‘Wishing’ to die did not also mean that he ‘longed’ for it. His wishing allowed him to peacefully await his own fate. It removed all unnecessary uncertainty.
Now everything stopped being important, and especially everything that required additional time for reflection. There was just not enough time for anything. Except for death.
Since I had inwardly proved to myself that I had not ‘dried up’ as a writer, I could begin in reality to struggle in solving a dilemma. Which of the three planned books should I start to write? I will not mention the other two anticipated books because I have, obviously, started writing the frontrunner. Of course, subtle reasons were in this book’s favour because I had also done most of the serious and necessary preparatory work for the other two future books from the narrow selection.
Of those subtle reasons, the scales were tipped by those that I would group under ‘local-patriotic’ reasons. Namely, in a recent conversation with a colleague on the topics of nationalism and globalism in literary themes, I realised for the first time the fact that the fervent defenders of the ‘domestic novel’ had labelled me ‘cosmopolitan’, a term that they used with condescension. Yet in this conclusion they ignored the fact that in four out of my five published novels, the action at least begins or takes place entirely in Belgrade and/or Serbia, and that of my seven books of prose (not counting this one, of course) six contain the same topography! And yet, the fault-finding had no end: perhaps those books in their essence or message were too cosmopolitan, so even local geography or local action could not help them. They did not manage to rise to the level of national myths, which was, to be honest, not part of their conception either.
The chosen topic hid new traps, not only compositional
