By Veton Surroi
1.
“I cannot speak of what happened in Khotyn, in the distant land of Russia.”
With this sentence begins the account of Ahmet Shabo and the novel The Fortress by Meša Selimović.
Ahmet Shabo is the survivor of a group of soldiers from Sarajevo who had gone to fight somewhere in the East. His comrades in arms—guards, the unemployed, tinsmiths, minor officials and others—were part of the Ottoman army fighting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Khotyn was damp, whether from the river, the marshes, or the rain. And when he returned to Sarajevo, Ahmet Shabo saw even the rain’s moisture only through the eyes of that place on the eastern bank of the Dniester.
Ahmet Shabo had been in Ukraine in 1621, led by Osman II.
The Ottoman army halted in Khotyn and turned back. Since then, Khotyn has been at times part of the Ottoman Empire, at times of the Principality of Moldavia, at times of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, later of the Soviet Union, and of independent Ukraine. Today it lies in southwestern Ukraine; from there Ukrainian soldiers go to the front, and refugees return from it.
Ahmet Shabo says:
“I cannot speak of what happened in Khotyn, in the distant land of Russia. It is not worth speaking about the terrible killing, about human fear, about the cruelties of one side and the other. It should not be remembered, nor mourned, nor celebrated.”
2.
On the western bank of the Dniester—indeed far from it, somewhere near Lviv—another novel unfolded about another war and another friction between two different civilizational systems. In Radetzky March, Joseph Roth describes an Austro-Hungarian nobleman (of Slovene origin) who is sent to a border town, W., in Galicia, on the eastern frontier of Austria-Hungary—the frontier separating the Europe we know from Russia.
This place, called Brody, where Joseph Roth himself was born, is the part of Ukraine that today has not been engulfed by fighting. Or so it seems. Because war is not only fought with bullets, explosions, artillery, and drones, but also through narratives—indeed, largely through narratives.
In Radetzky March, the protagonist describes the moment in which people of that time lived—before that war and now, before this one:
“They lived in a world that had already ended, although no one had yet announced its death.”
Back then the order of empires was dying (the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman). This time, the order largely built by Pax Americana since 1945.
3.
Yemen lies close to today’s war zone in the Persian Gulf.
It did so one hundred and fifty years ago as well.
At that time the Ottoman Empire had, almost ritually, to deal with uprisings of Arabs—some called them tribes, some peoples—and the Sublime Porte saw them as a threat to its reputation and to the functioning of the Empire. And, again ritually, the Porte mobilized its loyal Balkan soldiers, among them many Albanians.
Among them were several from Kamenica. They completed their military service—whether two or three years, the narrator Azem Vllasi could not recall exactly—and happy to be alive, missing neither eye nor leg nor arm, pulled by longing for their homeland and a life ahead that would leave Arabia and its perpetual tangle behind, they set off on foot back home.
They crossed deserts and rivers, lakes and mountains, dense forests filled with wild animals and open roads with bandits and soldiers forgotten by armies that no longer existed. They passed through villages where not a single word was understandable; through the fearful glances of villagers at these strangers who could not explain who they were. They passed also through the gaze that warns: if you turn your head once more in that direction, it may be hard to turn it again anywhere, ever.
They passed through rain that delighted them when their hair and eyes had been filled with dust; and through snow that delighted them no longer, despite the indelible memory of childhood, because their leather sandals had already begun to lose the last thin layer separating the sole from the earth.
And one day they entered Kosovo—first with their ears. At last they heard words that had meaning, shape, scent, and color. They knew they were close, perhaps an hour or less from their village, when after all the deserts, rivers, forests with beasts, roads with bandits, and words of languages that must have come from the Tower of Babel, they arrived at a narrow and steep ascent, the last climb before the village appears.
They recognized it immediately and sighed as though there were still another road like the one from Yemen to here:
“Ah, damn it, we have reached Brija.”
The last sigh before the destination—the inevitable sign of how difficult the passage from war to peace seems in the end.
4.
The full first paragraph of Ahmet Shabo reads:
“I cannot speak of what happened in Khotyn, in the distant land of Russia. It is not worth speaking of the terrible killing, of human fear, of the cruelties of one side and the other. It should not be remembered, nor mourned, nor celebrated. It is better to forget, so that human memory of everything ugly may die, and that children may not sing songs of revenge.”
This remains in literature.
Outside it we live in a world where people speak of today’s and yesterday’s Khotyns. They speak of terrible killings, of human fear, of the cruelties of both sides; they remember, mourn, and celebrate. Human memory of everything ugly is reborn with every day of war, and children prepare to sing new songs of revenge.