One morning — it was our fifth day in the citadel — Ilir and I were wandering aimlessly through the human jumble. We had already been tempted more than once to leave the tunnels and explore other parts of the fortress, but fear had stopped us. The place was said to be full of mysterious crannies, catacombs and labyrinths you could never find your way out of. Near certain dark passageways we had noticed people, from a distance, who seemed to be paying no attention to us but who, on closer inspection, turned out to be guards.
Roaming through the first gallery, we suddenly caught a few sentence fragments in the midst of the general commotion. Two tall, pale, middle-aged men wearing scarves around their necks were talking. Their voices were strangely monotonous. We forgot everything and fell in quietly behind them. We were captivated. The chains of their words shackled our arms and legs.
“Did the edict with the death sentence come on Monday?”
“No, it was already here on Saturday. Monday was the execution. The palace guard took the head away in a sack. They threw the rest of the body into the chasm from the eastern tower. The officer left for the capital that night.”
“Had he been poisoned when they cut off his head?”
“No, he was just drunk. They put the head in the Nook of Shame in Istanbul, according to custom.”
“I’ve seen that nook.”
“They kept the head there for eleven days, and took it out only to replace it with the head of Kara Razi. You know the rules say that there must be only one head in the nook at a time.”
They kept talking. We were following behind. We had left the tunnel and started across the esplanade. It was raining. Everything was wet and deserted. They walked into a narrow passage, went down some stone steps, up some other steps and into an abandoned gallery. We shivered like freezing puppies.
The gallery had a low ceiling and the echo of our steps came from overhead instead of underfoot. Their words began to twist; they swelled and stretched, endlessly elongated. We couldn’t understand a thing. That lasted until we reached the end of the gallery. We finally came to a large pit with a domed ceiling. There they turned and noticed us. They stared at us for a long time with their grey eyes. We couldn’t stop shivering. Then they looked away, and one of them pointed to some rusty irons hanging from the wall.
“This is where they kept Gur Çerçizi. Chained to those shackles right there. Third from the right. They kept him chained up long after he was dead. When they took the body away, it was half-eaten by rats.”
“What about Karafili? They were imprisoned together, weren’t they?”
“Yes, Karafili was chained up over there, the fifth set. He lived until the sultan’s edict came pardoning him. They took him up to a platform with no parapet at the top of the citadel and everyone thought he would be delirious with joy. When he began walking towards the edge of the wall, someone said he seemed blind, but no one paid attention. He walked to the rampart and when he got to the edge everyone expected him to stop and look down at the beautiful view, make some short statement or just thank the sultan for pardoning him. But instead he took another step and dropped off the cliff. It was only then that everyone realised that he really had lost his sight.”
Now we were going up some stairs. The stones were slippery.
“Hurshid Pasha’s head rolled down these very steps. The right eye was crushed when it fell and the officer who brought the head to the capital was punished. They accused him of not having taken proper care of it during the trip and of not sprinkling it with salt as the rules require.”
“If I’m not mistaken, the rule about the salt was instituted by Bugrahan, the chief physician, after suspicion arose about the head of Timurtash. Isn’t that right?”
“No, the suspicions were about the head of Velldrem. It had changed so much after decapitation that there were those who doubted that it was really his. That was when they instituted the rules.”
They went on chatting about heads for a long time. Absolutely spellbound, we followed them. Their necks were carefully wrapped in their shawls. For a minute it seemed to me that those black shawls were only meant to hold on their heads (long since cut off), to prevent them from rolling to the ground.
I began to feel sick. They were going upstairs now. The air was cooler. We came out into the open.
“Peanuts! Peanuts!”
At last we were safe. We ran like madmen through the packed gallery, looking for our families.
“Where were you? Why are you so pale?” our mothers asked almost simultaneously. “Why are you shaking like that?”
“We’re cold.”
Mamma wrapped us in a big wool blanket. Ilir’s mother gave us each some bread and marmalade. It was nice and warm there, among the living. Some women had come to visit. My father and Bido Sherifi were talking, looking serious. Nazo’s daughter-in-law, chin resting in her hand, stared sadly. Kako Pino was fidgeting with the little yellow bag where she kept her equipment. There would always be weddings, always and everywhere, now and till the end of time, she had replied, when on the first day of the move to the citadel someone had asked why she was taking her bag along. Nazo’s daughter-in-law sighed. Yes, life was nice among living people.
Ilir and I didn’t budge from that spot for the rest of the afternoon and the next day. We sat listening to what the women who came to see our mothers had to say. We were scared to death of running into the two strangers with the black scarves around their necks. We had decided that if we ever encountered them in the crowd, we would plug up our ears as fast as we could so we wouldn’t hear anything they said. Otherwise, if we let their words get into our ears, we would be shackled by them once more and would not be able to resist falling in step behind the men.
That night there was heavy bombing. I kept thinking of Grandmother. Her now solitary footsteps must be echoing through the big house. Up and down the steps. Sighs of wood and old age, and the curse of death she hurled at nations, governments and their planes.
Ilir and I sat in a corner drifting off to sleep when suddenly — like a snake that slithers under your feet before you even see it — the word “arrest” rang out. Necks craned, eyes narrowed, boots marched towards us. Trak-truk, trak-truk. “Under arrest.” Trak-truk. An Italian carabiniere pulled some handcuffs from his pocket. A tall man watched the handcuffs being put on him.
“Look, they’re locking those things on him with a key,” Ilir said to me.
“I saw.”
A woman, apparently the arrested man’s wife, let out a short, sharp scream.
“Don’t worry,” her husband said.
One of the carabinieri took him by the elbow and the little group moved off.
“Dirty fascists,” someone muttered.
The people who had gathered to watch now dispersed in silence. At noon there was more heavy bombing.
The next day I saw a face I thought I recognised among the people filing past endlessly. He was staring at me. I had seen that fair hair and those troubled eyes somewhere before. At last it came to me. This was the boy who had kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter in our cellar during the bombing.
After hanging around us for a while, he motioned to me. I shrugged. He gestured for me to follow him. He seemed not to want to come over. I got up and followed him. We went out onto the wide esplanade. It was chilly.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked me.
I told him. We had stopped near a battlement and the icy wind cut your face like a knife. The city lay in the chasm below.
“Do you recognise me?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“OK then. It was right in your cellar. Do you know what happened?” He grabbed me sharply by the shoulders. “Yes or no, say something! Do you know or not?”
“I know,” I told him.
The boy who had kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter took a deep breath.
“All right, have you seen her since . . .?”
“No.”
He clamped his jaw tight.
/> “In this city love is forbidden,” he said in a lower voice. “You’ll find out some day, when you grow up.”
(. . . garita!)
He kept kicking the rampart with the tip of his shoe.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m afraid they may have killed her. What do you think?”
I shrugged.
“In this city there are two ways to get rid of pregnant girls: suffocate them in a juk or drown them in a well. What do you think?”
I shrugged again. It was getting even colder.
“So you haven’t seen her anywhere in the neighbourhood?”
“Nowhere.”
“No one has seen her?”
“No one.”
“Are there many wells in your neighbourhood?”
“A few.”
He started biting his nails.
“If only I could find her body,” he said dully.
The wind was blowing. I was freezing.
“I’ll look for her everywhere,” he added.
He had unusually long fingers. He looked out at the grey cliffs. The city’s numberless roofs were barely visible in the fog.
“If I can’t find her, I’ll go to hell to look for her.”
I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but I was afraid.
Without another word he walked off quickly across the esplanade.
They were flying slowly, their wings outspread, and for a moment I thought they were going to land on the abandoned airfield, but they turned abruptly and headed for the city. Their wings flashed in the sun with menace. Now they were almost overhead, just at the altitude from which they usually started their dive-bombing. One last manoeuvre and they swooped down on the city one after another, almost vertically.
It was spring now. From the window two flights up I was watching the storks fly back. Circling the tops of minarets and the tall chimneys, they looked for their old nests, and the ellipses they traced in the sky clearly showed just how sad and dismayed they were to find their nests damaged or destroyed by the impact of the bombs and by the wind and rain of the past winter. As I watched them, I was thinking that storks could never imagine what could happen to a city in the winter, while they were away.
TWELVE
It was Sunday. From below came the noise of the pick swung by a neighbour who had been working for two weeks on a modern air-raid shelter like the one Lady Majnur had just had built. The bombing had stopped when spring began. We had been back in our homes for some time. The Karllashis and Angonis were the first to build modern shelters and leave the citadel. Next to leave were the nuns and prostitutes, whose shelters had been taken care of by the army. Then the people who had the money to build their own modern shelters went home. But most of us left the citadel only after the English bombing had eased. The first thing that struck me when we went home was that the tin sign saying “shelter for 90 persons” was gone. Someone must have taken it down while we were away, and the wall now had a light rectangular mark that gave me an empty feeling in my heart every time I looked at it.
Our neighbour’s pickaxe continued its regular thud. Sunday had spread out all over the city. It looked as if the sun had smacked into the earth and broken into pieces, and chunks of wet light were scattered everywhere — in the streets, on the windowpanes, on puddles and roofs. I remembered a day long ago when Grandmother had scaled a big fish. Her forearms were splattered with shiny scales. It was as if she was a Sunday all over. When my father got angry, he was a Tuesday.
I could hear the voices of Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo coming from the other room. They were still talking about the same thing. The neighbourhood women who had been coming by all morning, retailing ever more astounding pieces of news, had gone home to prepare lunch, but Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo went back to the conversation they had been having the previous Sunday. It seemed to me that all their chatting derived from prior conversations which were themselves the sequels of even older discussions going back to ancient times. I had also noticed that some topics of current interest were never broached directly. They would circle round the old ladies like buzzing flies, but could not cross the barrier of their indifference. At best a topic of that kind would take two or three weeks to gain admittance to the conversation, but most never achieved such a privilege.
All morning, the local women had made a whole series of guesses about a very recent event. My mother, as she brought Grandma and Aunt Xhemo their coffee, had asked them two or three times: “Have you heard the latest?” Obstinate as they were, they pretended not to hear, and they carried on elaborating a conversation that had been begun long ago, in the first year of the monarchy, or perhaps even further back, in the year 1901. Sitting beside them, I waited in vain for the expression of some opinion on the latest news. It was one of the few occasions when I felt angry with the old ladies. Stubborn as mules! I muttered to myself. Did they not grasp that the issue ought to make them prick up their ears, or were they dragging things out just to heighten the expectation that they would have something to say?
What had happened was deeply disturbing to me. Someone had gone into our cistern the night before. Fresh footprints were everywhere. Whoever it was had not even replaced the cover, and ashes had been found in a bucket that still smelled of kerosene. Apparently the intruder had used it as a torch to light the inside of the cistern.
For some time now there had been rumours that someone, or rather, some ghost, had been going down into the neighbourhood wells at night. Are there many wells in your neighbourhood . . .? At first the old ladies thought it was the ghost of someone called Xuano, who had been murdered in a dispute over property and was now seeking the gold he had hidden. But Aqif Kashahu’s deaf mother, who never slept at night, swore that with her own eyes she had seen the man coming out of their well at daybreak. If I can’t find her, I’ll go to hell to look for her . . . She had even spoken to him and, strangest of all, by her own account, she had seen his lips move in reply, but as she was deaf she hadn’t understood any of what was said.
Was it really him?
The roofs seemed dazed by the light. I walked over to the pile of bedding. The mattresses, blankets, pillows and lace-edged sheets — that whole soft white heap that was called juk — lay silent as a snare. In this city there are two ways to get rid of pregnant girls: suffocate them in a juk or drown them in a well.
Was it really him?
Two or three times I went up to the mirror and, after making it go misty with my breath, put my lips on its ice-cold surface. The shape of my kiss remained clear. It was a cold, joyless kiss, redolent with death.
I tried to summon up the face of the boy as I had seen him the other day, up in the fortress. I tried especially hard to remember his lips, which had caught my eye that day more than anything else about his face. They were special lips: lips that had already kissed.
The days went by with nothing to report. A person was looking for the body of another, whom he had once kissed. That was happening somewhere deep down, under the ground. Up above, everything was as before. The days were heavy and shapeless. All identical. Soon they would lose their one remaining distinction, the names that sheltered them like snail shells: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday.
Nothing happening. Wednesday and Thursday went by. Then Frisatsunday. The days stuck to each other like lumps of sticky dough. Finally, on Tuesday, something happened: after the rain, a little rainbow came out. In our city spring came from the sky, not from the soil, which was ruled by stone that knows no seasons. The coming of spring could be glimpsed in the thinning of clouds, the appearance of birds, and the occasional rainbow. This one rose up inside the city itself. Strangely, one end of it rested on the brothel, the other on Aunt Xhemo’s house, which was nonetheless considered one of the most respectable houses in town.
“Kako Pino, go out and look,” Bido Sherifi’s wife called out.
“It’s the end of the world,” Kako Pino said. “Selfixhe, come and look!”
Grandmother looked and shook her he
ad.
After the rainbow nothing happened for a whole week. Then one day Ilir said to me, “Isa and Javer are going to do something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But I heard Javer saying: ‘We have to break the peace and quiet of this petty-bor . . . petty-boar . . .’ I can’t remember the word.”
“Could they have meant to say pretty-boring?”
“No, it definitely wasn’t that.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Remember their death list? How come they never did anyone in?”
“Who knows? There might have been a good reason.”
“They won’t do anything now either.”
“I’m sure they will.”
“Yiorgos Poulos changed his name back to Giorgio Pulo. Why don’t they shoot him?”
“Do you want to bet they’ll do something this time?”
“OK.”
“I’ll bet France and two Switzerlands against Madagascar.”
“It’s a deal.”
Three days later I lost the France and two Switzerlands. Something serious happened all right: the town hall burned down. Very early in the morning we heard gunfire, then, coming from the street, people shouting: “The town hall is burning! The town hall is burning!” Shutters flew open. Heads, hands and arms stretched out as if they wanted to catch the news while it was still in the air. And it was true, the town hall was really going up in flames. Thick smoke like a herd of black horses was rising over the massive building and being blown around by the wind. Tongues of fire glowed red here and there against the black. Footsteps rang through the streets, then a hoarse voice shouted, “The title deeds are burning!”
“The deeds?” a woman asked from her window.
The hoarse voice kept shouting, “Citizens, come out, the town hall and the deeds are burning!”