“What are deeds?” I whispered.
No one answered.
The sound of footsteps in the street turned to thunder. I took advantage of the confusion to slip out. Mane Voco’s house was nearby. Ilir opened the door.
“Did you bring the France and two Switzerlands?” he asked as I came in.
“Don’t worry. I’ll give them to you. But wait a minute. What’s going on?”
“It burned down. It’s gone.”
“Was it them?”
“Of course. Who else?”
“Where are they?”
“In their room. Pretending to be surprised, to know nothing about it.”
“What are deeds?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come in and close the door!” Ilir’s mother shouted from upstairs.
We went upstairs. Ilir knocked on his brother’s door.
“Can we come in for a minute?” he asked.
We went in, first Ilir, then me.
Isa and Javer were both there. They were standing at the window watching the fire. They said something to each other in a foreign language.
“Strange,” Javer commented. “I wonder who started the fire? What are they saying over at your place?” he asked, turning to me.
“Yes, very strange all right,” Isa agreed.
“I was having a nice dream when the shots woke me up,” said Javer.
“Me too,” said Isa. “I was dreaming about flowers.”
There were shouts from the street.
“What are deeds?” This time it was Ilir who asked the question.
“Ah yes, deeds,” said Javer. “Can you hear them weeping and wailing over their precious deeds? Deeds are documents saying who is the owner of things like houses, yards and land. Understand?”
It was hard to follow. They both tried to explain it to us.
“All the information about property is written down in the deeds: where it lies, who inherits it from one generation to the next, things like that. Have you got that into your thick skulls? Everything is written down — the cistern, the fig tree in the back, the mortgage your father took out, and even you . . .”
Out in the streets, the shouts were getting louder and louder.
“Listen to them bleating,” said Isa. “The monster of private property has been wounded.”
A shrill cry rose above the general clamour.
“Lady Majnur,” said Javer, leaning out to hear better.
Lady Majnur had run into the street without her hat. The wisps of grey hair that poked out from under her black headscarf made a terrifying sight. Her shouts were punctuated by fragments of words and sprays of spit.
“The rabble! . . . It’s the debtors who set fire to the title deeds! . . . Communists! . . . Criminals! . . .”
“Scream, you old witch! Scream your head off, you old whore!” Javer snarled.
I plastered my face to the windowpane and looked out at the teeming street. Now and again the pane misted over. The land and houses, now they were free of the weight of their deeds, began to shift, wander and come apart. The walls seemed to part from their footings, and the age-old ties that had held them in place for so long seemed to have come asunder. As they drifted about, the great stone houses sometimes came dangerously close to each other. They could easily collide and destroy themselves, as they did in earthquakes.
“They’re burning, they’re burning!”
Only the streets, which belonged to everyone, tried to keep their heads in the uproar.
The chaos went on for a while. Smoke now rose more languidly from the burned-out building. The windows, from which flames had been leaping furiously only a short while before, had now begun to go dark.
“The Reichstag went up in flames as well,” said Javer, pointing to a place on the globe.
“Who burned it?” Ilir asked.
“Who? Arsonists, obviously,” Javer said.
“Every city in this world has a building that should be burned,” Isa said.
Javer smiled. A moment later he gave such a yawn he could have dislocated his jaw. He had rings under his eyes.
Isa was yawning a lot too. Neither tried to hide the fact that they hadn’t had a wink of sleep. I felt sure that if you got up close to them, they would smell of kerosene.
Outside the streets had almost settled down. I went out.
That night someone was arrested in our street. There were loud knocks at someone’s door, knocks that didn’t sound like the usual ones, and they woke up half the neighbourhood.
“Who did they take away?” Grandmother asked as she opened the street-side shutters.
“We don’t know yet,” someone whispered. “But I think it was one of Mezini’s sons.”
The next day we found out that there had been arrests all over the city. A big notice was posted in the town square offering a reward of forty thousand leks for information leading to the identification of the arsonist.
On the third night the police arrested a stranger. They had followed him for a while before making the arrest. The stranger walked as if dazed, clutching a bottle of kerosene (you could smell it from far off) and carrying a rope coiled over his shoulder. It was midnight. There was no doubt he was the arsonist. A box of matches and a little pouch of ashes were found in his pockets.
The next day people said that the boy who had kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter had been caught. Despite the calamities that had befallen it all last winter (“May we never live to see another winter like that,” the old women said), the city had not forgotten the fair-haired boy. Despite themselves, Grandma and Aunt Xhemo were finally obliged to allude to the event during their conversation, though they only touched on it briefly. Every one else was clucking and chortling with indignation.
“Did you hear what the boy who kissed Aqif Kashahu’s daughter told the magistrate?”
“What? He burned down the town hall?”
“No, he did not. The kerosene and ashes he was carrying when he was arrested were for something completely different.”
“Really?”
“He was going down into wells at night looking for the girl.”
“Down into wells at night? What people will do for love!”
“According to the boy, her own family killed her.”
“Today around noon the magistrate went to the Kashahus’ and asked to talk to the girl. She wasn’t in. The boy maintains she’s been murdered.”
“Now that you mention it, I confess I’ve not seen her either, since the kiss.”
“Like I said. You’re not the only one. Nobody’s set eyes on her.”
“You’re right! Go on!”
“Now, where was I? Oh yes. Aqif Kashahu said that he’d sent his daughter off to visit some distant cousins.”
“Oh, distant cousins . . .”
“You don’t look well,” Grandmother said to me. “Go spend a few days at Babazoti’s.”
I had been waiting for that.
FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE
now clear that a group of terrorists is currently operating in the city. When the police arrested the young man with the kerosene and the rope in the middle of the night, everyone thought that the Nero of our city had been caught at last. But it turned out he was not Nero but Orpheus, seeking his Eurydice in the wells of our courtyards. Trial. Executive measures. Property. All suits relating to property are suspended because of the burning of the land registry. Today Jur Qosja published an announcement in the newspaper denying the rumour that he had been to Salonica to see doctors about his lack of facial hair. “I went to buy raisins, as I do every year,” he told the newspaper. Cinema. Tomorrow: Grand Hotel, starring the famous actress Greta Garbo. I hereby prohibit all traffic between nine at night and four in the morning, except for midwives. City Commandant Bruno Arcivocale. Price of bread.
THIRTEEN
As in other years, I found that the landscape around Grandfather’s house had changed. At first glance things looked the same, but closer inspection r
evealed that certain paths were gone and others were slowly dying, while still others, new and frail but determined, were springing up amid the dust and grass.
As always, Babazoti was lying on his chaise longue, reading. Grandma was hanging the laundry out to dry. White sheets billowed in the fresh breeze. Bushes had sprouted everywhere. Taking advantage of the neglect caused by the spring bombing, they had launched a furious attack on the house.
The flapping and flailing of the sheets on the clothesline as they resisted the wind’s onslaught made a most peaceful sight. It has to be said that the wind was far from vicious that day, and was only attacking the sheets in a playful way.
The wind blew steadily from the same direction. Maybe it would bring Suzana.
Grandma finished hanging out the sheets.
“So, how are your mother and father? And Selfixhe?” she asked, clipping on the last peg.
“Everyone’s fine.”
Alongside the flapping of sheets I could make out the sound of something else.
“You look a little distracted,” Grandma said. “No wonder too, with all those bombs and planes.”
The alert came from a young and pretty siren . . . There she was, flying through the air. Her white wings sparkled in the sunlight. She appeared for a moment in the sky between the clouds, then was gone again.
I went outside the yard. And there she was, with her head leaning slightly to one side, dressed in a light grey skirt the colour of aluminium.
“Suzana!”
She turned round.
“Oh, you’re back.”
“Yes.”
She had grown.
“Since when?”
“Today.”
Her legs were even longer and shapelier.
“Where did you go during the bombing?” I asked her.
“There, in that cave over there.”
“We went to the citadel. I even went looking for you once.”
“Really? I thought you wouldn’t even remember me.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten you.”
She turned her head and adjusted a hairpin.
“Big deal! You didn’t forget me!” she said sharply and then ran off.
I saw the aluminium-grey dress flash once among the trees along the road to her house. Then when she got near the cliff edge, she branched off. By the badshade tree she slackened her pace, before turning round and coming back to me.
“Well, will you tell me things?” she asked, almost sternly.
“Sure, I’ll tell you things.”
Her eyes shone with pleasure.
“Many things?”
“A lot, yes.”
“Well, go ahead. Come on, start,” she said.
We sat down on the grass by the side of the road and I started telling her things. It wasn’t easy. I had so much to say that it got all jumbled up in my head. She was listening very attentively, her eyes open wide, frowning as though in pain every time I got in a muddle or put things in the wrong order or didn’t give them the importance she thought they deserved. Sometimes I got carried away by my story and boldly altered the facts. When I told her about the Englishman’s arm, for example, I said that Aqif Kashahu kept biting it in rage and that the crowd cheered every time he did. She listened carefully to everything, but when I started telling her how a man called Macbeth had invited someone to dinner whose name I couldn’t remember any more and how he had cut his guest’s head off, but then it turned out he didn’t know the rules about sprinkling salt on a severed head, she put her hand over my mouth and pleaded: “Tell me about something less gruesome, OK?”
So I told her about Lady Majnur screaming in the streets the day the town hall burned down, and about Vasiliqia, and about how when Grandmother heard that Vasiliqia had come she said she wished she had died the winter before. I was telling her about Aunt Xhemo’s last visit and the defeat of the Greeks when I heard my elder aunt calling me for lunch.
They were all at table already. The signs of a quarrel were obvious. My younger aunt was pouting.
“I don’t want to see that good for nothing around here any more, you hear?” Grandma said, throwing some food on a plate.
“He’s a friend, he lends me books,” my younger aunt answered stubbornly.
“Books! You should be ashamed. Love stories to corrupt your mind.”
“They’re not love stories, they’re about politics.”
“So much the worse. One of these days you’ll have the carabinieri over here.”
“That’s enough now,” said Babazoti.
It was a short truce.
“You’re a big girl now,” Grandma started up again. “You don’t see your girlfriends neglecting their embroidery. One of these days you’ll take a husband.”
My younger aunt stuck her tongue out, as she always did at the mention of marriage.
The next day I saw Suzana again. She seemed pensive.
“What did the Englishman’s ring look like?” she asked.
“Very pretty. It sparkled in the sun.”
“Who do you think gave it to him?”
I shrugged.
“How should I know?”
Suzana stared at me so hard that it seemed she was trying to find another pair of eyes behind mine.
“Maybe his fiancée,” she said.
“Maybe.”
Suzana took me by the arm.
“Listen,” she whispered into my ear. “Of all the things you told me, what sticks in my mind the most is what happened to Aqif Kashahu’s daughter. Will you tell it to me again?”
I nodded.
“Only this time, try to remember everything.”
I thought for a moment.
“Take your time,” she said. “Try to remember.”
I frowned to make her think I was trying hard to recall the slightest details, but in fact completely unrelated pieces of events had pushed their way into my mind.
“Now tell the story,” she said.
She was all ears. Her eyes, her hair, her thin arms, everything about her was frozen as she listened.
When I finished, she took a deep breath.
“What strange things happen in this world,” she said.
“One of my friends has a little world made of papier mâché,” I told her. “You can spin it with your finger.”
She wasn’t listening any more. Her mind was elsewhere.
“Do you want to go to the cave?” she asked.
I didn’t really feel like it. I was pretty sick of cellars and damp places, but I didn’t want to spoil her fun.
It was cool in the cave. We sat down on two big rocks and didn’t say a word.
Suddenly she said, “Let’s pretend the planes are coming and dropping their bombs. Can you hear? There’s a whole lot of them. The siren is wailing. Bombs are falling right next to us. When do the lights go out?”
“Now.”
She reached out and put her arms around my neck. Her soft cheek pressed against mine.
“Like this?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Her arms were as cold as aluminium. There was a good smell of soap from her neck.
“Someone has put the light back on,” she said in a little while. “They’ll see us.”
I held my neck very stiff. Suzana quickly let go of me.
“Now they’re dragging me by the hair. Can you see? What are you going to do?”
“I’ll go down to hell,” I said, putting on a booming voice.
She burst out laughing.
We played that same little game a few more times that day and the next. I got to like sitting motionless while she wrapped her long arms around my neck. Her neck always had that nice smell of soap. A sensation I’d never had before made me feel alternately unbearably heavy and intoxicated as if I was flying.
I was expecting her to ask me again if I knew any rude words. But she said nothing and kept her eyes half-shut. Apparently that was how she could best meditate on what had happened to Aqif Kashahu’s
daughter.
I was tempted to say, don’t think any more about that girl, she’s probably dead, but I was afraid of scaring Suzana. One of the gypsies who lived in the shed told me that all girls have the black triangle I’d seen on Margarita. For me, that was an indisputable sign that they would end up in dishonour.
One day (here they had no Thursdays or Tuesdays like in our neighbourhood, just mornings, afternoons and nights) we were sitting and hugging, counting the bombs that were falling more and more furiously, when a shadow appeared at the entrance to the cave. I saw it first, but there was nothing I could do.
“Suzana!” her mother called.
Suzana jerked her arms off my neck and sat there petrified. The woman whose face we couldn’t see in the darkness with the sunlight behind her came closer.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding all day,” she said quietly but sternly. (Aqif Kashahu, I remembered very well, hadn’t said a word.) Now she would drag her by the hair. “Get up,” she almost shouted, grabbing Suzana by the arm. Suzana’s delicate arm looked as if it would break in that vice-like grip.
She pushed her roughly. Suzana’s body seemed all out of joint. Her torso was thrust forward before her head could catch up, and her legs worked desperately to balance her again.
“So you’ve started already,” the woman growled through clenched teeth. Then, just before leaving the cave, she turned to me.
“And you, you little wretch, you can’t even blow your own nose yet . . .”
She called me other equally spiky-sounding names of the same general kind, with endings so sharp they sounded to me like they were laden with thorns.
They left. What would happen now? Would I have to go down into the wells?
Outside it was calm and bright. A bird flew in the sky. The anger and the thorny words stayed behind in the gloom of the cave.
They’re dragging me by the hair! What are you going to do? . . . I walked slowly. My head felt numb. I couldn’t get that wet rope near the edge of our cistern out of my mind. The black ashes in the bottom of the bucket still smelled of kerosene. “That’s what comes from courting,” Grandmother had said. “Oh Selfixhe, this was all we needed in times like these. Better death than love like this, may God protect us.”