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 Street of Islamic Arms, the crossroads where the Obelisk of Tokmakhan stood, and the adjacent Crescent Square. Abdulla carefully studied their behavior. 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, dishonored in war and defeated by Ali Pasha Tepelena, former governor of Albania and traitor to the Empire.”
The clock in the neighboring 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 center 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 passersby 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 mold. 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 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 color. 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 color 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 color 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 color 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 recognized 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 coffeepot 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 color of his skin or the arch of his nose. Or perhaps it was the other way around, and his face over the years had begun to resemble the copper coffeepot. 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 gray hair. The snow swirled around 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 keeper of the Traitor’s Niche, which symbolized 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
