But the indifference of the adults didn’t bother me much. I stayed there at the door and waited impatiently for Ilir to come by. Only a few days before, we had had a long argument about whose house was stronger. We often used to make bets of that kind with each other. Just before that we had been fighting about how far the king could throw a stone. I said he could throw a stone as far as Holy Trinity hill, while Ilir was adamant that he couldn’t throw it further than the riverbank. At the very most, as far as the bridge, but certainly no further.
Who knows how long this argument would have gone on if we hadn’t acquired a new topic for our squabbles! We fought even harder over the relative strengths of our houses, and could have gone on with that fight for a very long time. We might have insulted each other, or even turned to fists or stones, if those strangers hadn’t shown up that fine morning and put up the plaque with those marvellous words: “Air-raid shelter for 90 persons”.
Probably out of spite, Ilir never showed up. He must have heard about the plaque and sneaked home through the alley.
I waited a long time, then finally got bored and went in. I went straight downstairs to the cellar and stood looking respectfully at its thick walls, which hadn’t been whitewashed in ages.
Until then the cellar had never been an important part of the house. We used it to store coal or to slake lime. Compared to the main room two flights up from the ground the cellar was a kind of scullery maid. This main living room had six big fine windows as tall as my father, and a grainy, mottled ceiling of carved wood. A lot of housekeeping went on in this room. My mother would wash and scrub the floorboards until they shone like wax. The curtains on the windows were white with lace borders, and the room was ringed by low wooden ledges covered with thin mattresses, where old women would sit when they came to visit, sipping their coffee and making sage pronouncements. It was easy to see why the other rooms, even the hallway, were jealous of the main room. Envy could be detected in their constricted windows with their sills out of true and in their hunched, narrow doorways.
But everything changed the day the bombs started falling. The windows in the main room were shattered. The room got upset and lost its looks, while the old cellar, tranquil and kind, cared little about what was going on outside.
I felt sorry for the main room, now abandoned by everyone. During the bombing, while the thick walls of the cellar didn’t even vibrate, I felt bad for the main room all alone up there, for I knew it was trembling, shaking all over. I thought of the room as a lady of great beauty now suffering terrible anguish, her nerves strained, while the cellar was an old crone, deaf but tough. As the living room lost its status, the cellar was becoming the most honoured part of the house. It was as if our house had simply been turned upside down.
I would sometimes go up to the living room, now abandoned for good, and look out at the neighbouring houses, their roofs pierced with large holes through which the fine autumn rain now poured. I thought that after the first bombing the same upheaval must have happened in those houses as in ours. Perhaps the damp cellars and basements of the city had been waiting years for this day. Perhaps they had always felt that their time would come.
No doubt about it, these were hard times for the upper floors of the city. When it was built, the wood had cunningly had itself hoisted up top, leaving the stone to the foundations, cellars and cisterns. Down there in the half-darkness, the stone had to fight the rising damp and the groundwater, while the wood, nicely carved and carefully tended, adorned the upper floors. These were light, almost ethereal: the city’s dream, its caprice, its flight of fancy. Now the fancy had met its limit. After giving the upper floors such privileges, the city seemed to have changed its mind, and hurried to rectify the error. It had them covered with roofs of slate, as if to establish once and for all that here stone was king.
In any case, I liked this new age of cellar and basement. All over the city they were putting up metal plaques saying “Air-raid shelter for 15 persons” or “for 22 persons” or “for 35 persons”. But plaques saying “Air-raid shelter for 90 persons” were very rare. I was proud of our house. Suddenly it was the centre of the neighbourhood. It had really come to life. We left the gates open so people could come running in at the first sound of the siren. Some even came ahead of time and would sit for hours in the entrance hall leading to the cellar, eating, smoking and chatting.
The cellar was deep underground. A thick wall separated it from the cistern, part of which ran underneath it. A bit of light came in through a narrow slit cut into the foundation slightly above ground level. The air inside was now altogether stuffy.
Our house had become a public place, and not a day passed without some incident. Someone sprained an ankle running down the narrow steps too fast, others argued over room, someone else swore at all the others when they wouldn’t let him smoke because it might bother the people who were sick. But most of all they bickered over the best spots. Almost everyone brought along blankets, bedding, and even mattresses, and things got more and more crowded.
“What an age we live in,” Bido Sherifi grumbled. “Having to burrow underground like this!”
“These Italian swine will put us through a lot more before they’re through,” Mane Voco said.
“Not so loud! There may be spies here.”
“And the English! Why do they bomb the city instead of dropping their shells on the Italian barracks or the aerodrome?”
“I told you that damned aerodrome would bring the bombs.”
“Look, would you lower your voice?”
“Leave me alone,” Bido Sherifi replied. “All my life I’ve lowered my voice.”
Besides the usual neighbours, all kinds of other people came. Some I had never seen before, or at least not so close up. Qani Kekezi, squat and ruddy, cast his murky eyes here and there, as if looking for a cat. The women were afraid of him, especially Kako Pino. Lady Majnur, from the rich Kavo family, would go down the cellar stairs holding her nose. Two months earlier I had seen a peasant unloading a mule near the gate of her house. He was so filthy (he and the mule had probably both fallen in the mud) that his face and hands looked as if they were made of earth. From her window Lady Majnur was complaining to a neighbour: “He’s the only one who brings the grain he owes me. The other Christian yokels, pardon my language, have started cheating me.”
As for Xhexho, there was scarcely any sign of her. That happened from time to time. She would suddenly vanish. But no one worried much about these disappearances, any more than anyone was surprised when she reappeared.
Sometimes our cellar received chance visitors, passersby caught by the bombing or people visiting the neighbourhood. That was how the old artilleryman, Avdo Babaramo, arrived one day with his wife. He sat down near some old men who spent hours airing their views on world affairs in endless conversations in which all kinds of names of states, kings and governments came up. They also talked about Albania a lot. I listened curiously, racking my brain trying to understand exactly what was this Albania they were so worried about. Was it everything I saw around me: courtyards, streets, clouds, words, Xhexho’s voice, people’s eyes, boredom, or only a part of all that?
“In Smyrna one time,” the old artilleryman said, “a dervish asked me, ‘Which do you love more, your family or Albania?’ Albania, of course, I told him. A family you can make overnight. You walk out of a coffee house, run into a woman on the corner, take her to a hotel, and boom — wife and children. But you can’t make Albania overnight after a quick drink in a coffee house, can you? No, not in one night and not in a thousand and one nights either.”
“What a way to talk!” his wife said. “You’re getting senile. The older you get, the more you blabber on.”
“Oh shut up! As if you women knew anything about politics.”
“Yes, sir,” another old man added. “Albania is a complicated business all right.”
“Ex-treme-ly complicated. It sure is.”
Usually these conversations were inte
rrupted by the siren, and people rushed downstairs. Grandmother always went down last. The stairs creaked in protest at her footsteps. Hurry, Grandmother, hurry! But she never hurried. She always had some reason for being late. Sometimes she was still on the stairs when the first bombs exploded. When she heard the sound, she would make an impatient gesture as if shooing away a fly, and putting her hands over her ears, she would say, “Go on! Burst away.”
I would watch people heading for the stairs, anxious to see Çeço Kaili and his daughter. But the red-headed Çeço never came. He obviously preferred to brave the bombs at home rather than have people see his daughter’s beard. Old Xivo Gavo, who spent his days and nights writing his chronicle, didn’t come either. The old crones also stayed away. Aqif Kashahu, on the other hand, came with his two sons and his wife and daughter. He was as tall and stout as his daughter was small and frail. She never spoke, just cowered in a corner with a pensive, absent-minded air. Bido Macbeth Sherifi stared at Aqif Kashahu as if he were a ghost. Every time his wife came down into the cellar, she was shaking flour from her hands. And the flour was always red with blood. Aqif Kashahu’s ghost looked at everyone in turn. The cellar was full.
“Another air raid!”
The siren was always soft at first, as if awakening from a dream, but then its wailing got more and more raucous. Between two blasts was a valley of silence. A deep valley. Then the peaks of wailing again. Loud and undulating. Pit of silence. Another bout of wailing. Wailing and more wailing. Like trying to use a blanket to smother a piercing shriek that sought only to tear through it. A wild, savage shriek. The whole world is shrieking. Then the bombs. Very near. Then a sudden thunderbolt, an invisible hand turns the world upside down and blows out the two kerosene lamps. Black darkness. A scream rips the darkness. No one moves. We must be dead.
Silence. Then something moves. A noise. Like a match being struck. We are not dead. The match. The pale flame cuts streaks of light in the dark room. Everyone starts moving. All are alive. They light another lamp. But no. Someone is dead. Aqif Kashahu’s daughter’s thin arms droop lifelessly. Her head too. Her chestnut hair hangs motionless.
At last Aqif Kashahu lets out the scream I had long been expecting. But it’s not a cry of pain. A ferocious shriek. The girl’s head quivers. She turns round slowly, looking dazed. Her dangling arms contract. The boy in whose arms she was entwined during the bombing also stirs.
“Whore!” Aqif Kashahu screams.
His huge hand grabs her by the hair and he drags her towards the stairs. She tries to get up but falls down again. He hauls her to the middle of the cellar, and only at the foot of the stairs does she somehow manage to get up, scrambling on all fours. He still has hold of her hair.
We could hear the whistling of a dive-bomber outside, but Aqif Kashahu did not turn back. Dragging his daughter by the hair, he went out into the street at the height of the thunderous roar. And so they left under the falling bombs.
The boy had moved back into a corner and was looking at everyone like a trapped animal. I didn’t know him. He had light eyes and fair hair. His jaw trembled nervously. Suspiciously, as though expecting someone to jump him any minute, he crossed the cellar through a silence that wasn’t silent and went out.
An uproar broke out as soon as he had gone.
“Who in the world was that boy? Where did he come from? Woe betide us!”
“I’ve never seen him before.”
“God, that’s all we needed!”
“How shameful!”
“So Kashahu’s daughter wasn’t as pure as she made out!”
“Deplorable behaviour!”
“She was all over him, like a tart!”
“Like an Italian slut!”
The women pinched their cheeks in despair, adjusted the scarves on their heads, and clucked in indignation. The men stayed stock still.
“Love,” Javer muttered through clenched teeth.
Isa watched sadly.
The whole cellar seethed.
The incident was the talk of the town for a long time. People were obsessed by those two arms hanging lifelessly around the neck of a boy whom no one seemed to know. The two thin arms of the girl gradually turned into vicious talons that seized people by the throat, choking off their breath, suffocating them.
But just as from the corpse of one alarming event a new one always sprouts, so the talk about Aqif Kashahu’s daughter and her boyfriend was increasingly accompanied by comments about the strange sketches now being made by Dino Çiço, the town inventor.
Dino Çiço had long since given up sleep and was now encroaching on the sleep of others, poring over various calculations and sketches that no one in the region could make head or tail of. The rumour was that these figures had already attracted the interest of some Austrian or Japanese scientists (on this point there were conflicting reports), who had invited him to continue his work in their country, but he had refused. Subsequently Austrian or Portuguese scientists (again their nationality was uncertain) had tried to buy the patent for his invention, but he had declined their offer.
For a long time our townsman Dino Çiço had worked on his invention in complete secrecy. The exacting task had steadily paled his cheeks and reddened his eyes. The city could recall other men who had devoted their lives to calculations and sketches. Still others preferred direct experimentation. The teacher Qani Kekezi had stated more than once that he learned more from dissecting one cat than from reading any number of anatomy books.
Dino Çiço, however, was completely taken up with his own research. When construction of the aerodrome began at the edge of town, he temporarily laid his regular studies aside and threw himself into work on a new invention. He decided to build an aircraft himself. But this would be a special plane, powered not by an ordinary engine, but by a mechanism based on perpetual motion, or perpetuum mobile, as some people called it. Different people pronounced these latter words differently, and the question of pronunciation caused a few arguments, and even exchanges of blows and some broken teeth, which of course further altered the pronunciation of these strange words.
During the first bombing raids, discussion of Dino Çiço’s new invention, which would not only assure defence of the city but would also bring honour to its name, became more and more frequent, especially among the old and the very young. Aircraft that run without fuel are the most powerful of all. Fuel-free aircraft are fantastic. They can stay up in the air all day long. My aunt claims they can fly even longer. Can they stay up five days in a row? No, not five days. But why doesn’t he build this plane right away? What is he waiting for? Patience, my boy, these things can’t be done in a hurry . . .
So we waited.
In the meantime, planes of various kinds, their origin generally unknown, often flew over the city. Every time we raised our eyes to their shining bellies swollen with bombs we would look automatically towards the dark house with ramshackle eaves, whose owner never ventured out. He was working. Day and night. Go ahead, fly, fly, fly while you can, you pitiful engine-powered planes!
We tried to imagine the chaos Dino Çiço’s perpetual motion plane would wreak in the sky when it first took flight. Black and terrifying, with its strange shape, it would cleave the sky. All the world’s planes would flee in terror at the sight of it, tearing off in all directions, some south, some north; others, in total panic, would nose-dive and crash.
But for the moment the city was being bombed regularly every day. Planes circled overhead, quite at ease in the sky. The anti-aircraft battery, which was supposed to have been sent the previous week to defend the city, still hadn’t come. After the very first bombing we had all been convinced that besides streets, chimneys and sewers, a city had to have an anti-aircraft battery as well. The old gun, left in the citadel’s western tower since the days of the monarchy, had some defect that the municipal mechanics hadn’t been able to fix.
The city lay completely defenceless under the autumn sky, which everyone thought looked more open than
usual. Never had people craned their necks to peer up into the sky as often as they did that autumn. It was as if they were asking in amazement, “What’s the matter with this sky all of a sudden?” For planes were something new in that ancient sky. The thunder, clouds, rain, hail and snow which the sky had always dropped on the city and about which no one was so unreasonable as to complain were nothing compared to this baleful whim of old age. There was something strange and faithless in the heavy masses of cloud and the blue slits that opened suddenly within them like gigantic eyes. The element of treachery was evident even in the monotonous drizzle of rain and the howling wind. More and more I thought that the world might be better off with no sky at all.
One of those autumn days something happened that I had long been waiting for. It was a Sunday. From the way Grandmother put on her black clothes and shawl I knew that something unusual was up. She had become almost miraculously agile. I soon realised that she was about to make an extraordinary visit. Open-mouthed, I watched her movements in silence, for fear that one word from me would break the tranquil harmony of the swishing of clothes and hands.
Quivering with excitement, I asked in a near whisper: “Where are you going?”
She stared at me. Her eyes were calm, just a touch far away. She slowly opened her mouth and said: “To Dino Çiço’s.” I had guessed as much.
“Take me too, please,” I begged. She stroked my hair.
“Get dressed,” she said.
The cobblestones in the street were wet. It was raining softly. An old song ran through my mind:
It’s raining, it’s pouring
Old dames are snoring . . .
I had become an old dame, one of the katenxhikas. Walking through the rain in my black dress. Going to have coffee. Going to see, going to hear. I was happy.