Chronicle in Stone (11 page)

North . . . Everything was now heading north. It was as if the world had changed direction. (Whenever I turned the globe in one direction, Isa, just to annoy me, would spin it the opposite way. What was happening now was more or less the same.) The defeated Italians were retreating. We expected the Greeks to follow on their tail.

I pressed my nose on the windowpane and concentrated hard on watching the columns move along the road. The little raindrops that the wind now and then battered on the windowpane made it all seem even sadder. The retreat went on all morning. At noon the columns of troops were still marching by. In the afternoon, when the last of them had disappeared beyond the Zalli and the road lay deserted (it was the time when the lame traveller was set to reappear), the air was suddenly filled with the dull growl of engines. I gave a start, as if shaken from a dream. Why? What was going on? In an instant I was no longer sleepy. Something unbearable was happening: they were all taking off! Two at a time, or three by three, the bombers were leaving the airfield with a fighter escort and flying away in that detestable direction, north. Scarcely had one group of three lifted off when another came rumbling down the runway. One after another the clouds swallowed them up. The aerodrome was emptying out. Then I heard the massive noise of the big plane, and my heartbeat slowed. It was all over. For good. It raised itself heavily, turned its beak north and flew off on outstretched wings. Gone forever. From the far horizon bedecked with a thick mist which soon swallowed up the great plane came the last sound of the throaty breathing I knew so well, but it had already grown distant and alien. Suddenly the world sank back into silence.

When I looked beyond the river, I saw that nothing was left. There was just an ordinary field in the autumn rain. The aerodrome had disappeared. My dream had ended.

“What’s wrong, my boy?” Grandmother asked when she found me with my head lying like a wrecked ship on the windowsill.

I didn’t answer.

Papa and Mamma also came in from the other room and asked me the same question. I wanted to tell them, but my mouth, lips and throat refused to obey. Instead of words, only a hoarse, inhuman sob came out. My parents frowned with fear.

“You’re crying for that . . . for that accursed thing whose name I can’t even bring myself to say,” Grandmother said, pointing towards the field, now splattered with puddles like so many wounds.

“You’re snivelling because of the aerodrome?” my father asked angrily. I nodded. He scowled.

“Poor little fool,” my mother said. “And I thought you were sick.”

They sat in the main room for a long while, torturing me with their silence. In vain I tried to stifle my sobs. My father’s face was glum. Mamma looked lost. Only Grandmother moved back and forth behind me, constantly muttering.

“Lord, what times have come upon us. Kids crying because of those flying things. Evil omens, evil omens.”

What was that longing that filled the rain-drenched days? The abandoned field lay below, riddled with small puddles. Sometimes I thought I could hear the sound of it. I would run to the window, to find nothing on the horizon but useless clouds.

Maybe they had shot it down and now it languished on a hillside with its broken wings folded underneath. Once I had seen the remains of a long-limbed bird in a field. Its delicate bones had been washed clean by the rain. Part of it was spattered with mud.

Where could it be?

Over the field, once bound to the sky, a few wisps of fog now drifted.

One day they brought the cows back, and they moved slowly with their silent brown spots, seeking the last bits of grass along the edges of the concrete runway. For the first time I hated them.

The city, weary and sullen, had changed hands several times. The Italians and Greeks alternated. Flags and currencies were changed, amid general indifference. Nothing else.

FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE

changing of currencies. The Albanian lek and Italian lira will no longer be accepted. Henceforth the only legal tender will be the Greek drachma. The time limit for the changeover is one week. Yesterday the prison was emptied. The inmates, after thanking the Greek authorities, went their separate ways. I order the cessation of the blackout, effective today. I declare a state of siege, and a curfew from 1800 to 0600 hours. Commander of the city garrison: Katantzakis. Births. Marriages. Deaths. D. Kasoruho and I. Grapshi are happy to

FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE

der: restoration of the blackout for the entire city and cancellation of the state of siege. I order the re-opening of the prison. All former inmates are hereby called upon to return to serve out their sentences. Commander of the city garrison: Bruno Arcivocale. Currency must be converted quickly. The Greek drachma is no longer acceptable. The Albanian lek and the Italian lira shall be the sole legal tender. List of those killed in yesterday’s bombing: B. Dobi, L. Maksuti, S.

NINE

The last Italians left during the first week of November, four days after the evacuation of the aerodrome. For forty hours there was no government in the city. The Greeks arrived at two in the morning. They stayed for about seventy hours, and hardly anyone even saw them. All shutters stayed closed. No one went out in the street. The Greeks themselves seemed to move only at night. At ten in the morning on Thursday the Italians came back, marching in under freezing rain. They stayed only thirty hours. Six hours later the Greeks were back. The same thing happened all over again in the second week of November. The Italians came back. This time they stayed about sixty hours. The Greeks rushed back in as soon as the Italians had gone. They spent all day Friday and Friday night in the city, but when dawn broke on Saturday, the city awoke to find itself completely deserted. Everyone had gone. Who knows why the Italians didn’t come back? Or the Greeks? Saturday and Sunday went by. On Monday morning footsteps echoed in the street where none had been heard for several days. On either side of the street women opened their shutters gingerly and looked out. It was Llukan the Jailbird, with his old brown blanket slung over his right shoulder. In his kerchief he was carrying bread and cheese, and was apparently on his way home.

“Llukan!” Bido Sherifi’s wife called from a window.

“I was up there,” said Llukan, pointing to the prison. “I went there to report, but guess what? The prison is closed.”

There was almost a touch of sadness in his voice. The frequent changes of rulers had made mincemeat of his sentence, and this put him out of sorts.

“No more Greeks or Italians, you mean?”

“Greeks, Italians, it makes no difference to me,” Llukan answered in exasperation. “All I know is the prison isn’t working. The doors are wide open. Not a soul around. It’s enough to break your heart.”

Someone asked him another question, but he didn’t answer and just went on cursing.

“Lousy times, lousy country! Can’t even keep a lousy prison running. Am I supposed to waste time every day, climbing up to the citadel and coming back down for nothing? Days go by and I can’t serve my damn sentence. All my plans are screwed up. Son of a bitch good for nothing Italy! Damn, when I think about what a friend told me about Scandinavian prisons! Now that’s what you call prisons. You go in and out on schedule, by the book. Fixed sentences and good records. The gates don’t swing open and shut all the time like the doors of a whorehouse.”

One by one the women closed their shutters as Llukan got more and more obscene. Only Aqif Kashahu’s mother, who was deaf, stayed at her window and answered what she thought she was hearing.

“How true, dear fellow, how true. You’ve every right to be angry, my boy. Never had a lucky day in your life, poor thing, rotting in prison all the time. Governments come and go, and you’re always inside.”

Llukan the Jailbird walked on and the street was empty again. Nazo’s big cat leaped across the cobblestones. Kako Pino’s new cat, who had climbed up on the porch, sat and watched him. Around noon a stray dog passed by. All afternoon there was not a soul to be seen, apart from a solitary chicken.

The next morning, as Llukan the Jailbird came swearing down from the prison again with his blanket over his shoulder and kerchief-wrapped bread in hand, everyone finally got the idea that a period of no government had begun.

The first doors were opened just a slit. Little by little, the street came back to life. Some people ventured into the city centre. The Addis Ababa Café re-opened. The wind scattered newspaper shreds in the square. Empty tins lay here and there. The town hall looked sullen, with all its doors and windows boarded up. People strolled around, eyeing empty crates with Latin or Greek letters painted in black on their boards. The pedestal of the city’s only monument had been plastered with notices issued by the Italian and Greek garrison commanders. The posters were all torn. Someone was carefully gathering up random pieces: “XAQIS”, “KAT”, “Q”, “NX”. His collar was turned up, and he kept shaking his head, perhaps because he couldn’t find all the words. The cold wind blew the shreds from his hands.

These posters, turned to scraps by wind and rain, were all that remained of the turmoil of recent days. The city had been left without a government. In quick succession it had lost the planes, the anti-aircraft guns, the siren, the brothel, the searchlight and the nuns.

Briefly seduced by adventure, and having had a taste of the sky and of international dangers, the city had been stunned by it all and now withdrew into its ancient stones. Wind and rain were now vying to anaesthetise its jagged nerves. It was dazed. Its links to the sky had been permanently severed. The foreign planes that passed overhead no longer recognised it, or pretended not to see it. They flew high, leaving behind only a disdainful rumble.

One morning, after carefully closing the door behind her, Kako Pino went out into the street.

“Where are you off to, Kako Pino?” Bido Sherifi’s wife asked from her window.

“To a wedding.”

“A wedding? Who’s got it into his head to get married in times like these?”

“People marry in all kinds of times,” Kako Pino said.

The fact that Kako Pino was on her way to a wedding showed that the city could easily cope without a government. But as in any period of transition, these were uncertain times. The normal rules of life were suspended. The newspapers did not come out. No courts were in session. No more announcements, posters or ordinances appeared on the walls of the town hall. News, whether local or foreign, came only by word of mouth. The chief source was an old, hitherto unknown woman whose name suddenly spread far and wide in those faceless days. Her name was Sose, but most people called her “Old News”.

Ex-convicts, suspicious-looking men from the Highlands of Labëri, and other strangers wandered through the town. Everything was fleeting, unstable. The squares, streets and telegraph poles hoarded their secrets. Doors were manifestly mistrustful. The days were cold and without substance. Only the chimney stacks were fully alive.

It was then that Xhexho reappeared. The knock at the door fell on my head like a hammer blow. I wanted to hide, disappear, but it was impossible. Up the stairs she came, wheezing as always. Fear, gossip and news scurried before her like little black cats. There was no stopping them.

“Well, it’s Xhexho!” Grandmother said.

“Xhexho!” my mother said.

“How are you, Xhexho?” my father asked. “Where have you been all this time?”

Xhexho didn’t answer. As always, it was Grandmother she talked to.

“You see, Selfixhe? You see what God has sent us? I told you, Selfixhe, that black water would spurt from the springs. And sure enough, it did. Black. Have you seen the bomb-craters at Hazmurat? And Meçite? And Upper Palorto? Black water everywhere.”

“What is this black water?” I whispered to my mother.

“Bombs make craters in the ground, and they fill up with dirty water,” she said.

“But these people never learn,” Xhexho went on in her rasping, doom-laden voice. “Did you hear what they did? They stole that Englishman’s arm from that mu . . . mu-. . . how do you say it?”

“Museum,” my father said.

“Stole it, Selfixhe. No more, no less.”

“But who? What for?” my mother asked.

“A good question,” Xhexho whined. “Because they’re possessed, my girl. Because this is the age of the Evil One. Everything is upside down. Heaven dropped that Englishman’s arm down on us. Now you’ll see German hair and Chinese beards raining down on us, and then nails of Jews and Arabs’ noses . . .”

Xhexho went on and on. I stood aside, listening hard and trying to imagine a snowfall of nails, hair, beards and noses. I would ask Grandmother as soon as Xhexho left.

Maksut came by in the street, carrying a head I thought I recognised under his arm. It had been a long time since I’d seen his pretty wife. I would have to wait for spring to see her sitting out on her doorstep again. By this time they must have had a pyramid of severed heads at their house like the ones piled up by Genghis Khan. What was . . . garita doing now, I wondered. (The way she looked, her face, even her name now came to my mind only in part, like a hunk of bread gnawed by rats.)

Xhexho left. At first Qani Kekezi was suspected of stealing the Englishman’s arm, but then suspicion fell on Xivo Gavo the chronicler. Others thought it had been a smuggler from Varosh. The rumour was that he had sold the arm to a monastery on the other side of the mountain.

The city busied itself with petty affairs. That good-for-nothing Lame Kereco Spiri wandered the streets drunk, lamenting the passing of the brothel.

“They closed it, they closed it,” he kept saying, almost sobbing. “My warm little hearth, my feathered nest. They closed it on me! Woe is me! Where will I lay my head these winter nights?”

From time to time Llukan the Jailbird joined in the lament.

“My warm little hearth, my feathered nest,” Llukan would repeat mechanically.

“Get out of here! Have you no shame?” the old ladies shouted at them. “Get out of here!”

“Oh my lost little nest, where have you gone?
O sole mio
,” Lame Kareco Spiri mumbled in bewilderment as he blew kisses to the old ladies.

“Get out of here, good for nothing! May lightning strike you, may the earth swallow you up!”

“
Doubt thou the stars are fire; doubt that the sun doth move
. . .”

“Doubt that the sun doth move?” repeated Llukan.

“Go to hell, both of you.”

Things had really ground to a halt. People and things seemed to crawl along. Cattle grazed in the aerodrome field. Dino Çiço had suspended his research. His imagination was running dry.

In this somnolent state the city sought to re-establish contact with the outside world once more. To do so it used the old anti-aircraft gun in the citadel.

This old gun, kept in the citadel’s western tower since the days of the monarchy, could be seen from every corner of the city. Its long barrel, seeming slightly tired, pointed permanently at the sky. It was a familiar object as dear to everyone as its neighbour, the old clock, set into the other tower next to it. But with the passing years people had almost forgotten how to make use of that long tube and the handles, gears and winches built into the emplacement. From the time of its dedication (old men could still remember the ceremony organised by the city government, with patriotic speeches, music, bottles of beer and Lamçe the Gypsy who got thoroughly drunk and leapt from the fortress wall to his death in the street) the anti-aircraft gun had never once been fired.

After the bombing started, once people recovered from the initial shock and took cover in the shelters, the memory of the weapon flashed through the back of their minds. They recalled that the long metal tube, the levers and mechanism called “anti-aircraft gun”, were meant for just such occasions. It was a kind of revelation and everyone started asking:

“What about our anti-aircraft gun? Why doesn’t it come on?”

“You’re right, we do have an anti-aircraft gun. Why don’t we ever hear it?”

The initial disillusionment with our anti-aircraft defence was bitter indeed. When people came out of the cellars, they looked towards the western tower, where the silhouette of the weary, unmoved barrel stood out against the sky.

“It’s an outrage.” The expression, which as far as I knew was usually applied to women, and definitely not to weapons, was first uttered in the Addis Ababa Café, and was soon on everybody’s lips.

It was outrageous the old gun hadn’t been heard . . . If it had been a miserable little fire-cracker or some handgun of the kind infantrymen get as basic equipment, then it might be excused for being scared and upset at the sight of enemy aviation, but that long-limbed monster of a gun had been designed for just such eventualities and could not be forgiven for having let us down.

What people obviously held against it more than anything else was the length of its barrel. When I studied the gun with the help of Grandmother’s opera glasses I sometimes imagined I could read its thoughts. You often say of someone accused of a misdeed that he’s retreated into his shell, or that he’s shrunk away. But that poor gun could not hide or cringe, and had to stay sticking out in full sight of all.

Apparently some people took pity on it just as I did, and tried to invent excuses for it. It was rumoured that it was all the fault of the former mayor, the one who’d been in office at the time of the gun’s inauguration. People said he’d sold a key part of the mechanism — the range finder — and spent the proceeds on a wild orgy with a Macedonian whore in the fleshpots of Skopje. So he’d left the unfortunate weapon to cope with hostile skies without a range finder, which was like robbing it of its eyes.

Outrage steadily infiltrated the city. Meanwhile, other folk, of the kind who were utterly intransigent when the city’s honour was at stake (as they had been in the case of Argjir Argjiri) had a change of heart. True, there was something wrong with the gun, they said, but the defect had nothing to do with those stories about thieving and Macedonian whores. It was suffering a routine mechanical malfunction of the sort that could afflict materiel in any army in the world. Anyway, hadn’t officers of both opposing forces been to examine it, and taken a sceptical attitude towards its potential performance (not to mention the more offensive remarks they had made)? They can keep their opinions to themselves! others retorted. Don’t soldiers always bad-mouth their opponents’ equipment to make their own seem superior? Sure, armies have problems, but so do cities. Let others tear themselves to pieces with whatever weapons they want. But the city had to defend itself, by its own means. If all it had to fight with were lances — even if all it had were medieval pikestaffs! — then so be it! Because when all’s said and done, this was a matter of honour . . .

By the end of a day during which the arguments had gone back and forth, the view that the gun should be repaired finally prevailed. A procession consisting of a municipal mechanic, two of the town’s best clockmakers, Xivo Gavo the chronicler, the former artillery man Avdo Babaramo, a priest who had been unfrocked barely two weeks before and who claimed to have been a number in a gun crew in the First World War and to have even shot down a Turkish plane, and Qani Kekezi, whose presence had led Dino Çiço to change his mind and stay at home at the last minute, wound its way up to the citadel and its tower.