The Fall of the Stone City (6 page)

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 the 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.

When read to the accompaniment of the rousing strains of the hurriedly assembled municipal band, which played every day, the news seemed easy to believe. But when dusk fell and the communists
scattered their leaflets, it all became more questionable. The leaflets urged the people not to trust the occupiers, who were merely throwing dust in the Albanians’ eyes with their talk of
Kosovo and Çamëria and their flattery of the Albanian race. The communists claimed that the nationalists and royalists were preparing to do a deal with the Germans. The leaflets ended
with the words “Now or never!” Both the communists and the nationalists made use of this phrase. In fact it had been current for more than a century, which made it hard to work out when
“now” and especially “never” might be.

A fraction of this would have given anyone sleepless nights but it was particularly those citizens who hated anarchy and yearned for law and order who made their way to the city square each
morning with bloodshot eyes, to sit in the cafés and read the newspapers as the music played.

Besides the news, the government announcements and the music, there was something else that made everyone think back to peacetime with a pang of nostalgia. Each morning the two famous surgeons,
Big Dr Gurameto and Little Dr Gurameto, walked to the city hospital, just as in the time of the Albanian monarchy and in the time of the triple Italian-Albanian-African empire. Now, under what some
people were calling Teutonic Albania, there was a new hospital set up in the house of Remzi Kadare, the same house that its owner had lost at cards three months before.

The general conviction was that as long as these two doctors remained (with all their ups and downs, gramophones and dinners and non-dinners), the city was still intact.

In fact, many people were doing their best to push the city over the edge. On some days it seemed to come close to the brink, only to be saved at the last moment.

With the arrival of winter it became clear that there was no brink. The communists’ calls for war and the nationalists’ for peace mingled like two opposing winds to create a kind of
in-between state that was neither one nor the other.

Trouble, when it appeared, took the form of a moral scandal of an unprecedented nature. The newspaper
Demokratia
said that it was the only case of its kind involving two men on the entire
war-torn continent of Europe. A municipal employee Bufe Hasani was caught in flagrante in the city hall basement, to his shame, with a German!

No earthquake could have shaken the city more. After their initial blush of shame, people’s first thought was again of being blown up. This would no doubt be the inevitable reprisal, but
this time, a merited one. Things had gone too far! Everybody said so. All the city’s inhabitants knew how cautiously, almost bashfully, the German soldiers behaved towards the local women:
they were believed to be under orders not to trifle with the Albanians’ lofty sense of propriety. But the city, not satisfied with this courtesy, and as if on purpose to hold it up to
ridicule, had now provoked a different lust and violated the honour of a blond-haired German lad, barely eighteen, as pale as a young girl. Gjirokastër could no longer protest at being blown
up. It was the very least it deserved.

As can be imagined many people turned to Big Dr Gurameto for assistance, but he raised his hands helplessly. “This time I’m not interfering!”

He added that if it had been a matter of a woman, he would have spoken to Fritz von Schwabe, but this sort of business was not something he dealt with.

Some people saw no reason to tear their hair and cry “Shame!”, arguing that the occurrence was the logical consequence of a policy that was neither war nor peace. If you wanted this
kind of thing, that is, war and peace at the same time and a city confused, there it was in the city hall basement. They said this wasn’t the first time Albanians had got up to such tricks.
Whenever an Albanian sees that one sword is no good, he’ll sheathe it and draw another one.

In fact, from a more balanced point of view, the case of Bufe Hasani was merely a symptom. Like Big Dr Gurameto’s dinner, the incident in the cellar could be looked at in two ways. Indeed
it was not just an Albanian phenomenon but had global implications. It recalled Hitler’s humiliation of the British in the Munich agreement. Mentioning Bufe Hasani and Neville Chamberlain in
the same breath prompted grimaces, but the matter was essentially the same.

Feelings of fear and shame floated in the air; whenever fear rose, shame sank and vice versa.

Meanwhile there were other developments, some visible and others secret. Bufe Hasani’s two sons put together a bomb designed to kill their degenerate father but then set it aside,
expecting a proper solution to their problem when the city was blown up. At this moment the prime minister of the newly formed government, Mehdi Frashëri, arrived in the city to deal with the
issue. What a pity that the first duty of this scion of the most famous of all Albanian families, whose arrival was so eagerly awaited, was to tackle such a nasty business.

He arrived and left again at night, without ceremony, with no dinner or gramophone, as was to be expected with this kind of case in hand. But his visit still brought reassurance.

Comforting news for the nationalists also came from the Albanians’ two capital cities, Tirana and Prishtina. There was a rumour that the Albanian communist leader had been captured and
punished: after his eyes were gouged out, he had been forced to practise his family’s traditional profession of washing corpses in the Et’hem Bey Mosque in Tirana.

Bufe Hasani’s exploit was gradually forgotten, except when little children unexpectedly asked, “Mummy, what did Bufe Hasani do with that German uncle in the cellar of the city
hall?”

The surest sign of restored order was of course the renewed attention paid to the two doctors, or rather the rise and fall of their relative reputations. The doctors had become as used to this
as to sunrise and sunset and it seemed too late to tempt them to a new challenge. As ever, their relative positions were measured with reference to the international situation, and the prospects
were not looking good for the Germans. At first sight this suggested that Big Dr Gurameto would fall behind. However, his standing was calculated only relative to Little Dr Gurameto’s, and
Italy was the last country likely to benefit from Germany’s weakness, so it seemed that Little Dr Gurameto would be the loser again.

The two now worked together in the new surgical ward that was housed on the first floor of the great mansion of the Kadare family. Surely peace would prevail here at least, where patients spent
their last days, facing the prospect of death. But the opposite was the case. For anybody hankering to see pure civil war, the ward of the two Gurametos was the place to go, or so the correspondent
of the local paper reported. Bloody bandages, screams, vituperation, horror. The sick seemed afraid only of dying before they had vented their political hatreds. This was the sole explanation for
the continual uproar, the insults and the moans and shouts of “traitor to your country!” They would come to blows with medicine bottles, there were assaults with syringes and even an
amputated arm that one patient had asked to be left beside him, protesting he would miss it, but really to keep it within reach if things came to a fight.

According to the journalist the two Gurametos could hardly keep this bedlam under control, although many also formed the impression that the two doctors were merely waiting for the ward to calm
down before attacking each other with scalpels and bloody forceps.

As evening fell, another man was listening carefully to the tumult from the upper floor. The unhinged Remzi Kadare, the former owner of the house, huddled in army blankets, added his own
expletives to the bedlam above. “You tart! You whore!” he shouted, addressing the house that had been his own home before he lost it at poker. “That’s what the place
deserves,” he roared. “Drip blood and gall! I knew you weren’t to be trusted. I was right to take a chance with you! I risked you and lost you, you bitch!”

The night gradually grew colder and he wrapped himself more tightly in the blankets. Burying his head in them, he sang to himself.

The weeks passed quickly. Winter held the city under its stern rule. But this meant little to the mind of Vehip Qorri. “Blind Vehip” had been a rhymester since the
previous century, before there were newspapers. As his nickname indicated, he had been blind since birth but even though he had never seen the world, he described it accurately in verses that were
full of dates and the names of people and streets. He composed some of his rhymes to order and for a small fee, to mark occasions of every kind such as birthdays or the award of decorations, to
advertise barber shops, or announce changes of address and opening hours. He produced others to publicise court verdicts, quarrels, scandals, municipal notices, riding accidents, the imposition of
fines, cases of intoxication, the downfall of governments, currency devaluations and the like. People who enjoyed rhymes would stop at the street corner where he had his pitch, ask for verses about
X or Y and pay him or not, according to how they liked the result.