The Fall of the Stone City (10 page)

DAY
3,033

Everybody was caught up in the intoxication caused by this news. From morning to night the cafés speculated on the reason why Stalin had chosen Gjirokastër of all
places. Most people thought that it did not take great minds to work this out: the city was the Leader’s birthplace and it was well known that among all the leaders of the Communist Bloc
outside of Russia, Stalin did not and could not have a more faithful devotee than the leader of Albania. Some suggested other reasons but only quietly and tentatively, mentioning for instance the
ladies and how they had fallen. Among the thousands of cities in the Eastern Bloc, only ours had done away with its ladies.

For whatever reason, Gjirokastër would become for a few days the centre of the world. In fact, a secretly harboured desire of the city to become the centre of the planet just once was
probably now coming out in the open.

As happens whenever people go too far, in the midst of the rejoicing it turned out that the city had been, as they say, riding for a fall. As January ended and February began, a dark thunderbolt
struck: Stalin would not be coming.

After the first shock, when, having dreamed of being the summit of the world the city fell into a bottomless pit, a hail of questions fell. Why? Stalin must be angry, of course. This was the
first guess, because anger caused most kinds of furore. He was no doubt angry at Gjirokastër, perhaps at Albania, if not the whole of Europe.

In 1908, when the sultan had cancelled his visit, it took several years to discover the reason, which turned out to be something that had not crossed anybody’s mind: the alphabet. The
sultan’s court had protested that after the Ottoman Empire’s centuries-old love affair with Albania, the latter had treacherously rejected the Arabic script in favour of the Latin
alphabet!

Of course Stalin was greater and more daunting than the sultan, and his explosion of fury would also be greater and more devastating.

DAY
3,042

Nobody could remember a more bitterly cold February. In its first week, instead of brighter news or at least no news at all, a shock came when the two doctors, Big and Little
Gurameto, were arrested once again. For the first time they were not weighed in the balance against each other. Both men were seized at midnight, clapped in steel handcuffs and taken to the same
prison.

TIME TURNS BACK
.
DAY
3,029

Nobody knew who was the first to notice it, still less mention it. Time was not just suspended, as it had been for the anaesthetised hospital patients nine years before; it was
going backwards at great speed.

All sorts of reasons were suggested. One was that Stalin was not ageing but growing younger, by some secret technique. Consequently time was flowing backwards, to match. Soon we would reach not
1954 but 1952, and so on: 1949, 1939, 1937. . .

There was no news of the doctors.

1953

CHAPTER NINE

Nobody had ever seen the Cave of Sanisha but everyone talked about it. The cave was universally imagined as the deepest and most terrifying dungeon of the city’s prison,
which was housed in the ancient castle that dominated Gjirokastër. It had been closed up since the time of Ali Pasha Tepelene, whose sister Sanisha gave it its name. This young woman had been
kidnapped and raped and her assailants had been tortured in this cell for days and nights on end, while Ali Pasha himself watched through a secret spyhole.

Whenever governments turned nasty they used this cave as a threat, but people were sure that it would never be put to use again. So in that unforgettable February when there was talk of the Cave
of Sanisha being opened, something else was in fact expected, perhaps the release of the two doctors. Everybody felt sure that they had been arrested in error. When the news came one evening that
not only had their arrest been no mistake, but that after one hundred and fifty years of disuse the Cave of Sanisha would be their dungeon, the city was incredulous. The cave had not been opened
after the murder of the Turkish prefect nor the suspected murder of the sultan’s mother, the rebellion against the king nor even the conspiracy of the anti-communist members of parliament;
but now it was to be used for the doctors.

The report turned out to be true. The cave had been specially equipped for them, and both the doctors were already inside it.

What condition were they in? Did they rest their heads on stones for pillows, did anyone think to cover them with blankets? Both Gurametos, wasting in prison! Were they chained to the wall like
the rapists of long ago? Was salt rubbed into the wounds of their tortured bodies? Or were they well treated with champagne and music?

All sorts of strange questions were asked before anybody thought of the most important one: what had they done?

At first it was hard to find anything to accuse them of but soon it became easy enough. Just as the world was swept with wind and rain, so it was burdened with guilt. A share could be allotted
to the doctors with plenty left over for others.

Meanwhile these frantic attempts to conjure up a crime were interrupted by the arrival of two investigators. Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu were two young men from the city, fresh graduates of the
Dzerzhinsky Academy of the secret police in Moscow. Their faces were pale, their ties tightly knotted and their overcoats extremely long. The godfather of the secret police who gave his name to the
academy had proverbially worn a coat like this and had said, “Long coat, short shrift.”

The two investigators became the visible dimension of the Gurameto case. The doctors were below in the dark of the pit but at least the investigators bobbed above the surface like balloons,
signals from the lower depths.

On Tuesday, 13 February, the two investigators emerged from the Cave of Sanisha clutching their files and strode purposefully down Hamurati Street, heading not for the police station but the
hospital.

Remzi Kadare was at the gate, his expression menacing and his face distorted with senseless fury. He wagged his finger. “Whatever happens here isn’t my fault. If you want to find the
guilty ones, look at the other Kadares from Palorto.” He lowered his voice. “Oh no, what’s going on? They’re up to no good.”

The investigators listened in puzzlement and then crossed the hospital yard, watched by the doctors and nurses standing at the entrance.

The examination of the two doctors’ operation records, or rather, the full list of their patients, caused no concern. On the contrary, a wave of relief swept through the entire hospital.
This first ray of light shed on the mystery roused some hope. They were looking at the mortality rate of operations. Everywhere in the world people died during surgery, their families complained
about the doctors, the doctors justified themselves and the cases went to court.

The investigators spent more than four hours in the hospital registry. Before they had passed the main gate, where Remzi Kadare again stood ready to say something that to him was very important,
the first results of the investigation became known. Of the twelve thousand and more operations carried out by Big Dr Gurameto, about one thousand eight hundred patients had died on the operating
table or soon after. The number for Little Dr Gurameto was less than one thousand. (The tendency to compare the two was again apparent.)

The investigation of the two doctors, like many things where they were concerned, took place on two levels. The first, in the Cave of Sanisha, was hidden from everybody. The second and visible
dimension involved the hospital, the morgue, family homes and sometimes the cemetery. Records of autopsies and personal interviews were attached to the medical records.

The investigators, now pale after sleepless nights, appeared less often in the city. They lost weight, making their overcoats seem even longer. What was called the public side of the
investigation now had its own secret aspects, which strangely did not relate to the dead but to the living. One by one, surviving patients, or rather their surgical scars, were to be examined for
the oddest things, such as stitches in the form of six-pointed stars, tattoos, and old symbols (Hebrew ones for instance) of mysterious import.

Some called these stories crazy but others replied, “Wait, just wait and you’ll see. This business will go far. This is serious stuff.” Since the two doctors were not only
surgeons but gynaecologists, women would also be subjected to intimate examinations.

Listeners to foreign radio stations, especially the BBC, passed on an extraordinary piece of news: a group of terrorist doctors had been exposed in the Kremlin, the very citadel of communism.
The Soviets themselves had broadcast the news, calling it “murder in a white coat”. The usual furore was absent, probably because the case spoke for itself, but the report shocked the
entire planet. Under the direction of a Jewish organisation known as the “Joint”, a group of doctors was preparing the greatest crime in the history of mankind: the elimination by
murder of all the communist leaders throughout the world, starting with Joseph Stalin.

This incomparable crime would change world history. The globe would tilt on its axis and not regain its balance for a thousand years, if ever. So Stalin’s anger, which had been thought to
be directed at Gjirokastër, was in fact aimed at the whole world.

A small, hesitant voice ventured to say that perhaps he was angry at both Gjirokastër
and
the world.

At first it seemed a nonsensical idea to link the plot to Gjirokastër but now it was the natural and obvious thing. The conspiracy, although first discovered in the Kremlin, had stretched
its tentacles everywhere: Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Albania, even Mongolia.

People’s brains worked feverishly. So there was some truth in the stories about Stalin’s rejuvenation, time in reverse gear, the years moving backwards and that semi-official notice
of a visit by the Father of the Peoples.

There were two interpretations of this visit. According to the first, Stalin really had intended to come. The headquarters of the “Joint”, having long ago made its preparations to
strike on Stalin’s first visit abroad, had issued orders to its cell in Albania, that is in Gjirokastër, to stand ready. The conspirators would poke out their heads like moles, and would
suffer the consequences.

In the second version the announcement of a visit was a front. It would never take place, and the “Joint” headquarters and Gjirokastër itself would fall into a trap. But still
the moles would poke out their heads, and suffer. In either case Gjirokastër would pay a heavy cost for its vainglory. The city’s name was whispered everywhere. The entire communist
world seethed with orders, warnings, secret communiqués.

At three in the afternoon on 16 February, Blind Vehip was clapped in handcuffs at the crossroads of Varosh Street, in full view of the astonished passers-by.

With her face as white as plaster, in a long dress on which there was no trace of violence, she approached the village. She walked slowly, yet not with downcast head as
expected but with a distant expression, everything about her suggesting detachment.

That is how they had seen her leaving the village of Kardhiq, where for three days and nights they had stripped her of her humanity, and that is how she looked as they watched her coming to
Tepelene. Those who had heard her story from others, who themselves had it from hearsay, had imagined her looking like this, or even paler. A song had been composed about her, though nobody knew
when or by whom. It began, “I lost my soul in the prison cell/Of Sanisha, black as hell.”

As she walked, her brother Ali Tepelene watched her from his great house through a long officer’s telescope. His face was as black with fury as hers was pale. His sister’s movements
made it clear that she had come to look for death. No doubt at his hands. He did what she wanted and coldly shot her, first with a bullet in the forehead, and then with two, one in the forehead and
one in the heart, and then four, fourteen, God knows how many. But this brought him no peace of mind. He killed her again, with all kinds of weapons, but still he was not satisfied, only filled
with such distress that when he saw her dead, he kissed her on the brow.

Later when he heard the song, he said to himself, “Ah, why didn’t I kill her properly?”

No one know who had composed the song, and its meaning was ambiguous: it could be interpreted as a song of her ravishers, shackled in the Cave of Sanisha, in the cell which her avenging brother
had later created especially for them; it might equally be taken as a song about the fatal depths of a woman’s body, below her belly, which had led them into temptation. But in both cases it
was a song or lament put into the mouths of her violators. Ali Tepelene, the most powerful vezir of the Ottoman Empire, who would give orders even to the sultan, had been unable in forty years to
detach the meaning of the song from its dark history.

On 17 February, shortly before midnight, Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu, the foremost investigators of Albania and perhaps of the entire Communist Bloc, could not rid their minds of this song; its
words made their knees buckle with terror and desire as they descended the steps of the famous cave.

They led the two doctors, whom they had known since childhood, in handcuffs.

A blinding light shone from an electric torch.

Neither of the investigators knew what their voices would sound like under the stone vault. When they first spoke, the sound was even stranger than they expected.

They heard their words, not in their own voices but as if spoken by actors from the distant past, returning to them enveloped in a terrifying echo and hanging suspended in the chamber before
they melted away. “For . . . the . . . m u r d e r . . . ”

It took some time for the doctors to understand the language. They were under investigation for the murder of patients during surgical procedures. They had no way of questioning why. There were
no whys and hows. They were supposed to listen carefully to the conclusion of the investigation. This was a democratic proletarian state with the highest form of justice in the world, which never
punished the innocent. The doctors were now cleared of the accusation of murder. The investigators had examined the full list of their patients and the exact times of their murders, they meant
their deaths, and in particular the biographies of the victims, or rather the deceased, and had concluded that the numbers of the deceased of different political allegiances, i.e. communists,
royalists and nationalists, did not reveal any political bias on the part of the surgeons. The suspicions against them were totally groundless.