That same night Javer, who was still a wanted man, went to his uncle Azem Kurti’s house, where he had not set foot in a long time.
“They’re looking for me, Uncle,” he had said, “but I have repented.”
“Repented? You have done the right thing, nephew. Come, let me kiss you. I knew this day would come. Did you see what we did to that friend of yours?”
“Yes, I saw,” Javer answered.
“Bring us some raki and a hot meal,” Azem said to the women. “Let us celebrate this reconciliation.”
When they had sat down at the table, Javer said:
“Now, Uncle, you’re going to tell me all about the business with Isa.”
And Azem laid out the facts. Sipping his raki, eating his roast, he described the killing. Javer listened.
“What’s wrong, nephew? You look pale,” the uncle said.
“Yes, Uncle, I feel pale.”
“Those books have thinned your blood. Your fingers are thinner too.”
Javer looked at his fingers and then coolly took a revolver out of his pocket. Azem’s eyes opened wide. Javer shoved the barrel of the gun into his uncle’s food-stuffed mouth. Azem’s teeth rattled on the metal. Then, one by one, the bullets smashed his jaw, his forehead and his skull to smithereens. Morsels of half-chewed meat mingled with blobs of Azem’s brain as they rained down together onto the low dining table.
Javer left amid the wailing of his cousins. The next day the Bulldog flew over the city dropping multi-coloured leaflets saying, “Yesterday the Communist Javer Kurti killed his own uncle at the family dinner table. Fathers and Mothers, judge for yourselves what the Communists are like.”
That evening the bodies of six people shot dead in the citadel prison were brought to the main square. They were left there in a pile so people could see. A white banner bore this inscription in capital letters: THIS IS HOW WE ANSWER RED TERROR.
The rain had stopped. It was very cold at night. By dawn the corpses were covered with frost. They lay there on the square all that day. On the second morning, another pile of corpses was found on the other side of the square. A bit of cloth bore the words: THIS IS HOW WE ANSWER WHITE TERROR.
The police rushed in to get rid of the bodies, but they weren’t given time to complete the job. They were ordered to go after the terrorists first. None of the guards on duty the previous night had suspected a thing. Around midnight, the municipal road-sweeper’s cart, drawn by Ballashi, an old nag well-known to everyone in the city, had pulled up in the square. As usual, the cart was covered with a black tarpaulin. Just before daybreak someone passing alongside the cart happened to give the tarpaulin an idle tug, and that’s when the bodies fell out in a heap.
People came back from the town centre in consternation.
“Go and see.”
“Go and look, on the square. A real slaughter.”
“Don’t let the children see. Keep the children back.”
Grandmother shook her head pensively and said: “What terrible times.”
The city was soaked in blood. The bodies of the executed prisoners were still in the square. Now both piles had been covered with tarpaulins. In the afternoon Hanko, a crone who had not crossed the threshold of her house in twenty-nine years, went out and headed for the centre of the city. People were dumbfounded, and stepped aside to let her pass. Her vacant eyes seemed to see everything without looking at anything.
“Who is that man standing on that rock?” she asked, pointing with her cane.
“It’s a statue, Mother Hanko. It’s made of iron.”
“I thought it was Omer’s son.”
“It is Omer’s son, Mother Hanko. He’s been dead for a long time.”
Then she asked to see the bodies. She went to each pile of corpses in turn, lifted the frozen tarpaulins, and stared at the dead for a long time.
“What country are they from?” she asked, pointing to the Italians.
“From Italy.”
“Foreigners?” she said.
“Yes, foreigners.”
She put her hands on each face, as if to recognise the corpses.
“What about those?”
“Those are from our city. This one is from the Toro family, this one from the Xhulas, this one the Angonis, this one the Merajs, and this one the Kokobobos.”
Granny Hanko covered up the pile with her dry, withered hands and turned to leave.
“Why all this blood? Can’t you tell us anything, Mother Hanko?” a woman asked between her sobs.
The crone turned her aged head, but seemed to have forgotten where the voice had come from.
“The world is changing blood,” she said to no one in particular. “A person changes blood every four or five years, and the world every four or five hundred years. These are the winters of blood.”
So saying, she set off homeward. She was one hundred and thirty-two years old.
Winter. White terror. Those words were everywhere. As was the frost. One day, I woke very early, got out of bed, and went upstairs to the main room. Thick clouds like wet, muddy sponges had settled over the city. The sky was black as pitch. A supernatural light spilled in through a single rent in the cloud cover. It slid over the grey roofs and came to rest on a white house. The only white building in the neighbourhood. I had never noticed that before. It looked sinister among the grey houses at that time of the morning.
What house was this? Where did it come from? And why do they call what’s happening these days a “white terror”? Why not green terror, or blue terror?
I had grown more and more afraid of the colour white. The white roses I could remember, the drapes in the main room, Grandmother’s nightgown all now seemed inscribed with the word “terror”.
FRAGMENT OF A CHRONICLE
rder. Any person found to have connections with the terrorists will be sentenced to death. I hereby declare a curfew from four in the afternoon to six in the morning. Garrison commander: Emilio de Fiori. Curfew exemptions previously granted to midwives are hereby cancelled. I order a census of the city pop
SIXTEEN
The highway, the bridge over the river, and Zalli Street teemed with soldiers, mules and trucks heading slowly north. Italy had capitulated. Long columns of soldiers with blankets on their shoulders were coming into the city. Some of them still bore their arms. Others had thrown them away or had sold them. The cobblestones were filthy with mud trampled in by their boots. The streets rang with shouting and swearing in Italian. The milling mass of soldiers got more and more chaotic. Some of them left straight away to go further north, while fresh columns, each filthier than the last, arrived from the south. Rain-soaked, exhausted, and unshaven, the soldiers all trudged up steep Zalli Street, gazing in stupor at the tall stone houses.
The gloomy winter city looked down its nose at the defeated. Soon they too would wander through the snow like ghosts, mumbling “pane, pane”.
Llukan the Jailbird with his blanket over his shoulder came down the road from the prison.