all he could not put out of his mind the last moment before Bugrahan departed, when, waving his hand to the cheering crowds, he had turned his head towards the niche and averted his eyes at once. It had seemed to Abdulla that the vizier’s features had clenched in a grimace. Two months later, before dawn on the first Wednesday of December, when the doctor and two protocol officials brought the head of the defeated Bugrahan, the first thing to flash through Abdulla’s mind was the image of that brief glance towards the empty niche.
The clock on the neighboring square struck noon. The café opposite was full of people. The cold was tightening its grip. Abdulla thought that from where he stood he could sense the melancholy mood of the section of the clientele described by the doctor as “the old state criers in their grief.” Abdulla knew that if he drank strong coffee there, with a little hashish, his eyes would view differently this crowd that endlessly whirled and seethed within the square’s granite perimeter. He had tried this several times. Before his eyes, the crowd had turned into a mass of heads and bodies, whose furious gestures suggested that they were impatient to cut themselves asunder from one another. Their quarrel must be as old as the world itself. At such moments Abdulla was thankful for the invention of all the necklaces and chains, scarves and helmet straps with which people kept their heads firmly fastened to their bodies. All these had been devised to prevent heads from being detached. But he noticed that the more splendid this neckwear appeared, and the thicker its gold embroidery (depending on its wearer’s position in the state hierarchy), the more the head and body were inclined to come apart. Usually when his train of thought reached this point, Abdulla’s hand went involuntarily to his own neck with its ordinary shirt collar, and this movement of his hand was accompanied by a feeling of despair as shallow and insipid as everything else in his life.
2
On the Empire’s Frontier
MOST OF Albania’s rebellious southern pashadom was under snow. Yet the landscape was not uniformly white, but broken up by dark patches and cracks caused by the jagged terrain. The lowlands lay black under the freezing wind. The snow and the land were both old, and knew each other’s wiles.
The land of the Albanians had been part of the Ottoman Empire for four hundred years. The empire had ancient territories dating back almost eight hundred years, as well as very recent additions. Now winter had come to all of them: to the old domains of the imperial heartland, or Dar-al-Islam, as they were called, and to the new possessions—known as the Dar-al-Harb, which might be translated as “foreign lands” or “lands of war”; to the great renegade pashadoms, to the regions put to sleep after losing their nationhood, to the regions that enjoyed privileges—or the halal lands, as they were once called; to the snowfields, to the treacherous shadowlands where the sun never penetrated, and to the marshes made all the more desolate by the clamor of geese. In short, to all the provinces whose stations and destinies had been laid down in the recent special decree, “On the Status of the Empire.”
Only clouds, mists, rainbows, winds, rains, and the royal messengers on the muddy highways roamed freely from one part of the mighty state to another. As winter approached, there had been more couriers than ever.
The winter was harshest on the frontier of the empire, and especially in the land of the Albanians. Or perhaps it seemed this way because of the rebellion. It had been apparent for many years that conflicts increased the heat when they occurred in summer, but had the opposite effect in winter, when the wind cut more sharply than a sword.
This was Albania’s second major uprising since its subjugation. Throughout the autumn, it was rumored in the capital city that the sultan-emperor himself would march against the distant territory, just like at the time of Scanderbeg’s great rebellion. This plan was considered to have good and bad aspects. The good was obvious, in that it was clear to everybody that a campaign led by the sovereign himself would quickly suppress the uprising. The bad was that an imperial offensive stuck in the memory and, unlike in previous times, the capital increasingly set store by forgetting.
It was previously thought that states had so many memorials and monuments in order that nothing should be forgotten. But it was discovered later that a major state had as much need to forget as to remember, if not more. The memories of events and statesmen paled as the years passed. Dust covered them, mud stained them, until they were finally erased as if they had never been. But recently people had come to understand that forgetting was more difficult and complicated than remembering. It was forbidden, for example, to mention the name of Scanderbeg in books or the press, but there was no such ruling regarding the two sultans’ campaigns against him in Albania. Nobody dared say that poems and chronicles could no longer mention the sovereigns’ battles. But at the same time, nobody could advise how to answer bothersome questions: who had the great emperors set off to fight against, and what had they done when they arrived?
The Central Archive could perform many miracles, as it had done with the Balkans, but it was beyond its skill to hide these looming questions that emerged through the fog like mountaintops and seemed to glint above the entire world.
Albania had rebelled many times since the death of Scanderbeg, may he never rest in peace, but never like this. This was an extended rebellion that came in waves like the shocks of an earthquake, sometimes overtly, sometimes in secret. It had been started long ago by the old Bushatli family in the north and continued by Ali Pasha Tepelena in the south, and was shaking the foundations of the historic empire.
During the long autumn, everybody in the capital talked about the Albanian affair. Obviously, the rebel territory would be severely punished, and the era of the great pashadoms in Albania would come to an end. But this was not enough for the old aristocratic and religious elites. They wanted to know why matters had been allowed to go so far, and who was to blame. For years they had opposed the favors shown to Albania. They had written letters and issued warnings. But the rot had not been stopped.
Instead, something unprecedented had happened. For forty years, the great native pashas of Albania, Kara Mahmud Bushatli in the north and Ali Tepelena in the south, had kept the country beyond the reach of the Sublime Porte. They said that Kara Mahmud, the pasha of the north, rushed out like a tiger from the ravines of his frontier domain at whim and attacked neighboring states without the permission of the capital, breaking all the alliances, treaties, and agreements that had been reached with so much effort, and turning the state’s entire foreign policy upside down. The foreign minister, the Reiz Efendi, appeared before the sultan, rending his cheeks and beard, and demanded that either this rampaging pasha be put in his place, or he himself should be dismissed.
“Kara Mahmud Bushatli, a model civil servant,” the British consul, famous for his quips, had once said. If he was not mistaken, this pasha had waged war on neighboring states six times without the sultan’s permission. He had been pronounced a traitor on each occasion and sentenced to death, but was always pardoned. The seventh time he had attacked a foreign country, again without permission, and he had been killed there. Oh God, such pashas existed only in the Balkans. And just look at his name: Kara Mahmud, with that handle, Kara, meaning “Black,” attached by the official curse. Apparently he’d liked the sobriquet, and besides, he was aware that after every pardon he would be condemned again, so he kept it joined to his name, rather as we hesitate to put down a wet hood when we come in from the rain, knowing that we are going straight out again.
People laughed at the Englishman, although everyone knew that the European consuls were, without exception, embroiled in the business of both Kara Mahmud and Ali Pasha. Carriages bearing their diplomatic crests swept through the renegade pashadoms like the north wind. But to the consuls’ surprise, apart from its besieged castles the vast province of Albania was to all appearances at peace. With their faces glued to the little windows of their coaches, they expected to see turmoil and bloodshed, but found only silence. They referred to their newspapers, as if trying to confirm from the headlines that there was indeed an uprising, and poked their heads outside, but everywhere there was the
