The Fall of the Stone City Read online

  Whenever governments turned nasty they used this cave as a threat, but people were sure that it would never be put to use again. So in that unforgettable February when there was talk of the Cave of Sanisha being opened, something else was in fact expected, perhaps the release of the two doctors. Everybody felt sure that they had been arrested in error. When the news came one evening that not only had their arrest been no mistake, but that after one hundred and fifty years of disuse the Cave of Sanisha would be their dungeon, the city was incredulous. The cave had not been opened after the murder of the Turkish prefect nor the suspected murder of the sultan’s mother, the rebellion against the king nor even the conspiracy of the anti-communist members of parliament; but now it was to be used for the doctors.

  The report turned out to be true. The cave had been specially equipped for them, and both the doctors were already inside it.

  What condition were they in? Did they rest their heads on stones for pillows, did anyone think to cover them with blankets? Both Gurametos, wasting in prison! Were they chained to the wall like the rapists of long ago? Was salt rubbed into the wounds of their tortured bodies? Or were they well treated with champagne and music?

  All sorts of strange questions were asked before anybody thought of the most important one: what had they done?

  At first it was hard to find anything to accuse them of but soon it became easy enough. Just as the world was swept with wind and rain, so it was burdened with guilt. A share could be allotted to the doctors with plenty left over for others.

  Meanwhile these frantic attempts to conjure up a crime were interrupted by the arrival of two investigators. Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu were two young men from the city, fresh graduates of the Dzerzhinsky Academy of the secret police in Moscow. Their faces were pale, their ties tightly knotted and their overcoats extremely long. The godfather of the secret police who gave his name to the academy had proverbially worn a coat like this and had said, “Long coat, short shrift.”

  The two investigators became the visible dimension of the Gurameto case. The doctors were below in the dark of the pit but at least the investigators bobbed above the surface like balloons, signals from the lower depths.

  On Tuesday, 13 February, the two investigators emerged from the Cave of Sanisha clutching their files and strode purposefully down Hamurati Street, heading not for the police station but the hospital.

  Remzi Kadare was at the gate, his expression menacing and his face distorted with senseless fury. He wagged his finger. “Whatever happens here isn’t my fault. If you want to find the guilty ones, look at the other Kadares from Palorto.” He lowered his voice. “Oh no, what’s going on? They’re up to no good.”

  The investigators listened in puzzlement and then crossed the hospital yard, watched by the doctors and nurses standing at the entrance.

  The examination of the two doctors’ operation records, or rather, the full list of their patients, caused no concern. On the contrary, a wave of relief swept through the entire hospital. This first ray of light shed on the mystery roused some hope. They were looking at the mortality rate of operations. Everywhere in the world people died during surgery, their families complained about the doctors, the doctors justified themselves and the cases went to court.

  The investigators spent more than four hours in the hospital registry. Before they had passed the main gate, where Remzi Kadare again stood ready to say something that to him was very important, the first results of the investigation became known. Of the twelve thousand and more operations carried out by Big Dr Gurameto, about one thousand eight hundred patients had died on the operating table or soon after. The number for Little Dr Gurameto was less than one thousand. (The tendency to compare the two was again apparent.)

  The investigation of the two doctors, like many things where they were concerned, took place on two levels. The first, in the Cave of Sanisha, was hidden from everybody. The second and visible dimension involved the hospital, the morgue, family homes and sometimes the cemetery. Records of autopsies and personal interviews were attached to the medical records.

  The investigators, now pale after sleepless nights, appeared less often in the city. They lost weight, making their overcoats seem even longer. What was called the public side of the investigation now had its own secret aspects, which strangely did not relate to the dead but to the living. One by one, surviving patients, or rather their surgical scars, were to be examined for the oddest things, such as stitches in the form of six-pointed stars, tattoos, and old symbols (Hebrew ones for instance) of mysterious import.

  Some called these stories crazy but others replied, “Wait, just wait and you’ll see. This business will go far. This is serious stuff.” Since the two doctors were not only surgeons but gynaecologists, women would also be subjected to intimate examinations.

  Listeners to foreign radio stations, especially the BBC, passed on an extraordinary piece of news: a group of terrorist doctors had been exposed in the Kremlin, the very citadel of communism. The Soviets themselves had broadcast the news, calling it “murder in a white coat”. The usual furore was absent, probably because the case spoke for itself, but the report shocked the entire planet. Under the direction of a Jewish organisation known as the “Joint”, a group of doctors was preparing the greatest crime in the history of mankind: the elimination by murder of all the communist leaders throughout the world, starting with Joseph Stalin.

  This incomparable crime would change world history. The globe would tilt on its axis and not regain its balance for a thousand years, if ever. So Stalin’s anger, which had been thought to be directed at Gjirokastër, was in fact aimed at the whole world.

  A small, hesitant voice ventured to say that perhaps he was angry at both Gjirokastër and the world.

  At first it seemed a nonsensical idea to link the plot to Gjirokastër but now it was the natural and obvious thing. The conspiracy, although first discovered in the Kremlin, had stretched its tentacles everywhere: Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Albania, even Mongolia.

  People’s brains worked feverishly. So there was some truth in the stories about Stalin’s rejuvenation, time in reverse gear, the years moving backwards and that semi-official notice of a visit by the Father of the Peoples.

  There were two interpretations of this visit. According to the first, Stalin really had intended to come. The headquarters of the “Joint”, having long ago made its preparations to strike on Stalin’s first visit abroad, had issued orders to its cell in Albania, that is in Gjirokastër, to stand ready. The conspirators would poke out their heads like moles, and would suffer the consequences.

  In the second version the announcement of a visit was a front. It would never take place, and the “Joint” headquarters and Gjirokastër itself would fall into a trap. But still the moles would poke out their heads, and suffer. In either case Gjirokastër would pay a heavy cost for its vainglory. The city’s name was whispered everywhere. The entire communist world seethed with orders, warnings, secret communiqués.

  At three in the afternoon on 16 February, Blind Vehip was clapped in handcuffs at the crossroads of Varosh Street, in full view of the astonished passers-by.

  With her face as white as plaster, in a long dress on which there was no trace of violence, she approached the village. She walked slowly, yet not with downcast head as expected but with a distant expression, everything about her suggesting detachment.

  That is how they had seen her leaving the village of Kardhiq, where for three days and nights they had stripped her of her humanity, and that is how she looked as they watched her coming to Tepelene. Those who had heard her story from others, who themselves had it from hearsay, had imagined her looking like this, or even paler. A song had been composed about her, though nobody knew when or by whom. It began, “I lost my soul in the prison cell/Of Sanisha, black as hell.”

  As she walked, her brother Ali Tepelene watched her from his great house through a long officer’s telescope. His face was as black with fury as hers
was pale. His sister’s movements made it clear that she had come to look for death. No doubt at his hands. He did what she wanted and coldly shot her, first with a bullet in the forehead, and then with two, one in the forehead and one in the heart, and then four, fourteen, God knows how many. But this brought him no peace of mind. He killed her again, with all kinds of weapons, but still he was not satisfied, only filled with such distress that when he saw her dead, he kissed her on the brow.

  Later when he heard the song, he said to himself, “Ah, why didn’t I kill her properly?”

  No one know who had composed the song, and its meaning was ambiguous: it could be interpreted as a song of her ravishers, shackled in the Cave of Sanisha, in the cell which her avenging brother had later created especially for them; it might equally be taken as a song about the fatal depths of a woman’s body, below her belly, which had led them into temptation. But in both cases it was a song or lament put into the mouths of her violators. Ali Tepelene, the most powerful vezir of the Ottoman Empire, who would give orders even to the sultan, had been unable in forty years to detach the meaning of the song from its dark history.

  On 17 February, shortly before midnight, Shaqo Mezini and Arian Ciu, the foremost investigators of Albania and perhaps of the entire Communist Bloc, could not rid their minds of this song; its words made their knees buckle with terror and desire as they descended the steps of the famous cave.

  They led the two doctors, whom they had known since childhood, in handcuffs.

  A blinding light shone from an electric torch.

  Neither of the investigators knew what their voices would sound like under the stone vault. When they first spoke, the sound was even stranger than they expected.

  They heard their words, not in their own voices but as if spoken by actors from the distant past, returning to them enveloped in a terrifying echo and hanging suspended in the chamber before they melted away. “For . . . the . . . m u r d e r . . . ”

  It took some time for the doctors to understand the language. They were under investigation for the murder of patients during surgical procedures. They had no way of questioning why. There were no whys and hows. They were supposed to listen carefully to the conclusion of the investigation. This was a democratic proletarian state with the highest form of justice in the world, which never punished the innocent. The doctors were now cleared of the accusation of murder. The investigators had examined the full list of their patients and the exact times of their murders, they meant their deaths, and in particular the biographies of the victims, or rather the deceased, and had concluded that the numbers of the deceased of different political allegiances, i.e. communists, royalists and nationalists, did not reveal any political bias on the part of the surgeons. The suspicions against them were totally groundless.

  The doctors sighed in relief but the investigators did not look any more relaxed. “We have only one question. It is simple, but fundamental.”

  After a long silence the question was finally put to the two prisoners. The investigators now knew that the doctors had not committed murder. But the question was, were they aware . . .

  Almost in unison the doctors exclaimed, “What?” And indeed the astonished Big Dr Gurameto said it in German, “Was?”

  The investigators tried to explain. The word “aware” need not be interpreted in a literal sense. They meant a general awareness that medicine could be used to commit murder. Political murder, of course. For instance of communist leaders.

  The same gasps of amazement came again, and an exclamation in German.

  Never. Of course not. They were doctors. They were bound by the Hippocratic oath. Who would dare suggest something so repellent, even as a joke?

  “Our interview is over,” said one of the investigators. “As you see, we have been impartial. We only wanted the truth. Guard, take the prisoners to their cells.”

  Two hours later, at three in the morning, they brought the doctors back to the cave. Not only the investigators’ voices but everything else was different. The cave had become their home. In fact the investigators’ first words were, “I think you know that we are here in the Cave of Sanisha.”

  The doctors nodded to show they did.

  Both sides stared at each other. “Don’t think we’re taking back what we said two hours ago, that we hoodwinked you and just pretended to believe in your innocence. There’s no question of that. You’re clear of any charge of murder. We’re going to ask you about something else.”

  The investigators felt that the cave had taken them into its power. A fervour and excitement that they had never felt before, in which lust and suffering were mixed, had totally mastered them. They were not just investigators, they were the ravishers of Ali Pasha Tepelene’s sister. They were both torturers and their own victims.

  “Dr Gurameto, we want to ask you about the dinner on the night of 16 September 1943.”

  More than anything that had been said so far, this sent a chill of terror through the doctor.

  Ah, that dinner. He did not say these words aloud, but they were in his eyes, his laboured breath, the very hair on his head.

  The investigators looked straight at him.

  “What do you want to know?” Dr Gurameto said, but in a voice that seemed to question whether what had happened could ever be known.

  “We want the truth,” the investigators said, almost in one voice. “Everything. Hour by hour and minute by minute.”

  The doctor stared into vacant space.

  Could this truth ever be known or put in words? So far every effort had been made to conceal it. For almost ten years, by unspoken agreement, these events had been covered by the cold ash of oblivion, forgotten by both Germans and Albanians, royalists, nationalists and communists alike. Now they wanted to wipe away this ash. They wanted the truth.

  “The whole truth,” the investigators repeated. “What happened. What was said. What was not said.”

  Big Dr Gurameto lowered his eyelids. The doctor began to speak, slowly and tonelessly. The square in front of the city hall with its wet asphalt and the statue of Çerçiz Topulli in the middle appeared before him with extraordinary distinctness. The tank crews had just descended to stretch their legs. The officers fussed over the mud that spattered their boots. Then, by the door of an armoured vehicle, he saw Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, the commander of the troops, with his army greatcoat slung over his shoulder. His college friend watched him with glistening eyes as he approached.

  Their emotional greeting. What von Schwabe said: ‘Do you recognise me? Have I changed?’ Then his dismay at Albanian treachery, his threat to punish the city, the hostages. As threatening as anything he said was the pale glint of his Iron Cross.

  Dr Gurameto asked if it was necessary to relate in detail what happened next. The investigators replied that he should tell what he thought was necessary, so he described his invitation, the colonel’s acceptance and the dinner itself. He gave an account of who was present and of the atmosphere, the music and the champagne; he did not dwell any more than necessary on the release of the hostages. After he finished describing daybreak and how everybody was exhausted after the long night without sleep, there fell a long silence that was finally broken by Shaqo Mezini with a single ominous question.

  “Is that all?”

  Dr Gurameto said nothing. The other investigator bent down by his shoulder and murmured softly in an almost caressing voice, “What you have told us is accurate. But we know these things. We want the rest of the story. What we don’t know. The mystery.”

  Gurameto froze. The investigators watched him, but their expectations were dashed. With a jerk of his head, as if to banish all inner uncertainty of his own, he said, “There’s no mystery.”

  Shaqo Mezini straightened his back against the metal chair. “Doctor, I’m sorry to have to say this, but you’re not telling the truth.”

  Gurameto gave the investigator a cold look.

  “I know something different,” the investigator said, shakin
g his head as if to convey that saying this gave him a kind of pleasure that went beyond an investigator’s professional satisfaction.

  Big Dr Gurameto’s eyes conceded defeat.

  An intoxicating thrill swept through Shaqo Mezini. He had not realised how eagerly he had been waiting for this moment. At times of weakness, when he lost faith in the investigation’s prospects of success, he was more scared that the doctor would not give in than of his superiors’ displeasure. From the first day when he had learned that the doctor was part of this case, all his thoughts, obscurely, inexplicably, had focused obsessively on the figure of the prisoner. He had seen him dozens of times on Varosh Street, setting off for the hospital, an aloof, imposing figure. The investigator’s secret dream was to become a person like this, held in regard by everybody but not regarding anybody himself. He knew that he was not the only person to revere the doctor like this and was aware that his aura came from his reputation as a surgeon, from having studied in Germany, and the many stories told about him.

  Later, when he returned from the academy in Moscow to find this provincial city shorn of all its glamour, he was startled to discover that Big Dr Gurameto’s aura, and that of his little counterpart, had survived undiminished. The young investigator was now conscious of this attraction, and that it was mixed with an element of anxiety. The big doctor was still unapproachable but now also seemed opposed to him. Shaqo Mezini found it hard to grasp the idea that he felt men like Big Dr Gurameto were in fact a block to him. It wasn’t even that they stood in the way of new ideas, the construction of socialism and the like; their opposition, though Shaqo Mezini could not know it, resulted from something deeper. It was intrinsic to men of Shaqo Mezini’s kind, something infinitely ruthless, like every kind of male rivalry.