Chronicle in Stone

THIRTEEN

As in other years, I found that the landscape around Grandfather’s house had changed. At first glance things looked the same, but closer inspection revealed that certain paths were gone and others were slowly dying, while still others, new and frail but determined, were springing up amid the dust and grass.

As always, Babazoti was lying on his chaise longue, reading. Grandma was hanging the laundry out to dry. White sheets billowed in the fresh breeze. Bushes had sprouted everywhere. Taking advantage of the neglect caused by the spring bombing, they had launched a furious attack on the house.

The flapping and flailing of the sheets on the clothesline as they resisted the wind’s onslaught made a most peaceful sight. It has to be said that the wind was far from vicious that day, and was only attacking the sheets in a playful way.

The wind blew steadily from the same direction. Maybe it would bring Suzana.

Grandma finished hanging out the sheets.

“So, how are your mother and father? And Selfixhe?” she asked, clipping on the last peg.

“Everyone’s fine.”

Alongside the flapping of sheets I could make out the sound of something else.

“You look a little distracted,” Grandma said. “No wonder too, with all those bombs and planes.”

The alert came from a young and pretty siren… There she was, flying through the air. Her white wings sparkled in the sunlight. She appeared for a moment in the sky between the clouds, then was gone again.

I went outside the yard. And there she was, with her head leaning slightly to one side, dressed in a light grey skirt the colour of aluminium.

“Suzana!”

She turned round.

“Oh, you’re back.”

“Yes.”

She had grown.

“Since when?”

“Today.”

Her legs were even longer and shapelier.

“Where did you go during the bombing?” I asked her.

“There, in that cave over there.”

“We went to the citadel. I even went looking for you once.”

“Really? I thought you wouldn’t even remember me.”

“No, I haven’t forgotten you.”

She turned her head and adjusted a hairpin.

“Big deal! You didn’t forget me!” she said sharply and then ran off.

I saw the aluminium-grey dress flash once among the trees along the road to her house. Then when she got near the cliff edge, she branched off. By the badshade tree she slackened her pace, before turning round and coming back to me.

“Well, will you tell me things?” she asked, almost sternly.

“Sure, I’ll tell you things.”

Her eyes shone with pleasure.

“Many things?”

“A lot, yes.”

“Well, go ahead. Come on, start,” she said.

We sat down on the grass by the side of the road and I started telling her things. It wasn’t easy. I had so much to say that it got all jumbled up in my head. She was listening very attentively, her eyes open wide, frowning as though in pain every time I got in a muddle or put things in the wrong order or didn’t give them the importance she thought they deserved. Sometimes I got carried away by my story and boldly altered the facts. When I told her about the Englishman’s arm, for example, I said that Aqif Kashahu kept biting it in rage and that the crowd cheered every time he did. She listened carefully to everything, but when I started telling her how a man called Macbeth had invited someone to dinner whose name I couldn’t remember any more and how he had cut his guest’s head off, but then it turned out he didn’t know the rules about sprinkling salt on a severed head, she put her hand over my mouth and pleaded: “Tell me about something less gruesome, OK?”

So I told her about Lady Majnur screaming in the streets the day the town hall burned down, and about Vasiliqia, and about how when Grandmother heard that Vasiliqia had come she said she wished she had died the winter before. I was telling her about Aunt Xhemo’s last visit and the defeat of the Greeks when I heard my elder aunt calling me for lunch.

They were all at table already. The signs of a quarrel were obvious. My younger aunt was pouting.

“I don’t want to see that good for nothing around here any more, you hear?” Grandma said, throwing some food on a plate.

“He’s a friend, he lends me books,” my younger aunt answered stubbornly.

“Books! You should be ashamed. Love stories to corrupt your mind.”

“They’re not love stories, they’re about politics.”

“So much the worse. One of these days you’ll have the carabinieri over here.”

“That’s enough now,” said Babazoti.

It was a short truce.

“You’re a big girl now,” Grandma started up again. “You don’t see your girlfriends neglecting their embroidery. One of these days you’ll take a husband.”

My younger aunt stuck her tongue out, as she always did at the mention of marriage.

The next day I saw Suzana again. She seemed pensive.

“What did the Englishman’s ring look like?” she asked.

“Very pretty. It sparkled in the sun.”

“Who do you think gave it to him?”

I shrugged.

“How should I know?”

Suzana stared at me so hard that it seemed she was trying to find another pair of eyes behind mine.

“Maybe his fiancée,” she said.

“Maybe.”

Suzana took me by the arm.

“Listen,” she whispered into my ear. “Of all the things you told me, what sticks in my mind the most is what happened to Aqif Kashahu’s daughter. Will you tell it to me again?”

I nodded.

“Only this time, try to remember everything.”

I thought for a moment.

“Take your time,” she said. “Try to remember.”

I frowned to make her think I was trying hard to recall the slightest details, but in fact completely unrelated pieces of events had pushed their way into my mind.

“Now tell the story,” she said.

She was all ears. Her eyes, her hair, her thin arms, everything about her was frozen as she listened.

When I finished, she took a deep breath.

“What strange things happen in this world,” she said.

“One of my friends has a little world made of papier mâché,” I told her. “You can spin it with your finger.”

She wasn’t listening any more. Her mind was elsewhere.

“Do you want to go to the cave?” she asked.

I didn’t really feel like it. I was pretty sick of cellars and damp places, but I didn’t want to spoil her fun.

It was cool in the cave. We sat down on two big rocks and didn’t say a word.

Suddenly she said, “Let’s pretend the planes are coming and dropping their bombs. Can you hear? There’s a whole lot of them. The siren is wailing. Bombs are falling right next to us. When do the lights go out?”

“Now.”

She reached out and put her arms around my neck. Her soft cheek pressed against mine.

“Like this?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Her arms were as cold as aluminium. There was a good smell of soap from her neck.

“Someone has put the light back on,” she said in a little while. “They’ll see us.”

I held my neck very stiff. Suzana quickly let go of me.

“Now they’re dragging me by the hair. Can you see? What are you going to do?”

“I’ll go down to hell,” I said, putting on a booming voice.

She burst out laughing.

We played that same little game a few more times that day and the next. I got to like sitting motionless while she wrapped her long arms around my neck. Her neck always had that nice smell of soap. A sensation I’d never had before made me feel alternately unbearably heavy and intoxicated as if I was flying.

I was expecting her to ask me again if I knew any rude words. But she said nothing and kept her eyes half-shut. Apparently that was how she could best meditate on what had happened to Aqif Kashahu’s daughter.

I was tempted to say, don’t think any more about that girl, she’s probably dead, but I was afraid of scaring Suzana. One of the gypsies who lived in the shed told me that all girls have the black triangle I’d seen on Margarita. For me, that was an indisputable sign that they would end up in dishonour.

One day (here they had no Thursdays or Tuesdays like in our neighbourhood, just mornings, afternoons and nights) we were sitting and hugging, counting the bombs that were falling more and more furiously, when a shadow appeared at the entrance to the cave. I saw it first, but there was nothing I could do.

“Suzana!” her mother called.

Suzana jerked her arms off my neck and sat there petrified. The woman whose face we couldn’t see in the darkness with the sunlight behind her came closer.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding all day,” she said quietly but sternly. (Aqif Kashahu, I remembered very well, hadn’t said a word.) Now she would drag her by the hair. “Get up,” she almost shouted, grabbing Suzana by the arm. Suzana’s delicate arm looked as if it would break in that vice-like grip.

She pushed her roughly. Suzana’s body seemed all out of joint. Her torso was thrust forward before her head could catch up, and her legs worked desperately to balance her again.

“So you’ve started already,” the woman growled through clenched teeth. Then, just before leaving the cave, she turned to me.

“And you, you little wretch, you can’t even blow your own nose yet…”

She called me other equally spiky-sounding names of the same general kind, with endings so sharp they sounded to me like they were laden with thorns.

They left. What would happen now? Would I have to go down into the wells?

Outside it was calm and bright. A bird flew in the sky. The anger and the thorny words stayed behind in the gloom of the cave.

They’re dragging me by the hair! What are you going to do?… I walked slowly. My head felt numb. I couldn’t get that wet rope near the edge of our cistern out of my mind. The black ashes in the bottom of the bucket still smelled of kerosene. “That’s what comes from courting,” Grandmother had said. “Oh Selfixhe, this was all we needed in times like these. Better death than love like this, may God protect us.”

… dragging me by the hair, what are you…?

I climbed up on the roof. From there I could see Suzana’s house. The white sheets were hanging in the yard. The juk …

I lay down on the warm slates and looked up at the sky. A little cloud was drifting north. It kept changing its shape.

“We can endure a lot, Selfixhe, but may God stop the spread of affairs of this kind. Better the plague.”

Grandmother had gingerly picked up the bucket and emptied it. She stared for a long time at the wet black ashes, then shook her head. I was about to ask why she was shaking her head like that, but that handful of black ash robbed me of any inclination to speak.

The little cloud in the sky lurched ahead as if it was tipsy. It had turned long and skinny now. Life in the sky must be pretty boring in the summer. Not much happened then. The little cloud crossing the sky the way a man crosses an empty square in the noonday heat melted away before reaching the north. I had noticed that clouds died very fast. Then their remains drifted in the sky for a long time. It was easy to tell dead clouds from the living.

I was surprised to see Suzana the next day. She walked by our gate, accompanied by her father like a proper young lady. She didn’t even turn to look at me. I thought she seemed completely alien. That evening, they passed by again. This time, when she saw me at the gate, she raised her head high and squeezed close against her father. Her father looked at me askance. He was very handsome.

In the days that followed Suzana came out accompanied by her mother. Holding onto her arm like a proper young lady again. Her mother looked at me as you’d look at a mad dog. Who knows how many of those barbed-wire words were running through her mind, the old witch!

I spent the whole summer and the beginning of autumn at Grandfather’s. It was the longest summer of my life. I was sleepy all the time. The days went by without incident and often without their names. When you’d unpacked the hours from the day and then the night and piled them all up, you could toss out the boxes they came in, which is all that “Wednesday” or “Sunday” or “Friday” really are.

The season dragged on. It started to get cold again. The first claps of thunder rumbled somewhere over the horizon. Babazoti’s house got gloomier. Grandma quarrelled more and more with my younger aunt, who came and went happily, not paying the slightest attention to her mother, humming a song which had just come out:

We’re all so hungry and broke

Townspeople and plain country folk…

Grandma would listen and shake her head thoughtfully, as if to say: “This girl will break my heart.”

The first rain fell. It was time for me to go home. The sky was overcast. The wind blew in from the northern mountain passes. I went down Citadel Street, crossed the Bridge of Brawls, and was making my way through the town centre. It felt funny to be among the grey stone walls rising high on either side. The streets were strangely empty. Except that in a little square near the market a small crowd of people stood listening to someone making a speech. I stopped to listen. I didn’t know the speaker. He was a medium-sized man with greying hair who opened his arms wide from time to time as he spoke.

“In these times of turmoil we must try to love one another. Love will protect us. What can we gain from fratricidal struggle? Son will rise up against father, brother will fight brother. There will be rivers of blood. Let us drive civil war out of our town. Let us keep death out. For centuries the unhappy Albanian has gone through life with the heavy burden of a weapon on his back. Other nations think of food, but we Albanians care only for guns. Let us cast off that weight of steel, my brothers, for steel speaks only of strife. What we need is reconciliation. Civil war…”

The neighbourhood streets were completely deserted. The doors had a sly look about them. I walked faster. Where were all the people? I was almost running. My footsteps rang off the stones with a scary sound. More boarded doors. The metal door-knocker shaped like a human hand… No room at the inn!… But no, our gate, at least, stood ajar, waiting for me. I pushed it open and went in.

“You picked a great day to come back,” my mother said.

“What do you mean?”

She didn’t explain. Grandmother and Papa kissed me.

“Why did Mamma say I picked a great day to come back?” I asked Grandmother.

“They shot someone today,” she said. “He was wounded.”

“Who?”

“Gjergj Pula.”

“Really? Who shot him?”

“No one knows. The police are looking for suspects.”

“Did they ever find Aqif Kashahu’s daughter?” I asked.

“What made you think of Aqif Kashahu’s daughter?” Grandmother asked, almost reproachfully. “She’s away visiting some cousins.”

A partisan. A boy from the town centre had joined the resistance. A week before he had been a boy like all the others, with a home and a door with a knocker, who yawned when he was sleepy. He was Bido Sherifi’s youngest nephew. And suddenly he had become a partisan. Now he was up in the mountains. On the march. The high peaks were shrouded in winter mists that rolled down the gorges like nightmares. The partisan was up there somewhere. Everyone else was down here. He alone was up there.

“Why do they say: ‘He joined the resistance’?”

“You wear me out with your questions.”

Start of winter. I was looking at the first frost that covered the world and wondering what foreign land’s shreds and tatters would be blown to us by the winter wind this year.