They now judged Mane Voco’s son in more or less the same terms as they had applied to the breeze-block house. “Why, dreadful boy, do you want to see the world except as it is? Why do you rebel?”
They discussed the matter endlessly, and I listened carefully, because what Mane Voco’s son had done had something to do with a secret of mine. I too had put one of those accursed lenses to my eye more than once. I had found it in Grandmother’s old chest, and playing with it one day I happened to raise it to one eye. I was astonished. Suddenly the world around me fell into place. The edges of things suddenly got sharper and brighter. I sat for a long time holding the lens over one eye and closing the other, looking out at the wide view from our house. It was amazing, as if an invisible hand had wiped clean a misted window that had covered the world, revealing it as something new and bright. Despite that, I didn’t like it. I was used to looking at the world through a cloud of haze, so that the edges of things ran together and separated freely, not according to any fixed rules. No one, I reckoned, asked the roofs, streets or telegraph poles to account for slight shifts from their starting positions. But through that round glass the world looked stiff, measured and mean, granting objects no more qualities than those they already had. It was like a house where everything — oil, flour, even water — was measured to the last drop and nothing was ever left over or accidentally spilled.
All the same, the lens came in very handy at the movies. Before I went I would wash it and put it in my pocket. When the lights went out I would take it out, close my left eye, and put it over my right. When I got home no one could understand why one of my eyes was a little red. One night, two gypsy kids I’d taken with me to see the film got very curious when I took out the lens. During the film I heard them whispering to each other “D’you reckon he be a spy?”
“The end of the world,” Kako Pino said again.
But they soon went back to their usual boring conversation about the cost of living. I wasn’t interested, so I started wondering again why people see with their eyes and not with their fingers, cheeks or some other part of the body. Eyes, after all, were only pieces of flesh from our bodies. How does the world manage to get in through an eye? Why don’t people blow up from the great mass of light, space and colour that constantly pours into them through their eyes? I had racked my brains for a long time over the enigma of sight. I was obsessed by the mystery of blindness, which I feared more than anything else. This fear may have come from the fact that most of the curses I used to hear had to do with eyes. Once our toilet was blocked, and the dark hole of the drain looked to me like a blind eye. That must be how eyes get stopped up, I said to myself. The flow of light, with all those sights dissolved in it, can’t get through the eye sockets, and that must be what blindness is. Vehip Qorri, the town poet, must have just that kind of liquid blackness in his eye sockets.
Sight. What an inexplicable thing! I turn my head towards the lower sections of the city and my eyes, like two great pumps, start sucking in the light with all those images of roofs, chimneys, a few lone fig trees, streets, passers-by. Can they feel me sucking them in? I close my eyes. The flow stops. I open them. It starts again.
After the stormy night, the roofs seemed to have come unusually close to one another. They were soaking wet. The stone slates formed an infuriatingly monotonous expanse as far as I could see. The light glanced off them, casually. Down below, streets and alleys twisted and turned, with only a handful of people to be seen on them: a few peasants on horseback, a priest, old women dressed in black, out visiting.
Varosh Street crept painfully uphill alongside the gullies, while on its right Gjobek Street plunged down steeply, skirting the Italian nuns’ cardboard house as if it were plague-stricken, and then crashed into Varosh Street, a collision from which both streets emerged crooked. Further on, Fools’ Alley, blind and obstinate, lurched towards genteel Gymnasium Street, which dodged it at the last minute with a clever twist. Then Fools’ Alley, as if looking for trouble with other streets, tumbled around the district with sudden, sharp turns.
I was watching out for Ilir, my best friend, Mane Voco’s younger son, to come round the corner. When I saw him I ran downstairs and into the street.
“Let’s go over to the slaughterhouse,” he said. “We’ve never done that before.”
“The slaughterhouse? What for?”
“What do you mean, what for? To watch. To see how they kill the cows and sheep.”
“What’s to see at the slaughterhouse? We’ve seen the butcher shops. Carcasses hanging on hooks, some with their legs up, some with them down.”
“Butchers’ shops are one thing,” Ilir said, “but slaughtering is another. There are no tiresome customers haggling over the price of meat. You can even see them kill bulls. All they do there is kill animals.”
“Slaughter” was one of the words being bandied about more and more often, but its meaning still seemed rather vague.
“Last week,” Ilir went on, “a bull escaped from the meat-packers and ran wild. They all chased after him and hit him with anything they could get their hands on until finally he fell off the steps and broke his back. A lot of grown-ups go just to watch.”
To be honest, the places in the city where you could see anything of interest could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Apart from the movies, which were for children and the frivolous, there were only two places you might get to see a fight, usually on Sundays: the gypsy district and the square behind the mosque, where the porters divided up their earnings. Other fights were accidental and usually broke out in unpredictable places. And recently a lot of fights had not lived up to the pre-match invective. More than once I had heard onlookers complain, “Bah, in our day they knew how to break bones,” and then walk off disappointed. Only the Gypsies and the porters really fought hard and kept almost all the promises they’d made in the run-up to the fight.
The slaughterhouse seemed to be a new amusement, so I didn’t argue.
As we trudged up the cobblestone street, we saw Javer and Maksut, Nazo’s boy, coming down. They weren’t talking to each other and looked cross. We didn’t say anything either. Maksut had always had eyes that bulged out of their sockets, and I didn’t like looking at him. One day I heard a woman arguing with a neighbour, and when she screamed “May your eyes burst from their sockets” I thought of Nazo’s boy right away, and now, every time I saw him I felt that his eyes might pop out and roll along the cobblestones and I might accidentally step on them and burst them open.
“What’s the matter?” asked Ilir. “What’s the frown for?”
“It’s Nazo’s boy. When I see him it turns my stomach.”
“Isa doesn’t like him either,” Ilir said. “Whenever his name is mentioned, Isa frowns just the way you did.”
“Really? So Isa thinks his eyes are going to pop out too?”
“Are you crazy?”
I let it drop.
There was a man coming towards us down the street, draped in a blanket, carrying a lump of bread wrapped in a piece of cloth. It was Llukan, whom people called The Shadow.
“So, you’re out of jail!” a passer-by said to him.
“Yes, I’m out.”
“When are you going back?”
“And why shouldn’t I go back? Prisons are made for men.”
Since the days of the Turks, Llukan had been in prison dozens of times for petty crimes. Everyone always remembered him trudging down the street from the citadel in just that way, with a brown blanket over his shoulders and in his hand some meagre victuals wrapped in a handkerchief.
“So, Llukan, you’re out again!” someone else said.
“Sure am, friend.”
“You could have left the blanket up there. You’ll be back soon enough.”
Llukan responded with a flood of insults. The further away he went, the louder he shouted.
We walked towards the centre of town. The streets were full of alien sounds. It was market day. Peasants were converging
on the square from all over. Horseshoes clacked, slid and sparked on the cobblestones. On the hills villagers drew their horses by the bridles, their sweating, panting bodies merging with those of their animals as they dragged them upwards.
The windows of the great houses were shut tight on both sides of the street. Behind them the wives of the agas sat on soft cushions and held their noses, felt faint, and nearly vomited, complaining about the stench of the peasants wafting in from the street. Plump, with white round faces, they rarely ventured out into the city. They protested that the closing of the border with Greece had kept them from getting the eels from Lake Ioannina that were so good for their rheumatism. They found the peasants repugnant and never mentioned them without first muttering “excuse the expression,” as they did when saying the word “lavatory”. In fact, they were quite dismayed by the times they lived in, and sat in rows on their cushions sipping coffee endlessly and yearning for the return of the monarchy.
Some Italian soldiers stood guard at the cinema, watching people go by. We carried on up the street. The shop signs stretched out one after another. Tinsmith. Barber. Addis Ababa Café. Saddles. Vinegar. And a poster that began with the words “I order” in big letters.
We walked on. Now the slaughterhouse was near. You still couldn’t hear the bleating of the sheep or smell the blood, and there was no sign, but somehow it was clear that the slaughterhouse was nearby. The silent cobblestones and deserted street corner told us that we were close to it. We started up a slippery wet stairway, not at all like a set of ordinary stone steps. It was very high and its risers bore none of the carvings or decorations we were used to, not even simple ones. It was a hard climb. There was a tomb-like silence at the top. Not a sound made by man or beast. What were they doing up there? Finally we arrived. Everything was ready. The men standing around waiting nonchalantly were well dressed, with white shirts, stiff collars and neckties. Some of them wore soft felt Borsalino hats. One had an old-fashioned top hat. He looked at his watch.
We heard a splash of water. A man was watering the ground with a black rubber hose. Another man with a broom swept the water into the gutters at the side. Water splattered near our feet. We looked down and stepped back, but it was too late. The ground was full of blood. Everything must have been done before we got there. But no one made a move to leave, so they must have been getting ready for another killing. The water foamed over the broad puddles of blood, washing them from the cement pavement, and carrying them away before they could harden.
Then we saw everything. The rectangular yard was ringed on all sides by a one-storey building, also in cement. A hundred iron hooks hung from the ceiling. Below there were sheep, and among them peasants in thick black wool cloaks bending over the backs of the animals, clutching them by their wool. They too were waiting.
The group of spectators seemed in no hurry. Two of them had taken out their strings of beads and were slowly ticking them off. I had never seen them before. The one with the top hat looked at his watch. Apparently it was time.
Suddenly we saw the slaughterers, with their white coats and chapped, sinewy hands. They were standing near the fountain at the centre of the square, and they remained motionless even when the peasants began pushing the animals towards them from the stalls. There was a muffled rumble as thousands of hooves scuffed the ground. It was a low, rhythmic noise and it went on for a long time. When the first animals drew near the fountain where the slaughterers were waiting, we suddenly saw the gleam of the knives. Then it began.
I felt a pain in my right hand. Ilir’s nails were sinking into my flesh. I felt sick.
“Let’s go.”
Neither of us actually spoke those words, but we sought the stairs blindly, with our hands over our eyes.
At last we found them, ran down as fast as we could, and were off. The farther we got from the slaughterhouse, the livelier the streets were. People were going home from the market, laden with produce. Others were just on their way there. Did they have any idea what was going on in the slaughterhouse?
“Where have you been?” a voice suddenly thundered, seeming to roll from the sky. We looked up. It was Mane Voco, Ilir’s father, standing in front of us. He was holding a loaf of bread and a bunch of fresh onions.
“Where have you been?” he asked again. “Why are you so pale?”
“We were up there . . . at the slaughterhouse.”
“The slaughterhouse?” The onions writhed in his hand like snakes. “What were you doing at the slaughterhouse?”
“Nothing, Papa, just watching.”
“Watching what?”
The onions stopped moving; their stalks hung limply. “I don’t want you going up there again,” Mane Voco said in a milder tone. His fingers searched for something in his vest pocket. Finally he came up with half a lek. “Here,” he said, “go to the movies, both of you.”
He left. Gradually we recovered from the shock. The sights of the market comforted us as we walked through it. On counters, in baskets, sacks and unfolded kerchiefs lay a world of green that couldn’t be found in our part of the city: cabbage, onions, lettuce, milk, fresh eggs, cheese, parsley. And in the midst of it all, the clinking of coins. Questions and answers. “How much?” “How much!” Murmurings. Curses. “May you drop dead before you eat them!” “This’ll pay for your doctor.” So much poison flowed over the lettuces and cabbages! Where worms crawled, there crept death . . . “And how much is that?”
We walked on. At the far end of the market an Italian soldier sat playing a harmonica and making eyes at the girls. We were back at the cinema. There was no film that day.
We went home. On my way upstairs, I heard my youngest aunt laughing. She was sitting on a chair, jiggling one leg and laughing loudly. Xhexho looked over to Grandmother two or three times, but she only pursed her lips as if to say, “What can you do, Xhexho? That’s how girls act these days.”
My father came in. “Did you hear?” my aunt said to him at once. “They took a shot at the King of Italy in Tirana.”
“I heard at the coffee house,” my father said. “The assassin had hidden his pistol in a bouquet of roses.”
“Really?”
“They’re going to hang him tomorrow. He’s only seventeen.”
“Oh, the poor boy,” Grandmother sighed.
“The end of the world.”
“Too bad he didn’t get him,” my aunt shouted out. “The roses got in his way.”
“Where do you hear such things?” my mother asked in a tone of reproach.
“Here and there,” was all my aunt would say.
Xhexho adjusted the kerchief on her head, said goodbye to Grandmother and Kako Pino, and left. Kako Pino left soon after. My aunt stayed on for a while.
I went up the two flights. There was still some activity in the streets. The last people were going home from the market. Maksut, Nazo’s boy, was carrying a cabbage that looked like a severed head. He seemed to be smiling broadly.
The peasants had started packing up. Soon their black cloaks would darken the streets — Varosh, Palorto, Hazmurat, Çetemel, Zall — and the highway and bridge too, as they made their way back to the villages that we never saw. The city, like a tethered horse, would swallow up the greenery they had brought. But all that soft green, that meadow dew and tinkle of cowbells, was not enough to soften the city’s harshness. They were leaving now, their black cloaks dancing in the twilight. The cobblestones flashed their last sparks of anger under the iron horseshoes. It was getting late. The peasants had to hurry home to their villages. They never even turned to look back at the city, alone now with its stones. A muffled ringing rolled down the hill from the citadel. Every evening the guards checked the window bars, striking them rhythmically with iron rods.
I saw the last of the peasants crossing the bridge over the river and I thought about the strange division of people into peasants and city-dwellers. What were the villages like? Where were they and why didn’t we ever see them? To tell the truth I didn??
?t really believe the villages existed. It seemed to me that the peasants were only pretending to go to their villages, while actually they weren’t going anywhere, just crouching behind the scattered bush-covered hillocks around the city, waiting out the long week for another market day, when once again they would fill the streets with greens, eggs and the tinkling of bells.
I wondered how it was that it had occurred to people to pile up so many stones and so much wood to make all those walls and roofs and then call that great heap of streets, roofs, chimneys and yards a city. But even less comprehensible were the words “occupied city”, which came up more and more in the grown-ups’ conversations. Our city was occupied. Which meant that there were foreign soldiers in it. That much I knew, but there was something else that bothered me. I couldn’t see how a city could be unoccupied. And anyway, even if our city wasn’t occupied, wouldn’t there be these same streets, the same fountains, roofs and people? Wouldn’t I still have the same mother and father and wouldn’t Xhexho, Kako Pino, Aunt Xhemo and all the same people still come to visit?
“You can’t understand what a free city means, because you’re growing up in slavery,” Javer told me one day when I asked him about it. “It’s hard to explain it to you, believe me, but in a free city, everything will be so different, so beautiful, that at first we’ll all be dazzled.”
“Will we get a lot to eat?”
“Of course we’ll eat. But there’ll be lots of other things besides eating. So many things that I don’t even know them all myself.”
From time to time the sun shone through the clouds. The rain fell in sparse drops that seemed to smile secretly. The wooden door opened and Kako Pino went out into the street. Skinny, dressed all in black, holding the red bag with her instruments under her arm, she set out nimbly down the street. The rain fell lightly, joyfully. There was a wedding somewhere, and Kako Pino was going. Her wizened hands, drawing various objects out of her bag — tweezers, hairpins, thread, boxes — decorated the brides’ faces with star-like dots, cypress branches and signs of the zodiac, all floating in the white mystery of powder.