The Fall of the Stone City

CHAPTER NINE

Nobody had ever seen the Cave of Sanisha but everyone talked about it. The cave was universally imagined as the deepest and most terrifying dungeon of the city’s prison, which was housed in the ancient castle that dominated Gjirokastër. It had been closed up since the time of Ali Pasha Tepelene, whose sister Sanisha gave it its name. This young woman had been kidnapped and raped and her assailants had been tortured in this cell for days and nights on end, while Ali Pasha himself watched through a secret spyhole.

Whenever governments turned nasty they used this cave as a threat, but people were sure that it would never be put to use again. So in that unforgettable February when there was talk of the Cave of Sanisha being opened, something else was in fact expected, perhaps the release of the two doctors. Everybody felt sure that they had been arrested in error. When the news came one evening that not only had their arrest been no mistake, but that after one hundred and fifty years of disuse the Cave of Sanisha would be their dungeon, the city was incredulous. The cave had not been opened after the murder of the Turkish prefect nor the suspected murder of the sultan’s mother, the rebellion against the king nor even the conspiracy of the anti-communist members of parliament; but now it was to be used for the doctors.

The report turned out to be true. The cave had been specially equipped for them, and both the doctors were already inside it.

What condition were they in? Did they rest their heads on stones for pillows, did anyone think to cover them with blankets? Both Gurametos, wasting in prison! Were they chained to the wall like the rapists of long ago? Was salt rubbed into the wounds of their tortured bodies? Or were they well treated with champagne and music?

All sorts of strange questions were asked before anybody thought of the most important one: what had they done?

At first it was hard to find anything to accuse them of but soon it became easy enough. Just as the world was swept with wind and rain, so it was burdened with guilt. A share could be allotted to the doctors with plenty left over for others.

Meanwhile these frantic attempts to conjure up a crime were interrupted by the arrival of two investigators. Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu were two young men from the city, fresh graduates of the Dzerzhinsky Academy of the secret police in Moscow. Their faces were pale, their ties tightly knotted and their overcoats extremely long. The godfather of the secret police who gave his name to the academy had proverbially worn a coat like this and had said, “Long coat, short shrift.”

The two investigators became the visible dimension of the Gurameto case. The doctors were below in the dark of the pit but at least the investigators bobbed above the surface like balloons, signals from the lower depths.

On Tuesday, 13 February, the two investigators emerged from the Cave of Sanisha clutching their files and strode purposefully down Hamurati Street, heading not for the police station but the hospital.

Remzi Kadare was at the gate, his expression menacing and his face distorted with senseless fury. He wagged his finger. “Whatever happens here isn’t my fault. If you want to find the guilty ones, look at the other Kadares from Palorto.” He lowered his voice. “Oh no, what’s going on? They’re up to no good.”

The investigators listened in puzzlement and then crossed the hospital yard, watched by the doctors and nurses standing at the entrance.

The examination of the two doctors’ operation records, or rather, the full list of their patients, caused no concern. On the contrary, a wave of relief swept through the entire hospital. This first ray of light shed on the mystery roused some hope. They were looking at the mortality rate of operations. Everywhere in the world people died during surgery, their families complained about the doctors, the doctors justified themselves and the cases went to court.

The investigators spent more than four hours in the hospital registry. Before they had passed the main gate, where Remzi Kadare again stood ready to say something that to him was very important, the first results of the investigation became known. Of the twelve thousand and more operations carried out by Big Dr Gurameto, about one thousand eight hundred patients had died on the operating table or soon after. The number for Little Dr Gurameto was less than one thousand. (The tendency to compare the two was again apparent.)

The investigation of the two doctors, like many things where they were concerned, took place on two levels. The first, in the Cave of Sanisha, was hidden from everybody. The second and visible dimension involved the hospital, the morgue, family homes and sometimes the cemetery. Records of autopsies and personal interviews were attached to the medical records.

The investigators, now pale after sleepless nights, appeared less often in the city. They lost weight, making their overcoats seem even longer. What was called the public side of the investigation now had its own secret aspects, which strangely did not relate to the dead but to the living. One by one, surviving patients, or rather their surgical scars, were to be examined for the oddest things, such as stitches in the form of six-pointed stars, tattoos, and old symbols (Hebrew ones for instance) of mysterious import.

Some called these stories crazy but others replied, “Wait, just wait and you’ll see. This business will go far. This is serious stuff.” Since the two doctors were not only surgeons but gynaecologists, women would also be subjected to intimate examinations.

Listeners to foreign radio stations, especially the BBC, passed on an extraordinary piece of news: a group of terrorist doctors had been exposed in the Kremlin, the very citadel of communism. The Soviets themselves had broadcast the news, calling it “murder in a white coat”. The usual furore was absent, probably because the case spoke for itself, but the report shocked the entire planet. Under the direction of a Jewish organisation known as the “Joint”, a group of doctors was preparing the greatest crime in the history of mankind: the elimination by murder of all the communist leaders throughout the world, starting with Joseph Stalin.

This incomparable crime would change world history. The globe would tilt on its axis and not regain its balance for a thousand years, if ever. So Stalin’s anger, which had been thought to be directed at Gjirokastër, was in fact aimed at the whole world.

A small, hesitant voice ventured to say that perhaps he was angry at both Gjirokastër and the world.

At first it seemed a nonsensical idea to link the plot to Gjirokastër but now it was the natural and obvious thing. The conspiracy, although first discovered in the Kremlin, had stretched its tentacles everywhere: Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Albania, even Mongolia.

People’s brains worked feverishly. So there was some truth in the stories about Stalin’s rejuvenation, time in reverse gear, the years moving backwards and that semi-official notice of a visit by the Father of the Peoples.

There were two interpretations of this visit. According to the first, Stalin really had intended to come. The headquarters of the “Joint”, having long ago made its preparations to strike on Stalin’s first visit abroad, had issued orders to its cell in Albania, that is in Gjirokastër, to stand ready. The conspirators would poke out their heads like moles, and would suffer the consequences.

In the second version the announcement of a visit was a front. It would never take place, and the “Joint” headquarters and Gjirokastër itself would fall into a trap. But still the moles would poke out their heads, and suffer. In either case Gjirokastër would pay a heavy cost for its vainglory. The city’s name was whispered everywhere. The entire communist world seethed with orders, warnings, secret communiqués.

At three in the afternoon on 16 February, Blind Vehip was clapped in handcuffs at the crossroads of Varosh Street, in full view of the astonished passers-by.

With her face as white as plaster, in a long dress on which there was no trace of violence, she approached the village. She walked slowly, yet not with downcast head as expected but with a distant expression, everything about her suggesting detachment.

That is how they had seen her leaving the village of Kardhiq, where for three days and nights they had stripped her of her humanity, and that is how she looked as they watched her coming to Tepelene. Those who had heard her story from others, who themselves had it from hearsay, had imagined her looking like this, or even paler. A song had been composed about her, though nobody knew when or by whom. It began, “I lost my soul in the prison cell/Of Sanisha, black as hell.”

As she walked, her brother Ali Tepelene watched her from his great house through a long officer’s telescope. His face was as black with fury as hers was pale. His sister’s movements made it clear that she had come to look for death. No doubt at his hands. He did what she wanted and coldly shot her, first with a bullet in the forehead, and then with two, one in the forehead and one in the heart, and then four, fourteen, God knows how many. But this brought him no peace of mind. He killed her again, with all kinds of weapons, but still he was not satisfied, only filled with such distress that when he saw her dead, he kissed her on the brow.

Later when he heard the song, he said to himself, “Ah, why didn’t I kill her properly?”

No one know who had composed the song, and its meaning was ambiguous: it could be interpreted as a song of her ravishers, shackled in the Cave of Sanisha, in the cell which her avenging brother had later created especially for them; it might equally be taken as a song about the fatal depths of a woman’s body, below her belly, which had led them into temptation. But in both cases it was a song or lament put into the mouths of her violators. Ali Tepelene, the most powerful vezir of the Ottoman Empire, who would give orders even to the sultan, had been unable in forty years to detach the meaning of the song from its dark history.

On 17 February, shortly before midnight, Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu, the foremost investigators of Albania and perhaps of the entire Communist Bloc, could not rid their minds of this song; its words made their knees buckle with terror and desire as they descended the steps of the famous cave.

They led the two doctors, whom they had known since childhood, in handcuffs.

A blinding light shone from an electric torch.

Neither of the investigators knew what their voices would sound like under the stone vault. When they first spoke, the sound was even stranger than they expected.

They heard their words, not in their own voices but as if spoken by actors from the distant past, returning to them enveloped in a terrifying echo and hanging suspended in the chamber before they melted away. “For. . the. . m u r d e r. . ”

It took some time for the doctors to understand the language. They were under investigation for the murder of patients during surgical procedures. They had no way of questioning why. There were no whys and hows. They were supposed to listen carefully to the conclusion of the investigation. This was a democratic proletarian state with the highest form of justice in the world, which never punished the innocent. The doctors were now cleared of the accusation of murder. The investigators had examined the full list of their patients and the exact times of their murders, they meant their deaths, and in particular the biographies of the victims, or rather the deceased, and had concluded that the numbers of the deceased of different political allegiances, i.e. communists, royalists and nationalists, did not reveal any political bias on the part of the surgeons. The suspicions against them were totally groundless.

The doctors sighed in relief but the investigators did not look any more relaxed. “We have only one question. It is simple, but fundamental.”

After a long silence the question was finally put to the two prisoners. The investigators now knew that the doctors had not committed murder. But the question was, were they aware. .

Almost in unison the doctors exclaimed, “What?” And indeed the astonished Big Dr Gurameto said it in German, “Was?”

The investigators tried to explain. The word “aware” need not be interpreted in a literal sense. They meant a general awareness that medicine could be used to commit murder. Political murder, of course. For instance of communist leaders.

The same gasps of amazement came again, and an exclamation in German.

Never. Of course not. They were doctors. They were bound by the Hippocratic oath. Who would dare suggest something so repellent, even as a joke?

“Our interview is over,” said one of the investigators. “As you see, we have been impartial. We only wanted the truth. Guard, take the prisoners to their cells.”

Two hours later, at three in the morning, they brought the doctors back to the cave. Not only the investigators’ voices but everything else was different. The cave had become their home. In fact the investigators’ first words were, “I think you know that we are here in the Cave of Sanisha.”

The doctors nodded to show they did.

Both sides stared at each other. “Don’t think we’re taking back what we said two hours ago, that we hoodwinked you and just pretended to believe in your innocence. There’s no question of that. You’re clear of any charge of murder. We’re going to ask you about something else.”

The investigators felt that the cave had taken them into its power. A fervour and excitement that they had never felt before, in which lust and suffering were mixed, had totally mastered them. They were not just investigators, they were the ravishers of Ali Pasha Tepelene’s sister. They were both torturers and their own victims.

“Dr Gurameto, we want to ask you about the dinner on the night of 16 September 1943.”

More than anything that had been said so far, this sent a chill of terror through the doctor.

Ah, that dinner. He did not say these words aloud, but they were in his eyes, his laboured breath, the very hair on his head.

The investigators looked straight at him.

“What do you want to know?” Dr Gurameto said, but in a voice that seemed to question whether what had happened could ever be known.

“We want the truth,” the investigators said, almost in one voice. “Everything. Hour by hour and minute by minute.”

The doctor stared into vacant space.

Could this truth ever be known or put in words? So far every effort had been made to conceal it. For almost ten years, by unspoken agreement, these events had been covered by the cold ash of oblivion, forgotten by both Germans and Albanians, royalists, nationalists and communists alike. Now they wanted to wipe away this ash. They wanted the truth.

“The whole truth,” the investigators repeated. “What happened. What was said. What was not said.”

Big Dr Gurameto lowered his eyelids. The doctor began to speak, slowly and tonelessly. The square in front of the city hall with its wet asphalt and the statue of Çerçiz Topulli in the middle appeared before him with extraordinary distinctness. The tank crews had just descended to stretch their legs. The officers fussed over the mud that spattered their boots. Then, by the door of an armoured vehicle, he saw Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, the commander of the troops, with his army greatcoat slung over his shoulder. His college friend watched him with glistening eyes as he approached.

Their emotional greeting. What von Schwabe said: ‘Do you recognise me? Have I changed?’ Then his dismay at Albanian treachery, his threat to punish the city, the hostages. As threatening as anything he said was the pale glint of his Iron Cross.

Dr Gurameto asked if it was necessary to relate in detail what happened next. The investigators replied that he should tell what he thought was necessary, so he described his invitation, the colonel’s acceptance and the dinner itself. He gave an account of who was present and of the atmosphere, the music and the champagne; he did not dwell any more than necessary on the release of the hostages. After he finished describing daybreak and how everybody was exhausted after the long night without sleep, there fell a long silence that was finally broken by Shaqo Mezini with a single ominous question.

“Is that all?”

Dr Gurameto said nothing. The other investigator bent down by his shoulder and murmured softly in an almost caressing voice, “What you have told us is accurate. But we know these things. We want the rest of the story. What we don’t know. The mystery.”

Gurameto froze. The investigators watched him, but their expectations were dashed. With a jerk of his head, as if to banish all inner uncertainty of his own, he said, “There’s no mystery.”

Shaqo Mezini straightened his back against the metal chair. “Doctor, I’m sorry to have to say this, but you’re not telling the truth.”

Gurameto gave the investigator a cold look.

“I know something different,” the investigator said, shaking his head as if to convey that saying this gave him a kind of pleasure that went beyond an investigator’s professional satisfaction.

Big Dr Gurameto’s eyes conceded defeat.

An intoxicating thrill swept through Shaqo Mezini. He had not realised how eagerly he had been waiting for this moment. At times of weakness, when he lost faith in the investigation’s prospects of success, he was more scared that the doctor would not give in than of his superiors’ displeasure. From the first day when he had learned that the doctor was part of this case, all his thoughts, obscurely, inexplicably, had focused obsessively on the figure of the prisoner. He had seen him dozens of times on Varosh Street, setting off for the hospital, an aloof, imposing figure. The investigator’s secret dream was to become a person like this, held in regard by everybody but not regarding anybody himself. He knew that he was not the only person to revere the doctor like this and was aware that his aura came from his reputation as a surgeon, from having studied in Germany, and the many stories told about him.

Later, when he returned from the academy in Moscow to find this provincial city shorn of all its glamour, he was startled to discover that Big Dr Gurameto’s aura, and that of his little counterpart, had survived undiminished. The young investigator was now conscious of this attraction, and that it was mixed with an element of anxiety. The big doctor was still unapproachable but now also seemed opposed to him. Shaqo Mezini found it hard to grasp the idea that he felt men like Big Dr Gurameto were in fact a block to him. It wasn’t even that they stood in the way of new ideas, the construction of socialism and the like; their opposition, though Shaqo Mezini could not know it, resulted from something deeper. It was intrinsic to men of Shaqo Mezini’s kind, something infinitely ruthless, like every kind of male rivalry.

Dr Gurameto was in Shaqo Mezini’s way. With his scalpels in his hand and wearing his white mask, he had acquired a stature that nobody could diminish. Moreover, he was a gynaecologist. To Shaqo Mezini’s mind, this meant having power over women, especially beautiful women, who submitted to him. A master of women! This was precisely what Shaqo Mezini was not. He was not ugly but neither was he sufficiently handsome to attract beautiful women. He had had a few ordinary exploits but never with women of real beauty, and there was never a question of having them in his power. But Gurameto ruled them, without possessing them. They came to him of their own accord, the investigator was sure, and he had no need to visit them. Perhaps his hand had even gone below the belly of Shaqo’s own mother.

All these thoughts rolled through his mind like lowering storm clouds, and on the day when he was summoned and told that Big Dr Gurameto would be under his investigation, these clouds suddenly burst. He had never felt so excited. His elation was mixed with a kind of savagery. The stark thought now came to his mind that Big Gurameto had been a general impediment, an impediment to Shaqo Mezini in particular, and that he still stood in his way. In every sense.

Shaqo Mezini’s thirst for revenge was inseparably bound to a feeling of fear. Of course he had the doctor before him in handcuffs but still he did not feel safe. For some reason he felt that these handcuffs might make the doctor all the more dangerous. Shaqo Mezini could not persuade himself that Big Dr Gurameto too might feel frightened. He cast sidelong glances at the instruments of torture, kept in an alcove since the time of Sanisha, but not even these offered reassurance. This doctor had terrified thousands of patients with his surgical tools. How could he feel fear?

The investigator was convinced not only that Dr Gurameto was fearless but that he could not lie. Fear and lying were connected. When Shaqo Mezini came face to face with the surgeon for the first time, a sudden onset of terror drove out any emotion of anger against his enemy. The surgeon was shackled and his face was drawn and despairing, but still he showed no fear.

Shaqo Mezini was ashamed to realise that deep down he wanted to rouse not his enemy’s hostility but his sympathy, and this he tried to convey to him in an almost subliminal message. “I’m sorry for you, but I can’t do anything about it. Talk, put an end to your suffering. Save us all.”

And then, as if responding to this covert appeal, the miracle-working surgeon, a legend in the city, caved in. At the critical moment he committed an act of suicide: he uttered a lie. Throughout that endless day the two investigators and their superiors had liaised with their superiors in Tirana, and these superiors had liaised with the other leaders of the great Communist Bloc, perhaps with Stalin himself. An aircraft had already reached Tirana and was expected to continue its flight to the airport of Gjirokastër. Now there was no room for doubt; the first crack had finally appeared in the doctor’s story.

The investigators could hardly contain their joy.

Shaqo Mezini’s first impulse was to leap to his feet, fill his lungs with air and shout in triumph. At last everything had fallen into place. Dr Gurameto had given in and Shaqo Mezini, not only a young investigator but also a young male, had gained the upper hand.

How grateful he felt to the Communist party that had worked this miracle.

His glance slid again to the antiquated instruments of torture that were now to be used on the manacled prisoner.

“Dr Gurameto,” he announced in a firm voice of command. “Big Dr Gurameto, as they call you, isn’t what you have just told us rather hard to believe? You have described an emotional reunion with an old college friend after many years. This close friend, by an amazing coincidence, turned out to be the commander of the German troops invading Albania. Isn’t it a bit like of one of those old fairy tales we learned at school? Quite apart from the dinner with music and champagne, the release of the hostages and the salvation of the city, doesn’t it look a bit like a game? Why not stop this charade and tell us what was really behind it?”

“I’m not playing a game,” Gurameto said, looking him straight in the eye. “This isn’t a charade. I don’t behave like that.”

The investigators now stared at him in outright mockery. Shaqo Mezini’s only anxiety was that Dr Gurameto, having fallen into this morass, might find a way to climb out of it. But fortunately he was only sinking deeper.

“And if it turns out that it was a game? If we prove it?”

Gurameto shook his head again, this time in contempt.

The investigators were clearly waiting for something. They looked at their wristwatches and whispered to each other, but none of this made any impression on Gurameto. They repeated in flat, weary voices more or less what they had already asked. Had there been an ulterior purpose, or not, to the dinner on the night of 16 September? The investigators were now obviously impatient, and mentioned an aircraft. The plane from Tirana was delayed but it would certainly arrive, if only just before dawn.

During the course of the interrogation the investigators remembered that Little Dr Gurameto was also there. All this time he had been handcuffed by the left wrist to the other doctor’s right hand but he had not uttered a word for hours. Two or three times the investigators had been about to ask him something, but thinking that he had not been present at the events of that day, or perhaps simply because they were tired, they forgot about him.

Both sides were succumbing to exhaustion. They heard muffled sounds from the entrance to the cave. Then came footsteps and the tapping of a cane, like a blind man’s. The investigators were so tired that they entirely forgot Little Doctor Gurameto, who seemed to have evaporated like a ghost in front of their eyes. The two doctors had merged into one.

Big Dr Gurameto was experiencing something similar, except that the two investigators were not turning into one but had become three. “So there are three investigators,” he thought. “But thirteen won’t drag a word out of me.” The three figures hovered before him as if in a mist and one of them stammered some words in German.

Upon hearing a sudden noise the doctor opened his eyes for a moment, and he realised that this was not a dream. There really were three investigators in front of him, and one was speaking German. For the second time he was addressed with the words, “mein Herr”.

Gurameto shivered. An ashen light filtered through a crevice in the cave. Perhaps it was dawn. They were all fully awake now.

“Grosse Herr Gurameto,” said the newly-arrived investigator. “I am an officer of the Staatssicherheit, the security service of the East German Republic.”

The man’s German reached the doctor’s ears even more indistinctly than the investigators’ Albanian. The German said that he had flown from Berlin to interrogate him. He said that in the entire communist camp, there was no more important case than this. He invited the doctor to consider it seriously.

“I know of no other way,” Gurameto replied.

The German investigator had been briefed about the case and asked the doctor to tell him in a very few words what had happened on the day of 16 September 1943 and the following night.

Dr Gurameto nodded. He replied in German, the language of the question, and his account was as detailed as before.

When he had finished, the third investigator asked quietly, “Is that the truth?”

“Yes,” the prisoner replied.

The silence was insupportable. Then Gurameto noticed another figure, an interpreter whispering into the ears of the two Albanian investigators.

“What you have just said is not the truth,” said the German.

Dr Gurameto’s expression did not change.

“The German officer, Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, whom you insist that you met on 16 September 1943, was not in Albania at the time you claim.”

The German’s voice sank lower. Not taking his eyes off the handcuffed prisoner, he said that Fritz von Schwabe had not been present on Albanian soil or indeed any other kind, because he had been buried four months before.

Gurameto’s face turned wan.

The other man explained that Colonel Fritz von Schwabe had died of wounds in a field hospital in the Ukraine on 11 May 1943. The investigator had brought his death certificate and photographs that showed the colonel in the hospital, and his funeral.

“There’s no need to go on,” Gurameto interrupted in a broken voice. His head suddenly fell forward, as if struck by a blow at the back of the neck. “I need to sleep,” he added after a moment. “Please.”

The investigators exchanged glances.

CHAPTER TEN

The uproar caused by what was called the conspiracy of the century spread across the entire planet. The investigation was conducted by eleven communist states, in twenty-seven languages and thirty-nine dialects, not to mention sub-dialects. About four hundred doctors imprisoned in as many cells were subjected to continuous interrogation.

None of the inmates of these cells received any news from outside, and those outside were ignorant of the cells. The Cave of Sanisha was only one cell among many.

At noon the following day the three investigators, with the interpreter a shadowy presence behind them, paid another visit to the two handcuffed prisoners in the cave.

“The truth was. . the truth is that I suspected from the very start that it wasn’t him.”

Gurameto’s first words crept slowly out of his mouth and were swallowed up by the echoing vault. He squinted in an effort to recall the time more clearly, casting his mind back to the square of the city hall, the wet asphalt and the tank crew who went up to the window of the closed café and raised their hands to their brows like peaked caps as they tried to see inside.

An aide had nodded towards one of the armoured vehicles, where the officer was waiting. On the way to the square the aide had told Gurameto explicitly, “The regimental commander, your friend from university, is waiting for you by the city hall.”

The colonel stood leaning against the armoured vehicle, in dark glasses, with one leg crossed over the other. Gurameto, even before he was close to him, felt his chest tighten with a spasm of doubt. After his greeting, “Don’t you recognise me?” the same spasm came again. His voice had changed. The man smiled and pointed to his face; it did not need a surgeon to notice the scars.

“Four wounds,” said the colonel, as the two spread their arms to embrace one another.

Of course the scars made a difference, Gurameto thought. But there were other things too. The uniform, the passage of fifteen years, the war.

The doctor described their conversation to his interrogators almost exactly as before: the colonel’s disappointment at the treachery of the Albanians and their violation of the laws of hospitality enshrined in the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, the threat of taking hostages and finally his own invitation to dinner.

He described the dinner in the same way, now dwelling on certain details, like the donning of the masks. This had been a fashion of the time at student dinners when the men were at university, even if he could not remember Fritz von Schwabe following it. Nor could he understand why the other man put on a mask and then took it off. Of course, from time to time the doctor’s suspicions had been aroused, especially when he caught out his guest in some error of fact. But he had put these doubts out of his mind for the reasons he had explained: the passage of time, his career in the army, the war. The doctor also said more about the following morning. His daughter, seeing them all asleep where they had fallen, thought that her father had poisoned his guests alongside his own family. He himself suspected his daughter of the same thing.

But now for the first time he mentioned his later suspicions. He never saw the German again. He tried once to meet him but was told that he was busy. On another occasion when he enquired after him he was told that there was nobody by the name of Fritz von Schwabe. He discovered later and only by chance that von Schwabe had been transferred elsewhere on duty. After that he heard nothing more.

The prisoner hung his head as a sign that his story was over. But a moment later he added that the other side had probably also deplored the dinner.

“What?” said the investigators almost together.

“I said that the Germans too may have disapproved of the dinner.”

“Aha.”

The silence was so protracted that everybody was sure that there was no more to say. The investigators whispered for a while among themselves. Shaqo Mezini was the first to speak.

“My question is a simple one: Why? A man arrives from far away, commanding the first regiment to enter another country and suddenly takes it into his head to change his name and pretend to be someone else. What is he up to?”

The handcuffed prisoner shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea.

The investigator’s voice rose, resonating through the cave. “What was he thinking of? How could he find the time, in such conditions, exposed to so many dangers, to invent this tale of a college friend and come for dinner? Was it his prank, or yours? Or were you both involved? Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” replied the prisoner. “Perhaps it was his game. But not mine.”

“Gurameto. Don’t try to wriggle out of this. It wasn’t a game, but something much deeper. Tell us!”

“I don’t know.”

“You knew you would meet him. You had agreed between yourselves. You had codes, masks, false names. Talk!”

“No.”

“Do you recognise this writing? This name?”

The German investigator had interrupted, producing a short letter in German that ended with the words “Jerusalem, February 1949” and was signed “Dr Jakoel”.

“I know this man,” the prisoner replied. “He was my colleague. He was a pharmacist in the city, a Jew. He left for Palestine in 1946.”

“What else?”

“He was one of the hostages released that night.”

“Aha, a Nazi colonel, a bearer of the Iron Cross, releases the first Jew he captures in Albania. Why? Sprich!”

The prisoner shrugged his shoulders.

“Herr Gurameto, I haven’t flown two thousand kilometres to listen to ravings in a medieval cave. Let me repeat the question. Why?”

“Because I asked him to.”

“Aha. And why did you ask him? And why did he listen to you? Sprich!”

“Because we were, according to him, college friends.”

“College friends or something else? Sprich!”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Herr Gurameto, do you know what the ‘Joint’ is?”

“No. I’ve never heard of it.”

“Let me tell you,” Shaqo Mezini interrupted. “It’s a long-standing Jewish organisation. A murderous sect, whose aim is to establish Jewish rule throughout the world.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Their next crime, their most horrible crime, was to be the murder of the leaders of world communism, starting with Stalin.”

“I’ve never. . ”

“That’s enough. Don’t interrupt. And now talk!”

“Sprich!”

“Never. . ”

“That’s enough.”

“You’re not letting me speak.”

“Speak!”

The investigators started a crossfire of questions.

“There is a mystery, I admit,” said Gurameto. “But you can work it out yourselves. You have the means. You have the real name of this person who pretended to be a dead man. Perhaps you have the man himself.”

“That’s enough! You’re here to answer questions, not ask them. Speak!”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Then we’ll force you. We have the means to do that.”

The eyes of first the investigators and then the prisoner wandered to the corner with the antique instruments of torture: hooks, knives, pincers to gouge out eyes, pliers to grip testicles. Witnesses had testified that it was the tortures effected by the pliers that Ali Pasha Tepelene particularly liked to watch through a spyhole in the wall.

The investigators whispered again among themselves.

“Dr Gurameto,” said Shaqo Mezini, no longer hiding the fact that he was in charge. “Despite our differences, we hope we will come to an understanding. As you can see, our suspicions relate to a terrible and macabre crime. The State requires us to be suspicious. For its own protection, of course. We don’t believe that you are its enemy; you have worked for it for years. You don’t want to see this State overthrown any more than we do. Is that true? Speak!”

The prisoner shrugged his shoulders again.

“The matter is simple. We want to know what lies behind this story. What was this game from the very start? What really happened at that dinner? Where did the orders come from? What were your secret signals and codes? I hardly need remind you that we’re dealing with a worldwide conspiracy in which you played a part, perhaps unwittingly. Speak!”

The prisoner raised his head. He moved his lips several times as if testing them before he spoke. “You think the German colonel was part of this conspiracy? And me too?

“Why not?

“I had no part in it. I know nothing about it. There’s your answer.”

“Did it cross your mind, even for a moment, that your dinner guest was. . a dead man?”

This question came from the other investigator, who had been silent so far that night.

The prisoner screwed up his eyes. “As I said, I suspected it wasn’t him. And also, but only for a moment, that he was dead. It was a well-known story in the city, passed down by our grandmothers. You couldn’t help thinking of it.”

“Aha, go on.”

“I can prove that I suspected it. I have a living witness.”

“We know,” the investigator interrupted. “Blind Vehip. We know everything.”

“I thought that as soon as you arrested him.”

“Go on! Keep talking!”

Gurameto went on to describe his conversation with the blind man under the pale street lamp at the intersection of Varosh Street and the road to the lycée. As he talked he couldn’t help thinking of the interrogation they must have carried out, their questions and the blind man’s answers. “You’re not telling the truth, old man. Where did you get the idea that Dr Gurameto had invited a dead man to dinner? Speak!” “I don’t know what to say. It just came into my head.” “You’re blind. You’ve never seen either the living or the dead. How can you tell the difference when you have no eyes?” “I don’t know. Perhaps just because. . ” “What? Speak!” “Perhaps it’s just because I’m blind.”

His own questioning of the blind man nine years ago was where this interrogation had started. Now it was being turned against him. The investigators were repeating it word for word.

The prisoner raised his hand to his brow. In a quiet voice he said that he needed to pull himself together.

Of course he had suspected all the time that his guest was not what he claimed to be, and during the dinner especially. There had been moments when the two men had been on the point of admitting it to each other. “My dear unforgotten friend, aren’t you in fact dead?” And the other man’s reply. “Yes, but how could you tell? Of course I am.”

Again the prisoner said he was not trying to hide anything. The secret that eluded him lay in the events themselves.

Strangely, the investigators did not interrupt him.

Ever since he had seen the colonel leaning against the armoured vehicle on the square of the city hall, two contrary thoughts had been at war inside him. Was it him or not? This man resembled his old college friend, but at the same time did not. The doctor thought of the moment when the disciples saw the risen Christ. His body was that of Jesus and yet was not. That was how the scriptures described it, soma pneumatikon, a spiritual or ethereal body.

Gurameto saw in the investigators’ faces that the mention of Christ caused not just irritation but fear. Perhaps this was why they hadn’t interrupted him.

Everything was like that, as if on two planes, the prisoner went on to explain. Sometimes he took the colonel to be a dead man, and indeed at times the colonel had seemed on the point of revealing himself as such. That donning and removal of the mask had probably even been a sign to him, which he had failed to understand.

“A sign,” Shaqo Mezini muttered.

The investigators looked at each other. For the first time, the prisoner had admitted that the conspirator had given him a sign.

It was now past three o’clock in the morning. Gurameto, his voice faint from exhaustion, was saying that the dead man had probably come to him in a shape that was in accordance with the laws of his world and brought signs from it. That was why there was so much mystery and misunderstanding.

The prisoner said he was no longer in a fit state. He would try to say more tomorrow.

After a whispered consultation, the investigators told him he could rest.

After the plane that had brought the German investigator, for the second time that week a light aircraft landed at the city’s airport. The airport had been virtually abandoned for ten years and this increase in traffic was striking. The first time, they barely managed to clear the runway of weeds and there had been no question of landing lights. In anticipation of the aircraft’s arrival, men holding torches had stood for hours in the February cold. Fortunately this second plane landed in the afternoon. At the last moment the wind from the Tepelene Gorge to the north of the city, as keen as ever, almost brought it down.

Clearly something extraordinary was happening, but few associated it with the interrogation in the Cave of Sanisha.

The man who disembarked from the second aircraft was a Russian investigator. His German counterpart with his gaunt, lined face had been a formidable presence, but this Russian looked unassuming. He was portly, almost bald and walked with an avuncular amble.

Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu came to the airport to meet him. At first they were visibly disappointed, but their conversation with him as they walked from the runway to the little airport building made them change their minds. They quickly realised that this person must be important. They all spoke fluently in Russian and before even reaching the hotel, the two Albanian investigators felt certain that this man had come straight from the Kremlin.

They talked in a secluded corner of the hotel. The Russian grasped the situation at once, as if he had been dealing with the case for years. He had come to provide assistance. He made it clear that he had experience of trials in Moscow that had been kept from the public.

The Albanians described for him how the investigation stood. They told him about the German investigator’s help, about the moments when they hoped the doctors would crack and other aspects of the case about which they did not feel so confident.

The Russian gave extraordinarily detailed instructions. In the first session they would test the prisoners’ sincerity, especially Big Dr Gurameto’s. Everything else depended on this. They would try to obtain precise answers to certain questions. What had the doctor and his foreign guest said in their private conversations during the dinner? What did the doctor know about German intentions towards Albania? There had been talk of secret discussions before the invasion with a group of pro-German Albanians who would take over the country’s government. What had been Dr Gurameto’s role in this group, if any? Why had he felt in such a strong position, almost equal to the German colonel? Where had he found the courage to speak up for the hostages, especially Jakoel the Jew? What did the Germans think about their massacre of civilians at the village of Borova? Did they feel remorse? Or did they pretend to? Who had waved that white sheet as a sign of the city’s surrender? If there was no truth in this story of the white sheet, who made it up, the Albanians or the Germans?

The two Albanians were reluctant to interrupt the Russian, but expressed their surprise. So far they had thought they were investigating the great Jewish plot, but now they were being asked about the German occupation.

As their discussion came to an end, the Russian investigator’s eyes gleamed. He understood what the Albanians were trying to say, but he was leading up to this. Testing the prisoner’s sincerity was merely a preparation for the final stage. First they had to make it clear to him that there was nothing that they didn’t know.

The Russian explained that the revelation of private conversations was the most effective of all possible methods of interrogation. The prisoner might imagine all kinds of things, but never that they could know what he said in private. When he realised that they did, he would be overcome with terror.

The Albanian investigators stared at the Russian in admiration.

“Don’t look so astonished,” the Russian said. “I know my job and this is no bluff. We know all these things, maybe better than the prisoner does himself. For instance, we might remind him of the phrase he used, ‘I’m not Albania, Fritz, just as you aren’t Germany. We’re something else.’”

“Excuse me,” said Shaqo Mezini. “This means that Fritz von Schwabe is still alive and he has told you of the events of that night.”

“No,” the Russian butted in. “He’s dead. Our German colleagues have confirmed this.”

The Russian’s clear eyes glittered with enthusiasm. The mysterious colonel really had died, but for the moment the two Albanians need not be told anything more. He knew from experience that premature revelations spoilt the proceedings. For the moment they should concentrate on this matter of private conversations. They were the key to everything.

The next interrogation session would be decisive. The prisoner had promised to talk. The Russian investigator would watch through that same hole in the wall that Ali Pasha Tepelene had used, following for entire nights the torture of the men who had raped his sister.

“Good God, he even knows about that,” muttered Arian Ciu.

“What?” asked the Russian. The Albanians’ awe of him was obvious, and again their visitor’s glassy eyes glistened.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

At midnight Big Dr Gurameto was led into the Cave of Sanisha alone. This was the first time he had been interrogated without the little doctor. The handcuffs which had tied him to the other man’s right hand dangled from his wrist and his movements were clumsy. Without his colleague he felt an empty space beside him.

“You promised to talk,” Shaqo Mezini said softly.

The prisoner nodded.

The questioning that night was long and tiring but the investigators did not intervene as they had in other sessions, when they had thought that a crossfire of interruptions was the best way to unsettle their victim. They now realised that not interrupting was just as disorienting.

It struck the doctor that they were making him talk with the express purpose of wearing him down. He told them what he knew about the secret talks with the Germans before the invasion. Of course the Germans had kept a file on Albania and had their people in place. The group of German sympathisers was large. The cream of the nationalist elite, as they were known, all either had a German cultural background or supported the Germans. They included Mehdi and Mit’hat Frashëri, from the most famous Albanian family of all; the great Albanian linguist Eqrem Çabej; the country’s most admired poet, Lasgush Poradeci; Father Anton Harapi, a figure of uncompromised moral stature; the renowned scholar, Lef Nosi; the distinguished Kosovo politician Rexhep Mitrovica and dozens of others.

Gurameto, the celebrated surgeon, expected them to ask him where he stood, so he told them himself. He had known many of these people but he did not count himself among this elite and still less was he a collaborator, any more than Çabej and Poradeci were. He did not hide that he had been inclined, tempted, like many who had studied in Germany, but this should not be confused with Nazism. It was an attraction to Germany, as was only natural. A lot of things were not as clear then as they later became. He was a surgeon and sometimes he performed ten operations in one day. He had no time for anything else. He would come home at midnight still wearing his white coat.

Finally they butted in to remind him that the question was about the secret talks before the invasion.

Of course he had heard about them, and in fact knew a good deal. The Germans had made preparations, knowing they would enter Albania sooner or later. So they had discussed certain matters in advance with their sympathisers in Albania. The essential point was that the Germans would come as liberators and not an occupying power. This meant observing certain conditions: there would be no murderous reprisals and the customs of the country would be respected, especially where Albanian honour and women were concerned. The doctor was aware of these things.

One of the investigators broke in to ask if this knowledge had given him the courage to demand the release of the hostages.

Of course, the prisoner replied. He was almost certain that the Germans would ask for the massacre of Borova to be forgotten and promise that such a thing would not happen again.

But what about the release of Jakoel the Jew? How had he been so bold as to ask for this? It was well known that nobody at that time dared ask for the release of a Jew.

The eyes of the investigators and the prisoner met for a moment.

It was a matter of respect for local customs. To the doctor’s knowledge, the Jewish question had been one of the most delicate aspects of the talks. The politicians who were to take over the government of Albania had dug in their heels over the Jews.

“So now you’re singing the praises of the Quislings!” the investigators pounced, speaking together.

“I’m not praising anybody. I know that the communists too insisted that the Jews would not be harmed.”

“We shot these Quislings afterwards,” Shaqo Mezini said. “You know that perfectly well: Father Anton Harapi, Lef Nosi.”

“I know. But not because of the Jews.”

“Go on,” said the investigator.

“Well, the question of Jakoel also had to do with local customs. Besides, Fritz von Schwabe was well acquainted with the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, which we had talked about so often. The Jews of Albania and all the Jews who sought refuge here at that time were considered ‘under their hosts’ protection’, and this principle was inviolable.”

Shaqo Mezini leafed through the notes in front him.

The investigators knew everything that had been said at the dinner table that night and asked only one thing. Towards midnight, the dead man, or the supposed Fritz von Schwabe, had said, “You will hear this music differently.” What did this phrase mean?

The prisoner furrowed his brow. In fact he did remember this phrase, and even the smile accompanying it, but he had never known what it meant.

“And those private conversations?” said Shaqo Mezini. “You may not believe it but we know about these too.” He bent down to the prisoner’s right ear to speak softly. “‘I’m not Albania, just as you’re not Germany, Fritz. We’re something else.’ Do you remember saying that?”

“Perhaps.”

“‘We’re something else. . ’ A strange claim, isn’t it?”

Gurameto hesitated. “I remember some of this but these things, about girls we had known and so forth, weren’t important. I remember vaguely. . But amazingly, this man remembered precisely a dream I had told him long ago. In fact when I was becoming suspicious it was this that persuaded me that the man really was Fritz von Schwabe.”

“Go on.”

“I had not told this dream to anyone else. In fact it had no particular meaning. It was a kind of nightmare in which I was lying stretched out on the table being operated on by a surgeon who was my own self.”

“Aha.”

Shaqo Mezini drew close to his ear again. “‘When we were students, we said in the tavern. . but if you are no longer the person you were then.’ Do you remember saying those words, doctor?”

The prisoner shook his head.

“What did you say in that tavern?” the investigator went on. “And why should one of you doubt the other?”

Gurameto shook his head again.

“When someone says, ‘if you are no longer the person you were then,’ I take this as a suspicion that the other person is trying to wriggle out of a duty or agreement.”

The prisoner said he couldn’t remember. Perhaps they’d been talking about old traditions.

Without hurry or irritation, the investigators put more questions, sometimes mentioning the colonel by name and sometimes calling him “the deceased”. What did the deceased say about this, or that? Why did the doctor feel he was on equal terms with the deceased?

The investigators dwelt at great length on this point. “You were a provincial doctor but he was the commander of a tank regiment, and moreover on the victors’ side. Where did this sense of equality come from?”

The prisoner shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. Memories of student days, perhaps.”

“That’s not enough,” Shaqo Mezini said. “I’ll be plain. Who was taking orders from whom?”

“I don’t understand.”

“We were talking about your courage. Where did it come from?”

The investigation had started to go round in circles.

“This courage to ask for the release of the hostages. Where did you find it?”

“I don’t know; perhaps it was because of the dinner.” The prisoner spoke more slowly. “It was due to the reasons you mentioned before, but especially because of the dinner. The invitation seemed the natural thing at the time but later it looked improper.”

“What have I done?” he had said on arriving home. His wife and daughter had wondered too. This dinner would require an explanation. Otherwise he would be reviled as a traitor and shot by his own people. The only justification for the dinner would be the release of the hostages.

Now it struck Gurameto as odd that he was no longer being badgered about that great conspiracy, the “Joint”. And, more lonely and exhausted than ever, he was overcome by a suspicion. How could they know so much? “How did they find out all this?” he repeated to himself.

Like sheet lightning, pictures flashed through his mind of his wife and daughter, their hair in disarray, raped and tortured amidst cries of “Talk!” “Sprich!” No, it was the cave that caused this fear. These were things that not even his wife and daughter could know. So who did?

Fritz, he thought. Alive, in irons like himself, and under interrogation.

The investigators stared at him as he rejected the idea with a shake of his head.

Then it must be someone else. There could be only one answer. Everybody at the dinner had been under surveillance all the time. They were all suspected by both sides.

With vacant eyes he stared at the investigators as if straining to find out from them, but their own eyes were just as blank.

“Bravo! Excellent!”

The delighted investigators were listening to their Russian colleague. Immediately after the session they had gathered in an adjacent cell, which had been turned into an improvised office.

“Ve efferythink know, ha ha ha,” laughed the Russian, trying to pronounce the Albanian words. “You were terrific, boys,” he went on. “Tell me honestly, did you begin to suspect yourselves that Fritz von Schwabe was alive and in our hands and had told us everything that happened?”

They cheerfully admitted that they had almost been persuaded, even though they knew to the contrary.

“So, let me tell you again, he’s dead. Our German colleagues were correct when they told us he died on 11 May in a field hospital in the Ukraine. So, who was ‘the deceased’?”

He asked for a coffee with milk before opening the file in front of him with chubby hands. Sipping the coffee, he drew out a sheaf of photographs from the file. “Here is ‘the deceased’,” he said, pointing to one of them. “Colonel Klaus Hempf, bearer of the Iron Cross. Here he is again, or rather here are the two colonels, the dead one and his ghost, with bandaged heads in a field hospital, in western Ukraine in May 1943. And now here is Klaus Hempf in a place that I think you will recognise.”

They gasped. Colonel Klaus Hempf stood smiling in sunglasses, leaning against an armoured vehicle in the city square of Gjirokastër. The statue of Çerçiz Topulli was visible, as was Remzi Kadare’s house in the background.

“Incredible,” they exclaimed almost in one voice.

“Now, listen carefully,” said the Russian.

He briefly recounted the story. The two wounded colonels met by chance in the field hospital in May 1943. Fritz von Schwabe was seriously wounded, a hopeless case, but Klaus Hempf’s injuries were less severe. The latter expected to be promoted to general as soon as he was discharged from the hospital and sent to a new front. His colleague was waiting only to die.

It was the sort of deathbed friendship that was common in military hospitals. The officers opened their hearts to each other. The dying man grew nostalgic as his strength ebbed and as he left his last wishes. The colonels shared a common interest in the Balkans. Klaus Hempf was to be transferred there after he left hospital. Fritz von Schwabe had dreamed of such a posting because his bosom friend from university, Gurameto, was there. Both had read the popular novels of Karl May, which extolled the local customs, especially those of the Albanians: hospitality, the word of honour, the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini. Gurameto had often talked about these things.

Clearly Fritz would not be going anywhere and least of all to Albania as he had promised his friend. So he asked his fellow-officer to carry out his dying wish, if destiny led him there: to seek out his friend and bid him farewell. He gave his address: Dr Gurameto, 22 Varosh Street, Gjirokastër.

Klaus promised. It was 11 May 1943. Fritz died, practically in his arms.

Klaus might have forgotten his vow if he had not by chance been in command of the tank regiment entering Albania four months later on 16 September 1943. The name of the city reminded him of his promise. He found the address in his notebook. And so the events as we know them unfolded: his meeting with Dr Gurameto, the sudden whim to present himself as his friend, the invitation and the dinner.

“This sounds like a romantic movie, no?” asked the Russian investigator. “Or a fairy tale. That’s what you kept shouting during the interrogation, didn’t you? ‘What is this fairy tale? What does it mean? Speak!’”

They nodded that this was true.

“But you see, it’s no fairy tale. Dr Gurameto is not lying. All this actually happened. This is not speculation or rumour. Our files prove everything.”

The Russian investigator now produced from the file some photographs of written pages, extracts from Klaus Hempf’s diary. “Does this dinner strike you as mysterious? There is no mystery at all. Here is a record of the conversation, written the next morning with exemplary accuracy.”

He also handed over four typed pages.

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. Now take a look at the rubber stamp at the top of each page.”

There was the Nazi emblem with the word “Gestapo”. Their skin crept more than at the sight of any ghost.

“Didn’t it ever occur to you that one of the colonel’s aides at the famous dinner would be a Gestapo man? Here are his notes, which we found in the Gestapo archive. You see, we know everything.”

The Russian laughed.

“You may ask, so this hero of a colonel was being watched? Of course he was. At that time everybody was suspected of something. You didn’t become a suspect; you were one already. But now after the good news here comes the bad. In some cases we don’t know everything, and this is one of them.”

He sipped the last of his coffee.

“There is one vital element we don’t know, and that is why Colonel Klaus Hempf, there on the city square, did not tell Dr Gurameto that he brought a message from his college friend, but said that he himself was Fritz von Schwabe.”

For a moment he pinned the two Albanians in his stare.

“Was it a whim? Of course it was. Hempf’s personal file describes him as an impulsive, even unreliable character. It’s a characteristic of these headstrong, reckless types. But we don’t know the real reason behind this caprice. The riddle remains unsolved and this mystery lies behind the dinner. How can we find out this secret?”

He requested a second cup of coffee and continued as the others listened in silence.

“The authors of this conundrum now lie dead and buried.”

The Albanian investigators listened in bewilderment.

“They took the truth to their graves,” the Russian added. “But before we ask how we can dig up this truth, we must ask ourselves if we need it. Dr Gurameto talked about the German strategy for this country, secret agreements and the like. At the time these things were important but now they are merely the politics of a bygone era. Albania is now a communist country. This story is finished. But let me say again, there is a mystery behind this dinner. From the moment that the German colonel introduces himself as a visitor from the next world, we are in the dark. Now, listen carefully to me.”

The atmosphere was heavy on that night of 27 February 1953. Shaqo Mezini could not sleep. Lightning was bad for sleep, he had heard. He stood up several times and went to the window, watching the jagged forks above the prison. He had not seen such lightning for a long time. It was called false lightning, he remembered. His thoughts whirred compulsively. What if the wire of the lightning conductor breaks? He imagined the lightning carried into the depths of the prison, down to the Cave of Sanisha, and Gurameto burned to a cinder.

It was almost midnight. He seized his winter coat that lay thrown across the chair, silently descended the stairs and went out into the street.

The staff car of the Interior Ministry was waiting at the end of the alley, with Arian Ciu inside. They muttered a greeting to each other. “What a night!” said his colleague. The car climbed the street with difficulty.

“Dr Gurameto, we have thought a lot about your case.”

“What?” said Arian Ciu in a tired voice.

“Nothing. Was I talking to myself?”

“That’s what it seemed to me.”

Shaqo Mezini had thought about what he would say. “Dr Gurameto, we believe that you have been honest with us in this investigation. You have ideals. We’re cut from the same cloth as yourself. We have ideals, but different ones to yours. Fortunately we agree on one thing and that is the importance of the nation. You’re convinced that you’re helping the nation in what you do. We think the same. Both sides can’t be right. It’s you or us, Dr Gurameto. Let’s find out which it will be.’

The engine noise changed and they noticed they had entered the castle. The scattered lights barely illuminated the arched vaults. Shaqo Mezini turned over in his mind the same thoughts that had preoccupied him for the last thirty hours.

“We could take the shortest route and convict you on the spot. Collaboration with the occupier. The people are shedding blood on the battlefield against the enemy while you host dinners with music and champagne. That would be sufficient for a bullet in the neck in any country, even France or England.

“We could take it further. Let’s go back to the dinner; what was it for? To celebrate treason and toast the German invasion? How shocking. But it could be still worse. Something else might be behind it. Some horror manifesting itself at your dinner. Something that would appal even the Germans. Something monstrous that is bigger than any of us.”

Shouts of “Halt!” came from the guards, then the prison’s outer gates creaked. A soldier holding an oil lamp lit up the investigators’ faces. Then the car proceeded across the deserted courtyard.

“What were we talking about? Your sentence. Hundreds of people heard the music coming from your dinner. The most obvious thing would be to shoot you and intern your wife and daughter. Your story would end on a sandbank by the river. But we have another idea. We have faith in your vein of idealism and we think that you can do something for the nation. The evening before last, you talked to us about the pro-German elite, which included Mehdi Frashëri, Father Anton Harapi, Eqrem Çabej, Lasgush Poradeci, Mustafa Kruja and, if I recollect rightly, Ernest Koliqi. Even though they all made or were about to make the wrong choice, their purpose was, as you said, to serve an ideal. They sacrificed all they had, their reputation, their honour, in a mistaken cause. One sacrificed his Franciscan habit and another his own talent. But they were thinking of the nation. Big Dr Gurameto, that is all we are asking of you. Do what they did.”

The car stopped with a jolt.

The inner gates creaked louder than the outer pair. The investigators walked in silence behind the guard, who led them down the long vaulted passage. They found Gurameto huddled on a straw mattress. They helped him to sit up on a chair at the table and brought him coffee with milk.

“Thank you,” said the prisoner in German.

It took him some time to collect himself.

It was hard for Shaqo Mezini too. His head felt as heavy as lead. He recited, like a monologue learned by heart, the greater part of what had been running through his mind for the last thirty hours. When he came to the words, “Do what they did”, he had a sudden mental block.

The prisoner looked at him helplessly, uncomprehending.

“What the hell,” the investigator said to himself, and leafed through the file at random. A short letter in German caught his eye.

“What do you say to this?” he said quietly, handing it to the prisoner.

Gurameto took it from him with a shaking hand.

“This is from my Jewish colleague. This is the second time you’ve asked me.”

“Of course. The letter was intercepted by Soviet intelligence.”

Shaqo Mezini read the translated text for the umpteenth time. “My dear colleague, what has happened to you? I have had no news from you since I arrived in Jerusalem. How are you? Have they bothered you because of me? Please write. My heartfelt greetings, Jakoel.”

What the hell, Shaqo Mezini thought again. What was the relevance of this letter to what he wanted to say? His memory had never failed him like this before. This bloody doctor had worn him out.

“Do what they did,” he said again. This was where he had got stuck. He held his head in the palm of his hand.

“I’ve got it,” he almost exclaimed aloud. His train of thought came back to him. He was talking about the dinner. Of course, that was where it all began. That was the riddle. Nobody could penetrate its innermost depths, its darkest recesses, not all the investigators of the communist camp, not even the Nazis in their day. Not Colonel Klaus Hempf, nor Gurameto himself.

This mystery loomed above everything, and its roots ran deep. Political regimes fell and states were overthrown but the spores of this organism survived. The “Joint” was one of them. The participants themselves did not understand how far it stretched. Murder was only part of its activities. Would Hitler have been a target? His turn might have come. Do something for your country.

All the communist secret services had been on the trail of the “Joint”. Stalin was waiting. Did Dr Gurameto understand what this meant? That Stalin himself was waiting. .

Let Dr Gurameto make this sacrifice for his country.

Sooner or later, the “Joint” would be exposed. Let it be Albania’s destiny to do this. Let Albania unmask it and become the golden boy of the bloc, of Stalin himself.

Shaqo Mezini was exhausted. The prisoner’s face showed not the slightest comprehension. The investigators tried to calm themselves. In cold, precise terms they told Gurameto what they expected of him. A simple thing, a confession. In other words, a signature, admitting he was a member of the “Joint”, as no doubt he was. Just like his old college friend, Fritz von Schwabe and the other colonel, Klaus Hempf. And Little Dr Gurameto, who had already signed.

He had no reason to stare at them like that. He had said it himself during the famous dinner. “I’m not Albania. Just as you’re not Germany. We’re something else.”

“You were members of the ‘Joint’, Jews, Germans, Albanians, Hungarians. You held your meetings everywhere. The meeting in Albania was just one in a series.”

The investigators interrupted one another in their haste.

“You were everywhere. Like the plague.”

Everybody knew about the Zionist “Joint” and felt its presence, but it was invisible to the eye. Only Gurameto could see it, only he could fathom the unfathomable. He could explain this dinner and illuminate its dark void. So they could finally get out of this cave. “Talk, you. . de—”

Whether they pronounced the word “devil” before they saw the shackled man shake his head or just afterwards, they could not tell, neither then nor later. They recollected only a scream of “It’s finished!” after which Shaqo Mezini held on to his colleague to keep himself upright.

At three in the morning they gave the order for the prisoner to be put to torture.

When dawn broke the torture was still continuing. People came and went through the chambers of the cave like ghosts. The shouts of the torturers were heard, interspersed with Gurameto’s groans. “The name of the chief. His nickname. Your cover name. The secret code. Talk!”

The tapping of a cane was heard in the semi-darkness. It must be Blind Vehip who for some reason they had brought there, only to take him away again.

The shouts were gruff, unvarying. “After Stalin, who? Where? You? When? With poison? Radiation? Talk!”

The mournful strains of a gypsy song were heard from somewhere. Shaqo Mezini remembered the day when his fiancée had left him. He had heard a song like this in the distance. He could not remember the words but they more or less went “You said farewell to me/But not to my knife in your heart.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

He had the feeling that this was not the first time he had dreamed of Sanisha. She seemed composed and aloof, especially towards himself. Finally she set aside her indifference and, turning her pale face towards him asked, “Is your investigation about me?”

Shaqo Mezini shrugged his shoulders, which seemed to him the best he could do. It was a kind of answer that combined an apology (he was only doing his job) with a feeble protest (an investigation in your cave doesn’t necessarily mean it’s about you).

She was not at all angry, but not grateful either. In different circumstances this ravished woman might have opened her heart to him. “Officer, if you only knew what they did to me.” But she remained cold and distant.

He heard the indistinct buzz of conversation around him. There was a double door through which he could see sparkling chandeliers and people moving to and fro. He heard the name of Stalin, but it seemed to him improper to ask what was happening. Then he understood: Comrade Stalin was hosting a dinner in the Kremlin. Journalists were relaying the news. “Comrade Stalin, on this occasion. . All communists should know that the peoples of the world owe a debt. . ”

Sanisha appeared again among the guests. “I don’t care,” she said to Shaqo Mezini, “but I’m sure my brother won’t like it. No brother wants his sister’s rape investigated.” The investigator shrugged his shoulders again. He wanted to ask if she was invited to Comrade Stalin’s dinner. Comrade Stalin, the Father of the Peoples. Then she said, “Perhaps you’re no longer frightened of my brother, Ali Pasha Tepelene. In my day, everybody was terrified of him.”

It was the sort of dream that you could, with a little effort, snap yourself out of. Shaqo Mezini forced it away but it lingered in his mind. Even after he opened his eyes he could hear the words, “Comrade Stalin, Comrade Stalin, the glorious leader.”

He leaped out of bed and ran to the window. Even before flinging the window open, he identified the source of his torment. The voice came from a huge loudspeaker on top of the castle. You did not need to hear the words to know this meant bad news. Loudspeakers did not broadcast anything else. The words came distorted, fragmentary. “At this hour of trial, when Comrade Stalin is suffering. . ”

At least he’s not dead, Shaqo Mezini thought.

On the street, as he ran towards the Interior Ministry’s branch office, he heard the broadcast distinctly from another direction. It was a bulletin on the patient’s condition. “Breathing difficulties. . intermittent. .”

He sprinted across the office yard. His colleague Arian Ciu, with a pale, waxen face, was trying to make a phone call. “All the lines are engaged,” he said with a guilty look.

Shaqo Mezini, short of breath, did not reply. “Are there any instructions?” he finally gasped.

A short call had come from headquarters in Tirana. “Everybody at their post. This is an order.” There was no further explanation.

“At our posts,” Shaqo Mezini thought. “Of course.”

An inscrutable expression crossed Arian Ciu’s face.

“No more?” Shaqo Mezini asked. The lines had been busy for the past hour. “Is the chief in his office?”

“Yes. Our enemies are rejoicing too soon. That was all he said.”

“Are you scared?” Shaqo Mezini asked suddenly.

Arian Ciu did not know where to look. “No. What do you mean by that?”

Shaqo Mezini was overcome by a wave of emotion he had never felt before, a barely resistible urge to lay his head on the chest of his office colleague, and say, “Hold on to me, brother. We’re both lost.”

The door opened noisily. The chief of investigations entered, stared at them as if surprised to find them there, and just as noisily departed again.

They stood in silence and looked towards the window. It gradually dawned on them that they were both looking in the direction of the military airport. How incredible to think back to the time when the investigators from Berlin and Moscow had landed there.

At midday the station chief held a short meeting in his office. The latest bulletin reported no change in Stalin’s condition. The orders from headquarters remained the same: everybody at their posts. The radio was broadcasting classical music and two of the typists were in tears.

At four in the afternoon Shaqo Mezini jumped to his feet. His face glowered. “Get up,” he said to his colleague. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“You know where.”

Without a word to anybody and with unsteady steps they set off for the prison. Sometimes the noise of their footsteps seemed too much to bear and the cobbles cracked explosively under their boots, and sometimes the sound was muffled, as if they were walking on clouds.

In the Cave of Sanisha they found Gurameto stretched out as usual on his straw mattress. He did not move when they entered or even when they called his name. The marks of torture were clearly visible on his cheeks.

“So you’re pleased at this, are you?” said Shaqo Mezini. “You heard Stalin is ill and you’re pleased at this, scum.”

He was still short of breath from the hurried ascent and he could barely utter the words.

“He can hardly breathe, and this makes you happy, doesn’t it?”

A faint gleam in Gurameto’s eyes suggested to the investigator that medical curiosity was one of the few instincts that the doctor retained. The investigator tried to conceal his own shortness of breath but this made it worse. The imprisoned doctor had probably taken what he said about breathing to refer to himself, not Stalin.

“Stalin can hardly breathe, do you hear me?” he shouted. “He’s dying and you’re glad, is that right?”

The prisoner did not reply.

The investigator’s eyes wandered to the corner where the old instruments of torture glinted dully. He remembered a few years ago a British collector, who was fond of Albania, wanting to buy them for pounds sterling.

Arian Ciu was looking at them too. “For what other occasion were these tools intended,” Mezini thought.

But he surprised himself by saying something else. “Gurameto, you’re a doctor. You can’t be pleased when someone is barely breathing, can you?” He brought his face close to the prisoner and continued in a whisper. “You would like to cure him, wouldn’t you? Speak!”

He thought he saw the man nod, but he could not be sure.

“Dr Gurameto,” he said gently. “You have it in your power to cure Stalin.”

He drew close to the man’s head again and murmured into his right ear. A word from him, or rather, his signature at the end of the record of interrogation would perform the miracle. It was said that it was worry over the failure to expose the Jewish plot that had laid Stalin low. So, the news that the plot had been exposed would surely restore him to life. “Save Stalin, doctor,” Shaqo Mezini gasped.

The other investigator watched dumbfounded.

Shaqo Mezini was close to collapse. Like his voice, his knees were giving way. His ribs were melting like candle wax and could no longer contain his heart. He felt an overpowering desire to hold the prisoner in his arms, to weep with him.

Did he fall to his knees now, or had it been some time ago? With a trembling, beseeching hand, he held out the document. “Bring him back to life,” he said tenderly. “Stalin’s resurrection is more important than Christ’s. Raise Stalin from the grave!”

This final plea exhausted him completely.

Both men watched the prisoner, making no movement.

This time Shaqo Mezini thought he saw Gurameto shake his head. “No!” the investigator screamed to himself, holding his hands to his eyes, as if blinded.

The next day in the office the hours crept wearily past. First one man and then the other looked into the distance towards the small military airport. They knew they were waiting in vain but their heads automatically made the same movement.

During the afternoon the phone calls petered out. Not just the office but the whole country seemed stricken. Arian Ciu stepped out occasionally to the next-door offices in search of news but each time came back without a word. The order was still the same: everybody at their posts. It became a catchphrase.

After his tiring night, Shaqo Mezini could not keep his mind focused. The desolate appearance of the airport depressed him more than anything else and reminded him of another dream, about how he might become one of the “high-flyers”. He had been struck when he saw the German investigator descending the aircraft steps in his casually unzipped leather jacket, his scarf blowing in the wind. He would have liked to look like this, the socialist camp’s famous investigator landing at airports in Budapest, Moscow and Sofia, in pursuit of the common enemy. He remembered the familiar exhilaration of times like this, which he associated in his mind with a particular song.

We are sons of Stalin

Prepared to do and die

Until the hammer and sickle

O’er every land does fly.

Now this dream, like the Great Man’s breathing, was ebbing. It was like that afternoon long ago when he had come home after a tedious meeting and his mother, with a bewildered expression, had handed him a letter left by his fiancée. “Don’t try to understand why. There’s no going back.”

And so it turned out. She never came back and he never found out the reason why. Sometimes he suspected himself of avoiding the truth. At home, whenever his fiancée was mentioned, he saw an unspoken question in his mother’s eyes. How can this son of mine, who uncovers everyone’s secrets, fail to understand his own mistake?

After the arrest of the two Gurametos, when their entire list of patients was screened, Shaqo Mezini was horrified to see not only his mother’s name but his fiancée’s. Numb with shock, he carefully checked the dates. Her appointment was three months after their engagement and five weeks after they had first slept together. Obsessively, he asked himself the reason for this visit and why she had kept it secret from him.

During the first investigation of Big Dr Gurameto, his eyes drifted involuntarily to the doctor’s right hand, the one that performed gynaecological examinations.

He pictured that silent afternoon when she had left the house with bowed head to go to the hospital, who could tell why.

He would have given anything to know the truth.

A week later he happened to find himself alone with the prisoner, against all regulations. He had never broken a rule before, but his conscience was easy. This infraction did no harm to the State.

He spoke quietly to the prisoner, as if at a routine interrogation of an ordinary suspect. He mentioned his fiancée’s name and added that she was a young woman of twenty-four. According to the hospital register she had attended her appointment at four thirty on the afternoon of 17 February 1951.

The prisoner had furrowed his brow and said that he couldn’t remember her.

She was an ordinary-looking woman of medium build.

The doctor shook his head again.

“Try to remember, doctor,” said Shaqo Mezini, noticing with alarm his own altered voice. The anxiety of those unforgotten weeks flooded over him again. “Doctor, please,” he entreated in a muffled voice. “Tell me out of human kindness. . she was my fiancée.”

The prisoner made no sign.

“You don’t remember? Of course you don’t. She wouldn’t strike you in any way. She was an ordinary woman. She was no great beauty.”

Shaqo Mezini sat down and his voice became colder and more threatening. “Why did she come to you? Why shouldn’t I know the reason? Did she complain about me? Speak!”

The prisoner still sat speechless.

“At least tell me what was wrong with her. Just listen to me. What was the problem?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Really?”

“Even if she did come to me, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s a matter of confidentiality.”

“Monster,” Shaqo Mezini said to himself. “Heartless monster. Hun.”

At all the later sessions he tried to avert his eyes from the prisoner’s right hand.

On 3 March before dawn he had given the order for the prisoner to be put to torture. He had gone to the chief operative named Tule Balloma. “Listen, there’s something on my mind. Those two fingers, the index finger and the next one, what do you call it. Give them a good twist.”

The operative looked at him strangely. “There are other parts that hurt more, boss.”

“I know, I know,” he had replied. “But it’s those I want. Crush them good and proper.”

“Don’t worry, boss. You’ll see.”

He was curious to see the result, although it would be small consolation.

For two years he had brooded on his fiancée’s desertion. He never imagined that just at the time when the scar was healing, the investigation of the doctors would lay bare this wound again. When they had assigned him to this case its global dimensions had staggered him. Simultaneously there came a pang: it was too late. If this had come earlier perhaps his fiancée would not have left him. The file contained something for which he had subconsciously yearned, the promise of celebrity.

The Dzerzhinsky Academy, which of all institutions should have cultivated an indifference to fame and the charms of women, surreptitiously offered these inducements. Forbidden lust haunted the cadets’ nightly dreams. Their officers, who knew every secret, could not fail to understand this, but astonishingly, instead of discouraging these desires, they openly hinted that they could hold the entire world in their hands if they knew how to reach out for it. The sons of Stalin would drown the world in blood. The world with its temples, cathedrals, its men and glamorous women, would kneel before them.

His fiancée had proved resistant to this fantasy. At the first supper at her home, supposedly by accident, he had let her see his pistol as he took off his jacket, but to no effect. She had shown no curiosity but only an obvious disdain for firearms.

His eventual fame would no doubt change this and he would become attractive to women, like the commissars with their leather jackets and scars on their foreheads. Or the surgeons who knew how to handle them. If only he too could be somebody. The young Ali Pasha Tepelene supposedly said that if he had been vezir, he would not have allowed the men of Kardhiq to ravish his sister, and from that day his sole ambition had been to become vezir, to take his revenge.

Shaqo Mezini seemed about to become a star at the precise moment in his life when it was of no use to him. He had known this instinctively as soon as he heard the radio broadcasts about the plot, when the newspapers with their banner headlines arrived, and later, as he watched the German investigator striding across the windswept tarmac to the airport building. Later, fame seemed to draw a little closer every day and came almost within his grasp, as it had on those heady evenings at the Dzerzhinsky Academy. Dozens of his student friends from Berlin to Ulan Bator were no doubt at the same time investigating the same repellent case. But destiny shone more brightly on him than on anyone else. His dream of becoming the most famous investigator of the socialist camp was about to become a reality: Shaqo Mezini, the thirty-year-old Albanian sleuth. There would be interviews, meetings with young pioneers and congress delegations. “Comrade Stalin, this is Shaqo Mezini, who exposed the famous ‘Joint’.” Then Stalin would invite him to supper and perhaps even talk to him tête-à-tête.

His intoxicated imagination stopped short before this climax. He was content to leave the details vague. At times, the scene of another supper threatened to superimpose itself, Christ’s perhaps. He knew about this from the Bible, which he had read and even underlined in red pencil while investigating Father Foti, the priest of Varosh. But more than anything else he remembered Gurameto’s dinner, which had started it all. He saw himself present sometimes as the man who was to arrest the mysterious guest and sometimes as this very guest himself, the all-powerful visitant from the grave.

Don’t give up, he thought. There is still hope.

It was 4 March and Stalin was still alive. Towards dawn they tortured Gurameto again. The operatives were sure he would sign.

The day was overcast with frozen clouds shot through with a deceptive light. The radio carried classical music interspersed with listeners’ letters and statements from meetings of workers and soldiers. Wishes for a speedy recovery, threats to our enemies.

The verses published in the press all mentioned Stalin’s laboured breathing. Everybody thought he was at his last gasp.

Gurameto’s torture continued till dawn. The investigators no longer waited for anybody’s instructions. Late in the afternoon they searched his house again and seized his gramophone and records. Among them they found Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”, mentioned in the statements. They played it while the torture continued.

For the prophecy to be fulfilled, the dead colonel’s words had to come true. “‘You’ll hear this music differently.’ Do you remember him saying that?”

Shaqo Mezini rambled as if in a fever. Arian Ciu listened to him impassively, alarmed by his colleague’s recourse to the Bible.

After two hours they both went to the hospital to fetch the surgical instruments that Gurameto had brought from Germany, each one with the initial “G” engraved on it. Arian Ciu did not need his colleague to explain that they would torture Gurameto with his own tools, to fulfil the other prophecy, seen in his dream, that he would be operated on with his own scalpels.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The news of Stalin’s death was broadcast shortly before noon. Shaqo Mezini was lying half-dressed on his bed after a strenuous night in the Cave of Sanisha when he felt his mother’s hand touch his shoulder. “Shaqo, Shaqo,” she said in a low voice. “Get up! He’s dead.”

He leaped to his feet, seized first his revolver from the bedhead and then his overcoat, bounded down the stairs in twos and threes and ran out into the street.

“Louder!” he thought, without knowing whom he might be addressing. His feet carried him instinctively to the office of the Interior Ministry. His mind was vacant. Then he realised that he had been talking to the loudspeaker. It was not blaring as loud as it should, nor did the mountains of Lunxhëria look sufficiently sombre. “Bad news for me,” he thought.

At the office his heartbeat steadied. All his comrades were there. With bloodshot eyes and without a word, they embraced each other as they arrived, as if at a funeral. He wrapped his arms round Arian Ciu’s neck and could not suppress a sob.

A hundred yards away the same was happening at the Party Committee. Decorated war veterans, angrily red-eyed, stood in groups in front of the door. Couriers entered the building, only to emerge with even grimmer expressions than before.

At one o’clock a collective wail from the children went up from the yard of the primary school. Many people could stand it no longer and fled, shutting themselves up in their homes. Others who had taken to their beds during Stalin’s long illness struggled to rise from them.

That afternoon people gathered in public halls and courtyards to listen together to the radio broadcast of the rally of mourning from the capital. The announcer’s trembling voice described the scene in Skanderbeg Square in Tirana, where the nation’s leaders knelt in front of the dead man’s statue. In a halting voice the Leader swore eternal loyalty on behalf of all Albanian communists.

Some people fainted and were carried to the hospital. By the post office, Remzi Kadare, roaring drunk, pointed a finger at the emergency entrance. Amid his sobs of despair, he was telling a story that his listeners took to be about the big event of the day, but was in fact his recollection of the fatal poker game when he had lost his house.

On other streets could be heard the shouts of unfortunate people as they were dragged by the hair to the Interior Ministry, accused of having laughed at the memorial rally instead of crying, although they swore blind they hadn’t been laughing at all but were as broken-hearted as everybody else. But for some reason their weeping had turned into a snigger. They were beaten all the harder.

After the rally Shaqo Mezini told his colleague that his legs would not carry him any longer and he was leaving. They could call for him if necessary.

At home he collapsed into a leaden sleep. When he woke up it was dark. He had a momentary sensation of being suspended in a void, above a kind of abyss of grief and fear. Stalin was gone. He no longer had. . What else could he have? Speak!

He shook his head, assailed by a cruel and unexpected recollection of the white stomach of his fiancée and the dark regions beneath her garters. He felt a pang at having had so little chance to savour them.

The pain ripped through his chest and the scream he suppressed was more violent than the one that came from his throat. His idol Stalin was no longer in this world; worse, his enemy Gurameto still was.

What could be more unjust? Shaqo Mezini shuddered with a strange fear at the prospect of being left alone in this world of sorrows with this monster Gurameto. It was unthinkable. He imagined the doctor’s cynical smile. “He’s gone, your little father’s gone, he’s left you all.” And his flesh crept again.

No, he thought. Never.

With uncertain steps he left the house. The streets were deserted. A street lamp flickered but refused to die. The Interior Ministry building was in semi-darkness. The guard on night duty looked at him in pity. In the office he found a note from Arian Ciu, “I’m at home. Call me if anything happens.”

A short time later the two men’s boots were heard, scraping against the cobbles on the street up to the castle. Neither of them spoke; it appeared that first one man and then the other were sleepwalking. They climbed for a long time, as if through clouds. Shaqo Mezini thought he saw the other man’s boots strike sparks, like the hooves of a horse he had once seen in childhood struggling to climb the cobbled street.

The iron gates to the Cave of Sanisha creaked dolefully. Gurameto was lying just as they had left him, stretched out on the straw.

Shaqo Mezini touched his knees with the toecap of his boot. “Wake up, Stalin’s dead!” The prisoner’s expression did not change under the pale light of the torch. The black patches and smears of dried blood gave his face the appearance of a crudely painted mask.

“This makes you laugh, eh?”

The mask did not change. Its expression could mean anything: laughter, grief, entreaty, anger, menace. (“When he heard the news of Stalin’s death, he laughed. Before my very eyes. I lost it. I couldn’t control myself.”)

The investigator’s eyes wandered from his face to his bandaged hand. (“No, I was not trying to destroy evidence. I didn’t know his fingers had been cut off.”)

Silently he motioned to Arian Ciu and the two started to drag the prisoner by the feet.

The empty handcuff on the prisoner’s right hand clanged as it hit the floor.

“Where’s the other one?” Shaqo Mezini asked.

“Who?”

“The other one, I said. The little doctor.”

“There’s no other doctor.”

Shaqo Mezini stopped in his tracks. His expression had never looked so menacing.

“I mean. . they’ve been separated for several days, you know.”

Their voices echoed indistinctly in the long vaulted passage. Where? How? Perhaps he was in the next chamber.

The superintendent of the cave joined them.

“He’s been in that room for a while. The young trainees beat him. You know better than I do. . The first-year intake.”

In each chamber their voices sounded different.

“Maybe he was shot by mistake,” the superintendent continued. “There’s been a lot of confusion in the last few days, believe me.”

Some of the chambers were pitch dark. In one, two points of light danced like cat’s eyes.

“What are those sparks?” asked the investigators.

“It’s Blind Vehip,” the superintendent replied guiltily. “The lads were making fun of him. They stuck phosphorescent stones in his eye sockets.”

“How do they find time for things like that?”

“One of the cave guards was telling me about it. I think they just found this guy,” Arian Ciu said.

“He’s a goner,” the superintendent said, throwing the beam of his torch onto Blind Vehip’s face.

“It doesn’t look like him,” Shaqo Mezini said. “Never mind. Big deal. Put him in that other handcuff.”

“That needs a signature here,” the superintendent said in a voice of entreaty, stretching out a piece of paper.

Shaqo Mezini did not reply. His hands were still occupied.

When he felt the other man tied to his wrist, Dr Gurameto gave the first signs of life. He was trying to say something.

“Don’t get me into trouble, boss,” said the superintendent.

The investigator looked at him with contempt. “Stalin’s dead! Don’t you understand that? It’s chaos everywhere.”

“I know,” the superintendent replied in a sheepish voice. “But what’s a poor man like me to do? Rules are rules.”

They were close to the entrance to the cave, and felt the cold night air.

“Here,” the superintendent said, pointing to a place on the sheet of paper. “‘Reason for prisoner’s removal: visit to crime scene’.”

Much later Big Dr Gurameto’s final hours were reconstructed with considerable accuracy from the record of the autopsy, the two judicial files and the testimonies of Arian Ciu, the superintendent of the Cave of Sanisha and the driver. The statements of Shaqo Mezini and Blind Vehip were not taken into account because of the confused mental state of both men.

All the facts agreed that towards dawn on 6 March 1953, more precisely at three forty in the morning, the prison car left the yard with five people inside: the two investigators, the driver and the two prisoners. It passed through the yard and the main gate of the castle and took the road leading out of the city.

For a long time there was silence in the car and the prisoners gave no sign of life. Then the cold night air revived Big Dr Gurameto and he tried to say something. Because of his lack of teeth his words were indistinct, so nobody paid him any attention. The other prisoner made no sound.

On the highway, when the car passed the cemetery of Vasiliko, Dr Gurameto came to life again. He tried to ask for something, more insistently than before, pointing with his free hand to the cemetery wall. But still nobody listened to him. A few hundred yards further on, he gestured again. After that, nothing worth noting happened until they reached the sandbank by the river.

The experts went back countless times to the short period when the car sped along this stretch of road but could shed no light on this most mysterious moment of all when Gurameto was trying to attract attention. All the witnesses reported him making incoherent noises but none of them could offer any explanation.

Of Gurameto’s three attempts to speak, the experts were able to interpret only the first. Probably the first thing that Big Dr Gurameto understood when he came round was that the person handcuffed to him was not his colleague. Evidently he was trying to say so. “This isn’t the other doctor.” Or, “This man is dead.”

No explanation could be found for his other two efforts to communicate, when he had been even more insistent and almost violent, waving his arm in the direction of the cemetery. The answer to the mystery seemed to lie in this gesture.

The statements described convincingly and consistently his final moments after the car reached the river at the place known as the Brigand’s Ford. The investigators had pulled the prisoners out of the car while the driver dug a hole in the sand. They carried both prisoners to the edge of the hole and, although they suspected that one of them had been dead for some time, shot both several times with their revolvers.

The trial of the two investigators was held towards the end of spring. Shaqo Mezini was sentenced to three and a half months’ imprisonment and Arian Ciu to two and a half, both for “misuse of office”. The mitigating circumstances of the shock of Stalin’s death and especially their victims’ cynical response to this dreadful news were decisive in reducing their sentences. Shaqo Mezini, because of his psychological imbalance, completed his sentence in the psychiatric hospital at Vlora, while Arian Ciu served his in the city prison, not far from the Cave of Sanisha.

Both were later reinstated at the Interior Ministry, but only to work in the uniform section of the Procurement Department rather than the Office of Investigations.

The graves were exhumed forty years later in September 1993, shortly after the fall of communism.

Relatives of the deceased found the bodies handcuffed, just as they had been buried. It was discovered first of all that one of the shackled men was not Little Dr Gurameto but someone else who was never identified. Little Dr Gurameto’s body was never found, despite his family’s persistent efforts. Indeed, the little doctor had left such few and slight traces behind him that some people began to doubt he had ever existed. Further research did not lay these suspicions to rest and indeed only strengthened them. There was no mention of Little Dr Gurameto in the investigation record or the witness statements. Plenty of people believed, even if they did not say so publicly, that Little Dr Gurameto had been merely an exteriorisation or projection of Big Dr Gurameto’s unconscious, a projection which the people around him for some inexplicable reason had accepted.

Dr Gurameto’s file was opened again fifteen years later in the spring of 2007, when the European Union asked Albania, like all the other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, to punish the crimes of communism.

This time, European as well as Albanian experts examined the case for weeks. Rarely had they been given the chance to get their teeth into such an investigation, which involved the secret services of several countries with entirely different regimes and histories: the royal and later the communist Albanian secret service, the German Gestapo and Stasi and the Soviet and indirectly the Israeli secret services. Moreover, besides such curiosities as the rhymes of Blind Vehip and the confessions of women, who, terrified by the summons to the Investigator’s Office, had revealed secrets that they had sworn to take to their graves, the file also included the statements of the surgeon’s daughter and his wife. The latter had testified to things that only she could know, such as the doctor’s nightmares, and legends such as that of the dead house guest, which his grandmother, as he himself had recalled, had used to lull him to sleep. Among the doctor’s several expressions of remorse for things he shouldn’t have done, the most important was his sigh, “Ah, that dinner. . ” which occasionally escaped him quite unexpectedly.

Even so, the more complicated the file on Dr Gurameto grew, the more lucid it became. With the exception of a brief moment that remained shrouded in mystery, the logic and continuity of the whole were incontestable. This fragment of time was an inconsiderable episode in his life, taking no more than five or six minutes, but it was of such intense opacity that it could have lasted for years.

It concerned the dawn of 6 March 1953, or more precisely the short period when the investigators’ car was following the potholed highway alongside the cemetery’s perimeter wall. The records showed that only the first of Dr Gurameto’s three attempts to speak had been entirely explained. The two others, which were the most frightening, had remained obscure.

What had the prisoner been trying to say? What profound distress suddenly gave him the superhuman strength almost to break out of his handcuffs?

Leafing through the file’s innumerable pages, the investigators sometimes thought that they espied a ray of light. This happened especially when they were tired. But any effort of concentration would cause this faint gleam to retreat back into the darkness from which it had emerged, as if it feared exposure.

In time they grasped that this explanation that was on the brink of becoming apparent was less a supernatural sign than something else that had no place in an investigative file. Any investigation would reject it like foreign tissue, not for any esoteric reason but simply because neither investigative skills nor language itself had yet created the terms for explanations of this kind.

There was no evidence anywhere to show what really occurred at the most ineffable moment of Big Dr Gurameto’s life at the dawn of that March day.

Here is what happened.

6 March 1953. Towards dawn. The car leaves the prison yard heading out of the city. The prisoners are silent, perhaps even unconscious. The fresh air revives one of them, Big Gurameto. After his first mumbled attempts to protest that he is tied to a stranger, he probably loses consciousness again. He wakes up later on the highway as the car passes the cemetery wall. In the faint reddish light of dawn he recognises the famous Vasiliko graveyard. He has been there dozens of times for the burials of patients who died under his hands on the operating table, or later. But he has another reason to remember this cemetery. When his grandmother, to soothe him to sleep, had told him the tale of the dead man wrongly invited to dinner, he, like many small boys, had pictured himself in the role of the son, whose father, as the legend relates, gave him an invitation to deliver to the first chance passer-by.

The Vasiliko cemetery was the only graveyard he knew, so he had imagined himself running past it, like in the legend. He is scared, his heart shakes, and instead of continuing along the road until he meets a passer-by, he reaches his hand through the cemetery railings to throw the invitation inside. As he flees he turns his head and sees the invitation where it has fallen, lying white on top of a grave.

Now, forty years later, when the prison car passes this cemetery, this vision returns. It seems to him that the invitation, thrown away long ago, is the cause of everything. It is still lying there. He feels an insane desire to turn back and pick up the invitation from the grave where it has fallen, to turn time back and retract the hand of fate, before the dead man can receive the message.

In his distressed state he believes he can do this and so he gasps, his mouth foams with exertion, and with his free hand he points to the iron railing behind which the white invitation card still rests. But nobody listens to him.

A second vision comes to him a short time later. Now he is no longer six years old, running with an invitation in his hand, but another Gurameto, grown-up, indeed dead, who has rotted in the grave for many years, as he saw himself in a nightmare. The marble grave with the headstone on which his name is carved looms above him, and around the cemetery are the iron railings.

Through these railings a woman’s dainty hand with long fingers and a ring with a sad association lets fall an invitation. It flutters forlornly before coming to rest on his grave.

The dead man, that is, Gurameto himself, bewildered after so many silent years, feels compelled to obey the order and rise up to go where he has been invited to dinner. To what dinner? He cannot tell. To the house of that woman whom he recognises and yet does not, or to 22 Varosh Street? To his own dinner, perhaps, the one that caused him so much trouble long ago?

That is the order, but he does not want to obey it. More foam gathers at the corners of his mouth. He screams and strains to break his shackles, until the terrified investigators draw their revolvers. But he will not calm down. Still he struggles to turn back to that grave, to remove that invitation at last and change destiny. But it is impossible.

Mali i Robit (Durrës); Lugano; Paris

Summer — winter, 2007–2008