Chronicle in Stone

Grandma always smelled like fresh bread, and whenever I got hungry, I always thought of her, with her milky complexion and her spreading shape which set the old joists of our house groaning, as if to protest: “Ouch! Grandma, you’re crushing us, and we can’t take any more.”

Grandfather said those ritual Turkish words that always seemed magical to me and we all started eating. I noticed that Grandma seemed angry because the pans and spoons in her hands were more than usually noisy. Whenever she was angry her gestures were rougher. Finally she couldn’t contain herself any more and burst out, “The hussy!”

The word made no impression on the others, who calmly went on chewing. They all seemed to know who she was talking about.

“Who’s a hussy, Grandma?” I asked.

Grandfather shot her a disapproving look and she nodded her head, still looking furious, as if to say, “Yes, all right, all right.”

“None of your business,” she said to me, suddenly taking the pot from the table.

“If it had been me,” said the older of my aunts, “I would’ve grabbed it right out of her hands.”

“What next! I wouldn’t stoop to fight with such trash.”

I could never imagine Grandma fighting with anyone; all my life I had never seen her doing anything but cooking and kneading dough for her bread.

“Drop the subject,” Grandfather said, tilting his head in my direction. Everyone obeyed, but Grandma still seemed angry, for the pans were being banged around even louder. Grandfather, who couldn’t stand noise, was the first to leave the table.

“Dirty hussy,” Grandma started up again.

“You should’ve grabbed it right off the clothesline yourself,” my elder aunt said again.

My younger aunt opened the newspaper and started reading.

“Put the paper down,” said Grandma. “Papers are for men.”

My aunt burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny? You see everyone’s upset and all you can do is sit there reading the paper and laugh.”

My aunt got up and walked out, taking the newspaper with her.

“Today the table linen, tomorrow the spoons, and next the carpets,” Grandma went on.

Now they were talking about it openly and I realised what was happening. Margarita was stealing.

“Why have you left your food on your plate?” my other aunt asked.

“I’m full,” I said, getting up from the table.

“You hardly ate a thing. You’re not sick, are you?”

“No.”

“Of course you are,” said Grandma. “You’ve caught your death. Sitting on the roof all day as if you had no home.”

I got up without a word and went into the living room. My younger aunt was sitting in the corner reading the newspaper.

I didn’t speak to her. The room was completely quiet. From the top of Citadel Street came the song of the stranger as he made his way down:

The clock struck seven as I came by;

I stood by your window and sighed a sigh

I listened, in a dream… So, towards seven in the evening, someone else was now going past the windows of a house where a girl called Miriam still lived, and who still had headaches.

The voice faded into the distance but before it disappeared altogether the wind brought me an extra part of the story:

Gladly would I fetch the doctor for you

But neighbours would likely take a dim view

But why would the neighbours object? What harm would it do to them? I couldn’t imagine. I wracked my brains to no end, but then I took comfort in recalling that one day, in the great living room, I’d heard it said that what happens in songs isn’t at all like what happens in life.

You could feel autumn coming on. Down below, among the branches losing their leaves, slid a shadow. Suzana. She must have known that I had come.

The tick-tock of the big clock was making a strange sound. Sadness was all around, spreading in great concentric circles through endless space. Soon it would spread out over the whole world.

It was a gloomy lunch. We ate in silence. Everyone seemed to be waiting impatiently for Grandmother to look at the cock’s bones.

In these past days, whenever a rooster was killed in the neighbourhood, everyone was informed right away, because the future could be read in the bones and everyone was expecting something serious to happen.

A week before, Ilir’s mother had sent us all over to Kako Pino’s. “She slaughtered a cock today,” Ilir’s mother had said. “Go on over there, children, and find out how the bones came out.”

We too had slaughtered a cock today. By afternoon people would be knocking at the door to ask about the bones. Grandmother would be asked about them if she went anywhere; my mother would be questioned the moment she stepped out through the gate, and Papa probably at the coffee house. It should be obvious from all this that in our city people did not get to eat chicken very often.

Lunch came to an end. Grandmother picked up the carcass, squinted, and stared hard at it, turning it this way and that, holding one side and then the other up to the light. We all waited in silence.

“War,” Grandmother said suddenly in a muffled voice. “The edges of the carina are red. War and blood.” She pointed to the places on the breastbone that foretold war.

No one spoke.

Grandmother kept looking at the bone.

“War,” she repeated, putting her left hand on my head as if to protect me from some scourge.

After lunch I went back to the pile of dirty dishes to look for the bone. I took it up the two flights to the main room, where I sat alone at the high windows and began a careful examination of that tragic bone. It was an October afternoon. A dry wind was blowing. I stared at the cold bone I held in my hand. It was reddish, shading into violet. Sometimes it seemed splattered with little drops of blood, sometimes it blazed with the reflections of a great fire.

Gradually it turned completely red, its back now covered no longer with little drops of blood but with whole streams rushing down the slopes, turning everything in their path red.

As I fell asleep with the bone in my hand, I saw the flames blazing on its side once more. Then, as if through a wall of smoke, I heard the first drums of war.

I could feel it the moment I entered the courtyard: Margarita was gone. I didn’t ask what had happened. The street was deserted and the courtyard trees were losing their leaves, which fluttered lazily onto the roof of the shack where the gypsies lived. I felt sad.

The autumn rains would start soon. The trees would be completely bare, and the wind would howl through the eaves. The roof would leak in the places I had sat in the summer, and in the old attic, the box of tobacco, the matches and the Turkish book would rot away.

Suzana would flutter about in the air somewhere and never find out what had happened to a man called Macbeth in distant Scotland. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the next time I came they had told me that she’d flown off with the storks.

On winter nights the hordes of mice would rage up and down in the attic. Fight on, Genghis Khan. Crush everything in your path. No one sleeps below Asia any more. It’s just a desert.

FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE

his declaration. During the Polish campaign I never ordered a night-time air raid, Adolf Hitler claims. I bombed