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

strange communiqué before it returned, stating that the situation in
Gjirokastër called for a more radical approach. In the city there were still eleven former vezirs and pashas of the Ottoman Empire, four former overseers of the sultan’s harem, three
former deputy managers of Italian-Albanian banks, fifteen ex-prefects of various regimes, two professional stranglers of heirs apparent, a street called “Lunatics’ Lane” and two
high-class courtesans, not to mention the famous three hundred former judges and more than six hundred cases of insanity: a lot for a medieval city now striving to become a communist one.
    The Baltic delegation’s communiqué made plain that what was required was an upsurge of renewal, what the newspapers called “new blood”. Very soon this became a flood.
Every day enthusiastic young volunteers arrived from central Albania: overfulfillers of already overfulfilled plans, on the Soviet model, some singing the song “Pickaxe in one hand, rifle in
the other”, or not just singing about these implements but actually carrying them; informers on saboteurs of ill-planned drainage ditches; informers on fastidious ladies who rarely left their
homes in a demonstration of disdain for the new order; activists who only looked forward to the future and others that did so mainly but not exclusively, and occasionally glanced back; sculptors of
busts of martyrs; self-sacrificing zealots keen to join the latter in their graves, if nature permitted; opponents of the ideological enemies known as “the three ‘no’s”
(imperialism, Zionism and Coca-Cola) and others of the seven ‘no’s; nutcases obsessed with cultivating friendship with other nations and others entranced by the notion of hostility. In
short, a perfect frenzy that made everyone weep.
    Just when everything seemed on track again, a secret report drawn up by an even more secret delegation from the capital announced bluntly that the rate of progress was still not satisfactory.
The ditches, however unnecessary, were being dug too slowly. The former vezirs, hangovers from the time of the sultan, were not dying fast enough. Except for the two high-class courtesans, who had
“distanced themselves from their bourgeois past” and joined the new order out of inner conviction, the other remnants of the old order were stubbornly clinging on.
    A song was heard in the streets, of the anonymous kind that appeared in Gjirokastër. It spread everywhere and seemed to confirm the secret report. Its words were sad, and its melody even
more plangent.
    Lena lies sick in a hospital bed.
    In the lonely ward, her hopes are dead.
    The authorities did all they could to prevent people singing it, but in vain.
    Nobody had ever imagined that a song about a hospital could become the reason for another dramatic development in the city: the campaign against its ladies. It all started at a meeting at which
a senior cultural official complained that people were still singing songs of what might be called a private nature, about how you’ve forgotten me but I’ll never forget you, you
didn’t visit me in hospital, I couldn’t get rid of my cough and twaddle of this sort. The city’s leaders suggested commissioning local musicians to compose two or three songs for
the new era, which still had a bit of feeling in them. The Party chairman butted in. “Come out with it – you mean about being ill.” Without more ado he phoned the two doctors, Big
and Little Gurameto, to demand the names of the singing patients.
    At first the doctors were at a loss how to respond. Big Dr Gurameto replied that they were surgeons and their patients either recovered or went straight to their graves and had no time for
sighing and groaning, so it would be better to ask other doctors who dealt with protracted illnesses such as typhus and especially tuberculosis.
    Meanwhile, taking advantage of the turbulent times, the Romany guard at the Hygiene Institute known as “Dan the