SEVENTEEN
The German troops had crossed the southern border and were now marching towards the city, from which the citizens were fleeing. It was the third time in its long history that the city had been abandoned in this way. A thousand years before, the inhabitants had fled when plague struck. The second time was four centuries ago, when the imperial Ottoman army crossed the border under the banner of Islam, at the same place where the German troops were now on the march.
The city was evacuated. You could feel the great loneliness of the stone.
Monday night was full of voices, footsteps, the slamming of doors. Groups of friends and neighbours were getting ready, locking the heavy doors and setting out in the middle of the night for outlying villages.
Mane Voco and Bido Sherifi, with their wives and children, had gathered in our hallway, along with Nazo and her daughter-in-law. Maksut had disappeared. I was sad because of Grandmother. She wouldn’t come with us this time either. Nor would Kako Pino. She was afraid there would be a wedding while she was gone. Someone might call her. For sixty years she had made up the city’s brides. She couldn’t let them down now. A badly made-up bride was the ugliest thing on earth, the end of the world, she had protested when they tried to persuade her to leave. No, no, no.
We left. We walked with faltering steps, like drunkards. Here and there in the darkness we could hear other steps. The town was draining itself of people. At the outskirts of the city we found ourselves alone. Bido Sherifi led the way, cane in hand. My father kept stumbling on the stony road. The others muttered, cursed, swore, coughed, and twisted their ankles in the ruts. Only Nazo’s daughter-in-law walked gracefully, even in that sinister night, swaying very slightly. I guess she couldn’t walk any other way.
We passed the fields lying fallow. When the moon came out we were on the high road. I had never seen anything so dismal as the road that night, with its endless ruts dug by the truck wheels. In the moonlight they looked like the black rails of a line leading towards death. Nazo stumbled, fell, and got up again.
We crossed the bridge over the river. The deserted airfield lay before us.
We had to cross over it. We came to its edge. I never thought I would walk on it one day. It saddened me greatly. In our eyes that field had something sacred about it. It had been a kind of sister or bride to the sky. Chosen by fate, like a princess. Now it was sundered from the sky like a wife scorned, and it had a wild and gloomy mien.
From all around came the smell of manure. Resentful cattle had soiled the airfield. I was now convinced that weeds and cattle and mud would always win out in the end – never the sky.
Farther along we could make out Holy Trinity hill, and just behind it, black and menacing, strangely close as though it had risen up suddenly to see who was coming, loomed the dark bulk of the mountain.
Auntiemoon Pino tried hard to improve the view or at least to embellish and soften the sinister look of the landscape. But its light, greedily sucked up by the mud and fog, was so faint and weak that it only sullied everything even more.
Finally the moon disappeared behind the clouds.
“We can’t see a thing,” said Nazo’s daughter-in-law.
Everyone turned round to look. She was right, the city was blotted out completely.
Someone moaned.
Now the plain, the road, Holy Trinity hill, the nameless banks of fog, and the mountain itself (it was hard to believe we were walking towards a mountain, for its shape was so ill-defined that it seemed that all we had before us was a slightly thicker patch of night) began shifting about awkwardly, scratching themselves in the dark like prehistoric monsters. Little by little I lost all sense of reality. We were walking aimlessly, walking for the sake of walking, wandering in the belly of the night. I could no longer think. I was used to thinking between walls, at street-corners, in rooms, and these familiar places seemed to give order to my thoughts. But now, without them, everything was not only incomprehensible, but cruel too. The mountain leaned right over Holy Trinity hill and calmly chewed its neck. The hill gave up the ghost. Someone sneezed. The sound cheered me but not for long.
The moon came out again. The mists were drawn immediately to its light, drank it into their beards and let it drip back onto the muddy mess of the field. Caught in the act, the mountain hastily drew back from the hill, but a deep gouge in the hill’s neck was clearly visible.
Nazo’s daughter-in-law, the only one who had not sighed or moaned even once during the walk (maybe because she was walking through the kingdom of magic, with whose ways she had long been familiar), looked back again.
“The city,” she muttered.
“Where?” I asked softly.
“There.”
“That mist?”
“Yes.”
That’s where Grandmother was.
The moon disappeared again, taking my thoughts of Grandmother with it. Taking advantage of the darkness, the mountain bent over the hill again. This time it would surely strangle it to death.
We walked on like that for a long time. Now we were going up a steep slope.
“Don’t fall asleep,” said Bido Sherifi.
Ilir was alongside me.
“I was sleeping,” he admitted.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
We were still going uphill.
“It’s getting light,” said Mane Voco.
It was true, there was a faint light in the sky, but it looked as though it might change its mind and darken again at any moment.
We stopped to rest on a small plateau. The plain below, the road, the hills, the mists and the mountain were now slowly beating back the power of night. Exhausted, still pale with anguish, they awaited the morning.
“Look,” Ilir said, “Look over there.”
In the distance the contours of the city could just be seen in the murky mix of night and day. It was the first time I had seen it from afar. I almost shouted for joy, for all night I had had the feeling that it was sinking lower and lower into the mud of the plain, like an old ship foundering on the shore.
But now the contours of the landscape had finally flung the impish genies from their back and were gradually recovering their shapes in the daylight. Only the grey eyes of Nazo’s daughter-in-law still held something of the magic of the night.
The city was far away, caught in the clumsily opening jaws of the fog. The crones were down there. Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo, with their cracked glasses perched on their noses, were keeping watch over the road from their respective windows, waiting to catch a glimpse of the men with yellow hair. Clues had been perceptible for some time. Now the signs were unmistakable: Grandmother and Aunt Xhemo were getting ready to turn into crones. The German invasion seemed to be the definitive test for them, as the great incursions of the Turks, the massacres on the ruins of the republic and the monarchy, and the forty years of constant hunger had been for other crones.
“Let’s move,” said Bido Sherifi. “We’re nearly there.”
We got up. I was almost asleep on my feet. It was a painful slumber, cut and torn by the jolts passed to my body by the holes in the road.
Then someone said, “This is it. We’re here.”
I opened my eyes.
“We’re here!”
“Where?”
“Here.”
I had no idea where I was.
“In the village?”
“Yes, in the village.”
