The Fall of the Stone City

CHAPTER SEVEN

The German Army retreated from Greece and Albania at the same time. It looked like a routine redeployment of troops. An unending column of vehicles rumbled all night along the asphalted highway. Daybreak came feebly, ash-grey. A fine rain turned to sleet, making the windows of the houses opaque. It seemed only natural for the city to show no interest in this great historical event.

The regiment housed in the Grihot barracks joined the long convoy and the troops from inside the city itself followed them. There were neither farewells nor appeals to the people to cover the withdrawal with rearguard attacks against the encroaching forces of communism. The old threats to blow up the city now seemed stale and empty.

The Germans lowered the swastika flag and left the national flag with the lonely eagle in the centre. With no sign of pride or shame and no reaction to the city’s indifference, the Germans climbed into their vehicles and set off to find new terrain.

A NEW ORDER

Just before noon the communist partisans entered the city from not one but three different directions. They stared at the great houses of Gjirokastër with awe and smiled hesitantly, uncertain where to put the welcoming flowers the citizens threw at them.

The mules could barely climb the steep lanes and looked wearier than the fighters themselves. Most were laden with mortar barrels and crates of ammunition, yet the partisans led them by the halter as if they were carrying grain or cheeses wrapped in cloth.

The young women among them attracted particular attention. They wore their hair in all kinds of styles, plaited, cropped, with long tresses or fashionable fringes. There had been contradictory rumours about them: either they were “Red virgins” who would kill at the slightest affront or they were wild about men.

The scene looked so peaceful, yet the city’s fears of what the partisans might do turned out to be well-founded. The first knocks at the gates of houses were followed by the wails of women and screams. “He’s innocent.” “Traitor! Get away, bitches.” “No!” And then the stutter of gunfire. “Territorials”, as the local communists were called, helped the patrols to carry out arrests of prominent nationalists.

Just after noon, at the precise moment when the flag was hoisted over the city hall, the partisans arrived at the hospital to arrest Big Dr Gurameto. He was handcuffed while in his surgical gown, halfway through an operation, before the partisans realised he should be allowed to wash his bloody hands. But the doctor merely said, “Why should I bother?” thinking he would be shot at once. He walked unsteadily and glanced instinctively at the flag above the city hall, which was now different in a slight but unexpected way.

“Get a move on!” said a partisan as Gurameto stumbled. The doctor looked down at his handcuffs, as if to protest that he was not used to managing in these things, but the partisan didn’t understand him. “Move!” he said again.

The eagle on the flag still had two heads as before, not three as had been rumoured.

“This way,” said the partisan when they reached the crossroads.

“What have I done?” Big Dr Gurameto wanted to ask, but the flag caught his eye again. Instead of a third head, which it was optimistically claimed would symbolise the unity of the communists, royalists and nationalists, a pale star shone above the double-headed eagle. “I see,” the doctor thought, staring at the fabric of the flag as if it could answer his question.

Both sides of the street were thronged with idlers and a few musicians carried mandolins. Messengers hurried past. The flag fluttered enigmatically in the wind and gave no answer.

A breathless messenger appeared and ran alongside the patrol for a few paces, struggling to say something.

“Halt,” said the patrol leader and stopped first himself. The messenger muttered something into his ear and the patrol leader looked at Dr Gurameto in surprise. Then, taking care not to stain his hands with blood, he removed the doctor’s handcuffs.

“Pardon our mistake, doctor,” he said quietly.

The territorial, who had been watching the scene with curiosity, whispered to the partisan. The other man nodded. As Gurameto turned to walk away he thought he caught a mention of Little Dr Gurameto’s name but he could not be sure.

The doctor walked down the street, looking for a tap to rinse his hands, but he couldn’t remember if there was one nearby. He was almost back at the hospital when he recognised the same patrol again, now coming from the opposite direction. In their midst was Little Dr Gurameto, handcuffed as he himself had been a short time ago.

The two doctors inclined their heads towards each other to suggest they could not tell what was happening, when the explanation flashed through Big Dr Gurameto’s mind. The territorial, used to the idea that the rise of one entailed the fall of the other, had persuaded the patrol that the release of the big doctor must lead to the arrest of the little one. Gurameto was sure that his colleague would go free too. He entered the hospital, cursing in German.

Little Dr Gurameto was indeed released a short time later. The two doctors embraced as if after a long separation, to the delight of the nurses. But at that moment another patrol, with set faces, appeared at the hospital entrance. The two doctors glanced at each other, wondering what this could mean. Would they be put in handcuffs again? But what the patrol asked was unimaginable. They wanted to arrest two patients as “enemies of the people”. Both were fresh from the operating table and one was still under anaesthetic.

The two Gurametos dropped their heads in their hands. “Are you crazy? This man has an open wound, and you want to tie him up!”

“You’re the crazy one here,” barked the patrol leader. “We have orders, full stop. Do you think you can stop us?”

The nurses joined the doctors in protest but the patrol would not be deterred. They produced the handcuffs, secured them this time on both doctors and set off for the city hall.

The patrol brought both doctors back to the hospital an hour later. The partisans were a noisy rabble. The two doctors’ hands were now free. A grey-haired man who claimed to be an impartial legal expert was trying in vain to calm everyone as they yelled, shouting each other down and brandishing revolvers and syringes under each other’s noses. “This is unheard of! This man’s at death’s door. He has one hand cut off and you’re going to shackle the other one. Where’s your humanity?”

“You call this humanity?” shouted a partisan. “You let criminals kill and maim and then tuck them up in hospital to save them from the people’s courts?”

The grey-haired lawyer negotiated a compromise: the wanted patients would be neither arrested nor released. The nurse in charge remembered there was a room in the hospital’s west wing with a grille over the window. Remzi Kadare had left legal instructions that he should be incarcerated here if he lost his mind.

They carried the accused patients there and left a partisan with a rifle and two grenades in his belt to guard the door.

DAY TWO, DAWN

The elderly judges, who were known as “the three hundred”, had not exercised their profession for a very long time. That morning they turned up at the door of the city hall, which was now known as the Committee. They brought all their ancient insignia and testimonials, in the conviction that they could still be of service to their country.

The Committee chairman could not conceal a certain satisfaction as he heard them out. His words of thanks at the end of the meeting made it clear that his pleasure was genuine. These three hundred were throwbacks to a vanished era but they had grasped sooner than all Albania’s pansy intellectuals that the revolution demanded ruthless violence.

The former judges listened to the talk of a new era and new laws, plainly surprised that such things could exist. Their services were declined but as the old men left, they remarked on how flattered they felt at being turned down so courteously.

DAY MINUS TWO

Besides the arrested patients, three others in the surgical ward had still not come round from their anaesthetic. A kidney patient was the first to surface and was met by a nurse who tried to explain to him that they were now living under a new order. It was not easy for the patient to take this in. As the other inmates woke up, the kidney patient launched into an explanation of what had happened. The others clustered round him as if listening to a fairy tale. The kidney patient said that important events had taken place in the city and in this very ward, but they had been fast asleep and had known nothing about them.

When the kidney patient saw that the others did not seem surprised, he started at the beginning again. All hell had been let loose in the city while they had been absent, as if down a rabbit hole. “The era we were in no longer exists, see? The times have moved on. Hours, days are passing and we are still stuck somewhere — I don’t know how to describe it. Out of time. In reverse or minus time.”

“I don’t understand this,” said a patient on crutches. “Say it straight. What’s this new time you’re talking about?”

“It’s called a new order. It’s what happens when the system changes. The first day is usually called zero hour. Then the numbering starts, one, two, three and so on. When they gave us the anaesthetic it was, let’s say, a certain time on such-and-such a day. We went under, and out of time. But time paid no attention. Time doesn’t wait, it goes on, and we were left behind. They’ve reached day two but we’re not even at zero. We’re minus. Now do you see it?”

“I see bullshit,” said a third patient.

“We have a time deficit,” he continued, ignoring him. “We’ll have to hurry to catch up to zero, and then we’ll see.”

“You’ve got us in a proper muddle,” said the appendix case. “Just tell us who’s won. In fact, I don’t care who it is as long as it’s not the communists.”

“I think it’s them,” said the third.

“No!” said the other patient. “Anyone but them!”

“In this new order you mentioned, are you allowed to kill your wife?” asked one patient on crutches. “Like in Yemen for instance.”

“What can you be thinking about?”

“I told you what I was thinking about.”

“Your wife? I don’t think so. But other people. . perhaps.”

A SEQUENCE OF DAYS AND MONTHS

Of all the expressions involving time, the most common was “the new era”.

On some days it seemed that such a thing really had come to pass. Everything appeared bathed in triumphant, dazzling sunlight, as if fresh from the suds of the washtub. But then another morning would dawn, ashen and exhausted, to confirm the view that time is the last thing in this world that is capable of renewal.

Nevertheless, if this “time” never seemed exactly reborn, there was something youthful about it. It was always a little hectic. There were incessant campaigns, one after another. There was a touch of fever especially in the chatter of the activists, who promised and threatened all kinds of things. Down with soil erosion! Glory to the martyrs! Hang the speculators! Forwards with reforestation!

There was no end of meetings. Hoarders of gold were denounced, along with the Corfu Channel incident, the rhymes of Blind Vehip and Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman. The rejection of the concept of perpetual motion was for some reason connected to the latter. The idea of “the new era” was always closely associated with “reconstruction”. Slogans were painted and songs sung everywhere about the new era, as if she were a bride.

“Work” and “reconstruction” usually meant digging irrigation channels. People got up before dawn, unfurled a banner and marched off in single file to start digging. It turned out later that some of the new ditches didn’t raise the level of water but merely diverted it from other channels, or failed to drain away flood waters and actually increased them. When people were punished for this it gradually became clear that the ditches, besides their ostensible function, had a different purpose that was more important.

“Don’t stare like that. There’s no great mystery here,” said a newly arrested engineer to his two cellmates. They were all in prison for sabotaging ditches. “It’s the same old story. It goes back to the Babylonians. That’s where tyranny began, they say. Either too much water, or too little. Water wanted in one place, but not in another.”

Two sensational items of news, about the start of the Cold War and Tito’s treachery, seemed to have something to do with the ditches. Other questions, including some of a purely mental nature, however remote they might appear, were also related.

Farewell to wandering thoughts, to whatever crossed your mind — ancient decrees, women’s private parts — to any thought either elevated or shameful. It became clearer every day that you had to think about some things a lot and others much less, if at all.

One of the things in the latter class was the famous dinner with the Germans. It was as if it had never happened. In fact anyone mentioning it even in passing was firmly rounded on. “What, you still believe those old tales about the German and the doctor being old school friends and all that blah-blah?” Yet this did not stem the rumours that somewhere, at a secret level you didn’t dare think about, the dinner was still being investigated. Indeed, the recently appointed chorus master at the House of Culture was suspected of being one of two undercover investigators. You would never guess the other in a thousand years, although it was generally known that this person had planted the suspicion that there had never been any dinner at all. He claimed that the gramophone had played to an empty room and a secret meeting in the guise of a dinner had taken place somewhere else, in order to leave no evidence behind.

A SEQUENCE OF SEASONS

It was winter. A few weeks before, the Cold War had started. This was no longer the laughing matter it had been at first (Eskimos etcetera), but nor was it as frightening as it later became (silent and as frigid as death). It was something to be worried about, like the Iron Curtain, invented by an English lord.

In order to demonstrate that it was possible to live with these fears, and even cheerfully, the number of festivals increased. Sports days were the favourite: they were cheap and needed no preparation. You gathered a few dozen time-wasters with itchy feet and all it took was a sign reading “Spring Cross-Country” for them to pelt off like lunatics. Along the road others would join in and then they would stop in some square to catch their breath and cheer, “Long live. . ” and just as often “Death to. . ”, for there were as many things that had to live as to die, and the quicker the better.

Almost as frequent were concerts, races, inaugurations and, in particular, award ceremonies. These latter were often of an unusual nature. For instance in the first week of April there were celebrations for Big Dr Gurameto’s twelve-thousandth operation.

As one can imagine, the little doctor was not forgotten although, as a lesser light, he had barely reached his nine-thousandth. That afternoon and evening old memories revived of the time when these two rivals had been the centre of attention. As in the old days, one was weighed against the other. This was a hard task because everybody knew that their relative status still depended primarily on the international situation.

After its defeat in the war Germany had been divided into a bad part and a good part, leaving Big Dr Gurameto roughly neutral. Italy was not as bad as West Germany, but not as good as East Germany, so he and Little Dr Gurameto were more or less quits. In short, they had emerged from the global upheaval fifty-fifty, as the English say.

The wave of affection for Big Dr Gurameto was all the stronger because of the memory of the rivalry between the two doctors, which had become a symbol of a past now recalled, for some reason, with nostalgia.

“Oh, how touching,” said Marie Turtulli, one of the city’s great ladies. “What sweet memories,” she repeated after a moment. “Just like in la Belle Époque.”

The rosy aureole surrounding the two doctors was best described in a rhyme by Blind Vehip,

The Gurametos, doctors both,

True to the Hippocratic oath.

Yet whispers persisted that the dinner of long ago was the subject of an investigation, still a covert one but now conducted by two independent groups. Its German aspect was lately overshadowed by its supernatural dimension; the dinner was associated mainly with the appearance of a dead man, who, for the purpose of disguise or some other reason, had worn the greatcoat of a German officer and in this shape, spattered with mud, had knocked at Dr Gurameto’s door.

DAY FIVE HUNDRED

A SPECTRAL THRONG OF GERMAN SYMPATHISERS

On the five-hundredth day of the new order there appeared a sight that should never have been seen. Beneath the city the first refugees from Çamëria arrived. There was no end to them. The Greeks had accused them of having supported the Germans and expelled them northwards across the border. They all brought evidence of recent atrocities: cradles with knife marks, old people scarred by burns, young wives blackened from the soot of their torched houses. They walked in an endless column under a bitter, pitiless wind.

To their left stood the first city in Albania, of which they had so often dreamed. But they had strict orders, nobody knew from whom, not to enter it. The city loomed above them, as inscrutable as a sphinx, inaccessible and failing to understand why it could not take them in. Who suffered most from this prohibition, the convoy of refugees or the city? To be sure it pained both, as if they had been showered with the debris of some terrible catastrophe. That afternoon the very rafters of Gjirokastër’s houses began to groan. The city suffered an agony of conscience. Receiving no mercy themselves, the refugees showed none for anybody else. Old loyalties had lost their meaning. Neither side in this conflict could claim victory, or even sustain their quarrel. It was scant consolation for the losers, the nationalists and the royalists, to recall how they had cheered for Çamëria and Kosovo: now they guiltily hung their heads. For perhaps it was these cheers that had to be paid for after the German defeat.

Migrations like this were said to be happening everywhere. An evil hour had struck for whole populations, entire peoples uprooted from their homes from the shores of the Baltic to the snowfields of the Caucasus and deep into the distant steppes, supposedly for supporting the Germans.

Other dreadful convoys came to mind. The Jews, three years ago. The Armenians, thirty years before.

The citizens of Gjirokastër watched the scene through binoculars and yearned for an end to these columns from Çamëria, but one convoy seemed to spawn another. It was said that in the Greek-minority villages, at night, people would offer them bread but they would not take it. They had expected that someone else would feed them.

Where were they going? Perhaps north to the olive groves of Vlora. It was rumoured that there the sky had filled with the cruel sound of thunder but something uncanny happened: the lightning rebelled against the laws of nature and refused to fall on these wretches’ heads.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE NEW ORDER CONTINUED

Dawn rose on the asphalted highway and on this bleak day spirits sank even lower. The cold tightened its grip on Gjirokastër. The coal ran out and martyrs were in short supply.

As if to a natural disaster, trucks of food and medicine were hurriedly dispatched from the capital city with inspectors, musical ensembles and delegations of all kinds, some from fraternal countries. One of these, from the Soviet Baltic republics, where something similar had happened, issued a strange communiqué before it returned, stating that the situation in Gjirokastër called for a more radical approach. In the city there were still eleven former vezirs and pashas of the Ottoman Empire, four former overseers of the sultan’s harem, three former deputy managers of Italian-Albanian banks, fifteen ex-prefects of various regimes, two professional stranglers of heirs apparent, a street called “Lunatics’ Lane” and two high-class courtesans, not to mention the famous three hundred former judges and more than six hundred cases of insanity: a lot for a medieval city now striving to become a communist one.

The Baltic delegation’s communiqué made plain that what was required was an upsurge of renewal, what the newspapers called “new blood”. Very soon this became a flood. Every day enthusiastic young volunteers arrived from central Albania: overfulfillers of already overfulfilled plans, on the Soviet model, some singing the song “Pickaxe in one hand, rifle in the other”, or not just singing about these implements but actually carrying them; informers on saboteurs of ill-planned drainage ditches; informers on fastidious ladies who rarely left their homes in a demonstration of disdain for the new order; activists who only looked forward to the future and others that did so mainly but not exclusively, and occasionally glanced back; sculptors of busts of martyrs; self-sacrificing zealots keen to join the latter in their graves, if nature permitted; opponents of the ideological enemies known as “the three ‘no’s” (imperialism, Zionism and Coca-Cola) and others of the seven ‘no’s; nutcases obsessed with cultivating friendship with other nations and others entranced by the notion of hostility. In short, a perfect frenzy that made everyone weep.

Just when everything seemed on track again, a secret report drawn up by an even more secret delegation from the capital announced bluntly that the rate of progress was still not satisfactory. The ditches, however unnecessary, were being dug too slowly. The former vezirs, hangovers from the time of the sultan, were not dying fast enough. Except for the two high-class courtesans, who had “distanced themselves from their bourgeois past” and joined the new order out of inner conviction, the other remnants of the old order were stubbornly clinging on.

A song was heard in the streets, of the anonymous kind that appeared in Gjirokastër. It spread everywhere and seemed to confirm the secret report. Its words were sad, and its melody even more plangent.

Lena lies sick in a hospital bed.

In the lonely ward, her hopes are dead.

The authorities did all they could to prevent people singing it, but in vain.

Nobody had ever imagined that a song about a hospital could become the reason for another dramatic development in the city: the campaign against its ladies. It all started at a meeting at which a senior cultural official complained that people were still singing songs of what might be called a private nature, about how you’ve forgotten me but I’ll never forget you, you didn’t visit me in hospital, I couldn’t get rid of my cough and twaddle of this sort. The city’s leaders suggested commissioning local musicians to compose two or three songs for the new era, which still had a bit of feeling in them. The Party chairman butted in. “Come out with it — you mean about being ill.” Without more ado he phoned the two doctors, Big and Little Gurameto, to demand the names of the singing patients.

At first the doctors were at a loss how to respond. Big Dr Gurameto replied that they were surgeons and their patients either recovered or went straight to their graves and had no time for sighing and groaning, so it would be better to ask other doctors who dealt with protracted illnesses such as typhus and especially tuberculosis.

Meanwhile, taking advantage of the turbulent times, the Romany guard at the Hygiene Institute known as “Dan the TB Man” produced a song in memory of his girlfriend, who had been run over that April by the night-soil cart.

I’m the gypsy of the institute

In an awful plight

Since the girl I loved

Fell under a load of shite.

The cultural officials chuckled but soon wiped the smiles from their faces. At their next meeting, which turned out to be fatal for them all, they agreed that private feelings involved not only disease and filth, but also nobler sentiments. Unaware of how dearly he would pay for this later, the head of culture recalled an old women’s song.

Sing, nightingale, sing tonight

In our garden of delight.

In your wings of song enfold us,

If we slumber wake us,

From all intrusion guard us

From all detection hide us.

The exclamations of how lovely, how delicate, what sensitivity, prompted the head of culture, as if with the devil at his elbow, to recollect another song describing the same women, this time from the men’s point of view.

Happy lads who woo them, happy lads who love them

Happy lads who count them theirs. .

Retribution came swiftly at an emergency meeting of the Party Committee before the week was out. The meeting denounced decadent trends in the city, nostalgia for the overthrown feudal-bourgeois order and the cult of declassed ladies, whose degraded songs were cunningly described simply as “women’s songs” instead of “songs of the elite”, as our literary critics have classified them.

Angry voices were raised. “Who’s at the bottom of this?” The head of culture fainted twice. Towards midnight the Party chairman made a start on his closing speech with a quotation from Lenin. “Your most dangerous enemy is the one you forget.” He spared no one, not even himself. “Our enemies have caught us napping. Decadence, thrown out the front door, has returned through the back window.” Before properly settling accounts with the notions of Nietzsche, perpetual motion and other perversities, the city was confronted with this virulent plague: its ladies. It was no coincidence that this was happening at a time of renewed tension with Greece and that the US Sixth Fleet had been patrolling the Mediterranean for days. “We will punish the culprits without mercy. Brace yourself for the worst.”

Shortly after the meeting ended, towards two in the morning, the head of culture shot himself.

THE CITY CONFRONTS ITS LADIES

The bullet that claimed the life of the head of culture was also in a way the first shot in a war between the city’s new authorities and its ladies. For those in the know it was obvious that the head of culture had died a victim of his own nostalgia for the ladies but, for reasons that remained unknown, this detail was quickly concealed and he was portrayed as their opponent, indeed a sort of first martyr in this new battle.

The meetings to denounce the ladies, unlike the usual ones, were conducted not only without cheering or music but with a sombre, even academic tinge that seemed appropriate to their subject. This was especially true of the opening presentation entrusted to the elderly antiquarian Xixo Gavo, which, despite its imposing title “A Thousand Years of Ladies”, was merely a recitation of an interminable list of the city’s ladies from 1361 until the previous week. Nobody in the audience understood what it was for but this did not prevent them from applauding the old historian when the list, and with it his speech, came to an end.

The other contributions more or less compensated for the shortcomings of the opening speech. One of them, “Ladies Under Communism”, not only surveyed, as the title suggested, the fate of ladies everywhere in the communist camp, from Budapest to the former St Petersburg, Bratislava and even Shanghai, but explained why the ladies of Gjirokastër occupied a special position in this vast field.

This was also the most obscure part of the talk, which each listener interpreted in his or her own way. According to the speaker, being a lady in this city, or occupying “lady status” did not depend so much on the title and property of a husband. Rather, it was something to do with large houses. It was no coincidence that a foreign architect had called these houses “ladies in stone”. According to him, inside these great houses no doubt constructed by deranged craftsmen, under their gingerbread ceilings and behind the pitiless glare of their windowpanes, there took place a mysterious and sophisticated process, like a retreat into a moonlit distance, which was the first symptom of the formation of a lady. These ladies were imagined as impossibly pale, their breasts and waists dazzlingly white, with a dark enigma hidden under silk that made the senses reel.

A sigh of relief followed the conclusion of the talk.

The next paper was easier to comprehend because it dealt with the events that had led to the death of the poor cultural official and also took a clear political position. From the very start the speaker did not hide his hostility to the ladies. He considered their songs, which many people recalled with tenderness, to be indubitably decadent. As for their coffee ritual, evoked in the words, “The coffee service arrives/Like a decree from the sultan”, this might be thought to describe a custom of aristocratic dignity, and even inspire admiration. But it struck this expert, who had been nurtured at the bosom of the people, merely as evidence that the ladies of the city were not just discriminating aristocrats, but women of power. Intoxicated by his own eloquence, the speaker lifted his head high to announce that these women had tyrannised the city for years.

An intervention by the chairman asking for this contribution to be cut short only spurred on the speaker. He did not stop but screeched that these ladies not only wielded power but were the city’s hidden face, its soul, its exact reflection. This, he claimed, was the explanation of the insane fantasies that flourished in this city, fictions about dinners for the dead and the like.

LADIES IN MOURNING

There was no doubt that the ladies were being targeted and it was obvious too how entirely irrational this was.

Paralysis gripped the city. Some of the punishments ordered by the capital city, astonishingly, were interpreted as acts of revenge on behalf of the ladies themselves. The speaker who had so taken them to task was a case in point. “I would arrest the dog,” said the Party chairman, “but those hags would be over the moon with delight. ‘Look,’ they would say, ‘he insulted us, and see how he suffered!’”

There were more meetings on the subject. Meanwhile most people privately thought that this campaign should never have been started. Gentlemen were easy to deal with. You summoned them to court, found them guilty and chained them up. But you couldn’t do anything to ladies. They rarely left their houses, only once, at most twice in as many months. They were as elusive as mirages.

When summer came to an end the Party chairman did not commit suicide as had been long expected but was dismissed, and this seemed an admission that the cause was lost.

But this conclusion was premature. The very moment of the ladies’ apparent triumph proved the truth of the expression, “win a battle, but lose the war”.

It was just after midday on 17 December when Madam Ganimet of the House of the Hankonats, dressed in her winter fur coat, tottered in her high heels across the intersection of Varosh Street and the road to the lycée, when a woman greeted her from her right-hand side. “Good morning, Comrade Ganimet!”

The lady so addressed stopped in her tracks, as if struck by a blow. There for a moment she remained, in the middle of the crossroads and then slowly, as if trying to identify her assailant, attempted to turn her head. But her neck would not obey her.

“It’s me, Comrade Ganimet. I’m Rosie, from the neighbourhood Committee. Are you coming along to the meeting tomorrow?”

Rosie’s quarry remained rooted to the spot. Then she raised her hand as if in search of support and lifted it to her chest. Her knees trembled and she collapsed on the cobblestones.

Some passers-by contacted the hospital, which sent its only ambulance at once.

This was merely the start. Now that a hitherto unsuspected method of bringing down the indomitable ladies had been found, it was open season everywhere. Like seagulls at the end of their life span the ladies of the city fell one after another, wherever they were caught by the fatal cry of “Comrade!” The same scene was repeated: first they froze on the spot and reached out a despairing arm as if for support from some kind gentleman. Sir, your arm, please. Then there was an attempt to see where the blow had come from, a catch of the breath, a trembling at the knees, followed by collapse.

Mrs Nermin Fico and Mrs Sabeko of the House of Zekat both fell on the same day, the first as she was setting out from home and the second when returning from a social call. That same week it was the turn of Mrs Turtulli as she crossed Chain Square. A lady of the Kokalari House, emerging out of doors for the first time in two years, on hearing the cry of “Comrade!” tried to flee, but her knees gave way and she crumpled on the spot. Mrs Mukades Janina, rumoured at one time to have been the king’s secret fiancée, slumped halfway across the Old Bridge, while her assailant, suddenly taking fright, ran away. A lady of the Çoçoli House managed to protest, “I’m not a comrade!” before she fainted, but others fell without a word. The two Maries, Marie Laboviti and Marie Kroi, could only manage an astonished cry of “Oaaah!”, covering their mouths with their hands as they did when teased by street urchins; but this time they did not laugh.

And so it continued, on Castle Street, by the Powder Magazine, in front of Xuano’s shop, by the State Bank and at Çerçiz Topulli Square, where in 1908 our hero Çerçiz shot the Turkish major, after challenging him, “Hey Turkish scum, here comes death from Çerçiz!” All over the town the ladies fell one by one.

Everyone noticed how few of them there were now.

Strangely, now that they were so much less visible, people thought about them more often, recalling places “where the incident happened”, and other details, such as the case of Mrs Meriban Hashorva, carried home on an army stretcher, or Mrs Shtino, who after a gypsy girl shouted “Comrade!” expressed her dying wishes on the way to the hospital. At these “sites of incidents” a stonemason whose name was never mentioned was said to be putting up plaques with the names of the ladies and the day and exact time of their fall.

It was now universally understood that after all that had happened, the ladies had shut themselves up indoors, never to emerge again. Among them were Mrs Pekmezi and Mrs Karllashi, two ladies of the House of Shamet who used an old family alphabet for their correspondence, and also a lady of the Çabejs, another of the Fico family and finally an elderly Kadare lady with her sister, Nesibe Karagjozi.

Clearly the ladies were beaten.

DAY 2,000

The setting of their star brought no joy. Secretly, people felt remorse at this disruption of the natural order. There was a feeling that the ladies would be gone for a long time. It would take decades, if not centuries, for the great Houses to produce new ladies, for only these cultivated families possessed the expertise. Without them it was predicted that the city would turn savage, but nobody knew in what way. The code of the ladies’ secrets had never been broken. Now their culture had been extinguished and it was impossible to say what might grow in the ashes they left behind.

Superficially the city remained the same. But to the much-abused surrounding villages and small towns, it seemed that the hour to settle scores had struck. Yet they did not dare. The city stood firm. With its ladies it had possibly held its head higher, but without them it seemed the more dangerous.

It now became clear that the city was unsuited not just to the new era but to any era. The news that it would be declared a “museum city” was welcomed as an honour by some, but the majority took it as a mark of shame. A third group tried to encourage hopes of the city’s regeneration. Words beginning with ‘re-’ appeared again, in feverish campaigns.

“Lunatics’ Lane” was at the top of the list for renaming. Some people thought this must mean demolishing the street, but this would not be easy. The principal obstacle was the house of the Leader of the new Albania, or rather its ruins, very close by. Families such as the Skëndulajs or the Shamets sometimes favoured and sometimes discouraged the demolition, while the Kadares’ house, which was also nearby but at the opposite end of the street, only suggested sinister ideas. It was in fact the other Kadare house in the Hazmurat neighbourhood whose bad reputation had clung to it ever since its owner, to the family’s shame, had gambled it away, but many people thought that it was this Kadare house in Palorto that would stain the city’s name for ever and ever. Nobody knew the reasons for this prophecy, but precisely because they were unknown, the curse seemed the more credible. People said a fire or a heavy British bomber might be able to dispel its evil aura.

LATER. DAY 3,000

However far-fetched they might seem, all these rumours about “Lunatics’ Lane”, whether its renaming or its demolition or the demolition of the entire city, were no more than a pale reflection of the conspiracies, cabals and other horrors that were hatched that winter among the highest echelons of power. The Leader’s drawn expression betrayed his fear of being overthrown but still he emerged the winner.

The decision to reconstruct his house to three times its original size was only one of the hopeful signs. The entire city’s spirits lifted. It had deluded itself with its fears of reprisals and humiliation. The order of the day was now not to humiliate the city, but to praise it to the skies.

A piece of good news arrived to increase the general joy. Rumours were generally ominous but this was something genuinely different. The city expected some rare treat; of what kind, nobody knew, not even the municipal leaders. But still the news spread. Probably there would be a big celebration with an important guest from the highest possible level. The city was no backwater to be awed by a visit. Besides the Leader, whose birthplace it was, the city had received King Zog and the princesses, his sisters, as well as Benito Mussolini of Italy and Victor Emmanuel, who was not only King of Italy and Albania but also Emperor of Ethiopia.

There had also been non-visits that did not take place such as, at the beginning of the century, that of the Ottoman sultan with his mother, the valide sultan, whose marshal of the levée was also a native of the city. The most recent unrealised visit was that of Adolf Hitler, who was supposed to have come to inspect a plane that the city claimed to have invented, which worked on the principle of perpetual motion. But the outbreak of war had prevented this.

None of these visits or non-visits could compare with the one that was now expected. Stalin was coming.

This great news ushered in the new year of 1953. The cold was no less biting but the icicles hanging from the eaves of the houses glistened as if for Easter.

DAY 3,033

Everybody was caught up in the intoxication caused by this news. From morning to night the cafés speculated on the reason why Stalin had chosen Gjirokastër of all places. Most people thought that it did not take great minds to work this out: the city was the Leader’s birthplace and it was well known that among all the leaders of the Communist Bloc outside of Russia, Stalin did not and could not have a more faithful devotee than the leader of Albania. Some suggested other reasons but only quietly and tentatively, mentioning for instance the ladies and how they had fallen. Among the thousands of cities in the Eastern Bloc, only ours had done away with its ladies.

For whatever reason, Gjirokastër would become for a few days the centre of the world. In fact, a secretly harboured desire of the city to become the centre of the planet just once was probably now coming out in the open.

As happens whenever people go too far, in the midst of the rejoicing it turned out that the city had been, as they say, riding for a fall. As January ended and February began, a dark thunderbolt struck: Stalin would not be coming.

After the first shock, when, having dreamed of being the summit of the world the city fell into a bottomless pit, a hail of questions fell. Why? Stalin must be angry, of course. This was the first guess, because anger caused most kinds of furore. He was no doubt angry at Gjirokastër, perhaps at Albania, if not the whole of Europe.

In 1908, when the sultan had cancelled his visit, it took several years to discover the reason, which turned out to be something that had not crossed anybody’s mind: the alphabet. The sultan’s court had protested that after the Ottoman Empire’s centuries-old love affair with Albania, the latter had treacherously rejected the Arabic script in favour of the Latin alphabet!

Of course Stalin was greater and more daunting than the sultan, and his explosion of fury would also be greater and more devastating.

DAY 3,042

Nobody could remember a more bitterly cold February. In its first week, instead of brighter news or at least no news at all, a shock came when the two doctors, Big and Little Gurameto, were arrested once again. For the first time they were not weighed in the balance against each other. Both men were seized at midnight, clapped in steel handcuffs and taken to the same prison.

TIME TURNS BACK. DAY 3,029

Nobody knew who was the first to notice it, still less mention it. Time was not just suspended, as it had been for the anaesthetised hospital patients nine years before; it was going backwards at great speed.

All sorts of reasons were suggested. One was that Stalin was not ageing but growing younger, by some secret technique. Consequently time was flowing backwards, to match. Soon we would reach not 1954 but 1952, and so on: 1949, 1939, 1937. .

There was no news of the doctors.