The Palace of Dreams

  It must have been snowing … there… . Then he stopped writing, snatching away the pen as if afraid it might be held to the paper by magic. It was with an effort that he went on to record, in the succinct style used in the rest of the Chronicle, the death of Kurt and his own appointment as head of the Palace of Dreams. Then his pen was still again, and he thought of the distant ancestor called Gjon who on a winter’s day several centuries before had built a bridge and at the same time edified his name. The patronymic bore within it, like a secret message, the destiny of the Quprilis for generation after generation. And so that the bridge might endure, a man was sacrificed in its building, walled up in its foundations. And although so much time had gone by since, the traces of his blood had come down to the present generation. So that the Quprilis might endure …

  Perhaps that was why—like the ancient Greeks, cutting off their hair at a funeral so that the angry soul of the departed wouldn’t be able to recognize them and do them harm—perhaps that was why the Quprilis had changed their name to Köprülü: to avoid being identified with the bridge.

  Mark-Alem knew all about this, but remembered how on the fateful night he had longed to throw off the protective mask, the Islamic half-shield of “Alem,” and adopt one of those ancient names that attracted danger and were marked by fate.

  As before he repeated to himself: Mark-Gjergj Ura, Mark-Gjorg Ura … still holding the pen poised in his hand, as if uncertain what name to append to the ancient chronicle… .

  Late one afternoon in March he finished the report, and sent it to the copyists’ office to be transcribed. Then, with some relief, he went out to his carriage to drive home. He was in the habit of shrinking back in his seat so as not to be seen by passersby in the often crowded streets. He huddled up in the corner again today. But after he’d gone some way he felt curiously drawn toward the carriage door. Something beyond the window was calling him insistently. Eventually he broke with his custom and craned forward, and through the mist made by his breath on the glass he saw he was driving past the central park. The almond trees are in bloom, he thought. He was moved. And though he almost shrank back in his corner again, as he usually did at once after something outside had attracted his attention, he now found himself unable to do so. There, a few paces away, was life reviving, warmer clouds, storks, love—all the things he’d been pretending to ignore for fear of being wrested from the grasp of the Palace of Dreams. He felt that if he was crouching there it was to protect himself, and that if ever, some late afternoon like this, he gave in to the call of life and left his refuge, the spell would be broken. The wind would turn against the Quprilis and the men would come for him as they’d come for Kurt, and take him, perhaps a little less unceremoniously, to the place from which there is no returning.

  But despite these thoughts he didn’t take his face away from the window. I’ll order the sculptor right away to carve a branch of flowering almond on my tombstone, he thought. He wiped the mist off the window with his hand, but what he saw outside was still no clearer; everything was distorted and iridescent. Then he realized his eyes were full of tears.

  Tirana

  1981

  About the Author

  Born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Girokaster, near the Greek border, Ismail Kadare studied in Tirana and at the Gorki Institute, Moscow. He is Albania’s greatest living poet and novelist, whose works have been translated worldwide. He established an uneasy modus vivendi with the Communist authorities until their attempts to turn his reputation to their advantage drove him in October 1990 to seek asylum in France, for, as he says, “Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible… . The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.”

  The Palace of Dreams, which appeared in Albania in 1981 and was immediately banned, arose out of Kadare’s long-nurtured ambition to invent a hell of his own. “I kept weighing up what an ambitious and over-fanciful proposal this was, though,” he wrote, “after those unknown Egyptians, after Virgil, Saint Augustine and, above all, Dante… .”