The city was truly sick. Now it was easy to see it sweating. Windows often shivered convulsively. Chimneys groaned. Every night the searchlight’s one eye lit up. Polyphemus. I dreamed of creeping up on it with a red-hot poker to put out that horrible eye. And I imagined the blinded searchlight would scream with pain all night long.
They were troubled times, and everything was uncertain. I thought of the shifting landscape around Grandfather’s house. It looked as if the ground around our house would soon start moving too. Everyone thought so.
Ilir raced down Fools’ Alley.
“Guess what?” he said, as he came through the door. “The world is round like a melon. I saw it at home. Isa brought it. It’s round, perfectly round, and it spins without stopping.”
He took a long time to tell me just what he had seen.
“But how come they don’t fall off?” I asked when he told me there were other cities under us, full of people and houses.
“I don’t know,” Ilir said. “I forgot to ask Isa. He and Javer were home looking at the globe. Then Javer tapped it with his finger and said, ‘Soon it’ll be a slaughterhouse.’”
“A slaughterhouse?”
“Yes. That’s what he said. The world will drown in blood. That’s what he said.”
“Where will all the blood come from?” I asked. “Fields and mountains don’t have blood.”
“Maybe they do,” said Ilir. “They must know something, the way they talk. When Javer said the world would be a slaughterhouse, I told him we’d been there and had seen how they slaughter sheep. He started laughing and said, ‘Now you’ll see what happens when they slaughter nations.’”
“Nations? Like on the postage stamps, you mean?”
“Right. Like that. Nations.”
“Who’s going to slaughter them?”
Ilir shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”
I thought about the slaughterhouse again. One day when she was talking about the aerodrome Xhexho said that the fields and grasses would be covered with cement. With wet slippery cement. A rubber hose sluicing cities and nations. To wash away the blood… Maybe we were only at the beginning of the slaughter. But I found it hard to imagine nations being led to the slaughter, bleating as they went. Peasants in their black woollen cloaks. Butchers in white coats. Rams, ewes, lambs. People standing around to watch. Other people just waiting. Then it was time. France. Norway. The square awash with blood. Holland bleating. Luxembourg like a newborn lamb. Russia with a big bell around its neck. Italy a goat (I don’t know why). Something mooing all on its own. Who could that be?
“Well, what do you hear about this house they’re all talking about?” Ilir asked.
“I heard it’s bad. Very bad.”
“You know what? They say it’s full of beautiful young girls.”
“Really? Xhexho says they’re bad women.”
“But beautiful.”
“Beautiful? You’re crazy.”
“You’re the one who’s crazy!”
Both of us shut up for a while.
Meanwhile the bordello had set the whole town abuzz. Xhexho swept in and out of our house several times a day, bringing the most incredible news. The wind blew constantly. There had not been such powerful gusts of wind for decades. They said that old Xivo Gavo had decided to mention the windstorm in his chronicle.
Around that time they had the first air-raid siren tests. At noon there came a wail that froze the marrow of our bones.
“That must be Bido Sherifi’s mother-in-law,” Grandmother said. “Nobody else can shriek like that.”
Papa and Mamma leaned on the windowsill. The wailing continued, but it was no human cry. It came in waves, seemed to fade away and then suddenly rose again, rending the heavens with yet more power. Not even a hundred of Bido Sherifi’s mothers-in-law could have made such a sound.
“It’s a siren,” my father said bleakly. “I heard one once in Egypt.”
Grandmother was dumbfounded.
So it was that the city came to have a siren.
“Now we have a mourner who will wail for us all,” said Xhexho, who had come to visit that afternoon. “That’s all we needed, Selfixhe. All we have to do now is wait for the archangel to gather up our souls.”
As if all this were not enough, something else happened that shook even those who had kept calm until then. Argjir Argjiri got married.
I had noticed that announcements of engagements or weddings sometimes surprised people, making some happy and bringing smiles to others. But I never thought the news of a wedding could be seen by everyone, without exception, as a major catastrophe. Have you heard? Argjir Argjiri is getting married. You’re kidding! No, really, it’s true. Don’t talk nonsense. Argjir Argjiri getting married? How? Well, he is. Come on! It’s impossible. No it isn’t. Kako Pino has even been summoned to paint the bride. No, it’s unbelievable. It can’t be. But I heard the same thing. It’s true then? Yes, it’s true. God, what an abomination. How shameful!
Argjir Argjiri was a short dark man with a voice so high-pitched he sounded like a woman. Everyone knew him, he roamed around in all the neighbourhoods. People said he was half-woman and half-man, and he was the only male, or supposed male, who came and went freely in every house even when the men weren’t home. Argjir helped the women with various household chores, looked after the children when the women were at the wash-house, went to fetch water with them and retailed gossip. He had a house of his own, and people said that he helped women not because he had to but because he liked their company and women’s work. This was after all not so strange, given that Argjir Argjiri was half-man and half-woman. Although for years he had been the butt of jokes and the object of jeers, by way of compensation he had won a right enjoyed by no other man: he could mingle freely with our city’s women and girls.
And now suddenly Argjir Argjiri announced that he was getting married. It was a terrible act of defiance.
The creature with the effeminate voice suddenly declared his manhood. For years he had borne the most biting taunts, awaiting his hour of revenge. The city scowled at such an intolerable outrage. There wasn’t a single home Argjir Argjiri had not entered, not a single woman he didn’t know. Dark suspicion stalked the town.
Hopes that the reports were false soon evaporated. Kako Pino was summoned. An orchestra was hired, the wedding date was set. Hopes that Argjir Argjiri would change his mind likewise dwindled. Even repeated threats, so rumours said, had no effect. He remained adamant. More pressure was put on him, but he stood his ground. It was all done very discreetly, through clenched teeth and in anonymous letters. No one wanted to lead the campaign against Argjir Argjiri openly, for fear of seeming to have a personal axe to grind.
No one ever found out why the man with the treble voice suddenly rebelled. What had happened to him? Why was he doing it? That’s right, why? At last the wedding night arrived. The city was under curfew. The wind that had been blowing for two weeks suddenly stopped. The silence seemed deeper after its incessant whistling. The eye of the searchlight blinked, then went out. The wedding drums rolled as if tolling the death of the city’s honour.
“The cup runneth over,” Xhexho commented bitterly. Now, she said, we could expect the springs to gush black water.
“That’s all we needed,” Isa said to Javer as he smoked in the dark. “The marriage of that hermaphrodite.”
“Things are all adrift,” Javer answered. “This town is going to wind up like Sodom and Gomorrah.”
The attack was swift and merciless. The siren failed to give a warning in time. The city was gripped by convulsions, like an epileptic. It pitched over, nearly fell. It was a Sunday, nine in the morning. On that October day near mid-century, the ancient city, pounded countless times through the ages by catapult and cannon, shell and battering ram, was attacked from the sky for the first time. Broken foundations groaned with pain like blinded men. Thousands of terrified windows spewed their shattered panes.