Ismail Kadare - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

Mark and his friend parted company at the first crossroads. On his way back to the studio, Mark went down Friars Street. As usual, there was no light in the windows of Zef’s third-floor apartment.

He lit a cigarette and tried to blank out everything from his mind.

The studio door made a creaking noise as he opened it. It would go on creaking like that until it had properly settled on its hinges, the locksmith had said. But there was a piece of paper, folded twice over, under the door. He bent down, picked it up, and as he read it he realized with alarm that the handwriting was his girlfriend’s:

“My uncle got here today. Nothing is quite sorted out yet. Je fembrasse”

He stood quite still for a moment with the letter in his hand. So the highland uncle had turned up. Judas too, he thought despondently.

The trumpets were sounding.

THE VIRUSES WERE SPREADING ALL OVER. Most of them had no names. You thought you had a cold and ended up having tests for leprosy.

Mark had a fever. At times he felt as if he was turning endless somersaults down to the deepest basement in the universe. He was going down and down, in an elevator falling faster and faster, at vertiginous speed, toward Dante’s Inferno. The abrupt rediscovery of things that had been buried deep since time immemorial was something he could not stand. The old secrets were like oil fields without any soul or remorse, like sorrowful seams of long-abandoned coal, or a lode of sapphire giving off occasional smiling cynical sparkles….

When he came out of this whirlpool, he found himself in stark silence, beneath still waters, and that was just as unbearable. Nothing stirred; there was not the slightest breath of movement in the reed bed over there. All passion was spent, not a spark of human excitement was permitted. It was just a specimen book filled with dried Furies mounted like butterflies and identified at the bottom of each page by an inventory number and a Latin botanical name.

One afternoon Mark’s fever dropped a little. He realized he was not so sick when it occurred to him, without the slightest hesitation or doubt, that he knew who the real bank robbers were. At least, he knew who two of them were: Palok Kuqi and Cuf Kertolla, the man who propped up the bar at the Town Café. Things often turn out like that — you hunt high and low for clues, but the culprits have been in front of you all along, even sipping a cup of coffee right next to you. Mark felt too weary to work out how he had come by his certain knowledge. But next to the horror of falling and the terror he had felt, this seemed perfectly natural.

Then his fever went up again. No! no! he moaned intermittently. He was being pestered by the iceberg that sank the Titanic , which insisted on his hearing its confession. You’re the assistant commissioner, the iceberg said, so you have to take my confession! I really must lay down my burden of remorse! But nobody’s blaming you! Mark pointed out, but he didn’t dare speak the truth, that nobody in the force wanted to waste time on a lump of ice. Notwithstanding, the iceberg had already begun to pour out the story of its so-called life. It had been born when the Titanic was no more than a set of lines and numbers on a naval architect’s drawing boards. One winter’s night, its parents, two giant North Sea icebergs, collided, and from that amorous encounter, or monstrous crash, as you will, the young one was born. Like any newborn babe he was quite small at the start, but he grew and grew in height and weight. It was very cold, and as everyone knows there’s nothing better for the health than living on cold and nothing else. I was the son of the frost, and the frost was my master. Other people, like you, say that cold is death, but for us, it’s the opposite, it’s heat that is death. That’s the great gulf of misunderstanding that keeps us apart. And that’s where the famous accident of the night of April 14 comes from. I, the antisun, was solitary and cold, and found myself staring at the brand-new Titanic. But you can’t understand that. Your god is warmth. In your lust for heat you’re capable of anything, you could even burn the world down. See now: a few minutes ago you were complaining of being cold, and now your forehead is burning and all you dream of is an ice cube to put on it!

That’s true enough, Mark said to himself. But he did not quite know how to apologize. The fact that the huge ship Titanic , with its deck lights and searchlights, with its roaring boilers and its cabin fires, with its freight of smiles, music, and champagne, with its women’s unshaven love nests, should have smashed into the guardian of the glacial realm now seemed to Mark to be the most natural thing in the world.

Two entities made of opposite elements had come up against each other in the wrong place, somewhere they should never have been together, just like that other case, that other story … That’s right, in that faraway town where a man and a snake, like people who have to share a single suit of clothes, had shared the same physical appearance.

Mark wanted to yell: Not now! Some other time, please! But he knew it would have been a waste of breath. The snake was another one who wanted charges brought. He told the whole story in the generally accepted version, in other words toeing what could be called the official line. Before quizzing him on the other, secret version, Mark wanted to know more about the moment of transition, the moment that seemed to be not of this world, the instantaneous flash in which the metamorphosis of man into reptile and reptile into man took place. That’s the sole matter on which I would be grateful not to answer any questions, the snake replied. It cannot be told. Even if I wanted to tell you about it, I could not. You said it yourself: It’s not of this world; as a consequence, any attempt to understand it would fail, first of all, but would also quite possibly be a mortal sin.

I guess that’s true, Mark thought.

As for the other, secret version, it was just the official story turned on its head, as it often is in so many cases: instead of the snake-groom turning into a man every night, it was the man-groom who could suddenly change into a snake. It was reminiscent of the story of an Albanian girl who had landed in Italy in 1999 after crossing the Strait of Otranto. In a hotel room in Bari, her boyfriend had suddenly turned into a wild animal…. A high proportion of the Albanian prostitutes in Rome and Paris had more or less the same story to tell On each and every one of their wedding nights, the bridegroom had thrown off his human disguise, metamorphosed into an unrecognizable, alien being, and insisted that his bride go work on the streets.

“How come there are now so many of you?” Mark asked, but no answer came, as the snake had vanished.

As it’s often been stated, all that happened at the time of the gods’ first departure. At the time, of course, nobody noticed at all. So we have lost the date of their departure and the real reason for it; yet it must have become pretty obvious to all. Now the opposite rumor was doing the rounds: the gods were coming back! They were returning from long years of wandering, and only they knew how to come back. (Maybe they were hitching rides in OSCE cars, or were using vehicles that mere mortals had not yet dreamed of.) Come as you can, bring what you will, but don’t leave us alone! Mark screamed — and this time, he screamed it all out loud.

He was hanging on to the tassels of his bedspread as if to stop himself from falling into the pit.

MARK WENT UP TO THE WINDOW to see what was going on outside. It was a most curious spectacle. The city was under water. Muddy brown water, the sort you see when there’s been flooding. Even from the balcony you could hear the lapping of the waves. Mark leaned over, dipped his fingers in it, and was surprised to find that it was not at all cold. He was alarmed to see how rapidly the flood had risen to the level of his second-floor apartment, and for a short while he stared at the buildings on the other side of the street and at the tops of the lampposts, which rose above the waterline. Then without a second thought he stripped off his shirt, and, as he was already in his underpants, put his leg over the balustrade. He dipped a toe into the water, and then let the rest of him slip in.