Chronicle in Stone

“Foreigners?” she said.

“Yes, foreigners.”

She put her hands on each face, as if to recognise the corpses.

“What about those?”

“Those are from our city. This one is from the Toro family, this one from the Xhulas, this one the Angonis, this one the Merajs, and this one the Kokobobos.”

Granny Hanko covered up the pile with her dry, withered hands and turned to leave.

“Why all this blood? Can’t you tell us anything, Mother Hanko?” a woman asked between her sobs.

The crone turned her aged head, but seemed to have forgotten where the voice had come from.

“The world is changing blood,” she said to no one in particular. “A person changes blood every four or five years, and the world every four or five hundred years. These are the winters of blood.”

So saying, she set off homeward. She was one hundred and thirty-two years old.

Winter. White terror. Those words were everywhere. As was the frost. One day, I woke very early, got out of bed, and went upstairs to the main room. Thick clouds like wet, muddy sponges had settled over the city. The sky was black as pitch. A supernatural light spilled in through a single rent in the cloud cover. It slid over the grey roofs and came to rest on a white house. The only white building in the neighbourhood. I had never noticed that before. It looked sinister among the grey houses at that time of the morning.

What house was this? Where did it come from? And why do they call what’s happening these days a “white terror”? Why not green terror, or blue terror?

I had grown more and more afraid of the colour white. The white roses I could remember, the drapes in the main room, Grandmother’s nightgown all now seemed inscribed with the word “terror”.

FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE

rder. Any person found to have connections with the terrorists will be sentenced to death. I hereby declare a curfew from four in the afternoon to six in the morning. Garrison commander: Emilio de Fiori. Curfew exemptions previously granted to midwives are hereby cancelled. I order a census of the city pop

SIXTEEN

The highway, the bridge over the river, and Zalli Street teemed with soldiers, mules and trucks heading slowly north. Italy had capitulated. Long columns of soldiers with blankets on their shoulders were coming into the city. Some of them still bore their arms. Others had thrown them away or had sold them. The cobblestones were filthy with mud trampled in by their boots. The streets rang with shouting and swearing in Italian. The milling mass of soldiers got more and more chaotic. Some of them left straight away to go further north, while fresh columns, each filthier than the last, arrived from the south. Rain-soaked, exhausted, and unshaven, the soldiers all trudged up steep Zalli Street, gazing in stupor at the tall stone houses.

The gloomy winter city looked down its nose at the defeated. Soon they too would wander through the snow like ghosts, mumbling “pane, pane”.

Llukan the Jailbird with his blanket over his shoulder came down the road from the prison.

“Everyone’s gone!” he was shouting. “Not a soul left in the prison. It’s enough to make you cry.”

The nuns left too. The prostitutes had climbed aboard a truck, and when it started off, Lame Kareco Spiri ran after it for a long time in the rain. Splattered by its rear wheels, he chased it madly, gesturing at the girls who, crammed into the back and whipped by the wind, waved back at him. When he finally gave up he walked back into the city looking utterly miserable and muttering unceasingly, “What am I going to do without them?”

Long, apparently endless columns continued to march along the highway. The whole city was spotted with mud.

“Disgusting, isn’t it Selfixhe?” said Aunt Xhemo, who had just arrived for a visit. “The world is one big mudhole.”

“Well,” said Grandmother, “that’s the way kingdoms come to an end.”

“Yes, they’re leaving all right,” said Aunt Xhemo, “but others will take their place, and leave their mud and filth behind.”

The city had really been disguised by a mask of ugliness. The reddish-brown mud clashed with its distinguished tones of grey. The retreating Italians had muddied us all, just like the back wheels of the truck that carried off the ladies of the bordello.

I sat at the window in the main room two flights up and watched the routed army. The remnants of Greece had been scattered by the winter wind. Italy, on the other hand, was sunk in mire.

Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo, with their funny-looking ancient glasses with the cracked lenses perched on their noses, watched the road full of soldiers.

“Well, now Italy has been thrashed as well,” Aunt Xhemo said. “They were a thorn in our side long enough.”

“They didn’t give us an easy time, that’s for sure,” commented Grandmother.

“Where will those poor lads go now, in the cold, and with so little to be had?” Aunt Xhemo asked.

“They’ll be on the road,” said Grandmother. “Where else can they go?”

“Pity the mothers waiting for them!”

“That’s how it is when nations collapse in winter,” said Grandmother.

Aunt Xhemo sighed.

“Blankets,” she said a moment later, “a whole world of blankets.”

The column of troops and mules kept on coming through the night. In the morning it stretched out just as far, making it seem as if yesterday’s men and animals were still trudging past. Soiled with mud, the city awoke from a restless night to an even more troubled dawn. Isa Toska’s gang had come into the city during the night, singing old songs. At dawn they were followed by some Ballist detachments. In the morning the two groups, mixed in with the throng of harried Italian soldiers, wandered about almost side by side at the corners and squares, pretending not to notice one another. Here and there some scuffles broke out between Ballist patrols and Isa Toska’s men.

Some Italian officers tried to fly off in the Bulldog, which had long been lying abandoned in the field. Sputtering and howling, the poor machine did manage to get a few metres off the ground in a lurching flight that ended with a crash in a field a few hundred metres away, and that last flight, as short as it was shameful, brought the history of the military airfield to a close.

But the real battle, the one Ilir and I reckoned ought to happen on the Bridge of Brawls, for we were sure it had been waiting for this for God knows how long so as to justify the name it bore, took place in fact around the Grihot barracks, pitting the Italians against the Ballists. The latter, taking advantage of the disorder and exhaustion of the Italians, tried to get them to disarm, initially by persuasion, then by force. Machine-guns went on spitting all day. That’s when I first saw my father use Grandmother’s opera glasses, to get a better view of what was going on over there.

My disappointment with the Bridge of Brawls persuaded me once and for all that far from behaving in accordance with the meanings and responsibilities expressed by their titles or conventional names, people and things usually did the opposite. Ilir and I had begun to notice the phenomenon long before. Particularly since we had seen a group of gypsies with reed baskets on their heads raising not an eyebrow when they walked across the Ladies’ Square, a place we thought reserved for the exclusive use of women of high rank.

I found it all very puzzling but I stopped worrying about it when I heard Grandmother saying very firmly that the times we lived in were so full of distress that we would be hard put to say which was the worst of our troubles.

Right after the bloody clash at Grihot, the first detachment of partisans made its way across the airfield and came onto the road. The long thin column, with a red flag at its head, cut through the crowd of Italian soldiers,