Chronicle in Stone

FIVE

When I got back from Babazoti’s, I sensed that the magic spells over our neighbourhood had lost almost all of their force. The workmen had also finished cleaning our cistern. Finally free of the powers of darkness, it was now being filled with fresh water, which gurgled joyfully along the eaves. I leaned over the mouth of the cistern and said, “A-oo.” Although filled with new and unknown water, it answered me at once. The same voice, just a little fainter. This meant that all the water in the world, whichever part of the sky it fell from, spoke the same language.

Apart from the fact that the cows no longer grazed in the field across the river, nothing worrisome had happened, except for the sudden disappearance of Kako Pino’s cat.

She was just now at her window talking about it with Bido Sherifi’s wife, who was leaning out of her own window, her hands covered with flour.

“I tell you, he’s the one who took your cat, that cursed teacher won’t leave a single one alive. He’s the one who took it.”

“Of course. Who else? It’s the end of the world.”

Obviously they were talking about Qani Kekezi.

“That’s what education does for you, Kako Pino. More harm than good. I ask you: a cat-thief!”

“Yes, he’s gone completely crazy,” said Kako Pino. “The poor cats are afraid to set foot outside any more. A topsy-turvy world we live in!”

“But that’s not all,” said Bido Sherifi’s wife. “Wait until he starts coming after people with that knife. Have you ever seen eyes like his? Blood-red they are.”

Bido Sherifi’s wife shook her hands, raising a cloud of flour that caught the sun and glowed as if it was on fire.

“The end of the world,” said Kako Pino. “Can’t tell who’s worse than the others.”

The shutters on both windows closed, ending the conversation. I had nothing to do, and sat watching the street. A cat was jumping from roof to roof, then came down and crossed the street. Nazo’s son, Maksut, was coming home from the market. He carried another severed head under his arm. Whose head? I couldn’t stand it, so I looked away.

I tried to picture Margarita, but was surprised to find that I couldn’t recall her face very well. She had come into my thoughts two or three times. Did she realise that I dragged her name with me around the house, banging it on the stone, catching it on nails? Did she feel no pain from all that?

The day before I had talked to Ilir about it.

“At Grandfather’s, there’s now a beautiful married woman,” I told him.

He wasn’t impressed and didn’t answer. A little later I mentioned Margarita to him again. Again he showed no interest, and only asked me, “Does she have pink cheeks?”

“Yes,” I answered, somewhat perplexed. “Pink.”

Actually, I didn’t remember what colour her cheeks were. The moment Ilir asked about her, Margarita’s face suddenly seemed misty. A day passed and the image was even less clear. I was forgetting her.

The third time she came to mind, I mentioned her to Ilir again. He stared at me. This time he’s going to say something, I thought, feeling happy about it already.

“You know what?” Ilir said. “Last night I stole my mother’s garters to make a slingshot. Do me a favour and hold onto them for a few days. I’m afraid she’ll find them.”

I stuffed the garters into my pocket.

There was no one in the street. I remembered that Javer had promised to give me a book. I left and went to his place.

Javer was alone, smoking a cigarette and whistling to himself.

“You promised you would give me a book,” I said.

“Si, signor,” he said. “Here are the books. Pick one.”

There was a shelf of books on the wall. I walked over and looked at them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had never seen so many books.

“Look,” Javer explained, “this is the name of the author, the one who wrote the book, and this is the title. But I’m afraid none of these books will really interest you.”

I took a bunch of books off the shelves, one by one. Most of the titles were meaningless to me.

“I’ll take this one,” I said. “The author is a man called Jung.”

Javer burst out laughing.

“You want to read Jung?”

“Why not? He writes about magic, doesn’t he?”

Javer laughed again. I was irritated and turned to leave, but he stopped me.

“Look,” he said, “take another one instead. I can barely understand Jung myself. Anyway, he didn’t write in Albanian.”

I looked through the books again and plunged into reading. Javer kept on smoking and humming. Finally I found one that had on its opening page the words “ghost”, “witches”, “first murderer” and even “second murderer”.

“OK, I’ll take this one,” I said, without even looking at the title.

“Really? Macbeth? It’ll be too hard for you.”

“I want it.”

“Then take it,” said Javer. “But don’t lose it.”

I left almost at a run, went home and pushed the door open. I was amazed to have a book in my hands.

There were all kinds of things in our big house: copper cauldrons, plates of all sizes, bread bins, mortars, iron hooks, beams, steel balls (one was supposed to be a cannonball), barrels, chests with dates painted on them, all sorts of buckets, pitchers, and ewers, a rifle with a butt inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a whole clutter of strange old things including a trough for slaking lime – but not a single book. Apart from a torn and yellowing manual of dream interpretation, there wasn’t a single sheet of printed paper in the house.

I closed the door and scurried upstairs at top speed. There was no one in the living room. I sat by the window, opened the book, and started to read. I read very slowly, and hardly understood anything. I read up to a certain point, then started over again from the beginning. Little by little I began to understand what I was reading. My head was spinning. Outside it was getting dark. The letters started dancing around, trying to jump out of line. My eyes hurt.

After dinner I went to the kerosene lamp and opened the book again. The letters looked frightening in the yellow lamplight.

“That’s enough reading,” my mother decreed. “Go to bed.”

“You sleep, I’m going to read.”

“No,” she said. “We don’t have enough kerosene.”

I couldn’t get to sleep. The book lay nearby. Silent. A thin object on the divan. It was so strange… Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Decomposed into little black marks. Hair, eyes, legs and hands, voices, nails, beards, knocks on doors, walls, blood, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The h’s, r’s, o’s, t’s gallop over the page. They gather together to create a horse or a hailstorm. Then gallop away again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a ghost. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping. Without end.

I slept so fitfully I thought I had a fever. Through the sleep I could just barely feel a steady laboured breathing coming from outside, a painful shifting of streets and neighbourhoods. The city seemed to be scratching itself in slow motion. It was a pain of transformation. The streets swelled, twisted. The walls of houses grew thick and turned into the battlements of Scottish castles. Fearsome keeps loomed up here and there.

In the morning the city looked worn out from its trials. It had changed. But not that much.

I spent almost all day reading.

Night fell again. I looked outside at the walls and buildings. My mind was on fire. All the normal limits on the shape of things seemed to have been suspended. They could turn into anything now.

Aqif Kashahu was trudging down Varosh Street with his two boys. He turned into our street. Kako Pino stuck her head out of the window, then went back inside. Bido Sherifi’s great double gate was open. Aqif Kashahu was going towards it. It was obvious: this must be his last night. Bido Sherifi himself came to the gate to greet his distinguished guest. Bido’s wife leaned out of her window for a moment, then disappeared. Kako Pino did the same. The signs were clear. Aqif Kashahu and his heirs went inside. The great gates swung shut with a metallic clatter. Flourish.

“Why do you stay shut up in the house all day? Go out and play with your friends.”

“Ssh, Grandmother.”

I was waiting to hear Aqif Kashahu’s death scream. It must have all been over by now. I heard a knock. Then another. Bido Sherifi’s wife appeared in the window. She was trying to wash the blood from her hands. She shook them. A cloud of flour drifted down. The flour was red with blood.

Grandmother put her hand on my forehead.

Another flourish of trumpets came from downstairs.

“Go and see the big cauldron they’re taking out of the basement,” said Grandmother. “I don’t have the heart to watch.”

For several days they had been talking about selling the big copper cauldron. Now the dealer had come and the big cauldron, as it left the house, was chiming farewell. Trumpets and alarum within.

Night had fallen. Again the city sank into a darkness peopled with keeps, foreign names and owls.

“That book has addled your brain,” Grandmother said. “Go to Grandfather’s tomorrow to clear your mind.”

“All right, I’ll go.”

Margarita…

I was exhausted. My head sank onto the windowsill.

The next day I set out for Grandfather’s. When I passed the Bridge of Brawls and turned into Citadel Street the city was suddenly freed of its keeps and night-owls. I was almost running for the last part of the way.

“Where’s Margarita?” I asked Grandma, who was kneading dough for bread rolls.

“What do you want with Margarita?” she asked. “You’d do better to start by asking how Grandfather is, or your aunts and uncles, instead of starting right out with ‘Where’s Margarita?’”

“She’s not gone, is she?”

“No, she’s still here,” Grandma said in a mocking tone, muttering to herself as she kept on kneading dough.

I wandered around the house for a while and then, since I had nothing else to do, I went up to the roof where I liked to sit for hours on the light-coloured, slanting slates near the old dormer. People looked different from the roof. I was watching a half-rotten telegraph pole when I remembered the box I had filled with Grandfather’s cigarette butts and had hidden in the attic, along with a Turkish book and a box with two or three matches. I really wanted to smoke on the roof, holding in my lap the Turkish book with its sickly, yellowing pages.

I was thinking about lighting a cigarette, so I crawled to the dormer, stuck my arm through the pieces of dusty broken glass, and took out the book first, then the box of tobacco, and finally the matchbox. The cover of the book was mouldy and the pages, which had got wet, were stuck together. I tore off a piece of the back cover and though the tobacco looked a little mouldy too, I rolled a cigarette as well as I could, took it in my mouth and tried to light it. But the match was wet and wouldn’t light.

I put everything back on a blackened beam in the attic, and as I was shaking the dust off my arm, I got another idea.

The old attic was just above Margarita’s room. Once it had provided light for the small hallway, but when part of the hallway was turned into a room, the attic became useless; it didn’t light anything any more.

The idea that I could see what Margarita was doing shook me out of my lethargy. To be safe, I pulled out the fragments of broken glass still hanging in the window frame, then put one foot through and onto a beam and slipped in under the roof. I started climbing downwards, clinging to the blackened beams that crisscrossed in every direction. A minute later I was on the ceiling of her room. I moved slowly and noiselessly, crawling on my stomach until I came to a crack. I peered through.

The room was empty.

Where could Margarita be? On the blanket she used as a bedspread some pieces of delicate underwear were neatly folded. I heard a splash and realised that she was taking a bath.

I waited a long time for her to come out of the bath. She was all wrapped up in a big bathrobe, her hair hanging down loose, still wet. She went to the mirror, picked up a comb, and started to run it through her hair. She sang softly to herself:

In far-away Holland

In the land of windmills…

Still singing, she took her powder-box from the dressing table and undid her bathrobe. Puffy clouds wafted from her cleavage and her armpits as if she was an extraterrestrial being.

When she took off her robe entirely and leaned over to take her underwear from the bed, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the lace on her body was like white butterflies perched in arcs across her breasts, hips and the tops of her thighs, like those white butterflies of the fields that come out in the spring and that I had chased so often without ever catching one.

I was lying there in a daze, when I heard Grandma’s voice. She was looking all over for me. My aunt was calling too, from the courtyard.

I got up carefully and climbed back over the beams, hoisted myself onto the roof again and slid down along the back wall of the house.

“Where were you?” asked Grandma. “How did you get so filthy?”

“On the roof,” I answered.

“What were you doing on the roof? You’ll shift the slates and when it rains we’ll have leaks again.”

“No, Grandma, I was careful.”

“I doubt it,” she said. “Come on, it’s time to eat.”

Grandma always smelled like fresh bread, and whenever I got hungry, I always thought of her, with her milky complexion and her spreading shape which set the old joists of our house groaning, as if to protest: “Ouch! Grandma, you’re crushing us, and we can’t take any more.”

Grandfather said those ritual Turkish words that always seemed magical to me and we all started eating. I noticed that Grandma seemed angry because the pans and spoons in her hands were more than usually noisy. Whenever she was angry her gestures were rougher. Finally she couldn’t contain herself any more and burst out, “The hussy!”

The word made no impression on the others, who calmly went on chewing. They all seemed to know who she was talking about.

“Who’s a hussy, Grandma?” I asked.

Grandfather shot her a disapproving look and she nodded her head, still looking furious, as if to say, “Yes, all right, all right.”

“None of your business,” she said to me, suddenly taking the pot from the table.

“If it had been me,” said the older of my aunts, “I would’ve grabbed it right out of her hands.”

“What next! I wouldn’t stoop to fight with such trash.”

I could never imagine Grandma fighting with anyone; all my life I had never seen her doing anything but cooking and kneading dough for her bread.

“Drop the subject,” Grandfather said, tilting his head in my direction. Everyone obeyed, but Grandma still seemed angry, for the pans were being banged around even louder. Grandfather, who couldn’t stand noise, was the first to leave the table.

“Dirty hussy,” Grandma started up again.

“You should’ve grabbed it right off the clothesline yourself,” my elder aunt said again.

My younger aunt opened the newspaper and started reading.

“Put the paper down,” said Grandma. “Papers are for men.”

My aunt burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny? You see everyone’s upset and all you can do is sit there reading the paper and laugh.”

My aunt got up and walked out, taking the newspaper with her.

“Today the table linen, tomorrow the spoons, and next the carpets,” Grandma went on.

Now they were talking about it openly and I realised what was happening. Margarita was stealing.

“Why have you left your food on your plate?” my other aunt asked.

“I’m full,” I said, getting up from the table.

“You hardly ate a thing. You’re not sick, are you?”

“No.”

“Of course you are,” said Grandma. “You’ve caught your death. Sitting on the roof all day as if you had no home.”

I got up without a word and went into the living room. My younger aunt was sitting in the corner reading the newspaper.

I didn’t speak to her. The room was completely quiet. From the top of Citadel Street came the song of the stranger as he made his way down:

The clock struck seven as I came by;

I stood by your window and sighed a sigh

I listened, in a dream… So, towards seven in the evening, someone else was now going past the windows of a house where a girl called Miriam still lived, and who still had headaches.

The voice faded into the distance but before it disappeared altogether the wind brought me an extra part of the story:

Gladly would I fetch the doctor for you

But neighbours would likely take a dim view

But why would the neighbours object? What harm would it do to them? I couldn’t imagine. I wracked my brains to no end, but then I took comfort in recalling that one day, in the great living room, I’d heard it said that what happens in songs isn’t at all like what happens in life.

You could feel autumn coming on. Down below, among the branches losing their leaves, slid a shadow. Suzana. She must have known that I had come.

The tick-tock of the big clock was making a strange sound. Sadness was all around, spreading in great concentric circles through endless space. Soon it would spread out over the whole world.

It was a gloomy lunch. We ate in silence. Everyone seemed to be waiting impatiently for Grandmother to look at the cock’s bones.

In these past days, whenever a rooster was killed in the neighbourhood, everyone was informed right away, because the future could be read in the bones and everyone was expecting something serious to happen.

A week before, Ilir’s mother had sent us all over to Kako Pino’s. “She slaughtered a cock today,” Ilir’s mother had said. “Go on over there, children, and find out how the bones came out.”

We too had slaughtered a cock today. By afternoon people would be knocking at the door to ask about the bones. Grandmother would be asked about them if she went anywhere; my mother would be questioned the moment she stepped out through the gate, and Papa probably at the coffee house. It should be obvious from all this that in our city people did not get to eat chicken very often.

Lunch came to an end. Grandmother picked up the carcass, squinted, and stared hard at it, turning it this way and that, holding one side and then the other up to the light. We all waited in silence.

“War,” Grandmother said suddenly in a muffled voice. “The edges of the carina are red. War and blood.” She pointed to the places on the breastbone that foretold war.

No one spoke.

Grandmother kept looking at the bone.

“War,” she repeated, putting her left hand on my head as if to protect me from some scourge.

After lunch I went back to the pile of dirty dishes to look for the bone. I took it up the two flights to the main room, where I sat alone at the high windows and began a careful examination of that tragic bone. It was an October afternoon. A dry wind was blowing. I stared at the cold bone I held in my hand. It was reddish, shading into violet. Sometimes it seemed splattered with little drops of blood, sometimes it blazed with the reflections of a great fire.

Gradually it turned completely red, its back now covered no longer with little drops of blood but with whole streams rushing down the slopes, turning everything in their path red.

As I fell asleep with the bone in my hand, I saw the flames blazing on its side once more. Then, as if through a wall of smoke, I heard the first drums of war.

I could feel it the moment I entered the courtyard: Margarita was gone. I didn’t ask what had happened. The street was deserted and the courtyard trees were losing their leaves, which fluttered lazily onto the roof of the shack where the gypsies lived. I felt sad.

The autumn rains would start soon. The trees would be completely bare, and the wind would howl through the eaves. The roof would leak in the places I had sat in the summer, and in the old attic, the box of tobacco, the matches and the Turkish book would rot away.

Suzana would flutter about in the air somewhere and never find out what had happened to a man called Macbeth in distant Scotland. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the next time I came they had told me that she’d flown off with the storks.

On winter nights the hordes of mice would rage up and down in the attic. Fight on, Genghis Khan. Crush everything in your path. No one sleeps below Asia any more. It’s just a desert.