The White Castle Read online

  This distasteful brutality grew more virulent and senseless with every passing day. In the beginning everything had been simpler; we had been like children playing, cracking a few coarse but harmless jokes between rounds in a game; each hour of interrogation was like a little skit between the acts of a play while we rested during our long and pleasurable hunting excursions; but as time went by they turned into rituals that sapped all our will, our patience, our nerve, but which we somehow could not forgo. I saw villagers stupefied with horror at Hoja’s questions and his incomprehensible rage; if they could have understood exactly what was being asked of them, perhaps they would have complied: I saw toothless and tired old men herded into the village square; before they stuttered out their misdeeds, real or imagined, they would beg for help from those around them, and from us, with hopeless eyes; I saw youths roughed up, knocked down and forced to stand again when their confessions and sins were not found satisfactory: I would remember how after reading what I’d written at the table Hoja had said, ‘You rogue, you’, and brought a fist down on my back, mumbling and worrying himself to death because he could not understand how I could be like that. But now he had a better idea of what he was looking for, what conclusion he wanted to reach, even if not precisely. He tried other methods as well: half the time he’d interrupt the villager and insist that he was lying; then our men would rough up the offender. At other times he’d interrupt the man, claiming that one of his friends had contradicted him. For a while he tried calling them forward two by two. When he saw the confessions were superficial, and the villagers were ashamed before one another in spite of the violence that our men applied so purposefully, he’d fly into a rage.

  By the time the relentless, heavy rains began I too was almost inured to what was happening. I remember the villagers who said very little, and had little intention of saying very much, being beaten in vain and made to stand and wait soaking wet in the muddy square of a village hour after hour. As time went on the attractions of the hunt faded and our excursions were cut short. Occasionally we killed a sad-eyed gazelle or a fat wild boar, which grieved the sultan, but now we were preoccupied not with the details of the hunt but with these inquisitions for which the preparations, like those for a hunt, began well in advance. At night, as if he felt guilty for what he had done all day, Hoja poured out his feelings to me. He, too, was disturbed by what was happening, by the violence, but he wanted to prove something, something that would benefit all of us: he wanted to demonstrate it to the sultan as well; and besides, why were those villagers hiding the truth? Later he said we should perform the same experiment in a Muslim village for comparison; but this did not yield the results he’d wished: although he interrogated them with little coercion, the fact was that they made more or less the same confessions and told the same stories as their Christian neighbours. It was one of those miserable days when the rain would not let up, Hoja muttered a few words implying they were not true Muslims, but in the evening when the day’s events were discussed I could see he realized this truth had not escaped the sultan’s notice either.

  This discovery only increased his anger and forced him to resort to even more violence than the sultan could bear to witness but which, perhaps like me, he followed with morbid curiosity. As we moved further and further north we came once again to a forested area where the villagers spoke a Slav dialect; in a quaint little village we saw Hoja beat with his own fists a handsome adolescent who could remember nothing more than a childish lie. Hoja swore he would never do this again; in the evening he was overcome by a sense of guilt that even I found excessive. On another occasion, while a yellowish rain was falling, I thought I saw the women of a village weeping from afar at what was being done to their men. Even our soldiers, who had become expert at their work, were sick of what was happening; sometimes they would select the next man to confess before we did and bring him forward, and our translator asked the first questions himself instead of Hoja, who looked worn out by his rage. It was not that we never came across interesting victims who told of their sins at great length, as if deep down in their hearts they’d been waiting for years for this day of interrogation, terrified and bewildered either by tales of our violence, which we’d heard had travelled from village to village and become legend, or by the spectre of some absolute justice whose mystery they could not penetrate; but by now Hoja was no longer interested in the infidelities of husbands and wives, the stories of poor villagers who envied their rich neighbours. He continually repeated that there was a deeper truth, but I think he doubted now and then, as we did, whether we would be able to discover it. Or at least he sensed our doubt and flew into a rage, but we and the sultan all felt he had no intention of giving up. Perhaps for this reason we became resigned spectators, who watched him take the reins in his own hands. Once, sheltering from a sudden downpour under the edge of a roof, we grew hopeful at the sight of Hoja being soaked to the skin while he endlessly interrogated an adolescent who hated his stepfather and stepbrothers for mistreating his mother; but later in the evening, he closed the subject saying this one, too, was just a common adolescent not worth remembering.

  We pressed north and further north; the march, twisting between the high mountains, inched forward very slowly on muddy roads through deep black forests. I loved the cool, dark air coming from the woods thick with pine and beech-trees, the misty silences awakening doubt, everything indistinct. Though no one called them by this name, I believe we were in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, which I’d seen in my childhood on a map of Europe my father had, one drawn by some mediocre artist who had decorated it with pictures of deer and Gothic châteaux. Hoja had caught cold in the rains and was ill, but we would still go into the forest every morning, breaking away from the march which was crawling along a road that twisted as if it wanted to delay ever reaching an end. We now seemed to have forgotten the hunting expeditions: it was as if we lingered at the shore of a lake or the edge of a precipice, not to shoot deer but rather to make the villagers who were preparing for us wait even longer! When we decided the time had come, we’d enter one of the villages, and after going through our ritual would trail along after Hoja who rushed us on to yet another village, never able to find the treasure he sought but desperate to forget those he manhandled and beat up, and his own despair. On one occasion he wanted to perform an experiment: the sultan, whose patience astounded me, had twenty janissaries brought forth for this purpose; he asked the same questions first of them, and then of the fair-haired villagers who stood dumbfounded in front of their houses. Another time he brought the villagers up to the march, showed them our weapon screeching and groaning while it strained to keep up with the sovereign’s army on the muddy roads, asked them what they thought of it and had the scribes write down their answers, but his strength was exhausted. Perhaps it was because, as he claimed, we knew nothing of truth, or perhaps he too was intimidated by the meaningless violence, perhaps it was the feeling of guilt that came over him at night, or because he was sick of hearing the army and the pashas mutter disapprovingly about the weapon and the episodes in the forest, or perhaps simply because he was ill, I don’t know: his hoarse voice did not boom out as it used to; he’d lost his old vigour in asking the questions whose answers he knew by heart; in the evenings when he spoke of victory, of the future, of how we must rise up and save ourselves, it was as if even his own voice, diminishing as time went by, did not believe what he was saying. The last image I have of him is interrogating a few bewildered Slav villagers without any conviction while a yellow rain the colour of sulphurous smoke was just starting up again. We didn’t want to listen anymore and kept our distance; through the dreamy light flattened out by the rain, we saw them staring blankly at the wet surface of a huge mirror in a gilded frame that Hoja passed from hand to hand.

  We did not go out on these ‘hunting’ expeditions again; we’d forded the river and entered the lands of the Poles. Our weapon could make no progress on roads which had turned to sodden clay in the fil
thy rain, growing heavier with every passing day, and it held back the march now we needed to move quickly. It was then that the rumours increased about how our siege engine – which the pashas already hated – would bring misfortune, even a curse upon us; these were spiced with the whisperings of the janissaries who had participated in Hoja’s ‘experiments’. As always it was not Hoja but me, the infidel, whom they blamed. When Hoja started up his patter, leavened with verse that now made even the sovereign impatient, and spoke of the indispensability of the weapon, of the enemy’s strength, of how we must rouse ourselves and take action, the pashas listening to him in the sovereign’s tent were even more firmly convinced that we were charlatans and our weapon would bring bad luck. They looked upon Hoja as a sick man who’d gone astray but was not beyond saving; the truly dangerous, truly guilty one, was I, who had deceived Hoja and the sovereign and concocted these ill-omened ideas. At night when we withdrew into our tents Hoja would revile the pashas in his ravaged voice the way he used to rail against his fools in years past, but there was nothing left of the joy and hope I believed we had been able to keep alive in those years.

  I could see, however, that he was not about to give up yet. Two days later, when our weapon got stuck in the mud right in the middle of the line of march, I lost all hope; but Hoja continued to struggle, sick as he was. No one would spare us a man, not even a horse; he went to the sultan and found nearly forty horses, had them unhitched from the cannon, and collected a group of men; towards evening, after struggling all day under the gaze of those who prayed it would sink into the mud and stay there, he whipped the horses in a rage and made our monstrous insect move. He spent the evening arguing with the pashas, who wanted to be rid of us and said the weapon was sapping the strength of the army as well as bringing bad luck, but I sensed he no longer believed in victory.

  That night in our tent when I tried to play something on the oud I’d managed to take along on the campaign, Hoja grabbed it from my hands and threw it aside. Did I know that they wanted my head? I knew. He said he would be a happy man if it were his head they were after instead of mine. I knew this too, but said nothing. I was about to pick up my oud again when he stopped me, asked me to tell him more about that place, my country. When I told him a couple of little fictions as I did with the sovereign, he got angry. He wanted the truth, the real facts: he asked about my mother, my fiancée, my brothers and sisters. When I began to describe the ‘truth’ to him he joined in, muttering hoarse words in the Italian he’d learned from me, short, incomplete sentences I couldn’t make much sense of.

  During the next few days, when he saw the ruined fortifications captured by our advance forces, I felt that he was desperately preoccupied by some sort of strange, foul thoughts. One morning as we were picking our way slowly through a village hit by our cannon fire, he dismounted when he saw the wounded dying in agony at the foot of a wall, and ran up to them. Watching him from a distance I thought at first that he wanted to help them, as if he would have asked them about their wounds had there been a translator with him; then I realized he was in the grip of an enthusiasm whose reason I seemed to sense; there was something else he wanted to ask them. The next day when we went with the sovereign to review the gutted fortifications and small towers on either side of the road, he was in the same excited state: he saw a wounded man whose head was still not severed from his body lying among the buildings levelled to the ground and wooden barricades riddled by cannon fire, and ran to his side. I followed him, to prevent him from doing some vile thing, afraid they would think I had put him up to it, or perhaps out of sheer base curiosity. It was as if he believed the wounded, their bodies shredded by projectiles and cannon balls, would tell him something before they drew the mask of death over their faces; Hoja was prepared to interrogate them so they might divulge it; from them he would learn that deep truth which would change everything in an instant, but I saw that he immediately identified the despair on those faces so very close to death as his own despair, and when he came close to them he couldn’t speak.

  That day at twilight, learning the sovereign was angry that Doppio Castle had not been captured despite all efforts, Hoja went to the sultan, again in the same state of excitement. He was apprehensive when he returned, but seemed not to know why. He had told the sultan that he wanted to send his weapon into battle, that it was for this day he’d worked on the machine so many years. The sovereign, contrary to my expectations, agreed that the moment had come, but judged it necessary to allow more time to Huseyn Pasha the Blond, whom he’d charged earlier with the assault on the castle. Why had the sovereign said this? It was one of those questions which through the years I could never be sure Hoja was asking of me or himself; for some reason I no longer felt close to him, I’d had enough of this anxiety. Hoja answered the question himself: it was because they feared he would steal a share of the victory.

  Until the next afternoon, when we learned that Huseyn Pasha the Blond had still not been able to conquer the castle, Hoja squandered all his strength trying to convince himself that he was right. Since the rumours that I was accursed and a spy, I no longer went to the sovereign’s tent. That night when he went to interpret the events of the day, Hoja managed to tell tales of victory and good fortune that the sultan seemed to believe. When he returned to our tent he had assumed the optimistic air of a man who was confident he would break the legs of Satan in the end. As I listened to him I was struck less by his optimism than by the supreme effort he was apparently making to keep it alive.

  He recounted the same old story of us and them, of the coming victory, but there was a sadness in his voice I had never heard before, accompanying these stories like a melancholy tune; it was as if he were speaking of a childhood memory which both of us knew very well because we had shared a life together. He didn’t object when I picked up my oud, nor when I clumsily jangled its strings: he was speaking of the future, of the wonderful days we would enjoy after we’d turned the river’s current in the direction we wished, but we both knew he was talking about the past: visions of tranquillity appeared before my eyes, graceful trees in a cloistered garden behind a house, warm rooms sparkling with light, a happy family crowd gathered round a dinner table. He gave me a feeling of peace for the first time in years; I understood what he felt when he said it would be hard to leave, that he loved the people here. Then, reflecting on these people for a while, he remembered his fools and grew angry, and I felt he had good cause. It seemed his optimism was not merely an affectation; perhaps because this feeling that a new life was about to begin was something we both shared, or because I thought I’d act in the same way if I were in his place, I don’t know.

  The next morning when we launched our weapon, to test it, against a small enemy fortification close to the front, we both had the same uncanny premonition that it would not be much of a success. The nearly one hundred men the sovereign had provided for our support broke formation and scattered during the weapon’s first assault. Some of them were crushed to bits by the weapon itself, some of them, after a few ineffective shots, were hit when the apparatus got stuck like an ass in the mud and they were left without cover. Most of them fled in fear of bad luck, and we were unable to regroup to prepare a fresh assault. We must both have been thinking the same thing.

  Later, when Hasan Pasha the Stout and his men took the fortification with scarcely a casualty inside of an hour, Hoja wanted to put that profound science to the test once again, this time with a hope I imagined I too understood quite well, but all the infidel soldiers at the fortification had fallen under the sword; there was not even a single man left drawing a last breath among the burning ruins of the barricades. And when he saw the heads piled up to one side to be taken to the sovereign, I knew at once what he was thinking; I even found his fascination justified, but by now I could not stand to see it go so far: I turned my back on him. A bit later when I looked again, overcome by curiosity, he was moving away from the stack of heads; I was never able to learn just how far he had
gone.

  At noon we returned to the march to hear that Doppio Castle had still not been taken. Apparently the sultan was furious, he was talking about punishing Huseyn Pasha the Blond: all of us, the whole army, would join the siege! The sovereign told Hoja that if the castle did not fall by evening our weapon would be used in the morning assault. It was then the sultan ordered that an inept commander, who had been unable all day long to take even a small fortification, should have his head cut off. The sultan had paid no attention to our weapon’s failure at the fortification, news of which had by now caught up with the march, nor to the gossip about its bringing bad luck. Hoja no longer talked about sharing in the victory; although he didn’t say so, I knew he was thinking about the death of the former imperial astrologer; and when I dreamed of scenes from my childhood or the animals on our estate, I knew the same things were passing through his mind; I knew that he, too, was thinking that news of a victory at the castle would be our last chance, that he didn’t really believe in this chance, didn’t want it. I knew there was a little church with its bell-tower ablaze in a village destroyed in rage against the castle that just could not be taken, and in that church the prayer intoned by a brave priest was summoning us to a new life; that as we moved north the sun setting behind the hills of the forest awakened in him, as it did in me, a feeling of the perfection of something being silently, carefully, brought to completion.

  After the sun had set and we learned not only that Huseyn Pasha the Blond had failed, but that Austrians, Hungarians, and Kazaks had joined the Poles at the siege of Doppio, we finally saw the castle itself. It was at the top of a high hill, its towers streaming with flags were caught by the faint red glow of the setting sun, and it was white; purest white and beautiful. I didn’t know why I thought that one could see such a beautiful and unattainable thing only in a dream. In that dream you would run along a road twisting through a dark forest, straining to reach the bright day of that hilltop, that ivory edifice; as if there were a grand ball going on which you wanted to join in, a chance for happiness you did not want to miss, but although you expected to reach the end of the road at any moment, it would never end. When I learned that the flooding river had left a stinking swamp in the low ground between the dark woods and the foot of the slope, and that the infantry, though they were able to cross the swamp, could not get up the slope no matter how hard they tried and despite support of cannon fire, I thought of the road that had led us here. It was as if everything were as perfect as the view of that pure white castle with birds flying over its towers, as perfect as the darkening rocky cliff of the slope and the still, black forest. I knew now that many of the things I’d experienced for years as coincidence had been inevitable, that our soldiers would never be able to reach the white towers of the castle, that Hoja was thinking the same thing. I knew only too well that when we joined the siege in the morning our weapon would founder in the swamp leaving the men inside and around it to die, that as a result there would be voices demanding my head to silence the rumours of a curse, the fear, and the grumblings of soldiers, and I knew Hoja realized as much. I remembered how once, years earlier, to provoke him to talk about himself, I had spoken of a childhood friend of mine with whom I’d developed the habit of thinking the same thing at the same time. I had no doubt he too was now thinking of the very same things.