Dimiter

  Q. To say the least. And then?

  A. Oh, well, as we were hurrying and still in pursuit of the baker, I suggested that our fellow be kept in Quelleza, but the commandant and commissar quickly said no and they advised me to take our fellow with us to Shkoder, which we finally did and then gave him to your Secret Police, the Sigurimi. They seemed very nervous.

  Q. The Secret Police?

  A. No, the people at Quelleza. They seemed very anxious to be rid of the fellow.

  Q. Did it never occur to you that the Prisoner might be the would-be assassin of Mehmet Shehu you were sent there to find in the first place?

  A. Oh, well, of course, but we were told that he’d been captured near the Buna.

  Q. And who told you that?

  A. The people at Quelleza.

  Q. From Quelleza to Shkoder, did the Prisoner speak or in any way give you information?

  A. He did not. He didn’t speak at any time. Not a word.

  Q. And what else did you notice about him that was unusual?

  A. Oh, well, one thing, perhaps. While we were marching-back to Shkoder we stopped in the middle of the day at Mesi and lunched in a courtyard next to the jail. It was un-seasonably warm and humid, so we rested. One of my men played the lute and we sang. We’d chained the Prisoner’s legs to an apricot tree and I kept staring at him.

  Q. Why?

  A. There were swarms of mosquitoes biting. They were biting rather fiercely, in fact.

  Q. And what of that?

  A. He never slapped at them.

  Q. His hands were free?

  A. Yes, they were free.

  Q. Very well. Now then, earlier you stated that his papers seemed in order.

  A. So I thought.

  Q. And he never did actually resist arrest?

  A. No, not really.

  Q. So again I ask, why did you club him with your rifle? I mean some reason besides an odd look in his eyes. Did you think he was holding a gun or a knife beneath the blanket?

  A. No, he wasn’t holding anything.

  Q. Then why did you strike him?

  A. I was afraid.

  Q. Afraid of what?

  A. When I yanked off the blanket I saw blood on his hand. I mean the hand that I hadn’t seen before, the right one. It was gashed as if by the teeth of some animal.

  Q. And this made you feel afraid?

  A. It did.

  Q. For what reason?

  A. I thought of the dog with the broken neck.

  EXCERPT FROM THE QUESTIONING OF THE BLIND MAN,

  LIGENI SHIRQI, TAKEN AT QUELLEZA 12 OCTOBER

  Q. Your door was unlocked?

  A. Yes, it was. I heard the knocking and I called out, “Come in, you are welcome.”

  Q. You didn’t think it dangerous?

  A. Danger is irrelevant. Things are different here. It’s not like below. Had he killed my own children, I had to make him welcome. “I live in the house,” goes the saying, “but the house belongs to the guest and to God.”

  Q. There is no God.

  A. No, not in the city, perhaps, Colonel Vlora, but right now we are up in the mountains and our general impression here is that he exists.

  Q. Do maintain the proprieties, Uncle.

  A. Does that help?

  Q. Only facing reality helps.

  A. I would face it, effendum, but where is it? As you know, in my world I must be turned.

  Q. You were saying . . .

  A. I called out, “You are welcome,” and I heard him come in. A torrent of rain gusted in, a great blow, and as it thundered I could feel the flash of lightning on my skin. It came suddenly, this storm, like an unexpected grief. I got up and I greeted the stranger as I should: I said, “God may have—”

  Q. Never mind all that. You said something that triggered his arrest: “He is alien.” What did you mean by that statement?

  A. Well, he wasn’t a mountain man, not a Geg.

  Q. That is surely innocuous.

  A. Ah, but he’d told me that he was a Geg.

  Q. You say he told you?

  A. That’s right.

  Q. He spoke?

  A. In the mountains this is common, effendum.

  Q. Don’t be cheeky, old man. Tell me everything he said.

  A. From what point?

  Q. From the beginning.

  A. Well, now, as I told you—or tried to tell you—I greeted him properly. “God may have brought you here,” I told him. And “How are you?” “I am happy to find you well,” he said. These are formulas of grace that we observe.

  Q. Yes, I know. What happened next?

  A. Well, I asked him to sit at the table, of course, and I set out some food, a great deal of it. He saw that I was blind, I suppose, for he said not to labor overmuch on his account. I said, “Thanks be to God we have food for the guest. Not to have it is the greatest shame of all.” He said nothing to that and I kept putting out the food and the raki.

  Q. Why so much food?

  A. Well, his size. He was big. Or rather, dense. Very powerfully built.

  Q. How could you tell that?

  A. Just as I knew you’re from the north. From his step. He got up and put a log on the fire. That was rude. I thought perhaps he was a city dweller, then.

  Q. Just go on.

  A. Well, I asked where he was from and he answered, “From Theti,” and then he explained he was a seller of cheese. Well, I already knew that, of course, from the aroma.

  Q. Which, of course, you promptly told him.

  A. What was that?

  Q. Never mind. What happened next?

  A. Well, then I learned he was a Christian, you see, and I took away the raki I’d set out and in its place I gave him wine.

  Q. How did you learn that he was Christian?

  A. His skull cap. I heard him slip it off and set it down on the table. The hard little button at the top makes a sound. But he wasn’t from Theti and he wasn’t a Geg. We plant the heel firmly up here, effendum. It’s from walking up and down the sides of mountains. When he first came in the door, that’s how he walked. But then his steps became different. They grew softer, more relaxed. It’s when he saw that I was blind, I would guess.

  Q. You mean he let down his guard?

  A. Yes, that could be.

  Q. Where was he from, then, do you think? From the south?

  A. I don’t know

  Q. From outside?

  A. What do you mean?

  Q. When he spoke was there an accent? Something foreign?

  A. No, no accent. That’s what’s puzzling: perfect northern, even down to the little inflections that are special just to Theti.

  Q. And what else did he say to you?

  A. Not very much. Not in words.

  Q. Please explain that.

  A. Well, I asked him his name and he told me. After that he—

  Q. What name did he give? Do you remember?

  A. Yes, he said that his name was Selca Decani. That, too, was odd. Not the name, my reaction. I had once been acquainted with a Selca Decani, and now when he told me that name I thought, “Yes! Yes, of course! How on earth could I have failed to know that voice right away!” So I said, “Please forgive me, old friend, I’ve grown senile.” Then I suddenly remembered.

  Q. That Selca Decani had died years before?

  A. How did you know that?

  Q. Never mind.

  A. Yes, he’d died.

  Q. Yet the voice was Decani’s?

  A. No, not really. Not at all. Just at first.

  Q. And what then?

  A. Well, I urged him to eat. But he didn’t. I could tell. He was quiet and still. Yet I sensed a great turmoil churning within him, some terrible emotions conflicting. At war. But then soon these grew quiet and I felt a new energy flowing from his being, as something comforting and warm, almost loving, washed over me. At first I didn’t know what it was. Then he spoke and he asked me a very strange question. He asked if I had ever seen God and, if I had, was it this th
at had caused my blindness.

  Q. This is fanciful.

  A That is what he said.

  Q. Well, alright. Did you ask him what he meant by it?

  A. No. Nor would I ask you when you came to the city from the mountains. Either question would be rude.

  Q. Your ears are dangerous.

  A. They hear. They heard your step.

  Q. What did you say to him?

  A. Nothing at first. I was startled. Then I asked if he was warm enough.

  Q. And what was his answer?

  A. Silence. But again I was aware of this force he emitted. And then suddenly I realized what it was: it was pity, a pity so thick that you could squeeze it, almost physical. It wasn’t the pity you resent, that you hate. It was the other kind: the pity that comforts, that heals. One more thing: for a moment I was sure that I could see him. He was young, a strong face with an archangel’s smile. Does this sound like an illusion? Some things aren’t.

  Q. You are mad. Are you finished?

  A. Yes, I’m finished. That was all, that’s when your men broke in. They checked his papers. They seemed to be satisfied. As they were leaving, I spoke up and stopped them.

  Q. You said you felt pity from him.

  A. Yes.

  Q. And so why did you betray him?

  A. I am loyal to the state.

  Q. Try again.

  A. I couldn’t stand to be near him any longer.

  Q. Why was that?

  A. It was something that I felt from him.

  Q. The pity?

  A. Something else: a brutal, terrifying energy. It burned.

  Q. That was surely in your mind.

  A. No, it was real.

  Q. Then what was it?

  A. At the time I felt certain it was goodness.

  Decani was a dead man roaming the hills seeking momentary life in mistaken recollections. This had been the actual and secret belief of both the commissar and the chief of police at Quelleza (and later of Security people in Shkoder, though none had dared utter so dangerous a view), and the reason they’d disposed of the Prisoner with haste, for who knew what might happen to an ordinary soul when it brushed against the host of a resurrected mist. But then who was the Prisoner?

  Some felt unease.

  In Shkoder they followed the uses of sense, and so the Prisoner was tested in the scientific way, which pretended that matter was real and could be measured. Their further assumption was far less speculative, namely that their captive was an enemy agent and bent on a mission that was therefore unguessable, for only wide China was Albania’s friend, and who could hope to keep track of the shifts and purposes of every other nation on the face of earth? There was simply no time, their hearts complained; but they plodded on listlessly, testing for signs that the stranger had been air-dropped: wax from his ears, a sample of his stool, and dirt scraped from under his fingernails were analyzed minutely in search of traces of food or flora foreign to the land; his clothing was scanned underneath black light, for this would make visible a dry-cleaning mark. But these arcane wisdoms yielded nothing. Further, a check of the Prisoner’s teeth showed only an “oversized facial amalgam” fashioned from poorly polished silver, and “two swedged chrome-cobalt alloy crowns” that were “overcontoured and extremely ill-fitting around the edges, resulting in penetration of the gum”: Albanian dentistry, without question. Yet how could this be? How could any of it be? Every person was known, counted, and followed; every citizen’s name was on endless lists that were checked each day at each change of location: to market and work and then back to one’s home; to the “cultural” meetings that were held after dinner and the one-hour readings of the news before, where the mind took flight behind etherized eyes. Here no one went anywhere. They were taken. How could the Prisoner be of this land, moving soundless and alone with the papers of a ghost? In a basement of the Shkoder Security Building the Prisoner was stripped naked and then beaten and interrogated in shifts by female security agents from the morning of Friday, 1 October, until just before noon of the following day, by which time the inquisitors’ mechanical blows had evoked the emotions that normally cause them, stoking the agents to genuine fury and the shouting of wild imprecations of blood. Even worse was done. And still the Prisoner would not speak. Thus, on the evening of 2 October, entangled in anger and mystification, the agents at Shkoder had shipped him to the capital, Tirana, and the faceless State Security Building, for here there were specialists. Horrors. Means.

  Here were answers to questions that no one had asked.

  “Who are you?” the Interrogator wearily repeated.

  Jerked to his feet amid blows, the Prisoner again stood eerily silent, his gaze a light touch upon the stone floor. The Interrogator stared at the lacework of blood that had dried in a band around his forehead. What did it remind him of, he wondered? And then he remembered: “Christ in Silence.” A miniature print of the Symbolist painting had hung in a cell of the Jesuit seminary close to the center of the city; he had seen it when they’d wrenched the place from the priests, weeks before they decided to shoot its director and replace him with Samia Sabrilu, the notorious fifteen-year-old girl who’d been chosen for her cruelty, arrogance, and cunning, as well as her sexual precocity and hatred of her father. This was almost a year before the time they would throw all the priests into labor camps or their graves and convert the old seminary into a restaurant that specialized in dishes of the north. The Interrogator pursed his lips in thought. No, the painting wasn’t all. There was something else. He was certain he had seen this man before. It was somewhere in Tirana, he thought. A state dinner perhaps.

  Or in a dream.

  “Who are you? If you tell us who you are you can sleep.”

  Neglect and a cold isolation had preceded, and then afterward the clanging and the ear-bursting Klaxons and the searing white light for the strangling of dreams; then the absolute darkness and fetid waters teeming with particles of unknown matter ominously seeping up into his cell from a thousand grieving, rusted pores, flooding slowly ever higher until inches from the ceiling, where they lapped and waited, stinking and irresolute, and then little by little subsided, a procedure repeated again and again. This phase had a term of three days (if one measured them relative to the observer); and then had come the torturers, all of them with nicknames meant to shield them from possible future retribution. Two were men, one called “Dreamer” for his faraway look and the other, a young one who was always smiling and in fact was the Interrogator’s son, was called “Laugher,” while the third, a tall and blocky former nun with a heavy step, was known as “Angel.” With dirty gray skin, a sunless stare, and a mad, irrepressible tic in one eye that made it seem she was constantly winking slyly, in her dark blue uniform shirt and trousers she was the phantom of the merciless chamber. The Prisoner was resting on his back on a bloodstained narrow wooden table, and when the three had surrounded him “Angel” had lifted a look to the Interrogator, and as soon as he uttered the word “Begin!” her lissome truncheon cleaved the whistling air from on high in a smacking wallop to the Prisoner’s kidney with a result that was welcomed by no one in the chamber, for The Prisoner’s eyes slid open calmly, as if he had awakened in a hammock of summer. Unsettled, the Interrogator took a step backward, for he felt an unearthliness descending, and soon flurrying fists and truncheons and curses enshrouded the table in a living hot fog made of rage and exuberance and self hate, and he listened to the shouts and grunts of exertion, to the smackings and the infantile bawdy suggestions, the hissed accusations and imprecations, aware that very soon they would thicken and be finally subsumed into a single autonomous living frenzy that would suck up all minds and yet be mindless, gather all souls, but have none of its own, only that of the beast at the center of its whirlwind. “Pig!” “Degenerate!” “Criminal scum!” The flung epithets seethed with a righteous fury that shivered and broke in each voice with every blow. The Interrogator felt himself trembling with excitement, and he gave himself up to the beas
t for a term, but abruptly withdrew at a glimpse of “Laugher” as the eyes of his son shone madly with pleasure and some nameless emotion not found in sweet air. “Enough! Something else!” the Interrogator ordered, after which “Angel” held the Prisoner’s fingers under a door that she slowly pushed shut, at first grinning and crooning a thousand remarkable lascivious suggestions, and then frowning in thickening consternation when the Prisoner’s face did not change its expression. Confounded, it was then that they had thought to pull out his fingernails, first placing a helmet on his head that was designed to make him hear his own screams greatly amplified. The helmet failed. He never screamed. But when the last of his fingernails had been drawn, he closed his eyes and slowly sank to the mottled stone floor with a sound like sighs mixed up with bones. Suddenly anxious, the Interrogator jerked his gaze to a withered old man in a cheap brown suit who was standing at the edge of the circle of light. His gaunt and elongated face was in shadow, but he clutched the frayed grip of a black leather medical bag with both his hands in front of him, so that a ring on his index finger caught the light in flashes as a restless thumb kept rubbing irregularly at its flat green stone, made of paste. It glinted like signals from a distant ship.

  “Hurry, check him!”

  The Interrogator’s growl was tense, for he was gripped by the alarming foreboding that the Prisoner would slip away with his secret into the shadowland of death.

  “Check him now! Right away! Hurry up!”

  The creaking old doctor shuffled forward, spent and bowed by the weight of tedium and the endless repetition of meaningless acts in a purposeless world. He dragged his crumpled soul along behind him like an empty canvas sack.

  “Do not lose him!” the Interrogator shouted.

  Hurriedly, the bloodstained wooden table was wheeled back from darkness into light and as “Laugher” stooped down to haul the Prisoner up off the floor, “Angel” roughly deflected him, scooping up the body with effortless ease and then dumping the Prisoner onto the table like a crackling bag of sticks. “He is air,” she grunted under her breath; and then for a curious instant she hesitated, staring at the Prisoner intently while a curious softness bathed her face: it was as if she had been taken unaware by innocence, of some memory of childhood grace. She stepped backward and out of the light. By then the old doctor had wheezed to the table. He searched for a pulse with fingers that rustled, floppy and dry, as if stuffed with straw, while his other hand opened his medical bag, unsnicking the clasp at the top. In the hush there was a faint sound of clutter being dragged as he groped along the bottom of the bag for his stethoscope. He found it and fished it out. One of the ear tubes slapped at the bag. It made a tiny whipping sound.