Elegy for Kosovo by Ismaíl Kadaré Page B

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.
    â€œYour 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.
    â€œHow 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.”
    â€œEurope,” she said to herself, as if she were trying to seize this word transformed by ridicule and neglect. She had watched words wilt away and die when they were neglected by the minds of men. “Europe,” she repeated, almost with dread. Twenty-odd empires, a hundred different peoples. Some jammed against each other, others far apart. Which was Europe’s true mass — constricted or distended? As learned friends of hers had explained, Europe had started out as a dense galaxy in the middle of a void, but in recent years, particularly with the great plague, it had turned into a void itself, besieged by great hordes.
    The barbarians had again burst through the defending barriers. They brandished their spears right under Europe’s nose without clarifying the meaning of their sign: death or goodwill.
    One by one she brought to mind her powerful connections: princes, cardinals, philosophers, even the pope of Rome. She tried to recollect their faces, their eyes, particularly the lines on their foreheads, where the worries of a man are drawn more clearly than anywhere else. Were they racking their brains how to rally together to defend themselves, particularly now that their southern barrier had been breached, or were they thinking no further than their next banquet?
    Her weary mind found calm. Then, in her thoughts, she saw a long rope, an exceedingly long rope, uncoil as if it had been randomly thrown. “Greece!” she exclaimed, as if she had had a revelation. Her friend Wyclif had told her that this had been how the ancient Greek world had measured itself: an endless strip of land, a thousand five hundred miles long, stretching from the coasts of Asia Minor to the Greek peninsula and the shores of Illyria, and from the southern beaches of Gaul down to Calabria and Sicily. This rope was delicate, brittle, cut in places by waves of fate, and yet it had managed to hold out and penetrate the depths of the continent.
    Now the Greeks, like the other peoples of the region, had been toppled. The eleven peoples of the peninsula had to stumble along within a communal shell named Balkan, and it seemed that nobody gave them a second thought, unless to anathematize them: “You cursed wretches!”
    She could not blot out the eyes of the poor destitute fugitives who had sung and spoken at the banquet. In their black sockets she saw a Europe that had died, transformed into a doleful memory. “Great Lord in Heaven! Why have you wrought these things in those lands?” she thought. “One has to lose a thing in order to cherish it!”
    Everything they had narrated unraveled slowly in her mind: the sacrifices at the foot of bridges, the Furies in the guise of washerwomen on the banks of a river, the idlers in the village coffeehouses , the killer forced to attend the funeral feast of his victim. “It is all there, O Lord!” she