The Fall of the Stone City (17 page)

The graves were exhumed forty years later in September 1993, shortly after the fall of communism.

Relatives of the deceased found the bodies handcuffed, just as they had been buried. It was discovered first of all that one of the shackled men was not Little Dr Gurameto but someone else who
was never identified. Little Dr Gurameto’s body was never found, despite his family’s persistent efforts. Indeed, the little doctor had left such few and slight traces behind him that
some people began to doubt he had ever existed. Further research did not lay these suspicions to rest and indeed only strengthened them. There was no mention of Little Dr Gurameto in the
investigation record or the witness statements. Plenty of people believed, even if they did not say so publicly, that Little Dr Gurameto had been merely an exteriorisation or projection of Big Dr
Gurameto’s unconscious, a projection which the people around him for some inexplicable reason had accepted.

Dr Gurameto’s file was opened again fifteen years later in the spring of 2007, when the European Union asked Albania, like all the other countries of the former Eastern
Bloc, to punish the crimes of communism.

This time, European as well as Albanian experts examined the case for weeks. Rarely had they been given the chance to get their teeth into such an investigation, which involved the secret
services of several countries with entirely different regimes and histories: the royal and later the communist Albanian secret service, the German Gestapo and Stasi and the Soviet and indirectly
the Israeli secret services. Moreover, besides such curiosities as the rhymes of Blind Vehip and the confessions of women, who, terrified by the summons to the Investigator’s Office, had
revealed secrets that they had sworn to take to their graves, the file also included the statements of the surgeon’s daughter and his wife. The latter had testified to things that only she
could know, such as the doctor’s nightmares, and legends such as that of the dead house guest, which his grandmother, as he himself had recalled, had used to lull him to sleep. Among the
doctor’s several expressions of remorse for things he shouldn’t have done, the most important was his sigh, “Ah, that dinner . . . ” which occasionally escaped him quite
unexpectedly.

Even so, the more complicated the file on Dr Gurameto grew, the more lucid it became. With the exception of a brief moment that remained shrouded in mystery, the logic and continuity of the
whole were incontestable. This fragment of time was an inconsiderable episode in his life, taking no more than five or six minutes, but it was of such intense opacity that it could have lasted for
years.

It concerned the dawn of 6 March 1953, or more precisely the short period when the investigators’ car was following the potholed highway alongside the cemetery’s perimeter wall. The
records showed that only the first of Dr Gurameto’s three attempts to speak had been entirely explained. The two others, which were the most frightening, had remained obscure.

What had the prisoner been trying to say? What profound distress suddenly gave him the superhuman strength almost to break out of his handcuffs?

Leafing through the file’s innumerable pages, the investigators sometimes thought that they espied a ray of light. This happened especially when they were tired. But any effort of
concentration would cause this faint gleam to retreat back into the darkness from which it had emerged, as if it feared exposure.

In time they grasped that this explanation that was on the brink of becoming apparent was less a supernatural sign than something else that had no place in an investigative file. Any
investigation would reject it like foreign tissue, not for any esoteric reason but simply because neither investigative skills nor language itself had yet created the terms for explanations of this
kind.

There was no evidence anywhere to show what really occurred at the most ineffable moment of Big Dr Gurameto’s life at the dawn of that March day.

Here is what happened.

6 March 1953. Towards dawn. The car leaves the prison yard heading out of the city. The prisoners are silent, perhaps even unconscious. The fresh air revives one of them, Big Gurameto. After his
first mumbled attempts to protest that he is tied to a stranger, he probably loses consciousness again. He wakes up later on the highway as the car passes the cemetery wall. In the faint reddish
light of dawn he recognises the famous Vasiliko graveyard. He has been there dozens of times for the burials of patients who died under his hands on the operating table, or later. But he has
another reason to remember this cemetery. When his grandmother, to soothe him to sleep, had told him the tale of the dead man wrongly invited to dinner, he, like many small boys, had pictured
himself in the role of the son, whose father, as the legend relates, gave him an invitation to deliver to the first chance passer-by.

The Vasiliko cemetery was the only graveyard he knew, so he had imagined himself running past it, like in the legend. He is scared, his heart shakes, and instead of continuing along the road
until he meets a passer-by, he reaches his hand through the cemetery railings to throw the invitation inside. As he flees he turns his head and sees the invitation where it has fallen, lying white
on top of a grave.

Now, forty years later, when the prison car passes this cemetery, this vision returns. It seems to him that the invitation, thrown away long ago, is the cause of everything. It is still lying
there. He feels an insane desire to turn back and pick up the invitation from the grave where it has fallen, to turn time back and retract the hand of fate, before the dead man can receive the
message.

In his distressed state he believes he can do this and so he gasps, his mouth foams with exertion, and with his free hand he points to the iron railing behind which the white invitation card
still rests. But nobody listens to him.

A second vision comes to him a short time later. Now he is no longer six years old, running with an invitation in his hand, but another Gurameto, grown-up, indeed dead, who has rotted in the
grave for many years, as he saw himself in a nightmare. The marble grave with the headstone on which his name is carved looms above him, and around the cemetery are the iron railings.

Through these railings a woman’s dainty hand with long fingers and a ring with a sad association lets fall an invitation. It flutters forlornly before coming to rest on his grave.

The dead man, that is, Gurameto himself, bewildered after so many silent years, feels compelled to obey the order and rise up to go where he has been invited to dinner. To what dinner? He cannot
tell. To the house of that woman whom he recognises and yet does not, or to 22 Varosh Street? To his own dinner, perhaps, the one that caused him so much trouble long ago?

That is the order, but he does not want to obey it. More foam gathers at the corners of his mouth. He screams and strains to break his shackles, until the terrified investigators draw their
revolvers. But he will not calm down. Still he struggles to turn back to that grave, to remove that invitation at last and change destiny. But it is impossible.

Summer–winter, 2007–2008