“They’ve gone up to the mountains to join up, the bitches,” she hissed.
No one answered.
My mother brought the coffee.
“Up in the mountains all the boys and girls sleep around without a second thought,” said Lady Majnur. “Just wait. You’ll see. They’ll all come back with babies.”
My mother turned pale. Lady Majnur’s face grew harsher. A gold tooth in the right side of her mouth seemed to be smiling for all the others.
“But they’ll catch them now, one by one,” she went on. “They have nowhere to go. They’ve run out of food and clothing. In the middle of winter, with all the wolves. Anyway, they say a lot of them can hardly move. Obviously not. Pregnant to the eyeballs…”
“Come, Lady Majnur,” said Grandmother. “Don’t talk that way. Those stories might be slander.”
There was a deep silence.
My mother turned away to hide her tears and went into the other room.
“You were harsh,” said Grandmother.
Lady Majnur’s glassy eyes tried to smile, but Bido Sherifi’s wife stood up. Then she exploded:
“Dirty witch!” And she went to join my mother in the other room.
“The end of the world,” said Kako Pino to no one in particular.
Lady Majnur stood up, puce with anger.
Grandmother did not budge. She was looking out at the winter-ravaged earth.
FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE
according to bulletin no. 1187. Countless Russian troops and tanks have been annihilated by the murderous fire of the Germans. A battle of apocalyptic scale. Only German and Italian troops, Mussolini has declared, could have endured a winter so harsh, the worst in a hundred and forty years. Timoshenko, wounded and bleeding, is roaming through the steppes of Russia which are now piled high with corpses. Trial. Executive measures. Property. New evidence brought by the Karllashis. Gillette razor blades. Registered trademark. Safety blades. I hereby prohibit all assemblies in the streets, squares and houses. I order the suspension of weddings and funerals. Garrison commander Bruno Arcivo
FIFTEEN
A notice was posted on what remained of a wall of the ruined house. We came to play in those ruins every day. Wallowing in their own misfortune, they were nonetheless kind to us. We took whatever we wanted from them, demolished small pieces of wall, shifted stones about, without much changing the look of the ruins. After enduring the flames, which had turned it into a ruin in a matter of hours, the house was now completely indifferent, and tolerated any fresh attack. Some iron bars protruding from the remnants of the walls looked like the fingers of a frozen hand. The notice had been hung right on those bars. Two old men had stopped to read it. It was typewritten, and in two languages, Albanian and Italian:
Ilir tugged on the sleeve of my jacket.
“That was his house,” he whispered to me.
“Enver Hoxha’s?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard Papa telling Isa one day.”
“So where is he now, this Enver Hoxha?”
“Far away. Somewhere near Tirana.”
I whistled in amazement.
“He went all the way to Tirana?”
“Sure.”
“Is Tirana very far?” I asked.
“Yes, very. Maybe we’ll go there too when we grow up.”
Someone else stopped to read the notice. We left.
Xhexho and Kako Pino were at our house drinking coffee with Grandmother. Xhexho carefully turned her cup upside down.
“It seems that a new kind of war has broken out,” she said. “I forget exactly what they call it, war with classes or class war, or something like that. Well, Selfixhe, it’s a war all right, but not like the others. In this war brothers kill each other. The son slays the father. At home, at the dinner table, wherever. The son looks his father in the eye, then he tells him he doesn’t recognise him as his father any more and bang, he shoots him, right between the eyes.”
“The end of the world,” said Kako Pino.
“Apparently,” Xhexho went on, “someone called Gole Balloma from the Gjobek neighbourhood is wandering the streets screaming that he’s going to skin Mak Karllashi alive, cure and dry his hide in his own tannery, make shoes out of it and dance around in them.”
“I’ve never heard anything so monstrous,” my mother burst out in indignation.
“There you are, Selfixhe,” said Xhexho. “We had thought all our troubles were over, but now it looks as if the worst is yet to come. Do you remember Enver, the Hoxha boy?”
“The one who went to study in the land of the Franks? Of course I remember him?”
“And so do I,” Kako Pino chimed in.
“Well, they say he’s the one leading the war now. He’s also the one who invented this new war I was telling you about.”
“That’s hard to believe,” said Grandmother. “He was such a well-behaved lad.”
“Yes, Selfixhe, very well behaved. But they say he wears dark glasses now so he won’t be recognised and that he’s the one running the war.”
“War, always war,” Kako Pino sighed.
“What can you do?” said Grandmother. “It looks to me as if this world can’t manage without war. As old as I am, I’ve never seen a day of real peace.”
My mother sighed.
“I heard that Karllashi’s daughter is back from Italy,” Xhexho said, breaking the silence. “God, what a scandal! She wears her skirt above the knee and has dresses of such thin fabric you would think she was in a snakeskin. You can see everything. She spends all day preening, paints her lips red, bleaches her hair, smokes, and speaks Italian. ‘Oh, Mother, what a filthy country,’ she complains. ‘Father, how could you bring me back to this hole.’ Oh this, oh that, all day long. That’s what the world’s coming to, Selfixhe.”
