Yet whispers persisted that the dinner of long ago was the subject of an investigation, still a covert one but now conducted by two independent groups. Its German aspect was lately overshadowed by its supernatural dimension; the dinner was associated mainly with the appearance of a dead man, who, for the purpose of disguise or some other reason, had worn the greatcoat of a German officer and in this shape, spattered with mud, had knocked at Dr Gurameto’s door.
DAY FIVE HUNDRED
A SPECTRAL THRONG OF GERMAN SYMPATHISERS
On the five-hundredth day of the new order there appeared a sight that should never have been seen. Beneath the city the first refugees from Çamëria arrived. There was no end to them. The Greeks had accused them of having supported the Germans and expelled them northwards across the border. They all brought evidence of recent atrocities: cradles with knife marks, old people scarred by burns, young wives blackened from the soot of their torched houses. They walked in an endless column under a bitter, pitiless wind.
To their left stood the first city in Albania, of which they had so often dreamed. But they had strict orders, nobody knew from whom, not to enter it. The city loomed above them, as inscrutable as a sphinx, inaccessible and failing to understand why it could not take them in. Who suffered most from this prohibition, the convoy of refugees or the city? To be sure it pained both, as if they had been showered with the debris of some terrible catastrophe. That afternoon the very rafters of Gjirokastër’s houses began to groan. The city suffered an agony of conscience. Receiving no mercy themselves, the refugees showed none for anybody else. Old loyalties had lost their meaning. Neither side in this conflict could claim victory, or even sustain their quarrel. It was scant consolation for the losers, the nationalists and the royalists, to recall how they had cheered for Çamëria and Kosovo: now they guiltily hung their heads. For perhaps it was these cheers that had to be paid for after the German defeat.
Migrations like this were said to be happening everywhere. An evil hour had struck for whole populations, entire peoples uprooted from their homes from the shores of the Baltic to the snowfields of the Caucasus and deep into the distant steppes, supposedly for supporting the Germans.
Other dreadful convoys came to mind. The Jews, three years ago. The Armenians, thirty years before.
The citizens of Gjirokastër watched the scene through binoculars and yearned for an end to these columns from Çamëria, but one convoy seemed to spawn another. It was said that in the Greek-minority villages, at night, people would offer them bread but they would not take it. They had expected that someone else would feed them.
Where were they going? Perhaps north to the olive groves of Vlora. It was rumoured that there the sky had filled with the cruel sound of thunder but something uncanny happened: the lightning rebelled against the laws of nature and refused to fall on these wretches’ heads.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NEW ORDER CONTINUED
Dawn rose on the asphalted highway and on this bleak day spirits sank even lower. The cold tightened its grip on Gjirokastër. The coal ran out and martyrs were in short supply.
As if to a natural disaster, trucks of food and medicine were hurriedly dispatched from the capital city with inspectors, musical ensembles and delegations of all kinds, some from fraternal countries. One of these, from the Soviet Baltic republics, where something similar had happened, issued a strange communiqué before it returned, stating that the situation in Gjirokastër called for a more radical approach. In the city there were still eleven former vezirs and pashas of the Ottoman Empire, four former overseers of the sultan’s harem, three former deputy managers of Italian-Albanian banks, fifteen ex-prefects of various regimes, two professional stranglers of heirs apparent, a street called “Lunatics’ Lane” and two high-class courtesans, not to mention the famous three hundred former judges and more than six hundred cases of insanity: a lot for a medieval city now striving to become a communist one.
The Baltic delegation’s communiqué made plain that what was required was an upsurge of renewal, what the newspapers called “new blood”. Very soon this became a flood. Every day enthusiastic young volunteers arrived from central Albania: overfulfillers of already overfulfilled plans, on the Soviet model, some singing the song “Pickaxe in one hand, rifle in the other”, or not just singing about these implements but actually carrying them; informers on saboteurs of ill-planned drainage ditches; informers on fastidious ladies who rarely left their homes in a demonstration of disdain for the new order; activists who only looked forward to the future and others that did so mainly but not exclusively, and occasionally glanced back; sculptors of busts of martyrs; self-sacrificing zealots keen to join the latter in their graves, if nature permitted; opponents of the ideological enemies known as “the three ‘no’s” (imperialism, Zionism and Coca-Cola) and others of the seven ‘no’s; nutcases obsessed with cultivating friendship with other nations and others entranced by the notion of hostility. In short, a perfect frenzy that made everyone weep.
Just when everything seemed on track again, a secret report drawn up by an even more secret delegation from the capital announced bluntly that the rate of progress was still not satisfactory. The ditches, however unnecessary, were being dug too slowly. The former vezirs, hangovers from the time of the sultan, were not dying fast enough. Except for the two high-class courtesans, who had “distanced themselves from their bourgeois past” and joined the new order out of inner conviction, the other remnants of the old order were stubbornly clinging on.
A song was heard in the streets, of the anonymous kind that appeared in Gjirokastër. It spread everywhere and seemed to confirm the secret report. Its words were sad, and its melody even more plangent.
Lena lies sick in a hospital bed.
In the lonely ward, her hopes are dead.
The authorities did all they could to prevent people singing it, but in vain.
Nobody had ever imagined that a song about a hospital could become the reason for another dramatic development in the city: the campaign against its ladies. It all started at a meeting at which a senior cultural official complained that people were still singing songs of what might be called a private nature, about how you’ve forgotten me but I’ll never forget you, you didn’t visit me in hospital, I couldn’t get rid of my cough and twaddle of this sort. The city’s leaders suggested commissioning local musicians to compose two or three songs for the new era, which still had a bit of feeling in them. The Party chairman butted in. “Come out with it — you mean about being ill.” Without more ado he phoned the two doctors, Big and Little Gurameto, to demand the names of the singing patients.
At first the doctors were at a loss how to respond. Big Dr Gurameto replied that they were surgeons and their patients either recovered or went straight to their graves and had no time for sighing and groaning, so it would be better to ask other doctors who dealt with protracted illnesses such as typhus and especially tuberculosis.
Meanwhile, taking advantage of the turbulent times, the Romany guard at the Hygiene Institute known as “Dan the TB Man” produced a song in memory of his girlfriend, who had been run over that April by the night-soil cart.
I’m the gypsy of the institute
In an awful plight
Since the girl I loved
Fell under a load of shite.
The cultural officials chuckled but soon wiped the smiles from their faces. At their next meeting, which turned out to be fatal for them all, they agreed that private feelings involved not only disease and filth, but also nobler sentiments. Unaware of how dearly he would pay for this later, the head of culture recalled an old women’s song.