put forward different opinions, but all agreed on the main point that the body must be buried. Unlike their carefully chosen expressions about the head, their language about the body was coarse and plain. They spoke of it with contempt, as if talking about an annoying servant. They soon decided that the body would be buried early in the morning in a simple ceremony on the outskirts of the city, with the honors due to a vizier after his death, albeit a traitorous one.
“And now leave me in peace,” Hurshid Pasha said. “I want to rest.”
In vain the war correspondents begged him to answer their questions for the newspapers of the capital city.
“Tomorrow,” he said. His eyes drooped, as if the laughter that had enlivened them in the last half hour had exhausted them more than all those sleepless nights.
The journalists left, but the pasha, instead of lying down, paced his tent. What a day, he repeated to himself. It was Tuesday. The February wind whistled outside. He saw the pile of newspapers in the corner, his name in black among the headlines, and for a moment he imagined Tuesday as a creature with a trailing black beard ruffled by the wind. Allah, how can you have created days like this? he said to himself.
Two months ago, he had departed from the capital on a day with just such a whistling wind, but before leaving he had entered the cold and lofty halls of the Central Archive to read the file on Ali Pasha. For hours he had studied the correspondence between the sultan and the vizier of Albania. The dates showed the letters becoming less and less frequent. It seemed fitting to read the final ones under the desolate blast of the wind shaking the glass in the high windows of the Archive. “This is my last message to you,” the sultan wrote. “If you do not obey me this time, know that you will be consigned to the flames. I will turn you to ash, ash, ash.” This was the actual last letter. No reply came from Ali. The couriers had covered the distance between the two continents at incredible speed, their pouches empty. Winter was approaching. The correspondence ceased. After the letters, there would come only ravens and the clouds of war.
I won the war, Hurshid Pasha almost said aloud. I survived. He heard the gale howl again and it seemed to him that he had stumbled and fallen, ensnared by the wind.
The army had gone to bed. The infantry battalions, soldiers and wounded officers, the Anatolian corps, the assault troops, the elderly pashas who suffered from asthma and expected their pensions after this last campaign, and the young pashas, for whom the campaign was the first step in their careers, all lay in rows. Stretched out next to one another were the ensigns, the sheikhs of the death squads, dervishes, spies of the Fourth Directorate, tetanus patients, assistant pronouncers of curses . . . More than half of them were asleep. Their heads rested on the hard pillows, like dying fires in which life sporadically glowed. None of them felt any joy. On the contrary, they were afraid. They had taken part in a huge act of destruction. Their hands had touched the foundations of the state. Deep inside, they sensed that they had tampered with things they should have left alone, and for this they or their offspring could be punished. Their stomachs were heavy with ill-digested halva distributed to mark the victory. Some of them emerged like somnambulists from the tent doors and threw it up, their faces as pale as wax from stomach cramps. The wind still howled from the farthest distances. Beyond this gale there was more wind, and more beyond that.
Even those who slept were not at peace. Some talked in their sleep. Others writhed and thrashed, groaned and fought for breath as they grappled with the void of the night. The wheels of a carriage were heard far away, and someone whispered, “Ali Pasha’s head has left.” In one of the infantrymen’s tents, a soldier moaned in his sleep: “Put the head back on, for God’s sake, put the head back on, and stop all this.” One of his neighbors whispered to a comrade alongside, “I’ve heard that in a remote village of Trebizond there’s an old barber-surgeon who can fix a severed head. I wrote his name on a bit of paper and stuck it in my army card.” His friend listened in silence, and then in horror said, “No, no! That would be too much, if they came back with their heads stuck on, crooked, any old how, in some botched job, and . . .” “What?” asked his friend. But the other soldier had fallen back to sleep. “With heads stuck on crooked,” his comrade repeated. Crooked? Why crooked, for God’s sake?
The distant sound of wheels reached Hurshid Pasha’s ears. He’s gone, he thought. Wrapping his shoulders in a woollen blanket, he closed his eyes for the tenth time, but still he couldn’t sleep. He felt a constant pressure in his temples. The hissing wind, racing low over the surface of the land, seemed to penetrate his skull. The head has set off for Asia, he thought, but the body remains in Europe. His imagination conjured up some sticky, ectoplasmic creature, pulled by both continents, endlessly lengthening and becoming thinner and more transparent, as if at any moment it might turn into some ethereal substance, something between a cloud and the tail of a comet.
The carriage is heading for Asia, he thought wearily. He is stretching, changing his shape continually, wrapping himself around me. Lying down, Hurshid Pasha felt weak. He propped himself up on his elbow. The thought swept through him, sometimes clearly, sometimes obscurely, that his glory would rise above the other man’s ruin. Ali Pasha had been above him for so long, like rolling thunder. Now, under the earth, he would be like some mute crevasse opened by an earthquake. Enough, he said to himself. He has gone. I am still here. It was simple. And indeed for a few moments his mind was clear. But then an old, forgotten phrase came to him from somewhere: “spurned by the grave.” So such horrors had been known before.
This thought calmed him a little, and his mind drifted, but then it occurred to him that Ali Pasha would have two graves. Two graves, he repeated to himself. With his entire being, he suddenly yearned for a single grave for himself. He longed for rest, and almost groaned audibly. Wrapping himself again in his woollen blanket, he drowsed for a few moments. He was lying down, at the center of the earth, whole and entire . . . while nearby him were muffled voices. There were plains, with gentle hills, like dough, and apparently a quarrel among them . . . “grr grr . . . give me the head . . . you take the body . . . grr grr . . .” It was Europe and Asia, quarreling over him . . .
He woke several times during the night. Once his mind remained empty. Another time he asked himself softly, oh God, why aren’t things simpler? Towards midnight he started from sleep again. Where am I? he wondered, and then remembered what had happened. I won, he thought drowsily, and huddled deeper in his blanket. It’s midnight . . . Tundj Hata was now a black cat with a fish head between his teeth, racing through a landscape of darkness and confusion. Run with that curious fish, Hurshid Pasha thought, and immediately fell asleep.
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