The Palace of Dreams (24 page)

Other important State institutions, more indirectly, called his attention to the unrest currently prevailing in Jewish and Armenian intellectual circles (God, were they asking for some new massacre?) and to a certain slackening of the links between the major pashaliks and the metropolis. Probably for the umpteenth time, these institutions renewed their warnings against the weakening of religious feeling among the younger generation. It was well known that such warnings derived from the Sheikh-ul-Islam.

Mark-Alem, absorbed by all these preoccupations, was unaware of the approach of spring. The weather was slightly warmer, the migrating storks had returned, but he didn’t notice.

One afternoon, at the same time and almost at the same place in the corridor as before, he saw some men silently carrying a coffin out of one of the cells. The greengrocer, he said to himself, without looking after them to make sure or to find out more. A little while later, as he was being jolted along in his carriage, the sight of the little procession came back to him. But he drove it away. Outside, in the crimson light of the setting sun, he could see the first shoots of grass in the gardens of the houses, though the trees were still bare.

At home he found his eldest uncle, the governor, and his wife, together with some other close relations. The governor hadn’t been back to the capital since Kurt’s execution. They were all talking about Mark-Alem’s betrothal. His mother’s eyes were damp, as if spring had reached her at least. He listened absently to what they were saying, without contributing to the conversation himself. With some surprise, as if at some sudden revelation, he realized he was twenty-eight years old. Since he’d started working in the Palace of Dreams, where time obeyed completely different laws, he’d practically never given a thought to his age.

Encouraged by his silence, the others started to speak more confidently about the girl they had in mind for him. She was nineteen, and fair—he liked blondes. They led the conversation around to the subject very carefully, as if they were holding a crystal goblet in their hands. Mark-Alem didn’t say either yes or no. And in the days that followed, as if to avoid jeopardizing what they thought was their success, they refrained from mentioning the matter further.

At home, apart from the two dinner parties that his mother held in honor of her eldest brother, that week was uneventful. The sculptor usually employed to see to the family’s graves came to submit suggestions for the inscription on Kurt’s tombstone and the bronze ornaments to be added to it.

The following week Mark-Alem got home late every evening. He had more work than he could cope with. The Sovereign had asked for a long report on the sleep and dreams of the whole Empire. People were working overtime in every section of the Tabir Sarrail. The Director-General was still unwell, and Mark-Alem had to write the final version of the report.

Every so often as he sat at his desk, he would feel his head grow heavy, and wonder at the pages already written as if it had been someone else who’d penned them. There before him lay the melancholy aggregate of the sleep of one of the vastest empires in the world: more than forty nationalities, representatives of almost all religions and of every race. If the report had included the whole globe, it wouldn’t have made much difference. To all intents and purposes it covered the sleep of the entire planet—terrible and infinite shadows, a bottomless abyss from which Mark-Alem was trying to dredge up a few fragments of truth. Hypnos himself, the Greek god of sleep, couldn’t have known more than he did about dreams.

One afternoon he got his family’s
Chronicle
out of the library. The last time he’d looked at it was that cold morning when, newly appointed, he was about to present himself for the first time at the Palace of which he was now virtually the Director. As he turned the pages he still wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Then he realized he wasn’t looking for anything. All he wanted was to get to the blank pages at the end… . It was the first time it had ever occurred to him to add something to this ancient chronicle. For a long while he sat still, gazing at the ledger. Important things had been happening. The war against Russia was just over. Greece had left the Empire, and the rest of the Balkans was in turmoil. As for Albania … It grew more and more distant and dim, like some far cold constellation, and he wondered if he really knew anything about what went on there… . He sat there uncertainly, his pen growing heavy in his hand, until finally it rested on the paper and instead of writing “Albania” wrote:
There.
He gazed at the expression that had substituted itself for the name of his homeland, and suddenly felt oppressed by what he immediately thought of as “Quprilian sadness.” It was a term unknown to any other language in the world, though it ought to be incorporated in them all.

It must have been snowing … there… .
Then he stopped writing, snatching away the pen as if afraid it might be held to the paper by magic. It was with an effort that he went on to record, in the succinct style used in the rest of the
Chronicle,
the death of Kurt and his own appointment as head of the Palace of Dreams. Then his pen was still again, and he thought of the distant ancestor called Gjon who on a winter’s day several centuries before had built a bridge and at the same time edified his name. The patronymic bore within it, like a secret message, the destiny of the Quprilis for generation after generation. And so that the bridge might endure, a man was sacrificed in its building, walled up in its foundations. And although so much time had gone by since, the traces of his blood had come down to the present generation. So that the Quprilis might endure …

Perhaps that was why—like the ancient Greeks, cutting off their hair at a funeral so that the angry soul of the departed wouldn’t be able to recognize them and do them harm—perhaps that was why the Quprilis had changed their name to Köprülü: to avoid being identified with the bridge.

Mark-Alem knew all about this, but remembered how on the fateful night he had longed to throw off the protective mask, the Islamic half-shield of “Alem,” and adopt one of those ancient names that attracted danger and were marked by fate.

As before he repeated to himself: Mark-Gjergj Ura, Mark-Gjorg Ura … still holding the pen poised in his hand, as if uncertain what name to append to the ancient chronicle… .

Late one afternoon
in March he finished the report, and sent it to the copyists’ office to be transcribed. Then, with some relief, he went out to his carriage to drive home. He was in the habit of shrinking back in his seat so as not to be seen by passersby in the often crowded streets. He huddled up in the corner again today. But after he’d gone some way he felt curiously drawn toward the carriage door. Something beyond the window was calling him insistently. Eventually he broke with his custom and craned forward, and through the mist made by his breath on the glass he saw he was driving past the central park. The almond trees are in bloom, he thought. He was moved. And though he almost shrank back in his corner again, as he usually did at once after something outside had attracted his attention, he now found himself unable to do so. There, a few paces away, was life reviving, warmer clouds, storks, love—all the things he’d been pretending to ignore for fear of being wrested from the grasp of the Palace of Dreams. He felt that if he was crouching there it was to protect himself, and that if ever, some late afternoon like this, he gave in to the call of life and left his refuge, the spell would be broken. The wind would turn against the Quprilis and the men would come for him as they’d come for Kurt, and take him, perhaps a little less unceremoniously, to the place from which there is no returning.

But despite these thoughts he didn’t take his face away from the window. I’ll order the sculptor right away to carve a branch of flowering almond on my tombstone, he thought. He wiped the mist off the window with his hand, but what he saw outside was still no clearer; everything was distorted and iridescent. Then he realized his eyes were full of tears.

Tirana

1981

About the Author

Born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Girokaster, near the Greek border, Ismail Kadare studied in Tirana and at the Gorki Institute, Moscow. He is Albania’s greatest living poet and novelist, whose works have been translated worldwide. He established an uneasy
modus vivendi
with the Communist authorities until their attempts to turn his reputation to their advantage drove him in October 1990 to seek asylum in France, for, as he says, “Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible… . The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.”

The Palace of Dreams,
which appeared in Albania in 1981 and was immediately banned, arose out of Kadare
’s
long-nurtured ambition to invent a hell of his own. “I kept weighing up what an ambitious and over-fanciful proposal this was, though,” he wrote, “after those unknown Egyptians, after Virgil, Saint Augustine and, above all, Dante… .”