Chronicle in Stone

was due to the stomach trouble from which I suffered last week. Editor-in-chief. More undisciplined pupils have been expelled from school. We have received a number of complaints from parents about the teacher Qani Kekezi. This gentleman’s pedagogical procedures are strange indeed. During anatomy lessons he dissects cats in front of the children, who are terrified. Recently a mutilated cat got loose and leapt into the pupils’ benches, trailing its intestines. Miss Lejla Karllashi left yesterday for Italy. We take this opportunity to offer readers the departure times for the Durres-Bari steamship line. Addresses of the city’s midwives.

FOUR

“You look a little sickly,” Grandmother said. “You’d better go stay at your grandfather’s for a few days.”

I liked to visit our maternal grandfather, whom we called Babazoti. His was a more cheerful place, not so harsh, and most of all there was no hunger there as there was in our house. In our big house, maybe because of the hallways, cupboards and cellars, you could really feel the hunger. Besides, our neighbourhood was grey, and thick with houses stuck almost on top of each other. Everything was hard and fixed, set down once and for all centuries ago. The streets, curves, corners, doorsteps, telephone poles and everything else seemed cut in stone and measured out to the last centimetre. But Grandfather’s place was different. There was nothing rigid about it. Everything seemed soft and mobile. The ground was free to do as it pleased – to stay level, for example, or to hump its back and throw streams into the river like a donkey shaking off its load. The scenery had something human about it: as the seasons passed it lost or gained weight, got lighter or darker, more beautiful or uglier. Whereas our neighbourhood was, so to speak, allergic to change.

Strangest of all was that that part of town had only two houses: Grandfather’s and another about a hundred yards away. The wasteland between them was rough and unfriendly. On misty mornings, you sometimes saw a stoat dashing across it, but then for days on end it stayed empty. The snakes were getting ready to hibernate underground. The fallen rocks and stones, which had tumbled down from who knows where centuries ago and settled in the bushes and sparse grasses, added to the sense of desolation. Everyone considered it a part of the city that was dying. The paths across it varied their tracks, as if impatient to abandon the place forever. And the bushes became more and more daring, sprouting in the most unexpected places: in the middle of the street, alongside the fountain, in the courtyards. One had even tried to grow on a doorstep, and had paid for its temerity with its life.

The bushes were ominous. Wandering around with Ilir in the upper districts, along the border between the mountains and the city, I noticed that the brush had grown even behind the row of ruins of the last houses, long since abandoned. There they lurked like wild beasts, surrounding the whole city. At night I could hear them howling. It was a muffled howl, barely perceptible, almost like a sob.

On the north side was the road leading to the citadel and linking the city’s upper districts with the centre. It overlooked the two houses at roof level. Once a truck had crashed into Babazoti’s courtyard. Sometimes a drunk stumbled onto the roof and rain would drip in for a week. But it didn’t happen often, since there were few passers- by on this street. From time to time somebody going home from the market in the hot afternoon would walk by singing at the top of his lungs.

The clock struck seven when I came by

I stood at your window and heaved a sigh.

And I heard what your darling voice said:

“If only I didn’t have such a pain in my head.”

It seemed that a woman named Miriam complained of recurring headaches at seven every evening. Not much to it, but I liked the song a lot. No one would have dared sing such a song in our neighbourhood. If anyone had, a dozen windows would be thrown open and women young and old would claw their cheeks in shame and rain curses and probably a bucket of water down on the impertinent singer. But here, in this wide deserted space, you could shout to your heart’s content and never fill it with the noise. It was no accident that the stranger broke into song as soon as he turned into this street. He must have been singing it in his head all day long, in the market, the coffee house, and the centre of town, eagerly waiting to get to this lonely place to let his lungs give full vent to it.

The evenings especially were stunningly beautiful in this neighbourhood, with a charm all their own. Whenever I heard people say “Good evening,” I thought of Grandfather’s courtyard, where the gypsies who lived in a separate shack would play their violins while Grandfather stretched out on a chaise longue and puffed on his big black pipe. The gypsies had not been able to pay their rent for years, and they seemed to consider these summer evening concerts a way of working off some of the debt.

“Babazoti,” I would whisper, “roll me one too,” and without a word he’d roll a thin cigarette, light it and hand it to me. I’d sit beside him and suck on the burning tobacco in delight, ignoring the threatening gestures my aunts and uncles directed at me from the shadows.

I thought there was no greater happiness in the world than to sit smoking after a good meal, listening like Grandpa, with half-closed eyes, to the gypsies playing their violins.

Ah! I thought, when I grow up I’ll buy myself a big black pipe that smokes like a chimney, and I’ll grow a beard like Grandpa’s and I’ll lie on the divan and read great big books all day long.

“Babazoti,” I said in a drawling, sleepy voice, “will you teach me Turkish?”

“I will,” he answered, “when you’re a little older.” His voice was deep and soothing, and as I leaned against the chaise longue, I dreamed of the magic of tobacco and tried to figure out how much I would smoke and how many books I would have to read in Turkish before my time to die would come.

The thick books lay in the trunk, piled one on top of the other, an endless swarm of Arabic letters waiting to carry me off and reveal secrets and mysteries, for only Arabic letters knew the path to the mysteries, just as ants know the holes and fissures underground.

“Babazoti,” I asked, “can you read ants?” He chuckled softly and patted my tousled hair.

“No, boy, you can’t read ants.”

“But why not? When they’re all piled up together, they look just like Turkish letters.”

“It only seems that way, but it’s not really true.”

“But I’ve seen them,” I insisted one last time.

As I drew on my cigarette, I wondered what ants were for if you couldn’t read them like books.

All these things were running pell-mell through my mind as I walked past Avdo Babaramo’s house. He was an old artilleryman whose house was the only one up near the citadel. Then I headed back down through the underbrush, along the narrow path that seemed to have moved yet again. Bits of memory, fragments of sentences or words, splinters of trivial events swarmed about, shoving and catching one another by the ear or nose with a brusqueness sharpened by the speed of my steps.

I came to Suzana’s house. Once she heard I had come, she would run over and flutter around between the edge of the cliff and the gypsies’ shack, where we’d played at skipping on my second visit. Then she would stop in the middle of the waste ground near a tree we called badshade and watch what was going on from afar. Then, for sure, she would creep close to the house, if she weren’t feeling too fearful of Grandfather’s Turkish books. Her flutterings had something of the butterfly but something of a stork as well. She was taller than me, thin, and had long hair that she combed in a different style each day. Everyone said she was pretty. There were no other little girls or boys in Grandfather’s neighbourhood, so Suzana always waited impatiently for me to come. She said being around grown-ups bored her. Sitting at home embroidering bored her, going to the wash-house bored her, eating meals bored her. She was bored morning, noon and night. In short, she was really bored. She liked the word a lot and she spoke it with the greatest care, as if afraid to bruise it accidentally with tooth or tongue.

I would tell Suzana all kinds of things about life in our neighbourhood. She listened to everything attentively, with her eyebrows arched. Last time, when I told her about Ceco Kaili’s daughter’s beard, she opened her eyes wide, bit her lip two or three times, and was about to say something, but she held back, hesitated again, and then leaned forward, her face pale, her mouth near my ear, and asked: “Do you know any rude words?”

“Leave me alone, you idiot,” I said.

“You’re the one who’s an idiot,” she said, almost screaming, and ran off. As she ran she turned once and yelled from far off: “Idi-o-o-t!”