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
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.
“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.
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:
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.
I was lying there in a daze, when I heard Grandma’s voice. She was looking all over for me. My aunt was calling too, from the courtyard.
I got up carefully and climbed back over the beams, hoisted myself onto the roof again and slid down along the back wall of the house.
“Where were you?” asked Grandma. “How did you get so filthy?”
“On the roof,” I answered.
“What were you doing on the roof? You’ll shift the slates and when it rains we’ll have leaks again.”
“No, Grandma, I was careful.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “Come on, it’s time to eat.”
