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 these things were fixed in Abdulla’s memory. But above 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