Chronicle in Stone (18 page)

“Put down that gun, you dog,” she said blankly.

“Out of the way, bitch,” the partisan said, levelling the gun at the two men.

“Wait a minute, Tare,” said one of the partisans as he moved to draw the girl aside. But he didn’t have time.

“Death to communism!” shouted Mak Karllashi.

The gun of the one-armed partisan fired. Mak Karllashi went down first. The partisan tried to miss the girl, but in vain. She writhed tight against her father as if the bullets had stitched her body to his. After the burst of fire came a muffled silence. The bodies had fallen in a heap. They twitched for a moment, then seemed to find peace. The shiny black boots of the tanner’s son protruded from the pile of silent bodies.

The sound of wailing came from behind the door.

“Roll me a cigarette,” the one-armed partisan said to his friend. He looked upset.

After a while they slung their weapons on their shoulders again. They were about to leave when heavy footsteps sounded on the cobblestones. It was a partisan patrol. Three of them, all tall, and wearing studded boots. They approached.

“Death to fascism!”

“Freedom for the people!”

“What happened here?” asked the one in the middle.

“We just executed an enemy of the people,” the one-armed partisan said.

“The order?” said the partisan sternly.

Partisan Tare took the crumpled piece of paper from his pocket.

“Fine,” the other said.

The three men turned to leave, when at the last moment one of them noticed Mak Karllashi’s daughter’s hair in the pile.

“Let me see that order again,” he said, turning to Tare.

Partisan Tare looked him in the eye. He reached slowly, very slowly, into his jacket pocket with his one arm and felt with two fingers for the piece of paper.

The partisan from the patrol read it dutifully.

“I see a girl was executed here,” he said. “I don’t see her name on the order.”

“It’s not there,” said Partisan Tare, and his neck stiffened as though he’d been slapped.

“Who shot her?”

“I did.”

“Your name?”

“Tare Bonjaku.”

“Partisan Tare Bonjaku, put down your weapon,” the patrol leader ordered. “I’m putting you under arrest.”

Partisan Tare lowered his head.

“Your gun.”

His hand moved again. He shrugged the strap off his shoulder and held out the gun.

The other man began looking around. His gaze stopped at the courtyard of Xuano’s abandoned house.

“Over there,” he said, pointing to the courtyard.

Partisan Tare started for the courtyard.

“You, keep him here under arrest until the comrades come to give judgment,” he said to Tare’s two companions.

“Yes, sir.”

“Death to Fascism!”

“Freedom for the people.”

The arrested partisan sat down on a pile of stones and looked at the walls of the abandoned house, which had begun to collapse.

His companions sat some distance away. No one spoke. Outside, the cries of the Karllashi women could still be heard. They were dragging the bodies into their own yard. The arrested man asked for another cigarette. They gave it to him.

He smoked it, then sat with his chin in his hand. The two others looked away. Finally footsteps were heard in the street. They had arrived. There were three of them.

The man under arrest stood up. It was a short trial.

“Partisan Tare Bonjaku, you are accused of killing a girl. Is it true?”

“It’s true,” he answered.

“What do you have to say in your defence?”

“Nothing. I have only one hand. The enemies of the people cut off my right hand. I don’t shoot well with the left. I hit the girl by accident.”

“We understand.”

They conferred privately for a moment. Then one of them spoke:

“Partisan Tare Bonjaku, you are sentenced to death by firing squad for the misuse of revolutionary violence.”

Silence. The man who had just spoken gestured to Tare’s two companions.

“Now?” one of them asked in a faint voice.

“Yes, now.”

Their foreheads were wet with cold sweat.

The condemned man understood. He remained near the walls and looked at them. They took their weapons from their shoulders. He raised his one arm in a clenched-fist salute and shouted:

“Long live communism!”

A brief burst of fire. The partisan fell onto the pile of stones.

They left, with the dead man’s two companions bringing up the rear.

“We lost Tare for a filthy whore,” one of them muttered.

“They’re killing each other now!” someone shouted in the distance. “They’re killing each other now!”

Lady Majnur stuck her head out of the window and made a face.

“As long as they carry on to the last man!”

The two partisans heard her and looked up immediately, but there was no one in the window. One of them raised his machine-gun and fired a burst at the windows. Shattered panes spattered noisily on the cobblestones.

OLD SOSE’S NEWS
(in lieu of a chronicle)

It is written in the ancient books: “A people with yellow hair will try to reduce this city to ashes.”

SEVENTEEN

The German troops had crossed the southern border and were now marching towards the city, from which the citizens were fleeing. It was the third time in its long history that the city had been abandoned in this way. A thousand years before, the inhabitants had fled when plague struck. The second time was four centuries ago, when the imperial Ottoman army crossed the border under the banner of Islam, at the same place where the German troops were now on the march.

The city was evacuated. You could feel the great loneliness of the stone.

Monday night was full of voices, footsteps, the slamming of doors. Groups of friends and neighbours were getting ready, locking the heavy doors and setting out in the middle of the night for outlying villages.

Mane Voco and Bido Sherifi, with their wives and children, had gathered in our hallway, along with Nazo and her daughter-in-law. Maksut had disappeared. I was sad because of Grandmother. She wouldn’t come with us this time either. Nor would Kako Pino. She was afraid there would be a wedding while she was gone. Someone might call her. For sixty years she had made up the city’s brides. She couldn’t let them down now. A badly made-up bride was the ugliest thing on earth, the end of the world, she had protested when they tried to persuade her to leave. No, no, no.

We left. We walked with faltering steps, like drunkards. Here and there in the darkness we could hear other steps. The town was draining itself of people. At the outskirts of the city we found ourselves alone. Bido Sherifi led the way, cane in hand. My father kept stumbling on the stony road. The others muttered, cursed, swore, coughed, and twisted their ankles in the ruts. Only Nazo’s daughter-in-law walked gracefully, even in that sinister night, swaying very slightly. I guess she couldn’t walk any other way.

We passed the fields lying fallow. When the moon came out we were on the high road. I had never seen anything so dismal as the road that night, with its endless ruts dug by the truck wheels. In the moonlight they looked like the black rails of a line leading towards death. Nazo stumbled, fell, and got up again.

We crossed the bridge over the river. The deserted airfield lay before us.

We had to cross over it. We came to its edge. I never thought I would walk on it one day. It saddened me greatly. In our eyes that field had something sacred about it. It had been a kind of sister or bride to the sky. Chosen by fate, like a princess. Now it was sundered from the sky like a wife scorned, and it had a wild and gloomy mien.

From all around came the smell of manure. Resentful cattle had soiled the airfield. I was now convinced that weeds and cattle and mud would always win out in the end — never the sky.

Farther along we could make out Holy Trinity hill, and just behind it, black and menacing, strangely close as though it had risen up suddenly to see who was coming, loomed the dark bulk of the mountain.

Auntiemoon Pino tried hard to improve the view or at least to embellish and soften the sinister look of the landscape. But its light, greedily sucked up by the mud and fog, was so faint and weak that it only sullied everything even more.

Finally the moon disappeared behind the clouds.

“We can’t see a thing,” said Nazo’s daughter-in-law.

Everyone turned round to look. She was right, the city was blotted out completely.

Someone moaned.

Now the plain, the road, Holy Trinity hill, the nameless banks of fog, and the mountain itself (it was hard to believe we were walking towards a mountain, for its shape was so ill-defined that it seemed that all we had before us was a slightly thicker patch of night) began shifting about awkwardly, scratching themselves in the dark like prehistoric monsters. Little by little I lost all sense of reality. We were walking aimlessly, walking for the sake of walking, wandering in the belly of the night. I could no longer think. I was used to thinking between walls, at street-corners, in rooms, and these familiar places seemed to give order to my thoughts. But now, without them, everything was not only incomprehensible, but cruel too. The mountain leaned right over Holy Trinity hill and calmly chewed its neck. The hill gave up the ghost. Someone sneezed. The sound cheered me but not for long.

The moon came out again. The mists were drawn immediately to its light, drank it into their beards and let it drip back onto the muddy mess of the field. Caught in the act, the mountain hastily drew back from the hill, but a deep gouge in the hill’s neck was clearly visible.

Nazo’s daughter-in-law, the only one who had not sighed or moaned even once during the walk (maybe because she was walking through the kingdom of magic, with whose ways she had long been familiar), looked back again.

“The city,” she muttered.

“Where?” I asked softly.

“There.”

“That mist?”

“Yes.”

That’s where Grandmother was.

The moon disappeared again, taking my thoughts of Grandmother with it. Taking advantage of the darkness, the mountain bent over the hill again. This time it would surely strangle it to death.

We walked on like that for a long time. Now we were going up a steep slope.

“Don’t fall asleep,” said Bido Sherifi.

Ilir was alongside me.

“I was sleeping,” he admitted.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

We were still going uphill.

“It’s getting light,” said Mane Voco.

It was true, there was a faint light in the sky, but it looked as though it might change its mind and darken again at any moment.

We stopped to rest on a small plateau. The plain below, the road, the hills, the mists and the mountain were now slowly beating back the power of night. Exhausted, still pale with anguish, they awaited the morning.

“Look,” Ilir said, “Look over there.”

In the distance the contours of the city could just be seen in the murky mix of night and day. It was the first time I had seen it from afar. I almost shouted for joy, for all night I had had the feeling that it was sinking lower and lower into the mud of the plain, like an old ship foundering on the shore.

But now the contours of the landscape had finally flung the impish genies from their back and were gradually recovering their shapes in the daylight. Only the grey eyes of Nazo’s daughter-in-law still held something of the magic of the night.

The city was far away, caught in the clumsily opening jaws of the fog. The crones were down there. Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo, with their cracked glasses perched on their noses, were keeping watch over the road from their respective windows, waiting to catch a glimpse of the men with yellow hair. Clues had been perceptible for some time. Now the signs were unmistakable: Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo were getting ready to turn into crones. The German invasion seemed to be the definitive test for them, as the great incursions of the Turks, the massacres on the ruins of the republic and the monarchy, and the forty years of constant hunger had been for other crones.

“Let’s move,” said Bido Sherifi. “We’re nearly there.”

We got up. I was almost asleep on my feet. It was a painful slumber, cut and torn by the jolts passed to my body by the holes in the road.

Then someone said, “This is it. We’re here.”

I opened my eyes.

“We’re here!”

“Where?”

“Here.”

I had no idea where I was.

“In the village?”

“Yes, in the village.”

“Where is it?”

“Right there.”

I looked around in bewilderment. So this was what they called a village! I was dumbfounded, then suddenly burst out laughing.

“What’s the matter? What’s wrong with you?” asked Nazo’s daughter-in-law.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

“Lord above, now my child’s lost his mind!” my mother said.

“What’s the matter with you?” my father asked sternly.

“But . . . don’t you see? . . . those houses . . . over there?”

“Now stop that,” my father commanded.

My mother shook me by the shoulders, then put her arms around me.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. These low shacks with whitewashed walls looked to me like dolls’ houses. They weren’t even lined up in a row so as to form one side of a street facing the other side in a virtually permanent state of rivalry, taunting each other with a sneering challenge: “You want to see who’s bigger, do you?” No, it was all different here. To prevent such squabbling, the cottages were separated from each other as if they were all in business on their own accounts. And to top it all, they were surrounded by patches of tilled land, chicken coops, haystacks and doghouses.

The villagers stared in amazement as our little group made its way across an open space. Two or three frightened kids hid behind their doors. A cow began to moo. More peasants came out. They had kindly features, the sun was in their hair, and they smelled of fresh milk.

I could hear cowbells tinkling. My eyes closed.

I woke up halfway through the afternoon. I was in an empty room. My father was hanging paper over the windows to replace the broken panes, while my mother cleaned the floor, which was filthy with dried-out chicken droppings. It all seemed very depressing to me.

In a little while Bido Sherifi’s wife and Nazo came.

“So, are you settled in?” they asked.

My mother pursed her lips.

“What about you?”

“Not so bad. We found an abandoned house.”

Bido Sherifi’s wife heaved a deep sigh.

“How did we get into this mess?”

They left.

I felt like crying. Suddenly I was terribly homesick for our house and the city. Had something irreparable happened?

Papa went down to the cellar and came back up.

“Be careful not to light a fire,” he said. “It’s full of hay down there. If it goes up we’ll burn like mice in a barn.”

Mane Voco came by. He had lost a lot of weight since Isa was hanged.

“Do you have a little salt?” he asked. “We forgot to bring any.”

My mother gave him some.

The house we were in was also abandoned. The other room was a wreck. I went downstairs to see the hay.

“A-oo,” I said at the cellar entrance.

There was no answer.

The hay we were worried about had a heady tang. I went back up to the room wondering why we always lived in houses with some danger underneath. In the city it was the water in the cistern, here the threat of fire in the cellar.

Refugees from the city passed by all day. Some stopped in the village and moved into deserted houses like we had. Most kept going, looking for villages farther away. I noticed Qani Kekezi among the people walking by with bundles and cradles. Bits of newspaper, cigarette butts and gossip trailed in the refugees’ wake. Back in the city Gjergj Pula had been killed. He had just applied to change his name again, to Jürgen Pulen. (The rumour was that apart from Giorgio, Yiorgos and Jürgen, which he never got a chance to use, he had lined up the name Yogura in case of a Japanese invasion.)

Refugees passed through the villages all night long. I slept fitfully, a sleep interrupted by tinkling bells, the lowing of cattle, and knocking at doors.

I was still asleep when I heard Xhexho’s loud voice from the street.

“Where are you, my friends? I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Where are you, poor things?”

She burst in the door. Bido Sherifi’s wife and Ilir’s mother ran to her.

“Xhexho, do you have any news? What’s happening?”

Xhexho started pacing up and down the room, then brought her hands to her cheeks.

“My God, how low we have fallen! Wandering the road like Romanies. Scattered like a raven’s chicks. What kind of a pigsty is this? How did you end up here? Why has God let us live, to be reduced to this? What a catastrophe!”

“Enough, Xhexho! It’s not as if we took to the road for the fun of it. We had no choice but to flee evil,” said Bido Sherifi’s wife. “What news have you brought?”

“I don’t know where to start. Did you hear what happened to Çeço Kaili’s daughter? She went off with the Italians.”

“With the Italians?”

“Lately her beard got as long as Mullah Kasemi’s. The barber was at Kaili’s house every day with a bag full of all kinds of razors, even the ones the Franks make. There was no other choice. Nothing else worked. Then one night she just got up and left. They say it was the barber who set it up. She got into the truck that took the girls from the brothel.”

“Maybe the terrible bad luck that has befallen the city has left with her,” said Xhexho. “After all, that girl with the beard did bring bad luck. It’s a good thing she left,” Xhexho added, surprising everyone with the uncharacteristically hopeful words she had spoken. But her optimism was short-lived. Raising her voice, which sounded like a dull whistle coming through her nose, she nearly shouted, “No, it won’t leave us alone just yet! Have you heard what they’re saying about Maksut, Nazo’s boy? He’s a spy! Yes, a spy!”

“A spy?”

“That’s what I said. A snake in the wall. That’s why he let his wife and mother come here alone; he’s afraid of the partisans. He’s in hiding, hasn’t turned up anywhere. They say he’s waiting for the Germans. He sends them information at night and tells them which roads to take. They say he’s the one who reported Isa.”

Ilir’s mother broke into sobs.

“The cur, the cur,” she cried.

Xhexho sighed deeply.

“Avdo Babaramo still hasn’t found his son’s body,” she said in a less excited voice. “The poor man is still on the road, looking everywhere. But now we’re all on the road.” Xhexho raised her voice and added: “Like wandering Jews!”

Her nasal voice droned on. Then, obviously worn out, she spoke more softly.

“What can I say? We left home like crazy people. Men and women loaded down with bundles, cradles, bowls, and the infirm, and our dogs and cats ran off without a second thought, like the wretched of the earth. And Dino Çiço among them, with his plane on his back.”

“With his plane?”

“Yes, dear friends, with his plane on his back! His family followed along behind, begging him to leave it in the house, saying he wouldn’t be able to take the weight and would slow them all down. But he wouldn’t hear of leaving it behind. He wouldn’t risk the Germans getting hold of it for anything in the world.”