Ismaíl Kadaré: Chronicle in Stone

Shutters flew open noisily, and women young and old stuck their heads out in terror. “What is it? What’s going on?”

“The magic! The magic!” we howled, thundering through the neighbourhood like a pack of mad dogs.

Kako Pino appeared in her window and made the sign of the cross, Nazo’s beautiful daughter-in-law smiled with her big eyes, Mane Voco poked the long barrel of his rifle out of the dormer, and Isa’s face lit up behind the big lenses of his glasses, which shone like two suns.

“Ilir!” cried Mane Voco’s wife, pinching her cheeks and lurching after us. “Ilir, my son, for the love of God throw it away! Throw it away!”

But Ilir paid no attention. His eyes bulging, he ran on, as we followed behind.

“The magic! The magic!”

Our mothers shouted to us from windows and doors and over garden walls. They clawed their cheeks in horror, threatened and wept, but still we ran on, refusing to abandon the magic object. We believed we held the city’s anguish in that filthy ball of rags.

In the end we got tired and came to a stop at Zamani Square, bathed in sweat and covered with dust, barely able to catch our breath, but radiant with joy.

“What do we do now?” someone asked.

“Anyone have a match?”

Someone did.

Ilir lit the magic ball and threw it down. As it burned, we began to shout again, then unbuttoned our flies and pissed on it, cheering wildly and sprinkling each other for fun.

Water from the cistern wouldn’t lather. “It’s bewitched,” said Xhexho. “Change it at once or you’re done for.”

Changing the water was a tough job. My father was reluctant. Grandmother insisted on it, and the other neighbourhood women who drew water from our cistern took her side. They collected some money and offered to work all day alongside the cleaning workers.

At last the decision was made. The chore began. The workers went up and down by rope, lamps in hand. Bucket after bucket was emptied. The old water came out to make way for the new.

Javer and Isa sat staring and smoking at the foot of the stairs, and burst out laughing from time to time.

“What’s so funny?” asked Xhexho. “Why don’t you get a bucket and give us a hand?”

“This great labour reminds us of the pyramids of Egypt,” said Javer.

Nazo’s daughter-in-law smiled.

The buckets were deafening as they clattered off the walls of the cistern.

“What we need is new people, not new water,” Javer said. Isa burst out laughing.

Mane Voco, Isa’s father, looked disapprovingly at the two boys.

Grandmother was coming down the stairs carrying a tray with cups of coffee for the workers.

Breathing hard, they sipped their coffee standing up. The lack of air deep in the cistern had made them pale. One of them was called Omer. When he went down, I leaned over the opening of the cistern and said his name.

“Omer,” echoed the cistern. When it was empty, its voice was loud, but curiously hoarse, as though it had a cold.

“Do you know who Omer was – Homer, that is?” Isa asked me.

“No, tell me.”

“He was a blind poet of ancient Greece.”

“Who put out his eyes? The Italians?”

They laughed.

“He wrote wonderful books about one-eyed monsters and about a city called Troy and also about a wooden horse.”

I leaned into the opening again. “Homer,” I shouted. Patches of light and shadow mingled in the cistern.

“Hoooomer,” it answered.

I thought I could hear the tapping of a blind man’s cane.

while Japan prepared its attack on India and Australia. Trial. Writ server. Property. Gole Balloma from the Varosh district was subpoenaed for failure to pay his debts. L. Xuano’s household goods will be auctioned on Sunday. Warrants have been issued for the arrest of the old women H.Z. and C.V., charged with practising magic. Readers are advised that the defective quality of the last issue of the paper, with any errors that may have crept in, was due to the stomach trouble from which I suffered last week. Editor-in-chief. More undisciplined pupils have been expelled from school. We have received a number of complaints from parents about the teacher Qani Kekezi. This gentleman’s pedagogical procedures are strange indeed. During anatomy lessons he dissects cats in front of the children, who are terrified. Recently a mutilated cat got loose and leapt into the pupils’ benches, trailing its intestines. Miss Lejla Karllashi left yesterday for Italy. We take this opportunity to offer readers the departure times for the Durrës-Bari steamship line. Addresses of the city’s midwives.

“You look a little sickly,” Grandmother said. “You’d better go stay at your grandfather’s for a few days.”

I liked to visit our maternal grandfather, whom we called Babazoti . His was a more cheerful place, not so harsh, and most of all there was no hunger there as there was in our house. In our big house, maybe because of the hallways, cupboards and cellars, you could really feel the hunger. Besides, our neighbourhood was grey, and thick with houses stuck almost on top of each other. Everything was hard and fixed, set down once and for all centuries ago. The streets, curves, corners, doorsteps, telephone poles and everything else seemed cut in stone and measured out to the last centimetre. But Grandfather’s place was different. There was nothing rigid about it. Everything seemed soft and mobile. The ground was free to do as it pleased – to stay level, for example, or to hump its back and throw streams into the river like a donkey shaking off its load. The scenery had something human about it: as the seasons passed it lost or gained weight, got lighter or darker, more beautiful or uglier. Whereas our neighbourhood was, so to speak, allergic to change.

Strangest of all was that that part of town had only two houses: Grandfather’s and another about a hundred yards away. The wasteland between them was rough and unfriendly. On misty mornings, you sometimes saw a stoat dashing across it, but then for days on end it stayed empty. The snakes were getting ready to hibernate underground. The fallen rocks and stones, which had tumbled down from who knows where centuries ago and settled in the bushes and sparse grasses, added to the sense of desolation. Everyone considered it a part of the city that was dying. The paths across it varied their tracks, as if impatient to abandon the place forever. And the bushes became more and more daring, sprouting in the most unexpected places: in the middle of the street, alongside the fountain, in the courtyards. One had even tried to grow on a doorstep, and had paid for its temerity with its life.

The bushes were ominous. Wandering around with Ilir in the upper districts, along the border between the mountains and the city, I noticed that the brush had grown even behind the row of ruins of the last houses, long since abandoned. There they lurked like wild beasts, surrounding the whole city. At night I could hear them howling. It was a muffled howl, barely perceptible, almost like a sob.

On the north side was the road leading to the citadel and linking the city’s upper districts with the centre. It overlooked the two houses at roof level. Once a truck had crashed into Babazoti’s courtyard. Sometimes a drunk stumbled onto the roof and rain would drip in for a week. But it didn’t happen often, since there were few passers-by on this street. From time to time somebody going home from the market in the hot afternoon would walk by singing at the top of his lungs.