So it was that the days went by. I was absorbed by the aerodrome and I thought of nothing else.
One morning I was struck by something unusual the moment I had taken my seat by the window. There on the field, sitting among the planes I knew so well, was a new arrival. I had never seen one so large. The visitor, which had apparently come in during the night, stood there majestically, its light grey wings outstretched. I fell under its spell at once. I forgot all about its colleagues, which looked dwarfed beside it, and welcomed it warmly. Earth and sky together could not have sent me a more beautiful gift than this gigantic plane. It became my best friend. It was my very own flying and roaring machine that put death at my command.
I thought about it all the time. I felt proud to see it take off with a rumble that shook the world and that it alone could make, and to watch it turn slowly south. I never worried so much when any other plane was late coming back in. It always seemed to me that it stayed too long down there in the south. I thought I could hear it breathe heavily on its return. It seemed exhausted. At times like that I would wish it would never fly south again where they were fighting. The others are younger, let them go, I thought. The big one needed some rest.
But it couldn’t rest. Heavy and majestic, it took off almost every day and headed for the front. I was sorry not to be down south too, so I could see its huge wings above me.
“Those accursed planes are off again,” Grand-mother said one day, standing at the window and pointing at three of them, my great friend among them.
“What have you got against them?” I asked.
“They bring fire and blood wherever they go.”
“But the ones here never bomb us.”
“They bomb other cities. It’s the same thing.”
“Which ones?” I asked. “Where?”
“Far away, beyond the clouds,” said Grandmother.
I looked in the direction Grandmother had pointed to and said nothing. There beyond the clouds, I thought, far off, there are other cities where they’re fighting. What were they like, those other cities? And what was the war like there?
A north wind blew. The big window panes rattled. The sky was overcast. A low and even hum rose up from the aerodrome. Zzz! It filled the valley, coming in waves, never stopping. Zzz-sss. The sound spread and spread. Suzana! What was the secret of your lightness? Butterfly, stork-butterfly. You don’t know anything about the aerodrome. At your place now it’s like a desert. Blow wind, blow, on and on. Plane-stork-butterfly. Where are you flying off to? Planes hover in the sky . . .
I was awakened by Grandmother’s hand on my shoulder.
“You’ll catch cold,” she said.
I had fallen asleep with my head on the windowsill.
“They’ve addled your mind,” said Grandmother.
It was true. I was bewitched. And cold too.
“The cursed things are off again.”
I didn’t answer back. I knew she hated them, but that afflicted me now only in respect of the big plane. Maybe Grandmother was right about the others. Who could tell what the planes were doing way down there beyond the clouds, hidden from view? We too stole corn when we went to the fields outside the city, and got up to all kinds of mischief we would never have dared to do in town.
But there was one thing I just couldn’t work out — why the opening of the aerodrome had done nothing to stop the bombing. On the contrary, it got worse. When the English planes came, the small fighters took off right away, but the big plane sat on its belly on the field. Why didn’t it take off? The idea would torment me. I did all I could to think of excuses, refusing to believe that it could be afraid. No, this plane could never feel fear. During the bombings, as we burrowed in the cellar and it stood out in the middle of the open field, I dreamed for it to take off, just once. The English bombers would run for it then!
But the big plane was never in the air when the English came; it never took off then. It seemed it would never fly over our city. It knew only one direction, south, where they said the war was raging.
One day I was over at Ilir’s. We were playing with the globe, turning it this way and that, when Javer and Isa came in. They were furious, railing at everything, cursing the Italians and the aerodrome and denouncing Mussolini, who was supposed to be coming to visit the city soon. There was nothing unusual about that. Everyone cursed the Italians. We had long known that they were evil, despite their beautiful clothes, their plumes and their shiny buttons. But we didn’t know what to think of their planes yet.
“But what are their planes like?” I asked.
“Bastards, just like they are,” said Javer.
“You don’t understand such things,” said Isa. “You’re still too young. You’d do better not to ask.”
They exchanged a few words in a foreign language, the way they always did when they didn’t want us to understand them.
Javer looked at me for a minute, half smiling.
“Your grandmother tells me you really like the aerodrome,” he said.
I blushed.
“You like planes, do you?” he asked a moment later.
“Yes, I like them,” I said almost spitefully.
“Me too,” said Ilir.
They said something else in their unknown language. They didn’t seem angry any more. Javer took a deep breath.
“Poor kids,” he muttered. “Fallen in love with war, they have. Terrible.”
“Sign of the times,” Isa said. “This is the age of the plane.”
“Did you hear?” asked Ilir. “We’re terrible.”
“Extraordinarily terrible,” I said. I took the lens out of my pocket and put it over one eye.
“Could you get me a lens like that too?” asked Ilir.
Javer’s words stuck in my mind all afternoon. Although when Ilir and I were alone again we decided that what they had said about the planes was a “hateful slander”, they had nevertheless cast a shadow of doubt over the aerodrome. Only the big plane was free of all suspicion. Even if all the other planes were evil, my plane couldn’t be. I still loved it just as much. My heart swelled with pride when I saw it lift off the runway, filling the valley with its impressive din. I especially loved it when it came back exhausted from the south, where there was fighting.
The nights were terribly dark again. We stayed in the main room two flights up, and my father’s monotonous voice once again tallied the lights of the military convoy, now going the opposite way, from south to north. I gazed off into the distance as before, but now I knew that down at the foot of the city, somewhere on the night-drowned field, the big plane was sleeping, its wings outstretched. I tried to figure out the approximate direction of the aerodrome, but it was so dark that I was disoriented. You couldn’t see anything at all.
The convoys kept rolling north. The booming of artillery seemed to come closer every night. The streets and windows were bursting with news.
One morning we saw long columns of Italian soldiers retreating along the road. They trudged slowly northward, in a direction neither the crusaders nor the lame wanderer had ever taken. Their weapons were slung on their shoulders, and they carried packs on their backs. Here and there among the soldiers were long mule trains loaded with supplies and ammunition.
North . . . Everything was now heading north. It was as if the world had changed direction. (Whenever I turned the globe in one direction, Isa, just to annoy me, would spin it the opposite way. What was happening now was more or less the same.) The defeated Italians were retreating. We expected the Greeks to follow on their tail.
I pressed my nose on the windowpane and concentrated hard on watching the columns move along the road. The little raindrops that the wind now and then battered on the windowpane made it all seem even sadder. The retreat went on all morning. At noon the columns of troops were still marching by. In the afternoon, when the last of them had disappeared beyond the Zalli and the road lay deserted (it was the time when the lame traveller was set to reappear), the air was sudd
enly filled with the dull growl of engines. I gave a start, as if shaken from a dream. Why? What was going on? In an instant I was no longer sleepy. Something unbearable was happening: they were all taking off! Two at a time, or three by three, the bombers were leaving the airfield with a fighter escort and flying away in that detestable direction, north. Scarcely had one group of three lifted off when another came rumbling down the runway. One after another the clouds swallowed them up. The aerodrome was emptying out. Then I heard the massive noise of the big plane, and my heartbeat slowed. It was all over. For good. It raised itself heavily, turned its beak north and flew off on outstretched wings. Gone forever. From the far horizon bedecked with a thick mist which soon swallowed up the great plane came the last sound of the throaty breathing I knew so well, but it had already grown distant and alien. Suddenly the world sank back into silence.
When I looked beyond the river, I saw that nothing was left. There was just an ordinary field in the autumn rain. The aerodrome had disappeared. My dream had ended.
“What’s wrong, my boy?” Grandmother asked when she found me with my head lying like a wrecked ship on the windowsill.
I didn’t answer.
Papa and Mamma also came in from the other room and asked me the same question. I wanted to tell them, but my mouth, lips and throat refused to obey. Instead of words, only a hoarse, inhuman sob came out. My parents frowned with fear.
“You’re crying for that . . . for that accursed thing whose name I can’t even bring myself to say,” Grandmother said, pointing towards the field, now splattered with puddles like so many wounds.
“You’re snivelling because of the aerodrome?” my father asked angrily. I nodded. He scowled.
“Poor little fool,” my mother said. “And I thought you were sick.”
They sat in the main room for a long while, torturing me with their silence. In vain I tried to stifle my sobs. My father’s face was glum. Mamma looked lost. Only Grandmother moved back and forth behind me, constantly muttering.
“Lord, what times have come upon us. Kids crying because of those flying things. Evil omens, evil omens.”
What was that longing that filled the rain-drenched days? The abandoned field lay below, riddled with small puddles. Sometimes I thought I could hear the sound of it. I would run to the window, to find nothing on the horizon but useless clouds.
Maybe they had shot it down and now it languished on a hillside with its broken wings folded underneath. Once I had seen the remains of a long-limbed bird in a field. Its delicate bones had been washed clean by the rain. Part of it was spattered with mud.
Where could it be?
Over the field, once bound to the sky, a few wisps of fog now drifted.
One day they brought the cows back, and they moved slowly with their silent brown spots, seeking the last bits of grass along the edges of the concrete runway. For the first time I hated them.
The city, weary and sullen, had changed hands several times. The Italians and Greeks alternated. Flags and currencies were changed, amid general indifference. Nothing else.
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changing of currencies. The Albanian lek and Italian lira will no longer be accepted. Henceforth the only legal tender will be the Greek drachma. The time limit for the changeover is one week. Yesterday the prison was emptied. The inmates, after thanking the Greek authorities, went their separate ways. I order the cessation of the blackout, effective today. I declare a state of siege, and a curfew from 1800 to 0600 hours. Commander of the city garrison: Katantzakis. Births. Marriages. Deaths. D. Kasoruho and I. Grapshi are happy to
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der: restoration of the blackout for the entire city and cancellation of the state of siege. I order the re-opening of the prison. All former inmates are hereby called upon to return to serve out their sentences. Commander of the city garrison: Bruno Arcivocale. Currency must be converted quickly. The Greek drachma is no longer acceptable. The Albanian lek and the Italian lira shall be the sole legal tender. List of those killed in yesterday’s bombing: B. Dobi, L. Maksuti, S.
NINE
The last Italians left during the first week of November, four days after the evacuation of the aerodrome. For forty hours there was no government in the city. The Greeks arrived at two in the morning. They stayed for about seventy hours, and hardly anyone even saw them. All shutters stayed closed. No one went out in the street. The Greeks themselves seemed to move only at night. At ten in the morning on Thursday the Italians came back, marching in under freezing rain. They stayed only thirty hours. Six hours later the Greeks were back. The same thing happened all over again in the second week of November. The Italians came back. This time they stayed about sixty hours. The Greeks rushed back in as soon as the Italians had gone. They spent all day Friday and Friday night in the city, but when dawn broke on Saturday, the city awoke to find itself completely deserted. Everyone had gone. Who knows why the Italians didn’t come back? Or the Greeks? Saturday and Sunday went by. On Monday morning footsteps echoed in the street where none had been heard for several days. On either side of the street women opened their shutters gingerly and looked out. It was Llukan the Jailbird, with his old brown blanket slung over his right shoulder. In his kerchief he was carrying bread and cheese, and was apparently on his way home.
“Llukan!” Bido Sherifi’s wife called from a window.
“I was up there,” said Llukan, pointing to the prison. “I went there to report, but guess what? The prison is closed.”
There was almost a touch of sadness in his voice. The frequent changes of rulers had made mincemeat of his sentence, and this put him out of sorts.
“No more Greeks or Italians, you mean?”
“Greeks, Italians, it makes no difference to me,” Llukan answered in exasperation. “All I know is the prison isn’t working. The doors are wide open. Not a soul around. It’s enough to break your heart.”
Someone asked him another question, but he didn’t answer and just went on cursing.
“Lousy times, lousy country! Can’t even keep a lousy prison running. Am I supposed to waste time every day, climbing up to the citadel and coming back down for nothing? Days go by and I can’t serve my damn sentence. All my plans are screwed up. Son of a bitch good for nothing Italy! Damn, when I think about what a friend told me about Scandinavian prisons! Now that’s what you call prisons. You go in and out on schedule, by the book. Fixed sentences and good records. The gates don’t swing open and shut all the time like the doors of a whorehouse.”
One by one the women closed their shutters as Llukan got more and more obscene. Only Aqif Kashahu’s mother, who was deaf, stayed at her window and answered what she thought she was hearing.
“How true, dear fellow, how true. You’ve every right to be angry, my boy. Never had a lucky day in your life, poor thing, rotting in prison all the time. Governments come and go, and you’re always inside.”
Llukan the Jailbird walked on and the street was empty again. Nazo’s big cat leaped across the cobblestones. Kako Pino’s new cat, who had climbed up on the porch, sat and watched him. Around noon a stray dog passed by. All afternoon there was not a soul to be seen, apart from a solitary chicken.
The next morning, as Llukan the Jailbird came swearing down from the prison again with his blanket over his shoulder and kerchief-wrapped bread in hand, everyone finally got the idea that a period of no government had begun.
The first doors were opened just a slit. Little by little, the street came back to life. Some people ventured into the city centre. The Addis Ababa Café re-opened. The wind scattered newspaper shreds in the square. Empty tins lay here and there. The town hall looked sullen, with all its doors and windows boarded up. People strolled around, eyeing empty crates with Latin or Greek letters painted in black on their boards. The pedestal of the city’s only monument had been plastered with notices issued by the Italian and Greek garrison commanders. The posters were all torn. Someone was carefully gathering
up random pieces: “XAQIS”, “KAT”, “Q”, “NX”. His collar was turned up, and he kept shaking his head, perhaps because he couldn’t find all the words. The cold wind blew the shreds from his hands.
These posters, turned to scraps by wind and rain, were all that remained of the turmoil of recent days. The city had been left without a government. In quick succession it had lost the planes, the anti-aircraft guns, the siren, the brothel, the searchlight and the nuns.
Briefly seduced by adventure, and having had a taste of the sky and of international dangers, the city had been stunned by it all and now withdrew into its ancient stones. Wind and rain were now vying to anaesthetise its jagged nerves. It was dazed. Its links to the sky had been permanently severed. The foreign planes that passed overhead no longer recognised it, or pretended not to see it. They flew high, leaving behind only a disdainful rumble.
One morning, after carefully closing the door behind her, Kako Pino went out into the street.
“Where are you off to, Kako Pino?” Bido Sherifi’s wife asked from her window.
“To a wedding.”
“A wedding? Who’s got it into his head to get married in times like these?”
“People marry in all kinds of times,” Kako Pino said.
The fact that Kako Pino was on her way to a wedding showed that the city could easily cope without a government. But as in any period of transition, these were uncertain times. The normal rules of life were suspended. The newspapers did not come out. No courts were in session. No more announcements, posters or ordinances appeared on the walls of the town hall. News, whether local or foreign, came only by word of mouth. The chief source was an old, hitherto unknown woman whose name suddenly spread far and wide in those faceless days. Her name was Sose, but most people called her “Old News”.