They held in their hands various strange panniers and pails that no doubt contained the honey and the chunks of ice and salt necessary for the transport and preservation of the head on its long journey.
“Wait outside for my order,” said Hurshid Pasha.
The courier bowed. As he went out, their eyes met again. The light of triumph shone in the pasha’s eyes. For the past week, Tundj Hata had been wandering about the camp. The very sight of this man, with his awkward limp and muddy face that ended in a short graying beard, had set Hurshid Pasha’s stomach churning. But everyone knew that Tundj Hata wouldn’t look like this for long; as soon as the order for a head came from the capital, he would collect himself and dye his beard with henna. With the severed head in his pannier, he would leap onto a horse and race through winter and darkness over rough roads or off the highway entirely in order to reach the city as soon as possible. The thought that it could be his own cold head had made Hurshid Pasha shiver, as if he could already feel the handfuls of snow the courier’s assistants would carefully pack around it. He had never before been so on edge. He’d lost his temper over everything and nothing. When one of his adjutants had brought him his lunch a few days before, he had thrown the honey-flavored dish in the man’s face, screaming, “You dog, who told you I wanted honey? The sight of it makes me sick.” And indeed recently he could not bear the sight of honey or salt or ice, and least of all the sight of Tundj Hata, whom he would surely have gotten rid of, if the courier had not been one of those officials who, despite having no particular rank in the state hierarchy, are inviolable and eternal, like the pillars of government buildings.
The pasha sometimes thought that the courier sensed his aversion. He noticed in Tundj Hata’s eyes a glint of contained derision, like the play of light at the bottom of a well, as if his eyes were saying, one day I might have your head under my arm, but you’ll never have mine. The thought of this truth had nagged at the pasha’s mind. More and more often, he remembered a neighbor’s cat that, many years ago when he was a boy, had stolen a fish head from the family kitchen as the women shouted and bustled. It seemed to Hurshid Pasha that, in just the same way, Tundj Hata was merely waiting for the moment when, amid the tumult of war, he would seize a head, his own or Ali Pasha’s, and gallop with it towards the capital city.
But now all these worries were over. The blade of destiny had harvested its crop, and it was there on the table, this white cabbage from the gardens of hell. The joy that had so far only trickled through in drops now flooded Hurshid Pasha’s entire being. His lethargy vanished. I defeated this old man, he said to himself. I am the one left on this earth.
Voices around him, some faint and others raucous, discussed the best time to set off with the head. Some people said that Tundj Hata should waste no time and leave at once, because the journey was very long. Others shook their beards doubtfully. It would be better to send the head late at night when the world was asleep, to avoid anything unexpected. Two years ago, the couriers transporting the head of the pasha of the sea, Admiral Kara Kiliç, had been attacked. Now in front of them was the head of the empire’s most famous vizier and there was every reason for the sultan’s enemies to seize it. In fact, Hurshid Pasha’s secret wish was that Tundj Hata would lose the head on the road. This was the only chance of the courier losing his own head in turn. But Hurshid Pasha knew that such a thing would never happen. He remembered well the kitchen women striking the thieving cat with their pokers and ladles, but the cat had refused to surrender its trophy. Even if Tundj Hata’s hands were cut off, he would carry that head to the Traitor’s Niche.
Hurshid Pasha listened to their arguments for a while. He knew that if the head were lost, a government commission would find out why, to the last detail.
“The head will leave at night,” he said calmly. “When the world is asleep.”
Elation now poured over him in torrents. The storm passed, and infinite rainbows of glory arched above his head. I have been left alive, he almost cried out loud with a flippant laugh.
He heard the sounds of life around him. Tundj Hata had been summoned to the tent again to be informed of the hour of departure, and his assistants were taking charge of the head. As the pasha’s scribe drafted the accompanying report to be handed in to the relevant office, they discussed Tundj Hata’s route. Someone pointed out on a map the places where fresh snow could always be found. Somebody suggested “honey from Morea.” Someone else noted that in this wintry weather there would be no need to change the ice at all. Then someone asked, “What about the body?”
Everybody turned around in surprise. After an initial bewilderment, the question gradually took shape in their minds. Indeed, what would they do with the body? Hmm, Hurshid Pasha said to himself. Until then, Ali Pasha had been nothing but a head to him. He had totally forgotten the menial body that had carried this head for eighty years.
“The body,” Hurshid Pasha said, touching his beard with two fingers. There was something childish in his gesture. “Hmm, the body,” he repeated, and smiled, as if to say, amazing, how nature works. But soon he pulled himself together. “Of course we must deal with the body, too,” he said. “What do you think?”
They 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