Of all these predictions, the worst came true. On the highway at the entrance to the city the German advance party was fired on. It was neither war nor appeasement, just an ambush. The three motorcyclists of the advance party made a sharp U-turn and sped back in the direction from which they had come. The shooters also vanished, as if swallowed up by the bushes.
The news soon reached the city’s cafés and everybody scrambled for the shelter of their own homes. As they hurried off they exchanged parting shots, some reviling the communists for staging a provocation and then scarpering, as they did so often, and others denouncing the cowards who would stop at nothing to appease the wolf.
Even before the heavy gates of the houses closed, the news had spread: the city would be punished for its treachery. What stunned everybody was not the punishment itself, but the way it would be carried out. It was an unusual reprisaclass="underline" the city was to be blown up. Of course this was frightening, but the first response was not fear but shame.
It took some time to sink in. The stone houses with their title deeds, the three hundred imperial judges, the houses of the ladies and with them the ladies themselves with their silken nightdresses, their secrets and their bangles, would fly into the air and fall from the sky like hail.
As if to avert their eyes from this appalling vision, the citizens fell back on their recent quarrels. “Look what the communists have done to us.” “It’s your own fault. You thought you’d won Kosovo and Çamëria.” “It wasn’t us, it was you, pretending you would fight.” “What, so we’d do the fighting while you stood back and watched?” “We didn’t say we’d fight, you did. You lied.” “You’re on the warpath? Stay where you are. Fight, or sit tight, just don’t move!”
In this way they snapped at each other until the argument eventually returned to the unresolved matter of who had fired on the Germans. The silence that followed was wearisome, and so back they came to the manner of their punishment: being blown up. This was of course an appalling prospect, but the men of the city felt there was something unspeakably and particularly shameful about it. Cities everywhere had been punished down the ages, and indeed, if you thought hard, this had been the number one calamity throughout history. Cities had been besieged, deprived of food and water and bombarded; their gates had been battered, their walls demolished, their houses burned to ashes and flattened, their sites ploughed and sown with salt so that no grass would ever grow again. Many cities have met their end, despairing, but with courage. To be blown up was something else.
Finally, the men understood where their feeling of shame came from. This reprisal seemed to them an insult to their manhood. “Isn’t this a sort of punishment for women?” went the talk round the tables. “Or am I wrong?” The essential idea was easy to grasp instinctively but hard to explain. Being blown into the air and made to leap and caper — all this was women’s stuff. In short, the stone city, so proud of its manly traditions, had been marked out to die like a woman. How delighted the despised villages around the city would be. Or would they feel sorry for Gjirokastër? In any event it would be too late.
At this point the men’s hearts sank and their voices failed. They turned their heads away so as not to burst into tears like the women, who, being women, were already weeping.
In the gathering dusk something for which there was still no word crept over the city.
Those who were determined to flee left for the villages of Lunxhëria or the Broad Mountain, where they thought the wolves and foxes would be more hospitable.
The rattle of the approaching tanks could be heard and after waiting so long, many people thought that this protracted roar was the explosion, a newly-invented way of being blown up, German-style.
Finally the German tanks appeared, moving in a black, orderly file along the highway. The first tank halted at the river bridge, rotated its turret and aimed its barrel at the city. The second, third, fourth and all the others did the same, in sequence.
Even before the first shell was fired, Gjirokastër’s inhabitants had understood not only the tanks’ message but the whole situation. The stone city had fired on the German Army’s advance guard. Now it would be punished according to the rules of war, which took no account of how cultivated, ancient or crazy a town might be.
The first shell flew through the air above the roofs just as an old man of the Karagjoz house announced, “I’ll not be blown up, I’ll make a dash for it before you blink. But this is torture, neither one thing nor the other!”
The shells fell first on the outskirts and then by careful degrees approached the centre and people in the shelters made their final wishes, uttered what they thought were their last words, prayed.
Then the bombardment suddenly stopped. The first inquisitive people who emerged from the cellars were astonished to find the city still there and not in ruins as they had imagined. But this fact was easy to grasp compared to the next piece of news, which concerned the cessation of the shelling and was strange and baffling. One of the inhabitants had apparently waved a white sheet from a rooftop, nobody could tell exactly where. He had signalled to the Germans the city’s surrender. While lots of people accepted this as truth, many thought it must have been a mirage.
Meanwhile the rumble of the tanks had started again. Now they were slowly climbing towards Gjirokastër.
Dusk fell at last and under the cover of darkness harder questions were asked. Who had raised the white flag? The original question of who had fired on the German advance party now seemed naive and childish. People sensed that it would soon be answered and plenty of men would boast of this feat, while whoever had waved the white sheet would vanish into obscurity.
There was no way of identifying the man or even the house from whose roof the flag had been raised. “Somewhere in that direction,” hazarded those who claimed to have seen it. Other people tried to guess who it might have been but when asked to pin down his name, or at least the roof, they all shrugged their shoulders as if this shame, if that is what it could be called, was too great to be borne by a single person, or a single roof.
Everybody agreed on this and so they felt relieved when someone found an explanation for what had happened, one that dispelled every suspicion of blame. The explanation was very simple: no search would ever discover the person or ghost who had raised the flag of surrender. The September wind had pulled a white curtain out of a window left open when the occupants of the house sought shelter in the cellar, and blown it back and forth in front of the eyes of the Germans. The inhabitants of the city could finally be reassured that neither cowardice nor, worse, attempted treason had set this flag fluttering. Destiny itself in the form of the wind had done the necessary job.
CHAPTER THREE
Events had so stunned the city that it was hard to believe that this was still the same day. The very word “afternoon” seemed not to fit any more. Should it be called the second part of the day? The last part? Perhaps the most treacherous part, harbouring a centuries-old grudge against the day as a whole, or rather its first part, which you might call forenoon; forget the idea of morning. Its malice had rankled, to erupt suddenly that mid-September.
There was also a sense of gratitude to destiny for at least having preserved the city from other long-forgotten calamities such as the Double Night, a sort of calendrical monster that beggared the imagination, a stretch of time that was unlike anything else and came from no one knew where, from the bowels of the universe perhaps, a union of two nights in one, smothering the day between them as dishonoured women once were smothered in the old houses of Gjirokastër.