Ismail Kadare: The Fall of the Stone City

The Vasiliko cemetery was the only graveyard he knew, so he had imagined himself running past it, like in the legend. He is scared, his heart shakes, and instead of continuing along the road until he meets a passer-by, he reaches his hand through the cemetery railings to throw the invitation inside. As he flees he turns his head and sees the invitation where it has fallen, lying white on top of a grave.

Now, forty years later, when the prison car passes this cemetery, this vision returns. It seems to him that the invitation, thrown away long ago, is the cause of everything. It is still lying there. He feels an insane desire to turn back and pick up the invitation from the grave where it has fallen, to turn time back and retract the hand of fate, before the dead man can receive the message.

In his distressed state he believes he can do this and so he gasps, his mouth foams with exertion, and with his free hand he points to the iron railing behind which the white invitation card still rests. But nobody listens to him.

A second vision comes to him a short time later. Now he is no longer six years old, running with an invitation in his hand, but another Gurameto, grown-up, indeed dead, who has rotted in the grave for many years, as he saw himself in a nightmare. The marble grave with the headstone on which his name is carved looms above him, and around the cemetery are the iron railings.

Through these railings a woman’s dainty hand with long fingers and a ring with a sad association lets fall an invitation. It flutters forlornly before coming to rest on his grave.

The dead man, that is, Gurameto himself, bewildered after so many silent years, feels compelled to obey the order and rise up to go where he has been invited to dinner. To what dinner? He cannot tell. To the house of that woman whom he recognises and yet does not, or to 22 Varosh Street? To his own dinner, perhaps, the one that caused him so much trouble long ago?

That is the order, but he does not want to obey it. More foam gathers at the corners of his mouth. He screams and strains to break his shackles, until the terrified investigators draw their revolvers. But he will not calm down. Still he struggles to turn back to that grave, to remove that invitation at last and change destiny. But it is impossible.

Mali i Robit (Durrës); Lugano; Paris

Summer — winter, 2007–2008