The Fall of the Stone City (8 page)

Nevertheless, if this “time” never seemed exactly reborn, there was something youthful about it. It was always a little hectic. There were incessant campaigns, one after another.
There was a touch of fever especially in the chatter of the activists, who promised and threatened all kinds of things. Down with soil erosion! Glory to the martyrs! Hang the speculators! Forwards
with reforestation!

There was no end of meetings. Hoarders of gold were denounced, along with the Corfu Channel incident, the rhymes of Blind Vehip and Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman. The rejection of the
concept of perpetual motion was for some reason connected to the latter. The idea of “the new era” was always closely associated with “reconstruction”. Slogans were painted
and songs sung everywhere about the new era, as if she were a bride.

“Work” and “reconstruction” usually meant digging irrigation channels. People got up before dawn, unfurled a banner and marched off in single file to start digging. It
turned out later that some of the new ditches didn’t raise the level of water but merely diverted it from other channels, or failed to drain away flood waters and actually increased them.
When people were punished for this it gradually became clear that the ditches, besides their ostensible function, had a different purpose that was more important.

“Don’t stare like that. There’s no great mystery here,” said a newly arrested engineer to his two cellmates. They were all in prison for sabotaging ditches.
“It’s the same old story. It goes back to the Babylonians. That’s where tyranny began, they say. Either too much water, or too little. Water wanted in one place, but not in
another.”

Two sensational items of news, about the start of the Cold War and Tito’s treachery, seemed to have something to do with the ditches. Other questions, including some of a purely mental
nature, however remote they might appear, were also related.

Farewell to wandering thoughts, to whatever crossed your mind – ancient decrees, women’s private parts – to any thought either elevated or shameful. It became clearer every day
that you had to think about some things a lot and others much less, if at all.

One of the things in the latter class was the famous dinner with the Germans. It was as if it had never happened. In fact anyone mentioning it even in passing was firmly rounded on. “What,
you still believe those old tales about the German and the doctor being old school friends and all that blah-blah?” Yet this did not stem the rumours that somewhere, at a secret level you
didn’t dare think about, the dinner was still being investigated. Indeed, the recently appointed chorus master at the House of Culture was suspected of being one of two undercover
investigators. You would never guess the other in a thousand years, although it was generally known that this person had planted the suspicion that there had never been any dinner at all. He
claimed that the gramophone had played to an empty room and a secret meeting in the guise of a dinner had taken place somewhere else, in order to leave no evidence behind.

A SEQUENCE OF SEASONS

It was winter. A few weeks before, the Cold War had started. This was no longer the laughing matter it had been at first (Eskimos etcetera), but nor was it as frightening as it
later became (silent and as frigid as death). It was something to be worried about, like the Iron Curtain, invented by an English lord.

In order to demonstrate that it was possible to live with these fears, and even cheerfully, the number of festivals increased. Sports days were the favourite: they were cheap and needed no
preparation. You gathered a few dozen time-wasters with itchy feet and all it took was a sign reading “Spring Cross-Country” for them to pelt off like lunatics. Along the road others
would join in and then they would stop in some square to catch their breath and cheer, “Long live . . . ” and just as often “Death to . . . ”, for there were as many things
that had to live as to die, and the quicker the better.

Almost as frequent were concerts, races, inaugurations and, in particular, award ceremonies. These latter were often of an unusual nature. For instance in the first week of April there were
celebrations for Big Dr Gurameto’s twelve-thousandth operation.

As one can imagine, the little doctor was not forgotten although, as a lesser light, he had barely reached his nine-thousandth. That afternoon and evening old memories revived of the time when
these two rivals had been the centre of attention. As in the old days, one was weighed against the other. This was a hard task because everybody knew that their relative status still depended
primarily on the international situation.

After its defeat in the war Germany had been divided into a bad part and a good part, leaving Big Dr Gurameto roughly neutral. Italy was not as bad as West Germany, but not as good as East
Germany, so he and Little Dr Gurameto were more or less quits. In short, they had emerged from the global upheaval fifty-fifty, as the English say.

The wave of affection for Big Dr Gurameto was all the stronger because of the memory of the rivalry between the two doctors, which had become a symbol of a past now recalled, for some reason,
with nostalgia.

“Oh, how touching,” said Marie Turtulli, one of the city’s great ladies. “What sweet memories,” she repeated after a moment. “Just like in la Belle
Époque.”

The rosy aureole surrounding the two doctors was best described in a rhyme by Blind Vehip,

Yet whispers persisted that the dinner of long ago was the subject of an investigation, still a covert one but now conducted by two independent groups. Its German aspect was lately overshadowed
by its supernatural dimension; the dinner was associated mainly with the appearance of a dead man, who, for the purpose of disguise or some other reason, had worn the greatcoat of a German officer
and in this shape, spattered with mud, had knocked at Dr Gurameto’s door.

DAY FIVE HUNDRED

A SPECTRAL THRONG OF GERMAN SYMPATHISERS

On the five-hundredth day of the new order there appeared a sight that should never have been seen. Beneath the city the first refugees from Çamëria arrived. There
was no end to them. The Greeks had accused them of having supported the Germans and expelled them northwards across the border. They all brought evidence of recent atrocities: cradles with knife
marks, old people scarred by burns, young wives blackened from the soot of their torched houses. They walked in an endless column under a bitter, pitiless wind.

To their left stood the first city in Albania, of which they had so often dreamed. But they had strict orders, nobody knew from whom, not to enter it. The city loomed above them, as inscrutable
as a sphinx, inaccessible and failing to understand why it could not take them in. Who suffered most from this prohibition, the convoy of refugees or the city? To be sure it pained both, as if they
had been showered with the debris of some terrible catastrophe. That afternoon the very rafters of Gjirokastër’s houses began to groan. The city suffered an agony of conscience.
Receiving no mercy themselves, the refugees showed none for anybody else. Old loyalties had lost their meaning. Neither side in this conflict could claim victory, or even sustain their quarrel. It
was scant consolation for the losers, the nationalists and the royalists, to recall how they had cheered for Çamëria and Kosovo: now they guiltily hung their heads. For perhaps it was
these cheers that had to be paid for after the German defeat.

Migrations like this were said to be happening everywhere. An evil hour had struck for whole populations, entire peoples uprooted from their homes from the shores of the Baltic to the snowfields
of the Caucasus and deep into the distant steppes, supposedly for supporting the Germans.

Other dreadful convoys came to mind. The Jews, three years ago. The Armenians, thirty years before.

The citizens of Gjirokastër watched the scene through binoculars and yearned for an end to these columns from Çamëria, but one convoy seemed to spawn another. It was said that
in the Greek-minority villages, at night, people would offer them bread but they would not take it. They had expected that someone else would feed them.

Where were they going? Perhaps north to the olive groves of Vlora. It was rumoured that there the sky had filled with the cruel sound of thunder but something uncanny happened: the lightning
rebelled against the laws of nature and refused to fall on these wretches’ heads.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE NEW ORDER CONTINUED

Dawn rose on the asphalted highway and on this bleak day spirits sank even lower. The cold tightened its grip on Gjirokastër. The coal ran out and martyrs were in short
supply.

As if to a natural disaster, trucks of food and medicine were hurriedly dispatched from the capital city with inspectors, musical ensembles and delegations of all kinds, some from fraternal
countries. One of these, from the Soviet Baltic republics, where something similar had happened, issued a strange communiqué before it returned, stating that the situation in
Gjirokastër called for a more radical approach. In the city there were still eleven former vezirs and pashas of the Ottoman Empire, four former overseers of the sultan’s harem, three
former deputy managers of Italian-Albanian banks, fifteen ex-prefects of various regimes, two professional stranglers of heirs apparent, a street called “Lunatics’ Lane” and two
high-class courtesans, not to mention the famous three hundred former judges and more than six hundred cases of insanity: a lot for a medieval city now striving to become a communist one.

The Baltic delegation’s communiqué made plain that what was required was an upsurge of renewal, what the newspapers called “new blood”. Very soon this became a flood.
Every day enthusiastic young volunteers arrived from central Albania: overfulfillers of already overfulfilled plans, on the Soviet model, some singing the song “Pickaxe in one hand, rifle in
the other”, or not just singing about these implements but actually carrying them; informers on saboteurs of ill-planned drainage ditches; informers on fastidious ladies who rarely left their
homes in a demonstration of disdain for the new order; activists who only looked forward to the future and others that did so mainly but not exclusively, and occasionally glanced back; sculptors of
busts of martyrs; self-sacrificing zealots keen to join the latter in their graves, if nature permitted; opponents of the ideological enemies known as “the three ‘no’s”
(imperialism, Zionism and Coca-Cola) and others of the seven ‘no’s; nutcases obsessed with cultivating friendship with other nations and others entranced by the notion of hostility. In
short, a perfect frenzy that made everyone weep.

Just when everything seemed on track again, a secret report drawn up by an even more secret delegation from the capital announced bluntly that the rate of progress was still not satisfactory.
The ditches, however unnecessary, were being dug too slowly. The former vezirs, hangovers from the time of the sultan, were not dying fast enough. Except for the two high-class courtesans, who had
“distanced themselves from their bourgeois past” and joined the new order out of inner conviction, the other remnants of the old order were stubbornly clinging on.

A song was heard in the streets, of the anonymous kind that appeared in Gjirokastër. It spread everywhere and seemed to confirm the secret report. Its words were sad, and its melody even
more plangent.

The authorities did all they could to prevent people singing it, but in vain.

Nobody had ever imagined that a song about a hospital could become the reason for another dramatic development in the city: the campaign against its ladies. It all started at a meeting at which
a senior cultural official complained that people were still singing songs of what might be called a private nature, about how you’ve forgotten me but I’ll never forget you, you
didn’t visit me in hospital, I couldn’t get rid of my cough and twaddle of this sort. The city’s leaders suggested commissioning local musicians to compose two or three songs for
the new era, which still had a bit of feeling in them. The Party chairman butted in. “Come out with it – you mean about being ill.” Without more ado he phoned the two doctors, Big
and Little Gurameto, to demand the names of the singing patients.

At first the doctors were at a loss how to respond. Big Dr Gurameto replied that they were surgeons and their patients either recovered or went straight to their graves and had no time for
sighing and groaning, so it would be better to ask other doctors who dealt with protracted illnesses such as typhus and especially tuberculosis.

Meanwhile, taking advantage of the turbulent times, the Romany guard at the Hygiene Institute known as “Dan the TB Man” produced a song in memory of his girlfriend, who had been run
over that April by the night-soil cart.

The cultural officials chuckled but soon wiped the smiles from their faces. At their next meeting, which turned out to be fatal for them all, they agreed that private feelings involved not only
disease and filth, but also nobler sentiments. Unaware of how dearly he would pay for this later, the head of culture recalled an old women’s song.

The exclamations of how lovely, how delicate, what sensitivity, prompted the head of culture, as if with the devil at his elbow, to recollect another song describing the same women, this time
from the men’s point of view.