The Fall of the Stone City Read online

  Dr Gurameto was in Shaqo Mezini’s way. With his scalpels in his hand and wearing his white mask, he had acquired a stature that nobody could diminish. Moreover, he was a gynaecologist. To Shaqo Mezini’s mind, this meant having power over women, especially beautiful women, who submitted to him. A master of women! This was precisely what Shaqo Mezini was not. He was not ugly but neither was he sufficiently handsome to attract beautiful women. He had had a few ordinary exploits but never with women of real beauty, and there was never a question of having them in his power. But Gurameto ruled them, without possessing them. They came to him of their own accord, the investigator was sure, and he had no need to visit them. Perhaps his hand had even gone below the belly of Shaqo’s own mother.

  All these thoughts rolled through his mind like lowering storm clouds, and on the day when he was summoned and told that Big Dr Gurameto would be under his investigation, these clouds suddenly burst. He had never felt so excited. His elation was mixed with a kind of savagery. The stark thought now came to his mind that Big Gurameto had been a general impediment, an impediment to Shaqo Mezini in particular, and that he still stood in his way. In every sense.

  Shaqo Mezini’s thirst for revenge was inseparably bound to a feeling of fear. Of course he had the doctor before him in handcuffs but still he did not feel safe. For some reason he felt that these handcuffs might make the doctor all the more dangerous. Shaqo Mezini could not persuade himself that Big Dr Gurameto too might feel frightened. He cast sidelong glances at the instruments of torture, kept in an alcove since the time of Sanisha, but not even these offered reassurance. This doctor had terrified thousands of patients with his surgical tools. How could he feel fear?

  The investigator was convinced not only that Dr Gurameto was fearless but that he could not lie. Fear and lying were connected. When Shaqo Mezini came face to face with the surgeon for the first time, a sudden onset of terror drove out any emotion of anger against his enemy. The surgeon was shackled and his face was drawn and despairing, but still he showed no fear.

  Shaqo Mezini was ashamed to realise that deep down he wanted to rouse not his enemy’s hostility but his sympathy, and this he tried to convey to him in an almost subliminal message. “I’m sorry for you, but I can’t do anything about it. Talk, put an end to your suffering. Save us all.”

  And then, as if responding to this covert appeal, the miracle-working surgeon, a legend in the city, caved in. At the critical moment he committed an act of suicide: he uttered a lie. Throughout that endless day the two investigators and their superiors had liaised with their superiors in Tirana, and these superiors had liaised with the other leaders of the great Communist Bloc, perhaps with Stalin himself. An aircraft had already reached Tirana and was expected to continue its flight to the airport of Gjirokastër. Now there was no room for doubt; the first crack had finally appeared in the doctor’s story.

  The investigators could hardly contain their joy.

  Shaqo Mezini’s first impulse was to leap to his feet, fill his lungs with air and shout in triumph. At last everything had fallen into place. Dr Gurameto had given in and Shaqo Mezini, not only a young investigator but also a young male, had gained the upper hand.

  How grateful he felt to the Communist party that had worked this miracle.

  His glance slid again to the antiquated instruments of torture that were now to be used on the manacled prisoner.

  “Dr Gurameto,” he announced in a firm voice of command. “Big Dr Gurameto, as they call you, isn’t what you have just told us rather hard to believe? You have described an emotional reunion with an old college friend after many years. This close friend, by an amazing coincidence, turned out to be the commander of the German troops invading Albania. Isn’t it a bit like of one of those old fairy tales we learned at school? Quite apart from the dinner with music and champagne, the release of the hostages and the salvation of the city, doesn’t it look a bit like a game? Why not stop this charade and tell us what was really behind it?”

  “I’m not playing a game,” Gurameto said, looking him straight in the eye. “This isn’t a charade. I don’t behave like that.”

  The investigators now stared at him in outright mockery. Shaqo Mezini’s only anxiety was that Dr Gurameto, having fallen into this morass, might find a way to climb out of it. But fortunately he was only sinking deeper.

  “And if it turns out that it was a game? If we prove it?”

  Gurameto shook his head again, this time in contempt.

  The investigators were clearly waiting for something. They looked at their wristwatches and whispered to each other, but none of this made any impression on Gurameto. They repeated in flat, weary voices more or less what they had already asked. Had there been an ulterior purpose, or not, to the dinner on the night of 16 September? The investigators were now obviously impatient, and mentioned an aircraft. The plane from Tirana was delayed but it would certainly arrive, if only just before dawn.

  During the course of the interrogation the investigators remembered that Little Dr Gurameto was also there. All this time he had been handcuffed by the left wrist to the other doctor’s right hand but he had not uttered a word for hours. Two or three times the investigators had been about to ask him something, but thinking that he had not been present at the events of that day, or perhaps simply because they were tired, they forgot about him.

  Both sides were succumbing to exhaustion. They heard muffled sounds from the entrance to the cave. Then came footsteps and the tapping of a cane, like a blind man’s. The investigators were so tired that they entirely forgot Little Doctor Gurameto, who seemed to have evaporated like a ghost in front of their eyes. The two doctors had merged into one.

  Big Dr Gurameto was experiencing something similar, except that the two investigators were not turning into one but had become three. “So there are three investigators,” he thought. “But thirteen won’t drag a word out of me.” The three figures hovered before him as if in a mist and one of them stammered some words in German.

  Upon hearing a sudden noise the doctor opened his eyes for a moment, and he realised that this was not a dream. There really were three investigators in front of him, and one was speaking German. For the second time he was addressed with the words, “mein Herr”.

  Gurameto shivered. An ashen light filtered through a crevice in the cave. Perhaps it was dawn. They were all fully awake now.

  “Grosse Herr Gurameto,” said the newly-arrived investigator. “I am an officer of the Staatssicherheit, the security service of the East German Republic.”

  The man’s German reached the doctor’s ears even more indistinctly than the investigators’ Albanian. The German said that he had flown from Berlin to interrogate him. He said that in the entire communist camp, there was no more important case than this. He invited the doctor to consider it seriously.

  “I know of no other way,” Gurameto replied.

  The German investigator had been briefed about the case and asked the doctor to tell him in a very few words what had happened on the day of 16 September 1943 and the following night.

  Dr Gurameto nodded. He replied in German, the language of the question, and his account was as detailed as before.

  When he had finished, the third investigator asked quietly, “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes,” the prisoner replied.

  The silence was insupportable. Then Gurameto noticed another figure, an interpreter whispering into the ears of the two Albanian investigators.

  “What you have just said is not the truth,” said the German.

  Dr Gurameto’s expression did not change.

  “The German officer, Colonel Fritz von Schwabe, whom you insist that you met on 16 September 1943, was not in Albania at the time you claim.”

  The German’s voice sank lower. Not taking his eyes off the handcuffed prisoner, he said that Fritz von Schwabe had not been present on Albanian soil or indeed any other kind, because he had been buried four months before.

  Guramet
o’s face turned wan.

  The other man explained that Colonel Fritz von Schwabe had died of wounds in a field hospital in the Ukraine on 11 May 1943. The investigator had brought his death certificate and photographs that showed the colonel in the hospital, and his funeral.

  “There’s no need to go on,” Gurameto interrupted in a broken voice. His head suddenly fell forward, as if struck by a blow at the back of the neck. “I need to sleep,” he added after a moment. “Please.”

  The investigators exchanged glances.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The uproar caused by what was called the conspiracy of the century spread across the entire planet. The investigation was conducted by eleven communist states, in twenty-seven languages and thirty-nine dialects, not to mention sub-dialects. About four hundred doctors imprisoned in as many cells were subjected to continuous interrogation.

  None of the inmates of these cells received any news from outside, and those outside were ignorant of the cells. The Cave of Sanisha was only one cell among many.

  At noon the following day the three investigators, with the interpreter a shadowy presence behind them, paid another visit to the two handcuffed prisoners in the cave.

  “The truth was . . . the truth is that I suspected from the very start that it wasn’t him.”

  Gurameto’s first words crept slowly out of his mouth and were swallowed up by the echoing vault. He squinted in an effort to recall the time more clearly, casting his mind back to the square of the city hall, the wet asphalt and the tank crew who went up to the window of the closed café and raised their hands to their brows like peaked caps as they tried to see inside.

  An aide had nodded towards one of the armoured vehicles, where the officer was waiting. On the way to the square the aide had told Gurameto explicitly, “The regimental commander, your friend from university, is waiting for you by the city hall.”

  The colonel stood leaning against the armoured vehicle, in dark glasses, with one leg crossed over the other. Gurameto, even before he was close to him, felt his chest tighten with a spasm of doubt. After his greeting, “Don’t you recognise me?” the same spasm came again. His voice had changed. The man smiled and pointed to his face; it did not need a surgeon to notice the scars.

  “Four wounds,” said the colonel, as the two spread their arms to embrace one another.

  Of course the scars made a difference, Gurameto thought. But there were other things too. The uniform, the passage of fifteen years, the war.

  The doctor described their conversation to his interrogators almost exactly as before: the colonel’s disappointment at the treachery of the Albanians and their violation of the laws of hospitality enshrined in the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, the threat of taking hostages and finally his own invitation to dinner.

  He described the dinner in the same way, now dwelling on certain details, like the donning of the masks. This had been a fashion of the time at student dinners when the men were at university, even if he could not remember Fritz von Schwabe following it. Nor could he understand why the other man put on a mask and then took it off. Of course, from time to time the doctor’s suspicions had been aroused, especially when he caught out his guest in some error of fact. But he had put these doubts out of his mind for the reasons he had explained: the passage of time, his career in the army, the war. The doctor also said more about the following morning. His daughter, seeing them all asleep where they had fallen, thought that her father had poisoned his guests alongside his own family. He himself suspected his daughter of the same thing.

  But now for the first time he mentioned his later suspicions. He never saw the German again. He tried once to meet him but was told that he was busy. On another occasion when he enquired after him he was told that there was nobody by the name of Fritz von Schwabe. He discovered later and only by chance that von Schwabe had been transferred elsewhere on duty. After that he heard nothing more.

  The prisoner hung his head as a sign that his story was over. But a moment later he added that the other side had probably also deplored the dinner.

  “What?” said the investigators almost together.

  “I said that the Germans too may have disapproved of the dinner.”

  “Aha.”

  The silence was so protracted that everybody was sure that there was no more to say. The investigators whispered for a while among themselves. Shaqo Mezini was the first to speak.

  “My question is a simple one: Why? A man arrives from far away, commanding the first regiment to enter another country and suddenly takes it into his head to change his name and pretend to be someone else. What is he up to?”

  The handcuffed prisoner shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea.

  The investigator’s voice rose, resonating through the cave. “What was he thinking of? How could he find the time, in such conditions, exposed to so many dangers, to invent this tale of a college friend and come for dinner? Was it his prank, or yours? Or were you both involved? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” replied the prisoner. “Perhaps it was his game. But not mine.”

  “Gurameto. Don’t try to wriggle out of this. It wasn’t a game, but something much deeper. Tell us!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You knew you would meet him. You had agreed between yourselves. You had codes, masks, false names. Talk!”

  “No.”

  “Do you recognise this writing? This name?”

  The German investigator had interrupted, producing a short letter in German that ended with the words “Jerusalem, February 1949” and was signed “Dr Jakoel”.

  “I know this man,” the prisoner replied. “He was my colleague. He was a pharmacist in the city, a Jew. He left for Palestine in 1946.”

  “What else?”

  “He was one of the hostages released that night.”

  “Aha, a Nazi colonel, a bearer of the Iron Cross, releases the first Jew he captures in Albania. Why? Sprich!”

  The prisoner shrugged his shoulders.

  “Herr Gurameto, I haven’t flown two thousand kilometres to listen to ravings in a medieval cave. Let me repeat the question. Why?”

  “Because I asked him to.”

  “Aha. And why did you ask him? And why did he listen to you? Sprich!”

  “Because we were, according to him, college friends.”

  “College friends or something else? Sprich!”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Herr Gurameto, do you know what the ‘Joint’ is?”

  “No. I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Let me tell you,” Shaqo Mezini interrupted. “It’s a long-standing Jewish organisation. A murderous sect, whose aim is to establish Jewish rule throughout the world.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Their next crime, their most horrible crime, was to be the murder of the leaders of world communism, starting with Stalin.”

  “I’ve never . . . ”

  “That’s enough. Don’t interrupt. And now talk!”

  “Sprich!”

  “Never . . . ”

  “That’s enough.”

  “You’re not letting me speak.”

  “Speak!”

  The investigators started a crossfire of questions.

  “There is a mystery, I admit,” said Gurameto. “But you can work it out yourselves. You have the means. You have the real name of this person who pretended to be a dead man. Perhaps you have the man himself.”

  “That’s enough! You’re here to answer questions, not ask them. Speak!”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then we’ll force you. We have the means to do that.”

  The eyes of first the investigators and then the prisoner wandered to the corner with the antique instruments of torture: hooks, knives, pincers to gouge out eyes, pliers to grip testicles. Witnesses had testified that it was the tortures effected by the pliers that Ali Pasha Tepelene particularly liked to watch through a spyhole in the wall.<
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  The investigators whispered again among themselves.

  “Dr Gurameto,” said Shaqo Mezini, no longer hiding the fact that he was in charge. “Despite our differences, we hope we will come to an understanding. As you can see, our suspicions relate to a terrible and macabre crime. The State requires us to be suspicious. For its own protection, of course. We don’t believe that you are its enemy; you have worked for it for years. You don’t want to see this State overthrown any more than we do. Is that true? Speak!”

  The prisoner shrugged his shoulders again.

  “The matter is simple. We want to know what lies behind this story. What was this game from the very start? What really happened at that dinner? Where did the orders come from? What were your secret signals and codes? I hardly need remind you that we’re dealing with a worldwide conspiracy in which you played a part, perhaps unwittingly. Speak!”

  The prisoner raised his head. He moved his lips several times as if testing them before he spoke. “You think the German colonel was part of this conspiracy? And me too?

  “Why not?

  “I had no part in it. I know nothing about it. There’s your answer.”

  “Did it cross your mind, even for a moment, that your dinner guest was . . . a dead man?”

  This question came from the other investigator, who had been silent so far that night.

  The prisoner screwed up his eyes. “As I said, I suspected it wasn’t him. And also, but only for a moment, that he was dead. It was a well-known story in the city, passed down by our grandmothers. You couldn’t help thinking of it.”

  “Aha, go on.”

  “I can prove that I suspected it. I have a living witness.”

  “We know,” the investigator interrupted. “Blind Vehip. We know everything.”

  “I thought that as soon as you arrested him.”

  “Go on! Keep talking!”

  Gurameto went on to describe his conversation with the blind man under the pale street lamp at the intersection of Varosh Street and the road to the lycée. As he talked he couldn’t help thinking of the interrogation they must have carried out, their questions and the blind man’s answers. “You’re not telling the truth, old man. Where did you get the idea that Dr Gurameto had invited a dead man to dinner? Speak!” “I don’t know what to say. It just came into my head.” “You’re blind. You’ve never seen either the living or the dead. How can you tell the difference when you have no eyes?” “I don’t know. Perhaps just because . . . ” “What? Speak!” “Perhaps it’s just because I’m blind.”