Elegy for Kosovo

I

He had never before been on the losing side in a war, but nevertheless, late that afternoon, the first cracks began to appear. He closed his eyes wearily, but when he opened them again the view was still the same: soldiers and officers spinning in all directions as if caught up in a whirlwind. Two or three times he heard his name being shouted — Gjorg Shkreli! — but he was quick to realize that it was just his imagination. He didn’t recognize a single person in the confusion — he had lost sight of his Albanians since noon. On a battlefield the minstrels are always the last to fall, Prince Lazar had said the preceding night, and gave the order that they should all gather on a small mound not far from his tent — the Serbs with their guslas, the Walachians and the Bosnians with their flutes, and the players of the one-string lahuta from the Cursed Peaks — so that they could all follow the battle without risking their heads. “Those minstrels have always been the darlings of fate!” one of the men said with a faint smile and a twinkle of envy in his eyes, but the prince was quick to point out, “If we lose them, who will sing our glory?”

All afternoon the minstrels stood outside the commander in chief’s tent, their eyes at times clouded with tears as they watched the troop movements.

A scorching blanket of heat lay over the Plains of Kosovo, immersing them in a harsh, dreadful light. In the crazed glare the movements of the troops did not seem to make sense. The minstrels heard shouts of triumph from the commander in chief’s tent when, under the pressure of the Christian forces, the center of the Turkish lines started to bend back like a bow. The shouts came several times, but the minstrels could not figure out what was happening. With eyes grown weary from the light they struggled to follow the movement of the banners bearing crosses that were being slashed to pieces by the Turkish crescent. The harsh light spread a great dread. Just as the intoxicating wine had the night before. “They are advancing too far!” an old Bosnian minstrel said. The preceding night he had warned that no one must drink before going into battle, not even princes.

More shouts came from Prince Lazar’s tent as a horde of Serbs on horseback came thundering past. The soldiers following them told the minstrels the reason for the jubilation: the horses’ hooves were covered in honey and rice — the Christian army had cut so deep into Turkish lines that it had reached its rear guard and crushed the barrels containing their provisions.

Here and there shouts of triumph could be heard, but Gjorg Shkreli could not shake off his apprehension. And always that harsh. Intoxicating light that would not leave him in peace.

He soon noticed that he was not the only one to be uneasy. The horses of the heroes who had just been cheered seemed suddenly to slow down, hobbled by the honey as they stumbled back in the direction from which they had just come.

He stared again at the swirling banners over the swarm of soldiers. And it was in the sky that he thought he noticed the first sign of disaster. The silk of the banners was faltering and the crosses and the ornate lions and the crowned eagles no longer showed their former conviction. But the Ottoman crescents were rising with greater force. He could not escape the childish, illogical thought of how these lunar crescents, so undaunted by the blinding sun, would really come into their own as night fell.

There was a clamor to the right of Prince Lazar’s tent, but with his attention focused on the battlefield Gjorg did not manage to turn around in time. It was only when he heard someone shout — “The commander in chief is moving out!” — that he realized what had happened.

“What about us?” Vladan, the Serbian minstrel, called out, “What are we supposed to do?”

The prince was not setting out on a glorious counterattack. He was relocating his camp, but nobody was prepared to tell the minstrels what this meant,

Gjorg tried to bolster himself with the idea that a commander in chief’s relocation during a battle was nothing out of the ordinary, but his anxiety did not diminish,

The prince’s empty tent was filled with the wounded. The cries grew ever louder. The minstrels began running about in panic, clutching their instruments, which had suddenly become a burden,

“I’m going to see if I can find my Walachians!” one of them shouted,

The other minstrels immediately began scouring the battlefield, searching for their banners,

Vladan’s eyes filled with tears. It came as no surprise that people should be left behind in this confusion, he thought, but surely not a Serb of his distinction, who had stood outside the tent of Prince Lazar.

Gjorg, like the other minstrels, was also peering at the banners, looking for the Albanian eagles. He cursed himself for not having watched Count Balsha’s troop movements on the plain, or at least those of Jonima. Now it was too late to find them.

The drums of the two sides were still beating. Gjorg finally made out the Albanian banners, but their black and white eagles seemed harried, as if chased by a thunderstorm.

“Protect us, Mary Mother of God!” he silently prayed.

He started retreating like the others, without knowing where to. Someone shouted: “The Turks are attacking from this side!” Others shouted words that might have been taken for orders but quickly changed into laments. Again he lost sight of the banners with the Albanian eagles, but still he continued moving. “What a calamity!” someone shouted. “Turn back!” another yelled, but no one knew anymore which way was forward and which was back. King Tvrtko’s banner veered to the left of the battlefield. Then for an instant Prince Lazar’s banner appeared in a dust cloud right next to the menacing crescents.

Everyone ran. Unknown men, short swords in hand, glared with wild eyes. Gjorg had lost all hope of finding his Albanians.

His mind a blank, he turned back to where he had just come from, to the abandoned tent of the commander in chief. He came face to face with Vladan. Vladan was sobbing, tearing at his hair: “Prince Lazar has been captured! Serbia is dead!”

“Jesus Christ protect us!” Gjorg said, and held out his hand to Vladan to steady him. They made their way through the total confusion, Vladan ranting deliriously. “I’ve lost my gusla! Perhaps I threw it away myself! I thought, what do I need it for! If Prince Lazar has been taken prisoner, we’re all finished! Where are your Albanians?”

“I have no idea,” Gjorg answered. “I can’t even see our banners anymore!”

“There’s no point looking for them! They’ve all fallen! Throw away your lahuta, brother! You won’t want to be singing with the Turks!”

“Holy Mary!” Gjorg said. “I have never seen such a calamity in my life!”

Soldiers ran in all directions, gasping, stumbling over dead bodies. Men who had thrown away their weapons crouched down by corpses to snatch up their swords, only to throw them away again a few steps later. From all around men shouted: “Stop!” — “Where are you going?” — “Which side are you on?”

Through all the mayhem, shreds of violent news were heard. Mirçea of Rumania was heading for the Danube with his Walachians. King Tvrtko, having by now lost his crown, was hurrying back to Bosnia. The Catholic Albanians were following Count Balsha to the foggy mountains of western Albania, while the Orthodox Albanians were following Jonima down to the Macedonian flatlands. Everyone but the dead was trying to escape from the cursed plain,

“I had a premonition in my heart!” Vladan murmured. “For days now, I have had a premonition in my heart of this great disaster!”

“Then why,” Gjorg wanted to ask him, “why did you bring bad luck upon us, you wretch!” But he was too exhausted even to move his lips.

Hoarse voices came from far away: “Come back everyone! Good news! The Turkish sultan has been killed!”

Strangely enough, everyone kept running. They heard the news but had forgotten it in an instant. The day was coming to an end. It was too late to do anything. For a moment the fugitives glanced back at the wide plain, as if to sense where the sultan might have died, then right away, exhausted, they realized that his death, like everything else, had come too late.

Darkness fell quickly. There was a feeling that this day, with its harsh, morbid brightness, could engender only an all-engulfing darkness. Through this darkness trudged officers who had torn off their insignia, now doubly hidden, and soldiers, cooks, carriers of secrets that no longer served a purpose, keepers of the official seal, assassins who had not been able to ply their trade, army clerics whose terror had driven them insane, and madmen whose terror had brought them back to sanity.

Twice Gjorg was tempted to throw away his lahuta, but both times he had thought he was going mad and changed his mind. If he could keep a clear head until morning, he would not go insane. The third time he thought of throwing away his lahuta, the instrument’s single string gave off a mournful sound, as if to say, “What have I done to you?^“

The fugitives made their way through the darkness like black beetles. Someone had lit a torch, and in its light the men’s faces looked even more frightening. Dogs were licking the hooves of a fallen horse, “Lord in Heaven!” Gjorg muttered, “It is the honey we were cheering this very morning,”

“We are dead, brother!” he heard Vladan’s voice say, “Do you believe me now, that we are nothing but spirits?”

II

They had been walking for four days and no longer knew where they were. The throng of fugitives would swell and then thin out again in sorrow. Tagging along at times were Hungarian soldiers whose language nobody understood, Walachians desperately looking for the Danube, Jews who had come from God knows where. Just as suddenly as they had appeared, they disappeared again the following day, as if snatched away by some dream. A Turkish subaltern also tagged along for part of the way, the only Turk, it seemed, who had thrown in his lot with the Christians. He stared at everything in amazement, and every time they stopped to rest he would ask the others to teach him the correct way of crossing himself.

In a stupor, Gjorg heard snippets of conversation. “I think we’ve left Albania, we’ve been walking so many days now” — “I think so too” — “This isn’t Serbian land” — “What do you think?” — “I’d say this isn’t Serbia” — “What? Not Serbia, not Albania?” — “Let me put it to you this way, my friend: some say this is Serbia, some say Albania. The Lord only knows which of the two it really is. So who owns this accursed plain where we spilled our blood, the Field of the Blackbirds, as they call it? It was there, my brother, that the fighting started — a hundred, maybe even two hundred years ago.”

Gjorg opened his eyes and thought he saw the Cursed Peaks. They were crowned by the snow and the sky he knew, but the villages at their foot were different. His eyes filled with tears at the thought that he might never see them again.

Gjorg had lost sight of his traveling companions, including Vladan. Two Albanians he met outside a village told him that they were on their way to Albania, but that they couldn’t take him along. They were military couriers, and had to get there as fast as possible by whatever means they could — boat, cart, horses. They had to find their lord, Count Balsha, as soon as possible and hand him a message.

Gjorg didn’t understand. The calamity must have driven them mad, for what kind of message could they be delivering now that the war was lost? And if it were such an urgent matter, then why were they dozens of miles astray, and how were they going to find the count? How did they even know he was alive, and what could the point of such a message be, now that everyone was dead?

They listened coldly to his questions and told him that they were military couriers, that they were not permitted to question or doubt. It had been in the course of that horrifying afternoon that they had been ordered to deliver this message to Count Balsha from one of the flanks of the Albanian army — that was why they hadn’t managed to get to him. Everything had collapsed before their eyes, the count’s tent kept moving farther and farther away, and the torrent of soldiers had ended up carrying them in the opposite direction. Now, no matter what the cost, they intended to accomplish what they had thus far been prevented from doing: they would find the count, and if they did not find him, then his grave, and there at the grave, even if they were the last men standing, they would deliver their message,

Gjorg followed them with his eyes as they disappeared in a cloud of dust, and an instant later he was convinced that they had been merely an illusion. His spirit was filled with sorrow.

Outside a large village, Gjorg came across a crowd of fugitives moving toward them. He recognized them by their tattered army tunics and the distinctive darkness of their features. They were surprised that in a single day the sun of the Plains of Kosovo had spared their tousled heads but had completely blackened their faces.

Disgraced as they were, they seemed even darker. In three or four languages they hurled curses at the peasants who would not let them into the village, at fate, even at heaven.

“We went to war to save that cross!” they shouted, pointing to the belfry of the village church. “And you won’t even give us a crust of bread and shelter for the night! A curse upon you!”

The villagers watched them silently with cold, distrustful eyes. Only the dogs, still tied up, barked and tried to hurl themselves at the strangers.

“May you never live a happy day under your roofs, and may a thornbush blossom by your door!”

Gjorg turned to see who had uttered the curse. He would have recognized Vladan’s voice, whether speaking or singing, among dozens of others, but the curse had been uttered somewhere between speech and song.

“Vladan!” he shouted, when he realized it might well have been him.

And it really had been Vladan, his eyes burning with rage, now even gaunter than two days before when they had lost each other during their trek.

Vladan turned around and lifted his hand.

“You see how they treat us!” he said. “These damned spineless, these vile —”

“Hurl curses at them, brother! Hurl curses!”

a Hungarian stammered. “Curse them; you know how to curse better than anyone!”

“He knows how to curse because he is a minstrel,” said a man in a tattered tunic, “It is his trade both to curse and to exalt.“

“Is that so? In this disaster, we Hungarians, more than anyone else, get the short end of the stick! Insults, that’s all we get are insults. Yesterday I came across a man, an Albanian I think, who was eating a piece of bread, so I wished him, ‘May you get some often!’ and do you know what he did? He punched me in the face! As Heaven is my witness, we might have killed each other over these words that offended him. He must have thought they were shameful words and become furious, thinking I was making some improper suggestion!”

Three or four men burst out laughing.

“I think we should head along a different road,” the man in the torn tunic said. “You can’t expect to see eye to eye with these idiotic peasants.”

“They don’t want us here,” another man said. “But when there is a war to be fought for them, then they want us! When they need to be defended from the Turk or from the devil knows who, then they want us — but ask them for a piece of bread or shelter for the night, and they turn into rabid dogs!”

Vladan continued cursing. He tapped himself, as if fumbling for something.

“You were too quick to throw away your gusla,” Gjorg said to himself.

“Let’s go,” said the man with the torn tunic, not taking his eyes off the dogs.

The fugitives decided to tag along. A little way from the village they sat down to rest beneath some trees.

“You are a minstrel also?” the Hungarian asked Gjorg, eyeing the lahuta slung over his shoulder.

Gjorg nodded.

“Both of us sang in the prince’s tent,” said Vladan, who lay stretched out next to him. “Yes, on the eve of the battle.“

“I have never seen a prince’s tent,’ the Hungarian said. “Tell us what it was like.”

Vladan’s eyes clouded with pain.

“What can I tell you, Hungarian? They were all there — our Prince Lazar, may he rest in peace, and King Tvrtko, and the lord of the Walachians, and the counts of Albania. They reveled and drank, and sometimes laughed as they listened to our songs.”

“But why? Why did they laugh at you?” two or three men asked.

“Not at us,” Vladan said sullenly. “No man has ever dared laugh at a minstrel.. . They were laughing at something else…. It is a tangled matter. A Serb or Albanian can understand, but for you it would be too hard… You tell them, Gjorg.”

“No, you tell them,” Gjorg answered.

Vladan took three or four deep breaths, but then shook his head. It was impossible to explain, he told them, especially now, after the calamity on the Plains of Kosovo. But he continued speaking. “For hundreds of years the evil persisted; what I mean is that Serbian and Albanian songs said exactly the opposite thing. . particularly when it came to Kosovo, as each side claimed Kosovo as theirs. And each side cursed the other. And this lasted right up to the eve of the battle. Which was why the princes in the big tent laughed at the songs, for the princes had come together to fight the Turks while the minstrels were still singing songs against one another, the Serbs cursing the Albanians and the Albanians the Serbs. And all the while, across the plain, the Turks were gathering to destroy them both the following day! Lord have mercy upon us!“

Gjorg wanted to tell him that quarrels were always started by those who came last, that when the Serbs had come down from the north, the Albanians had already been there, in Kosovo. But now all of that had become meaningless.

Vladan looked at him as if he had read his mind.

“We ourselves have brought this disaster upon our heads, my brother! We have been fighting and slaughtering each other for so many years over Kosovo, and now Kosovo has fallen to others.”

They looked at each other for a few moments without saying anything, trying to fight back their tears. Now that they were far away from Kosovo, it was as if they had been set free from its shadow. Now their minds could finally shed their fetters, and after their minds, their spirits.

Vladan stared at Gjorg’s lahuta.

“Can I try it, brother? My spirit is burning to sing again.“

Gjorg stiffened for a moment. He did not know if it was a sin for him to give his lahuta to a Serbian guslar. His memory told him nothing, but the sorrow in the other man’s eyes erased his doubts. As if numb, he slipped the strap of his lahuta from his shoulder. Vladan’s hand trembled as he took hold of the instrument.

He held it in his hands for a few moments, then his fingers timidly stretched to pluck the single string. Gjorg saw him hold his breath. He was certain that one of two things would happen: either Vladan’s hand would not obey the foreign instrument, or the instrument would not obey the foreign hand. The metallic string would snap, or Vladan’s fingers would freeze. A split second could bring calamity, and yet, on the other hand, it could also bring harmony.

“This is madness,” Gjorg said to himself, as if he were glad. He thought he saw beads of cold sweat on Vladan’s brow.

He wanted to tell him not to torture himself this way, or simply to shout, “Don’t!” But Vladan had already plucked the string.

For an instant isolated, sorrowful notes rose up. Then came the words. Gjorg saw Vladan’s face turn spectral white. And the words, heavy as ancient headstones, were filled with sorrow. “Serbs, to arms! The Albanians are taking Kosovo from us!“

He sang these words, and then dropped his head as if he had been struck. “I cannot! I must not!” he muttered, gasping in despair.

The other fugitives looked at each other, wondering what had happened.

“How wretched we are!” Gjorg said to himself, and yet in his painful words there was a spark of uncertainty. “No, how blessed we are!” And he cried deep inside.

The Serb’s eyes were filled with the same tragic lament. Both men were prisoners, tied to each other by ancient chains that they could not and did not want to break.

III

Every time they set out to return to the Balkans, they came across people fleeing from there. “Are you out of your minds?” the people said. “We barely got out alive, and you are trying to return? Down there death is everywhere!”

The fleeing people were covered with so much dust that their faces looked more anguished and lifeless than the faces of the saints on the icons they were carrying with them. The news they brought was no less somber: Serbia, it seemed, was in utter disarray. Nobody knew what had become of Walachia or Bosnia. Only half of Albania was still holding out, the western region with its Albano-Venetian castles. And the lands of the Croats and the Slovenes had not yet fallen. But all the Balkan princes, both those in power and those overthrown, had bowed their heads before the Turkish sultan.

“What about Kosovo and its plains?” some of the men asked eagerly.

“Don’t ask! Even the grass is gone. Even the blackbirds have fled. Even the name is said to have been changed — it is to be called Muradie from now on, in honor of Sultan Murad, who died there.”

“What about the churches?” somebody asked.

“They have been torn down, and temples have been built in their place — they call them mosques, or. .”

The news about the churches was unclear and contradictory. Some said that only the Serb Orthodox churches had been torn down, while the Catholic churches, those of the Albanians, had been spared. Others insisted that all the churches. Catholic and Orthodox, had been destroyed, and others again claimed the opposite, that not a single church had been touched, and that it was the languages and not the faiths that were under attack.

The people listening clasped their heads in despair. What a calamity! How could people live without their language? How were they to understand each other?

The new arrivals shrugged their shoulders. They had spoken so little during their flight that it seemed they did not see the loss of their language as a big problem. There were even some who felt that it might be better this way. They had said what they had to say in this world, and now that everything had come to an end it was better to be silent.

Others shook their heads doubtfully. The language question was still somehow unsettled, they said. They had heard with their own ears how heralds proclaimed other prohibitions from village to village, prohibitions having to do with chimneys and with women showing their faces.

“No, no!” protested the men, who could not believe what they were hearing. “Prohibiting chimneys and covering women’s faces is incredible — it doesn’t make sense!”

“Sense or nonsense, call it what you want, but things have changed back there. What’s there now is slavery! Do you understand what I am saying? S-l-a-v-e-r-y! I am telling you, there is no more Bosnia, nor Greece, nor Serbia, nor Albania, nor Walachia — only a ‘region.’ That is what the Turkish officials call the world in their language. For them there are two kinds of regions — good and bad. The good or proper region is the Islamic region. The other is perverse, foreign.”

As they spoke they turned to Ibrahim, the Turk they had lost sight of for a few days, who had reappeared the night before.

To their surprise they saw him bowing down, prostrating himself, as they had heard that Muslims do,

“What are you doing there, Ibrahim?” they called out to him. “You want to become a Christian, and yet you continue to pray like a Muslim?“

The Turk motioned them not to disturb him. He finished his prayers and then got up with a lost look on his face, as if he had returned from another world.

The people stared at him wildly. Whispers were heard: “Accursed Turk!” — “You deceived us all! — “Right from the start I didn’t trust him!“

The Turk looked at them one by one, his eyes surprisingly bright.

“What is wrong?” he asked in a low voice.

“What is wrong?” someone in the crowd shouted. “This morning you made the sign of the cross, and now you pray like a Turk! Are you making fun of us?“

“No, I am not,” he answered. “I am not making fun of you. I have an honest heart.”

With jumbled words he began telling them his predicament. He wanted to become a Christian from deep within his heart, but at the same time he was unable to expel his other belief. For the time being, both lived within him. Especially at night, he felt them moving, jostling each other, gasping, trying to take over by fair means or foul. So while everyone else was sound asleep, Ibrahim was tortured. He felt that soon enough one of the two faiths would be broken and driven out of him. But he would not pressure or trick either one of them. He was waiting impartially for the result, hoping that in the end the faith of the cross would triumph.

They listened intently, and then a Bosnian man asked him, “In other words, you are waiting for your body to shed one of the faiths like a reptile sheds its skin? Speak frankly, Turk, are you a snake?“

The Turk’s eyes filled with deeper sorrow.

“I am not a snake, no! I am an orphan like the stars, a soldier lost like the sands of Yemen, but I am not a snake.”

One after the other they turned their backs on him and left. Only a Jew by the name of Heiml stayed back, eyeing him as if he were trying to figure out from which part of the Turk’s body one of the two faiths would be expelled.

IV

Now they were so far away that hardly any news reached them anymore. Even when news did come, it was so altered by the distance that they were not sure what to make of it. It was as if one were to believe a courier who had grown old — even died — traveling down an endless road; had still managed to somehow get through and deliver his message.

This was how the news came to them that their new monarchy who initially had been called “Emir” and then “Sultan, had been given the new title “Yildirim” — “Lightning Bolt.”

The fugitives were deeply pained. Under the title of Sultan, he had brought the Balkan and the Byzantine princes to their knees. With his new title he might well bring all of Europe to its knees. They could get as far away as they wanted; he was bound to follow them. Their souls would be plunged into terror every time the sky darkened and a lightning bolt came tearing through driving rain.

A second message specified that Lightning Bolt was only the nickname of Bayezid, the new monarch who had mounted the throne after his father’s death on the Plains of Kosovo. But this new message, instead of erasing the first one, gave it even more weight.

The Turks, before they ground the world under their heel, would conquer the skies. They had put the crescent moon on their banners and then made thunder and lightning their own — and tomorrow God knows what they would attack: the stars, the winter clouds, perhaps time itself.

For a few days the fugitives stayed in a friendly region. The villagers gave them bread to eat and listened to their tales with compassion even though they did not understand their language, and at night they let them sleep in the porches of their churches. The villagers feared only one thing: that the refugees might have brought the plague with them. The rest did not matter.

They had heard talk about the Turkish peril, but only vaguely. And for some time now there had been talk of a new crusade being summoned against the Turk. All the Christian states were to rally together. The pope of Rome himself was to head the crusade.

The fugitives rejoiced at these words. The farther north they went the higher the cathedrals and the towers of the castles became. Black iron crosses dominated the skies. One stifling night, two solitary lightning bolts, instead of sending shivers through the crosses as one would expect, seemed to turn in terror and dash away.

God be praised — Christianity was still mighty in all its lands. The Balkans had been defeated on the continent’s borders, but here, in its heart, things were quite different. The fugitives were soothed by the city gates and walled towers, the princely titles and emblems and coats of arms, and the Latin inscriptions in the bronze and marble of the churches.

While the fugitives were awaiting permission to enter one of the somber little cities (at times their very lack of size seemed to make them all the more dismal), guards came and dragged Ibrahim the Turk away and clapped him in irons.

At first they were not particularly worried. They had often run into trouble on account of the Turk. But this time things looked bad. All the explanations about how he had deserted his own army and how he had two faiths were of no avail. Quite the opposite. Every time his two faiths were mentioned, the guards’ eyes flashed with scorn. In the end, the Balkan fugitives were told that they were wasting their time: the Turk would be submitted to a secret investigation by the Holy Inquisition.

“If he is innocent,” they told each other, “then he will be set free like all the other innocents, but he might well be a spy, and we in our foolishness may have been gullible.” Others recalled that it was not the Holy Inquisition that dealt with spies but the town court. “If you ask me, I never really liked this business of his two faiths,” one of the Walachians said. “A man cannot have two faiths, just as no creature of God can have two heads. There might be two-headed vipers, but no two-headed men.“

The trial that began two weeks later confirmed what the Walachian had said. It was his double faith, even his triple faith — brought to light under torture — that cost the Turk his neck. During the trial, he asserted that he had wanted to become a Christian upon seeing the cross above the Plains of Kosovo. But the Islamic faith was not prepared to leave his body without a struggle, which was why he continued praying to his prophet. “And why are you drawn to the Jewish faith? Are not the other two enough for you, eh?” the judge yelled.

A faint murmur rose from the crowd.

The Turk tried to explain that he had only listened to Heiml the Jew out of curiosity, but the crowd was already growing wild.

He was to be burned at the stake, for it was certain that he had entered into a pact with the devil. “Had he kept to his Muslim belief, he would have remained unscathed,” the judge pronounced. “And had he converted to our faith, we would have welcomed him with open arms, like a brother. But he did neither the one nor the other,” the judge continued. “He has attempted to do the impossible, to waver between two faiths, doubtless following the devil’s counsel.”

The judge spoke at length of the holy and immutable principles of the church. The antichrist was attacking from all sides, but the church was unshakable. The creation of men of two faiths was only the most recent of Satan’s inventions.

The judge glared menacingly at the small group of Balkan men who were huddling together like sheep, and spoke harsh words of warning to those who undertook to turn Europe’s Christian traditions into pagan infamy.

The Turk was burned in front of the cathedral the following day at noon. As the smoke began to envelope the convicted man, the others remembered the day before the battle, back on the Plains of Kosovo, when both sides had unleashed curtains of smoke so that they would not have to look at each other.

The Turk’s first cries came from within the smoke. Incomprehensible words, it seemed, in his language. The crowd tried to detect the word “Allah,” the only word they knew, but the convicted man did not pronounce it.

The inquisitor who had prosecuted the burning man craned his neck so he could hear better. “I think he said ‘Abracadabra,’ “he whispered to his deputy.

The other man nodded, “I believe he did.” And he raised his iron cross like a shield.

“The poor Turk!” one of the Bosnians said to his friends. “He is crying for his mother, Remember when he told us that mama in his language is abllà?”

“No, I don’t remember a thing!” The other man cut him short,

The Turk’s shouts turned into stifled moans; then he emitted a sudden and terrible “NON!” It was an isolated shout, completely different from his previous cries, although that might only have been because it was the only Latin word he said. It was probably the first word he had learned in the Christian world, and in leaving that world, which had not accepted him, he expressed his regret in that final shout.

V

After the Turk was burned, the Balkan fugitives left immediately and headed north, out of fear that the Inquisition would pursue everyone in any way connected with him. The principalities they crossed became increasingly small and austere. It was as if an ancient fury had shriveled their lands and towers, while the swords of the guardsmen seemed increasingly sharp.

There were more and more searches. The fugitives were searched for hidden icons, for symptoms of the plague, for counterfeit currency. Most of the people had never heard of the Battle of Kosovo, so when the fugitives spoke of it, they aroused suspicion instead of compassion. Quite often they were told that if they were really soldiers, they should enlist as mercenaries in one of the many local regiments. There was no lack of wrangling princes and counts. The counts in particular were, more often than not, extremely belligerent and ever ready to hire ruthless warriors.

The fugitives listened in bewilderment. After the calamity of Kosovo, they could not face another war of any kind. They would rather work for blacksmiths or cheese makers. They knew how to make a type of cheese that, from what they could tell, was unknown in these parts. They also knew how to turn milk into yogurt, which was tangy, fresh, and did not spoil for days.

In the beginning, the villagers were amazed at this yogurt but then suddenly became terrified that they might find themselves burned at the stake. They quickly poured the “diseased” milk out of their jugs, and with tears in their eyes begged the Balkans not to breathe a word of this to anyone, as it would mean certain death for all concerned.

They passed through villages where different languages were spoken. One day Hans, a simpleton who tagged along part of the way, eyeing Gjorg’s lahuta, asked him, full of curiosity, what that “thingamajig” slung over his shoulder was, Gjorg was about to explain, but Hans shook his head slyly — “I know what it is! It is the instrument with which you turn milk into yogurt, ha, ha, ha!“

Gjorg laughed too, but Vladan, who had heard Hans, looked at them sullenly.

“You must throw that lahuta away, or you might well end up burned at the stake.“

“I will throw it away,” Gjorg said. “I will find a faraway, secluded spot, I shall play it one last time, and then I will throw it away.”

And he would surely have thrown it away, had not something extraordinary happened at the end of that week. Gjorg, Vladan, and Manolo, a Walachian storyteller, were summoned to a castle. The messengers who brought them the invitation told them that their lord always invited French and German minstrels to his banquets, and that he had heard about them and was interested in listening to their songs.

Gjorg was deep in thought; Vladan was on the verge of tears because he no longer had his gusla. As for Manolo — his face turned yellow and he wanted to run away, but the others managed with great difficulty to persuade him not to disgrace them.

Somehow Vladan succeeded in making a gusla by the day of the banquet. “Don’t worry!” the others said to him. “If worse comes to worst, you can use Gjorg’s lahuta.”

They placed all their hopes on this banquet. Now respect for them was bound to grow. People would see that they were good for more than just making war and cheese and “diseased” milk, that they could also sing of great deeds, just as their ancient clansmen had. Their situation would perhaps improve, suspicions would be dispelled, and perhaps they would even be granted permission to settle down in this place.

The Balkan fugitives escorted the minstrels part of the way and bade them good luck. Bathed and combed, their faces tense with agitation, the three of them, together with a Croat who could mimic the calls of birds and wolves, disappeared through the castle’s heavy portal.

The Balkan fugitives crossed themselves three times; some of them fell to their knees; others prayed with burning fervor: “Do not abandon us, Holy Mary, Mother of God!”

VI

Adozen minstrels waited in a row for their turn. The French sang of Roland, their hero who had blown his horn before dying, and the Germans sang of the ring of their lord whose name was Siegfried. Another minstrel, who seemed to be neither German nor French, sang of a Vilhelm who had shot an arrow at an apple he had placed on his son’s head.

When their turn came, the lord of the castle announced to his company that they were going to hear the Balkan minstrels who had come straight from the Battle of Kosovo, where the Turks had dealt Christendom a bitter blow. “Let us all hope and pray that this blow will be the last!”

One after the other, in the heavy silence, they sang their songs, ancient and cold as stone, each in his own language: “A great fog is covering the Field of the Blackbirds! Rise, O Serbs, the Albanians are taking Kosovo.” “A black fog has descended — Albanians, to arms, Kosovo is falling to the damned Serb.”

The guests, who had been listening with sorrowful faces, asked the Balkan minstrels to explain what their songs were about. At first the nobles sat speechless, not believing what they were told. Then they became angry — the Balkan lands have fallen, and these minstrels continue singing songs that keep the old enmities alive?

“It is true that there is dissension everywhere, but dissension like yours is really unique in the world!” one of the guests said contemptuously.

“What wretches you are!” the lord of the castle shouted.

They stood with bowed heads as the guests denounced them. They would have tried to explain, as they had that evening long ago, but they realized that their words would fall on deaf ears. “It would have been better for us to have died on the battlefield than end up at this cursed banquet,” Gjorg thought.

Among the hosts sat an old woman, who peered at them intently. From her attire and her position at the table, it was obvious that she was a great lady. Her eyes were fiery, but her face was white and cold, as if it were from another world.

“You must sing of other things,” she said in a kindly voice.

The minstrels held their peace.

“What songs do you expect from them?” one of the guests at the end of the table asked. “Hate is all they know!”

“They corrupt everything, the way they corrupt the milk,” a guest shouted through the mocking laughter.

“Do not insult them,” the old woman said, her eyes fixed on Gjorg’s hand, which was clenching the hilt of his dagger. “In their land,” she continued, “insulting a guest is a black calamity, blacker than a lost war.”

Silence descended on the banquet.

“Take your hand off your dagger,” Vladan whispered. “This can cost us our necks.” Entreaties and pleas rained down on Gjorg’s head like an avalanche of rocks: “Don’t do anything foolish that will cost us all our necks!” On the verge of tears, he pulled his numb fingers from the hilt of his dagger,

“At our table no man shall offend another!” the lord of the castle said.

The old woman’s eyes became even kindlier.

“If you cannot sing or do not want to, then why do you not tell us a tale?” she asked. “I have heard that there is much of interest in the lands from which you come. Tell us of the living, of the dead, of those hovering in between.”

Vladan looked at Manolo and then at the Croat, as if he were seeking help, but both men shrugged their shoulders. It was not surprising that they wavered — the one could only tell folktales, the other only mimic the calls of birds and wolves. To ask these minstrels to talk of their lands was like asking a cavalryman to take a broom and sweep the road. And yet, a large crowd of Balkan fugitives outside the castle gates had placed all their hope in them.

Vladan began speaking spontaneously. He himself was amazed that he could. It was the first time that he did not sing before listeners, but speak. It seemed ridiculous, shameful, and sinful, all together. Two or three times he felt that his mouth was about to dry up. “Do not stop, brother!” the others urged him with their eyes, but he signaled to them that he was at the end of his tether. The others came to his rescue. The first to speak was Manolo the Walachian, then the Croat, and finally Gjorg, who, after the insult he had suffered, had seemed determined not to open his mouth, even on pain of death.

Their tales were wondrous, at times cruel and chilling and at times filled with sorrow. Everyone listened, but the great lady most intently. Her face was still a mask, but her eyes were on fire. “These tales bring to mind the Greek tragedies,” she said in a low voice. “They are of the same diamond dust, the same seed.”

“What are these Greek tragedies?” the lord of the castle asked.

She sighed deeply and said that they were perhaps the greatest wealth of mankind. A simple treasure chest, like the one in which any feudal lord hides his gold coins, was big enough to hold all these tragedies. And yet, not only had they not been preserved, but over the centuries they had been scattered, these tragedies that would have made the world — in other words, its spirit — twice as beautiful.

The lord of the castle shook his head, dumbfounded at the thought of such negligence. The old lady smiled sadly. How could she explain to him that she, too, had always felt the same way about the negligence of the erudite men, the monastic librarians, the scribes and abbots? She had written countless letters to princes, cardinals, even to the pope. The responses she received had been increasingly cool, until finally she was openly reproached: instead of devoting herself to Jesus Christ, she, an erudite lady, possibly the most erudite lady of all the French and German lands, was obsessed with pagan gods.

For days in a row she had swept through her vast library like a shadow. But it became rapidly clear that there was no place in heaven for ancient deities.

Now, after so many years, she had heard as if in a trance these thunderclaps from that distant world, brought by these destitute fugitives with faces wild from war. Thunderclaps like fragments of the crown fallen from the ancient sky. Rites of death, changes of season, sacrificial customs, tales of blood feuds — all carrying the malediction for a thousand years, more immaculately than any chronicle.

Now, in those lands from which these poor destitute men had come, there were no ancient theaters left, no tragedies. There were only scattered fragments. Now that night had descended on all those lands, perhaps the time had come for her to resume her letters. That region, which seemed to be but a distant forecourt of Europe, was in fact its bridal chamber. The roots that had given birth to everything were there. And therefore it should under no circumstances be abandoned.

The Balkan minstrels continued to tell their tales, now interrupting each other. In their desire to be accepted they had forgotten the insults, and humbly, almost awkwardly, begged: We want to he like you. We think like you. Don’t drive us away.

The old lady sensed that there was something missing from their tales.

“Could you sing the things you have been telling us?” she asked.

They were shaken as if they had been dealt a blow. Then, tearing themselves out of their stupor, one after the other, each in his own language, and finally in Latin, said “No.” Non.

“Why not?” she asked kindly. “Why do you not try?”

“Non, domina magna, we cannot under any circumstances. We are minstrels of war.“

She shook her head and then insistently, almost beseeching them, repeated her request.

The Balkan minstrels’ faces grew dark. They broke out in cold sweats, as if they were being tortured. Even the words they uttered were uttered as if in a nightmare. They were martial minstrels. They were filled with fervor and hatred, but there was something vital missing. They could not break out of the mold. Besides which, they would first have to consult their elders. Consult the dead. They would have to wait for them to appear in their dreams so that they could consult them. No, they could not, under any circumstances. Non.

VII

The last sounds dissolved into the night, the barking of the dogs thinned out, but the great lady could not fall asleep. After a banquet, sleep always came either far too easily or with too much difficulty. And yet, her insomnia that night was of a different kind. Among the thoughts that always came to plague her, a new one appeared — solitary, foreign, and dangerous as a winter wolf. This thought, alien to her mind, to the whole world perhaps, tried to take shape but immediately disintegrated, thrashing around as if in a trap, tearing out of its confines, but then, on gaining its freedom the thought fled, rushing back into its snare, the skull from which it had escaped.

A courtyard with an unhinged door, a Mongol spear, and a map of the continent sent recently from Amsterdam struggled to connect with each other.

The old lady finally got out of bed, threw something over her shoulders, and walked over to the window. The thought that had repelled her sleep was still sparkling in her mind, formless and without a protective crust, free and lethal.

Standing by the big window, she finally managed to calm somewhat the foaming fury. She coaxed it tenderly, in the hope that it would rise from the fog.

And that is exactly what happened. The map and the barbarian spear with its tufts of fur and the mysterious inscriptions on its shaft connected with each other. The whole European continent was there: the lands of the Gauls, the German regions, and, farther up, the Baltic territories and the rugged Scandinavian lands sprawled out like a sleeping lion. Then, below the central flatlands, the peninsulas of the Pyrenees, the Apennines, and the third peninsula, which had initially been named Illyricum and Byzantium and now was being called “Balkan.” She saw clearly the regions from which the poor wandering fugitives had come: Croatia, Albania, Serbia, Greece, Bosnia, Walachia, Macedonia. From now on they would have to carry this new name, fossilized and ponderous, on their backs like a curse as they stumbled along like a tortoise in its shell

The barbarian spear had always been like a sign at the borders of the continent, but they had been quick to forget, like a nightmare that scatters with the approach of dawn. This is how they had all forgotten Attila and Genghis Khan, and this was perhaps how they were going to forget the Ottomans.

“Your apprehension is a great surprise to me,” Baron Melanchthon had said to her a few months earlier. “You are worried about something that does not exist, and therefore cannot be threatened. Europe — Asia — are but entities in the barbarians’ minds, or on their parchments. They are figures of legend, half woman, half God knows what.”

She had taken offense and made no reply.

“How dreadful,” she said to herself, her eyes fixed on the darkness as if she were speaking to the night. “The Ottomans have burst into the outer court of their mansion and they look the other way. They are reinforcing the gates of their castles, posting more guards on their towers, but when it comes to looking farther, their eyes are blind.”

“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.