Ilir’s mother broke into sobs.
“The cur, the cur,” she cried.
Xhexho sighed deeply.
“Avdo Babaramo still hasn’t found his son’s body,” she said in a less excited voice. “The poor man is still on the road, looking everywhere. But now we’re all on the road.” Xhexho raised her voice and added: “Like wandering Jews!”
Her nasal voice droned on. Then, obviously worn out, she spoke more softly.
“What can I say? We left home like crazy people. Men and women loaded down with bundles, cradles, bowls, and the infirm, and our dogs and cats ran off without a second thought, like the wretched of the earth. And Dino Çiço among them, with his plane on his back.”
“With his plane?”
“Yes, dear friends, with his plane on his back! His family followed along behind, begging him to leave it in the house, saying he wouldn’t be able to take the weight and would slow them all down. But he wouldn’t hear of leaving it behind. He wouldn’t risk the Germans getting hold of it for anything in the world.”
Grandmother’s absence became painfully clear. Only she could do anything to keep Xhexho from going on and on. Nothing my mother or any of the other women could say had any effect on Xhexho’s unstoppable rant.
Xhexho sensed this and savoured her position.
“So there you are, my dears. We have all been swept up by a miserable fate. You’ll never be able to call me a Cassandra again! When men got into planes, Xhexho said nothing. She was downcast, but kept her trap shut. But now we have a plane that has got onto a man! No, no and no! That is a monstrosity which drives me to distraction!”
Egged on by her own eloquence, she raised her voice and her rhetoric to its highest pitch.
“Oh Lord, what have we done to make You harry us so? You dropped bombs on us. You made our beards grow. You caused black water to rise from the earth… What tribulations will you visit on us next?”
At the climax of her declamation, Xhexho vanished into thin air, as she always did.
For the first time in my life I thought she was right. I had long suspected that everything was about to go upside down. Had our own cellar not challenged the main room of the house? Had not the beard destined for Jur Qosja’s chin gone and planted itself on the face of Çeço Kaili’s daughter? Not to mention those resentful cows that had got their own back on the aeroplanes…
I could not stop thinking about Dino Çiço tramping through the night with his plane on his back. But the two of them had probably fallen out. Their relationship must have soured, like everything else these days.
I ran outside hoping to see him and his plane. It was cold. There weren’t many refugees. The few I saw could hardly move. I recognised two boys from the neighbourhood.
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
“Over there, in that little shack. What about you?”
“In this one here.”
We didn’t use the word “house”.
Finally I found Ilir. He had looked haggard ever since Isa’s death. I told him what Xhexho had said about Maksut. His eyes flashed with hatred.
“Listen,” he said to me. “When we go back to the city, we’ll kill Maksut, OK?”
“OK. There’s an old dagger at home that belonged to my grandfather.”
“Is it sharp enough?”
“Yes, it’s really sharp. It even has Turkish writing on the handle.”
“We’ll ambush him at night on his way home. I’ll jump on his neck and you get him with the knife.”
I thought for a while.
“It’s better if we invite him to dinner and kill him in his sleep, like Macbeth did,” I said. “Then we’ll salt his head.”
“And roll it down the stairs so the right eye pops out,” Ilir added. “But wait a minute. How can we invite him to dinner? Where?”
We started making very intricate plans. We were almost happy. Qani Kekezi passed alongside us. His plump and ruddy face looked smooth, but closer examination revealed some fresh scratches.
“The poor village cats are in for it now,” Ilir said.
I laughed. I was happy to have my friend back. It seemed to me that Isa’s death had made him grow up and leave me behind. But now we were together again.
While plotting our assassination we had walked to the outskirts of the village without realising it. The ground was covered with frost. All around us, trees whose names we didn’t know, birds we were seeing for the first time, irregular, scattered haystacks, the crumbling earth softened by the ploughshare, cowpats – everything was as strange to us as it was incomprehensible. Some village children with soft eyes looked at us timidly. I looked at Ilir’s thin, drawn face and his untidy bush of hair and it occurred to me that I must look more or less the same. The peasant kids started following us.
“Did you see how frightened of us they were?” asked Ilir.
“We’re frightening.”
“We’re killers!” I said.
I took out the lens and put it over my eye.
“Thou canst not say I did it: never shake thy gory locks at me!” I thundered, addressing a half-eaten haystack.
“What’s all that?” Ilir asked.
“That’s what we’ll say when Maksut’s ghost appears after the murder.”
“That’ll be formidable,” Ilir said.
The village children who followed us were shivering. Now we were walking on a ploughed field.
“Why is the earth soft? What did they do to it?” Ilir asked, trying to sound angry.
I shrugged.
“Peasant work,” I said.
“Work with no rhyme or reason.”
“None whatsoever.”
“Let’s plan the murder instead,” said Ilir.
The peaceful plateau, which lay on a gentle incline, was exposed to the winter winds. The haystacks scattered here and there added to the impression of calm. We walked among them talking about the details of our murder. Without thinking, we soon found ourselves on the main road. Peasants and mules mingled with the refugees. Other people were coming from the opposite direction. A sallow-looking woman struggled to stay astride a mule.
“Not far from here there’s a monastery where they cure the sick,” Ilir said.
We turned back towards the village. We were following a group of refugees who, according to what we heard them saying, were coming back from the monastery, which they had gone to visit just out of curiosity. Others were coming towards us, on their way there.
“Where are you going?” someone in the crowd walking along with us asked them.
“To the monastery,” they answered, “to see the hand that works miracles.”
“Some miracles! We’re just on our way back from there. You know what it is? It’s the English pilot’s arm.”
“The Englishman’s arm?”
“The very same. With that ring still on the finger. Remember? It was stolen from the museum.”
“Of course. So that’s what happened to it.”
“You may as well go back.”
They turned back. We walked along absentmindedly among the chattering crowd. Then, little by little there were fewer and fewer words until the only sound came from our own footsteps.
“That arm,” someone said in a dull voice. “It’s as if it’s following us.”
No one answered.
“Poor humans,” the same voice said again. “If they only knew where their heads and hands can end up.”
We were back in the village.
At dusk, far in the distance where the city must have been, flames shot up. The refugees all came out and silently watched the pale flickering. We thought they were burning houses belonging to partisans. Through the gathering darkness and mist, the city waved its flame handkerchiefs, sending signals whose meaning no one could guess.
We kids climbed a barren knoll and shouted at the top of our lungs.
“That one up there is my house! That’s my house burning! Hurrah!”