Elegy for Kosovo (7 page)

“Europe,” she said to herself, as if she were trying to seize this word transformed by ridicule and neglect. She had watched words wilt away and die when they were neglected by the minds of men. “Europe,” she repeated, almost with dread. Twenty-odd empires, a hundred different peoples. Some jammed against each other, others far apart. Which was Europe's true mass — constricted or distended? As learned friends of hers had explained, Europe had started out as a dense galaxy in the middle of a void, but in recent years, particularly with the great plague, it had turned into a void itself, besieged by great hordes.

The barbarians had again burst through the defending barriers. They brandished their spears right under Europe's nose without clarifying the meaning of their sign: death or goodwill.

One by one she brought to mind her powerful connections: princes, cardinals, philosophers, even the pope of Rome. She tried to recollect their faces, their eyes, particularly the lines on their foreheads, where the worries of a man are drawn more clearly than anywhere else. Were they racking their brains how to rally together to defend themselves, particularly now that their southern barrier had been breached, or were they thinking no further than their next banquet?

Her weary mind found calm. Then, in her thoughts, she saw a long rope, an exceedingly long rope, uncoil as if it had been randomly thrown. “Greece!” she exclaimed, as if she had had a revelation. Her friend Wyclif had told her that this had been how the ancient Greek world had measured itself: an endless strip of land, a thousand five hundred miles long, stretching from the coasts of Asia Minor to the Greek peninsula and the shores of Illyria, and from the southern beaches of Gaul down to Calabria and Sicily. This rope was delicate, brittle, cut in places by waves of fate, and yet it had managed to hold out and penetrate the depths of the continent.

Now the Greeks, like the other peoples of the region, had been toppled. The eleven peoples of the peninsula had to stumble along within a communal shell named
Balkan,
and it seemed that nobody gave them a second thought, unless to anathematize them: “You cursed wretches!”

She could not blot out the eyes of the poor destitute fugitives who had sung and spoken at the banquet. In their black sockets she saw a Europe that had died, transformed into a doleful memory. “Great Lord in Heaven! Why have you wrought these things in those lands?” she thought. “One has to lose a thing in order to cherish it!”

Everything they had narrated unraveled slowly in her mind: the sacrifices at the foot of bridges, the Furies in the guise of washerwomen on the banks of a river, the idlers in the village coffeehouses
,
the killer forced to attend the funeral feast of his victim. “It is all there, O Lord!” she gasped. “Fragments of the great ruins that gave birth to everything.”

“We must not abandon our outer court!” she almost said aloud. “If it falls, we shall all fall!“

Her mind tumbled once more into an unbearable whirl. Her head and temples ached viciously. She tried to rise; she even thought she
had
risen, found paper and pen to write to princes, to her friend Wyclif, even the pope of Rome. And she felt much lighter, not only able to write but ready to deliver her message with her own hands across the sky.

In the morning she was found dead and cold. A whiteness, which one only finds in the darkness of nonexistence, had settled on her face like a mask.

All the banquet guests of the previous night attended her majestic funeral, which took place in the neighboring principality from which she had come. After the mass and the ringing of the bells, someone remembered to summon the foreign minstrels. It seems that during the banquet she had said that she would like them to sing something at her grave.

They numbly took out their musical instruments and, with the same numbness, sang a song for hen “A black fog has descended, the great lady has died. Rise, O Serbs, the Albanians are seizing Kosovo!” — “A black fog has descended upon us, the great lady has died. Rise, O Albanians! Kosovo is falling to the pernicious Serb!“

They sang, and even though the mourners at the funeral did not understand the words, they listened with full attention, their eyes blank, sorrowful, and filled with incomprehension.

As the army prepared to set out on its homeward march with my body, leaving behind only my blood gathered in a leaden vessel, I felt for a while that the world had fallen silent forever. But then I heard the rumbling of the iron chariots and the trampling of hooves growing fainter in the distance, and I realized that I had been left here on my own.

I had heard my father say, as he had heard his father say, that all aberration, memory, fury, and vengeance are imprinted in a man's blood. And yet it seems that I was the first monarch whose blood was so violently pressed out of his body on these cursed plains.

My corpse — limbs, crowned head, hair, my gray chest with the wound in its center — was carried to Anatolia, taking nothing with it. Everything remained here, and I have come to believe that my viziers did this to elude the shadow of my blood.

Thus they left, abandoning me here in this tomb, with an oil lamp above me burning day and night. I thought they would be quick to return, to attack Europe, now that the road lay open, or at least to pay homage to me, to show that they had not forgotten me. But spring came and went, as did summer, and then another spring, but no one came.

Where were they; what were they doing? Three years passed, seven, thirteen. Here and there a lone traveler stopping at my tomb brought me smatterings of news from the world. I wanted to shout, “Serves you right, Bayezid my son!” when I heard that Tamerlane had battled his way into Ankara and locked him in an iron cage like a savage beast.

So this was the reason why they had stayed away so long. My curse had struck my son who had killed his brother, Yakub, and perhaps even me, to seize my throne.

When there is no hope, time passes so much more slowly than when hope exists. Blood does not lose its power as it congeals. Even dry, powdered over the sides of the leaden vessel, it grows only wilder.

A curse upon you, people of the Balkans, who charged me to set out in my old age and lay down my life on these plains! Above all, a curse upon you for my solitude!

The twentieth year passed, and still there was no news. The twenty-fifth year. The fortieth. I had begun to believe that all had been lost forever, when I heard a familiar rumbling clatter. When peoples are preparing for battle against one another there is no mistaking the signs. “Here they come!” I said. “Here come my Turks!” New commanders will have arisen, new viziers, and, needless to say, a new generation of men. I was ready to offer my death to my people, to give them my blessing, when I realized that these were not Turks approaching.

The Balkan peoples were out to slaughter each other on the Plains of Kosovo. This time Serbs and Albanians had hoisted their emblems: the Albanians the Catholic cross, the Serbs the Orthodox.

“Butcher each other, you Balkan savages!” I muttered, renewing my curse on them.

But even without my curse they were determined to trample one another into the ground. They had set out on this course of destruction six hundred, seven hundred years before my campaign. They had reached a temporary truce in these flatlands only to resume their terrible slaughter even more viciously than before.

I must say I felt great joy at hearing them taunt each other. But soon enough my joy began to fade. Their fury was so protracted that even I, an outsider, grew weary.

Many years passed this way. Seventy, then a hundred and seventy. The oil lamp with its dim flame burned and burned in my tomb. New-sultans with ancient, ever-recurring names appeared — Mehmet, Murad, Sulejman, Ahmet, Murad, Mehmet — only to fall, one after the other, into oblivion. They had managed to bring half of Europe to its knees, but now, weary, they began to fall back. The Christian cross turned out to be more powerful than it had seemed. Our crescent withdrew from Vienna, the Hungarian flat-lands, somber Poland, Ukraine, Crimea, and finally the Balkan lands, which I believe we had loved the most. Perhaps we picked up the Balkan people's madness and they picked up our sluggishness. In the end we parted forever, each to our own destiny.

I remained more solitary than ever, with the pale flame of the oil lamp above me, a sorrowful crown.

And the Balkans, instead of trying to build something together, attacked each other again like beasts freed from their iron chains. Their songs were as wild as their weapons. And the prophecies and proclamations were terrible. “For seven hundred years I shall burn your towers! You dogs! For seven hundred years I shall cut you down!” the minstrels sang. And what they declared in their songs was inevitably done, and what was done was then added to their songs, as poison is added to poison.

Time has flown. Five hundred years passed since the day I fell. Then five hundred seventy. Then six hundred. I am still here, alone in my tomb with the flame of the charred oil lamp, while their din, like the roar of the sea, never ends.

From time to time the wind brings shreds of tattered newspaper thrown away by travelers. From these I learn what is going on all around. The surprising names of viziers and countries: NATO. R. Cook. Madeleine Albright. The slaughter of children in Drenicë. Milosevic.
Mein Kampf.
Again the name of the woman vizier. At times, my name, too, appears amongst theirs: . Murad I.

Allah, I have been so tired for over six hundred years now, a Muslim monarch all alone in the middle of the vast Christian expanses. During my worst hours I am seized by the suspicion that maybe my blood is the origin of all this horror. I know this is a crazed suspicion, and yet, in this nonexistence in which I am, I beg you: Finally grant me oblivion, my Lord! Make them remove my blood from these cold plains. And not just the leaden vessel, but make them dig up the earth around where my tent stood, where drops of my blood spattered the ground. O Lord, hear my prayer! Take away all the mud around here, for even a few drops of blood are enough to hold all the memory of the world.