The Siege by Ismail Kadare

Author:Ismail Kadare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
Published: 2008-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

On July 26 we decided to make the tunnel collapse. We first made sure they had stopped digging. That meant that they were going to attempt to break out that night, or the next day at the latest. We chose to set off the landslip as close to the foundations as possible, at a spot where the tunnel was deepest underground, so that the greater weight of earth above it would ensure the fullest possible destruction of the enemy below.

After the collapse we carried on watching the surface over the whole length of the passage. But the men who had been buried alive didn’t even try to cut a relief shaft, and no one came to their rescue from the outside either. In any case it would have been pointless to try anything of the kind.

To begin with we heard no noises at all, and we could hardly believe that dozens of sappers and soldiers armed to the teeth were right beneath our feet, no more than two fathoms down. But the silence lasted only a few days. Thereafter, and especially at night, when we put our ears to the ground, we could hear screams and wailing. But nobody will ever be able to say what really happened down there.

We considered that our best course was to let them die where they were. If we had got them out, we would not have had the means to keep them imprisoned, because even without them, we had limited supplies of food and water. In other circumstances we might have asked to exchange them for our own casualties who were in the enemy’s hands and possibly still alive. Or else they might have surrendered our prisoners for a ransom. But after the horrors inflicted on those of our women that they captured, our men are outraged. Not only have we changed, it is likely we will never go back to the way we used to be. Most of us have been made bitter by death and have lost all inclination for forgiveness and mercy.

When their groans began to fade away our brothers nonetheless prayed for the souls of those unfortunate men. For several nights in a row we lit candles and burned incense over the path of the tunnel. Despite this we all lost our sleep, and even those who did manage to drop off woke up more exhausted than insomniacs, because of the horrors they had seen in their dreams. Some even began to suspect the Turks of having invented the tunnel with the sole aim of storing their own dead beneath our feet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.