Free Chronicle in Stone by Ismaíl Kadaré

the page. They gather together to create a horse or a hailstorm. Then gallop away again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a ghost. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping. Without end.
    I slept so fitfully I thought I had a fever. Through the sleep I could just barely feel a steady laboured breathing coming from outside, a painful shifting of streets and neighbourhoods. The city seemed to be scratching itself in slow motion. It was a pain of transformation. The streets swelled, twisted. The walls of houses grew thick and turned into the battlements of Scottish castles. Fearsome keeps loomed up here and there.
    In the morning the city looked worn out from its trials. It had changed. But not that much.
    I spent almost all day reading.
    Night fell again. I looked outside at the walls and buildings. My mind was on fire. All the normal limits on the shape of things seemed to have been suspended. They could turn into anything now.
    Aqif Kashahu was trudging down Varosh Street with his two boys. He turned into our street. Kako Pino stuck her head out of the window, then went back inside. Bido Sherifi’s great double gate was open. Aqif Kashahu was going towards it. It was obvious: this must be his last night. Bido Sherifi himself came to the gate to greet his distinguished guest. Bido’s wife leaned out of her window for a moment, then disappeared. Kako Pino did the same. The signs were clear. Aqif Kashahu and his heirs went inside. The great gates swung shut with a metallic clatter. Flourish .
    “Why do you stay shut up in the house all day? Go out and play with your friends.”
    “Ssh, Grandmother.”
    I was waiting to hear Aqif Kashahu’s death scream. It must have all been over by now. I heard a knock. Then another. Bido Sherifi’s wife appeared in the window. She was trying to wash the blood from her hands. She shook them. A cloud of flour drifted down. The flour was red with blood.
    Grandmother put her hand on my forehead.
    Another flourish of trumpets came from downstairs.
    “Go and see the big cauldron they’re taking out of the basement,” said Grandmother. “I don’t have the heart to watch.”
    For several days they had been talking about selling the big copper cauldron. Now the dealer had come and the big cauldron, as it left the house, was chiming farewell. Trumpets and alarum within .
    Night had fallen. Again the city sank into a darkness peopled with keeps, foreign names and owls.
    “That book has addled your brain,” Grandmother said. “Go to Grandfather’s tomorrow to clear your mind.”
    “All right, I’ll go.”
    Margarita . . .
    I was exhausted. My head sank onto the windowsill.
    The next day I set out for Grandfather’s. When I passed the Bridge of Brawls and turned into Citadel Street the city was suddenly freed of its keeps and night-owls. I was almost running for the last part of the way.
    “Where’s Margarita?” I asked Grandma, who was kneading dough for bread rolls.
    “What do you want with Margarita?” she asked. “You’d do better to start by asking how Grandfather is, or your aunts and uncles, instead of starting right out with ‘Where’s Margarita?’”
    “She’s not gone, is she?”
    “No, she’s still here,” Grandma said in a mocking tone, muttering to herself as she kept on kneading dough.
    I wandered around the house for a while and then, since I had nothing else to do, I went up to the roof where I liked to sit for hours on the light-coloured, slanting slates near the old dormer. People looked different from the roof. I was watching a half-rotten telegraph pole when I remembered the box I had filled with Grandfather’s cigarette butts and had hidden in the attic, along with a Turkish book and a box with two or three matches. I really wanted to smoke on the roof, holding in my lap the Turkish book with its sickly, yellowing pages.
    I was thinking about lighting a cigarette, so I crawled to the dormer, stuck my arm through the