The Fall of the Stone City

CHAPTER ONE

No sign of jealousy between Big Dr Gurameto and Little Dr Gurameto had ever been apparent. Although they bore the same surname they had no family connection and had it not been for medicine their destinies would surely never have become entwined; still less would they have acquired the labels “big” and “little”, which created a relationship between them that doubtless neither desired.

It was as if a hidden hand had ensured that the city’s two most famous surgeons could never be separated, even if they had wished, and moreover had created an equilibrium between them that would never be upset. Big Dr Gurameto was not only older and more imposing than his colleague but had studied gynaecology in Germany, definitely a larger and more formidable country than Italy, where Little Dr Gurameto had trained. Although the competition between the two was slow to surface, everybody was sure it existed, carefully concealed, and that one day it would burst out with noise and furore into the greatest medical rivalry the city had ever known.

Meanwhile both doctors, or rather the relationship between them, played a significant role in every public event. This was perhaps because the people found it hard to hold two members of the profession in equal esteem and could hardly wait for one to get the better of the other. So far, Big Dr Gurameto had claimed the victory on every occasion; although this might be too strong a phrase, just as it would be an exaggeration to call the other doctor the loser.

Four years earlier, the event that some people called the Italian invasion and others Albania’s unification with Italy seemed designed specifically to upset the equilibrium between the two doctors and elevate one at the expense of the other. But the contest remained inconclusive: on one day the little doctor seemed certain to win, and on the next the big one. Little Dr Gurameto never gave anything away but Big Dr Gurameto’s face wore an expression of suppressed fury. This made him look more imposing than ever. There was a lot of speculation as to why he should look so furious. A satirical paper finally identified his anger as a pale reflection of the rage reportedly felt by Adolf Hitler when his friend Benito Mussolini disembarked in Albania without telling him beforehand.

Finally, after the first confused weeks, Big Dr Gurameto had emerged with his authority enhanced. Some found this paradoxical while to others it was a logical thing because, quite apart from the Italian occupation and the infighting between the Duce and the Führer, Germany remained the senior ally. If Germany abandoned Italy, Little Dr Gurameto’s country would be in the soup.

In the autumn of 1943 that is precisely what happened: Italy suddenly capitulated and lost her friend. Alliances have been broken throughout history but in this case the prospects for Italy were especially grim. To make matters worse, Italy’s big German brother felt not the slightest pity but turned violently against her. Germany accused Italy of betrayal and showered her with insults and contempt. Germany’s rage was uncontainable and German soldiers were ordered to shoot their former allies on the spot as deserters.

Events moved so fast that the city of Gjirokastër, accustomed to viewing the world in both broad and detailed perspective, seemed to lose its bearings. Its bewilderment was such that for the first time ever the city failed to interpret the situation in so far as it affected the two Dr Gurametos. The new balance of power after Italy’s surrender should have offered an ideal opportunity to reassess the relationship between the men: Italy was on her knees, the German Army was advancing north from Greece to fill the vacuum left in Albania and Big Dr Gurameto and Little Dr Gurameto were going about the city as always. But the chance was missed. The city’s inhabitants shook their heads, sighed and reached the philosophical conclusion that this oversight was surest proof of the dramatic nature of the events.

The longer people pondered the political situation, the more complicated and even mysterious it seemed. Italy had capitulated, as everybody knew, but what was the status of Albania? Either she had capitulated together with Italy or some other interpretation was called for, and the more one tried to explain the situation, the more confused it became.

Sometimes the question was put more simply. Albania had been one of the three component parts of the now fallen empire. Did this mean that one third of Germany’s fury would fall on her?

It was not easy to find the answer. Any fool could see that Italy was bearing the brunt of Germany’s anger but nobody could forecast what would happen to the other two parts of the empire, Ethiopia and Albania. But then, who else but the Albanians could be the targets of German rage? The German Army was less than forty miles away. Germany was surely drooling at the mouth, like a wolf that has caught sight of a lamb.

A feeling of helplessness had the city in its grip when an unexpected development put an end to all uncertainty. One morning two unknown aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets over Gjirokastër. They were in two languages, German and Albanian, and provided a full explanation. Germany was not invading, she merely wanted to pass through Albania. She was coming as a friend. Not only did Germany have no quarrel with Albania, in fact she was liberating the country from the hated Italian occupation and restoring Albania’s violated independence. She recognised ethnic Albania with Kosovo and Çamëria within its borders.

Despite this reassurance some sceptics came out with the familiar refrain. “How can those high-ups tell what’s happening down here?” By “high-ups” they implied both high-level German officials and the aircraft dropping the leaflets. Yet the city’s nightmare did seem finally to be over. People could not believe their eyes, although the text was plain and moreover in two languages. It was almost too good to be true.

With calmer minds people began offering their opinions of the leaflets. As always, these were divided. Some liked this form of advance notice, so untypical of the deviousness of modern life. “Nowadays some almighty state can cross your border at night like a thief and protest the next morning without a flicker of shame, ‘It was you who attacked me.’ This prior warning in broad daylight is totally transparent, indeed gentlemanly, like sending a visiting card.”

“Nonsense,” said others. “This visiting card business is precisely the worst possible insult to any country, especially a brave country like ours. ‘Albania, I’m coming tomorrow morning. Come out to welcome me at ten o’clock. Never mind what people say about me. Take no notice of my artillery and tanks, because Germany is good, and brings culture and bouquets of flowers.’ Are you witless enough to believe this twaddle?”

“At least visiting cards are preferable to bombs,” said the others in self-defence.

A third group, sticklers for rules and regulations, raised another concern. Their anxiety was of a special kind, as fastidious in its demands as an overfed tomcat, arrogant and somehow brazen. “All right, so Germany has stated her intentions, but what stand will Albania take?”

This question created a sense of unease. “Rather than being finicky we should thank God the Germans haven’t torn us to shreds like they did the Greeks.” Various proverbs were cited in illustration, especially the one about the starved goat with its tail held high.

Meanwhile those with more patience urged caution. They produced some flyers they had found, left on their doorsteps overnight. These were not such attractive productions as the leaflets that had fallen from the air. They were in only one language and were the opposite of the leaflets in every respect. The flyers called for war and nothing but war, and vilified the Germans as evil invaders, worse even than the Italians.

People grew suspicious and gave the matter more consideration. Apparently there were two schools of thought in Albania as a whole. This fact made little impression on Gjirokastër. Everybody knew that there had been occasions when the city thought itself wiser than the rest of the country, and this case called for her wisdom, because it would fall to Gjirokastër, as the first large city through which the Germans would pass, to deal with them before anyone else.

CHAPTER TWO

The city had always had a reputation for arrogance. There were different explanations for this. Viewed in the most charitable light, its pride was an aspect of its isolation. The supporters of this theory, conscious of its obvious inadequacy, would hasten to add that “isolation” in this context required some qualification. The city was surrounded by a far-reaching hinterland with which it was on poor terms and the inhabitants of this hinterland considered the city alien, if not their actual enemy. At its back to the north, among the endless mountains full of foxes and wolves, lay the rugged and apparently innumerable villages of Labëria. To the east beyond the river and its valley lay the villages of Lunxhëria, which were also irritating to the city but for the opposite reason: because of their gentleness. Then there were the Greek-minority villages stretched along both sides of the river valley to the south. The Greek peasants who worked the land as sharecroppers were treated with disdain but perhaps provoked the city even more. The subtle irritation they caused was felt more during the hours of sleep than by day, and there was no reason for it at all. The presence of these Greeks was like a temptation to sin, leading the residents of the city into prejudiced opinions against not only the Greeks, but Hellenism as a whole, the state of Greece, its politics, and even its language.

To complicate this patchwork further, in the very middle of the territory, or more precisely between the city and the Greek-minority area, lay Lazarat, the most stubborn and vicious village imaginable. Historians, unable to account for its rancour towards Gjirokastër, said only that this malice did no harm, as long as the city bore the brunt of it and prevented it from seeping further into Albania.

It was said that on dark nights the lights of Gjirokastër, though faint and distant, so irked the villagers of Lazarat that they fired guns in the direction of the stone city.

According to other more cautious chroniclers, the origin of this enmity lay in the tall houses in whose upper storeys the ladies of the city were believed to live. Behind the roughcast walls, the ladies observed their own unbending rituals. Rarely seen in public, they were the city’s secret rulers.

The city itself was inured to all this and sought neither conciliation nor agreement with anyone. Faced with such general hostility, any other city might perhaps have attempted to ally itself with one neighbour against another, for instance with Labëria against the Greek minority or Lazarat against Lunxhëria. But Gjirokastër was not as wise as it should have been. Or perhaps it was wiser. It came to the same thing.

Not only did the city refuse conciliation, as a warning it illuminated its prison at night. This prison was inside the castle, at the stone city’s highest point. With this baleful light, which travellers compared to a malignant version of the floodlit Acropolis of Athens, Gjirokastër sent its message to its entire hinterland, Labëria, Lazarat, Lunxhëria, and the Greeks: here you will all rot, without distinction, without mercy.

This threat was not an idle one if one remembered the three hundred imperial judges — unemployed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire — who bided their time at home.

The reinstatement of these pitiless judges would turn even the most sweet-tempered of cities, let alone Gjirokastër, into a wild beast. People were heard to say that if even Lunxhëria exerted her charms in vain, nothing could mollify this city. The lights of the churches of Lunxhëria twinkled and their bells pealed at Easter and their women and their freshwater springs were of rare sweetness. The stone city was not as blind as it appeared; it took note of everything. Sometimes girls or young brides vanished from the villages of Lunxhëria. Their neighbours searched for them everywhere, in the streams, in ravines and among the shepherds’ shielings. Eventually a soft sigh like the rustle of silk would suggest firmly that they must have ended up in the tall houses of the city.

It was never proved whether men of the city had in fact abducted these women. Were the girls kidnapped or had they drifted like butterflies, of their own free will, close to the formidable gates of the houses, until one day they were sucked in, never to emerge again. Nobody knew what went on inside. Were they wretched there or happy? Perhaps their dream of becoming ladies had come true. Or perhaps they themselves had been only a dream, and nothing else.

This was how things stood just before the Germans arrived. The old conviction that Albania, when faced with danger, would come to its senses and forget its internal strife proved ill-founded.

Three days before the vanguard of the Wehrmacht crossed the state frontier, the situation was as follows. The villages of Lunxhëria with their sweet springs and lovely girls closed in on themselves and seemed determined to take no notice of the Germans. Their main concern in any invasion was the forcible seizure of brides; the reports that the Germans were not noted for this (and indeed, at least according to the leaflets dropped from the sky, would respect the traditional Albanian virtues) was sufficient to allay any fears of what would come from foreign occupation.

The Greek minority, seeing that this army had crushed the state of Greece, kept their heads down and prayed to God they would not be noticed. But for the villagers of Lazarat, the very fact that the Germans had thrashed the Greeks, whom they could not abide under any circumstances, was enough if not to arouse their admiration, at least to soften any animosity against the aggressors.

In Labëria the situation was different. The villagers’ opinions for or against communism were transformed instantly into feelings for or against the Germans. As always, when they ran out of arguments they reached for their guns. As they had more bullets than words there was little chance of an end to the quarrel.

The same questions that were fought over with such commotion and brutality in the villages of Labëria were debated more delicately in the city of Gjirokastër itself. In its elegant third-floor drawing rooms, binoculars were passed from hand to hand to observe the main road along which “the war was coming”.

There were two schools of thought. As expected, the communists were calling for war, fervently, and soon. The nationalists were not opposed to war but were not inclined to either fervour or haste. In their view excessive zeal was more characteristic of Russia than Albania and there was no reason why Albania should rush into war blindly, without considering her own advantage. Germany was indeed an invader, but Red Russia was no better. Besides, Germany was bringing home Kosovo and Çamëria, while Russia offered nothing but collective farms. In contrast, the words “ethnic Albania” in the German leaflets not only failed to conciliate the communists but actually provoked them. Their impatience for war probably did come from Russia. This was only natural for they were led by two or three Serbian chiefs for whom the phrase “ethnic Albania” was a red rag and worse.

These opinions changed with every passing hour and were expressed most bluntly in the city’s cafés. On one sentiment everyone could agree. Pass through, Mr Germany, like you promised, in transit. Don’t provoke us, and we won’t provoke you. Achtung! You’ve already thrashed Greece and Serbia. That’s your business! Give us Kosovo and Çamëria, jawohl!

Of all these predictions, the worst came true. On the highway at the entrance to the city the German advance party was fired on. It was neither war nor appeasement, just an ambush. The three motorcyclists of the advance party made a sharp U-turn and sped back in the direction from which they had come. The shooters also vanished, as if swallowed up by the bushes.

The news soon reached the city’s cafés and everybody scrambled for the shelter of their own homes. As they hurried off they exchanged parting shots, some reviling the communists for staging a provocation and then scarpering, as they did so often, and others denouncing the cowards who would stop at nothing to appease the wolf.

Even before the heavy gates of the houses closed, the news had spread: the city would be punished for its treachery. What stunned everybody was not the punishment itself, but the way it would be carried out. It was an unusual reprisal: the city was to be blown up. Of course this was frightening, but the first response was not fear but shame.

It took some time to sink in. The stone houses with their title deeds, the three hundred imperial judges, the houses of the ladies and with them the ladies themselves with their silken nightdresses, their secrets and their bangles, would fly into the air and fall from the sky like hail.

As if to avert their eyes from this appalling vision, the citizens fell back on their recent quarrels. “Look what the communists have done to us.” “It’s your own fault. You thought you’d won Kosovo and Çamëria.” “It wasn’t us, it was you, pretending you would fight.” “What, so we’d do the fighting while you stood back and watched?” “We didn’t say we’d fight, you did. You lied.” “You’re on the warpath? Stay where you are. Fight, or sit tight, just don’t move!”

In this way they snapped at each other until the argument eventually returned to the unresolved matter of who had fired on the Germans. The silence that followed was wearisome, and so back they came to the manner of their punishment: being blown up. This was of course an appalling prospect, but the men of the city felt there was something unspeakably and particularly shameful about it. Cities everywhere had been punished down the ages, and indeed, if you thought hard, this had been the number one calamity throughout history. Cities had been besieged, deprived of food and water and bombarded; their gates had been battered, their walls demolished, their houses burned to ashes and flattened, their sites ploughed and sown with salt so that no grass would ever grow again. Many cities have met their end, despairing, but with courage. To be blown up was something else.

Finally, the men understood where their feeling of shame came from. This reprisal seemed to them an insult to their manhood. “Isn’t this a sort of punishment for women?” went the talk round the tables. “Or am I wrong?” The essential idea was easy to grasp instinctively but hard to explain. Being blown into the air and made to leap and caper — all this was women’s stuff. In short, the stone city, so proud of its manly traditions, had been marked out to die like a woman. How delighted the despised villages around the city would be. Or would they feel sorry for Gjirokastër? In any event it would be too late.

At this point the men’s hearts sank and their voices failed. They turned their heads away so as not to burst into tears like the women, who, being women, were already weeping.

In the gathering dusk something for which there was still no word crept over the city.

Those who were determined to flee left for the villages of Lunxhëria or the Broad Mountain, where they thought the wolves and foxes would be more hospitable.

The rattle of the approaching tanks could be heard and after waiting so long, many people thought that this protracted roar was the explosion, a newly-invented way of being blown up, German-style.

Finally the German tanks appeared, moving in a black, orderly file along the highway. The first tank halted at the river bridge, rotated its turret and aimed its barrel at the city. The second, third, fourth and all the others did the same, in sequence.

Even before the first shell was fired, Gjirokastër’s inhabitants had understood not only the tanks’ message but the whole situation. The stone city had fired on the German Army’s advance guard. Now it would be punished according to the rules of war, which took no account of how cultivated, ancient or crazy a town might be.

The first shell flew through the air above the roofs just as an old man of the Karagjoz house announced, “I’ll not be blown up, I’ll make a dash for it before you blink. But this is torture, neither one thing nor the other!”

The shells fell first on the outskirts and then by careful degrees approached the centre and people in the shelters made their final wishes, uttered what they thought were their last words, prayed.

Then the bombardment suddenly stopped. The first inquisitive people who emerged from the cellars were astonished to find the city still there and not in ruins as they had imagined. But this fact was easy to grasp compared to the next piece of news, which concerned the cessation of the shelling and was strange and baffling. One of the inhabitants had apparently waved a white sheet from a rooftop, nobody could tell exactly where. He had signalled to the Germans the city’s surrender. While lots of people accepted this as truth, many thought it must have been a mirage.

Meanwhile the rumble of the tanks had started again. Now they were slowly climbing towards Gjirokastër.

Dusk fell at last and under the cover of darkness harder questions were asked. Who had raised the white flag? The original question of who had fired on the German advance party now seemed naive and childish. People sensed that it would soon be answered and plenty of men would boast of this feat, while whoever had waved the white sheet would vanish into obscurity.

There was no way of identifying the man or even the house from whose roof the flag had been raised. “Somewhere in that direction,” hazarded those who claimed to have seen it. Other people tried to guess who it might have been but when asked to pin down his name, or at least the roof, they all shrugged their shoulders as if this shame, if that is what it could be called, was too great to be borne by a single person, or a single roof.

Everybody agreed on this and so they felt relieved when someone found an explanation for what had happened, one that dispelled every suspicion of blame. The explanation was very simple: no search would ever discover the person or ghost who had raised the flag of surrender. The September wind had pulled a white curtain out of a window left open when the occupants of the house sought shelter in the cellar, and blown it back and forth in front of the eyes of the Germans. The inhabitants of the city could finally be reassured that neither cowardice nor, worse, attempted treason had set this flag fluttering. Destiny itself in the form of the wind had done the necessary job.

CHAPTER THREE

Events had so stunned the city that it was hard to believe that this was still the same day. The very word “afternoon” seemed not to fit any more. Should it be called the second part of the day? The last part? Perhaps the most treacherous part, harbouring a centuries-old grudge against the day as a whole, or rather its first part, which you might call forenoon; forget the idea of morning. Its malice had rankled, to erupt suddenly that mid-September.

There was also a sense of gratitude to destiny for at least having preserved the city from other long-forgotten calamities such as the Double Night, a sort of calendrical monster that beggared the imagination, a stretch of time that was unlike anything else and came from no one knew where, from the bowels of the universe perhaps, a union of two nights in one, smothering the day between them as dishonoured women once were smothered in the old houses of Gjirokastër.

Recourse to such flights of fancy was understandable because the inhabitants of the city had lost something that had always been a source of pride to them: their cool heads. Or had they lost their heads altogether?

Nevertheless, with whatever mental powers left to them they hoped they had grasped certain things. For instance they understood that they had exchanged being blown up for a mass shooting but they didn’t yet know who would be the unfortunate people marked out for death. No doubt talks were under way with the Germans about their demands but nobody could work out where these were taking place, or who was talking to whom. Instead, people pricked their ears to catch the scraping sounds of footsteps in the night. Perhaps these were intermediaries, or would-be denunciators who did not know where to go.

Meanwhile another kind of sound was heard. It was more than unexpected. It was incredible, like the story of the man caught in the wolf’s fangs who in despair had prayed, “Oh God, make this a dream!” and whose prayer was answered. The sound was indeed like an answer to prayer, a happy end to an inauspicious beginning. It resembled machine-gun fire of a totally different kind, as if a new sort of weapon had been invented, one which fired music.

“What sort of gun is this? It’s like the music of Strauss,” said the Shamet boys, who played in the municipal band. Moreover, it was apparent at once that this noise, whether gunfire, music or both, did not come from the city’s main square but from the. . from the house of Big Dr Gurameto.

Before they concluded that Dr Gurameto had lost his wits, something else made people catch their breath. It was the feeling of bottomless and boundless remorse that follows an unpardonable oversight: they had forgotten the two doctors.

How had this happened? In all the upheaval of these world-shaking events with the rise and fall of states, broken alliances and changes to frontiers and flags, how had they forgotten the two doctors, who particularly should have been remembered at such a time? Forgetting their rivalry, their points of comparison and the fluctuating authority of each was like losing a compass bearing, forgetting the city’s barometer or thermometer; not to mention the stock-market index and the currency devaluation and the collapse of the Swiss banks that would follow a German invasion. In short, the mainspring that ticks inside every city and whose ticking everyone feels without knowing where it might be had been broken.

And now it seemed that Big Dr Gurameto was taking his revenge. “So you forgot me, did you? Now just see if I don’t drive you crazy!” And in the silence he had turned on his gramophone to wake the heavens. But this supposition, like most speculations that are too hasty, was soon questioned. Revenge was not Dr Gurameto’s style. Everyone knew he stood aloof from all these things.

So what was happening in his house? Any idiot could hear the music. But what it was for, for what occasion or what purpose, nobody could tell.

At once two new theories were put forward. The first claimed that Dr Gurameto’s intention was to cock a snook at the Germans. “So you’re invading us? You think you’ve frightened us and brought us to our knees? Nothing of the sort! Look, in front of your very nose my daughter’s getting engaged and I’m not postponing the party because according to our customs no Albanian will put off even the hour let alone the day of a celebration. So I’m behaving as if you weren’t here at all. You’re even welcome to come if you like. According to our traditions, my house is open to everyone, friend or foe.”

This interpretation showed what a fine man Big Dr Gurameto was and a cheer went up, if a silent one. “Bravo for Big Dr Gurameto, the toast of Gjirokastër!’ Simultaneously everyone derided his counterpart, Little Dr Gurameto. “Down with the little one! To hell with him, a disgrace to the neighbourhood and our whole city!”

But this conjecture proved short-lived. It was next reported that Dr Gurameto was not holding an engagement party. His dinner was not intended as a slap in the Germans’ faces. On the contrary, he was hosting it in their honour. He had invited these foreigners in order to say, “They greeted you with bullets at the gates of the city this morning, but I’ll welcome you with food and wine and music!”

A storm of fury blew up against the doctor. Many people said they had always known he would be unmasked as the Germanophile he was and others cursed him as the Judas of the city. They were correspondingly profuse in their praise for Little Dr Gurameto. At least the little one was cowering in the dark like everybody else, long-suffering but heroic, the pride of all Albania, whether Greater Albania or not!

It was plain to see that not a peep came from the darkened house of Little Dr Gurameto, while the big doctor’s house was ablaze with light, the music grew louder and above its strains the shouts of toasts and cheers in German could be heard.

The big doctor’s supporters, eager to exonerate him from this charge of treason, resorted to the suspicion that his mind had given way. Someone in this story had obviously lost his wits but nobody could tell if it was the doctor, the Germans or both.

Meanwhile, to spite the doctor’s admirers, the anti-Big Gurameto faction, more venomous than ever, asserted that the music was interspersed with machine-gun fire and that hostages were already being killed, not in the city square but in the cellars of the doctor’s house.

Others went even further, claiming that hostages the Germans especially wanted, such as Jakoel the Jew, were being led out of the cellars to be shot then and there in the dining hall, for sport! In other words, shoot them, slice open their bodies on the table, remove the organs for brave German soldiers and raise a toast to Albanian — German friendship.

This extravagant fantasy, especially the vision of Big Dr Gurameto with his surgical instruments cutting up bodies during dinner, brusquely restored people to their senses and the city thereby regained the faculty on which it had prided itself for the last six centuries at least.

It was true, though, that Dr Gurameto’s house was brightly lit and echoed to the sounds of merriment, with Brahms followed by Lili Marlene. And at the same time, machine guns were being lined up in the city square and trained on hostages handcuffed in pairs, who shivered in the dampness of the night. The weather was cold. A bitter north wind blew down the Gorge of Tepelene, as it always did when destiny took a turn for the worse. The hostages stood waiting. No gun had yet fired and the helmeted soldiers now and then lifted their heads in surprise towards the music. But it was the hostages who were the most bewildered and uncomprehending as they listened.

There could be no more extreme opposites than that grim square with its expectation of death and Big Dr Gurameto’s house with its singing and champagne, yet soon, inexplicably, it was assumed that the machine guns and the music, however far apart they might be, were mysteriously linked. But what was the connection between them, and did it promise good or ill?

As the sound of the gramophone slowly faded, so did the anguish of speculation about the dinner. The city could recall many extraordinary banquets of all kinds down the centuries, some joyful and others disgusting: guests had tried to throw themselves from the rooftops in their euphoria, had fired at each other in mid-celebration or attempted to kidnap the lady of the house; dawn had broken to reveal hosts and guests poisoned together. Yet none could be compared to the dinner of this night.

Reaching back deeper into the past, people remembered Christ’s Last Supper, as told by the scriptures, and were sure they would find the answer there. But as soon as they felt they had hit upon the truth, it eluded them again. Clearly, neither Big Dr Gurameto nor any of his German guests were Christ, but it would be going too far to identify either with Judas. With a sigh and a prayer to the Lord to forgive them these sinful thoughts, they tried to empty their minds completely.

Among the scattered houses of outlying neighbourhoods fresh news was slow to arrive so people made do with the old. Even an hour later they were still arguing about machine guns making music. Shaqo Bej Kokoboja, who had once found himself on the Prussian — Russian front by mistake, said that all this talk was nonsense: he had felt the bullets of a Schwarzlose machine gun on his own back and its sound was as familiar to him as his old lady’s snoring. When others retorted that nobody was talking about those old First World War blunderbusses but about Schubert — ever heard of Schubert? — he lost his temper. “Give over, all those Schuberts or sherbets are just popguns. Don’t tell me a machine gun can do a foxtrot or a cannon can play an opera.”

In one of these isolated houses a dinner was recollected from the distant past. Its memory had been preserved down the generations like a legend or a children’s bedtime story. The tale concerned the master of a house who was bound by a promise to invite a stranger to dinner. He handed the dinner invitation to his son with instructions. The son set off in search of an unknown passer-by but became frightened on the lonely road. Passing the cemetery, he threw the invitation over the wall and ran through the darkness, not knowing that the invitation had fallen on a grave. He returned home and said to his father, “I’ve done what you told me.” At that moment there appeared at the door the dead man with the invitation in his hand. The father and his family shrank back in horror. “You invited me and I’ve come,” said the dead man. “Don’t stare at me like that!”

Meanwhile, the dinner at Dr Gurameto’s continued. Nobody knew what was happening inside the house until news of a different kind spread, this time as welcome as an April breeze. It floated gently, more delicate than a rainbow, vulnerable to the slightest current. The irresistible wind from the Gorge of Tepelene seemed to help carry it to its proper destination: the hostages were being freed.

The news was breathtaking; people could not get it into their skulls. The hostages were. . the hostages were not being shot, but released. They had not fallen, shredded by bullets in the city square. They were slipping away, one by one, each to their own home. Oh God! It was Big Dr Gurameto who had performed this miracle!

The wave of gratitude towards him was uncontainable. Hearts melted, knees gave way, heads bowed. The heads then lifted to raise a proper cheer for Big Dr Gurameto. Never before had the mania for comparison, exalting one at the expense of the other, undergone such a reversal. The whole city felt bound to fall to its knees before Big Dr Gurameto, to wash his feet with tears and beg pardon for having doubted him. At the same time it was obliged to turn against his rival, the little doctor, this Judas of Europe and the continent’s disgrace, who had rejoiced prematurely at their hero’s downfall.

The little doctor was mystified. He and his supporters understood nothing of what was going on. Little Dr Gurameto had never nurtured any ill will against his colleague, and had always shown him every respect. But this in no way affected the violent movement of the barometer, which seemed to put paid to every nagging suspicion and conclude this long history of carefully hidden rivalry.

After settling accounts with Little Dr Gurameto, people returned, as was to be expected, to the central issue. As they gazed adoringly at Big Dr Gurameto’s brightly lit house, the music coming from it sounded divine and the ancient building itself resembled less a house than a cathedral.

The old curiosity about the secrets of the city’s ladies now quietly revived, if feebly after such a long abeyance. Was it true that Mrs Gurameto and her daughter were waltzing with the Germans, whose commanding officer, Baron von Schwabe, wore a mask?

This curiosity was bound sooner or later to settle again on the first, unavoidable question. What was this occasion really about? Some still called it the “dinner of shame” but others referred to it as the “resurrection dinner”. The secret was finally coming out, conveyed through mysterious channels, perhaps carried by servants or the dispatch riders who came and went all night.

CHAPTER FOUR

And what happened was this: on the afternoon that preceded the dinner, after the tanks and armoured vehicles had rumbled and rattled their way into the town, there stepped out from one of the military cars onto the city square Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, commander of the German division and bearer of the Iron Cross. His legs still stiff, he stood surveying the scene and announced, “Gjirokastër. I have a friend here.”

His aides thought he was joking but the colonel went on in the same tone of voice, “A great friend, from university, my closest friend, more than a brother to me.”

His aides expected laughter to follow this statement. “I was joking,” he would surely say, and explain himself.

But nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, he gave his aides a look of the kind they had never seen and told them his friend’s name. He mentioned the college in Munich where they had studied together and his address. “Big Dr Gurameto. Der grosse Doktor Gurameto, 22 Varosh Straße, Gjirokastër, Albanien.”

The aides heard their commander order this Albanian to be found and brought to him at once.

Four soldiers mounted two motorcycles with sidecars. Armed with machine guns, they sped off with the address of the man they were looking for.

At this point the town’s inhabitants still had not emerged from the shelters, so nobody saw the soldiers knock at Dr Gurameto’s gate and escort him away.

At the city square the colonel’s aides finally believed what he had told them, but as they noticed how anxiously he waited for the man he claimed to be his friend, their suspicions were roused again. Was he really a great friend, closer than any brother, or someone wanted for arrest? They waited to see whether this famous doctor would be given a medal or shot for some crime, of what sort nobody could say.

The motorcycles returned, first one, then the other. All eyes were now focused on the mysterious doctor. Apparently the man would be neither decorated nor executed. This was something harder to credit: a sentimental reunion, as if from the last century or even the age of chivalry.

At first the doctor stood nonplussed and failed to recognise his college friend. Perhaps it was the passage of time, his military uniform or the two scars on his face. But then the meeting went as it should.

The doctor and the colonel embraced and their tears of emotion finally dispelled every shred of doubt. Such a touching encounter, so. . no, no, it couldn’t be of that kind. Neither of them seemed that sort. And yet there was something behind this. Colonel von Schwabe, although young and of relatively modest rank, had strong connections in Berlin, the capital of the Reich. He might know things that nobody else did, for instance that this doctor was about to be appointed the governor of Albania.

The emotional reunion continued, as touching as the discovery of a lost brother in an old ballad.

“Like the Nibelungenlied, eh? Or the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini? Do you remember what you told me in the Widow Martha’s Tavern? About Albanian honour, hospitality?”

“Remember it? Of course I do!” Big Dr Gurameto replied. He was overcome by nostalgia too, but now and then an inexplicable shadow crossed his face.

The colonel also looked pensive.

“I’ve dreamed of this meeting for so long,” he said. “I used to talk to people about you and the things you told me. I used to read Karl May’s adventure stories about Albania. People thought I was crazy. They didn’t know how close we were. You know, when I believed I was on my deathbed I thought of you. I even had the delusion that it wasn’t our military surgeon operating on me, but you. Do you remember telling me about that terrifying dream you had, in which you were operating on yourself? I dreamed that you were operating on me. The instruments were in someone else’s hand, but I dreamed it was you who restored me to life. You brought me back from the grave.”

The colonel broke off and laid his hand on one of the scars on his forehead. When he spoke again, his voice was slow, almost heartbroken. “And so when they gave me orders to take this tank division and occupy Albania, my first thought was of you. I wouldn’t invade Albania but save it, unite it with the eternal Reich and of course, before anything else, I would find you, my brother. And I set off happily to the country where honour rules, as you used to say.”

His voice faltered and he fell silent for a moment. “Dr Gurameto, they fired on me in your city.”

His voice was now hoarse and he frowned. Big Dr Gurameto stood frozen to the spot.

“I was fired on,” the colonel went on. “I was betrayed. The advance party barely escaped with their lives. When they told me, my first thought was again of you. It was my fault for believing you. Nostalgia had turned me soft and without thinking I had put my men in mortal danger. I was beside myself. ‘Gurameto,’ I shouted, ‘you traitor, where’s your Albanian honour now?’”

The doctor stood transfixed, speechless. The colonel’s voice grew faint.

“I sent you word. I dropped thousands of leaflets from the air. I told you I was coming as a guest. I asked the master of the house, ‘Will you receive guests?’ And then came your reply. My men escaped by the skin of their teeth. When I saw my soldiers bent low over their motorcycles, I almost howled. All those things we talked about at the Widow Martha’s Tavern, did they mean nothing? Where is your honour, Dr Gurameto? Have you nothing to say?”

The doctor finally found his voice. “I didn’t fire on you, Fritz.”

“Really? It was worse than that. Your country fired on me.”

“I answer for my own house, not the state.”

“It comes to the same.”

“It doesn’t come to the same. I’m not Albania, just as you’re not Germany, Fritz. We’re something else.”

The colonel lowered his eyes thoughtfully. “Something else,” he murmured. “Well put. You’re an amazing man, Gurameto. You always were special. You’re the superman, aren’t you? You don’t belong to the real world.”

“Nor do you, Fritz.”

“You mean that’s why we don’t get on with the rest?”

“Perhaps. I’m still the person I was.”

“And I’m not? You mean that this uniform of mine, these scars, the war, the Iron Cross have changed me? I tell you, they haven’t, not in the slightest.”

“If that’s true, Fritz, and if you’re still the same person, I’m inviting you to dinner at my house, according to the customs we spoke about. Tonight.”

The colonel raised his hand to his scarred brow, as if struck by a blow. His icy stare seemed to say, “Come to dinner, in this country where they fired on me behind my back?”

He put his arms round Gurameto but this time his embrace was cold. Gurameto interpreted it as a refusal of his invitation and tensed his neck. But the reply was the opposite. Their final words were partly in Albanian and partly in archaic German.

As evening fell on the city, Big Dr Gurameto felt the weight of a sorrow he had never known before. He listened to the sounds of preparation for the dinner and looked out from the first floor veranda towards the gate of his yard, where his guest would knock.

The colonel came at the promised time and, strangely, his car drew up without a sound, as if it had glided through the air above the city to avoid being seen by anybody.

His guest seemed to have arrived so stealthily that the master of the house asked him if he should draw the curtains and turn off the gramophone.

To his surprise, the colonel said no. Certainly not. Wherever Colonel Fritz von Schwabe goes for dinner, especially in Albania, let the lamps be lit and the music sound, as custom demands. “You invited me to dinner, and here I am,” his voice boomed.

Smiling, he bounded up the staircase, followed by his aides and a soldier carrying a case of champagne. They entered the great drawing room, kissed the hands of the lady and daughter of the house and gave a curt nod to the doctor’s prospective son-in-law.

The slight embarrassment on both sides, perhaps because this was the first time any Albanian house had welcomed German servicemen, vanished at once when the guests took their places at the dinner table. Clearly the evening would go well. Cheerful toasts were raised. The conversation flowed without longueurs and paused without stalling. The colonel and his host sometimes talked tête-à-tête, teasing each other with recollections of student days, which inevitably involved the names of drinks and young ladies. Mrs Gurameto’s sparkling eyes showed that this did not offend her in the slightest. Following the tradition of university feasts, the guests were provided with masks, which they wore or set aside as the fancy took them.

“My God,” sighed the colonel. His voice was not loud, but a silence fell. “My God,” he repeated, “for weeks, months, I’ve dreamed of visiting a house like this.”

His expression clouded over again. His voice softened, as it had that afternoon in the city square.

“For so many weeks, so many months,” he continued softly, “as I crossed the wasteland of Europe, with death and hatred all around me, I yearned for a dinner like this. Of all the possible houses in this whole sorry continent that I dreamed of visiting, yours was the very first.”

“I believe you,” Gurameto replied calmly.

“Thank you, brother. The prospect was doubly inviting, because the house was yours, and because it was Albanian. It was just as you said, like in Lekë Dukagjini: ‘Give me your word of honour, oh master of the house!’ What a magnificent phrase. The whole time I was thinking, quite rightly, that our ancient German customs are close to yours. The world has forgotten these customs, but we will bring them back. That’s what I told myself, as I travelled across wintry, frozen Europe. It was all ours, we were winning all the time, but something was missing.”

One of the officers tried to seize the opportunity of the silence to raise a toast, but at a glance from his superior he left his glass where it stood.

“And so, as I told you, when the order came to occupy — I mean to unite Albania, my first thought was that I would visit my brother. I would find him wherever he was. And look, I have come. But you. . You fired on me, Gurameto. Treacherously, behind my back.”

“It wasn’t me,” the doctor said quietly.

“I know. But you know better than I do that your Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini demands blood for blood. German blood was spilt. Blood is never counted as lost.”

Dr Gurameto awaited the verdict with his eyes closed.

“Eighty hostages will wash away that blood. While we are dining here, my men are rounding them up.”

The expression of the master of the house turned to stone. He had heard something about this, but had thought the order would be rescinded.

Everybody waited to hear how he would reply. That rigid face would produce something. For instance he might say, “Why tell me this?” Or, “You are my guest. Show me the respect that I have shown you.” Or he might simply pronounce the old formula that followed an insult to a table, according to the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, and go to the window to announce to the people that his German guest had violated his hospitality.

But Big Dr Gurameto said nothing of the sort. The thought in his mind was of something entirely different.

In fact it was not a thought at all but a sudden, incongruous flashback of the strange dream of which the colonel had reminded him a few hours before on the city square. Instantaneously and with blinding clarity he saw himself stretched out on the operating table. He looked up — the surgeon operating on him was himself. This came as a surprise to him but what struck him most was the expression on the surgeon’s face. It did not reveal whether the surgeon recognised him or not. Gurameto even wanted to say to him, “It’s me, don’t you know me?” But at that moment the surgeon, with the scalpel in his hand, gave a slight sign of recognition, as if this patient were a person he had met before. Again, Gurameto wanted to say, “Careful, be gentle, don’t you see it’s me, your own self?” But the surgeon donned his protective mask and Gurameto could only try to interpret the expression of this mask. It changed, sometimes suggesting that the surgeon would be gentle, as if to himself, but at other times the masked face conveyed the opposite impression, that he was the last person from whom Gurameto could expect kindness.

Gurameto wanted to question the surgeon but the anaesthetic prevented him. The expression of the mask grew sterner. It seemed to say, now that you’re in my hands, you’ll see what I’ll do to you. The torture continued. The mask bent over him. As the surgeon was about to make the first incision, he whispered, “Don’t you know that a person’s worst enemy is his own self?”

The colonel was talking at the dinner table but his voice came as if from a distance. The doctor could not be sure if he heard him correctly. “You brought me back to life, Gurameto.” His voice was soft, very faint. “You brought me back to life, but to your own misfortune.”

Of course this evening was his misfortune. From now on the whole city would revile him as a traitor. In the days, months and years to come, even after his death, this was how he would be remembered.

He wanted to wake from this nightmare too, but what came from his mouth were only a few calm words. “Fritz, free the hostages.”

The dinner table froze.

“Was?”

The master of the house looked forlornly at his guest. “Free the hostages, Fritz,” he repeated. “Libera obsides.”

“How dare you?” A lump in the colonel’s throat strangled his words. “How dare you give me orders. If you weren’t. . ”

The colonel left the phrase unsaid, but everyone knew what he wanted to say. If you weren’t my old college friend, from that tavern on the other side of ravaged Europe, there would be Armageddon here.

The colonel put his hand on Dr Gurameto’s shoulder, as if comforting someone in shock. In a gentle, soothing voice and with a playful smile, he said, “You gave me an order in a dead language. What did you mean by that, my friend?”

The officers at the table stared wide-eyed, moving their hands from their champagne glasses to their revolvers and back again.

The colonel repeated his question and added, “Was this a slight to the German language?”

Gurameto shook his head but his explanation was confused. It had nothing to with German. He loved Latin and always had done. He had spoken in Latin impulsively, without thinking. They had spoken Latin in their student days, to tell each other secrets.

The colonel thought for a moment, and sipped his champagne. “You asked me to free the hostages,” he said quietly. “Tell me why!”

“They’re innocent,” the doctor replied. “No other reason.”

As they sat at the dinner table, outside in the darkness German soldiers were knocking on the doors of the houses of Gjirokastër.

The doctor asked how the hostages were being selected. Was their fate written on their faces?

The colonel replied that every tenth house was being chosen, as in all reprisals. “Dr Gurameto, you want justice as much as I do. Listen to me! Hand over whoever fired on my advance party and I will release the hostages. On the spot. I give you my word. I give you my word of honour, according to the Code of Lekë Dukagjini.”

Gurameto did not reply.

“That’s my bargain with the city. This offer is on the table.”

Still Dr Gurameto did not speak and the colonel leaned over, his face close to the doctor’s. “If the city won’t hand them over, give them to me yourself.”

The doctor said nothing.

“Gurameto, my brother,” the colonel said more gently. “I don’t want to spill Albanian blood. I came as a guest, with promises and gifts, but you fired on me.” His voice was once again disconsolate, broken.

“Give me those damned names,” said the colonel, now almost pleading. “Give them to me and the hostages are yours, instantly.”

Gurameto shook his head in refusal, but diffidently. “I can’t,” he said. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know their names, because they don’t have any.”

“Now you’re playing games with me.”

“I’m not joking, Fritz. They don’t have names, only nicknames.”

One of the officers, apparently belonging to the Gestapo, nodded.

The colonel raised his hands to his head and the doctor drew close to his ear, like at the beginning of the dinner, when they had teased each other about their confidences at the Widow Martha’s Tavern.

The colonel listened and then said very softly, “Gurameto, you know some deep mysteries that nobody else does.”

Dr Gurameto’s reply was a startling one. “So much the worse for you. Free the hostages!”

“I can’t.” Now it was the colonel’s turn to say this.

“Yes you can,” said Gurameto. “You know you can.”

“If you can’t give me their names, at least give me their nicknames,” the colonel said in a broken voice.

The guests listened to this crazy conversation, understanding nothing and unable to tell any longer who was giving orders to whom. It was as if the two men were caught in a trap from which they could not escape. Big Dr Gurameto was totally different from what they had thought. Now nobody would be surprised to see him the next governor of Albania, or even Greater Albania, just as had been predicted on the city square. His demeanour suited the part. It would not be unexpected to hear the doctor addressed as “Your Excellency”.

What Fritz von Schwabe said was not far short.

“I’ll give you seven hostages,” he announced in an exhausted voice.

CHAPTER FIVE

At this moment it became clear that there were two currents of events, one inside Big Dr Gurameto’s house and one outside in the city. So far separate, these currents now swirled together as if in a vortex of delirium and as they merged they swelled, dissolved, and altered their shape, no longer appearing in their true form.

Yet, one piece of news remained constant: the hostages really were being freed.

Like shadows they crept away from the city square and disappeared in the streets and lanes, where the house-gates had long been left open for them.

Low voices were heard everywhere. “Be careful, don’t shout, don’t make a noise. No celebrations. Who knows what’s happening. They might change their minds and take them back.”

The city recalled other long-forgotten tales of hostages. Everyone had their own style of hostage-taking. The Ottoman Turks had one way and Mussolini’s troops another, while the Italians did it differently to Albanian brigands, who in turn were not like Macedonian brigands, nor the nomadic Roma. The same was true of governors: the pasha of Janina had been as impetuous as the pasha of Berat had been unhurried and calculating, though that had not prevented the latter from sending back a hostage’s head on a dish when the deadline for his ransom expired.

All these memories inevitably prompted a further question. What had the Germans gained in exchange for their release? This was the crux in any hostage story. Give me back my kidnapped wife, and I’ll free your prisoner. You want the hostages? Hand over the gold, the murderer, the carpets, the men who fired on the advance party!

The Germans’ demand was after all in plain black and white on the posters stuck everywhere: give us the terrorists’ names and we’ll hand back the hostages!

Some details of the haggling over names in Gurameto’s house filtered through.

“We know from Herr Marx that communists have no fatherland, but this is the first time we’ve heard of them having no names, here on our first evening in Albania!”

And so the conversation turned to nicknames, which seemed so much the fashion in this city. You could be quietly drinking coffee with someone who would suddenly throw you a conspiratorial glance and turn your blood cold by announcing, “Listen, so far I’ve been called Çelo Nallbani, but you should know that from now on my name is ‘Wolf’. Or ‘North Pole’.” The history of the nicknames did not reach as far back as the stories of hostages but was just as colourful. Some nicknames were easy to interpret and bore a kind of meaning, like “Comrade Lightning” or “The Fist” but others were incomprehensible: “Blah-blah”, “Vitamin C” or “Mandolinist”.

The Germans must have gained something during the course of their conversation but nobody knew if they had indeed extracted names or had been palmed off with nicknames. Some thought that they might have been sold a mixture of names and nicknames, just as wheat is sometimes bought with chaff.

However the matter was threshed out, there was no avoiding the truly central question: quite apart from the matter of names and nicknames, did this ploy of Big Dr Gurameto’s represent treason or not?

Everybody knew that the two sides in this debate would never agree in a thousand years and would both be at odds with a third group of more cautious people, of whom there are always plenty, who took the view that it was hard for the uninitiated to judge those with inside knowledge, or for insiders to judge outsiders and so on. Then they would lose the thread again until a voice piped up, “So what’s really going on in there?”

The scene was imagined in two ways. In one, a merry and indeed tipsy Dr Gurameto, at ease in this world of pseudonyms, held a glass of champagne. The alternative version also included Gurameto but this time grim-faced, dramatically handcuffed and with a revolver at his head. Meanwhile the other Dr Gurameto, the little one, was lying low, trembling like a mouse.

Another handful of hostages was released and they too scattered like ghosts. Again whispers went round. “No celebrations, don’t make a sound, don’t rejoice too soon!” Inevitably people started totting up how many had been freed and how many remained. With astonishing mental agility they calculated the number of hostages that might be released in exchange for one name and how many for a nickname. Of course nicknames were a weak currency compared to real names, rather like ordinary francs compared to gold francs.

When the third and largest batch of hostages was released all at once, most people were of the opinion that either the Germans really had lost their wits, or Dr Gurameto’s treason had gone beyond all bounds. Meanwhile the latter’s admirers, though fewer in number, were so fervent that they claimed not only that Dr Gurameto was the greatest liberator of hostages in history but that in the course of the dinner his appointment as governor of Albania had arrived directly from Berlin. Only this, and not treachery, could explain the miracle that was taking place. These admirers asserted that there might be some truth in the image of a revolver against a head, but it would be the other way round, with Dr Gurameto holding a gun to the colonel’s head as he issued the order, “Fritz, release the hostages!”

But ancient scripture warns against rejoicing too soon and just as the hope blossomed that the last of the hostages would be freed before midnight, it was cut down as if by the stroke of a knife. A curt, cold order was issued at the gate of the house from which the music of the gramophone boomed. “Stop! Halt!” the Germans said. “We’ve done enough for this city. German magnanimity, the Nibelungenlied, Beethoven and so forth has its limits, and so does mercy. We have never before done so much for anyone! Enough!”

The Albanians looked for the reason for the Germans’ sudden change of heart among their own past sins. These included their abductions of women (it was believed that each time this happened, a spring ran dry); their periodic incursions into Greece, with all the drums and dudgeon of war, which left only grief and ashes behind. The sacking of the city of Voskopojë, although it happened so long ago, had to be counted among these sins. Finally there were the imperial judges, in whose strongboxes, alongside their silver watch chains, lay ancient court judgments with terrible sentences.

These were their visible sins, startling and gross, but more corrosive than these were their secret, inward falls from grace. The white fancywork, lace and drapery of the old houses sometimes, instead of inspiring admiration, made your flesh creep: it was hard to forget all those memories of incest, dishonoured brides and old people smothered under the awnings of the great verandas.

All these things were recalled to mind but quickly dismissed, until the real snag was hit upon: Jakoel the Jew. Had they really not known this all along or had they pretended that by banishing him from their minds he would be lost in the crowd?

Nothing suggested that the Germans were aware that a special fish had been netted in their catch of hostages, but one could still imagine the tense conversation between Big Dr Gurameto and Fritz von Schwabe on that night across the dinner table.

“Dr Gurameto, you’ve broken your word. There is a Jew here.”

“A Jew? So what?”

“So what? You know I can’t release Jews.”

“Jews, Albanians, it’s all the same.”

“It’s not the same, Gurameto, not at all.”

“Albanians do not betray their guests. You know that, Fritz. This Jew is a guest in our city. We can’t hand over a guest.”

“Because the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini forbids it?”

“I told you this long ago in the tavern. It’s been our law for a thousand years.”

The colonel paused doubtfully then shook his head. “In that case Lekë Dukagjini is an enemy of the Reich. I will release them all, but not the Jew.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“We talked about it in the tavern,” said Gurameto in a muffled voice. “But if you’re not the same man as then. . ”

These words struck more terror in the colonel than a bolt of lightning.

“Dr Gurameto, do you think I’m not the same man?”

The two stared at each other with cold determination.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Gurameto wearily. “You are the same man as you were then.”

Fritz von Schwabe breathed more easily.

Time was passing.

In the darkness, on the city square, the forty remaining hostages shivered in the cold. Among them, the Jew Jakoel felt the cold most of all. He was on the brink of telling the others to hand him in to save themselves, but his lips would not form the words. All around him was silence and calm. For the first time in many years the nationalists, royalists and communists, who had been at odds over everything else for years, were of the same mind concerning this Jew. Jakoel wanted to weep but the tears would not come.

The discussion in Dr Gurameto’s house petered out. Only the gramophone continued its din. The guests looked first at the colonel and then at the doctor, not understanding what was happening. It was as if a dense fog had descended. The rumour was that a second order had just arrived from Berlin, annulling Big Dr Gurameto’s appointment as governor and restoring his powers to Fritz von Schwabe.

The colonel himself stood up to change the gramophone record. He put on Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and everybody realised there was no more hope. And so they sat for a long time, waiting for the rattle of machine guns.

The first cocks crew. A superstition claimed that they drove away ghosts.

The doctor and the colonel muttered to each other in private for a long time and again the situation changed. Nobody explained why. Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, bearer of the Iron Cross, took a deep breath and ordered the hostages to be freed. Not just some, but all of them.

The tension relaxed and it was as if the dinner were starting again. Dr Gurameto’s sweet-natured daughter, her chestnut hair combed in the latest fashion, carried in a tray with glasses to celebrate the agreement. All the guests had seen how beautiful she was, even if they had pretended to take no notice. One after another they had fallen in love with her, passionately, as war-weary men do. And she had fallen in love with them. Faced for the first time with such a dense crowd of dangerous masculinity, all men of chivalry, intimate with death, she had fallen suddenly, tremulously in love with them, as if here in this room the men would fill the great emptiness of the future. Her hands trembled as she passed round the drinks to the colonel, then to her father, her mother and to the others in turn and finally, with a slight hesitation, to her fiancé.

They emptied their glasses and the shouts of “Zum Wohl!” mingled with the music of the gramophone as the cocks crew a second time. With soft steps the girl left the drawing room before the exhausted men collapsed on the sofas and on the carpet itself, drifting into a deep sleep.

The girl was woken by the first morning light. For a moment, she could not tell what time it was or why she was lying fully clothed on the bed in her parents’ room.

“Oh God, what have I done!” she said in terror, holding her brow.

The house was silent. Her feet carried her involuntarily to the great drawing room, from which a rasping sound came, like the final struggle of a man who finds it hard to die.

She saw them stretched out where they had fallen, arms outspread and mouths gaping, her father, fiancé and mother, in whose lap an officer had laid his head; and then the colonel, his face still masked, and the others, frozen, white, like sculptures.

She turned towards the gramophone. The needle was stuck, causing the rasping noise. The icy thought ran through her that nobody else could be blamed for the poisoning but herself, the sole person left alive.

CHAPTER SIX

After this unforgettable mid-September night the sun rose, for the first time unobserved by anyone in the stone city. Everybody was still asleep, exhausted by the night’s events.

Their waking would become a whole story in itself, to be told in the course of many days and over many cups of coffee. “Where are we?” they asked, as they awoke to find themselves on verandas, in linen cupboards, stretched on the rafters of attics or, as in most cases, on the staircases and in the cellars where sleep had overtaken them. They struggled to work out, if not what time it was, at least the day or the month.

The most difficult question: “What happened?” came last. A thick veil had fallen between them and their memories of events. Behind this veil the story could be discerned dimly, as if it were scared to emerge.

The music of a gramophone was the first thing that seeped through. Then, slowly, and with great effort, people recalled the nightmare of the hostages. The fact that eighty people had lived through the horror of this experience, minute by minute, should have left no room for speculation or error but the hostages did not all tell the same story. Some did not want to admit that they had been hostages, perhaps fearing that in a second wave of arrests they would be told, “You, sir. This is the second time we’ve arrested you.” Other people who had not been hostages were thirsty for fame. They claimed that they had been present facing the machine guns on the city square and were so persuasive that they were believed more readily than genuine hostages.

This confusion added to the general mystery surrounding the events of the day. Out of force of habit these were called “unforgettable”, although so many deserved to be forgotten. They were recalled to mind one by one but more and more tentatively. What about the partisan ambush at the entrance to the city? God knows what really happened there. There were no eyewitness accounts and there was no physical evidence apart from two black skid marks on the asphalt, where it was thought the German motorcycles had turned back.

Probably there really had been an ambush, which the communists called heroic and the nationalists considered a provocation, but it was equally plausible that the whole incident had been invented by the Germans to justify their tactics of terror.

The ambush could be interpreted to the credit of all three parties, but the same could hardly be said of the incident of the white sheet, which was taken as a sign of surrender to the Germans. It was easy to call it a mirage but seen by whom, the inhabitants of the city or the German Army?

Obviously Gurameto’s famous dinner was the biggest mystery of all. It had started as Big Dr Gurameto’s fairy-tale reunion with his German college friend. But the rest went beyond any fairy tale. The invitation to dinner, the gradual release of the hostages, not to mention the climax at dawn in the Gurameto house, the motionless Germans laid out in deathly sleep in the drawing room and the doctor’s daughter, thinking she had poisoned them, and then the Germans slowly stirring, resurrected as if at Easter time, not one Christ but a whole cohort of Christs. This was not just a disgrace to the house but a blasphemous parody.

All these events might have been accepted as imaginary had it not been for one detail: the music of the gramophone. This music had blared all night and everyone had heard it. It might have been taken for a crazy whim on the part of Gurameto, of a kind familiar to the city, where the more respected its citizens were, the more impulsive they were likely to be in their caprices. And yet it was hardly likely that Dr Gurameto would get it into his head on the night of the German invasion to play his gramophone in hermit-like seclusion.

Unable to account for this extraordinary hiatus, people inevitably suggested the influence of some force majeure, like the Double Night. It was as if, after lying in wait for a thousand years, this monster had finally descended to enfold forty or more hours in its arms, seizing a whole day like a wolf snatching a sheep, and had vanished again into the infinite depths of time.

But as people’s heads cleared, so their eyes regained their proper vision. On either side of the iron gates in the city square hung two long flags with the swastika in their centre. Above them was a huge banner in both Albanian and German, appealing for recruits to the newly founded Albanian gendarmerie. A long queue of elderly men had formed by the side entrance before dawn. The German sentries stared in astonishment at their strange gowns and cloaks to which were pinned unheard-of insignia and stripes. These were the old judges of the former empire, who hoped to find employment. From the folds of their robes peered their letters of appointment and copies of their judgments and rulings with their seals and signatures, from all their different postings throughout the boundless Ottoman dominions.

The Albanian interpreter in the ground-floor office found it hard to render into German their records of service, in which the old men placed so many hopes. These described the variety of sentences they had handed down, not just usual ones like beheading and hanging but more sophisticated ones like skinning and dismemberment alive, drowning in vats of boiling water or tepid water in a tank with two snakes. There were other forms of drowning (one involving a monkey) and two ways of being buried alive: one with the legs and part of the trunk under the earth and the head and chest above, and one the other way round. At this point the German officer interrupted the Albanian interpreter with a tactful expression of thanks, adding that Germany had its own forms of punishment and the Third Reich was not a Mongol empire, an expression that struck the old men as “not in very good taste”.

Meanwhile the city’s newspaper Demokratia had reappeared, full of news from the capital. Albania, following its liberation by the Third Reich, had cast off the hated Italian yoke and had been declared a sovereign state. A government had been formed headed not by the famous Mehdi Frashëri, as hoped, but by a respected gentleman named Biçaku. Indeed, a Regency Council had been set up with four members, one for each religious community, evidently in expectation of the return of King Zog I. In even larger type came news of the unification of Kosovo and Çamëria with Albania and a headline announcing the restoration of the ancient Albanian flag: the real standard of Skanderbeg was to be used again, with the black eagle and without the lictor’s fasces, which were a bitter memory of Italy.

Other reports described the spread of Albanian-language schools in Kosovo, supported by research that demonstrated the superiority of Albanian to most other Balkan languages and sometimes the superiority of the Albanian race itself.

When read to the accompaniment of the rousing strains of the hurriedly assembled municipal band, which played every day, the news seemed easy to believe. But when dusk fell and the communists scattered their leaflets, it all became more questionable. The leaflets urged the people not to trust the occupiers, who were merely throwing dust in the Albanians’ eyes with their talk of Kosovo and Çamëria and their flattery of the Albanian race. The communists claimed that the nationalists and royalists were preparing to do a deal with the Germans. The leaflets ended with the words “Now or never!” Both the communists and the nationalists made use of this phrase. In fact it had been current for more than a century, which made it hard to work out when “now” and especially “never” might be.

A fraction of this would have given anyone sleepless nights but it was particularly those citizens who hated anarchy and yearned for law and order who made their way to the city square each morning with bloodshot eyes, to sit in the cafés and read the newspapers as the music played.

Besides the news, the government announcements and the music, there was something else that made everyone think back to peacetime with a pang of nostalgia. Each morning the two famous surgeons, Big Dr Gurameto and Little Dr Gurameto, walked to the city hospital, just as in the time of the Albanian monarchy and in the time of the triple Italian-Albanian-African empire. Now, under what some people were calling Teutonic Albania, there was a new hospital set up in the house of Remzi Kadare, the same house that its owner had lost at cards three months before.

The general conviction was that as long as these two doctors remained (with all their ups and downs, gramophones and dinners and non-dinners), the city was still intact.

In fact, many people were doing their best to push the city over the edge. On some days it seemed to come close to the brink, only to be saved at the last moment.

With the arrival of winter it became clear that there was no brink. The communists’ calls for war and the nationalists’ for peace mingled like two opposing winds to create a kind of in-between state that was neither one nor the other.

Trouble, when it appeared, took the form of a moral scandal of an unprecedented nature. The newspaper Demokratia said that it was the only case of its kind involving two men on the entire war-torn continent of Europe. A municipal employee Bufe Hasani was caught in flagrante in the city hall basement, to his shame, with a German!

No earthquake could have shaken the city more. After their initial blush of shame, people’s first thought was again of being blown up. This would no doubt be the inevitable reprisal, but this time, a merited one. Things had gone too far! Everybody said so. All the city’s inhabitants knew how cautiously, almost bashfully, the German soldiers behaved towards the local women: they were believed to be under orders not to trifle with the Albanians’ lofty sense of propriety. But the city, not satisfied with this courtesy, and as if on purpose to hold it up to ridicule, had now provoked a different lust and violated the honour of a blond-haired German lad, barely eighteen, as pale as a young girl. Gjirokastër could no longer protest at being blown up. It was the very least it deserved.

As can be imagined many people turned to Big Dr Gurameto for assistance, but he raised his hands helplessly. “This time I’m not interfering!”

He added that if it had been a matter of a woman, he would have spoken to Fritz von Schwabe, but this sort of business was not something he dealt with.

Some people saw no reason to tear their hair and cry “Shame!”, arguing that the occurrence was the logical consequence of a policy that was neither war nor peace. If you wanted this kind of thing, that is, war and peace at the same time and a city confused, there it was in the city hall basement. They said this wasn’t the first time Albanians had got up to such tricks. Whenever an Albanian sees that one sword is no good, he’ll sheathe it and draw another one.

In fact, from a more balanced point of view, the case of Bufe Hasani was merely a symptom. Like Big Dr Gurameto’s dinner, the incident in the cellar could be looked at in two ways. Indeed it was not just an Albanian phenomenon but had global implications. It recalled Hitler’s humiliation of the British in the Munich agreement. Mentioning Bufe Hasani and Neville Chamberlain in the same breath prompted grimaces, but the matter was essentially the same.

Feelings of fear and shame floated in the air; whenever fear rose, shame sank and vice versa.

Meanwhile there were other developments, some visible and others secret. Bufe Hasani’s two sons put together a bomb designed to kill their degenerate father but then set it aside, expecting a proper solution to their problem when the city was blown up. At this moment the prime minister of the newly formed government, Mehdi Frashëri, arrived in the city to deal with the issue. What a pity that the first duty of this scion of the most famous of all Albanian families, whose arrival was so eagerly awaited, was to tackle such a nasty business.

He arrived and left again at night, without ceremony, with no dinner or gramophone, as was to be expected with this kind of case in hand. But his visit still brought reassurance.

Comforting news for the nationalists also came from the Albanians’ two capital cities, Tirana and Prishtina. There was a rumour that the Albanian communist leader had been captured and punished: after his eyes were gouged out, he had been forced to practise his family’s traditional profession of washing corpses in the Et’hem Bey Mosque in Tirana.

Bufe Hasani’s exploit was gradually forgotten, except when little children unexpectedly asked, “Mummy, what did Bufe Hasani do with that German uncle in the cellar of the city hall?”

The surest sign of restored order was of course the renewed attention paid to the two doctors, or rather the rise and fall of their relative reputations. The doctors had become as used to this as to sunrise and sunset and it seemed too late to tempt them to a new challenge. As ever, their relative positions were measured with reference to the international situation, and the prospects were not looking good for the Germans. At first sight this suggested that Big Dr Gurameto would fall behind. However, his standing was calculated only relative to Little Dr Gurameto’s, and Italy was the last country likely to benefit from Germany’s weakness, so it seemed that Little Dr Gurameto would be the loser again.

The two now worked together in the new surgical ward that was housed on the first floor of the great mansion of the Kadare family. Surely peace would prevail here at least, where patients spent their last days, facing the prospect of death. But the opposite was the case. For anybody hankering to see pure civil war, the ward of the two Gurametos was the place to go, or so the correspondent of the local paper reported. Bloody bandages, screams, vituperation, horror. The sick seemed afraid only of dying before they had vented their political hatreds. This was the sole explanation for the continual uproar, the insults and the moans and shouts of “traitor to your country!” They would come to blows with medicine bottles, there were assaults with syringes and even an amputated arm that one patient had asked to be left beside him, protesting he would miss it, but really to keep it within reach if things came to a fight.

According to the journalist the two Gurametos could hardly keep this bedlam under control, although many also formed the impression that the two doctors were merely waiting for the ward to calm down before attacking each other with scalpels and bloody forceps.

As evening fell, another man was listening carefully to the tumult from the upper floor. The unhinged Remzi Kadare, the former owner of the house, huddled in army blankets, added his own expletives to the bedlam above. “You tart! You whore!” he shouted, addressing the house that had been his own home before he lost it at poker. “That’s what the place deserves,” he roared. “Drip blood and gall! I knew you weren’t to be trusted. I was right to take a chance with you! I risked you and lost you, you bitch!”

The night gradually grew colder and he wrapped himself more tightly in the blankets. Burying his head in them, he sang to himself.

I saw a nightmare, mother, the worst of all my dreams

Our big house was a hospital, full of groans and screams.

I woke from sleep, dear mother, and wept at dawn of day

I thought I’ll burn it down, or gamble it away.

And so I did, dear mother, and I’m a wretched knave

My wife has gone to Janina, and you are in your grave.

Remzi was my first name, my surname Kadare

You should have fed me poison when at your breast I lay.

The weeks passed quickly. Winter held the city under its stern rule. But this meant little to the mind of Vehip Qorri. “Blind Vehip” had been a rhymester since the previous century, before there were newspapers. As his nickname indicated, he had been blind since birth but even though he had never seen the world, he described it accurately in verses that were full of dates and the names of people and streets. He composed some of his rhymes to order and for a small fee, to mark occasions of every kind such as birthdays or the award of decorations, to advertise barber shops, or announce changes of address and opening hours. He produced others to publicise court verdicts, quarrels, scandals, municipal notices, riding accidents, the imposition of fines, cases of intoxication, the downfall of governments, currency devaluations and the like. People who enjoyed rhymes would stop at the street corner where he had his pitch, ask for verses about X or Y and pay him or not, according to how they liked the result.

Sometimes his customers, for one reason or another (when faced with threats for instance, or when an engagement that the rhyme celebrated was broken off) asked him to remove a verse from his repertoire, again for a fee. This would cost more than the original composition.

That was Blind Vehip’s daily routine. Occasionally, but very rarely, he would take it into his head to compose a rhyme without a commission, “from the heart”, as he put it. His usual rhymes were topical but his verses “from the heart” were obscure and elusive.

At the end of April he produced a verse about Big Dr Gurameto, perhaps his grimmest yet.

Gurameto, the mortal sinner

Met the devil one day on the street,

Who told him to host a great dinner

With champagne and good things to eat.

His listeners did not say what they thought of this verse. At first they merely frowned, turned their backs and walked slowly away. Gurameto no doubt understood the rhyme completely but he was totally aloof to anything that happened on the street and took no notice. Then the audience began to grow steadily at Blind Vehip’s usual spot at the crossroads of Varosh Street and the road to the lycée. Dr Gurameto passed here regularly on his way to the hospital but never turned his head.

Two weeks later, Blind Vehip, perhaps smarting at the snub or maybe simply on a whim, produced a new version of his rhyme. Now the words made your flesh creep.

What was the doctor’s design,

Asking the corse to dine?

The archaic word “corse” that old people still used to refer to the dead made it seem more frightening; perhaps this was what led Big Dr Gurameto to swallow his pride and, early one evening, stop in front of old Vehip. He waved a couple of idlers away with his hand. “What have you got against me?” he said.

The blind man recognised his voice and shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing. What could I ever have against you? Just look at yourself, compared to me.”

“You’re lying. You’ve got it in for me. But you won’t tell me why.”

The blind man paused for a moment, and then said curtly, “No.”

Dr Gurameto was famously reticent but his silence was still striking.

“That dinner seems so long ago,” he eventually said in a low voice. “I can barely remember it myself. Why bring it up now?”

“I don’t know.”

Gurameto turned his head to make sure no one was listening. “Do you really believe that I invited the dead to dinner that night?”

“I don’t know what to say,” the blind man replied.

Gurameto stared at him fixedly. “Vehip,” he said. “I want to ask you something, as a doctor. Do you remember when you lost your sight?”

“No,” the blind man said. “I was born like this.”

“I see. So you’ve never seen living people.”

“Neither the living, nor the dead,” said Vehip.

“I see,” repeated Dr Gurameto.

“That comes as a surprise to you, I can tell,” the blind man said. “You’re surprised that I’ve never seen the living, but still more surprised I’ve never seen the dead.”

“That’s true,” said Gurameto. “Blindness is close to death. I won’t interfere with you. I’m not threatening you and I won’t promise anything. Make whatever rhymes you like.”

As he walked away, he heard the blind man’s voice behind him. “Long live the doctor!”