Elegy for Kosovo (6 page)

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!”

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.

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.”