The Fall of the Stone City (15 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

He had the feeling that this was not the first time he had dreamed of Sanisha. She seemed composed and aloof, especially towards himself. Finally she set aside her
indifference and, turning her pale face towards him asked, “Is your investigation about me?”

Shaqo Mezini shrugged his shoulders, which seemed to him the best he could do. It was a kind of answer that combined an apology (he was only doing his job) with a feeble protest (an
investigation in your cave doesn’t necessarily mean it’s about you).

She was not at all angry, but not grateful either. In different circumstances this ravished woman might have opened her heart to him. “Officer, if you only knew what they did to me.”
But she remained cold and distant.

He heard the indistinct buzz of conversation around him. There was a double door through which he could see sparkling chandeliers and people moving to and fro. He heard the name of Stalin, but
it seemed to him improper to ask what was happening. Then he understood: Comrade Stalin was hosting a dinner in the Kremlin. Journalists were relaying the news. “Comrade Stalin, on this
occasion . . . All communists should know that the peoples of the world owe a debt . . . ”

Sanisha appeared again among the guests. “I don’t care,” she said to Shaqo Mezini, “but I’m sure my brother won’t like it. No brother wants his sister’s
rape investigated.” The investigator shrugged his shoulders again. He wanted to ask if she was invited to Comrade Stalin’s dinner. Comrade Stalin, the Father of the Peoples. Then she
said, “Perhaps you’re no longer frightened of my brother, Ali Pasha Tepelene. In my day, everybody was terrified of him.”

It was the sort of dream that you could, with a little effort, snap yourself out of. Shaqo Mezini forced it away but it lingered in his mind. Even after he opened his eyes he could hear the
words, “Comrade Stalin, Comrade Stalin, the glorious leader.”

He leaped out of bed and ran to the window. Even before flinging the window open, he identified the source of his torment. The voice came from a huge loudspeaker on top of the castle. You did
not need to hear the words to know this meant bad news. Loudspeakers did not broadcast anything else. The words came distorted, fragmentary. “At this hour of trial, when Comrade Stalin is
suffering . . . ”

At least he’s not dead, Shaqo Mezini thought.

On the street, as he ran towards the Interior Ministry’s branch office, he heard the broadcast distinctly from another direction. It was a bulletin on the patient’s condition.
“Breathing difficulties . . . intermittent . . .”

He sprinted across the office yard. His colleague Arian Ciu, with a pale, waxen face, was trying to make a phone call. “All the lines are engaged,” he said with a guilty look.

Shaqo Mezini, short of breath, did not reply. “Are there any instructions?” he finally gasped.

A short call had come from headquarters in Tirana. “Everybody at their post. This is an order.” There was no further explanation.

“At our posts,” Shaqo Mezini thought. “Of course.”

An inscrutable expression crossed Arian Ciu’s face.

“No more?” Shaqo Mezini asked. The lines had been busy for the past hour. “Is the chief in his office?”

“Yes. Our enemies are rejoicing too soon. That was all he said.”

“Are you scared?” Shaqo Mezini asked suddenly.

Arian Ciu did not know where to look. “No. What do you mean by that?”

Shaqo Mezini was overcome by a wave of emotion he had never felt before, a barely resistible urge to lay his head on the chest of his office colleague, and say, “Hold on to me, brother.
We’re both lost.”

The door opened noisily. The chief of investigations entered, stared at them as if surprised to find them there, and just as noisily departed again.

They stood in silence and looked towards the window. It gradually dawned on them that they were both looking in the direction of the military airport. How incredible to think back to the time
when the investigators from Berlin and Moscow had landed there.

At midday the station chief held a short meeting in his office. The latest bulletin reported no change in Stalin’s condition. The orders from headquarters remained the same: everybody at
their posts. The radio was broadcasting classical music and two of the typists were in tears.

At four in the afternoon Shaqo Mezini jumped to his feet. His face glowered. “Get up,” he said to his colleague. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“You know where.”

Without a word to anybody and with unsteady steps they set off for the prison. Sometimes the noise of their footsteps seemed too much to bear and the cobbles cracked explosively under their
boots, and sometimes the sound was muffled, as if they were walking on clouds.

In the Cave of Sanisha they found Gurameto stretched out as usual on his straw mattress. He did not move when they entered or even when they called his name. The marks of torture were clearly
visible on his cheeks.

“So you’re pleased at this, are you?” said Shaqo Mezini. “You heard Stalin is ill and you’re pleased at this, scum.”

He was still short of breath from the hurried ascent and he could barely utter the words.

“He can hardly breathe, and this makes you happy, doesn’t it?”

A faint gleam in Gurameto’s eyes suggested to the investigator that medical curiosity was one of the few instincts that the doctor retained. The investigator tried to conceal his own
shortness of breath but this made it worse. The imprisoned doctor had probably taken what he said about breathing to refer to himself, not Stalin.

“Stalin can hardly breathe, do you hear me?” he shouted. “He’s dying and you’re glad, is that right?”

The prisoner did not reply.

The investigator’s eyes wandered to the corner where the old instruments of torture glinted dully. He remembered a few years ago a British collector, who was fond of Albania, wanting to
buy them for pounds sterling.

Arian Ciu was looking at them too. “For what other occasion were these tools intended,” Mezini thought.

But he surprised himself by saying something else. “Gurameto, you’re a doctor. You can’t be pleased when someone is barely breathing, can you?” He brought his face close
to the prisoner and continued in a whisper. “You would like to cure him, wouldn’t you? Speak!”

He thought he saw the man nod, but he could not be sure.

“Dr Gurameto,” he said gently. “You have it in your power to cure Stalin.”

He drew close to the man’s head again and murmured into his right ear. A word from him, or rather, his signature at the end of the record of interrogation would perform the miracle. It was
said that it was worry over the failure to expose the Jewish plot that had laid Stalin low. So, the news that the plot had been exposed would surely restore him to life. “Save Stalin,
doctor,” Shaqo Mezini gasped.

The other investigator watched dumbfounded.

Shaqo Mezini was close to collapse. Like his voice, his knees were giving way. His ribs were melting like candle wax and could no longer contain his heart. He felt an overpowering desire to hold
the prisoner in his arms, to weep with him.

Did he fall to his knees now, or had it been some time ago? With a trembling, beseeching hand, he held out the document. “Bring him back to life,” he said tenderly.
“Stalin’s resurrection is more important than Christ’s. Raise Stalin from the grave!”

This final plea exhausted him completely.

Both men watched the prisoner, making no movement.

This time Shaqo Mezini thought he saw Gurameto shake his head. “No!” the investigator screamed to himself, holding his hands to his eyes, as if blinded.

The next day in the office the hours crept wearily past. First one man and then the other looked into the distance towards the small military airport. They knew they were
waiting in vain but their heads automatically made the same movement.

During the afternoon the phone calls petered out. Not just the office but the whole country seemed stricken. Arian Ciu stepped out occasionally to the next-door offices in search of news but
each time came back without a word. The order was still the same: everybody at their posts. It became a catchphrase.

After his tiring night, Shaqo Mezini could not keep his mind focused. The desolate appearance of the airport depressed him more than anything else and reminded him of another dream, about how he
might become one of the “high-flyers”. He had been struck when he saw the German investigator descending the aircraft steps in his casually unzipped leather jacket, his scarf blowing in
the wind. He would have liked to look like this, the socialist camp’s famous investigator landing at airports in Budapest, Moscow and Sofia, in pursuit of the common enemy. He remembered the
familiar exhilaration of times like this, which he associated in his mind with a particular song.

Now this dream, like the Great Man’s breathing, was ebbing. It was like that afternoon long ago when he had come home after a tedious meeting and his mother, with a bewildered expression,
had handed him a letter left by his fiancée. “Don’t try to understand why. There’s no going back.”

And so it turned out. She never came back and he never found out the reason why. Sometimes he suspected himself of avoiding the truth. At home, whenever his fiancée was mentioned, he saw
an unspoken question in his mother’s eyes. How can this son of mine, who uncovers everyone’s secrets, fail to understand his own mistake?

After the arrest of the two Gurametos, when their entire list of patients was screened, Shaqo Mezini was horrified to see not only his mother’s name but his fiancée’s. Numb
with shock, he carefully checked the dates. Her appointment was three months after their engagement and five weeks after they had first slept together. Obsessively, he asked himself the reason for
this visit and why she had kept it secret from him.

During the first investigation of Big Dr Gurameto, his eyes drifted involuntarily to the doctor’s right hand, the one that performed gynaecological examinations.

He pictured that silent afternoon when she had left the house with bowed head to go to the hospital, who could tell why.

He would have given anything to know the truth.

A week later he happened to find himself alone with the prisoner, against all regulations. He had never broken a rule before, but his conscience was easy. This infraction did no harm to the
State.

He spoke quietly to the prisoner, as if at a routine interrogation of an ordinary suspect. He mentioned his fiancée’s name and added that she was a young woman of twenty-four.
According to the hospital register she had attended her appointment at four thirty on the afternoon of 17 February 1951.

The prisoner had furrowed his brow and said that he couldn’t remember her.

She was an ordinary-looking woman of medium build.

The doctor shook his head again.

“Try to remember, doctor,” said Shaqo Mezini, noticing with alarm his own altered voice. The anxiety of those unforgotten weeks flooded over him again. “Doctor, please,”
he entreated in a muffled voice. “Tell me out of human kindness . . . she was my fiancée.”

The prisoner made no sign.

“You don’t remember? Of course you don’t. She wouldn’t strike you in any way. She was an ordinary woman. She was no great beauty.”

Shaqo Mezini sat down and his voice became colder and more threatening. “Why did she come to you? Why shouldn’t I know the reason? Did she complain about me? Speak!”

The prisoner still sat speechless.

“At least tell me what was wrong with her. Just listen to me. What was the problem?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Really?”

“Even if she did come to me, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s a matter of confidentiality.”

“Monster,” Shaqo Mezini said to himself. “Heartless monster. Hun.”

At all the later sessions he tried to avert his eyes from the prisoner’s right hand.

On 3 March before dawn he had given the order for the prisoner to be put to torture. He had gone to the chief operative named Tule Balloma. “Listen, there’s something on my mind.
Those two fingers, the index finger and the next one, what do you call it. Give them a good twist.”

The operative looked at him strangely. “There are other parts that hurt more, boss.”

“I know, I know,” he had replied. “But it’s those I want. Crush them good and proper.”

“Don’t worry, boss. You’ll see.”

He was curious to see the result, although it would be small consolation.

For two years he had brooded on his fiancée’s desertion. He never imagined that just at the time when the scar was healing, the investigation of the doctors would lay bare this
wound again. When they had assigned him to this case its global dimensions had staggered him. Simultaneously there came a pang: it was too late. If this had come earlier perhaps his fiancée
would not have left him. The file contained something for which he had subconsciously yearned, the promise of celebrity.

The Dzerzhinsky Academy, which of all institutions should have cultivated an indifference to fame and the charms of women, surreptitiously offered these inducements. Forbidden lust haunted the
cadets’ nightly dreams. Their officers, who knew every secret, could not fail to understand this, but astonishingly, instead of discouraging these desires, they openly hinted that they could
hold the entire world in their hands if they knew how to reach out for it. The sons of Stalin would drown the world in blood. The world with its temples, cathedrals, its men and glamorous women,
would kneel before them.

His fiancée had proved resistant to this fantasy. At the first supper at her home, supposedly by accident, he had let her see his pistol as he took off his jacket, but to no effect. She
had shown no curiosity but only an obvious disdain for firearms.

His eventual fame would no doubt change this and he would become attractive to women, like the commissars with their leather jackets and scars on their foreheads. Or the surgeons who knew how to
handle them. If only he too could be somebody. The young Ali Pasha Tepelene supposedly said that if he had been vezir, he would not have allowed the men of Kardhiq to ravish his sister, and from
that day his sole ambition had been to become vezir, to take his revenge.