Ismail Kadare - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

“Really?” the locksmith said. “You didn’t know she had opened her shop?”

“I’d been told. Of course, I had heard, but…”

The locksmith nodded his head and smiled.

“He comes to collect his wife here almost every evening after work. When you see him, all dressed up and looking so pleased with himself, it’s hard to remember he’s a local lad, a mountain boy. He looks like he comes straight from the capital. Oh, you’re frowning, I know what you’re going to answer, that there are plenty of ragamuffins in Tirana as well. I know that as well as you, but for us, all the same, the capital means something! And anyway, our mountain areas are going to be modernized as well, aren’t they? They’ll also get civilized, like people say these days, and that’s a fact!”

“Sure,” Mark replied. “No doubt about it, Kol.”

They were now quite close to the studio, and slowed their pace.

As they went up the stairs, Mark felt that the locksmith’s expression had changed. His eyes had become alternately intense and haughty. They lit up as soon as he saw a door, and went dull whenever they were directed toward anything else. The eye of a true craftsman, Mark thought. He didn’t even bother to turn the nude portrait of his girlfriend to the wall, as he usually did when he had visitors in the studio.

The locksmith hurried about the studio, huffing and puffing, from one corner to another, as if he were trying to find cover from a potential threat.

Mark could not take his eyes off him. He sought but could not find on the locksmith’s face some reading of the extent of the danger, for he was sure that in the craftsman’s mind the danger was proportionate to the value of the paintings. As he tracked the man’s stops and starts, and the sporadic glints in his eye, Mark felt as though he were awaiting a sentence. Did the locksmith believe, or did he not, that the studio was at risk of being burgled?

Talking more to himself than to his client, in one spot the locksmith mumbled, “This lock’ll have to be changed,” and at another, “Well, these door panels need strengthening, for sure,” “You’ll need a vertical bolt right here,” “Both sides of the jamb need metal catches….”

The inspection went on. At one point, Mark tried to interrupt with additional information, but what he got by way of response was silent fury. The locksmith’s eyes, divided by a deep vertical furrow right down his forehead, suddenly turned threatening.

“Look, do you want to be safe … or be burgled?”

Mark blushed to the nape of his neck, something that did not happen to him often.

“Sorcerer!” he muttered to himself. How had the man managed to see into the depths of his soul?

He took comfort in the thought that the locksmith’s state of overexcitement meant that the man would have forgotten the exchange entirely in a few days’ time.

The scene was brought to an end, so it seemed, by a deep sigh from the craftsman. He suddenly went limp; in an instant, his eyes lost their sparkle and also the look of contempt with which they had been filled. He cast about for something to sit on.

“Would you like a drink?” asked Mark.

The locksmith had turned back into an ordinary human, and his breathing had resumed a normal rhythm.

“Theft can explain how the whole world goes round,” he said as he lit a cigarette. “You can tell a man by his looks, people say. I have a very different opinion.”

He was talking once again in his natural voice, with his customary jocular intonation. It wasn’t the way someone behaved, or spoke, or wrote or drew, according to him, that best defined what sort of a person he or she was — especially as far as amorous relations were concerned — but above all the way he or she forced a lock. It was a surer mark of a rapist than any sample of blood or sperm. And the same thing went for sodomists.

Mark began to laugh out loud. His eye caught the canvas of the nude, but now it was too late to turn it to the wall. Anyway, as the girl’s face was still unfinished, she remained quite unidentifiable.

“That’s how burglars and burgled alike give themselves away,” the locksmith continued. “Thieves, as I said, can be identified by the way they break locks, and their victims can be recognized by their choice of locks. You could sum up a whole epoch by its locks and bolts — or rather, by its styles of breaking and entering.”

He got off his chair and wandered around the studio. Mark thought he was now looking at the paintings with another kind of eye.

“This one, I don’t know, it looks different from the others. Is it by you?”

Mark smiled.

“It’s a copy of a painting by a great Spanish master, a painter called El Greco. I did it as a learning exercise, at college.”

“Oh, I see.”

On his return from Spain, the director had told him about Philip If’s retreat to the Escorial, and ever since then, Mark could not look at his old exercise without imagining the sick man’s gloomy chamber, where few people stayed very long, apart from his sisters, because of the stink.

“There used to be quite extraordinary heists,” the locksmith said. “My father — may his soul rest in peace — taught me my trade, and told me a whole mess of good stories.” He chuckled under his breath, as if hesitating to say out loud what had just come into his mind. “Did you ever imagine anyone could steal a coffin?”

“No, I’ve heard stories about corpses being stolen, but never about a stolen coffin.”

“Well, then. One of our neighbors got his wife’s coffin pinched! In those days, I suppose you remember, it was the custom to have coffins delivered well ahead of the funeral, and to stand them up, empty, like they were on show, by the front door of the bereaved. Well, then. It got pinched. The poor old husband seemed to have lost his wits. Then his despair suddenly turned into joy. He reckoned it was a good omen. He got so taken up with the idea that he convinced himself his wife wasn’t dead, and he started shaking her like she was an apple tree, to make her come to!”

“Unbelievable!” the painter exclaimed politely.

“At one time there were bandits aplenty on the Shkodër road,” the locksmith said after a pause. “As well as up the Te-pelen Gorge, and farther on, all the way to Janina.”

He talked about thieving as others would talk of a drought, of an especially heavy snowfall, or of an unusually bountiful harvest.

“Under the dictatorship, robberies, like everything else, shrank to nothing. But it’s getting late.”

He stood up, and then rattled off in two minutes the list of all the equipment he needed and the time it would take to complete the job, not forgetting, of course, his estimate of the charge.

Mark walked him back to the shop and then returned to the studio to look at the items that the locksmith said needed strengthening. Then he walked up and down, as he always did when he felt preoccupied. As he came up to the Greco copy, he thought that he too would like to be looked after by his sisters. As for his girlfriend, he would certainly like her by his bedside, but … only if he were injured!

He wondered how such an idea had lodged itself in his head. He stared for a moment at the corner of the bay window. He didn’t know why, but he vaguely imagined that that was where the bullet meant for him would come from.

Maybe he ought to take that picture down? At least until his boss had got tired of talking about his trip to Spain.

He couldn’t get his mind off what the locksmith had just told him about robberies. It was as if in the locksmith’s mind that was the principal approach to understanding world history. Just as some people had tried to explain history exclusively in terms of the role of women.