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.