The two Gurametos dropped their heads in their hands. “Are you crazy? This man has an open wound, and you want to tie him up!”
“You’re the crazy one here,” barked the patrol leader. “We have orders, full stop. Do you think you can stop us?”
The nurses joined the doctors in protest but the patrol would not be deterred. They produced the handcuffs, secured them this time on both doctors and set off for the city hall.
The patrol brought both doctors back to the hospital an hour later. The partisans were a noisy rabble. The two doctors’ hands were now free. A grey-haired man who claimed to be an impartial legal expert was trying in vain to calm everyone as they yelled, shouting each other down and brandishing revolvers and syringes under each other’s noses. “This is unheard of! This man’s at death’s door. He has one hand cut off and you’re going to shackle the other one. Where’s your humanity?”
“You call this humanity?” shouted a partisan. “You let criminals kill and maim and then tuck them up in hospital to save them from the people’s courts?”
The grey-haired lawyer negotiated a compromise: the wanted patients would be neither arrested nor released. The nurse in charge remembered there was a room in the hospital’s west wing with a grille over the window. Remzi Kadare had left legal instructions that he should be incarcerated here if he lost his mind.
They carried the accused patients there and left a partisan with a rifle and two grenades in his belt to guard the door.
DAY TWO, DAWN
The elderly judges, who were known as “the three hundred”, had not exercised their profession for a very long time. That morning they turned up at the door of the city hall, which was now known as the Committee. They brought all their ancient insignia and testimonials, in the conviction that they could still be of service to their country.
The Committee chairman could not conceal a certain satisfaction as he heard them out. His words of thanks at the end of the meeting made it clear that his pleasure was genuine. These three hundred were throwbacks to a vanished era but they had grasped sooner than all Albania’s pansy intellectuals that the revolution demanded ruthless violence.
The former judges listened to the talk of a new era and new laws, plainly surprised that such things could exist. Their services were declined but as the old men left, they remarked on how flattered they felt at being turned down so courteously.
DAY MINUS TWO
Besides the arrested patients, three others in the surgical ward had still not come round from their anaesthetic. A kidney patient was the first to surface and was met by a nurse who tried to explain to him that they were now living under a new order. It was not easy for the patient to take this in. As the other inmates woke up, the kidney patient launched into an explanation of what had happened. The others clustered round him as if listening to a fairy tale. The kidney patient said that important events had taken place in the city and in this very ward, but they had been fast asleep and had known nothing about them.
When the kidney patient saw that the others did not seem surprised, he started at the beginning again. All hell had been let loose in the city while they had been absent, as if down a rabbit hole. “The era we were in no longer exists, see? The times have moved on. Hours, days are passing and we are still stuck somewhere – I don’t know how to describe it. Out of time. In reverse or minus time.”
“I don’t understand this,” said a patient on crutches. “Say it straight. What’s this new time you’re talking about?”
“It’s called a new order. It’s what happens when the system changes. The first day is usually called zero hour. Then the numbering starts, one, two, three and so on. When they gave us the anaesthetic it was, let’s say, a certain time on such-and-such a day. We went under, and out of time. But time paid no attention. Time doesn’t wait, it goes on, and we were left behind. They’ve reached day two but we’re not even at zero. We’re minus. Now do you see it?”
“I see bullshit,” said a third patient.
“We have a time deficit,” he continued, ignoring him. “We’ll have to hurry to catch up to zero, and then we’ll see.”
“You’ve got us in a proper muddle,” said the appendix case. “Just tell us who’s won. In fact, I don’t care who it is as long as it’s not the communists.”
“I think it’s them,” said the third.
“No!” said the other patient. “Anyone but them!”
“In this new order you mentioned, are you allowed to kill your wife?” asked one patient on crutches. “Like in Yemen for instance.”
“What can you be thinking about?”
“I told you what I was thinking about.”
“Your wife? I don’t think so. But other people . . . perhaps.”
A SEQUENCE OF DAYS AND MONTHS
Of all the expressions involving time, the most common was “the new era”.
On some days it seemed that such a thing really had come to pass. Everything appeared bathed in triumphant, dazzling sunlight, as if fresh from the suds of the washtub. But then another morning would dawn, ashen and exhausted, to confirm the view that time is the last thing in this world that is capable of renewal.
Nevertheless, if this “time” never seemed exactly reborn, there was something youthful about it. It was always a little hectic. There were incessant campaigns, one after another. There was a touch of fever especially in the chatter of the activists, who promised and threatened all kinds of things. Down with soil erosion! Glory to the martyrs! Hang the speculators! Forwards with reforestation!
There was no end of meetings. Hoarders of gold were denounced, along with the Corfu Channel incident, the rhymes of Blind Vehip and Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman. The rejection of the concept of perpetual motion was for some reason connected to the latter. The idea of “the new era” was always closely associated with “reconstruction”. Slogans were painted and songs sung everywhere about the new era, as if she were a bride.
“Work” and “reconstruction” usually meant digging irrigation channels. People got up before dawn, unfurled a banner and marched off in single file to start digging. It turned out later that some of the new ditches didn’t raise the level of water but merely diverted it from other channels, or failed to drain away flood waters and actually increased them. When people were punished for this it gradually became clear that the ditches, besides their ostensible function, had a different purpose that was more important.
“Don’t stare like that. There’s no great mystery here,” said a newly arrested engineer to his two cellmates. They were all in prison for sabotaging ditches. “It’s the same old story. It goes back to the Babylonians. That’s where tyranny began, they say. Either too much water, or too little. Water wanted in one place, but not in another.”
Two sensational items of news, about the start of the Cold War and Tito’s treachery, seemed to have something to do with the ditches. Other questions, including some of a purely mental nature, however remote they might appear, were also related.
Farewell to wandering thoughts, to whatever crossed your mind – ancient decrees, women’s private parts – to any thought either elevated or shameful. It became clearer every day that you had to think about some things a lot and others much less, if at all.
One of the things in the latter class was the famous dinner with the Germans. It was as if it had never happened. In fact anyone mentioning it even in passing was firmly rounded on. “What, you still believe those old tales about the German and the doctor being old school friends and all that blah-blah?” Yet this did not stem the rumours that somewhere, at a secret level you didn’t dare think about, the dinner was still being investigated. Indeed, the recently appointed chorus master at the House of Culture was suspected of being one of two undercover investigators. You would never guess the other in a thousand years, although it was generally known that this person had planted the suspicion that there had never been any dinner at all. He claimed that the gramophone had played to an emp
ty room and a secret meeting in the guise of a dinner had taken place somewhere else, in order to leave no evidence behind.
A SEQUENCE OF SEASONS
It was winter. A few weeks before, the Cold War had started. This was no longer the laughing matter it had been at first (Eskimos etcetera), but nor was it as frightening as it later became (silent and as frigid as death). It was something to be worried about, like the Iron Curtain, invented by an English lord.
In order to demonstrate that it was possible to live with these fears, and even cheerfully, the number of festivals increased. Sports days were the favourite: they were cheap and needed no preparation. You gathered a few dozen time-wasters with itchy feet and all it took was a sign reading “Spring Cross-Country” for them to pelt off like lunatics. Along the road others would join in and then they would stop in some square to catch their breath and cheer, “Long live . . . ” and just as often “Death to . . . ”, for there were as many things that had to live as to die, and the quicker the better.
Almost as frequent were concerts, races, inaugurations and, in particular, award ceremonies. These latter were often of an unusual nature. For instance in the first week of April there were celebrations for Big Dr Gurameto’s twelve-thousandth operation.
As one can imagine, the little doctor was not forgotten although, as a lesser light, he had barely reached his nine-thousandth. That afternoon and evening old memories revived of the time when these two rivals had been the centre of attention. As in the old days, one was weighed against the other. This was a hard task because everybody knew that their relative status still depended primarily on the international situation.
After its defeat in the war Germany had been divided into a bad part and a good part, leaving Big Dr Gurameto roughly neutral. Italy was not as bad as West Germany, but not as good as East Germany, so he and Little Dr Gurameto were more or less quits. In short, they had emerged from the global upheaval fifty-fifty, as the English say.
The wave of affection for Big Dr Gurameto was all the stronger because of the memory of the rivalry between the two doctors, which had become a symbol of a past now recalled, for some reason, with nostalgia.
“Oh, how touching,” said Marie Turtulli, one of the city’s great ladies. “What sweet memories,” she repeated after a moment. “Just like in la Belle Époque.”
The rosy aureole surrounding the two doctors was best described in a rhyme by Blind Vehip,
The Gurametos, doctors both,
True to the Hippocratic oath.
Yet whispers persisted that the dinner of long ago was the subject of an investigation, still a covert one but now conducted by two independent groups. Its German aspect was lately overshadowed by its supernatural dimension; the dinner was associated mainly with the appearance of a dead man, who, for the purpose of disguise or some other reason, had worn the greatcoat of a German officer and in this shape, spattered with mud, had knocked at Dr Gurameto’s door.
DAY FIVE HUNDRED
A SPECTRAL THRONG OF GERMAN SYMPATHISERS
On the five-hundredth day of the new order there appeared a sight that should never have been seen. Beneath the city the first refugees from Çamëria arrived. There was no end to them. The Greeks had accused them of having supported the Germans and expelled them northwards across the border. They all brought evidence of recent atrocities: cradles with knife marks, old people scarred by burns, young wives blackened from the soot of their torched houses. They walked in an endless column under a bitter, pitiless wind.
To their left stood the first city in Albania, of which they had so often dreamed. But they had strict orders, nobody knew from whom, not to enter it. The city loomed above them, as inscrutable as a sphinx, inaccessible and failing to understand why it could not take them in. Who suffered most from this prohibition, the convoy of refugees or the city? To be sure it pained both, as if they had been showered with the debris of some terrible catastrophe. That afternoon the very rafters of Gjirokastër’s houses began to groan. The city suffered an agony of conscience. Receiving no mercy themselves, the refugees showed none for anybody else. Old loyalties had lost their meaning. Neither side in this conflict could claim victory, or even sustain their quarrel. It was scant consolation for the losers, the nationalists and the royalists, to recall how they had cheered for Çamëria and Kosovo: now they guiltily hung their heads. For perhaps it was these cheers that had to be paid for after the German defeat.
Migrations like this were said to be happening everywhere. An evil hour had struck for whole populations, entire peoples uprooted from their homes from the shores of the Baltic to the snowfields of the Caucasus and deep into the distant steppes, supposedly for supporting the Germans.
Other dreadful convoys came to mind. The Jews, three years ago. The Armenians, thirty years before.
The citizens of Gjirokastër watched the scene through binoculars and yearned for an end to these columns from Çamëria, but one convoy seemed to spawn another. It was said that in the Greek-minority villages, at night, people would offer them bread but they would not take it. They had expected that someone else would feed them.
Where were they going? Perhaps north to the olive groves of Vlora. It was rumoured that there the sky had filled with the cruel sound of thunder but something uncanny happened: the lightning rebelled against the laws of nature and refused to fall on these wretches’ heads.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NEW ORDER CONTINUED
Dawn rose on the asphalted highway and on this bleak day spirits sank even lower. The cold tightened its grip on Gjirokastër. The coal ran out and martyrs were in short supply.
As if to a natural disaster, trucks of food and medicine were hurriedly dispatched from the capital city with inspectors, musical ensembles and delegations of all kinds, some from fraternal countries. One of these, from the Soviet Baltic republics, where something similar had happened, issued a strange communiqué before it returned, stating that the situation in Gjirokastër called for a more radical approach. In the city there were still eleven former vezirs and pashas of the Ottoman Empire, four former overseers of the sultan’s harem, three former deputy managers of Italian-Albanian banks, fifteen ex-prefects of various regimes, two professional stranglers of heirs apparent, a street called “Lunatics’ Lane” and two high-class courtesans, not to mention the famous three hundred former judges and more than six hundred cases of insanity: a lot for a medieval city now striving to become a communist one.
The Baltic delegation’s communiqué made plain that what was required was an upsurge of renewal, what the newspapers called “new blood”. Very soon this became a flood. Every day enthusiastic young volunteers arrived from central Albania: overfulfillers of already overfulfilled plans, on the Soviet model, some singing the song “Pickaxe in one hand, rifle in the other”, or not just singing about these implements but actually carrying them; informers on saboteurs of ill-planned drainage ditches; informers on fastidious ladies who rarely left their homes in a demonstration of disdain for the new order; activists who only looked forward to the future and others that did so mainly but not exclusively, and occasionally glanced back; sculptors of busts of martyrs; self-sacrificing zealots keen to join the latter in their graves, if nature permitted; opponents of the ideological enemies known as “the three ‘no’s” (imperialism, Zionism and Coca-Cola) and others of the seven ‘no’s; nutcases obsessed with cultivating friendship with other nations and others entranced by the notion of hostility. In short, a perfect frenzy that made everyone weep.
Just when everything seemed on track again, a secret report drawn up by an even more secret delegation from the capital announced bluntly that the rate of progress was still not satisfactory. The ditches, however unnecessary, were being dug too slowly. The former vezirs, hangovers from the time of the sultan, were not dying fast enough. Except for the two high-class courtesans, who had “distanced themselves from their bourgeois past” and joined the new order out of inner conviction, the other remnants of
the old order were stubbornly clinging on.
A song was heard in the streets, of the anonymous kind that appeared in Gjirokastër. It spread everywhere and seemed to confirm the secret report. Its words were sad, and its melody even more plangent.
Lena lies sick in a hospital bed.
In the lonely ward, her hopes are dead.
The authorities did all they could to prevent people singing it, but in vain.
Nobody had ever imagined that a song about a hospital could become the reason for another dramatic development in the city: the campaign against its ladies. It all started at a meeting at which a senior cultural official complained that people were still singing songs of what might be called a private nature, about how you’ve forgotten me but I’ll never forget you, you didn’t visit me in hospital, I couldn’t get rid of my cough and twaddle of this sort. The city’s leaders suggested commissioning local musicians to compose two or three songs for the new era, which still had a bit of feeling in them. The Party chairman butted in. “Come out with it – you mean about being ill.” Without more ado he phoned the two doctors, Big and Little Gurameto, to demand the names of the singing patients.
At first the doctors were at a loss how to respond. Big Dr Gurameto replied that they were surgeons and their patients either recovered or went straight to their graves and had no time for sighing and groaning, so it would be better to ask other doctors who dealt with protracted illnesses such as typhus and especially tuberculosis.