FIFTEEN
A notice was posted on what remained of a wall of the ruined house. We came to play in those ruins every day. Wallowing in their own misfortune, they were nonetheless kind to us. We took whatever we wanted from them, demolished small pieces of wall, shifted stones about, without much changing the look of the ruins. After enduring the flames, which had turned it into a ruin in a matter of hours, the house was now completely indifferent, and tolerated any fresh attack. Some iron bars protruding from the remnants of the walls looked like the fingers of a frozen hand. The notice had been hung right on those bars. Two old men had stopped to read it. It was typewritten, and in two languages, Albanian and Italian:
Wanted: the dangerous Communist Enver Hoxha. Aged about 30. Tall. Wears sunglasses. Reward for any information leading to his capture: 15,000 leks; for his capture: 30,000 leks. Garrison commander Bruno Arcivocale.
Ilir tugged on the sleeve of my jacket.
“That was his house,” he whispered to me.
“Enver Hoxha’s?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard Papa telling Isa one day.”
“So where is he now, this Enver Hoxha?”
“Far away. Somewhere near Tirana.”
I whistled in amazement.
“He went all the way to Tirana?”
“Sure.”
“Is Tirana very far?” I asked.
“Yes, very. Maybe we’ll go there too when we grow up.”
Someone else stopped to read the notice. We left.
Xhexho and Kako Pino were at our house drinking coffee with Grandmother. Xhexho carefully turned her cup upside down.
“It seems that a new kind of war has broken out,” she said. “I forget exactly what they call it, war with classes or class war, or something like that. Well, Selfixhe, it’s a war all right, but not like the others. In this war brothers kill each other. The son slays the father. At home, at the dinner table, wherever. The son looks his father in the eye, then he tells him he doesn’t recognise him as his father any more and bang, he shoots him, right between the eyes.”
“The end of the world,” said Kako Pino.
“Apparently,” Xhexho went on, “someone called Gole Balloma from the Gjobek neighbourhood is wandering the streets screaming that he’s going to skin Mak Karllashi alive, cure and dry his hide in his own tannery, make shoes out of it and dance around in them.”
“I’ve never heard anything so monstrous,” my mother burst out in indignation.
“There you are, Selfixhe,” said Xhexho. “We had thought all our troubles were over, but now it looks as if the worst is yet to come. Do you remember Enver, the Hoxha boy?”
“The one who went to study in the land of the Franks? Of course I remember him?”
“And so do I,” Kako Pino chimed in.
“Well, they say he’s the one leading the war now. He’s also the one who invented this new war I was telling you about.”
“That’s hard to believe,” said Grandmother. “He was such a well-behaved lad.”
“Yes, Selfixhe, very well behaved. But they say he wears dark glasses now so he won’t be recognised and that he’s the one running the war.”
“War, always war,” Kako Pino sighed.
“What can you do?” said Grandmother. “It looks to me as if this world can’t manage without war. As old as I am, I’ve never seen a day of real peace.”
My mother sighed.
“I heard that Karllashi’s daughter is back from Italy,” Xhexho said, breaking the silence. “God, what a scandal! She wears her skirt above the knee and has dresses of such thin fabric you would think she was in a snakeskin. You can see everything. She spends all day preening, paints her lips red, bleaches her hair, smokes, and speaks Italian. ‘Oh, Mother, what a filthy country,’ she complains. ‘Father, how could you bring me back to this hole.’ Oh this, oh that, all day long. That’s what the world’s coming to, Selfixhe.”
“What can you expect?” Grandmother asked once again. “That’s what happens to girls when they leave home.”
“Yes, exactly,” Kako Pino agreed. “Everything’s upside down.”
The next day, as if he had been listening to Xhexho, Ilir said to me, “Let’s go and have a look at Karllashi’s daughter, the one who’s just back from Italy.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Very. Her hair is gold like the sun. She sits at the window daydreaming, and her hair blows in the wind.”
We ran out, crossed Fools’ Alley, and stopped in front of the Karllashis’ house. And there she was, elbows resting on the windowsill, and it really did look as if she had sun in her hair. No other woman in the city ever had hair like that, except for one of the prostitutes, the one Ramiz Kurti had killed the year before, after which the brothel was closed for six months.
We stood in front of the Karllashis’ house for a long time. Two katenxhikas went by. One was all hunched up. Then Gjergj Pula passed by. He was so pale he looked as though he had come straight out of hospital. We stared at each other. Then Maksut went by with a severed head under his arm. Karllashi’s daughter left the window. We waited for her to reappear, but she didn’t. Now we didn’t know where to go. The street was deserted. Bido Sherifi’s wife appeared at her window, shook flour from her hands, and disappeared. Nazo’s door closed without a sound after Maksut went inside.
Suddenly shots rang out. A short burst. Then another burst. Then separate shots. Some people came running from Market Street, Harilla Lluka among them.
“Run!” he shouted. “Take cover! Someone’s been killed.”
Ilir’s mother came to the doorstep.
“Ilir, get inside!” she yelled.
I heard them calling me too. Doors were noisily slammed shut. More shots rang out.
The news spread like wildfire: Bruno Arcivocale, the garrison commander, had been assassinated.
Late that night the silence was broken by a knock at a door.
“It’s at Mane Voco’s,” said Grandmother, going to open the window to look out.
Outside we heard heavy footsteps, then some words in Italian and shouts of “My son, my son!”
Then silence again. Someone had been arrested.
Grandmother closed the window.
“They just took Isa away,” she said.
Arcivocale’s funeral was magnificent. There were speeches in the centre of town. Then the long procession marched to the cemetery while a military band played. Shiny musical instruments wailed mournfully through their lily-shaped mouths. Fascist officers, dressed in black from head to toe, walked slowly alongside, looking impressive and serious. Followed by the priests. Then came the nuns. The casket containing Arcivocale swung gently from side to side. Old ladies, women and children rushed to a thousand windows. The city watched the departure of its late commander. On the walls tatters of notices and ordinances torn by the wind would bear fragments of his name for some time: RCIV, ARC, OC, L. Then the rain would finally wipe them out and new notices and ordinances with the name of the new commander would go up.
It rained steadily for four days in a row. It was an ancient, monotonous rain. (“Once a rain fell upon the earth lasting thirty thousand years,” Xivo Gavo said in the introduction to his chronicle.) It was under this rain that Isa was hanged. The execution took place at dawn in the town centre. Groups of people came to watch. Two girls were also hanged along with Isa. Their hair dripped with rain. Isa was missing one leg. It made him look horrible, like an upside down cone. His glasses were the only thing that seemed alive on his battered face. The victims had pieces of white cloth attached to their chests bearing their names. Azem Kurti, Javer’s uncle and commander of the Balli Kombëtar, who along with Mak Karllashi’s son had taken part in the killing of Isa, raised the skirts of the hanged girls with his cane. Their thin white legs swung back and forth for a moment before coming to rest. Mane Voco’s wife broke away from the people trying to hold her back and ran through the stree
ts screaming hysterically, “My son! My son!” She rushed all the way to the gallows and embraced Isa’s single leg, pressing it to her face and hair. “My son, my son, what have they done to you?” The conical form gave a jerk. His glasses fell off. The woman gathered up the shattered lenses and pressed them to her breast. “My little boy, my little boy.”
That same night Javer, who was still a wanted man, went to his uncle Azem Kurti’s house, where he had not set foot in a long time.
“They’re looking for me, Uncle,” he had said, “but I have repented.”
“Repented? You have done the right thing, nephew. Come, let me kiss you. I knew this day would come. Did you see what we did to that friend of yours?”
“Yes, I saw,” Javer answered.
“Bring us some raki and a hot meal,” Azem said to the women. “Let us celebrate this reconciliation.”
When they had sat down at the table, Javer said:
“Now, Uncle, you’re going to tell me all about the business with Isa.”
And Azem laid out the facts. Sipping his raki, eating his roast, he described the killing. Javer listened.
“What’s wrong, nephew? You look pale,” the uncle said.
“Yes, Uncle, I feel pale.”
“Those books have thinned your blood. Your fingers are thinner too.”
Javer looked at his fingers and then coolly took a revolver out of his pocket. Azem’s eyes opened wide. Javer shoved the barrel of the gun into his uncle’s food-stuffed mouth. Azem’s teeth rattled on the metal. Then, one by one, the bullets smashed his jaw, his forehead and his skull to smithereens. Morsels of half-chewed meat mingled with blobs of Azem’s brain as they rained down together onto the low dining table.
Javer left amid the wailing of his cousins. The next day the Bulldog flew over the city dropping multi-coloured leaflets saying, “Yesterday the Communist Javer Kurti killed his own uncle at the family dinner table. Fathers and Mothers, judge for yourselves what the Communists are like.”
That evening the bodies of six people shot dead in the citadel prison were brought to the main square. They were left there in a pile so people could see. A white banner bore this inscription in capital letters: THIS IS HOW WE ANSWER RED TERROR.
The rain had stopped. It was very cold at night. By dawn the corpses were covered with frost. They lay there on the square all that day. On the second morning, another pile of corpses was found on the other side of the square. A bit of cloth bore the words: THIS IS HOW WE ANSWER WHITE TERROR.
The police rushed in to get rid of the bodies, but they weren’t given time to complete the job. They were ordered to go after the terrorists first. None of the guards on duty the previous night had suspected a thing. Around midnight, the municipal road-sweeper’s cart, drawn by Ballashi, an old nag well-known to everyone in the city, had pulled up in the square. As usual, the cart was covered with a black tarpaulin. Just before daybreak someone passing alongside the cart happened to give the tarpaulin an idle tug, and that’s when the bodies fell out in a heap.
People came back from the town centre in consternation.
“Go and see.”
“Go and look, on the square. A real slaughter.”
“Don’t let the children see. Keep the children back.”
Grandmother shook her head pensively and said: “What terrible times.”
The city was soaked in blood. The bodies of the executed prisoners were still in the square. Now both piles had been covered with tarpaulins. In the afternoon Hanko, a crone who had not crossed the threshold of her house in twenty-nine years, went out and headed for the centre of the city. People were dumbfounded, and stepped aside to let her pass. Her vacant eyes seemed to see everything without looking at anything.
“Who is that man standing on that rock?” she asked, pointing with her cane.
“It’s a statue, Mother Hanko. It’s made of iron.”
“I thought it was Omer’s son.”
“It is Omer’s son, Mother Hanko. He’s been dead for a long time.”
Then she asked to see the bodies. She went to each pile of corpses in turn, lifted the frozen tarpaulins, and stared at the dead for a long time.
“What country are they from?” she asked, pointing to the Italians.
“From Italy.”
“Foreigners?” she said.
“Yes, foreigners.”
She put her hands on each face, as if to recognise the corpses.
“What about those?”
“Those are from our city. This one is from the Toro family, this one from the Xhulas, this one the Angonis, this one the Merajs, and this one the Kokobobos.”
Granny Hanko covered up the pile with her dry, withered hands and turned to leave.
“Why all this blood? Can’t you tell us anything, Mother Hanko?” a woman asked between her sobs.
The crone turned her aged head, but seemed to have forgotten where the voice had come from.
“The world is changing blood,” she said to no one in particular. “A person changes blood every four or five years, and the world every four or five hundred years. These are the winters of blood.”
So saying, she set off homeward. She was one hundred and thirty-two years old.
Winter. White terror. Those words were everywhere. As was the frost. One day, I woke very early, got out of bed, and went upstairs to the main room. Thick clouds like wet, muddy sponges had settled over the city. The sky was black as pitch. A supernatural light spilled in through a single rent in the cloud cover. It slid over the grey roofs and came to rest on a white house. The only white building in the neighbourhood. I had never noticed that before. It looked sinister among the grey houses at that time of the morning.
What house was this? Where did it come from? And why do they call what’s happening these days a “white terror”? Why not green terror, or blue terror?
I had grown more and more afraid of the colour white. The white roses I could remember, the drapes in the main room, Grandmother’s nightgown all now seemed inscribed with the word “terror”.
FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE
rder. Any person found to have connections with the terrorists will be sentenced to death. I hereby declare a curfew from four in the afternoon to six in the morning. Garrison commander: Emilio de Fiori. Curfew exemptions previously granted to midwives are hereby cancelled. I order a census of the city pop
SIXTEEN
The highway, the bridge over the river, and Zalli Street teemed with soldiers, mules and trucks heading slowly north. Italy had capitulated. Long columns of soldiers with blankets on their shoulders were coming into the city. Some of them still bore their arms. Others had thrown them away or had sold them. The cobblestones were filthy with mud trampled in by their boots. The streets rang with shouting and swearing in Italian. The milling mass of soldiers got more and more chaotic. Some of them left straight away to go further north, while fresh columns, each filthier than the last, arrived from the south. Rain-soaked, exhausted, and unshaven, the soldiers all trudged up steep Zalli Street, gazing in stupor at the tall stone houses.
The gloomy winter city looked down its nose at the defeated. Soon they too would wander through the snow like ghosts, mumbling “pane, pane”.
Llukan the Jailbird with his blanket over his shoulder came down the road from the prison.
“Everyone’s gone!” he was shouting. “Not a soul left in the prison. It’s enough to make you cry.”
The nuns left too. The prostitutes had climbed aboard a truck, and when it started off, Lame Kareco Spiri ran after it for a long time in the rain. Splattered by its rear wheels, he chased it madly, gesturing at the girls who, crammed into the back and whipped by the wind, waved back at him. When he finally gave up he walked back into the city looking utterly miserable and muttering unceasingly, “What am I going to do without them?”
Long, apparently endless columns continued to march along the highway. The whole city was spotted with mud.
“Disgusting, isn’t
it Selfixhe?” said Aunt Xhemo, who had just arrived for a visit. “The world is one big mudhole.”
“Well,” said Grandmother, “that’s the way kingdoms come to an end.”
“Yes, they’re leaving all right,” said Aunt Xhemo, “but others will take their place, and leave their mud and filth behind.”
The city had really been disguised by a mask of ugliness. The reddish-brown mud clashed with its distinguished tones of grey. The retreating Italians had muddied us all, just like the back wheels of the truck that carried off the ladies of the bordello.
I sat at the window in the main room two flights up and watched the routed army. The remnants of Greece had been scattered by the winter wind. Italy, on the other hand, was sunk in mire.
Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo, with their funny-looking ancient glasses with the cracked lenses perched on their noses, watched the road full of soldiers.
“Well, now Italy has been thrashed as well,” Aunt Xhemo said. “They were a thorn in our side long enough.”
“They didn’t give us an easy time, that’s for sure,” commented Grandmother.
“Where will those poor lads go now, in the cold, and with so little to be had?” Aunt Xhemo asked.
“They’ll be on the road,” said Grandmother. “Where else can they go?”
“Pity the mothers waiting for them!”
“That’s how it is when nations collapse in winter,” said Grandmother.
Aunt Xhemo sighed.
“Blankets,” she said a moment later, “a whole world of blankets.”
The column of troops and mules kept on coming through the night. In the morning it stretched out just as far, making it seem as if yesterday’s men and animals were still trudging past. Soiled with mud, the city awoke from a restless night to an even more troubled dawn. Isa Toska’s gang had come into the city during the night, singing old songs. At dawn they were followed by some Ballist detachments. In the morning the two groups, mixed in with the throng of harried Italian soldiers, wandered about almost side by side at the corners and squares, pretending not to notice one another. Here and there some scuffles broke out between Ballist patrols and Isa Toska’s men.