The Fall of the Stone City Read online

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At this moment it became clear that there were two currents of events, one inside Big Dr Gurameto’s house and one outside in the city. So far separate, these currents now swirled together as if in a vortex of delirium and as they merged they swelled, dissolved, and altered their shape, no longer appearing in their true form.

  Yet, one piece of news remained constant: the hostages really were being freed.

  Like shadows they crept away from the city square and disappeared in the streets and lanes, where the house-gates had long been left open for them.

  Low voices were heard everywhere. “Be careful, don’t shout, don’t make a noise. No celebrations. Who knows what’s happening. They might change their minds and take them back.”

  The city recalled other long-forgotten tales of hostages. Everyone had their own style of hostage-taking. The Ottoman Turks had one way and Mussolini’s troops another, while the Italians did it differently to Albanian brigands, who in turn were not like Macedonian brigands, nor the nomadic Roma. The same was true of governors: the pasha of Janina had been as impetuous as the pasha of Berat had been unhurried and calculating, though that had not prevented the latter from sending back a hostage’s head on a dish when the deadline for his ransom expired.

  All these memories inevitably prompted a further question. What had the Germans gained in exchange for their release? This was the crux in any hostage story. Give me back my kidnapped wife, and I’ll free your prisoner. You want the hostages? Hand over the gold, the murderer, the carpets, the men who fired on the advance party!

  The Germans’ demand was after all in plain black and white on the posters stuck everywhere: give us the terrorists’ names and we’ll hand back the hostages!

  Some details of the haggling over names in Gurameto’s house filtered through.

  “We know from Herr Marx that communists have no fatherland, but this is the first time we’ve heard of them having no names, here on our first evening in Albania!”

  And so the conversation turned to nicknames, which seemed so much the fashion in this city. You could be quietly drinking coffee with someone who would suddenly throw you a conspiratorial glance and turn your blood cold by announcing, “Listen, so far I’ve been called Çelo Nallbani, but you should know that from now on my name is ‘Wolf’. Or ‘North Pole’.” The history of the nicknames did not reach as far back as the stories of hostages but was just as colourful. Some nicknames were easy to interpret and bore a kind of meaning, like “Comrade Lightning” or “The Fist” but others were incomprehensible: “Blah-blah”, “Vitamin C” or “Mandolinist”.

  The Germans must have gained something during the course of their conversation but nobody knew if they had indeed extracted names or had been palmed off with nicknames. Some thought that they might have been sold a mixture of names and nicknames, just as wheat is sometimes bought with chaff.

  However the matter was threshed out, there was no avoiding the truly central question: quite apart from the matter of names and nicknames, did this ploy of Big Dr Gurameto’s represent treason or not?

  Everybody knew that the two sides in this debate would never agree in a thousand years and would both be at odds with a third group of more cautious people, of whom there are always plenty, who took the view that it was hard for the uninitiated to judge those with inside knowledge, or for insiders to judge outsiders and so on. Then they would lose the thread again until a voice piped up, “So what’s really going on in there?”

  The scene was imagined in two ways. In one, a merry and indeed tipsy Dr Gurameto, at ease in this world of pseudonyms, held a glass of champagne. The alternative version also included Gurameto but this time grim-faced, dramatically handcuffed and with a revolver at his head. Meanwhile the other Dr Gurameto, the little one, was lying low, trembling like a mouse.

  Another handful of hostages was released and they too scattered like ghosts. Again whispers went round. “No celebrations, don’t make a sound, don’t rejoice too soon!” Inevitably people started totting up how many had been freed and how many remained. With astonishing mental agility they calculated the number of hostages that might be released in exchange for one name and how many for a nickname. Of course nicknames were a weak currency compared to real names, rather like ordinary francs compared to gold francs.

  When the third and largest batch of hostages was released all at once, most people were of the opinion that either the Germans really had lost their wits, or Dr Gurameto’s treason had gone beyond all bounds. Meanwhile the latter’s admirers, though fewer in number, were so fervent that they claimed not only that Dr Gurameto was the greatest liberator of hostages in history but that in the course of the dinner his appointment as governor of Albania had arrived directly from Berlin. Only this, and not treachery, could explain the miracle that was taking place. These admirers asserted that there might be some truth in the image of a revolver against a head, but it would be the other way round, with Dr Gurameto holding a gun to the colonel’s head as he issued the order, “Fritz, release the hostages!”

  But ancient scripture warns against rejoicing too soon and just as the hope blossomed that the last of the hostages would be freed before midnight, it was cut down as if by the stroke of a knife. A curt, cold order was issued at the gate of the house from which the music of the gramophone boomed. “Stop! Halt!” the Germans said. “We’ve done enough for this city. German magnanimity, the Nibelungenlied, Beethoven and so forth has its limits, and so does mercy. We have never before done so much for anyone! Enough!”

  The Albanians looked for the reason for the Germans’ sudden change of heart among their own past sins. These included their abductions of women (it was believed that each time this happened, a spring ran dry); their periodic incursions into Greece, with all the drums and dudgeon of war, which left only grief and ashes behind. The sacking of the city of Voskopojë, although it happened so long ago, had to be counted among these sins. Finally there were the imperial judges, in whose strongboxes, alongside their silver watch chains, lay ancient court judgments with terrible sentences.

  These were their visible sins, startling and gross, but more corrosive than these were their secret, inward falls from grace. The white fancywork, lace and drapery of the old houses sometimes, instead of inspiring admiration, made your flesh creep: it was hard to forget all those memories of incest, dishonoured brides and old people smothered under the awnings of the great verandas.

  All these things were recalled to mind but quickly dismissed, until the real snag was hit upon: Jakoel the Jew. Had they really not known this all along or had they pretended that by banishing him from their minds he would be lost in the crowd?

  Nothing suggested that the Germans were aware that a special fish had been netted in their catch of hostages, but one could still imagine the tense conversation between Big Dr Gurameto and Fritz von Schwabe on that night across the dinner table.

  “Dr Gurameto, you’ve broken your word. There is a Jew here.”

  “A Jew? So what?”

  “So what? You know I can’t release Jews.”

  “Jews, Albanians, it’s all the same.”

  “It’s not the same, Gurameto, not at all.”

  “Albanians do not betray their guests. You know that, Fritz. This Jew is a guest in our city. We can’t hand over a guest.”

  “Because the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini forbids it?”

  “I told you this long ago in the tavern. It’s been our law for a thousand years.”

  The colonel paused doubtfully then shook his head. “In that case Lekë Dukagjini is an enemy of the Reich. I will release them all, but not the Jew.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “We talked about it in the tavern,” said Gurameto in a muffled voice. “But if you’re not the same man as then . . . ”

  These words struck more terror in the colonel than a bolt of lightning.

  “Dr Gurameto, do you think I’m not the same man?”

/>   The two stared at each other with cold determination.

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Gurameto wearily. “You are the same man as you were then.”

  Fritz von Schwabe breathed more easily.

  Time was passing.

  In the darkness, on the city square, the forty remaining hostages shivered in the cold. Among them, the Jew Jakoel felt the cold most of all. He was on the brink of telling the others to hand him in to save themselves, but his lips would not form the words. All around him was silence and calm. For the first time in many years the nationalists, royalists and communists, who had been at odds over everything else for years, were of the same mind concerning this Jew. Jakoel wanted to weep but the tears would not come.

  The discussion in Dr Gurameto’s house petered out. Only the gramophone continued its din. The guests looked first at the colonel and then at the doctor, not understanding what was happening. It was as if a dense fog had descended. The rumour was that a second order had just arrived from Berlin, annulling Big Dr Gurameto’s appointment as governor and restoring his powers to Fritz von Schwabe.

  The colonel himself stood up to change the gramophone record. He put on Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and everybody realised there was no more hope. And so they sat for a long time, waiting for the rattle of machine guns.

  The first cocks crew. A superstition claimed that they drove away ghosts.

  The doctor and the colonel muttered to each other in private for a long time and again the situation changed. Nobody explained why. Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, bearer of the Iron Cross, took a deep breath and ordered the hostages to be freed. Not just some, but all of them.

  The tension relaxed and it was as if the dinner were starting again. Dr Gurameto’s sweet-natured daughter, her chestnut hair combed in the latest fashion, carried in a tray with glasses to celebrate the agreement. All the guests had seen how beautiful she was, even if they had pretended to take no notice. One after another they had fallen in love with her, passionately, as war-weary men do. And she had fallen in love with them. Faced for the first time with such a dense crowd of dangerous masculinity, all men of chivalry, intimate with death, she had fallen suddenly, tremulously in love with them, as if here in this room the men would fill the great emptiness of the future. Her hands trembled as she passed round the drinks to the colonel, then to her father, her mother and to the others in turn and finally, with a slight hesitation, to her fiancé.

  They emptied their glasses and the shouts of “Zum Wohl!” mingled with the music of the gramophone as the cocks crew a second time. With soft steps the girl left the drawing room before the exhausted men collapsed on the sofas and on the carpet itself, drifting into a deep sleep.

  The girl was woken by the first morning light. For a moment, she could not tell what time it was or why she was lying fully clothed on the bed in her parents’ room.

  “Oh God, what have I done!” she said in terror, holding her brow.

  The house was silent. Her feet carried her involuntarily to the great drawing room, from which a rasping sound came, like the final struggle of a man who finds it hard to die.

  She saw them stretched out where they had fallen, arms outspread and mouths gaping, her father, fiancé and mother, in whose lap an officer had laid his head; and then the colonel, his face still masked, and the others, frozen, white, like sculptures.

  She turned towards the gramophone. The needle was stuck, causing the rasping noise. The icy thought ran through her that nobody else could be blamed for the poisoning but herself, the sole person left alive.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After this unforgettable mid-September night the sun rose, for the first time unobserved by anyone in the stone city. Everybody was still asleep, exhausted by the night’s events.

  Their waking would become a whole story in itself, to be told in the course of many days and over many cups of coffee. “Where are we?” they asked, as they awoke to find themselves on verandas, in linen cupboards, stretched on the rafters of attics or, as in most cases, on the staircases and in the cellars where sleep had overtaken them. They struggled to work out, if not what time it was, at least the day or the month.

  The most difficult question: “What happened?” came last. A thick veil had fallen between them and their memories of events. Behind this veil the story could be discerned dimly, as if it were scared to emerge.

  The music of a gramophone was the first thing that seeped through. Then, slowly, and with great effort, people recalled the nightmare of the hostages. The fact that eighty people had lived through the horror of this experience, minute by minute, should have left no room for speculation or error but the hostages did not all tell the same story. Some did not want to admit that they had been hostages, perhaps fearing that in a second wave of arrests they would be told, “You, sir. This is the second time we’ve arrested you.” Other people who had not been hostages were thirsty for fame. They claimed that they had been present facing the machine guns on the city square and were so persuasive that they were believed more readily than genuine hostages.

  This confusion added to the general mystery surrounding the events of the day. Out of force of habit these were called “unforgettable”, although so many deserved to be forgotten. They were recalled to mind one by one but more and more tentatively. What about the partisan ambush at the entrance to the city? God knows what really happened there. There were no eyewitness accounts and there was no physical evidence apart from two black skid marks on the asphalt, where it was thought the German motorcycles had turned back.

  Probably there really had been an ambush, which the communists called heroic and the nationalists considered a provocation, but it was equally plausible that the whole incident had been invented by the Germans to justify their tactics of terror.

  The ambush could be interpreted to the credit of all three parties, but the same could hardly be said of the incident of the white sheet, which was taken as a sign of surrender to the Germans. It was easy to call it a mirage but seen by whom, the inhabitants of the city or the German Army?

  Obviously Gurameto’s famous dinner was the biggest mystery of all. It had started as Big Dr Gurameto’s fairy-tale reunion with his German college friend. But the rest went beyond any fairy tale. The invitation to dinner, the gradual release of the hostages, not to mention the climax at dawn in the Gurameto house, the motionless Germans laid out in deathly sleep in the drawing room and the doctor’s daughter, thinking she had poisoned them, and then the Germans slowly stirring, resurrected as if at Easter time, not one Christ but a whole cohort of Christs. This was not just a disgrace to the house but a blasphemous parody.

  All these events might have been accepted as imaginary had it not been for one detail: the music of the gramophone. This music had blared all night and everyone had heard it. It might have been taken for a crazy whim on the part of Gurameto, of a kind familiar to the city, where the more respected its citizens were, the more impulsive they were likely to be in their caprices. And yet it was hardly likely that Dr Gurameto would get it into his head on the night of the German invasion to play his gramophone in hermit-like seclusion.

  Unable to account for this extraordinary hiatus, people inevitably suggested the influence of some force majeure, like the Double Night. It was as if, after lying in wait for a thousand years, this monster had finally descended to enfold forty or more hours in its arms, seizing a whole day like a wolf snatching a sheep, and had vanished again into the infinite depths of time.

  But as people’s heads cleared, so their eyes regained their proper vision. On either side of the iron gates in the city square hung two long flags with the swastika in their centre. Above them was a huge banner in both Albanian and German, appealing for recruits to the newly founded Albanian gendarmerie. A long queue of elderly men had formed by the side entrance before dawn. The German sentries stared in astonishment at their strange gowns and cloaks to which were pinned unheard-of insignia and stripes. These were the old judges of t
he former empire, who hoped to find employment. From the folds of their robes peered their letters of appointment and copies of their judgments and rulings with their seals and signatures, from all their different postings throughout the boundless Ottoman dominions.

  The Albanian interpreter in the ground-floor office found it hard to render into German their records of service, in which the old men placed so many hopes. These described the variety of sentences they had handed down, not just usual ones like beheading and hanging but more sophisticated ones like skinning and dismemberment alive, drowning in vats of boiling water or tepid water in a tank with two snakes. There were other forms of drowning (one involving a monkey) and two ways of being buried alive: one with the legs and part of the trunk under the earth and the head and chest above, and one the other way round. At this point the German officer interrupted the Albanian interpreter with a tactful expression of thanks, adding that Germany had its own forms of punishment and the Third Reich was not a Mongol empire, an expression that struck the old men as “not in very good taste”.

  Meanwhile the city’s newspaper Demokratia had reappeared, full of news from the capital. Albania, following its liberation by the Third Reich, had cast off the hated Italian yoke and had been declared a sovereign state. A government had been formed headed not by the famous Mehdi Frashëri, as hoped, but by a respected gentleman named Biçaku. Indeed, a Regency Council had been set up with four members, one for each religious community, evidently in expectation of the return of King Zog I. In even larger type came news of the unification of Kosovo and Çamëria with Albania and a headline announcing the restoration of the ancient Albanian flag: the real standard of Skanderbeg was to be used again, with the black eagle and without the lictor’s fasces, which were a bitter memory of Italy.

  Other reports described the spread of Albanian-language schools in Kosovo, supported by research that demonstrated the superiority of Albanian to most other Balkan languages and sometimes the superiority of the Albanian race itself.