Chronicle in Stone

TWELVE

It was Sunday. From below came the noise of the pick swung by a neighbour who had been working for two weeks on a modern air-raid shelter like the one Lady Majnur had just had built. The bombing had stopped when spring began. We had been back in our homes for some time. The Karllashis and Angonis were the first to build modern shelters and leave the citadel. Next to leave were the nuns and prostitutes, whose shelters had been taken care of by the army. Then the people who had the money to build their own modern shelters went home. But most of us left the citadel only after the English bombing had eased. The first thing that struck me when we went home was that the tin sign saying “shelter for 90 persons” was gone. Someone must have taken it down while we were away, and the wall now had a light rectangular mark that gave me an empty feeling in my heart every time I looked at it.

Our neighbour’s pickaxe continued its regular thud. Sunday had spread out all over the city. It looked as if the sun had smacked into the earth and broken into pieces, and chunks of wet light were scattered everywhere – in the streets, on the windowpanes, on puddles and roofs. I remembered a day long ago when Grandmother had scaled a big fish. Her forearms were splattered with shiny scales. It was as if she was a Sunday all over. When my father got angry, he was a Tuesday.

I could hear the voices of Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo coming from the other room. They were still talking about the same thing. The neighbourhood women who had been coming by all morning, retailing ever more astounding pieces of news, had gone home to prepare lunch, but Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo went back to the conversation they had been having the previous Sunday. It seemed to me that all their chatting derived from prior conversations which were themselves the sequels of even older discussions going back to ancient times. I had also noticed that some topics of current interest were never broached directly. They would circle round the old ladies like buzzing flies, but could not cross the barrier of their indifference. At best a topic of that kind would take two or three weeks to gain admittance to the conversation, but most never achieved such a privilege.

All morning, the local women had made a whole series of guesses about a very recent event. My mother, as she brought Grandma and Aunt Xhemo their coffee, had asked them two or three times: “Have you heard the latest?” Obstinate as they were, they pretended not to hear, and they carried on elaborating a conversation that had been begun long ago, in the first year of the monarchy, or perhaps even further back, in the year 1901. Sitting beside them, I waited in vain for the expression of some opinion on the latest news. It was one of the few occasions when I felt angry with the old ladies. Stubborn as mules! I muttered to myself. Did they not grasp that the issue ought to make them prick up their ears, or were they dragging things out just to heighten the expectation that they would have something to say?

What had happened was deeply disturbing to me. Someone had gone into our cistern the night before. Fresh footprints were everywhere. Whoever it was had not even replaced the cover, and ashes had been found in a bucket that still smelled of kerosene. Apparently the intruder had used it as a torch to light the inside of the cistern.

For some time now there had been rumours that someone, or rather, some ghost, had been going down into the neighbourhood wells at night. Are there many wells in your neighbourhood…? At first the old ladies thought it was the ghost of someone called Xuano, who had been murdered in a dispute over property and was now seeking the gold he had hidden. But Aqif Kashahu’s deaf mother, who never slept at night, swore that with her own eyes she had seen the man coming out of their well at daybreak. If I can’t find her, I’ll go to hell to look for her … She had even spoken to him and, strangest of all, by her own account, she had seen his lips move in reply, but as she was deaf she hadn’t understood any of what was said.

Was it really him?

The roofs seemed dazed by the light. I walked over to the pile of bedding. The mattresses, blankets, pillows and lace-edged sheets – that whole soft white heap that was called juk - lay silent as a snare. In this city there are two ways to get rid of pregnant girls: suffocate them in a juk or drown them in a well.

Was it really him?

Two or three times I went up to the mirror and, after making it go misty with my breath, put my lips on its ice-cold surface. The shape of my kiss remained clear. It was a cold, joyless kiss, redolent with death.

I tried to summon up the face of the boy as I had seen him the other day, up in the fortress. I tried especially hard to remember his lips, which had caught my eye that day more than anything else about his face. They were special lips: lips that had already kissed.

The days went by with nothing to report. A person was looking for the body of another, whom he had once kissed. That was happening somewhere deep down, under the ground. Up above, everything was as before. The days were heavy and shapeless. All identical. Soon they would lose their one remaining distinction, the names that sheltered them like snail shells: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Nothing happening. Wednesday and Thursday went by. Then Frisatsunday. The days stuck to each other like lumps of sticky dough. Finally, on Tuesday, something happened: after the rain, a little rainbow came out. In our city spring came from the sky, not from the soil, which was ruled by stone that knows no seasons. The coming of spring could be glimpsed in the thinning of clouds, the appearance of birds, and the occasional rainbow. This one rose up inside the city itself. Strangely, one end of it rested on the brothel, the other on Aunt Xhemo’s house, which was nonetheless considered one of the most respectable houses in town.

“Kako Pino, go out and look,” Bido Sherifi’s wife called out.

“It’s the end of the world,” Kako Pino said. “Selfixhe, come and look!”

Grandmother looked and shook her head.

After the rainbow nothing happened for a whole week. Then one day Ilir said to me, “Isa and Javer are going to do something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But I heard Javer saying: ‘We have to break the peace and quiet of this petty-bor… petty-boar…’ I can’t remember the word.”

“Could they have meant to say pretty-boring?”

“No, it definitely wasn’t that.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Remember their death list? How come they never did anyone in?”

“Who knows? There might have been a good reason.”

“They won’t do anything now either.”

“I’m sure they will.”

“Yiorgos Poulos changed his name back to Giorgio Pulo. Why don’t they shoot him?”

“Do you want to bet they’ll do something this time?”

“OK.”

“I’ll bet France and two Switzerlands against Madagascar.”

“It’s a deal.”

Three days later I lost the France and two Switzerlands. Something serious happened all right: the town hall burned down. Very early in the morning we heard gunfire, then, coming from the street, people shouting: “The town hall is burning! The town hall is burning!” Shutters flew open. Heads, hands and arms stretched out as if they wanted to catch the news while it was still in the air. And it was true, the town hall was really going up in flames. Thick smoke like a herd of black horses was rising over the massive building and being blown around by the wind. Tongues of fire glowed red here and there against the black. Footsteps rang through the streets, then a hoarse voice shouted, “The title deeds are burning!”

“The deeds?” a woman asked from her window.

The hoarse voice kept shouting, “Citizens, come out, the town hall and the deeds are burning!”

“What are deeds?” I whispered.

No one answered.

The sound of footsteps in the street turned to thunder. I took advantage of the confusion to slip out. Mane Voco’s house was nearby. Ilir opened the door.

“Did you bring the France and two Switzerlands?” he asked as I came in.

“Don’t worry. I’ll give them to you. But wait a minute. What’s going on?”

“It burned down. It’s gone.”

“Was it them?”

“Of course. Who else?”

“Where are they?”

“In their room. Pretending to be surprised, to know nothing about it.”

“What are deeds?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come in and close the door!” Ilir’s mother shouted from upstairs.

We went upstairs. Ilir knocked on his brother’s door.

“Can we come in for a minute?” he asked.

We went in, first Ilir, then me.

Isa and Javer were both there. They were standing at the window watching the fire. They said something to each other in a foreign language.

“Strange,” Javer commented. “I wonder who started the fire? What are they saying over at your place?” he asked, turning to me.

“Yes, very strange all right,” Isa agreed.

“I was having a nice dream when the shots woke me up,” said Javer.

“Me too,” said Isa. “I was dreaming about flowers.”

There were shouts from the street.

“What are deeds?” This time it was Ilir who asked the question.

“Ah yes, deeds,” said Javer. “Can you hear them weeping and wailing over their precious deeds? Deeds are documents saying who is the owner of things like houses, yards and land. Understand?”

It was hard to follow. They both tried to explain it to us.

“All the information about property is written down in the deeds: where it lies, who inherits it from one generation to the next, things like that. Have you got that into your thick skulls? Everything is written down – the cistern, the fig tree in the back, the mortgage your father took out, and even you…”

Out in the streets, the shouts were getting louder and louder.

“Listen to them bleating,” said Isa. “The monster of private property has been wounded.”

A shrill cry rose above the general clamour.

“Lady Majnur,” said Javer, leaning out to hear better.

Lady Majnur had run into the street without her hat. The wisps of grey hair that poked out from under her black headscarf made a terrifying sight. Her shouts were punctuated by fragments of words and sprays of spit.

“The rabble!… It’s the debtors who set fire to the title deeds!… Communists!… Criminals!…”

“Scream, you old witch! Scream your head off, you old whore!” Javer snarled.

I plastered my face to the windowpane and looked out at the teeming street. Now and again the pane misted over. The land and houses, now they were free of the weight of their deeds, began to shift, wander and come apart. The walls seemed to part from their footings, and the age-old ties that had held them in place for so long seemed to have come asunder. As they drifted about, the great stone houses sometimes came dangerously close to each other. They could easily collide and destroy themselves, as they did in earthquakes.

“They’re burning, they’re burning!”

Only the streets, which belonged to everyone, tried to keep their heads in the uproar.

The chaos went on for a while. Smoke now rose more languidly from the burned-out building. The windows, from which flames had been leaping furiously only a short while before, had now begun to go dark.

“The Reichstag went up in flames as well,” said Javer, pointing to a place on the globe.

“Who burned it?” Ilir asked.

“Who? Arsonists, obviously,” Javer said.

“Every city in this world has a building that should be burned,” Isa said.

Javer smiled. A moment later he gave such a yawn he could have dislocated his jaw. He had rings under his eyes.

Isa was yawning a lot too. Neither tried to hide the fact that they hadn’t had a wink of sleep. I felt sure that if you got up close to them, they would smell of kerosene.

Outside the streets had almost settled down. I went out.

That night someone was arrested in our street. There were loud knocks at someone’s door, knocks that didn’t sound like the usual ones, and they woke up half the neighbourhood.

“Who did they take away?” Grandmother asked as she opened the street-side shutters.

“We don’t know yet,” someone whispered. “But I think it was one of Mezini’s sons.”

The next day we found out that there had been arrests all over the city. A big notice was posted in the town square offering a reward of forty thousand leks for information leading to the identification of the arsonist.

On the third night the police arrested a stranger. They had followed him for a while before making the arrest. The stranger walked as if dazed, clutching a bottle of kerosene (you could smell it from far off) and carrying a rope coiled over his shoulder. It was midnight. There was no doubt he was the arsonist. A box of matches and a little pouch of ashes were found in his pockets.

The next day people said that the boy who had kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter had been caught. Despite the calamities that had befallen it all last winter (“May we never live to see another winter like that,” the old women said), the city had not forgotten the fair-haired boy. Despite themselves, Grandma and Aunt Xhemo were finally obliged to allude to the event during their conversation, though they only touched on it briefly. Every one else was clucking and chortling with indignation.

“Did you hear what the boy who kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter told the magistrate?”

“What? He burned down the town hall?”

“No, he did not. The kerosene and ashes he was carrying when he was arrested were for something completely different.”

“Really?”

“He was going down into wells at night looking for the girl.”

“Down into wells at night? What people will do for love!”

“According to the boy, her own family killed her.”

“Today around noon the magistrate went to the Kashahus’ and asked to talk to the girl. She wasn’t in. The boy maintains she’s been murdered.”

“Now that you mention it, I confess I’ve not seen her either, since the kiss.”

“Like I said. You’re not the only one. Nobody’s set eyes on her.”

“You’re right! Go on!”

“Now, where was I? Oh yes. Aqif Kashahu said that he’d sent his daughter off to visit some distant cousins.”

“Oh, distant cousins…”

“You don’t look well,” Grandmother said to me. “Go spend a few days at Babazoti’s.”

I had been waiting for that.