A Grisly Fable of Ottoman Albania

THE TRAITOR’S NICHE
By Ismail Kadare
Translated by John Hodgson
200 pp. Counterpoint. $25.

After World War II, tiny Albania became a hermit state, rigidly controlled by a Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, who broke with both the Soviet Union and Maoist China, desecrated the country’s mosques and churches and planted the beaches across from the Greek island of Corfu with pillboxes before his regime collapsed in 1990, five years after his death. But the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s 1978 novel, “The Traitor’s Niche,” is an allegorical fable, finally (and very elegantly) translated into English by John Hodgson, about an earlier Albania, which for centuries formed part of the sprawling Ottoman Empire.

The novel begins with a severed head sitting in a dish of honey. It occupies a special niche in a square of the imperial capital, Istanbul, where it outstares the milling crowds. The head belonged to a hapless pasha who failed to suppress a rebellion in the distant province of Albania; it is tended by Abdulla, the guardian of the heads, and regularly inspected for signs of decay by a benign doctor who also advises Abdulla on how to overcome his impotence.

The popular expectation is that the head of Ali Tepelena, the rebel pasha of Albania, will soon come to replace it, now that his uprising is faltering and he is besieged in his castle by the young and vigorous Hurshid Pasha. The imperial courier Tundj Hata waits for the head. If Hurshid Pasha succeeds, Tundj Hata will pack the rebel’s head in salt and ice, according to the regulations contained in the state manual, and transport it posthaste to the niche in the capital; if not, he’ll be taking Hurshid’s head instead. It’s all the same to him — except that Ali’s head will make a better show when the villagers come to gawp at it in the little impromptu displays he always gives on his way to the capital.

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The display of heads quickens the villagers’ sluggish interest: For them, this is “literature, theater, art, philosophy and perhaps love.” They live in the terrible wasted lands of the empire, somewhere between Albania and Istanbul, where everything that is theirs, down to their language and their legends, has been erased. They speak in a crude patois, satisfied to gaze mutely at one of the heads the state values so much, inhabitants of a region where a man was found half-strangled and scratched by his own hands, wrestling to compose a ballad in his own tongue.

As this riveting novel unfolds — in brilliant, laconic, grimly comic fashion — it becomes apparent that the state is, in its own way, a frightful head. AMedusa, perhaps, with the capacity to destroy. Or, as the courier imagines, an octopus, the only creature he can think of whose head is in the middle of its body.

The head is what pulls the whole edifice together: the head in its niche, the stone of deterrence. “The capital city had been waiting for that little bundle packed in snow and salt for a long time. … More than anything, it needed to have that head.”

Ali Tepelena, once apostrophized by Byron, was real; Albania certainly exists. But the sultan is unseen, unnamed, almost irrelevant — another titular head, perhaps, whose functions are performed by the terrible ministries of state. In Kadare’s Istanbul there are newspaper headlines and tourists, a royal theater, couriers traveling by carriage, who don’t belong to the historical period. Are they anachronisms or elements of the surreal or slyly placed hooks that tether the narrative to another period, perhaps our own?