Chronicle in Stone

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.

Then the ceilings of the house came to life. The movements of mice, timid and sporadic at first, became bolder and more rapid until an unchained horde thundered from one corner of the attic to another. As the minutes passed, my mind turned the mice into the hordes of Genghis Khan, which I had seen in a film. Now they were gathering somewhere in the depths of Asia (Asia was Margarita’s ceiling). Getting ready for battle. A brief silence. Genghis Khan must be addressing his troops. He extends his hand toward the borders of Europe (the hall ceiling). The hordes move off. The commotion mounts, the ceilings groan. They cross the frontiers of our continent. The noise builds to a crescendo. Right above our heads. Terror. Carnage. Then the horde veers off. A messenger brings the news from the depths of Asia. A tribe has rebelled. The horde rushes back whence it came. Crosses the border again. Now they are back in Asia. A terrible slaughter begins. Margarita lies sleeping beneath the battlefield. Genghis Khan ought to end the hostilities. Doesn’t he realise Margarita is sleeping? But he’s not interested. In war there is no sleep, he shouts. And the battle rages on.

In the morning Grandma put her hand on my forehead.

“You talked in your sleep last night,” she said. “You don’t have a fever, do you?”

“No.”

It was my fourth and last day at Grandfather’s. After breakfast, I said good-bye and left.

On my way home, carrying a big piece of meat pie and Margarita’s name (the pie had been carefully wrapped in paper by Grandma; I’m not sure where I held Margarita’s name), I saw some school kids going up Varosh Street. They looked terribly upset. Their teacher Qani Kekezi must have dissected another cat in the classroom.

Nothing had changed at home or in the neighbourhood, but something was going on out on the plain across the river. The first thing I noticed was that the cattle that usually grazed there were gone. The haystacks were being taken away too. Trucks crisscrossed the plain. Eventually I began to see more clearly what was happening. A new, completely unknown word was cropping up here and there, made up of two other words: “air” and “drome” (we knew that “drome” meant “road” in Greek). Now everything was clear: across the river, in the plain at the foot of the city, an aerodrome was under construction.

Passers-by often stopped in the streets and alleys, turned towards the river, and gazed pensively into the distance.

A new guest had arrived. An unusual guest, lying flat at the city’s door, almost invisible. If it weren’t for the absence of the cows and haystacks, you might not have even noticed it was there. For my part, I was sorry the cows had gone. I missed the cows.

“Why is it called ‘aerodrome’?”

Javer looked at me thoughtfully with his grey eyes.

“Because it is the place where airplanes fly up into the sky.”

A guest. For better or for worse? It had crept in noiselessly. Thousands of astonished eyes observed it without fully realising that it was there. Now, stretched out over the whole length of the plain, incomprehensible and threatening, it perplexed everyone.

“War preparations.”

“Maybe. But it could also be to defend the city.”

“I don’t think so. It’s a sign that war is on the way.”

“Could be. All the same, a lot of people have got work there.”

“The money they earn is a loan from death.”

That was an exchange between two people I didn’t know.

There was more and more talk of the aerodrome. And it was only when they started calling it “aerodrome” that people realised that until then the plain had had no name. Apparently, it had had to wait for the planes to have its christening.