Chronicle in Stone (5 page)

He took a small piece of paper out of his pocket and scribbled on it in his slanted handwriting: “Forget about this idiotic magic. We have other things to worry about.”

“Not bad,” said Isa, polishing his glasses, “but maybe it would be better if we explained it a little more scientifically.”

Javer scowled, but not for long. The two friends finally noticed that we had been listening to them.

“Hey, you ghost-hunters! Have you been spying on us?”

The truth was that, like most kids in the neighbourhood, we were always on the lookout for magic talismans. We spent entire days searching everywhere: under doorsteps, in old cabinets, on roofs, in the bottom of fireplaces. Traces of our searches could be seen everywhere, and were especially apparent when it rained and the roof slates we had moved let in leaks. We had concentrated our investigations around Nazo’s house, because of her beautiful daughter-in-law.

Despite all our efforts, we had not found a single talisman, and we never imagined that we would discover one just when we had finally given up all hope.

It happened one sunny day in Fools’ Alley. We wouldn’t have traded this crooked ugly alley for any boulevard in the world, because no great street would ever have been so generous as to let children peel off its cobbles in broad daylight and do whatever they wanted with them. But Fools’ Alley, crazy as it was, allowed us to do that.

That day we were playing at throwing stones, when suddenly someone shouted in fear: “Look at this!”

We all ran towards him, then stopped, petrified. His face was tinged with green as he pointed to a dark spot on the ground. There among the rocks lay a magic ball the size of a fist. We cast frightened glances at one another and words stuck in our throats. (Xhexho later told me that the magic had stolen our power of speech.) But then suddenly great courage came upon us, as sometimes happens in a dream when you find yourself alone in some dark, deserted street, and your heart pounds in fright, and you sense that something evil is going to happen in this strange street, and you wait and wait for the evil but it holds back and you wait some more and your fear mounts and then somewhere something moves and a shadow, a half-seen face, comes near and your knees buckle and your voice goes and you’re about to faint but then suddenly, at the last minute, some insane fury grips you and your limbs feel free and your voice booms like thunder and you cry out, you charge the ghost and you . . . wake up. And that’s what happened to us.

“The magic! The magic!” we all yelled. Ilir picked it up and carried it off

“Witchcraft, witchcraft!” I yelled along with the others, and without knowing why, we raced down the alley, Ilir in the lead. We charged after him, screaming and panting in a mixture of joy and horror.

Shutters flew open noisily, and women young and old stuck their heads out in terror. “What is it? What’s going on?”

“The magic! The magic!” we howled, thundering through the neighbourhood like a pack of mad dogs.

Kako Pino appeared in her window and made the sign of the cross, Nazo’s beautiful daughter-in-law smiled with her big eyes, Mane Voco poked the long barrel of his rifle out of the dormer, and Isa’s face lit up behind the big lenses of his glasses, which shone like two suns.

“Ilir!” cried Mane Voco’s wife, pinching her cheeks and lurching after us. “Ilir, my son, for the love of God throw it away! Throw it away!”

But Ilir paid no attention. His eyes bulging, he ran on, as we followed behind.

“The magic! The magic!”

Our mothers shouted to us from windows and doors and over garden walls. They clawed their cheeks in horror, threatened and wept, but still we ran on, refusing to abandon the magic object. We believed we held the city’s anguish in that filthy ball of rags.

In the end we got tired and came to a stop at Zamani Square, bathed in sweat and covered with dust, barely able to catch our breath, but radiant with joy.

“What do we do now?” someone asked.

“Anyone have a match?”

Someone did.

Ilir lit the magic ball and threw it down. As it burned, we began to shout again, then unbuttoned our flies and pissed on it, cheering wildly and sprinkling each other for fun.

Water from the cistern wouldn’t lather. “It’s bewitched,” said Xhexho. “Change it at once or you’re done for.”

Changing the water was a tough job. My father was reluctant. Grandmother insisted on it, and the other neighbourhood women who drew water from our cistern took her side. They collected some money and offered to work all day alongside the cleaning workers.

At last the decision was made. The chore began. The workers went up and down by rope, lamps in hand. Bucket after bucket was emptied. The old water came out to make way for the new.

Javer and Isa sat staring and smoking at the foot of the stairs, and burst out laughing from time to time.

“What’s so funny?” asked Xhexho. “Why don’t you get a bucket and give us a hand?”

“This great labour reminds us of the pyramids of Egypt,” said Javer.

Nazo’s daughter-in-law smiled.

The buckets were deafening as they clattered off the walls of the cistern.

“What we need is new people, not new water,” Javer said. Isa burst out laughing.

Mane Voco, Isa’s father, looked disapprovingly at the two boys.

Grandmother was coming down the stairs carrying a tray with cups of coffee for the workers.

Breathing hard, they sipped their coffee standing up. The lack of air deep in the cistern had made them pale. One of them was called Omer. When he went down, I leaned over the opening of the cistern and said his name.

“Omer,” echoed the cistern. When it was empty, its voice was loud, but curiously hoarse, as though it had a cold.

“Do you know who Omer was — Homer, that is?” Isa asked me.

“No, tell me.”

“He was a blind poet of ancient Greece.”

“Who put out his eyes? The Italians?”

They laughed.

“He wrote wonderful books about one-eyed monsters and about a city called Troy and also about a wooden horse.”

I leaned into the opening again. “Homer,” I shouted. Patches of light and shadow mingled in the cistern.

“Hoooomer,” it answered.

I thought I could hear the tapping of a blind man’s cane.

FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE

while Japan prepared its attack on India and Australia. Trial. Writ server. Property. Gole Balloma from the Varosh district was subpoenaed for failure to pay his debts. L. Xuano’s household goods will be auctioned on Sunday. Warrants have been issued for the arrest of the old women H.Z. and C.V., charged with practising magic. Readers are advised that the defective quality of the last issue of the paper, with any errors that may have crept in, was due to the stomach trouble from which I suffered last week. Editor-in-chief. More undisciplined pupils have been expelled from school. We have received a number of complaints from parents about the teacher Qani Kekezi. This gentleman’s pedagogical procedures are strange indeed. During anatomy lessons he dissects cats in front of the children, who are terrified. Recently a mutilated cat got loose and leapt into the pupils’ benches, trailing its intestines. Miss Lejla Karllashi left yesterday for Italy. We take this opportunity to offer readers the departure times for the Durrës—Bari steamship line. Addresses of the city’s midwives.

FOUR

“You look a little sickly,” Grandmother said. “You’d better go stay at your grandfather’s for a few days.”

I liked to visit our maternal grandfather, whom we called
Babazoti
. His was a more cheerful place, not so harsh, and most of all there was no hunger there as there was in our house. In our big house, maybe because of the hallways, cupboards and cellars, you could really feel the hunger. Besides, our neighbourhood was grey, and thick with houses stuck almost on top of each other. Everything was hard and fixed, set down once and for all centuries ago. The streets, curves, corners, doorsteps, telephone poles and everything else seemed cut in stone and measured out to the last centimetre. But Grandfather’s place was different. There was nothing rigid about it. Everything seemed soft and mobile. The ground was free to do as it pleased — to stay level, for example, or to hump its back and throw streams into the river like a donkey shaking off its load. The scenery had something human about it: as the seasons passed it lost or gained weight, got lighter or darker, more beautiful or uglier. Whereas our neighbourhood was, so to speak, allergic to change.

Strangest of all was that that part of town had only two houses: Grandfather’s and another about a hundred yards away. The wasteland between them was rough and unfriendly. On misty mornings, you sometimes saw a stoat dashing across it, but then for days on end it stayed empty. The snakes were getting ready to hibernate underground. The fallen rocks and stones, which had tumbled down from who knows where centuries ago and settled in the bushes and sparse grasses, added to the sense of desolation. Everyone considered it a part of the city that was dying. The paths across it varied their tracks, as if impatient to abandon the place forever. And the bushes became more and more daring, sprouting in the most unexpected places: in the middle of the street, alongside the fountain, in the courtyards. One had even tried to grow on a doorstep, and had paid for its temerity with its life.

The bushes were ominous. Wandering around with Ilir in the upper districts, along the border between the mountains and the city, I noticed that the brush had grown even behind the row of ruins of the last houses, long since abandoned. There they lurked like wild beasts, surrounding the whole city. At night I could hear them howling. It was a muffled howl, barely perceptible, almost like a sob.

On the north side was the road leading to the citadel and linking the city’s upper districts with the centre. It overlooked the two houses at roof level. Once a truck had crashed into Babazoti’s courtyard. Sometimes a drunk stumbled onto the roof and rain would drip in for a week. But it didn’t happen often, since there were few passers-by on this street. From time to time somebody going home from the market in the hot afternoon would walk by singing at the top of his lungs.

The clock struck seven when I came by

I stood at your window and heaved a sigh.

And I heard what your darling voice said:

“If only I didn’t have such a pain in my head.”

It seemed that a woman named Miriam complained of recurring headaches at seven every evening. Not much to it, but I liked the song a lot. No one would have dared sing such a song in our neighbourhood. If anyone had, a dozen windows would be thrown open and women young and old would claw their cheeks in shame and rain curses and probably a bucket of water down on the impertinent singer. But here, in this wide deserted space, you could shout to your heart’s content and never fill it with the noise. It was no accident that the stranger broke into song as soon as he turned into this street. He must have been singing it in his head all day long, in the market, the coffee house, and the centre of town, eagerly waiting to get to this lonely place to let his lungs give full vent to it.

The evenings especially were stunningly beautiful in this neighbourhood, with a charm all their own. Whenever I heard people say “Good evening,” I thought of Grandfather’s courtyard, where the gypsies who lived in a separate shack would play their violins while Grandfather stretched out on a chaise longue and puffed on his big black pipe. The gypsies had not been able to pay their rent for years, and they seemed to consider these summer evening concerts a way of working off some of the debt.

“Babazoti,” I would whisper, “roll me one too,” and without a word he’d roll a thin cigarette, light it and hand it to me. I’d sit beside him and suck on the burning tobacco in delight, ignoring the threatening gestures my aunts and uncles directed at me from the shadows.

I thought there was no greater happiness in the world than to sit smoking after a good meal, listening like Grandpa, with half-closed eyes, to the gypsies playing their violins.

Ah! I thought, when I grow up I’ll buy myself a big black pipe that smokes like a chimney, and I’ll grow a beard like Grandpa’s and I’ll lie on the divan and read great big books all day long.

“Babazoti,” I said in a drawling, sleepy voice, “will you teach me Turkish?”

“I will,” he answered, “when you’re a little older.” His voice was deep and soothing, and as I leaned against the chaise longue, I dreamed of the magic of tobacco and tried to figure out how much I would smoke and how many books I would have to read in Turkish before my time to die would come.

The thick books lay in the trunk, piled one on top of the other, an endless swarm of Arabic letters waiting to carry me off and reveal secrets and mysteries, for only Arabic letters knew the path to the mysteries, just as ants know the holes and fissures underground.

“Babazoti,” I asked, “can you read ants?” He chuckled softly and patted my tousled hair.

“No, boy, you can’t read ants.”

“But why not? When they’re all piled up together, they look just like Turkish letters.”

“It only seems that way, but it’s not really true.”

“But I’ve seen them,” I insisted one last time.

As I drew on my cigarette, I wondered what ants were for if you couldn’t read them like books.

All these things were running pell-mell through my mind as I walked past Avdo Babaramo’s house. He was an old artilleryman whose house was the only one up near the citadel. Then I headed back down through the underbrush, along the narrow path that seemed to have moved yet again. Bits of memory, fragments of sentences or words, splinters of trivial events swarmed about, shoving and catching one another by the ear or nose with a brusqueness sharpened by the speed of my steps.

I came to Suzana’s house. Once she heard I had come, she would run over and flutter around between the edge of the cliff and the gypsies’ shack, where we’d played at skipping on my second visit. Then she would stop in the middle of the waste ground near a tree we called
badshade
and watch what was going on from afar. Then, for sure, she would creep close to the house, if she weren’t feeling too fearful of Grandfather’s Turkish books. Her flutterings had something of the butterfly but something of a stork as well. She was taller than me, thin, and had long hair that she combed in a different style each day. Everyone said she was pretty. There were no other little girls or boys in Grandfather’s neighbourhood, so Suzana always waited impatiently for me to come. She said being around grown-ups bored her. Sitting at home embroidering bored her, going to the wash-house bored her, eating meals bored her. She was bored morning, noon and night. In short, she was
really
bored. She liked the word a lot and she spoke it with the greatest care, as if afraid to bruise it accidentally with tooth or tongue.

I would tell Suzana all kinds of things about life in our neighbourhood. She listened to everything attentively, with her eyebrows arched. Last time, when I told her about Çeço Kaili’s daughter’s beard, she opened her eyes wide, bit her lip two or three times, and was about to say something, but she held back, hesitated again, and then leaned forward, her face pale, her mouth near my ear, and asked: “Do you know any rude words?”

“Leave me alone, you idiot,” I said.

“You’re the one who’s an idiot,” she said, almost screaming, and ran off. As she ran she turned once and yelled from far off: “Idi-o-o-t!”

That evening she came back into the yard and, putting her long thin arm around my shoulder, she whispered softly, “I’m sorry I called you an idiot. I wanted to tell you a
secret
, but I forgot that you’re a boy.”

“I don’t want your secrets,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of my own at home.”

She started to laugh, but then ran off, happy that we were more or less friends again.

This time I was coming to Grandfather’s bursting with scary news. I felt like a sort of hero coming home from a magic kingdom. I pictured the astonishment I would arouse with what I had to tell. But little did I know that a disturbing surprise was waiting for me in that old house: Margarita.

The moment I stepped through the courtyard gate and looked up I saw her in one of the upper-storey windows. I had never seen such a beautiful woman’s face in a house I could only imagine as a repository of aunts, uncles, Arabic letters and food.

She was sitting near the flowerpots, utterly, miraculously alien; as strange and unexpected as a rose that suddenly blooms one morning on a thorny stem.

“Who’s that?” I asked Grandma, a bit taken aback.

“Our new tenant,” she said. “We rented her the corner room a week ago.”

Margarita smiled through the flowerpots and asked, “Is this your grandson?”

“Yes,” Grandma answered.

I felt my ears turn red and ran out through the courtyard gate. As I stood at the gate, I heard something, a flutter of wings. Suzana, I thought.

“So, you’ve come back,” she said.

I had suddenly lost the urge to tell stories about the neighbourhood. “What can I tell you? There’s nothing to tell,” I said.

“Nothing?” she asked, with disappointment.

“Well, there are some stories about magic.”

“Magic? How come? Tell me.”

“There are different kinds.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

I stayed silent.

“Why don’t you want to tell me about it? Go on! Or else tell me about the Italians.”

I still didn’t say anything.

“You’re really stupid,” she said. “
Extra-ordi-narily
.”

“Really,
extra-ordi-narily
?”

I took the round lens from my pocket and stuck it to one eye, holding it in place between my cheek and brow. To hold the lens that way I had to distort my whole face and keep my neck frozen stiff. Suzana hated seeing me like that.

“Boo! Monster!” she said.

“I quite like my look.”

“Why do you want to look so ugly?”

“Because I feel like it.”

I began to move slowly, holding my neck stiff and my face screwed up, tightening every muscle to keep the lens from falling. She looked at me scornfully. For a moment I forgot my inexplicable irritation with her and, wanting to show off, I walked into the gypsies’ room with the lens over one eye, provoking the little cries of surprise and wonder that this trick usually aroused in them. On my way out I felt my cheek going numb. I couldn’t hold the lens in place any more, so I took it off and put it back in my pocket.

Suzana saw me take it off and came up to me and said softly, “Why are you always in a bad mood when you come over from your place?”

I looked at her and realised from her expression that she was closer to affection than to resentment. She took a step towards me.

“If you only knew! I’m so alone here. So bored.”

Her smile anticipated the kind words I would say, but just then, as if driven by some blind and irresistible force, suddenly and unthinkingly, I blurted out in a drawl that even I didn’t recognise as my own the words I had heard an Italian say:

“Che puttana!”

She clapped her hands to her mouth, took a step back, then another, then turned and ran away as fast as she could through the undergrowth. I stood there a moment, rooted to the ground. My forehead was covered with sweat. I was brought back to my senses by Grandma calling me for lunch.

I didn’t see Suzana again for the four days of my visit. Sometimes I thought I heard a rustle somewhere around me, but I couldn’t tell exactly where and I never did catch sight of her.

Autumn was closing in, the roses in the yard were fading, and everything was getting more barren by the day, but Grandfather’s old house had become brighter. These were the last evenings when the gypsies would play their violins. Grandfather, after reading his big books all afternoon, now smoked his pipe in the courtyard in the half-light, reclining on the divan. I would sit near him on a stool as usual, but I’d lost interest in tobacco and Turkish books, for Margarita often sat near me and put her arm around my shoulder. The sky was pitch black and now and then a falling star flashed in the void.

“A shooting star,” Margarita said softly. “Did you see it?”

I nodded.

To tell the truth, a star falling from the sky made about as much impression on me as a button falling off a coat, for Margarita’s thick hair was spread across my neck and her hair, her whole body, had a subtle fragrance I had never noticed on Mamma, Grandma or any of my aunts. Nor was it like any of the other smells I liked best, including the aroma of my favourite dishes.

It had grown cooler, and Grandpa got up from the chaise longue earlier now than on summer evenings. Everyone else got up after he did, the gypsies would put their violins back in their cases, and for a moment there would be silence. Then there would be a flash of lightning in the distance and Grandfather would say, “It’s going to rain tomorrow.”

“Good night,” the Gypsies would say on their way back to their shack.

“Good night,” Margarita’s husband would say, on the rare occasions he stayed there.

“Good night,” Margarita would reply in her warm voice.

“Good night,” they would all answer in turn.

I would say “Good night” too, last of all, sleepy as I was. Then the old steps would creak for a while until calm and sleep settled over everything.