Chronicle in Stone

TEN

It rained all the next day. The city lay stunned after the previous day’s defeat, its roofs and eaves drenched. Sadness trickled down the slates. Unyieldingly grey, it slid down the steep roofs, steadily renewed by the fresh sadness that poured from sorrowful reservoirs in the sky.

The next morning the city awoke to find itself occupied again. The Greeks were back. This time their mules, cannon and supplies were everywhere. On the metal pole atop the prison tower, where the Italian tricolour had flown, the Greek flag now waved. At first it was hard to make it out. The wind never stopped blowing, but it never blew in just one direction so that the banner could unfurl and be seen properly. Towards noon, when the wind shifted and the rain started again, the outlines of the large white cross could at last be seen on the weary silk.

“Did I have to live so long just to see Greek jackboots?” Grandmother lamented. “Why didn’t I die last winter?”

We were in the main room. I had never seen such despair in her eyes, in all her features. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. I took the round lens from my pocket and put it over one eye. The distant cross over the prison tower fluttered as if it were angry. Then it displayed itself in full, quite brazenly. It was just a pattern on a piece of silk. I wondered how two crossed lines on a piece of fabric could arouse such grief. A piece of material waving in the breeze had plunged an entire city into consternation. It was strange.

That evening people spoke of nothing but the Greeks. Terrible predictions were made. Many years ago, before the monarchy and even before the republic, the Greeks had occupied the city for a few weeks. Many people had been killed. Then as now, that same flag with the white cross had flown from the prison tower. And since the flag with the cross was back, all the rest would follow.

Xivo Gavo’s little window stayed lit far into the night. The old chronicler’s neighbours all thought he was describing the return of the Greeks. It later turned out that he had devoted only a single sentence of his chronicle to the event: “On 18 Nov. the G. entered the city.” No one could account for this laconic mention of such a calamity, and still less for his use of a single letter to represent the multitude of Greeks.

The next morning the cross was still there, dominating the city. The symbol of evil had been raised. Everyone expected the worst.

The Greeks began to walk around the streets in their khaki uniforms. Ordinances signed “Katantzakis” were again posted in the square. The coffee houses were packed with Greek sounds. They were thin and sharp, full of s’s and th’s that cut like razors. All the soldiers carried knives. Treachery hovered in the air. Impending slaughter. The city would have to be sluiced with a rubber hose. But it was raining. Maybe they wouldn’t need the hose.

There was no massacre on the first day. Nor on the second. They had put a big sign in the town square saying Vorio Epire, “Northern Epirus”. Commandant Katantzakis lunched and dined with some of the rich Christian families.

A Greek sergeant fired several shots, but no one was hit. He did, however, get the city’s only statue in the thigh. It was a big bronze statue in the town square, erected back in the days of the monarchy. The city had never had statues before that. The only representations of the human form were the scarecrows in the fields on the other side of the river. When plans to put up a statue were announced, many fanatical citizens who had hailed the anti-aircraft gun had been somewhat sceptical. A metal man? Was such a novelty really necessary? Might it not cause trouble? At night, when everyone was sleeping as God had ordained, the statue would be out there standing erect. Day and night, summer and winter, it would stand. People laughed and cried, shouted and died. But not the statue. It would just stand there and not utter a sound. And everyone knew how suspicious silence was.

The sculptor who came from Tirana to inspect the proposed site of the pedestal barely escaped blows. A bitter polemic raged in the city newspaper. At last the majority of the population resigned itself to having the statue. It arrived in a huge lorry with a tarpaulin over the back. It was winter. They set it up at night in the main square. To avoid trouble there was no unveiling ceremony. People stood and stared in wonder at the bronze warrior with his hand on his pistol, who gazed severely down into the square as if asking, “Why didn’t you want me?”

One night someone threw a blanket over the bronze man’s shoulders. From then on, the city’s heart went out to its statue.

Anyway, this was the statue the Greek sergeant shot. People rushed to the square to see the bullet hole. Some of them went starry-eyed and imagined that they themselves had to limp. Others actually were limping, as if they had been hit in the thigh. The square was in turmoil. Suddenly Katantzakis, escorted by several guards, appeared at the edge of the square, walked across it diagonally, and went into the town hall, where the Greek command was headquartered.

An hour later, in the spot reserved for proclamations, a sign was posted, in Greek and Albanian and signed by Katantzakis, ordering the arrest of the sergeant who had shot the statue.

That afternoon Xhexho came over.

“Oh my poor dears, do you know what we’re in for now?” she cried the moment she came through the door. “They say Vasiliqia has come back.”

“Vasiliqia?” exclaimed Grandmother, going pale.

“Vasiliqia?” my mother repeated in horror.

My father, hearing their voices, came in from the other room.

“What’s this, Xhexho? Vasiliqia’s back?”

There was a pause during which all you could hear was Xhexho’s wheezy breathing.

“If only I had died last winter,” lamented Grandmother. “Under the earth I would be spared such things.”

“I should have been so lucky,” Xhexho agreed.

“I thought nothing in this life could surprise me any more,” Grandmother said, “but Vasiliqia coming back? Anything but that.” There was a terrifying resignation in her voice.

Papa cracked his long sinewy fingers.

“They say she’s worse than ever now,” Xhexho went on. “It will be a catastrophe.”

“Woe betide us,” my mother wailed.

“Where is she?” my father asked. “When will we see her?”

“She’s locked up in Pasha Kauri’s house. They’re just waiting for the right day to bring her out.”

There was a knock at the door. It was Bido Sherifi’s wife, along with Kako Pino, Nazo’s daughter-in-law (more beautiful than ever amidst these horror-struck faces), and Mane Voco’s wife, holding Ilir by the hand.

“Vasiliqia?”

“Is it true? She’s back?”

“How dreadful!”

All the old women had facial tics. Their wrinkles leapt about so furiously it seemed they would come loose and fall off. I had the feeling I was already entangled in those wrinkles.

“So it is, Selfixhe,” said Xhexho, folding her arms on her chest.

“You’ve brought us tidings of death, Xhexho.”

“The end of the world.”

I had already heard about Vasiliqia. The name of this woman, who had terrorised our city some twenty years before, was linked in my mind with words like “cholera”, “plague” and “calamity”, and like them, cropped up in most of the curses people levelled at one another. For long years the name Vasiliqia had hung over their heads like an ever-present threat. Now it had stepped forward out of the universe of words and was plummeting down upon us, assuming the body, eyes, hair and mouth of a woman dressed in black.

More than twenty years ago this woman had arrived in our city with the Greek occupation forces. She would wander the streets in the company of a patrol of Greek gendarmes, weapons at the ready. “That man there has the evil eye,” she would say to them, “seize him.” And the gendarmes would grab him. “That boy over there looks suspicious. He’s no Christian. Grab him, cut him to pieces and throw him in the river.”

She moved through the streets, went into coffee houses, sat staring at people in the main square. The Greeks called her the holy maid. The streets and coffee houses emptied out. She was shot at twice, but was not hit. More than a hundred men and boys were executed on her orders. Then one fine day she walked off with a column of soldiers, heading south, back where she came from.

The city had never forgotten her. Once she had left the real world her name, “Vasiliqia”, had entered the abstract realm of words. “May the eye of Vasiliqia cut you down,” old women would curse. Vasiliqia became more and more remote, as distant as the plague (for plague, too, had once been very near), perhaps even as remote as death. Embittered by her long absence, all of a sudden she had now come back.

Evening fell. Pasha Kauri’s windows were draped with blankets. Why hadn’t they brought her out? What were they waiting for?

The city kept vigil with Vasiliqia on its mind.

The next day, around mid-morning, Xhexho came over again.

“The streets are deserted,” she reported. “Gjergj Pula was the only one I saw, going up to the market. Did you hear that he’s changed his name again?”

“To what?” asked Grandmother.

“Yiorgos Poulos.”

“The scoundrel.”

Gjergj Pula lived in a neighbourhood near ours. The first time the Italians came he had changed his name to Giorgio Pulo.

There was a knock at the door. Bido Sherifi’s wife came in, followed by Nazo’s daughter-in-law.

“We saw Xhexho coming in. Is there any news?”

“Better to be dead and buried than to hear the news there is,” said Xhexho. “Have you heard what they’re saying about Bufe Hasani?”

Grandmother nodded in my direction. I pretended not to be listening. Whenever Bufe Hasani’s name came up, Grandmother was careful not to let me hear.

“He has taken up… with a Greek soldier.”

“What a disgrace!”

“His wife is beside herself. ‘I thought it was all over when the Italians left,’ she wept, ‘when that damned Pepe took off, stinking of hair-cream from twenty paces. But now that filthy husband of mine has got his hooks into one of those spiropoules. A Greek, sisters, a Greek!’”

Nazo’s daughter-in-law’s almond eyes sharpened. Bido Sherifi’s wife pinched her cheeks, leaving traces of flour.

“That Bufe Hasani has his mind made up, and he has the cheek to say so. He says he’s going to pick a lover from every occupying army. A German if the Germans come, a Japanese if the Japanese come.”

“What about Vasiliqia?”

Xhexho snorted.

“They’re keeping her locked up. Who knows what they’re waiting for.”

In the afternoon Ilir came over.

“Isa and Javer have got revolvers,” he told me. “I saw them with my own eyes.”

“Revolvers?”

“Yeah. But don’t tell anyone.”

“What are they going to do with them?”

“They’re going to kill people. I was looking through the keyhole and heard them arguing about who they were going to kill first. They’re making a list. They’re still there in Isa’s room, arguing.”

“Who are they going to bump off?”

“Vasiliqia first, if she comes out. Javer wanted to put Gjergj Pula second, but Isa was against it.”

“That’s odd.”

“Let’s go listen through the keyhole.”

“OK.”

“Where are you going?” my mother asked. “Don’t go too far. You never know, Vasiliqia might come out!”

Isa and Javer had left the door ajar. We went in. They had stopped arguing. Javer was even humming a tune. Apparently they had reached agreement. Isa’s glasses looked bigger than usual. The lenses gleamed. They turned to look at us. They had the death list on them. You could tell from the way they looked.

“Can we go out and play,” Ilir asked, “or will Vasiliqia come out?”

Isa stared at us, not moving. Javer frowned.

“I don’t think they’re letting her out,” he said. “Her time has passed.”

There was a long silence. From the window you could see the road and part of the airfield beyond. The cows were still grazing on it. A vague memory of the big plane came back to me in flashes, as it had already several times. Far above the boring talk of Vasiliqia and the shameful behaviour of Bufe Hasani, its gleaming metal sparkled, so distant that it strained my eyes. That’s a point: where was it now? The image of the dead bird with its wings folded under it now mingled in my mind with Suzana’s frail, almost transparent limbs, and the three of them together – plane, bird and Suzana – mixing a young girl’s flesh, alloy and feathers, swapping life and death, had forged a single and extraordinary being.

“Her time has passed,” Javer repeated. “You can walk the streets without fear.”

We left. The streets were not as empty as Xhexho had said. Çeço Kaili and Aqif Kashahu were tramping over the cobblestones. Çeço Kaili’s red hair looked like a flame fanned by the wind. They were often together these days. Perhaps grief at their daughters’ disgrace had united them. One day Ilir had heard some women say that for a father, having a daughter who had been kissed by a boy was practically the same thing as having a daughter with a beard.

Both men looked glum. Lady Majnur had come to her window with a twig of marjoram in her hand. The houses of the other ladies which stood beside hers had their windows tightly shut. The Karllashi house, with its massive iron door (the hand-shaped iron knocker reminded me of the English pilot’s severed arm), was silent.

“Should we go to the square and see the hole in the statue?” asked Ilir.

“OK.”

“Look, Greeks!”

Soldiers were standing around in front of the boards where cinema posters were usually put up. They all had very dark complexions.

“Do the Greeks belong to the gypsies?” Ilir whispered.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. None of them has a violin or clarinet.”

“Look, that’s where Vasiliqia’s locked up,” Ilir said, pointing at Pasha Kauri’s brown-painted house, where some gendarmes were standing guard.

“Don’t point,” I warned.

“Don’t worry,” Ilir said. “Her time has passed.”

The Addis Ababa Café was closed. The barbershops too. A few more steps and we would cross the square. From afar we could see that the posters at the base of the statue had been torn by the wind. Sss-zzz. I stopped.

“Listen,” I said.

Ilir froze, open-mouthed.

A muffled rumble came from the distance. Someone on the square looked up at the sky. A Greek soldier shaded his eyes with his hand.

“Planes,” Ilir said.

We were in the middle of the square. The rumble grew louder. Suddenly the square seemed to have become much larger. The Greek soldier shouted out loud, then bolted. The sky trembled so much that I thought it would crumble.

Yes, it was him! His noise. His roar.

“Quick!” screamed Ilir, pulling at my sleeve. “Hurry!”

But I was frozen stiff.

“The big plane,” I mumbled in a daze.

“Down!” someone yelled sternly.

The howl was deafening now. It engulfed the sky and smothered the blast of the old anti-aircraft gun, whose shells disappeared into the void.

“Get dow-w-w-n!”

A fragment of a shout reached me from afar, and suddenly I saw, directly overhead, three bombers that had surged up from behind the roofs at dizzying speed. He was one of them. Yes, I would know him anywhere. He was huge, he had his great grey wings all stretched out, he was cruel and blinded by war, and he dropped his bombs: one, two, three… Heaven and earth crashed against each other. A blind force hurled me to the ground. Why was he doing it? What for? My ears ached. Enough! I couldn’t see anything. No ears, no eyes. I must be dead.

When everything was still again I heard a hoarse sob. It was me, crying… I got up. Miraculously, the square was still flat, though just a few moments before it had seemed hopelessly upside down, forever twisted. Ilir was lying face down a few steps away. I went to him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and shook him. He’d grazed the skin on his forehead and hands. I was bleeding too. Wordless, crying our hearts out, we set out quickly but sadly for home. On Market Street we ran into Isa and Javer who were running towards us, very pale. When they saw us, they gave a shout and grabbed us in their arms, then ran home with us at the same frenzied pace.

The Italians came back to the city. In the morning the road was filled with mules, guns and endless columns of soldiers. The Greek flag with its white cross was taken down from the prison tower, giving way to the Italian tricolour with its fascist insignia.

It was soon obvious that this was not just another passing occupation. The siren, the searchlight, the anti-aircraft battery, the nuns and the prostitutes all followed the soldiers in. Only the aerodrome stayed empty. Instead of military aircraft just one strange orange plane came to land there. It was ugly, with a flat nose and short wings, and people called it “Bulldog”. It looked like an orphan all alone there on the tarmac.