Free The Palace of Dreams by Ismaíl Kadaré, Barbara Bray

forbid!” breathed Mark-Alem’s mother.
    The governor’s laughter had relieved the tension, and forks were stretched out to spear the cakes.
    “I invited the Albanian rhapsodists to come because I wanted to hear the Albanian epic,” said Kurt. “The Austrian ambassador has read parts of it, and he thinks Albanian epics are much finer than the Bosnian ones.”
    “Does he indeed?”
    “Yes,” said Kurt. He blinked as if blinded by sunlight on snow. “They talk about hunts through the mountains; single combats; the abduction of women and girls; wedding processions to marriages full of danger; khroushks * rooted to the spot with fear lest they’ve made some mistake; horses drunk on wine; knights who’ve been treacherously blinded riding on blinded steeds through mountains holding their breath; owls foretelling woe; knockings at the gates of strange manor houses at night; a macabre challenge to a duel, issued to a dead man by a live one lurking around his grave with a pack of two hundred hounds; the moans of the dead man unable to rise from his grave to fight his enemy; men and gods quarreling, fighting, intermarrying; shrieks, battles, horrible curses; and over all, a cold sun that sheds light but never warms.”
    Mark-Alem listened as if bewitched. He was filled with a strange homesickness for the distant winter snow on which he had never trod.
    “That’s what it’s like, the Albanian epic from which we are absent,” said Kurt.
    “If it’s anything like what you describe, no wonder we’re not in it!” observed one of the cousins. “It sounds more like a melodramatic frenzy!”
    “But we are in the Slav epic,” said Kurt.
    “Isn’t that enough?” asked the cousin with dull eyes. “You said yourself we’re the only family in Europe and perhaps in the world that’s celebrated in a national epic. Don’t you think that’s sufficient? Do you want us to be celebrated by two nations?”
    “You ask if that isn’t enough for me,” said Kurt. “My answer is no!”
    The two cousins shook their heads indulgently. His elder brother smiled too.
    “You haven’t changed,” he said. “Still the same eccentric.”
    “When the rhapsodists come,” said Kurt, “I invite you all to come and hear them. Among other things they’ll sing the old ‘Ballad of the Bridge with Three Arches,’ about the bridge from which our family name derives… .”
    Mark-Alem was listening openmouthed.
    “But they’ll be singing it in the Albanian version,” Kurt went on. “I haven’t said anything about it yet to the Vizier, but I don’t think he’ll object to our putting them up. They’ll have had a long journey—not to mention the trouble of hiding their instruments. But it’s worth it… .”
    Kurt went on for some time, speaking with passion. He spoke again of the link between their family here and the Balkan epic there, and of the relations between government and art, the evanescent and the eternal, the flesh and the spirit… .
    His elder brother’s face had clouded over.
    “Be that as it may,” he said, “talk about it as much as you like between these four walls, but be careful not to do so anywhere else.”
    Silence fell around the table. The last clink of forks against plates only made it more tense.
    To lighten the atmosphere the governor turned to Mark-Alem and said in a sprightly tone:
    “We haven’t heard anything from you lately, nephew! You seem to be up to your neck in the world of dreams!”
    Mark-Alem felt himself blushing again. Everyone’s attention was once more concentrated on him.
    “You work in Selection, don’t you?” his uncle went on. “The Vizier was asking me about you yesterday. A person’s real career in the Palace of Dreams, he said, begins in Interpretation—that’s where the genuinely creative work is done and where people’s individual talents have a chance to shine. Do you agree?”
    Mark-Alem shrugged as if to say he hadn’t chosen the section he was sent to work