exclaimed the doctor. “Not long now.” He rubbed his hands together with glee. “Shall we take a look at this lover boy?”
“As you wish,” said Abdulla, and went to fetch the wooden ladder. The guards, with spears in their hands, observed the crowd out of the corners of their eyes. The doctor nimbly climbed the ladder, set down his bag in a corner of the recess, and inspected the head. He pressed it with deft fingers: first the temples, then under the eyes and on the throat, while whistling all the time under his breath. Then he opened his bag, took out a bottle and a piece of cotton, moistened the cotton with the liquid from the bottle, and carefully dabbed the head in all the places where he had touched it. Then he took out a smaller bottle, and with the help of a pipette squeezed several drops of liquid into the corners of both eyes. When he had finished, he returned the bottles and the remaining cotton to the bag and, after wiping away the last drops of moisture and fragments of cotton from one hardened cheek, patted the other lightly, almost affectionately, as if to say, amazing, no problems here at all.
“A miracle,” he said aloud, cheerfully waving his hand as he descended. “Goodbye for now, Abdulla.”
Abdulla followed him with his eyes as he vanished among the crowd of people. The grimmest and most doleful expression in the world would have surprised Abdulla less than this levity of the doctor.
The drowsy hubbub of the square filled Abdulla’s ears, and now and then there rose, like flecks of foam to the surface of the sea, fragments of words and phrases. Abdulla stood like a rock washed by this chatter, which flowed into the hollows of his eyes, down his cheeks, through his beard, drenching him like a rainstorm . . . Whose is this head? . . . head . . . whose . . . this head . . . it belonged to General . . . Gen . . . Bugrahan Pasha . . . Gen . . . defeated by Ali Pasha . . . and why have they put it . . . why . . . put . . . why in . . . of the Traitor’s . . . Niche . . . how . . . because he lost the war . . . But this Ali . . . this pasha . . . Ali Tepelena . . . what did you say? The rebel pasha of the province of Albania? . . . Where is this province? . . . Oh, a long way . . . Haven’t you read the newspapers? On the edge of the empire . . . the edge . . . the cursed frontier of the empire . . . What do they call it in their own language? . . . Shqi . . . Shqip . . . Shqipëria . . . I can’t hear you because of the noise . . . What a name . . .
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 vapor, 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 inquiries 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 favorite.
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
