Chronicle in Stone

  “A shooting star,” Margarita said softly. “Did you see it?”

  I nodded.

  To tell the truth, a star falling from the sky made about as much impression on me as a button falling off a coat, for Margarita’s thick hair was spread across my neck and her hair, her whole body, had a subtle fragrance I had never noticed on Mamma, Grandma or any of my aunts. Nor was it like any of the other smells I liked best, including the aroma of my favourite dishes.

  It had grown cooler, and Grandpa got up from the chaise longue earlier now than on summer evenings. Everyone else got up after he did, the gypsies would put their violins back in their cases, and for a moment there would be silence. Then there would be a flash of lightning in the distance and Grandfather would say, “It’s going to rain tomorrow.”

  “Good night,” the Gypsies would say on their way back to their shack.

  “Good night,” Margarita’s husband would say, on the rare occasions he stayed there.

  “Good night,” Margarita would reply in her warm voice.

  “Good night,” they would all answer in turn.

  I would say “Good night” too, last of all, sleepy as I was. Then the old steps would creak for a while until calm and sleep settled over everything.

  Then the ceilings of the house came to life. The movements of mice, timid and sporadic at first, became bolder and more rapid until an unchained horde thundered from one corner of the attic to another. As the minutes passed, my mind turned the mice into the hordes of Genghis Khan, which I had seen in a film. Now they were gathering somewhere in the depths of Asia (Asia was Margarita’s ceiling). Getting ready for battle. A brief silence. Genghis Khan must be addressing his troops. He extends his hand toward the borders of Europe (the hall ceiling). The hordes move off. The commotion mounts, the ceilings groan. They cross the frontiers of our continent. The noise builds to a crescendo. Right above our heads. Terror. Carnage. Then the horde veers off. A messenger brings the news from the depths of Asia. A tribe has rebelled. The horde rushes back whence it came. Crosses the border again. Now they are back in Asia. A terrible slaughter begins. Margarita lies sleeping beneath the battlefield. Genghis Khan ought to end the hostilities. Doesn’t he realise Margarita is sleeping? But he’s not interested. In war there is no sleep, he shouts. And the battle rages on.

  In the morning Grandma put her hand on my forehead.

  “You talked in your sleep last night,” she said. “You don’t have a fever, do you?”

  “No.”

  It was my fourth and last day at Grandfather’s. After breakfast, I said good-bye and left.

  On my way home, carrying a big piece of meat pie and Margarita’s name (the pie had been carefully wrapped in paper by Grandma; I’m not sure where I held Margarita’s name), I saw some school kids going up Varosh Street. They looked terribly upset. Their teacher Qani Kekezi must have dissected another cat in the classroom.

  Nothing had changed at home or in the neighbourhood, but something was going on out on the plain across the river. The first thing I noticed was that the cattle that usually grazed there were gone. The haystacks were being taken away too. Trucks crisscrossed the plain. Eventually I began to see more clearly what was happening. A new, completely unknown word was cropping up here and there, made up of two other words: “air” and “drome” (we knew that “drome” meant “road” in Greek). Now everything was clear: across the river, in the plain at the foot of the city, an aerodrome was under construction.

  Passers-by often stopped in the streets and alleys, turned towards the river, and gazed pensively into the distance.

  A new guest had arrived. An unusual guest, lying flat at the city’s door, almost invisible. If it weren’t for the absence of the cows and haystacks, you might not have even noticed it was there. For my part, I was sorry the cows had gone. I missed the cows.

  “Why is it called ‘aerodrome’?”

  Javer looked at me thoughtfully with his grey eyes.

  “Because it is the place where airplanes fly up into the sky.”

  A guest. For better or for worse? It had crept in noiselessly. Thousands of astonished eyes observed it without fully realising that it was there. Now, stretched out over the whole length of the plain, incomprehensible and threatening, it perplexed everyone.

  “War preparations.”

  “Maybe. But it could also be to defend the city.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s a sign that war is on the way.”

  “Could be. All the same, a lot of people have got work there.”

  “The money they earn is a loan from death.”

  That was an exchange between two people I didn’t know.

  There was more and more talk of the aerodrome. And it was only when they started calling it “aerodrome” that people realised that until then the plain had had no name. Apparently, it had had to wait for the planes to have its christening.

  FIVE

  When I got back from Babazoti’s, I sensed that the magic spells over our neighbourhood had lost almost all of their force. The workmen had also finished cleaning our cistern. Finally free of the powers of darkness, it was now being filled with fresh water, which gurgled joyfully along the eaves. I leaned over the mouth of the cistern and said, “A-oo.” Although filled with new and unknown water, it answered me at once. The same voice, just a little fainter. This meant that all the water in the world, whichever part of the sky it fell from, spoke the same language.

  Apart from the fact that the cows no longer grazed in the field across the river, nothing worrisome had happened, except for the sudden disappearance of Kako Pino’s cat.

  She was just now at her window talking about it with Bido Sherifi’s wife, who was leaning out of her own window, her hands covered with flour.

  “I tell you, he’s the one who took your cat, that cursed teacher won’t leave a single one alive. He’s the one who took it.”

  “Of course. Who else? It’s the end of the world.”

  Obviously they were talking about Qani Kekezi.

  “That’s what education does for you, Kako Pino. More harm than good. I ask you: a cat-thief!”

  “Yes, he’s gone completely crazy,” said Kako Pino. “The poor cats are afraid to set foot outside any more. A topsy-turvy world we live in!”

  “But that’s not all,” said Bido Sherifi’s wife. “Wait until he starts coming after people with that knife. Have you ever seen eyes like his? Blood-red they are.”

  Bido Sherifi’s wife shook her hands, raising a cloud of flour that caught the sun and glowed as if it was on fire.

  “The end of the world,” said Kako Pino. “Can’t tell who’s worse than the others.”

  The shutters on both windows closed, ending the conversation. I had nothing to do, and sat watching the street. A cat was jumping from roof to roof, then came down and crossed the street. Nazo’s son, Maksut, was coming home from the market. He carried another severed head under his arm. Whose head? I couldn’t stand it, so I looked away.

  I tried to picture Margarita, but was surprised to find that I couldn’t recall her face very well. She had come into my thoughts two or three times. Did she realise that I dragged her name with me around the house, banging it on the stone, catching it on nails? Did she feel no pain from all that?

  The day before I had talked to Ilir about it.

  “At Grandfather’s, there’s now a beautiful married woman,” I told him.

  He wasn’t impressed and didn’t answer. A little later I mentioned Margarita to him again. Again he showed no interest, and only asked me, “Does she have pink cheeks?”

  “Yes,” I answered, somewhat perplexed. “Pink.”

  Actually, I didn’t remember what colour her cheeks were. The moment Ilir asked about her, Margarita’s face suddenly seemed misty. A day passed and the image was even less clear. I was forgetting her.

  The third time she came to mind, I mentioned her to Ilir again. He stared at me. This time he’s going to say something, I thoug
ht, feeling happy about it already.

  “You know what?” Ilir said. “Last night I stole my mother’s garters to make a slingshot. Do me a favour and hold onto them for a few days. I’m afraid she’ll find them.”

  I stuffed the garters into my pocket.

  There was no one in the street. I remembered that Javer had promised to give me a book. I left and went to his place.

  Javer was alone, smoking a cigarette and whistling to himself.

  “You promised you would give me a book,” I said.

  “Si, signor,” he said. “Here are the books. Pick one.”

  There was a shelf of books on the wall. I walked over and looked at them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had never seen so many books.

  “Look,” Javer explained, “this is the name of the author, the one who wrote the book, and this is the title. But I’m afraid none of these books will really interest you.”

  I took a bunch of books off the shelves, one by one. Most of the titles were meaningless to me.

  “I’ll take this one,” I said. “The author is a man called Jung.”

  Javer burst out laughing.

  “You want to read Jung?”

  “Why not? He writes about magic, doesn’t he?”

  Javer laughed again. I was irritated and turned to leave, but he stopped me.

  “Look,” he said, “take another one instead. I can barely understand Jung myself. Anyway, he didn’t write in Albanian.”

  I looked through the books again and plunged into reading. Javer kept on smoking and humming. Finally I found one that had on its opening page the words “ghost”, “witches”, “first murderer” and even “second murderer”.

  “OK, I’ll take this one,” I said, without even looking at the title.

  “Really? Macbeth? It’ll be too hard for you.”

  “I want it.”

  “Then take it,” said Javer. “But don’t lose it.”

  I left almost at a run, went home and pushed the door open. I was amazed to have a book in my hands.

  There were all kinds of things in our big house: copper cauldrons, plates of all sizes, bread bins, mortars, iron hooks, beams, steel balls (one was supposed to be a cannonball), barrels, chests with dates painted on them, all sorts of buckets, pitchers, and ewers, a rifle with a butt inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a whole clutter of strange old things including a trough for slaking lime — but not a single book. Apart from a torn and yellowing manual of dream interpretation, there wasn’t a single sheet of printed paper in the house.

  I closed the door and scurried upstairs at top speed. There was no one in the living room. I sat by the window, opened the book, and started to read. I read very slowly, and hardly understood anything. I read up to a certain point, then started over again from the beginning. Little by little I began to understand what I was reading. My head was spinning. Outside it was getting dark. The letters started dancing around, trying to jump out of line. My eyes hurt.

  After dinner I went to the kerosene lamp and opened the book again. The letters looked frightening in the yellow lamplight.

  “That’s enough reading,” my mother decreed. “Go to bed.”

  “You sleep, I’m going to read.”

  “No,” she said. “We don’t have enough kerosene.”

  I couldn’t get to sleep. The book lay nearby. Silent. A thin object on the divan. It was so strange . . . Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Decomposed into little black marks. Hair, eyes, legs and hands, voices, nails, beards, knocks on doors, walls, blood, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The h’s, r’s, o’s, t’s gallop over the page. They gather together to create a horse or a hailstorm. Then gallop away again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a ghost. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping. Without end.

  I slept so fitfully I thought I had a fever. Through the sleep I could just barely feel a steady laboured breathing coming from outside, a painful shifting of streets and neighbourhoods. The city seemed to be scratching itself in slow motion. It was a pain of transformation. The streets swelled, twisted. The walls of houses grew thick and turned into the battlements of Scottish castles. Fearsome keeps loomed up here and there.

  In the morning the city looked worn out from its trials. It had changed. But not that much.

  I spent almost all day reading.

  Night fell again. I looked outside at the walls and buildings. My mind was on fire. All the normal limits on the shape of things seemed to have been suspended. They could turn into anything now.

  Aqif Kashahu was trudging down Varosh Street with his two boys. He turned into our street. Kako Pino stuck her head out of the window, then went back inside. Bido Sherifi’s great double gate was open. Aqif Kashahu was going towards it. It was obvious: this must be his last night. Bido Sherifi himself came to the gate to greet his distinguished guest. Bido’s wife leaned out of her window for a moment, then disappeared. Kako Pino did the same. The signs were clear. Aqif Kashahu and his heirs went inside. The great gates swung shut with a metallic clatter. Flourish.

  “Why do you stay shut up in the house all day? Go out and play with your friends.”

  “Ssh, Grandmother.”

  I was waiting to hear Aqif Kashahu’s death scream. It must have all been over by now. I heard a knock. Then another. Bido Sherifi’s wife appeared in the window. She was trying to wash the blood from her hands. She shook them. A cloud of flour drifted down. The flour was red with blood.

  Grandmother put her hand on my forehead.

  Another flourish of trumpets came from downstairs.

  “Go and see the big cauldron they’re taking out of the basement,” said Grandmother. “I don’t have the heart to watch.”

  For several days they had been talking about selling the big copper cauldron. Now the dealer had come and the big cauldron, as it left the house, was chiming farewell. Trumpets and alarum within.

  Night had fallen. Again the city sank into a darkness peopled with keeps, foreign names and owls.

  “That book has addled your brain,” Grandmother said. “Go to Grandfather’s tomorrow to clear your mind.”

  “All right, I’ll go.”

  Margarita . . .

  I was exhausted. My head sank onto the windowsill.

  The next day I set out for Grandfather’s. When I passed the Bridge of Brawls and turned into Citadel Street the city was suddenly freed of its keeps and night-owls. I was almost running for the last part of the way.

  “Where’s Margarita?” I asked Grandma, who was kneading dough for bread rolls.

  “What do you want with Margarita?” she asked. “You’d do better to start by asking how Grandfather is, or your aunts and uncles, instead of starting right out with ‘Where’s Margarita?’”

  “She’s not gone, is she?”

  “No, she’s still here,” Grandma said in a mocking tone, muttering to herself as she kept on kneading dough.

  I wandered around the house for a while and then, since I had nothing else to do, I went up to the roof where I liked to sit for hours on the light-coloured, slanting slates near the old dormer. People looked different from the roof. I was watching a half-rotten telegraph pole when I remembered the box I had filled with Grandfather’s cigarette butts and had hidden in the attic, along with a Turkish book and a box with two or three matches. I really wanted to smoke on the roof, holding in my lap the Turkish book with its sickly, yellowing pages.

  I was thinking about lighting a cigarette, so I crawled to the dormer, stuck my arm through the pieces of dusty broken glass, and took out the book first, then the box of tobacco, and finally the matchbox. The cover of the book was mouldy and the pages, which had got wet, were stuck together. I tore off a piece of the back cover and though the tobacco looked a little mouldy too, I rolled a cigarette as well as
I could, took it in my mouth and tried to light it. But the match was wet and wouldn’t light.

  I put everything back on a blackened beam in the attic, and as I was shaking the dust off my arm, I got another idea.

  The old attic was just above Margarita’s room. Once it had provided light for the small hallway, but when part of the hallway was turned into a room, the attic became useless; it didn’t light anything any more.

  The idea that I could see what Margarita was doing shook me out of my lethargy. To be safe, I pulled out the fragments of broken glass still hanging in the window frame, then put one foot through and onto a beam and slipped in under the roof. I started climbing downwards, clinging to the blackened beams that crisscrossed in every direction. A minute later I was on the ceiling of her room. I moved slowly and noiselessly, crawling on my stomach until I came to a crack. I peered through.

  The room was empty.

  Where could Margarita be? On the blanket she used as a bedspread some pieces of delicate underwear were neatly folded. I heard a splash and realised that she was taking a bath.

  I waited a long time for her to come out of the bath. She was all wrapped up in a big bathrobe, her hair hanging down loose, still wet. She went to the mirror, picked up a comb, and started to run it through her hair. She sang softly to herself:

  In far-away Holland

  In the land of windmills . . .

  Still singing, she took her powder-box from the dressing table and undid her bathrobe. Puffy clouds wafted from her cleavage and her armpits as if she was an extraterrestrial being.

  When she took off her robe entirely and leaned over to take her underwear from the bed, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the lace on her body was like white butterflies perched in arcs across her breasts, hips and the tops of her thighs, like those white butterflies of the fields that come out in the spring and that I had chased so often without ever catching one.