Chronicle in Stone (3 page)

“OK, you can have France and Canada, but give me Luxembourg.”

“You’re kidding! You really want Luxembourg?”

“If it’s all right with you.”

“Well, give me Abyssinia for two Polands, and we could do a deal.”

“No, not Abyssinia. Take France and Canada for two Polands.”

“No way!”

“All right, then, give me back the India I gave you yesterday for Venezuela.”

“India? Here, it’s yours. What do I want with India anyway? To tell you the truth, I changed my mind about it last night.”

“Did you change your mind about Turkey, too, by any chance?”

“I sold Turkey already. Otherwise, I’d give it back to you.”

“In that case you don’t get the Germany I promised you yesterday. I’d rather tear it up.”

“Big deal. You think I care?”

We had been haggling for an hour, sitting in the middle of the street trading stamps. We were still arguing when Javer came by. He said, “Still carving up the world, I see.”

TWO

Xhexho and Kako Pino had come to visit. They sat on a sofa in the living room, sipped coffee and chatted with Grandmother. Xhexho was worried. Grandmother seemed calmer, but she too looked uneasy. Kako Pino, frail and dressed all in black, kept shaking her small head with its thin, drawn face, repeating hypnotically after Xhexho’s every word, “It’s the end of the world.” I was captivated by what they were saying. They were talking about Isa, Mane Voco’s older son, who had done something unheard of last week: he had started wearing glasses.

“When they first told me,” Xhexho said, “I couldn’t believe my ears. I got up, threw a scarf on my head, and went to see Mane Voco. The poor man was taking it bravely, but the women of the house looked stunned, as if they’d been turned to stone. I wanted to ask them what was going on but I just couldn’t. How can you speak of something like that? Well, who should walk in at that very moment? Isa, his glasses flashing! ‘How are you? How’s everything?’ he says to me, just like that. Well, I wanted the ground to swallow me up. There was a lump in my throat. How I kept from bursting into tears, I’m sure I don’t know. He walked over to the cabinet, flipped through a few books, then went over to the window, stopped, and took off his glasses. Then he started rubbing his eyes. His mother and sisters stared at him, their lips trembling. I reached out, picked up the glasses, and put them on. What can I tell you, my friends? My head was spinning. These glasses must be cursed. The world whirled like the circles of hell. Everything shook, rolled and swayed as if possessed by the devil. I took them off in a hurry, and got up and ran out like a madwoman.”

Xhexho took a deep breath. Grandmother turned her coffee cup upside down to read the grains.

“Why did Isa do it?” she said sadly. “Such a quiet, intelligent boy. With a lout like Lame Kareco Spiri, I could understand it, but Isa . . .”

“The end of the world,” said Kako Pino.

“That’s the way it is, Selfixhe,” Xhexho went on. “We complain about all the evils that befall us, but we have only ourselves to blame. Yesterday they built a house of cardboard, today the boys wear glasses, and tomorrow, who can say? But the Almighty above,” and here Xhexho pointed a finger at the ceiling and her tone became menacing, “sees all and records all. He’ll make us pay.”

“The end of the world,” said Kako Pino again.

When Xhexho mentioned the cardboard house, I instinctively turned towards the Gjobek district, where the strange breeze-block construction, put up a few weeks ago by the Italians for their nuns, now stood — an alien structure quite incompatible with the sober stone houses all around it. This unusual building bothered people for a long time. We’ve never seen anything like this, said old women who knew the ways of the world and had even been to Turkey. Old as we are, we have never heard of a cardboard house before. It’s the devil’s work, for sure.

They now judged Mane Voco’s son in more or less the same terms as they had applied to the breeze-block house. “Why, dreadful boy, do you want to see the world except as it is? Why do you rebel?”

They discussed the matter endlessly, and I listened carefully, because what Mane Voco’s son had done had something to do with a secret of mine. I too had put one of those accursed lenses to my eye more than once. I had found it in Grandmother’s old chest, and playing with it one day I happened to raise it to one eye. I was astonished. Suddenly the world around me fell into place. The edges of things suddenly got sharper and brighter. I sat for a long time holding the lens over one eye and closing the other, looking out at the wide view from our house. It was amazing, as if an invisible hand had wiped clean a misted window that had covered the world, revealing it as something new and bright. Despite that, I didn’t like it. I was used to looking at the world through a cloud of haze, so that the edges of things ran together and separated freely, not according to any fixed rules. No one, I reckoned, asked the roofs, streets or telegraph poles to account for slight shifts from their starting positions. But through that round glass the world looked stiff, measured and mean, granting objects no more qualities than those they already had. It was like a house where everything — oil, flour, even water — was measured to the last drop and nothing was ever left over or accidentally spilled.

All the same, the lens came in very handy at the movies. Before I went I would wash it and put it in my pocket. When the lights went out I would take it out, close my left eye, and put it over my right. When I got home no one could understand why one of my eyes was a little red. One night, two gypsy kids I’d taken with me to see the film got very curious when I took out the lens. During the film I heard them whispering to each other “D’you reckon he be a spy?”

“The end of the world,” Kako Pino said again.

But they soon went back to their usual boring conversation about the cost of living. I wasn’t interested, so I started wondering again why people see with their eyes and not with their fingers, cheeks or some other part of the body. Eyes, after all, were only pieces of flesh from our bodies. How does the world manage to get in through an eye? Why don’t people blow up from the great mass of light, space and colour that constantly pours into them through their eyes? I had racked my brains for a long time over the enigma of sight. I was obsessed by the mystery of blindness, which I feared more than anything else. This fear may have come from the fact that most of the curses I used to hear had to do with eyes. Once our toilet was blocked, and the dark hole of the drain looked to me like a blind eye. That must be how eyes get stopped up, I said to myself. The flow of light, with all those sights dissolved in it, can’t get through the eye sockets, and that must be what blindness is. Vehip Qorri, the town poet, must have just that kind of liquid blackness in his eye sockets.

Sight. What an inexplicable thing! I turn my head towards the lower sections of the city and my eyes, like two great pumps, start sucking in the light with all those images of roofs, chimneys, a few lone fig trees, streets, passers-by. Can they feel me sucking them in? I close my eyes. The flow stops. I open them. It starts again.

After the stormy night, the roofs seemed to have come unusually close to one another. They were soaking wet. The stone slates formed an infuriatingly monotonous expanse as far as I could see. The light glanced off them, casually. Down below, streets and alleys twisted and turned, with only a handful of people to be seen on them: a few peasants on horseback, a priest, old women dressed in black, out visiting.

Varosh Street crept painfully uphill alongside the gullies, while on its right Gjobek Street plunged down steeply, skirting the Italian nuns’ cardboard house as if it were plague-stricken, and then crashed into Varosh Street, a collision from which both streets emerged crooked. Further on, Fools’ Alley, blind and obstinate, lurched towards genteel Gymnasium Street, which dodged it at the last minute with a clever twist. Then Fools’ Alley, as if looking for trouble with other streets, tumbled around the district with sudden, sharp turns.

I was watching out for Ilir, my best friend, Mane Voco’s younger son, to come round the corner. When I saw him I ran downstairs and into the street.

“Let’s go over to the slaughterhouse,” he said. “We’ve never done that before.”

“The slaughterhouse? What for?”

“What do you mean, what for? To watch. To see how they kill the cows and sheep.”

“What’s to see at the slaughterhouse? We’ve seen the butcher shops. Carcasses hanging on hooks, some with their legs up, some with them down.”

“Butchers’ shops are one thing,” Ilir said, “but slaughtering is another. There are no tiresome customers haggling over the price of meat. You can even see them kill bulls. All they do there is kill animals.”

“Slaughter” was one of the words being bandied about more and more often, but its meaning still seemed rather vague.

“Last week,” Ilir went on, “a bull escaped from the meat-packers and ran wild. They all chased after him and hit him with anything they could get their hands on until finally he fell off the steps and broke his back. A lot of grown-ups go just to watch.”

To be honest, the places in the city where you could see anything of interest could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Apart from the movies, which were for children and the frivolous, there were only two places you might get to see a fight, usually on Sundays: the gypsy district and the square behind the mosque, where the porters divided up their earnings. Other fights were accidental and usually broke out in unpredictable places. And recently a lot of fights had not lived up to the pre-match invective. More than once I had heard onlookers complain, “Bah, in our day they knew how to break bones,” and then walk off disappointed. Only the Gypsies and the porters really fought hard and kept almost all the promises they’d made in the run-up to the fight.

The slaughterhouse seemed to be a new amusement, so I didn’t argue.

As we trudged up the cobblestone street, we saw Javer and Maksut, Nazo’s boy, coming down. They weren’t talking to each other and looked cross. We didn’t say anything either. Maksut had always had eyes that bulged out of their sockets, and I didn’t like looking at him. One day I heard a woman arguing with a neighbour, and when she screamed “May your eyes burst from their sockets” I thought of Nazo’s boy right away, and now, every time I saw him I felt that his eyes might pop out and roll along the cobblestones and I might accidentally step on them and burst them open.

“What’s the matter?” asked Ilir. “What’s the frown for?”

“It’s Nazo’s boy. When I see him it turns my stomach.”

“Isa doesn’t like him either,” Ilir said. “Whenever his name is mentioned, Isa frowns just the way you did.”

“Really? So Isa thinks his eyes are going to pop out too?”

“Are you crazy?”

I let it drop.

There was a man coming towards us down the street, draped in a blanket, carrying a lump of bread wrapped in a piece of cloth. It was Llukan, whom people called The Shadow.

“So, you’re out of jail!” a passer-by said to him.

“Yes, I’m out.”

“When are you going back?”

“And why shouldn’t I go back? Prisons are made for men.”

Since the days of the Turks, Llukan had been in prison dozens of times for petty crimes. Everyone always remembered him trudging down the street from the citadel in just that way, with a brown blanket over his shoulders and in his hand some meagre victuals wrapped in a handkerchief.

“So, Llukan, you’re out again!” someone else said.

“Sure am, friend.”

“You could have left the blanket up there. You’ll be back soon enough.”

Llukan responded with a flood of insults. The further away he went, the louder he shouted.

We walked towards the centre of town. The streets were full of alien sounds. It was market day. Peasants were converging on the square from all over. Horseshoes clacked, slid and sparked on the cobblestones. On the hills villagers drew their horses by the bridles, their sweating, panting bodies merging with those of their animals as they dragged them upwards.

The windows of the great houses were shut tight on both sides of the street. Behind them the wives of the agas sat on soft cushions and held their noses, felt faint, and nearly vomited, complaining about the stench of the peasants wafting in from the street. Plump, with white round faces, they rarely ventured out into the city. They protested that the closing of the border with Greece had kept them from getting the eels from Lake Ioannina that were so good for their rheumatism. They found the peasants repugnant and never mentioned them without first muttering “excuse the expression,” as they did when saying the word “lavatory”. In fact, they were quite dismayed by the times they lived in, and sat in rows on their cushions sipping coffee endlessly and yearning for the return of the monarchy.

Some Italian soldiers stood guard at the cinema, watching people go by. We carried on up the street. The shop signs stretched out one after another. Tinsmith. Barber. Addis Ababa Café. Saddles. Vinegar. And a poster that began with the words “I order” in big letters.

We walked on. Now the slaughterhouse was near. You still couldn’t hear the bleating of the sheep or smell the blood, and there was no sign, but somehow it was clear that the slaughterhouse was nearby. The silent cobblestones and deserted street corner told us that we were close to it. We started up a slippery wet stairway, not at all like a set of ordinary stone steps. It was very high and its risers bore none of the carvings or decorations we were used to, not even simple ones. It was a hard climb. There was a tomb-like silence at the top. Not a sound made by man or beast. What were they doing up there? Finally we arrived. Everything was ready. The men standing around waiting nonchalantly were well dressed, with white shirts, stiff collars and neckties. Some of them wore soft felt Borsalino hats. One had an old-fashioned top hat. He looked at his watch.

We heard a splash of water. A man was watering the ground with a black rubber hose. Another man with a broom swept the water into the gutters at the side. Water splattered near our feet. We looked down and stepped back, but it was too late. The ground was full of blood. Everything must have been done before we got there. But no one made a move to leave, so they must have been getting ready for another killing. The water foamed over the broad puddles of blood, washing them from the cement pavement, and carrying them away before they could harden.

Then we saw everything. The rectangular yard was ringed on all sides by a one-storey building, also in cement. A hundred iron hooks hung from the ceiling. Below there were sheep, and among them peasants in thick black wool cloaks bending over the backs of the animals, clutching them by their wool. They too were waiting.

The group of spectators seemed in no hurry. Two of them had taken out their strings of beads and were slowly ticking them off. I had never seen them before. The one with the top hat looked at his watch. Apparently it was time.