Copyright © 1989, 2011 by Librairie Artheme Fayard
English-language translation copyright © 1994, 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or
[email protected].
Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.
10 9876543 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-621-9
ALSO BY ISMAIL KADARE
Elegy for Kosovo
The File on H.
The Palace of Dreams
The Pyramid
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
The Successor
The Three-Arched Bridge
1
THE WINDOW LOOKED DOWN on the street, where the passers-by, all muffled up, seemed to be hurrying along as fast as they could, A three-wheeled delivery van pulled up beside a tobacco kiosk, where drivers often stopped to buy cigarettes.
It struck old Hasiyé that the van was attracting a lot of attention. She wiped a space in the misted windowpane to get a better look.
Yes - three or four people had paused to stare at what the van was carrying: a tub containing a lemon tree. She could imagine the questions they’d ask the driver as he got back into his seat. “Where are you taking it?” “Where do they sell them?”
Suddenly the old woman thought she recognized Ana among the crowd. She was just going to tap on the window to attract her attention when she remembered that Ana was dead — had been dead for a long time.
She sighed. More and more often lately she found herself not only getting the order of events mixed up, but also confusing real facts with things seen only in dreams. She tended to mix up the living and the dead, too, but she didn’t mind too much about that. Most females of her age had the same problem: it was supposed to be typical of old women. Sometimes she thought that was why people treated them with respect.
She looked out into the street again. Ana was still there. Beautiful as ever, she was standing somewhat apart, gazing with a melancholy smile at the people hovering around the lemon tree. Why don’t you just go on sleeping peacefully under the ground where you were buried? thought Hasiyé.
She could hear her grandson learning his lessons in the other room: “Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus!” Would there never be an end to all this anger? she muttered to herself. Of late it had been getting worse instead of better.
She picked up her coffee cup and examined the grounds. They were muddy and hard to read, but that didn’t surprise her. What future could an old crone like her expect?
“Sing, O goddess, the wrath…” She felt like yelling at her grandson, and at the world in general, for that matter, to go to the devil and take their wrath with them - there was far too much of it already!
Enough, enough! Don’t keep dinning it in our ears!
She glanced outside again, but this time she couldn’t see any van, or any lemon tree, or any people staring. I must have been seeing things, she thought. Or perhaps I fell asleep for a moment.
Then she nodded off again, but now what she seemed to be looking at were the bowels of the earth. Not underground caverns or catacombs which man really may see, but closely packed geological strata unvisited by light, impenetrable to the human eye. Nearby, invisible too, lay latent earth tremors and other nameless, formless menaces.
There was a faint rumble of thunder in the distance. Then the whole sky was rent by a long, sickly roar.
“Strike! Strike!” muttered old Hasiyé, not knowing who she was talking to, or why.
The bell had rung loud and long, and as Silva opened the door she prepared a smile of welcome for the first of her guests. But instead of them she saw a man with a tub on his shoulder, and emerging from the tub — a barrel sawn in half - the branches of a lemon tree,
“This is Gjergj Dibra’s house, isn’t it?” he said,
“Yes,” she answered, taken aback. “Is that for us?”
“You ordered it, didn’t you?”
And without more ado he walked into the hail
“Where shall I put it?” he asked impatiently.
The tub must be pretty heavy.
“Careful!” she said. Then, opening a door: “In here, please.”
The man stumped across the room as Silva opened the French window on to the balcony.
“Anywhere here will do,” she said. “We'll find a better place for it later on.”
The man put the tub down, straightened up, and paused for a moment to get his breath back.
The phone rang in the hall.
“A lemon tree is all I needed!” thought Silva,
The man began to drone out instructions,
“You’ll need to spray it with insecticide every three months, and change the earth every six. And if there’s a frost, cover it 0ver with cellophane or it’ll shrivel up in a single night,”
But Silva didn’t pay much attention. Her guests would be arriving at any minute, she hadn’t prepared the salad yet or carved the roast, and she still had to change and tidy herself up.
The man seemed to notice her impatience.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I’ve come at a bad moment.”
“Oh no — it’s quite all right!” she said penitently. The man had hauled a heavy load all the way up to the third floor. She might have made more effort to conceal her irritation.
“Can I offer you something?” she said, trying to make amends as they went back through the hall.
“No, thanks,”
“Oh, you mustn’t refuse,” she insisted. “It’s my daughter’s birthday/.
When at last the door closed behind him, Suva went back to check the dinner table. She was tempted to add a few finishing touches, but in fact did nothing but stare absently at the coldly glittering array of plates and glasses. Thee the doorbell rang again and roused her from her daze. She recognized her daughter’s ring.
“Would you be a dear and make the salad and carve the meat while I have a shower and change? I’m sure I must smell of cooking!”
“Leave it to me, Mother!”
Silva looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she undressed. Had she put on weight round the hips? She stood there pensively for a moment, as if she’d forgotten where she was. Then the phone rang again in the hall and roused her from her reverie.
She turned on the shower, anxious to get on as fast as possible now before the guests arrived. They were all friends, apart from a couple of Brikena’s teachers, so they hadn’t been asked to come at any definite time.
She came to a halt again back in her bedroom, wondering what to wear. But she soon felt cold, and settled for a mauve dress that she knew Gjergj liked. It still fitted perfectly: she must have been wrong about putting on weight. “I don’t understand why you keep fussing about your figure,” her husband sometimes complained. “A woman doesn’t really blossom until she gets to your age!” (She was well aware he was being tactful in pu
tting the emphasis on flowering rather than on ripeness, and she was secretly grateful.) “I may be old-fashioned, but I don’t see why a woman in full bloom has to be as skinny as a rake!”
Silva smiled to herself as she looked in the glass. As often happened on birthdays and other festive occasions, the putting on of the dress had suddenly divided the day into two. Amid the seemingly never-ending rush of preparation there always came a moment when iuster was transformed into celebration. As she buttoned the neck of her dress, Silva realized the magic moment had arrived.
She didn’t take long over her hair, just doing it the way Gjergj liked it, despite or perhaps because of the fact that he was away and wouldn’t be able to see it.
“Oh, Mother — you do look lovely!” cried Brikena when Silva emerged into the hall
Silva smiled at her, threw a casual look at the table, and for some reason she herself didn’t quite understand, began to wander aimlessly round the flat. Usually she liked to sit down and wait for her guests, but today that pleasure was spoiled by not knowing exactly when they would come.
Her daughter’s voice came from the kitchen:
“I’ve done the carving, Mother - do you want to see?”
Finally Silva sat down in an armchair in the living room with her eyes half closed. It had been a really exhausting day, with her husband not there to give her a hand. A good thing ! had that shower, she thought. The statuettes on the bookshelves, relics of her days as an archaeologist, loomed through the October dusk like a row of ghosts foregathering to exchange some secret. But the slightest noise or interruption would be enough to deprive them of their mystery and turn them back into figures of clay and stone,
Brikena, slender and tall for her age, appeared in the doorway.
“It’s all ready! There’s nothing more for you to do!”
“Thank you. Come and have a rest.”
Brikena sat down opposite her mother.
“I wonder where Father is now!” she said.
Silva shrugged.
“Up in the sky over some desert, I expect! Or else in an airport waiting for another plane.”
Brikena was going to ask another question, but her mother, lying with her head against the back of her chair, looked as if she needed some peace after her harassing day. So Brikena went and got a photograph album from the bookshelves, then sat down again and started leafing through it.
Silva could hear the rustle of the pages, and although she was trying to make her mind a blank she couldn’t help imagining the photographs her daughter might be looking at. A montage of years and seasons - especially summers — rose up in her memory. Her family had always been fond of taking snaps, and Silva enjoyed spending a quiet afternoon sitting on the sofa as Brikena was sitting now, looking through one of their many albums.
The sound of pages turning stopped. Silva could guess which snap her daughter’s eyes were resting on.
“Which picture are you looking at?” she asked, her own eyes still closed.
“The one of Aunt Ana.”
So she’d been right — she’d been almost sure of it even as she asked. She went cold inside, transfixed by the fierce pain she still felt whenever her sister was mentioned, although it was eleven years now since she died.
At last the pages began to turn again, and Silva took a deep breath, perhaps to free herself from the vice in which her daughter had unknowingly caught her.
The doorbell rang again. This time it really was some visitors. First came Suva’s mother, followed by her brother and sister-in-law. Her mother, never very talkative, had scarcely spoken at all since Ana died. She might be at a family dinner or some other such gathering for hours without uttering a word, though she never inflicted her grief on anyone else. And unlike most people’s vehement mourning, hers seemed so muted and so evenly spread over the whole of her life as to be quite bearable. Silva often thought this was the way Ana ought to be mourned.
Suva’s mother kissed Brikena and handed her a parcel Then she embraced Silva, went silently into the living room, and sat down in her usual chair.
“Is there anything I can do to help, Silva?” asked her sister-in-law.
“No, thank you, Brikena and I have seen to everything.”
The sister-in-law and her husband settled down on the sofa. Silva sat on a chair facing them.
“It’s freezing cold out,” said her sister-in-law.
“Is it?” said Silva, getting up to put a log in the tiled stove.
Then there was a silence, during which Silva, surreptitiously studying her brother’s handsome face, thought she detected signs of anxiety. Sensing that he’d noticed her looking at him, she turned away, but a little while later, seeing that he wore the same expression as before, she wondered why he had always passed so unnoticed among their small circle of friends. Had any but herself remarked his present worried look? He was a graduate of the military academy and at present an officer in a tank regiment; but people were always surprised to hear that Silva had a brother at all. This state of affairs had been even more marked when Ana was alive: Silva and Ana, universally known as the Krasniqi sisters, had seemed to monopolize everyone’s attention, to the exclusion of the rest of the family. Whenever the girls mentioned their brother in conversation, people would stare and say, “Have you really got a brother? A real one, I mean, born of the same mother as both of you?” “Yes, of course!” they would answer, greatly amused.
Even now that Ana was dead, many people still thought of the two sisters together, just as they had done in the early sixties, when they were nearly always together, despite the fact that Ana was already married then and Silva still single. But everyone persisted in regarding their brother as practically non-existent.
“When did Gjergj leave?” he asked Silva, in the hope of cutting short her scrutiny.
“Four days ago.”
“How inconvenient!” said his wife, referring to Brikena’s birthday.
Silva knew that all her guests except her mother would make the same remark.
“It couldn’t be helped,” she said.
There was another ring at the door: two of Brikena’s teachers and their children, bearing gift-wrapped parcels. As they took their coats off in the hall they too asked about Gjergj’s trip, and they were just exclaiming “How inconvenient!” when the bell rang once more. Timidly this time.
““Who is it, Brikena?” Silva called out, not hearing any sound from the hall.
“Veriana,” her daughter called back.
Silva jumped up. By the front door, struggling out of her raincoat,her cheeks red from the cold, stood her only niece. A frail figure — the very image of Ana.
Silva went over and kissed her fondly.
“Father says he’s very sorry, Aunt Silva — something cropped up and he couldn’t manage it.”
“What a pity! But did you come all on your own?”
“Yes. On the bus.”
Silva took her niece’s hand and led her towards the living room. Silva herself just stood in the doorway.
“Good evening!” said the girl to everyone in general.
They all looked back at her with a mixture of curiosity and pity.
“Isn’t she like her poor mother!” whispered one of the women.
Veriana went straight over to her grandmother, who made room for her on her chair and began stroking her hair affectionately.
“Beseik’s been unexpectedly detained and can’t come,” said Silva from the door, answering her guests’ unspoken question.
Silva thought she heard someone say “What a pity!” Unless, thinking the same herself, she’d only imagined it. She drew back into the hall for a moment.
She really was sorry Besnik wasn’t there. It was because of him she hadn’t invited Skënder Bermema. She liked them both equally, but always made sure they didn’t both come to see her together. Besnik Straga, her brother-in-law, who hadn’t remarried after Ana’s death, was naturally closer to her, but Skënder Bermema was closely linked
to the memory of their youth, the rapturous years the two sisters had shared before Ana’s divorce from her first husband. Moreover, before Ana met and married Besnik, there’d been a friendship between her and Skënder which even after all these years was still something of a mystery to everyone, including Silva.
An ideal time for going over all these memories, Silva had thought an hour ago. On autumn afternoons like this, just before some festivity, she liked to sit on the windowsill and, as darkness came down like a theatre curtain, forget present preoccupations and conjure up the past: the scandal of Ana and _ Frederic’s divorce; the endless conjectures about the reasons for it; the mysterious attitude of Skënder Bermema, whose name had been closely linked to the whole business even in the courtroom, which people had likened to a literary jury. For at the husband’s request — though it had only made him seem even more ridiculous — the judge had pored for days over certain pages of Bermema’s books which Frédéric insisted were dedicated to Ana. Then came the unexpected twist when it turned out that Ana’s decision to get a divorce had nothing to do with Bermema, whose owe marriage was going through a difficult patch, but was really due to her relationship with Straga, and to their suddee decision to get married as soon as possible. No one ever knew whether, in view of the fact his jealousy had been concentrated for years on Bermema, this lessened Frederic’s fury, or whether his anger at being betrayed was increased by the entrance on the scene of a third man.
Silva had never tried to get to the bottom of the matter: she preferred it to be forgotten. The aspect of the business that had upset her most, apart from the divorce itself, was the coolness that grew up between Besnik and Skënder. This grieved her not only because she liked and respected them both, but also because they were the people most intimately connected with her sister’s memory.
Strangely enough, the breach between Besnik and Skënder had opened up when yoe might least have expected it: after Ana’s death. Was her death the cause of the rupture between the two friends? Silva would have thought it quite natural if it had been brought about by Ana herself, or by the break between Besnik and his fiancée, who happened to be the niece of Skënder’s wife. But neither of these theories held water, because Besnik and Skënder had gone on seeing one another after Besnik had broken with Zana, and even after his scandalous liaison with Ana, which had swiftly followed.