We crossed the bridge over the river. The deserted airfield lay before us.
We had to cross over it. We came to its edge. I never thought I would walk on it one day. It saddened me greatly. In our eyes that field had something sacred about it. It had been a kind of sister or bride to the sky. Chosen by fate, like a princess. Now it was sundered from the sky like a wife scorned, and it had a wild and gloomy mien.
From all around came the smell of manure. Resentful cattle had soiled the airfield. I was now convinced that weeds and cattle and mud would always win out in the end — never the sky.
Farther along we could make out Holy Trinity hill, and just behind it, black and menacing, strangely close as though it had risen up suddenly to see who was coming, loomed the dark bulk of the mountain.
Auntiemoon Pino tried hard to improve the view or at least to embellish and soften the sinister look of the landscape. But its light, greedily sucked up by the mud and fog, was so faint and weak that it only sullied everything even more.
Finally the moon disappeared behind the clouds.
“We can’t see a thing,” said Nazo’s daughter-in-law.
Everyone turned round to look. She was right, the city was blotted out completely.
Someone moaned.
Now the plain, the road, Holy Trinity hill, the nameless banks of fog, and the mountain itself (it was hard to believe we were walking towards a mountain, for its shape was so ill-defined that it seemed that all we had before us was a slightly thicker patch of night) began shifting about awkwardly, scratching themselves in the dark like prehistoric monsters. Little by little I lost all sense of reality. We were walking aimlessly, walking for the sake of walking, wandering in the belly of the night. I could no longer think. I was used to thinking between walls, at street-corners, in rooms, and these familiar places seemed to give order to my thoughts. But now, without them, everything was not only incomprehensible, but cruel too. The mountain leaned right over Holy Trinity hill and calmly chewed its neck. The hill gave up the ghost. Someone sneezed. The sound cheered me but not for long.
The moon came out again. The mists were drawn immediately to its light, drank it into their beards and let it drip back onto the muddy mess of the field. Caught in the act, the mountain hastily drew back from the hill, but a deep gouge in the hill’s neck was clearly visible.
Nazo’s daughter-in-law, the only one who had not sighed or moaned even once during the walk (maybe because she was walking through the kingdom of magic, with whose ways she had long been familiar), looked back again.
“The city,” she muttered.
“Where?” I asked softly.
“There.”
“That mist?”
“Yes.”
That’s where Grandmother was.
The moon disappeared again, taking my thoughts of Grandmother with it. Taking advantage of the darkness, the mountain bent over the hill again. This time it would surely strangle it to death.
We walked on like that for a long time. Now we were going up a steep slope.
“Don’t fall asleep,” said Bido Sherifi.
Ilir was alongside me.
“I was sleeping,” he admitted.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
We were still going uphill.
“It’s getting light,” said Mane Voco.
It was true, there was a faint light in the sky, but it looked as though it might change its mind and darken again at any moment.
We stopped to rest on a small plateau. The plain below, the road, the hills, the mists and the mountain were now slowly beating back the power of night. Exhausted, still pale with anguish, they awaited the morning.
“Look,” Ilir said, “Look over there.”
In the distance the contours of the city could just be seen in the murky mix of night and day. It was the first time I had seen it from afar. I almost shouted for joy, for all night I had had the feeling that it was sinking lower and lower into the mud of the plain, like an old ship foundering on the shore.
But now the contours of the landscape had finally flung the impish genies from their back and were gradually recovering their shapes in the daylight. Only the grey eyes of Nazo’s daughter-in-law still held something of the magic of the night.
The city was far away, caught in the clumsily opening jaws of the fog. The crones were down there. Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo, with their cracked glasses perched on their noses, were keeping watch over the road from their respective windows, waiting to catch a glimpse of the men with yellow hair. Clues had been perceptible for some time. Now the signs were unmistakable: Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo were getting ready to turn into crones. The German invasion seemed to be the definitive test for them, as the great incursions of the Turks, the massacres on the ruins of the republic and the monarchy, and the forty years of constant hunger had been for other crones.
“Let’s move,” said Bido Sherifi. “We’re nearly there.”
We got up. I was almost asleep on my feet. It was a painful slumber, cut and torn by the jolts passed to my body by the holes in the road.
Then someone said, “This is it. We’re here.”
I opened my eyes.
“We’re here!”
“Where?”
“Here.”
I had no idea where I was.
“In the village?”
“Yes, in the village.”
“Where is it?”
“Right there.”
I looked around in bewilderment. So this was what they called a village! I was dumbfounded, then suddenly burst out laughing.
“What’s the matter? What’s wrong with you?” asked Nazo’s daughter-in-law.
I couldn’t stop laughing.
“Lord above, now my child’s lost his mind!” my mother said.
“What’s the matter with you?” my father asked sternly.
“But . . . don’t you see? . . . those houses . . . over there?”
“Now stop that,” my father commanded.
My mother shook me by the shoulders, then put her arms around me.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. These low shacks with whitewashed walls looked to me like dolls’ houses. They weren’t even lined up in a row so as to form one side of a street facing the other side in a virtually permanent state of rivalry, taunting each other with a sneering challenge: “You want to see who’s bigger, do you?” No, it was all different here. To prevent such squabbling, the cottages were separated from each other as if they were all in business on their own accounts. And to top it all, they were surrounded by patches of tilled land, chicken coops, haystacks and doghouses.
The villagers stared in amazement as our little group made its way across an open space. Two or three frightened kids hid behind their doors. A cow began to moo. More peasants came out. They had kindly features, the sun was in their hair, and they smelled of fresh milk.
I could hear cowbells tinkling. My eyes closed.
I woke up halfway through the afternoon. I was in an empty room. My father was hanging paper over the windows to replace the broken panes, while my mother cleaned the floor, which was filthy with dried-out chicken droppings. It all seemed very depressing to me.
In a little while Bido Sherifi’s wife and Nazo came.
“So, are you settled in?” they asked.
My mother pursed her lips.
“What about you?”
“Not so bad. We found an abandoned house.”
Bido Sherifi’s wife heaved a deep sigh.
“How did we get into this mess?”
They left.
I felt like crying. Suddenly I was terribly homesick for our house and the city. Had something irreparable happened?
Papa went down to the cellar and came back up.
“Be careful not to light a fire,” he said. “It’s full of hay down there. If it goes up we’ll burn like mice in a barn.”
Mane Voco came by. He had lost a lot of weight since Isa was hanged.
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“Do you have a little salt?” he asked. “We forgot to bring any.”
My mother gave him some.
The house we were in was also abandoned. The other room was a wreck. I went downstairs to see the hay.
“A-oo,” I said at the cellar entrance.
There was no answer.
The hay we were worried about had a heady tang. I went back up to the room wondering why we always lived in houses with some danger underneath. In the city it was the water in the cistern, here the threat of fire in the cellar.
Refugees from the city passed by all day. Some stopped in the village and moved into deserted houses like we had. Most kept going, looking for villages farther away. I noticed Qani Kekezi among the people walking by with bundles and cradles. Bits of newspaper, cigarette butts and gossip trailed in the refugees’ wake. Back in the city Gjergj Pula had been killed. He had just applied to change his name again, to Jürgen Pulen. (The rumour was that apart from Giorgio, Yiorgos and Jürgen, which he never got a chance to use, he had lined up the name Yogura in case of a Japanese invasion.)
Refugees passed through the villages all night long. I slept fitfully, a sleep interrupted by tinkling bells, the lowing of cattle, and knocking at doors.
I was still asleep when I heard Xhexho’s loud voice from the street.
“Where are you, my friends? I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Where are you, poor things?”
She burst in the door. Bido Sherifi’s wife and Ilir’s mother ran to her.
“Xhexho, do you have any news? What’s happening?”
Xhexho started pacing up and down the room, then brought her hands to her cheeks.
“My God, how low we have fallen! Wandering the road like Romanies. Scattered like a raven’s chicks. What kind of a pigsty is this? How did you end up here? Why has God let us live, to be reduced to this? What a catastrophe!”
“Enough, Xhexho! It’s not as if we took to the road for the fun of it. We had no choice but to flee evil,” said Bido Sherifi’s wife. “What news have you brought?”
“I don’t know where to start. Did you hear what happened to Çeço Kaili’s daughter? She went off with the Italians.”
“With the Italians?”
“Lately her beard got as long as Mullah Kasemi’s. The barber was at Kaili’s house every day with a bag full of all kinds of razors, even the ones the Franks make. There was no other choice. Nothing else worked. Then one night she just got up and left. They say it was the barber who set it up. She got into the truck that took the girls from the brothel.”
“Maybe the terrible bad luck that has befallen the city has left with her,” said Xhexho. “After all, that girl with the beard did bring bad luck. It’s a good thing she left,” Xhexho added, surprising everyone with the uncharacteristically hopeful words she had spoken. But her optimism was short-lived. Raising her voice, which sounded like a dull whistle coming through her nose, she nearly shouted, “No, it won’t leave us alone just yet! Have you heard what they’re saying about Maksut, Nazo’s boy? He’s a spy! Yes, a spy!”
“A spy?”
“That’s what I said. A snake in the wall. That’s why he let his wife and mother come here alone; he’s afraid of the partisans. He’s in hiding, hasn’t turned up anywhere. They say he’s waiting for the Germans. He sends them information at night and tells them which roads to take. They say he’s the one who reported Isa.”
Ilir’s mother broke into sobs.
“The cur, the cur,” she cried.
Xhexho sighed deeply.
“Avdo Babaramo still hasn’t found his son’s body,” she said in a less excited voice. “The poor man is still on the road, looking everywhere. But now we’re all on the road.” Xhexho raised her voice and added: “Like wandering Jews!”
Her nasal voice droned on. Then, obviously worn out, she spoke more softly.
“What can I say? We left home like crazy people. Men and women loaded down with bundles, cradles, bowls, and the infirm, and our dogs and cats ran off without a second thought, like the wretched of the earth. And Dino Çiço among them, with his plane on his back.”
“With his plane?”
“Yes, dear friends, with his plane on his back! His family followed along behind, begging him to leave it in the house, saying he wouldn’t be able to take the weight and would slow them all down. But he wouldn’t hear of leaving it behind. He wouldn’t risk the Germans getting hold of it for anything in the world.”
Grandmother’s absence became painfully clear. Only she could do anything to keep Xhexho from going on and on. Nothing my mother or any of the other women could say had any effect on Xhexho’s unstoppable rant.
Xhexho sensed this and savoured her position.
“So there you are, my dears. We have all been swept up by a miserable fate. You’ll never be able to call me a Cassandra again! When men got into planes, Xhexho said nothing. She was downcast, but kept her trap shut. But now we have a plane that has got onto a man! No, no and no! That is a monstrosity which drives me to distraction!”
Egged on by her own eloquence, she raised her voice and her rhetoric to its highest pitch.
“Oh Lord, what have we done to make You harry us so? You dropped bombs on us. You made our beards grow. You caused black water to rise from the earth . . . What tribulations will you visit on us next?”
At the climax of her declamation, Xhexho vanished into thin air, as she always did.
For the first time in my life I thought she was right. I had long suspected that everything was about to go upside down. Had our own cellar not challenged the main room of the house? Had not the beard destined for Jur Qosja’s chin gone and planted itself on the face of Çeço Kaili’s daughter? Not to mention those resentful cows that had got their own back on the aeroplanes . . .
I could not stop thinking about Dino Çiço tramping through the night with his plane on his back. But the two of them had probably fallen out. Their relationship must have soured, like everything else these days.
I ran outside hoping to see him and his plane. It was cold. There weren’t many refugees. The few I saw could hardly move. I recognised two boys from the neighbourhood.
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
“Over there, in that little shack. What about you?”
“In this one here.”
We didn’t use the word “house”.
Finally I found Ilir. He had looked haggard ever since Isa’s death. I told him what Xhexho had said about Maksut. His eyes flashed with hatred.
“Listen,” he said to me. “When we go back to the city, we’ll kill Maksut, OK?”
“OK. There’s an old dagger at home that belonged to my grandfather.”
“Is it sharp enough?”
“Yes, it’s really sharp. It even has Turkish writing on the handle.”
“We’ll ambush him at night on his way home. I’ll jump on his neck and you get him with the knife.”
I thought for a while.
“It’s better if we invite him to dinner and kill him in his sleep, like Macbeth did,” I said. “Then we’ll salt his head.”
“And roll it down the stairs so the right eye pops out,” Ilir added. “But wait a minute. How can we invite him to dinner? Where?”
We started making very intricate plans. We were almost happy. Qani Kekezi passed alongside us. His plump and ruddy face looked smooth, but closer examination revealed some fresh scratches.
“The poor village cats are in for it now,” Ilir said.
I laughed. I was happy to have my friend back. It seemed to me that Isa’s death had made him grow up and leave me behind. But now we were together again.
While plotting our assassination we had walked to the outskirts of the village without realising it. The ground was covered with frost. All around us, trees whose names we didn’t know, birds we were seeing for the first time, irregular, scattered haystacks, the crumbling earth softened by the ploughshare, cowpats — everything was as strange to us
as it was incomprehensible. Some village children with soft eyes looked at us timidly. I looked at Ilir’s thin, drawn face and his untidy bush of hair and it occurred to me that I must look more or less the same. The peasant kids started following us.
“Did you see how frightened of us they were?” asked Ilir.
“We’re frightening.”
“We’re killers!” I said.
I took out the lens and put it over my eye.
“Thou canst not say I did it: never shake thy gory locks at me!” I thundered, addressing a half-eaten haystack.
“What’s all that?” Ilir asked.
“That’s what we’ll say when Maksut’s ghost appears after the murder.”
“That’ll be formidable,” Ilir said.
The village children who followed us were shivering. Now we were walking on a ploughed field.
“Why is the earth soft? What did they do to it?” Ilir asked, trying to sound angry.
I shrugged.
“Peasant work,” I said.
“Work with no rhyme or reason.”
“None whatsoever.”
“Let’s plan the murder instead,” said Ilir.
The peaceful plateau, which lay on a gentle incline, was exposed to the winter winds. The haystacks scattered here and there added to the impression of calm. We walked among them talking about the details of our murder. Without thinking, we soon found ourselves on the main road. Peasants and mules mingled with the refugees. Other people were coming from the opposite direction. A sallow-looking woman struggled to stay astride a mule.
“Not far from here there’s a monastery where they cure the sick,” Ilir said.
We turned back towards the village. We were following a group of refugees who, according to what we heard them saying, were coming back from the monastery, which they had gone to visit just out of curiosity. Others were coming towards us, on their way there.
“Where are you going?” someone in the crowd walking along with us asked them.
“To the monastery,” they answered, “to see the hand that works miracles.”
“Some miracles! We’re just on our way back from there. You know what it is? It’s the English pilot’s arm.”