Chronicle in Stone (19 page)

Grandmother’s absence became painfully clear. Only she could do anything to keep Xhexho from going on and on. Nothing my mother or any of the other women could say had any effect on Xhexho’s unstoppable rant.

Xhexho sensed this and savoured her position.

“So there you are, my dears. We have all been swept up by a miserable fate. You’ll never be able to call me a Cassandra again! When men got into planes, Xhexho said nothing. She was downcast, but kept her trap shut. But now we have a plane that has got onto a man! No, no and no! That is a monstrosity which drives me to distraction!”

Egged on by her own eloquence, she raised her voice and her rhetoric to its highest pitch.

“Oh Lord, what have we done to make You harry us so? You dropped bombs on us. You made our beards grow. You caused black water to rise from the earth . . . What tribulations will you visit on us next?”

At the climax of her declamation, Xhexho vanished into thin air, as she always did.

For the first time in my life I thought she was right. I had long suspected that everything was about to go upside down. Had our own cellar not challenged the main room of the house? Had not the beard destined for Jur Qosja’s chin gone and planted itself on the face of Çeço Kaili’s daughter? Not to mention those resentful cows that had got their own back on the aeroplanes . . .

I could not stop thinking about Dino Çiço tramping through the night with his plane on his back. But the two of them had probably fallen out. Their relationship must have soured, like everything else these days.

I ran outside hoping to see him and his plane. It was cold. There weren’t many refugees. The few I saw could hardly move. I recognised two boys from the neighbourhood.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“Over there, in that little shack. What about you?”

“In this one here.”

We didn’t use the word “house”.

Finally I found Ilir. He had looked haggard ever since Isa’s death. I told him what Xhexho had said about Maksut. His eyes flashed with hatred.

“Listen,” he said to me. “When we go back to the city, we’ll kill Maksut, OK?”

“OK. There’s an old dagger at home that belonged to my grandfather.”

“Is it sharp enough?”

“Yes, it’s really sharp. It even has Turkish writing on the handle.”

“We’ll ambush him at night on his way home. I’ll jump on his neck and you get him with the knife.”

I thought for a while.

“It’s better if we invite him to dinner and kill him in his sleep, like Macbeth did,” I said. “Then we’ll salt his head.”

“And roll it down the stairs so the right eye pops out,” Ilir added. “But wait a minute. How can we invite him to dinner? Where?”

We started making very intricate plans. We were almost happy. Qani Kekezi passed alongside us. His plump and ruddy face looked smooth, but closer examination revealed some fresh scratches.

“The poor village cats are in for it now,” Ilir said.

I laughed. I was happy to have my friend back. It seemed to me that Isa’s death had made him grow up and leave me behind. But now we were together again.

While plotting our assassination we had walked to the outskirts of the village without realising it. The ground was covered with frost. All around us, trees whose names we didn’t know, birds we were seeing for the first time, irregular, scattered haystacks, the crumbling earth softened by the ploughshare, cowpats — everything was as strange to us as it was incomprehensible. Some village children with soft eyes looked at us timidly. I looked at Ilir’s thin, drawn face and his untidy bush of hair and it occurred to me that I must look more or less the same. The peasant kids started following us.

“Did you see how frightened of us they were?” asked Ilir.

“We’re frightening.”

“We’re killers!” I said.

I took out the lens and put it over my eye.

“
Thou canst not say I did it: never shake thy gory locks at me!
” I thundered, addressing a half-eaten haystack.

“What’s all that?” Ilir asked.

“That’s what we’ll say when Maksut’s ghost appears after the murder.”

“That’ll be
formidable
,” Ilir said.

The village children who followed us were shivering. Now we were walking on a ploughed field.

“Why is the earth soft? What did they do to it?” Ilir asked, trying to sound angry.

I shrugged.

“Peasant work,” I said.

“Work with no rhyme or reason.”

“None whatsoever.”

“Let’s plan the murder instead,” said Ilir.

The peaceful plateau, which lay on a gentle incline, was exposed to the winter winds. The haystacks scattered here and there added to the impression of calm. We walked among them talking about the details of our murder. Without thinking, we soon found ourselves on the main road. Peasants and mules mingled with the refugees. Other people were coming from the opposite direction. A sallow-looking woman struggled to stay astride a mule.

“Not far from here there’s a monastery where they cure the sick,” Ilir said.

We turned back towards the village. We were following a group of refugees who, according to what we heard them saying, were coming back from the monastery, which they had gone to visit just out of curiosity. Others were coming towards us, on their way there.

“Where are you going?” someone in the crowd walking along with us asked them.

“To the monastery,” they answered, “to see the hand that works miracles.”

“Some miracles! We’re just on our way back from there. You know what it is? It’s the English pilot’s arm.”

“The Englishman’s arm?”

“The very same. With that ring still on the finger. Remember? It was stolen from the museum.”

“Of course. So that’s what happened to it.”

“You may as well go back.”

They turned back. We walked along absentmindedly among the chattering crowd. Then, little by little there were fewer and fewer words until the only sound came from our own footsteps.

“That arm,” someone said in a dull voice. “It’s as if it’s following us.”

No one answered.

“Poor humans,” the same voice said again. “If they only knew where their heads and hands can end up.”

We were back in the village.

At dusk, far in the distance where the city must have been, flames shot up. The refugees all came out and silently watched the pale flickering. We thought they were burning houses belonging to partisans. Through the gathering darkness and mist, the city waved its flame handkerchiefs, sending signals whose meaning no one could guess.

We kids climbed a barren knoll and shouted at the top of our lungs.

“That one up there is my house! That’s my house burning! Hurrah!”

“It’s not true. It’s mine, it’s my house.”

“Who in your family joined the resistance?”

“My uncle.”

“My brother’s a partisan too!”

Then we started arguing about the size of the flames. Each of us boasted that the flames from his house were higher than all the others.

“Mine’s the one all that smoke is coming from. One time when the chimney caught fire . . .”

“Smoke doesn’t count.”

“If you want to see something, just wait till my house burns.”

“Yeah, wait till my Grandfather’s Turkish books go up; they’re as thick as baklava,” I said proudly.

“Wait till my grandmother catches fire! She’s got so much fat on her she’ll go up like a torch,” said Lady Majnur’s grandson.

“Shame on you! How can you talk about your own grandmother that way?”

“She’s a Ballist, my grandmother is.”

“Ilir!” his mother called, “Ilir!”

One by one we all peeled away. As I was about to go back I saw Nazo’s daughter-in-law sitting all alone on a bare hillock, wearing a lovely jacket with a fur collar. The moon had just come out, and her pretty head stood out from the white fur collar as though from mist.

“Good evening,” she said to me.

“Good evening.”

She put her hand on the nape of my neck and ran her fingers through my hair, which had not been cut for a long time.

Then suddenly she asked me:

“What have you heard about Maksut?”

I looked down and didn’t say anything. Her fingers stiffened for a moment on my neck, then relaxed their grip.

“It’s burning,” she said, looking off towards the fires. “Are you sorry?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Well,” she said, “I hope it all burns down
entirely
.” (The word “entirely” sounded strange on her lips.) “So that nothing’s left but ruins. Do you like ashes?”

I was dumbfounded.

“Yes,” I said.

At that moment, in the moonlight, her eyes looked to me like two magical ruins.

Who are you then? How come you don’t know the birds, haystacks or trees? Where do you come from?

We come from that city over there. What we know about is stone. They’re like people, stones are: they’re young or old, hard or soft, polished or rough, sharp, pink and pock-marked, pitted or veined, sly or dependable enough to hold your foot when you slip, faithless, glad at your misfortunes, faithful, remaining on duty in foundations for centuries, dull-witted, morose, proud, dreaming of bearing epitaphs, modest, devoted without hope of reward, lined up on the ground in endless cobblestone rows like nameless people, nameless to the end of time.

Are you serious or crazy, or what?

And now, just like people, they’re splattered with blood by the war.

Lord, what kind of a city is that?

A city of the ordinary kind.

Ordinary? No, that’s not a city at all. It is an abomination.

WORDS OF UNKNOWN PERSONS

Don’t give me that about yellow hair. Who knows what’s under those iron helmets? They march. They march. Fighting rages everywhere. Where are we going in the darkness like this? I can’t stand it any more. Some day it will be beautiful, the sky will be clear. Where are you going? It is snowing in the mountains.

EIGHTEEN

At break of day, in the far distance, the city awoke, all alone and moody. Though it seemed very far away, on its fate depended everything around it: the mountains, the villages and the valleys. Fire in the city was an alarm signal for the whole surrounding area. Now, half deserted, like a prehistoric city in which life had ceased long ago, the nearly empty stone shell awaited the Germans.

The road that would lead them there (as it had led so many armies) now writhed at the city’s feet, begging forgiveness. But the city, proud and haughty as always, did not so much as glance at it. Through its clouded windows it gazed out at the horizon.

At first no one knew what had happened when the German reconnaissance patrol reached the city gates. We only found out later. The patrol was met with rifle-fire and grenades. The surviving motorcyclists turned back as quick as a flash. Then the road remained deserted for a while, sunk in a deep silence. The city had observed the time-honoured custom, and now calmly awaited reprisals.

They were not long in coming. This time tanks led the way. The road was black with them. The tanks did not enter the city but stopped on the road, and only their long gun barrels turned slowly towards the city. The Germans waited for some time, expecting to see white flags go up. But all remained grey.

Then the shelling began. It made a heavy, monotonous, pounding noise. The whole valley was filled with the sound of iron smashing against stone. Broken pieces of walls and roofs, the limbs of houses and the heads of chimneys, flew in all directions. Grey-black dust settled over everything. Two men who tried to raise a white flag atop one of the houses were shot dead by others determined not to surrender. A third man, snaking his way across a roof dragging a white bed-sheet, was hit as he tried to unfurl it. He collapsed on it, and as he rolled down the gradient he wound himself in the sheet as in a shroud, then plummeted to the street below.

The shelling lasted for three hours. Finally, in the midst of the grey backdrop of death, someone managed to wave something white. No one ever found out who it was that rose up like a ghost over the city only to sink back down into the abyss after waving that white something at the Germans. Exactly what it was no one knew — a flag, a handkerchief, or maybe just a headscarf. What was certain was that this white thing would long stick in people’s minds.

The Germans, apparently observing the target through binoculars, immediately caught sight of the white patch which clashed with the chaos of dust and debris. The shelling stopped. The tanks swung their gun turrets and began climbing up towards the city. The whole earth trembled. The tank treads clanked, echoed and struck sparks as they flayed the cobblestones. The air was filled with a hellish din. The nearly abandoned city had been invaded.

It was later learned that just when the tanks were rolling up Great Bridge Street into the city, roaring like monsters, Aunt Xhemo and the crone Granny Shano were standing at their windows talking to each other.

“What’s all the noise for?” Aunt Xhemo had asked. “They could just as well have come in without all that ruckus.”

Granny Shano had replied:

“They all make a lot of noise on the way in. But when they leave, you don’t hear a thing.”

At dusk the city, which through the centuries had appeared on maps as a possession of the Romans, the Normans, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Greeks and the Italians, now watched darkness fall as a part of the German empire. Utterly exhausted, dazed by the battle, it showed no sign of life.

Night fell. After the thunder that had swept over the whole region in waves, the world seemed deaf. In the restored calm, the thousands of refugees scattered through the surrounding villages and countryside, who had watched and listened to what was happening, stood as if turned to stone.

What was the city doing now, up there in the dark, alone with the Germans? According to the prophecies, this was to be the last year of its millenary life. The men with yellow hair had finally come.

In the village where we were staying hardly anyone slept that night. We all stood outside, silent and expectant. The very few who went inside to nap soon came out again, wrapped in their blankets. No one spoke or raised his voice. All eyes were turned to where they thought the city was. It was deep in black. Iron tank claws were sunk into its chest. No light. No signal. It was being strangled in darkness.

But daybreak came and it was still there. Grey, as always, and big. Someone was crying. One word was on everyone’s lips: “tonight”. We had decided to go back.

That evening we left the village. The same people were in our group. But Xhexho had joined us too. We walked in silence, leaving behind the haystacks that cropped up here and there. They seemed to want to tell us something, but couldn’t. We were strangers.

At the same time refugees were returning to the city in small groups from every direction. In a few hours the gigantic half-deserted shell would again be filled with footsteps, murmurs, passionate speeches, gossip, hopes and suffering.

We walked without stopping. We had long since passed the last haystack.

“Let’s turn back,” Xhexho said suddenly, stopping dead. “There’s a ringing in my right ear.”

No one said anything. We walked on. Xhexho went on mumbling for a while.

“Where are you rushing, you unhappy people?” she said tearfully. “To your doom!” An old woman from among the Hankonis told her to shut up. And so she did.

We marched on. It was maybe midnight. We could see nothing. We sensed that boils and tumours had sprouted here and there in the night. Probably knolls and boulders.

It must have been after midnight when we came down to the plain. A black shape loomed near us: the wreck of the Bulldog. There was an acrid smell. Someone must have used it as a latrine.

“Do you remember where you hid the dagger?” asked Ilir.

“Yes,” I told him.

We stopped to rest. Ilir and I went to piss near the downed plane. I never would have believed we could do such a thing.

Day was dawning and little by little the contours of the city were vaguely taking shape. It loomed before us like a sphinx. We weren’t sure what to do. Should we go in or not? Chimneys, rooftops and windows were emerging one after another from the blackened chaos. The spires of minarets and bell-towers and the tin flashings of gable-ends looked like madmen wandering among the roofs in ancient helmets.

We decided to go in. We crossed the river bridge (the sentry post had been abandoned) and took the road. There were no Germans anywhere. Maybe they were holed up in the citadel.

We still had a way to go across uncultivated fields. Suddenly the city rose up right in front of us. High and steep, almost vertical. Looking disdainful. Maybe a bit offended at having been deserted. Signs of the battering it had taken were everywhere: shattered house-fronts, demolished balconies.

We noticed a white patch on the first telegraph pole. As we came closer we saw that it was an announcement. It was still dark and we could barely make out the words. “I order . . . the arrest of . . . pers . . . dead . . . three . . . shot . . . as well as . . . garrison commander: Kurt Vollersee.”

We were on our way up Varosh Street. A faint light glimmered in the window of Xivo Gavo, the chronicler. Suddenly I felt a hand pull my head and press it against someone’s bosom.

“Don’t look!”

A dark shape was visible on one side of the street. Like a contorted body. I couldn’t really tell what it was. I almost vomited.

Further on no one stopped me from looking. We walked on in a daze. Two dead Italians on the street. Then another.

The hanged man could be seen from far off. At the junction. After a telegraph pole. As we came closer, we saw that it was a hanged woman. An old woman. Xhexho broke into a dull keening.

“Kako Pino,” Ilir whispered.

It was indeed her. Her skinny body swung gently in the wind. On her chest was a white rectangle with one Germanised Albanian word written on it: “saboteur”.

We walked faster. Here was our alleyway. Our house. Mamma has already taken the big key from her pocket. A few more steps. But a body lies on the cobblestones with its head in a pool of blood. On the chest a piece of paper with a few words. Nazo gave a strangled cry. “Maksut!” Her daughter-in-law gazed with indifference at her husband’s corpse, then stepped carefully around it as if afraid of soiling herself with the blood. I couldn’t take my eyes off the piece of paper. It read: “This is how spies will die.” In that handwriting I knew so well, the letters tilted forward as if leaning into wind and rain. It was Javer’s hand.

“Terrible things are going to happen. I told you so,” said Xhexho, before she disappeared down the alleyway.

We all went our separate ways. Nazo and her daughter-in-law started dragging the body towards the door.

My mother had barely put the key in the lock when the door swung open by itself. Grandmother came out like a ghost.

“Come in, come in,” she said in a low voice.

We went in.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” said Grandmother.

“Maksut, out there . . . in front.”

“I know. They killed him last night.”

“Kako Pino . . .”

“I know,” Grandmother said again. “They hanged her yesterday.”

We went upstairs together.

“She was on her way to make up a bride. A patrol stopped her in the street.”

“Are people still getting married in times like these?” my mother asked in surprise.

“People get married in all times,” Grandmother said.

“What madness!”

“It seems it was her instruments that aroused their suspicion,” Grandmother said. “They thought the metal things and the tweezers had something to do with bombs. That’s what they say, at least.”

I went to the window and looked out. It was cold. A searchlight threw up a frightening shaft of light, then went out.

German occupation. Greyness. Teutons. Their flag flew from the prison tower. Two
s
’s or
z
’s, distorted by the breeze.

Outside we could hear Nazo and her daughter-in-law, still dragging Maksut’s body.

“It’s going to be a merciless war,” said Grandmother, putting her hand on my head.

The sound of muffled footsteps came from the street.

“People are coming back,” she said. “They’ve been coming back in groups all night.”

Again the tender flesh of life was filling the carapace of stone.