Chronicle in Stone (14 page)

“Peanuts! Peanuts!”

A youngster was actually selling peanuts. Then we saw other street peddlers snaking through the crowd, crying “Hashure! Hot saleep!” or “Cigarettes!” News vendors were there too.

The first night in the citadel was cold and restless. The sound of thousands of coughs echoed off the great stone arches. Blankets rustled, cradles creaked, everything groaned, scratched or bumped around. All night you could hear footsteps nearby. We were huddled together. Water trickled down on us.

Around midnight I woke up. A hoarse voice droned: “Got to get out. We’re in a trap here . . . One of these nights they’ll lock the doors and slaughter us all like sheep. Got to get out. No matter what, before it’s too late . . . Anyway, it’s a citadel . . . Medieval . . . You understand? . . . Darkness, like in the year 1,000. Nothing has changed. It just seems that way, sure . . . but in fact it’s not any easier.”

“Who’s talking such drivel?” Bido Sherifi’s sleepy wife asked.

“Begone, Satan,” murmured Kako Pino.

The voice fell silent.

Towards dawn there was heavy bombing.

It was a gloomy morning, the light barely squeezing in through the narrow loopholes and chinks in the wall. The citadel began to come to life around seven o’clock. People were wandering through the tunnels and passageways once again, running into more and more acquaintances. Everyone was upset about the whole city’s waking up under one roof. Families were encamped alongside one another with no respect for rank or order. Boundaries and distances between neighbourhoods and houses had been rudely overturned; spatial orientation was confused. This common roof housed people who had seemed irreconcilable: Karllashis and Angonis, Muslims and Christians, nuns and prostitutes, the scions of great families, street cleaners and gypsies.

Some families, however, had not taken refuge in the citadel. For the most part, they were families in some kind of disgrace or which had something to hide. None of the old crones had come either.

On the second day in the citadel, back in the first gallery, we ran into Grandfather and some of our cousins among their retinue of gypsies. Babazoti was lying on his chaise longue, which he had brought along with him. He was reading a Turkish book, ignoring the crowds milling around him. Suzana was nowhere in sight.

“What does this ‘medieval’ mean?” Ilir asked me.

“I don’t know. Did you hear that madman in the middle of the night too?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s ask Javer.”

Isa and Javer disappeared from time to time. We went and found them.

“‘Medieval’,” Javer said, “refers to the Middle Ages, the bleakest period in history. The story of that Macbeth you read is set in that age.”

Certain people were associating the citadel with the Middle Ages more and more. The fortress was indeed very old. It had given birth to the city, and our houses resembled the citadel the way children look like their mothers. Over the centuries, the city had grown up a lot. Although the fortress was in good condition, no one ever thought that one day it would have the strength to take its offspring, the city, under its protection. That was a terrifying return to the past. It was like someone going back into the womb. Now that it had happened, we all wondered what would be next. Having accepted the citadel’s services, we now had to suffer the consequences. There might be epidemics as there were in the Middle Ages. Age-old crimes might come back. Xivo Gavo’s chronicle was full of murders and epidemics.

One morning — it was our fifth day in the citadel — Ilir and I were wandering aimlessly through the human jumble. We had already been tempted more than once to leave the tunnels and explore other parts of the fortress, but fear had stopped us. The place was said to be full of mysterious crannies, catacombs and labyrinths you could never find your way out of. Near certain dark passageways we had noticed people, from a distance, who seemed to be paying no attention to us but who, on closer inspection, turned out to be guards.

Roaming through the first gallery, we suddenly caught a few sentence fragments in the midst of the general commotion. Two tall, pale, middle-aged men wearing scarves around their necks were talking. Their voices were strangely monotonous. We forgot everything and fell in quietly behind them. We were captivated. The chains of their words shackled our arms and legs.

“Did the edict with the death sentence come on Monday?”

“No, it was already here on Saturday. Monday was the execution. The palace guard took the head away in a sack. They threw the rest of the body into the chasm from the eastern tower. The officer left for the capital that night.”

“Had he been poisoned when they cut off his head?”

“No, he was just drunk. They put the head in the Nook of Shame in Istanbul, according to custom.”

“I’ve seen that nook.”

“They kept the head there for eleven days, and took it out only to replace it with the head of Kara Razi. You know the rules say that there must be only one head in the nook at a time.”

They kept talking. We were following behind. We had left the tunnel and started across the esplanade. It was raining. Everything was wet and deserted. They walked into a narrow passage, went down some stone steps, up some other steps and into an abandoned gallery. We shivered like freezing puppies.

The gallery had a low ceiling and the echo of our steps came from overhead instead of underfoot. Their words began to twist; they swelled and stretched, endlessly elongated. We couldn’t understand a thing. That lasted until we reached the end of the gallery. We finally came to a large pit with a domed ceiling. There they turned and noticed us. They stared at us for a long time with their grey eyes. We couldn’t stop shivering. Then they looked away, and one of them pointed to some rusty irons hanging from the wall.

“This is where they kept Gur Çerçizi. Chained to those shackles right there. Third from the right. They kept him chained up long after he was dead. When they took the body away, it was half-eaten by rats.”

“What about Karafili? They were imprisoned together, weren’t they?”

“Yes, Karafili was chained up over there, the fifth set. He lived until the sultan’s edict came pardoning him. They took him up to a platform with no parapet at the top of the citadel and everyone thought he would be delirious with joy. When he began walking towards the edge of the wall, someone said he seemed blind, but no one paid attention. He walked to the rampart and when he got to the edge everyone expected him to stop and look down at the beautiful view, make some short statement or just thank the sultan for pardoning him. But instead he took another step and dropped off the cliff. It was only then that everyone realised that he really had lost his sight.”

Now we were going up some stairs. The stones were slippery.

“Hurshid Pasha’s head rolled down these very steps. The right eye was crushed when it fell and the officer who brought the head to the capital was punished. They accused him of not having taken proper care of it during the trip and of not sprinkling it with salt as the rules require.”

“If I’m not mistaken, the rule about the salt was instituted by Bugrahan, the chief physician, after suspicion arose about the head of Timurtash. Isn’t that right?”

“No, the suspicions were about the head of Velldrem. It had changed so much after decapitation that there were those who doubted that it was really his. That was when they instituted the rules.”

They went on chatting about heads for a long time. Absolutely spellbound, we followed them. Their necks were carefully wrapped in their shawls. For a minute it seemed to me that those black shawls were only meant to hold on their heads (long since cut off), to prevent them from rolling to the ground.

I began to feel sick. They were going upstairs now. The air was cooler. We came out into the open.

“Peanuts! Peanuts!”

At last we were safe. We ran like madmen through the packed gallery, looking for our families.

“Where were you? Why are you so pale?” our mothers asked almost simultaneously. “Why are you shaking like that?”

“We’re cold.”

Mamma wrapped us in a big wool blanket. Ilir’s mother gave us each some bread and marmalade. It was nice and warm there, among the living. Some women had come to visit. My father and Bido Sherifi were talking, looking serious. Nazo’s daughter-in-law, chin resting in her hand, stared sadly. Kako Pino was fidgeting with the little yellow bag where she kept her equipment. There would always be weddings, always and everywhere, now and till the end of time, she had replied, when on the first day of the move to the citadel someone had asked why she was taking her bag along. Nazo’s daughter-in-law sighed. Yes, life was nice among living people.

Ilir and I didn’t budge from that spot for the rest of the afternoon and the next day. We sat listening to what the women who came to see our mothers had to say. We were scared to death of running into the two strangers with the black scarves around their necks. We had decided that if we ever encountered them in the crowd, we would plug up our ears as fast as we could so we wouldn’t hear anything they said. Otherwise, if we let their words get into our ears, we would be shackled by them once more and would not be able to resist falling in step behind the men.

That night there was heavy bombing. I kept thinking of Grandmother. Her now solitary footsteps must be echoing through the big house. Up and down the steps. Sighs of wood and old age, and the curse of death she hurled at nations, governments and their planes.

Ilir and I sat in a corner drifting off to sleep when suddenly — like a snake that slithers under your feet before you even see it — the word “arrest” rang out. Necks craned, eyes narrowed, boots marched towards us. Trak-truk, trak-truk. “Under arrest.” Trak-truk. An Italian carabiniere pulled some handcuffs from his pocket. A tall man watched the handcuffs being put on him.

“Look, they’re locking those things on him with a key,” Ilir said to me.

“I saw.”

A woman, apparently the arrested man’s wife, let out a short, sharp scream.

“Don’t worry,” her husband said.

One of the carabinieri took him by the elbow and the little group moved off.

“Dirty fascists,” someone muttered.

The people who had gathered to watch now dispersed in silence. At noon there was more heavy bombing.

The next day I saw a face I thought I recognised among the people filing past endlessly. He was staring at me. I had seen that fair hair and those troubled eyes somewhere before. At last it came to me. This was the boy who had kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter in our cellar during the bombing.

After hanging around us for a while, he motioned to me. I shrugged. He gestured for me to follow him. He seemed not to want to come over. I got up and followed him. We went out onto the wide esplanade. It was chilly.

“What’s your name?” the boy asked me.

I told him. We had stopped near a battlement and the icy wind cut your face like a knife. The city lay in the chasm below.

“Do you recognise me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“OK then. It was right in your cellar. Do you know what happened?” He grabbed me sharply by the shoulders. “Yes or no, say something! Do you know or not?”

“I know,” I told him.

The boy who had kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter took a deep breath.

“All right, have you seen her since . . .?”

“No.”

He clamped his jaw tight.

“In this city love is forbidden,” he said in a lower voice. “You’ll find out some day, when you grow up.”

(. . . garita!)

He kept kicking the rampart with the tip of his shoe.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m afraid they may have killed her. What do you think?”

I shrugged.

“In this city there are two ways to get rid of pregnant girls: suffocate them in a
juk
or drown them in a well. What do you think?”

I shrugged again. It was getting even colder.

“So you haven’t seen her anywhere in the neighbourhood?”

“Nowhere.”

“No one has seen her?”

“No one.”

“Are there many wells in your neighbourhood?”

“A few.”

He started biting his nails.

“If only I could find her body,” he said dully.

The wind was blowing. I was freezing.

“I’ll look for her everywhere,” he added.

He had unusually long fingers. He looked out at the grey cliffs. The city’s numberless roofs were barely visible in the fog.

“If I can’t find her, I’ll go to hell to look for her.”

I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but I was afraid.

Without another word he walked off quickly across the esplanade.

They were flying slowly, their wings outspread, and for a moment I thought they were going to land on the abandoned airfield, but they turned abruptly and headed for the city. Their wings flashed in the sun with menace. Now they were almost overhead, just at the altitude from which they usually started their dive-bombing. One last manoeuvre and they swooped down on the city one after another, almost vertically.

It was spring now. From the window two flights up I was watching the storks fly back. Circling the tops of minarets and the tall chimneys, they looked for their old nests, and the ellipses they traced in the sky clearly showed just how sad and dismayed they were to find their nests damaged or destroyed by the impact of the bombs and by the wind and rain of the past winter. As I watched them, I was thinking that storks could never imagine what could happen to a city in the winter, while they were away.

TWELVE

It was Sunday. From below came the noise of the pick swung by a neighbour who had been working for two weeks on a modern air-raid shelter like the one Lady Majnur had just had built. The bombing had stopped when spring began. We had been back in our homes for some time. The Karllashis and Angonis were the first to build modern shelters and leave the citadel. Next to leave were the nuns and prostitutes, whose shelters had been taken care of by the army. Then the people who had the money to build their own modern shelters went home. But most of us left the citadel only after the English bombing had eased. The first thing that struck me when we went home was that the tin sign saying “shelter for 90 persons” was gone. Someone must have taken it down while we were away, and the wall now had a light rectangular mark that gave me an empty feeling in my heart every time I looked at it.

Our neighbour’s pickaxe continued its regular thud. Sunday had spread out all over the city. It looked as if the sun had smacked into the earth and broken into pieces, and chunks of wet light were scattered everywhere — in the streets, on the windowpanes, on puddles and roofs. I remembered a day long ago when Grandmother had scaled a big fish. Her forearms were splattered with shiny scales. It was as if she was a Sunday all over. When my father got angry, he was a Tuesday.

I could hear the voices of Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo coming from the other room. They were still talking about the same thing. The neighbourhood women who had been coming by all morning, retailing ever more astounding pieces of news, had gone home to prepare lunch, but Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo went back to the conversation they had been having the previous Sunday. It seemed to me that all their chatting derived from prior conversations which were themselves the sequels of even older discussions going back to ancient times. I had also noticed that some topics of current interest were never broached directly. They would circle round the old ladies like buzzing flies, but could not cross the barrier of their indifference. At best a topic of that kind would take two or three weeks to gain admittance to the conversation, but most never achieved such a privilege.

All morning, the local women had made a whole series of guesses about a very recent event. My mother, as she brought Grandma and Aunt Xhemo their coffee, had asked them two or three times: “Have you heard the latest?” Obstinate as they were, they pretended not to hear, and they carried on elaborating a conversation that had been begun long ago, in the first year of the monarchy, or perhaps even further back, in the year 1901. Sitting beside them, I waited in vain for the expression of some opinion on the latest news. It was one of the few occasions when I felt angry with the old ladies. Stubborn as mules! I muttered to myself. Did they not grasp that the issue ought to make them prick up their ears, or were they dragging things out just to heighten the expectation that they would have something to say?

What had happened was deeply disturbing to me. Someone had gone into our cistern the night before. Fresh footprints were everywhere. Whoever it was had not even replaced the cover, and ashes had been found in a bucket that still smelled of kerosene. Apparently the intruder had used it as a torch to light the inside of the cistern.

For some time now there had been rumours that someone, or rather, some ghost, had been going down into the neighbourhood wells at night.
Are there many wells in your neighbourhood . . .?
At first the old ladies thought it was the ghost of someone called Xuano, who had been murdered in a dispute over property and was now seeking the gold he had hidden. But Aqif Kashahu’s deaf mother, who never slept at night, swore that with her own eyes she had seen the man coming out of their well at daybreak.
If I can’t find her, I’ll go to hell to look for her
. . . She had even spoken to him and, strangest of all, by her own account, she had seen his lips move in reply, but as she was deaf she hadn’t understood any of what was said.

Was it really him?

The roofs seemed dazed by the light. I walked over to the pile of bedding. The mattresses, blankets, pillows and lace-edged sheets — that whole soft white heap that was called
juk
— lay silent as a snare.
In this city there are two ways to get rid of pregnant girls: suffocate them in a
juk
or drown them in a well
.

Was it really him?

Two or three times I went up to the mirror and, after making it go misty with my breath, put my lips on its ice-cold surface. The shape of my kiss remained clear. It was a cold, joyless kiss, redolent with death.

I tried to summon up the face of the boy as I had seen him the other day, up in the fortress. I tried especially hard to remember his lips, which had caught my eye that day more than anything else about his face. They were special lips: lips that had already kissed.

The days went by with nothing to report. A person was looking for the body of another, whom he had once kissed. That was happening somewhere deep down, under the ground. Up above, everything was as before. The days were heavy and shapeless. All identical. Soon they would lose their one remaining distinction, the names that sheltered them like snail shells: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Nothing happening. Wednesday and Thursday went by. Then Frisatsunday. The days stuck to each other like lumps of sticky dough. Finally, on Tuesday, something happened: after the rain, a little rainbow came out. In our city spring came from the sky, not from the soil, which was ruled by stone that knows no seasons. The coming of spring could be glimpsed in the thinning of clouds, the appearance of birds, and the occasional rainbow. This one rose up inside the city itself. Strangely, one end of it rested on the brothel, the other on Aunt Xhemo’s house, which was nonetheless considered one of the most respectable houses in town.

“Kako Pino, go out and look,” Bido Sherifi’s wife called out.

“It’s the end of the world,” Kako Pino said. “Selfixhe, come and look!”

Grandmother looked and shook her head.

After the rainbow nothing happened for a whole week. Then one day Ilir said to me, “Isa and Javer are going to do something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But I heard Javer saying: ‘We have to break the peace and quiet of this petty-bor . . . petty-boar . . .’ I can’t remember the word.”

“Could they have meant to say pretty-boring?”

“No, it definitely wasn’t that.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Remember their death list? How come they never did anyone in?”

“Who knows? There might have been a good reason.”

“They won’t do anything now either.”

“I’m sure they will.”

“Yiorgos Poulos changed his name back to Giorgio Pulo. Why don’t they shoot him?”

“Do you want to bet they’ll do something this time?”

“OK.”

“I’ll bet France and two Switzerlands against Madagascar.”

“It’s a deal.”

Three days later I lost the France and two Switzerlands. Something serious happened all right: the town hall burned down. Very early in the morning we heard gunfire, then, coming from the street, people shouting: “The town hall is burning! The town hall is burning!” Shutters flew open. Heads, hands and arms stretched out as if they wanted to catch the news while it was still in the air. And it was true, the town hall was really going up in flames. Thick smoke like a herd of black horses was rising over the massive building and being blown around by the wind. Tongues of fire glowed red here and there against the black. Footsteps rang through the streets, then a hoarse voice shouted, “The title deeds are burning!”

“The deeds?” a woman asked from her window.

The hoarse voice kept shouting, “Citizens, come out, the town hall and the
deeds
are burning!”

“What are
deeds
?” I whispered.

No one answered.

The sound of footsteps in the street turned to thunder. I took advantage of the confusion to slip out. Mane Voco’s house was nearby. Ilir opened the door.

“Did you bring the France and two Switzerlands?” he asked as I came in.

“Don’t worry. I’ll give them to you. But wait a minute. What’s going on?”

“It burned down. It’s gone.”

“Was it them?”

“Of course. Who else?”

“Where are they?”

“In their room. Pretending to be surprised, to know nothing about it.”

“What are deeds?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come in and close the door!” Ilir’s mother shouted from upstairs.

We went upstairs. Ilir knocked on his brother’s door.

“Can we come in for a minute?” he asked.

We went in, first Ilir, then me.

Isa and Javer were both there. They were standing at the window watching the fire. They said something to each other in a foreign language.

“Strange,” Javer commented. “I wonder who started the fire? What are they saying over at your place?” he asked, turning to me.

“Yes, very strange all right,” Isa agreed.

“I was having a nice dream when the shots woke me up,” said Javer.

“Me too,” said Isa. “I was dreaming about flowers.”

There were shouts from the street.

“What are deeds?” This time it was Ilir who asked the question.

“Ah yes, deeds,” said Javer. “Can you hear them weeping and wailing over their precious deeds? Deeds are documents saying who is the owner of things like houses, yards and land. Understand?”

It was hard to follow. They both tried to explain it to us.

“All the information about property is written down in the deeds: where it lies, who inherits it from one generation to the next, things like that. Have you got that into your thick skulls? Everything is written down — the cistern, the fig tree in the back, the mortgage your father took out, and even you . . .”

Out in the streets, the shouts were getting louder and louder.

“Listen to them bleating,” said Isa. “The monster of private property has been wounded.”

A shrill cry rose above the general clamour.

“Lady Majnur,” said Javer, leaning out to hear better.

Lady Majnur had run into the street without her hat. The wisps of grey hair that poked out from under her black headscarf made a terrifying sight. Her shouts were punctuated by fragments of words and sprays of spit.

“The rabble! . . . It’s the debtors who set fire to the title deeds! . . . Communists! . . . Criminals! . . .”

“Scream, you old witch! Scream your head off, you old whore!” Javer snarled.

I plastered my face to the windowpane and looked out at the teeming street. Now and again the pane misted over. The land and houses, now they were free of the weight of their deeds, began to shift, wander and come apart. The walls seemed to part from their footings, and the age-old ties that had held them in place for so long seemed to have come asunder. As they drifted about, the great stone houses sometimes came dangerously close to each other. They could easily collide and destroy themselves, as they did in earthquakes.

“They’re burning, they’re burning!”

Only the streets, which belonged to everyone, tried to keep their heads in the uproar.

The chaos went on for a while. Smoke now rose more languidly from the burned-out building. The windows, from which flames had been leaping furiously only a short while before, had now begun to go dark.

“The Reichstag went up in flames as well,” said Javer, pointing to a place on the globe.

“Who burned it?” Ilir asked.

“Who? Arsonists, obviously,” Javer said.

“Every city in this world has a building that should be burned,” Isa said.

Javer smiled. A moment later he gave such a yawn he could have dislocated his jaw. He had rings under his eyes.

Isa was yawning a lot too. Neither tried to hide the fact that they hadn’t had a wink of sleep. I felt sure that if you got up close to them, they would smell of kerosene.

Outside the streets had almost settled down. I went out.

That night someone was arrested in our street. There were loud knocks at someone’s door, knocks that didn’t sound like the usual ones, and they woke up half the neighbourhood.

“Who did they take away?” Grandmother asked as she opened the street-side shutters.

“We don’t know yet,” someone whispered. “But I think it was one of Mezini’s sons.”

The next day we found out that there had been arrests all over the city. A big notice was posted in the town square offering a reward of forty thousand leks for information leading to the identification of the arsonist.

On the third night the police arrested a stranger. They had followed him for a while before making the arrest. The stranger walked as if dazed, clutching a bottle of kerosene (you could smell it from far off) and carrying a rope coiled over his shoulder. It was midnight. There was no doubt he was the arsonist. A box of matches and a little pouch of ashes were found in his pockets.

The next day people said that the boy who had kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter had been caught. Despite the calamities that had befallen it all last winter (“May we never live to see another winter like that,” the old women said), the city had not forgotten the fair-haired boy. Despite themselves, Grandma and Aunt Xhemo were finally obliged to allude to the event during their conversation, though they only touched on it briefly. Every one else was clucking and chortling with indignation.

“Did you hear what the boy who kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter told the magistrate?”

“What? He burned down the town hall?”

“No, he did not. The kerosene and ashes he was carrying when he was arrested were for something completely different.”

“Really?”

“He was going down into wells at night looking for the girl.”

“Down into wells at night? What people will do for love!”

“According to the boy, her own family killed her.”

“Today around noon the magistrate went to the Kashahus’ and asked to talk to the girl. She wasn’t in. The boy maintains she’s been murdered.”

“Now that you mention it, I confess I’ve not seen her either, since the
kiss
.”