Chronicle in Stone (7 page)

Grandfather said those ritual Turkish words that always seemed magical to me and we all started eating. I noticed that Grandma seemed angry because the pans and spoons in her hands were more than usually noisy. Whenever she was angry her gestures were rougher. Finally she couldn’t contain herself any more and burst out, “The hussy!”

The word made no impression on the others, who calmly went on chewing. They all seemed to know who she was talking about.

“Who’s a hussy, Grandma?” I asked.

Grandfather shot her a disapproving look and she nodded her head, still looking furious, as if to say, “Yes, all right, all right.”

“None of your business,” she said to me, suddenly taking the pot from the table.

“If it had been me,” said the older of my aunts, “I would’ve grabbed it right out of her hands.”

“What next! I wouldn’t stoop to fight with such trash.”

I could never imagine Grandma fighting with anyone; all my life I had never seen her doing anything but cooking and kneading dough for her bread.

“Drop the subject,” Grandfather said, tilting his head in my direction. Everyone obeyed, but Grandma still seemed angry, for the pans were being banged around even louder. Grandfather, who couldn’t stand noise, was the first to leave the table.

“Dirty hussy,” Grandma started up again.

“You should’ve grabbed it right off the clothesline yourself,” my elder aunt said again.

My younger aunt opened the newspaper and started reading.

“Put the paper down,” said Grandma. “Papers are for men.”

My aunt burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny? You see everyone’s upset and all you can do is sit there reading the paper and laugh.”

My aunt got up and walked out, taking the newspaper with her.

“Today the table linen, tomorrow the spoons, and next the carpets,” Grandma went on.

Now they were talking about it openly and I realised what was happening. Margarita was stealing.

“Why have you left your food on your plate?” my other aunt asked.

“I’m full,” I said, getting up from the table.

“You hardly ate a thing. You’re not sick, are you?”

“No.”

“Of course you are,” said Grandma. “You’ve caught your death. Sitting on the roof all day as if you had no home.”

I got up without a word and went into the living room. My younger aunt was sitting in the corner reading the newspaper.

I didn’t speak to her. The room was completely quiet. From the top of Citadel Street came the song of the stranger as he made his way down:

The clock struck seven as I came by;

I stood by your window and sighed a sigh

I listened, in a dream . . . So, towards seven in the evening, someone else was now going past the windows of a house where a girl called Miriam still lived, and who still had headaches.

The voice faded into the distance but before it disappeared altogether the wind brought me an extra part of the story:

Gladly would I fetch the doctor for you

But neighbours would likely take a dim view

But why would the neighbours object? What harm would it do to them? I couldn’t imagine. I wracked my brains to no end, but then I took comfort in recalling that one day, in the great living room, I’d heard it said that what happens in songs isn’t at all like what happens in life.

You could feel autumn coming on. Down below, among the branches losing their leaves, slid a shadow. Suzana. She must have known that I had come.

The tick-tock of the big clock was making a strange sound. Sadness was all around, spreading in great concentric circles through endless space. Soon it would spread out over the whole world.

It was a gloomy lunch. We ate in silence. Everyone seemed to be waiting impatiently for Grandmother to look at the cock’s bones.

In these past days, whenever a rooster was killed in the neighbourhood, everyone was informed right away, because the future could be read in the bones and everyone was expecting something serious to happen.

A week before, Ilir’s mother had sent us all over to Kako Pino’s. “She slaughtered a cock today,” Ilir’s mother had said. “Go on over there, children, and find out how the bones came out.”

We too had slaughtered a cock today. By afternoon people would be knocking at the door to ask about the bones. Grandmother would be asked about them if she went anywhere; my mother would be questioned the moment she stepped out through the gate, and Papa probably at the coffee house. It should be obvious from all this that in our city people did not get to eat chicken very often.

Lunch came to an end. Grandmother picked up the carcass, squinted, and stared hard at it, turning it this way and that, holding one side and then the other up to the light. We all waited in silence.

“War,” Grandmother said suddenly in a muffled voice. “The edges of the carina are red. War and blood.” She pointed to the places on the breastbone that foretold war.

No one spoke.

Grandmother kept looking at the bone.

“War,” she repeated, putting her left hand on my head as if to protect me from some scourge.

After lunch I went back to the pile of dirty dishes to look for the bone. I took it up the two flights to the main room, where I sat alone at the high windows and began a careful examination of that tragic bone. It was an October afternoon. A dry wind was blowing. I stared at the cold bone I held in my hand. It was reddish, shading into violet. Sometimes it seemed splattered with little drops of blood, sometimes it blazed with the reflections of a great fire.

Gradually it turned completely red, its back now covered no longer with little drops of blood but with whole streams rushing down the slopes, turning everything in their path red.

As I fell asleep with the bone in my hand, I saw the flames blazing on its side once more. Then, as if through a wall of smoke, I heard the first drums of war.

I could feel it the moment I entered the courtyard: Margarita was gone. I didn’t ask what had happened. The street was deserted and the courtyard trees were losing their leaves, which fluttered lazily onto the roof of the shack where the gypsies lived. I felt sad.

The autumn rains would start soon. The trees would be completely bare, and the wind would howl through the eaves. The roof would leak in the places I had sat in the summer, and in the old attic, the box of tobacco, the matches and the Turkish book would rot away.

Suzana would flutter about in the air somewhere and never find out what had happened to a man called Macbeth in distant Scotland. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the next time I came they had told me that she’d flown off with the storks.

On winter nights the hordes of mice would rage up and down in the attic. Fight on, Genghis Khan. Crush everything in your path. No one sleeps below Asia any more. It’s just a desert.

FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE

his declaration. During the Polish campaign I never ordered a night-time air raid, Adolf Hitler claims. I bombed the country by day. I did the same in Norway, Belgium and France. Then suddenly Mr Churchill bombed Germany at night. You know how patient I am, Comrades. I waited a week. He bombed again. This man is mad, I said to myself. I waited two weeks. Many people came to me and said, “Führer, how much longer do we have to stand for this?” Then I gave the order to bomb England by night. Trial. Executive measures. Property. One hundred and twenty-seventh session. Angoni vs Karllashi. The chronicler Xivo Gavo refused to assist in clarifying the matter of the old land titles. Our fellow citizen the inventor Dino Çiço is preparing to leave on a trip to Hamburg. We take the opportunity to protest indignantly at an article in a Tirana newspaper headlined “World War Imminent. Mad Inventor Claims Creation of Device to Protect Town”. Yesterday our fellow citizen T.V. drank thirty cups of coffee in a row. I order a blackout in the city. Garrison Commander Bruno Arcivocale. Na-

SIX

I was coming home from Grandfather’s. I had stayed longer than usual because this was to be my last visit of the year. In the winter hardly anyone went to see him because the weather was too bad and the place was battered by the wind from all directions. Only my father would sometimes venture out into that wasteland to borrow a little money.

As soon as I came into the house, I could tell that something had changed. Mamma and Grandmother were darning an old blanket. Nazo’s daughter-in-law was helping.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We have to cover the windows at night,” Grandmother said. “Government orders.”

“What for?”

“In case of bombing. Didn’t they tell you about it over there?”

I shrugged.

“No, I don’t know anything about it.”

“They went from house to house announcing it,” Grandmother said.

Someone knocked furiously at the door.

“Xhexho,” Mamma said.

It was indeed Aunt Xhexho, and she was already halfway up the stairs.

“How are you, ladies?” she said, out of breath from her climb. “Sewing curtains? God, what a disaster. What next? To have to cover the house like a tomb. Harilla Lluka has been going from door to door since this morning. ‘Darkness’, he says, ‘Let there be darkness.’”

“Compulsory blackout,” said Nazo’s daughter-in-law without raising her eyes from the blanket. “That’s what it’s called.”

“May they be struck blind!” Xhexho exclaimed. “May their eyes go as dim as Vehip Qorri’s!”

I didn’t understand who Xhexho was cursing or why.

There was another knock at the door. It was Kako Pino and Nazo.

“Have you heard?” asked Kako Pino. “They say we have to block up the chimneys too. The end of the world!”

“Let them close up everything!” shouted Xhexho. “The chimneys and doors, and even the toilets if they want. The world’s gone mad, my good Pino, mad. Everything’s going to the dogs.”

“It’s crazy, all right,” Kako Pino agreed. “Barely one wedding a week. The end of the world!”

“They chase the cows out of the field and cover it with cement. Have you ever seen anything like it, Selfixhe? They say there’s a man called Yusuf, a man with a red beard, Yusuf Stalin his name is, who’s going to smash them all to pieces.”

“Is he a Muslim?” Nazo asked.

Xhexho hesitated a moment, then said confidently, “Yes. A Muslim.”

“That’s a good start,” said Nazo.

They all started talking, Nazo speaking to Grandmother while Xhexho whispered in Maksut’s wife’s ear, as if to ask her something. She shook her head without looking up from the blanket. Xhexho put her hands to her cheeks in despair.

The conversation got more intense. Now they were speaking in pairs, in low and level tones, except for Kako Pino and Nazo’s daughter-in-law.

“Well, that really is the end of the world,” Kako Pino suddenly said, not to anyone in particular. Then she got up and left. Nazo and her daughter-in-law followed.

The whole neighbourhood was worried, that was clear. The way shutters opened and closed, the knocks at doors here and there, the constant howl of the dry wind, and even the way the women hung out the sheets all seemed to pass on the general anxiety.

People couldn’t get used to the draped windows. Some found it ridiculous, most said it was absurd, and still others considered it an ill omen. On the third night Bido Sherifi took down a curtain, but just a few minutes later a harsh, angry voice came up from the street:

“Spegni la luce!”

Two nights later, when the machine-gun at the lookout post fired on the house of the chronicler Xivo Gavo, whose lamp was the last in the city to be extinguished, everyone realised that the
oscuramento
was no joke. Night after night, an angry eye kept watch, checking every point and all directions. No light ever escaped his attention.

So the city submitted tamely to the blackout. As night fell, the town gradually blurred; streets and roofs wobbled as if suffering vertigo, minarets and chimneys tottered as if suspended in mid-air, then disappeared with everything else.
Oscuramento
.

The construction project was another topic of daily conversation. The word “aerodrome” was mangled without mercy by the gums and stumps of all the city’s old women and came out so distorted as to be virtually unrecognisable. Yet these
r
’s,
d
’s and
m
’s (grains of sand watered with saliva), even when kneaded together in such comical ways, retained an extraordinary capacity to spread fear.

They were working day and night in the plain, which everyone now called “aerodrome plain”. Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of trucks rolled back and forth all day, doing something that from afar looked like nothing at all. From time to time the noise of the stone-crushers, cement mixers and polishing machines drifted up into the city.

About that time there were a number of robberies in the city. Taking advantage of the blackout, thieves were lifting off slates and getting into houses from the roofs. (Most burglaries in the city had always been done from the roofs.)

Not long after the first break-ins, an unknown aircraft flew over the city. It was so high up that no one would have noticed it had it not been for the unfamiliar, low throbbing noise it made, which came in waves, like an unending roll of thunder. It left a kind of stupefaction in its wake, drifting above us, hanging in the white clouds.

In the days that followed other planes passed overhead too, almost always alone and so high that they seemed intent on showing that they had nothing to do with our city. Whose were they? Where did they come from? Where were they going? What for? The sky was as impenetrable as it was indifferent.

The rooftop break-ins might well have got worse except for the appearance of a new monster: the searchlight. It had crept into the city in complete silence without anyone even suspecting its existence until suddenly, one October night, its one eye, like the eye of a Cyclops, lit up the stony river bed. A long arm of light stretched out like a transparent reptile seeking the city. It seemed pallid in the pit of darkness, but when it hit the first roofs the cone of light brightened and, with cruel clarity, began gliding over the fronts of the houses, which turned white with terror.

The same thing happened on subsequent nights. Every night the searchlight sought out the city in the dark and once it had found it, clutched on to it. Its beam was a jelly-like sea-creature that slithered over neighbourhoods, constantly changing its shape to fit the contours of the streets and houses on which it fell.

Around that time the visits of the aged
katenxhikas
became predictably more frequent. Unlike the old crones, the
katenxhikas
were old ladies who often left their houses, especially in times of trouble. They were different in other ways as well. They still complained about their daughters-in-law, for example, whereas the daughters-in-law of the old crones had long since left this world. The
katenxhikas
also complained of rheumatism, gout and various other illnesses, whereas the old crones suffered only the noble disability of blindness, about which they never complained. In short, the
katenxhikas
were nothing like the crones.

As usually happened after strange events, the
katenxhikas
poured through the streets and alleyways. In Citadel Street and Old Market Street, Upper and Lower Palorto, in the town square and on the Bridge of Brawls, in Dashu Square, in the gallery of the Christian Pasha, below the Citadel, over the Owls’ Valley, on Chain Square, in alleys with no name, they walked and walked in the sparse rain, wrapped in their black shawls, going down Varosh Street and back up Dunavat, hunched up, out of breath, and full of gossip.

A cold, dry wind blew steadily down from the mountain passes to the north. I listened to its uniform howl, and for some reason the expression “words are gone with the wind” went round and round in my head. Something strange was happening to me lately. Everyday words or expressions, things I had heard dozens of times, were suddenly taking on new meanings in my mind. The words were casting off their usual idiomatic sense. Expressions made up of two or three words would painfully fall apart. If I heard someone say, “My head is boiling,” despite myself I couldn’t help imagining a head boiling like a pot of beans. Words had a certain force in their normal state. But now, as they began to shear and crack up, they acquired amazing energy. I was afraid they would explode. I did all I could to stop it, but in vain. Chaos reigned in my head as words, devoid of logic and reality, abandoned themselves to their
danse macabre
. Common oaths like “You can eat your own head!” tormented me most of all. The horrific vision of someone holding his head in his hands and devouring it was compounded by the trouble I had understanding how anyone could eat his own head when everyone knows that you eat with your teeth and teeth are in the head, whether it be cursed or not.

Ordinary speech, once serene and reassuring, had been shaken as by an earthquake. Everything was upside down, falling apart, breaking up.

I had entered the kingdom of words, where a merciless tyranny reigned. The world was suddenly filled with people who had pumpkins for heads. Others had heads that spun and eyes that threw knives. Some had blood that froze like ice, others wandered about with forked tongues, gold fingers or iron fists. A slab of flesh pierced by two eyes would pop up here or there. The city itself was feverish (I had seen the window panes shiver, and had even seen their greyish sweat). Someone was walking around on his unearthed roots. Others, like madmen, asked idiotic questions: “Where are your ears? Where are your eyes?” Someone was trying to devour someone else not with his teeth but with his eyes. Unknown painters were blackening the door of a house or the fate of some young girl (where did these painters come from, I wondered, and why were they doing this, and anyway why did people care so much whether their destiny was painted black or white?). And, one fine day, a young man was smitten by love’s arrow. The world was falling apart before my very eyes. Surely that was what Kako Pino meant when she said, as she never stopped saying, “It’s the end of the world.”

It was one of those days when the power of words was at its peak. I was scouring the sloped roofs to see if I could find out where love had hidden before smiting a young man with its arrow. But unlike even small stones thrown down from that height, love didn’t make you bleed or leave a bump on your head. Why, then, in spite of that, did people complain about it so much, especially when it landed on a girl?

I was rescued from these thoughts by a knocking at the door that echoed through the whole house. We all recognised Xhexho’s knock. But the way she knocked this time, and the short spaces between blows, told us that something unusual had happened. With a worried look on her face, Mamma went down to open the door, while Grandmother stood waiting at the top of the stairs.

Then she too went down. The upper floors fell silent. The door opened. Someone came in. Someone else went out. Then someone came in again. The muffled sounds of women’s voices reached my ears. I tiptoed down the steps, trying not to attract attention. There was definitely something serious going on downstairs. The door creaked again. A hum of words I could not clearly distinguish filled the air like a haze. No one noticed me. They were standing by the railing next to the cistern, at the foot of the stairs. Besides Xhexho there was Nazo and her daughter-in-law, as well as Kako Pino, Bido Sherifi’s wife, and another neighbour. The frantic look in their eyes, the way Xhexho’s scarf had slid back to reveal a tuft of greyish hair, and the marks on their cheeks from recent gestures of indignation all told me that something irreparable had occurred. They were all talking at once. Something monstrous had indeed happened, but I couldn’t figure out what was. It wasn’t death or madness. Something worse. Xhexho stood in the centre of them all, and her grating wheeze, like a black-smith’s bellows, fanned their fear.

I listened for a long time, but I still couldn’t understand what it was all about. They were talking about some kind of house. The Italians had opened a business of some kind. It was called something that sounded quite easy. It was a word that had the sound “board” in it, like “boarding house”. Yet they were terrified. They cursed it. I had heard about a sugar house where beautiful young girls lived. This one must have been made of poison to throw the whole city into such turmoil.

“One man from every house,” Xhexho said, her voice low and strange. “That’s what they said. And if they don’t go of their own accord, they’ll be dragged there by brute force. One male from every family.”

The women pinched their cheeks again. Only Nazo’s daughter-in-law seemed unmoved. Xhexho cast her eyes about. They fell on me.

“Don’t you get any ideas about going there!” she exclaimed.

“Idiot,” said Grandmother. “Leave the boy alone.”

“The end of the world,” said Kako Pino, for at least the hundredth time

“Will our folk ever come to their senses?” Xhexho cried, addressing Grandmother as if she were the representative of the city.

Just then there was another knock at the door. It was Aunt Xhemo.

“What’s the matter, poor things? Why are you so upset?” she asked, the moment she set foot in the hallway.

Aunt Xhemo didn’t come to visit us very often, maybe two or three times a year. She was tall and straight and seemed to be all skin and bone. In the family she was known for her mania for cleanliness. She would never eat anything that had been touched by someone else. Bread, all her meals, coffee, tea — she prepared everything with her own hands. At home, she kept her own spoon, plate, cup and coffee pot separate. If she went visiting, she would bring along her own bread wrapped in a clean cloth, and her coffee pot, cup, spoon and glass wrapped in another. Everyone understood her mania, and no one was offended when she sat down at the table and unwrapped her simple fare.