Ismail Kadare: The Pyramid

It remained a prolific childbearer beneath the scorching sun, but its offspring were not easy to discern. Descendants cropped up in other countries and in other periods, as regimes or historical monuments, but it was hard to believe they had first been conceived in the middle of the Egyptian desert. They always took on false names, and only on two occasions did they make the mistake of declaring themselves openly, like a man removing or accidentally dropping his terrifying mask. The first was Timur the Lame’s skullstacks; their second reappearance took place six hundred years later, in the land that had previously belonged to the Illyrians and had now been handed down to their descendants under the name of Albania. Like the product of a cosmic copulation such as the Ancients might have imagined — in which sperm and eggs are dispersed in huge abandon and engender a multitude of creatures or celestial bodies — the old pyramid spawned not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of little ones. They were called bunkers, and each of them, however tiny it may have been in comparison transmitted all the terror that the mother of all pyramids had inspired., and all the madness too. Steel rods were planted in the concrete, following the principle invented long before by Kara Houleg, The word Unity was often inscribed on their loins, showing that these bunkers were indeed related both to the mother-pyramid and to the skullstacks, and that the old dream of connecting all brains to each other by a single idea could only be achieved by such rods of iron running through people’s heads and making of them a united entity.

Pyramidal phenomena occurred in cycles, without it ever being possible to determine precisely the timing of their appearance: for no one has ever been able to establish with certainty whether what happens is the future, or just the past moving backward, like a crab. People ended up accepting that maybe neither the past nor the future were what they were thought to be, since both could reverse their direction of travel, like trams at a terminus.

One morning a fair-haired tourist who was taking photographs of the pyramid made a wish: that the monument should become quite transparent, so that everything inside — the sarcophagi, the mummies, the indecipherable puzzle — would be visible, as through a wall of glass. Day was breaking, the pyramid began to go hazy, and the tourist could feel a shiver in his soul with each passing minute, as if he were at a spiritualist seance and about to take a snapshot of a ghost.

He developed his roll of film the same evening, and the pyramid really did look like a glass house, except that on one edge, near the ninth row on the northeast slope, you could see some kind of blemish. He took the film out of the developer, put it back in… to a depth of a thousand, of four thousand years. . but when he finally took it out, the blemish was still there. It was not, as he had first thought, a fault in the film. It was a bloodstain that neither water nor acid would ever wash clean.

Tirana-Paris, 1988–1992