Chronicle in Stone (8 page)

Aunt Xhemo listened in silence as the other women discussed the strange new establishment.

“You’re crazy to go on like this,” she finally said. “I was wondering what was happening. I thought they were opening this . . . this what do you call it, this communal canteen.”

Aunt Xhemo had always been worried about the existence of canteens. In her mind it was the worst possible calamity.

“Why are you fretting over a bordello?” she cried. “I could understand someone with a young husband being concerned,” she said, glancing at Nazo’s daughter-in-law. “But why should you care? Don’t be so silly!”

Nazo’s daughter-in-law smiled and, to everyone’s astonishment, put her hand to her mouth, and burst out laughing. Nazo nudged her in the ribs with her elbow.

The gathering adjourned. Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo slowly climbed back up the two flights of wooden stairs.

“Whatever will we hear about next, Selfixhe?” Aunt Xhemo sighed.

“When foreigners set foot in the country, you have to be ready for anything,” Grandmother answered. “A young girl can’t sit in the window any more without the Italians taking out pocket mirrors and flashing signals at her.”

“It was obvious from the day they arrived that they were fops,” said Aunt Xhemo. “God knows I’ve seen my share of armies, but I never thought I’d come across soldiers wearing perfume.”

“If that were all, I wouldn’t mind. But what I don’t like is what they’re doing down there,” said Grandmother, nodding towards the airfield.

Aunt Xhemo sighed. “War is at our doorstep, Selfixhe.”

Meanwhile, the women at their windows kept talking about the new business in the house they called a “board”. All the lightning in the heavens was called down upon it. A hundred times a day it was consumed by flames, reduced to ashes, but it must have arisen from those ashes every time, for the curses continued to rain down.

A new wave of
katenxhikas
flooded the streets and alleys. The cold wind still blew from the northern mountain passes, fluttering the black scarves of the
katenxhikas
and making their eyes water with teardrops that filled out like glass beads. They walked up and down, never stopping.

The city was truly sick. Now it was easy to see it sweating. Windows often shivered convulsively. Chimneys groaned. Every night the searchlight’s one eye lit up. Polyphemus. I dreamed of creeping up on it with a red-hot poker to put out that horrible eye. And I imagined the blinded searchlight would scream with pain all night long.

They were troubled times, and everything was uncertain. I thought of the shifting landscape around Grandfather’s house. It looked as if the ground around our house would soon start moving too. Everyone thought so.

Ilir raced down Fools’ Alley.

“Guess what?” he said, as he came through the door. “The world is round like a melon. I saw it at home. Isa brought it. It’s round, perfectly round, and it spins without stopping.”

He took a long time to tell me just what he had seen.

“But how come they don’t fall off?” I asked when he told me there were other cities under us, full of people and houses.

“I don’t know,” Ilir said. “I forgot to ask Isa. He and Javer were home looking at the globe. Then Javer tapped it with his finger and said, ‘Soon it’ll be a slaughterhouse.’”

“A slaughterhouse?”

“Yes. That’s what he said. The world will drown in blood. That’s what he said.”

“Where will all the blood come from?” I asked. “Fields and mountains don’t have blood.”

“Maybe they do,” said Ilir. “They must know something, the way they talk. When Javer said the world would be a slaughterhouse, I told him we’d been there and had seen how they slaughter sheep. He started laughing and said, ‘Now you’ll see what happens when they slaughter nations.’”

“Nations? Like on the postage stamps, you mean?”

“Right. Like that. Nations.”

“Who’s going to slaughter them?”

Ilir shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

I thought about the slaughterhouse again. One day when she was talking about the aerodrome Xhexho said that the fields and grasses would be covered with cement. With wet slippery cement. A rubber hose sluicing cities and nations. To wash away the blood . . . Maybe we were only at the beginning of the slaughter. But I found it hard to imagine nations being led to the slaughter, bleating as they went. Peasants in their black woollen cloaks. Butchers in white coats. Rams, ewes, lambs. People standing around to watch. Other people just waiting. Then it was time. France. Norway. The square awash with blood. Holland bleating. Luxembourg like a newborn lamb. Russia with a big bell around its neck. Italy a goat (I don’t know why). Something mooing all on its own. Who could that be?

“Well, what do you hear about this house they’re all talking about?” Ilir asked.

“I heard it’s bad. Very bad.”

“You know what? They say it’s full of beautiful young girls.”

“Really? Xhexho says they’re bad women.”

“But beautiful.”

“Beautiful? You’re crazy.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy!”

Both of us shut up for a while.

Meanwhile the bordello had set the whole town abuzz. Xhexho swept in and out of our house several times a day, bringing the most incredible news. The wind blew constantly. There had not been such powerful gusts of wind for decades. They said that old Xivo Gavo had decided to mention the windstorm in his chronicle.

Around that time they had the first air-raid siren tests. At noon there came a wail that froze the marrow of our bones.

“That must be Bido Sherifi’s mother-in-law,” Grandmother said. “Nobody else can shriek like that.”

Papa and Mamma leaned on the windowsill. The wailing continued, but it was no human cry. It came in waves, seemed to fade away and then suddenly rose again, rending the heavens with yet more power. Not even a hundred of Bido Sherifi’s mothers-in-law could have made such a sound.

“It’s a siren,” my father said bleakly. “I heard one once in Egypt.”

Grandmother was dumbfounded.

So it was that the city came to have a siren.

“Now we have a mourner who will wail for us all,” said Xhexho, who had come to visit that afternoon. “That’s all we needed, Selfixhe. All we have to do now is wait for the archangel to gather up our souls.”

As if all this were not enough, something else happened that shook even those who had kept calm until then. Argjir Argjiri got married.

I had noticed that announcements of engagements or weddings sometimes surprised people, making some happy and bringing smiles to others. But I never thought the news of a wedding could be seen by everyone, without exception, as a major catastrophe. Have you heard? Argjir Argjiri is getting married. You’re kidding! No, really, it’s true. Don’t talk nonsense. Argjir Argjiri getting married? How? Well, he is. Come on! It’s impossible. No it isn’t. Kako Pino has even been summoned to paint the bride. No, it’s unbelievable. It can’t be. But I heard the same thing. It’s true then? Yes, it’s true. God, what an abomination. How shameful!

Argjir Argjiri was a short dark man with a voice so high-pitched he sounded like a woman. Everyone knew him, he roamed around in all the neighbourhoods. People said he was half-woman and half-man, and he was the only male, or supposed male, who came and went freely in every house even when the men weren’t home. Argjir helped the women with various household chores, looked after the children when the women were at the wash-house, went to fetch water with them and retailed gossip. He had a house of his own, and people said that he helped women not because he had to but because he liked their company and women’s work. This was after all not so strange, given that Argjir Argjiri was half-man and half-woman. Although for years he had been the butt of jokes and the object of jeers, by way of compensation he had won a right enjoyed by no other man: he could mingle freely with our city’s women and girls.

And now suddenly Argjir Argjiri announced that he was getting married. It was a terrible act of defiance.

The creature with the effeminate voice suddenly declared his manhood. For years he had borne the most biting taunts, awaiting his hour of revenge. The city scowled at such an intolerable outrage. There wasn’t a single home Argjir Argjiri had not entered, not a single woman he didn’t know. Dark suspicion stalked the town.

Hopes that the reports were false soon evaporated. Kako Pino was summoned. An orchestra was hired, the wedding date was set. Hopes that Argjir Argjiri would change his mind likewise dwindled. Even repeated threats, so rumours said, had no effect. He remained adamant. More pressure was put on him, but he stood his ground. It was all done very discreetly, through clenched teeth and in anonymous letters. No one wanted to lead the campaign against Argjir Argjiri openly, for fear of seeming to have a personal axe to grind.

No one ever found out why the man with the treble voice suddenly rebelled. What had happened to him? Why was he doing it? That’s right, why? At last the wedding night arrived. The city was under curfew. The wind that had been blowing for two weeks suddenly stopped. The silence seemed deeper after its incessant whistling. The eye of the searchlight blinked, then went out. The wedding drums rolled as if tolling the death of the city’s honour.

“The cup runneth over,” Xhexho commented bitterly. Now, she said, we could expect the springs to gush black water.

“That’s all we needed,” Isa said to Javer as he smoked in the dark. “The marriage of that hermaphrodite.”

“Things are all adrift,” Javer answered. “This town is going to wind up like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

The attack was swift and merciless. The siren failed to give a warning in time. The city was gripped by convulsions, like an epileptic. It pitched over, nearly fell. It was a Sunday, nine in the morning. On that October day near mid-century, the ancient city, pounded countless times through the ages by catapult and cannon, shell and battering ram, was attacked from the sky for the first time. Broken foundations groaned with pain like blinded men. Thousands of terrified windows spewed their shattered panes.

After the infernal thundering, the world went deaf and dumb. The distraught city gazed up at a clear sky, which seemed to beg forgiveness for having stood by and watched. The three tiny silver crosses that had shaken that immense mass of stone to its foundations were now moving off into the distance.

The bombing left sixty-two dead. Granny Neslihan was found in the rubble, buried up to her waist. She didn’t understand what had happened to her. Waving her long arms in the air, she cried, “Who killed me?” She was 142 years old. And blind.

FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE

Prepare for an air raid. Build yourself a shelter to protect you and yours from the British bombs. Have sandbags ready and store water in the house. Get a hatchet, a shovel and a pickaxe to fight fire. City hall. Trial. Executive measures. Property. Trials are suspended until further notice. Our fellow townsman Argjir Argjiri was found dead in the bridal chamber the morning after his ill-fated marriage. The city could not forgive the man who had so disgraced it. Dr S. Çuberi. Venereal diseases. Daily from four to eight p.m. List of casualties of the latest

SEVEN

The city was bombed every day that week. Everything else was forgotten. No one talked of anything but bombs and planes. Hardly a word was even said about the death of Argjir Argjiri, who was found murdered at dawn, just a few hours after his wedding. His killers, like the authors of the threatening letters, were never identified.

On the seventh day of bombing something happened that was not without importance. A tin plaque was put up in our street. Some strangers came by early in the morning and nailed it to the wall of our house, to the right of the front door. In big black letters it read: “Air-raid shelter for 90 persons”.

There were no other signs in our street. We had never seen anything but a few posters giving city ordinances, and they peeled off in two or three days, soaked by the rain and torn by the wind. Obscene graffiti were occasionally scrawled on the walls of houses in chalk or charcoal. But not often. The first real placard was the one nailed to the right of our door.

That day passers-by stopped in front of it and those who could read explained it to the others.

“Is this house for sale?”

“No, Grandpa. It’s about something else.”

“What?”

“It says we should come and hide in this cellar when the planes drop their bombs.”

“Really?”

I stood at the door smiling at passers-by as if to say, “See, that’s what you call a house.” I was very proud. There were many large and beautiful houses in our neighbourhood, but none of them, not Çeço Kaili’s or Bido Sherifi’s or even Mak Karllashi’s mansion had a plaque like this one. It meant that ours was the strongest of all.

I kept smiling, but to my disappointment no one seemed to pay any attention to me. Except for Harilla Lluka, who when he caught sight of me took off his hat with the greatest respect and nodded in my direction. They said Harilla Lluka was the biggest coward in the neighbourhood.

But the indifference of the adults didn’t bother me much. I stayed there at the door and waited impatiently for Ilir to come by. Only a few days before, we had had a long argument about whose house was stronger. We often used to make bets of that kind with each other. Just before that we had been fighting about how far the king could throw a stone. I said he could throw a stone as far as Holy Trinity hill, while Ilir was adamant that he couldn’t throw it further than the riverbank. At the very most, as far as the bridge, but certainly no further.

Who knows how long this argument would have gone on if we hadn’t acquired a new topic for our squabbles! We fought even harder over the relative strengths of our houses, and could have gone on with that fight for a very long time. We might have insulted each other, or even turned to fists or stones, if those strangers hadn’t shown up that fine morning and put up the plaque with those marvellous words: “Air-raid shelter for 90 persons”.

Probably out of spite, Ilir never showed up. He must have heard about the plaque and sneaked home through the alley.

I waited a long time, then finally got bored and went in. I went straight downstairs to the cellar and stood looking respectfully at its thick walls, which hadn’t been whitewashed in ages.

Until then the cellar had never been an important part of the house. We used it to store coal or to slake lime. Compared to the main room two flights up from the ground the cellar was a kind of scullery maid. This main living room had six big fine windows as tall as my father, and a grainy, mottled ceiling of carved wood. A lot of housekeeping went on in this room. My mother would wash and scrub the floorboards until they shone like wax. The curtains on the windows were white with lace borders, and the room was ringed by low wooden ledges covered with thin mattresses, where old women would sit when they came to visit, sipping their coffee and making sage pronouncements. It was easy to see why the other rooms, even the hallway, were jealous of the main room. Envy could be detected in their constricted windows with their sills out of true and in their hunched, narrow doorways.

But everything changed the day the bombs started falling. The windows in the main room were shattered. The room got upset and lost its looks, while the old cellar, tranquil and kind, cared little about what was going on outside.

I felt sorry for the main room, now abandoned by everyone. During the bombing, while the thick walls of the cellar didn’t even vibrate, I felt bad for the main room all alone up there, for I knew it was trembling, shaking all over. I thought of the room as a lady of great beauty now suffering terrible anguish, her nerves strained, while the cellar was an old crone, deaf but tough. As the living room lost its status, the cellar was becoming the most honoured part of the house. It was as if our house had simply been turned upside down.

I would sometimes go up to the living room, now abandoned for good, and look out at the neighbouring houses, their roofs pierced with large holes through which the fine autumn rain now poured. I thought that after the first bombing the same upheaval must have happened in those houses as in ours. Perhaps the damp cellars and basements of the city had been waiting years for this day. Perhaps they had always felt that their time would come.

No doubt about it, these were hard times for the upper floors of the city. When it was built, the wood had cunningly had itself hoisted up top, leaving the stone to the foundations, cellars and cisterns. Down there in the half-darkness, the stone had to fight the rising damp and the groundwater, while the wood, nicely carved and carefully tended, adorned the upper floors. These were light, almost ethereal: the city’s dream, its caprice, its flight of fancy. Now the fancy had met its limit. After giving the upper floors such privileges, the city seemed to have changed its mind, and hurried to rectify the error. It had them covered with roofs of slate, as if to establish once and for all that here stone was king.

In any case, I liked this new age of cellar and basement. All over the city they were putting up metal plaques saying “Air-raid shelter for 15 persons” or “for 22 persons” or “for 35 persons”. But plaques saying “Air-raid shelter for 90 persons” were very rare. I was proud of our house. Suddenly it was the centre of the neighbourhood. It had really come to life. We left the gates open so people could come running in at the first sound of the siren. Some even came ahead of time and would sit for hours in the entrance hall leading to the cellar, eating, smoking and chatting.

The cellar was deep underground. A thick wall separated it from the cistern, part of which ran underneath it. A bit of light came in through a narrow slit cut into the foundation slightly above ground level. The air inside was now altogether stuffy.

Our house had become a public place, and not a day passed without some incident. Someone sprained an ankle running down the narrow steps too fast, others argued over room, someone else swore at all the others when they wouldn’t let him smoke because it might bother the people who were sick. But most of all they bickered over the best spots. Almost everyone brought along blankets, bedding, and even mattresses, and things got more and more crowded.

“What an age we live in,” Bido Sherifi grumbled. “Having to burrow underground like this!”

“These Italian swine will put us through a lot more before they’re through,” Mane Voco said.

“Not so loud! There may be spies here.”

“And the English! Why do they bomb the city instead of dropping their shells on the Italian barracks or the aerodrome?”

“I told you that damned aerodrome would bring the bombs.”

“Look, would you lower your voice?”

“Leave me alone,” Bido Sherifi replied. “All my life I’ve lowered my voice.”

Besides the usual neighbours, all kinds of other people came. Some I had never seen before, or at least not so close up. Qani Kekezi, squat and ruddy, cast his murky eyes here and there, as if looking for a cat. The women were afraid of him, especially Kako Pino. Lady Majnur, from the rich Kavo family, would go down the cellar stairs holding her nose. Two months earlier I had seen a peasant unloading a mule near the gate of her house. He was so filthy (he and the mule had probably both fallen in the mud) that his face and hands looked as if they were made of earth. From her window Lady Majnur was complaining to a neighbour: “He’s the only one who brings the grain he owes me. The other Christian yokels, pardon my language, have started cheating me.”

As for Xhexho, there was scarcely any sign of her. That happened from time to time. She would suddenly vanish. But no one worried much about these disappearances, any more than anyone was surprised when she reappeared.

Sometimes our cellar received chance visitors, passersby caught by the bombing or people visiting the neighbourhood. That was how the old artilleryman, Avdo Babaramo, arrived one day with his wife. He sat down near some old men who spent hours airing their views on world affairs in endless conversations in which all kinds of names of states, kings and governments came up. They also talked about Albania a lot. I listened curiously, racking my brain trying to understand exactly what was this Albania they were so worried about. Was it everything I saw around me: courtyards, streets, clouds, words, Xhexho’s voice, people’s eyes, boredom, or only a part of all that?

“In Smyrna one time,” the old artilleryman said, “a dervish asked me, ‘Which do you love more, your family or Albania?’ Albania, of course, I told him. A family you can make overnight. You walk out of a coffee house, run into a woman on the corner, take her to a hotel, and boom — wife and children. But you can’t make Albania overnight after a quick drink in a coffee house, can you? No, not in one night and not in a thousand and one nights either.”

“What a way to talk!” his wife said. “You’re getting senile. The older you get, the more you blabber on.”

“Oh shut up! As if you women knew anything about politics.”

“Yes, sir,” another old man added. “Albania is a complicated business all right.”

“
Ex-treme-ly
complicated. It sure is.”

Usually these conversations were interrupted by the siren, and people rushed downstairs. Grandmother always went down last. The stairs creaked in protest at her footsteps. Hurry, Grandmother, hurry! But she never hurried. She always had some reason for being late. Sometimes she was still on the stairs when the first bombs exploded. When she heard the sound, she would make an impatient gesture as if shooing away a fly, and putting her hands over her ears, she would say, “Go on! Burst away.”

I would watch people heading for the stairs, anxious to see Çeço Kaili and his daughter. But the red-headed Çeço never came. He obviously preferred to brave the bombs at home rather than have people see his daughter’s beard. Old Xivo Gavo, who spent his days and nights writing his chronicle, didn’t come either. The old crones also stayed away. Aqif Kashahu, on the other hand, came with his two sons and his wife and daughter. He was as tall and stout as his daughter was small and frail. She never spoke, just cowered in a corner with a pensive, absent-minded air. Bido Macbeth Sherifi stared at Aqif Kashahu as if he were a ghost. Every time his wife came down into the cellar, she was shaking flour from her hands. And the flour was always red with blood. Aqif Kashahu’s ghost looked at everyone in turn. The cellar was full.

“Another air raid!”

The siren was always soft at first, as if awakening from a dream, but then its wailing got more and more raucous. Between two blasts was a valley of silence. A deep valley. Then the peaks of wailing again. Loud and undulating. Pit of silence. Another bout of wailing. Wailing and more wailing. Like trying to use a blanket to smother a piercing shriek that sought only to tear through it. A wild, savage shriek. The whole world is shrieking. Then the bombs. Very near. Then a sudden thunderbolt, an invisible hand turns the world upside down and blows out the two kerosene lamps. Black darkness. A scream rips the darkness. No one moves. We must be dead.

Silence. Then something moves. A noise. Like a match being struck. We are not dead. The match. The pale flame cuts streaks of light in the dark room. Everyone starts moving. All are alive. They light another lamp. But no. Someone is dead. Aqif Kashahu’s daughter’s thin arms droop lifelessly. Her head too. Her chestnut hair hangs motionless.

At last Aqif Kashahu lets out the scream I had long been expecting. But it’s not a cry of pain. A ferocious shriek. The girl’s head quivers. She turns round slowly, looking dazed. Her dangling arms contract. The boy in whose arms she was entwined during the bombing also stirs.

“Whore!” Aqif Kashahu screams.

His huge hand grabs her by the hair and he drags her towards the stairs. She tries to get up but falls down again. He hauls her to the middle of the cellar, and only at the foot of the stairs does she somehow manage to get up, scrambling on all fours. He still has hold of her hair.

We could hear the whistling of a dive-bomber outside, but Aqif Kashahu did not turn back. Dragging his daughter by the hair, he went out into the street at the height of the thunderous roar. And so they left under the falling bombs.

The boy had moved back into a corner and was looking at everyone like a trapped animal. I didn’t know him. He had light eyes and fair hair. His jaw trembled nervously. Suspiciously, as though expecting someone to jump him any minute, he crossed the cellar through a silence that wasn’t silent and went out.

An uproar broke out as soon as he had gone.

“Who in the world was that boy? Where did he come from? Woe betide us!”

“I’ve never seen him before.”

“God, that’s all we needed!”

“How shameful!”

“So Kashahu’s daughter wasn’t as pure as she made out!”

“Deplorable behaviour!”

“She was all over him, like a tart!”

“Like an Italian slut!”

The women pinched their cheeks in despair, adjusted the scarves on their heads, and clucked in indignation. The men stayed stock still.

“Love,” Javer muttered through clenched teeth.

Isa watched sadly.

The whole cellar seethed.