Free The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare Page A

become a symbol of a past now recalled, for some reason,
with nostalgia.
    “Oh, how touching,” said Marie Turtulli, one of the city’s great ladies. “What sweet memories,” she repeated after a moment. “Just like in la Belle
Époque.”
    The rosy aureole surrounding the two doctors was best described in a rhyme by Blind Vehip,
    The Gurametos, doctors both,
    True to the Hippocratic oath.
    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