Elegy for Kosovo Read Online Free PDF

madmen whose terror had brought them back to sanity.
    Twice Gjorg was tempted to throw away his lahuta, but both times he had thought he was going mad and changed his mind. If he could keep a clear head until morning, he would not go insane. The third time he thought of throwing away his lahuta, the instrument’s single string gave off a mournful sound, as if to say, “What have I done to you? “
    The fugitives made their way through the darkness like black beetles. Someone had lit a torch, and in its light the men’s faces looked even more frightening. Dogs were licking the hooves of a fallen horse, “Lord in Heaven!” Gjorg muttered, “It is the honey we were cheering this very morning,”
    â€œWe are dead, brother!” he heard Vladan’s voice say, “Do you believe me now, that we are nothing but spirits?”

II
    They had been walking for four days and no longer knew where they were. The throng of fugitives would swell and then thin out again in sorrow. Tagging along at times were Hungarian soldiers whose language nobody understood, Walachians desperately looking for the Danube, Jews who had come from God knows where. Just as suddenly as they had appeared, they disappeared again the following day, as if snatched away by some dream. A Turkish subaltern also tagged along for part of the way, the only Turk, it seemed, who had thrown in his lot with the Christians. He stared at everything in amazement, and every time they stopped to rest he would ask the others to teach him the correct way of crossing himself.
    In a stupor, Gjorg heard snippets of conversation. “I think we’ve left Albania, we’ve been walking so many days now” — “I think so too” — “This isn’t Serbian land” — “What do you think?” — “I’d say this isn’t Serbia” — “What? Not Serbia, not Albania?” — “Let me put it to you this way, my friend: some say this is Serbia, some say Albania. The Lord only knows which of the two it really is. So who owns this accursed plain where we spilled our blood, the Field of the Blackbirds, as they call it? It was there, my brother, that the fighting started — a hundred, maybe even two hundred years ago.”
    Gjorg opened his eyes and thought he saw the Cursed Peaks. They were crowned by the snow and the sky he knew, but the villages at their foot were different. His eyes filled with tears at the thought that he might never see them again.
    Gjorg had lost sight of his traveling companions, including Vladan. Two Albanians he met outside a village told him that they were on their way to Albania, but that they couldn’t take him along. They were military couriers, and had to get there as fast as possible by whatever means they could — boat, cart, horses. They had to find their lord, Count Balsha, as soon as possible and hand him a message.
    Gjorg didn’t understand. The calamity must have driven them mad, for what kind of message could they be delivering now that the war was lost? And if it were such an urgent matter, then why were they dozens of miles astray, and how were they going to find the count? How did they even know he was alive, and what could the point of such a message be, now that everyone was dead?
    They listened coldly to his questions and told him that they were military couriers, that they were not permitted to question or doubt. It had been in the course of that horrifying afternoon that they had been ordered to deliver this message to Count Balsha from one of the flanks of the Albanian army — that was why they hadn’t managed to get to him. Everything had collapsed before their eyes, the count’s tent kept moving farther and farther away, and the torrent of soldiers had ended up carrying them in the opposite direction. Now, no matter what the cost, they intended to accomplish what they had thus far been prevented from doing: