Sing, nightingale, sing tonight
In our garden of delight.
In your wings of song enfold us,
If we slumber wake us,
From all intrusion guard us
From all detection hide us.
The exclamations of how lovely, how delicate, what sensitivity, prompted the head of culture, as if with the devil at his elbow, to recollect another song describing the same women, this time from the men’s point of view.
Happy lads who woo them, happy lads who love them
Happy lads who count them theirs. .
Retribution came swiftly at an emergency meeting of the Party Committee before the week was out. The meeting denounced decadent trends in the city, nostalgia for the overthrown feudal-bourgeois order and the cult of declassed ladies, whose degraded songs were cunningly described simply as “women’s songs” instead of “songs of the elite”, as our literary critics have classified them.
Angry voices were raised. “Who’s at the bottom of this?” The head of culture fainted twice. Towards midnight the Party chairman made a start on his closing speech with a quotation from Lenin. “Your most dangerous enemy is the one you forget.” He spared no one, not even himself. “Our enemies have caught us napping. Decadence, thrown out the front door, has returned through the back window.” Before properly settling accounts with the notions of Nietzsche, perpetual motion and other perversities, the city was confronted with this virulent plague: its ladies. It was no coincidence that this was happening at a time of renewed tension with Greece and that the US Sixth Fleet had been patrolling the Mediterranean for days. “We will punish the culprits without mercy. Brace yourself for the worst.”
Shortly after the meeting ended, towards two in the morning, the head of culture shot himself.
THE CITY CONFRONTS ITS LADIES
The bullet that claimed the life of the head of culture was also in a way the first shot in a war between the city’s new authorities and its ladies. For those in the know it was obvious that the head of culture had died a victim of his own nostalgia for the ladies but, for reasons that remained unknown, this detail was quickly concealed and he was portrayed as their opponent, indeed a sort of first martyr in this new battle.
The meetings to denounce the ladies, unlike the usual ones, were conducted not only without cheering or music but with a sombre, even academic tinge that seemed appropriate to their subject. This was especially true of the opening presentation entrusted to the elderly antiquarian Xixo Gavo, which, despite its imposing title “A Thousand Years of Ladies”, was merely a recitation of an interminable list of the city’s ladies from 1361 until the previous week. Nobody in the audience understood what it was for but this did not prevent them from applauding the old historian when the list, and with it his speech, came to an end.
The other contributions more or less compensated for the shortcomings of the opening speech. One of them, “Ladies Under Communism”, not only surveyed, as the title suggested, the fate of ladies everywhere in the communist camp, from Budapest to the former St Petersburg, Bratislava and even Shanghai, but explained why the ladies of Gjirokastër occupied a special position in this vast field.
This was also the most obscure part of the talk, which each listener interpreted in his or her own way. According to the speaker, being a lady in this city, or occupying “lady status” did not depend so much on the title and property of a husband. Rather, it was something to do with large houses. It was no coincidence that a foreign architect had called these houses “ladies in stone”. According to him, inside these great houses no doubt constructed by deranged craftsmen, under their gingerbread ceilings and behind the pitiless glare of their windowpanes, there took place a mysterious and sophisticated process, like a retreat into a moonlit distance, which was the first symptom of the formation of a lady. These ladies were imagined as impossibly pale, their breasts and waists dazzlingly white, with a dark enigma hidden under silk that made the senses reel.
A sigh of relief followed the conclusion of the talk.
The next paper was easier to comprehend because it dealt with the events that had led to the death of the poor cultural official and also took a clear political position. From the very start the speaker did not hide his hostility to the ladies. He considered their songs, which many people recalled with tenderness, to be indubitably decadent. As for their coffee ritual, evoked in the words, “The coffee service arrives/Like a decree from the sultan”, this might be thought to describe a custom of aristocratic dignity, and even inspire admiration. But it struck this expert, who had been nurtured at the bosom of the people, merely as evidence that the ladies of the city were not just discriminating aristocrats, but women of power. Intoxicated by his own eloquence, the speaker lifted his head high to announce that these women had tyrannised the city for years.
An intervention by the chairman asking for this contribution to be cut short only spurred on the speaker. He did not stop but screeched that these ladies not only wielded power but were the city’s hidden face, its soul, its exact reflection. This, he claimed, was the explanation of the insane fantasies that flourished in this city, fictions about dinners for the dead and the like.
LADIES IN MOURNING
There was no doubt that the ladies were being targeted and it was obvious too how entirely irrational this was.
Paralysis gripped the city. Some of the punishments ordered by the capital city, astonishingly, were interpreted as acts of revenge on behalf of the ladies themselves. The speaker who had so taken them to task was a case in point. “I would arrest the dog,” said the Party chairman, “but those hags would be over the moon with delight. ‘Look,’ they would say, ‘he insulted us, and see how he suffered!’”
There were more meetings on the subject. Meanwhile most people privately thought that this campaign should never have been started. Gentlemen were easy to deal with. You summoned them to court, found them guilty and chained them up. But you couldn’t do anything to ladies. They rarely left their houses, only once, at most twice in as many months. They were as elusive as mirages.
When summer came to an end the Party chairman did not commit suicide as had been long expected but was dismissed, and this seemed an admission that the cause was lost.
But this conclusion was premature. The very moment of the ladies’ apparent triumph proved the truth of the expression, “win a battle, but lose the war”.
It was just after midday on 17 December when Madam Ganimet of the House of the Hankonats, dressed in her winter fur coat, tottered in her high heels across the intersection of Varosh Street and the road to the lycée, when a woman greeted her from her right-hand side. “Good morning, Comrade Ganimet!”
The lady so addressed stopped in her tracks, as if struck by a blow. There for a moment she remained, in the middle of the crossroads and then slowly, as if trying to identify her assailant, attempted to turn her head. But her neck would not obey her.
“It’s me, Comrade Ganimet. I’m Rosie, from the neighbourhood Committee. Are you coming along to the meeting tomorrow?”
Rosie’s quarry remained rooted to the spot. Then she raised her hand as if in search of support and lifted it to her chest. Her knees trembled and she collapsed on the cobblestones.
Some passers-by contacted the hospital, which sent its only ambulance at once.
This was merely the start. Now that a hitherto unsuspected method of bringing down the indomitable ladies had been found, it was open season everywhere. Like seagulls at the end of their life span the ladies of the city fell one after another, wherever they were caught by the fatal cry of “Comrade!” The same scene was repeated: first they froze on the spot and reached out a despairing arm as if for support from some kind gentleman. Sir, your arm, please. Then there was an attempt to see where the blow had come from, a catch of the breath, a trembling at the knees, followed by collapse.