The Fall of the Stone City

by Ismail Kadare

  In the Cave of Sanisha they found Gurameto stretched out as usual on his straw mattress. He did not move when they entered or even when they called his name. The marks of torture were clearly visible on his cheeks.

  “So you’re pleased at this, are you?” said Shaqo Mezini. “You heard Stalin is ill and you’re pleased at this, scum.”

  He was still short of breath from the hurried ascent and he could barely utter the words.

  “He can hardly breathe, and this makes you happy, doesn’t it?”

  A faint gleam in Gurameto’s eyes suggested to the investigator that medical curiosity was one of the few instincts that the doctor retained. The investigator tried to conceal his own shortness of breath but this made it worse. The imprisoned doctor had probably taken what he said about breathing to refer to himself, not Stalin.

  “Stalin can hardly breathe, do you hear me?” he shouted. “He’s dying and you’re glad, is that right?”

  The prisoner did not reply.

  The investigator’s eyes wandered to the corner where the old instruments of torture glinted dully. He remembered a few years ago a British collector, who was fond of Albania, wanting to buy them for pounds sterling.

  Arian Ciu was looking at them too. “For what other occasion were these tools intended,” Mezini thought.

  But he surprised himself by saying something else. “Gurameto, you’re a doctor. You can’t be pleased when someone is barely breathing, can you?” He brought his face close to the prisoner and continued in a whisper. “You would like to cure him, wouldn’t you? Speak!”

  He thought he saw the man nod, but he could not be sure.

  “Dr Gurameto,” he said gently. “You have it in your power to cure Stalin.”

  He drew close to the man’s head again and murmured into his right ear. A word from him, or rather, his signature at the end of the record of interrogation would perform the miracle. It was said that it was worry over the failure to expose the Jewish plot that had laid Stalin low. So, the news that the plot had been exposed would surely restore him to life. “Save Stalin, doctor,” Shaqo Mezini gasped.

  The other investigator watched dumbfounded.

  Shaqo Mezini was close to collapse. Like his voice, his knees were giving way. His ribs were melting like candle wax and could no longer contain his heart. He felt an overpowering desire to hold the prisoner in his arms, to weep with him.

  Did he fall to his knees now, or had it been some time ago? With a trembling, beseeching hand, he held out the document. “Bring him back to life,” he said tenderly. “Stalin’s resurrection is more important than Christ’s. Raise Stalin from the grave!”

  This final plea exhausted him completely.

  Both men watched the prisoner, making no movement.

  This time Shaqo Mezini thought he saw Gurameto shake his head. “No!” the investigator screamed to himself, holding his hands to his eyes, as if blinded.

  The next day in the office the hours crept wearily past. First one man and then the other looked into the distance towards the small military airport. They knew they were waiting in vain but their heads automatically made the same movement.

  During the afternoon the phone calls petered out. Not just the office but the whole country seemed stricken. Arian Ciu stepped out occasionally to the next-door offices in search of news but each time came back without a word. The order was still the same: everybody at their posts. It became a catchphrase.

  After his tiring night, Shaqo Mezini could not keep his mind focused. The desolate appearance of the airport depressed him more than anything else and reminded him of another dream, about how he might become one of the “high-flyers”. He had been struck when he saw the German investigator descending the aircraft steps in his casually unzipped leather jacket, his scarf blowing in the wind. He would have liked to look like this, the socialist camp’s famous investigator landing at airports in Budapest, Moscow and Sofia, in pursuit of the common enemy. He remembered the familiar exhilaration of times like this, which he associated in his mind with a particular song.

  We are sons of Stalin

  Prepared to do and die

  Until the hammer and sickle

  O’er every land does fly.

  Now this dream, like the Great Man’s breathing, was ebbing. It was like that afternoon long ago when he had come home after a tedious meeting and his mother, with a bewildered expression, had handed him a letter left by his fiancée. “Don’t try to understand why. There’s no going back.”

  And so it turned out. She never came back and he never found out the reason why. Sometimes he suspected himself of avoiding the truth. At home, whenever his fiancée was mentioned, he saw an unspoken question in his mother’s eyes. How can this son of mine, who uncovers everyone’s secrets, fail to understand his own mistake?

  After the arrest of the two Gurametos, when their entire list of patients was screened, Shaqo Mezini was horrified to see not only his mother’s name but his fiancée’s. Numb with shock, he carefully checked the dates. Her appointment was three months after their engagement and five weeks after they had first slept together. Obsessively, he asked himself the reason for this visit and why she had kept it secret from him.

  During the first investigation of Big Dr Gurameto, his eyes drifted involuntarily to the doctor’s right hand, the one that performed gynaecological examinations.

  He pictured that silent afternoon when she had left the house with bowed head to go to the hospital, who could tell why.

  He would have given anything to know the truth.

  A week later he happened to find himself alone with the prisoner, against all regulations. He had never broken a rule before, but his conscience was easy. This infraction did no harm to the State.

  He spoke quietly to the prisoner, as if at a routine interrogation of an ordinary suspect. He mentioned his fiancée’s name and added that she was a young woman of twenty-four. According to the hospital register she had attended her appointment at four thirty on the afternoon of 17 February 1951.

  The prisoner had furrowed his brow and said that he couldn’t remember her.

  She was an ordinary-looking woman of medium build.

  The doctor shook his head again.

  “Try to remember, doctor,” said Shaqo Mezini, noticing with alarm his own altered voice. The anxiety of those unforgotten weeks flooded over him again. “Doctor, please,” he entreated in a muffled voice. “Tell me out of human kindness . . . she was my fiancée.”

  The prisoner made no sign.

  “You don’t remember? Of course you don’t. She wouldn’t strike you in any way. She was an ordinary woman. She was no great beauty.”

  Shaqo Mezini sat down and his voice became colder and more threatening. “Why did she come to you? Why shouldn’t I know the reason? Did she complain about me? Speak!”

  The prisoner still sat speechless.

  “At least tell me what was wrong with her. Just listen to me. What was the problem?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Really?”

  “Even if she did come to me, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s a matter of confidentiality.”

  “Monster,” Shaqo Mezini said to himself. “Heartless monster. Hun.”

  At all the later sessions he tried to avert his eyes from the prisoner’s right hand.

  On 3 March before dawn he had given the order for the prisoner to be put to torture. He had gone to the chief operative named Tule Balloma. “Listen, there’s something on my mind. Those two fingers, the index finger and the next one, what do you call it. Give them a good twist.”

  The operative looked at him strangely. “There are other parts that hurt more, boss.”

  “I know, I know,” he had replied. “But it’s those I want. Crush them good and proper.”

  “Don’t worry, boss. You’ll see.”

  He was curious to see the result, although it would be small consolation.

  For two years he had brooded on his fiancée’s desert
ion. He never imagined that just at the time when the scar was healing, the investigation of the doctors would lay bare this wound again. When they had assigned him to this case its global dimensions had staggered him. Simultaneously there came a pang: it was too late. If this had come earlier perhaps his fiancée would not have left him. The file contained something for which he had subconsciously yearned, the promise of celebrity.

  The Dzerzhinsky Academy, which of all institutions should have cultivated an indifference to fame and the charms of women, surreptitiously offered these inducements. Forbidden lust haunted the cadets’ nightly dreams. Their officers, who knew every secret, could not fail to understand this, but astonishingly, instead of discouraging these desires, they openly hinted that they could hold the entire world in their hands if they knew how to reach out for it. The sons of Stalin would drown the world in blood. The world with its temples, cathedrals, its men and glamorous women, would kneel before them.

  His fiancée had proved resistant to this fantasy. At the first supper at her home, supposedly by accident, he had let her see his pistol as he took off his jacket, but to no effect. She had shown no curiosity but only an obvious disdain for firearms.

  His eventual fame would no doubt change this and he would become attractive to women, like the commissars with their leather jackets and scars on their foreheads. Or the surgeons who knew how to handle them. If only he too could be somebody. The young Ali Pasha Tepelene supposedly said that if he had been vezir, he would not have allowed the men of Kardhiq to ravish his sister, and from that day his sole ambition had been to become vezir, to take his revenge.

  Shaqo Mezini seemed about to become a star at the precise moment in his life when it was of no use to him. He had known this instinctively as soon as he heard the radio broadcasts about the plot, when the newspapers with their banner headlines arrived, and later, as he watched the German investigator striding across the windswept tarmac to the airport building. Later, fame seemed to draw a little closer every day and came almost within his grasp, as it had on those heady evenings at the Dzerzhinsky Academy. Dozens of his student friends from Berlin to Ulan Bator were no doubt at the same time investigating the same repellent case. But destiny shone more brightly on him than on anyone else. His dream of becoming the most famous investigator of the socialist camp was about to become a reality: Shaqo Mezini, the thirty-year-old Albanian sleuth. There would be interviews, meetings with young pioneers and congress delegations. “Comrade Stalin, this is Shaqo Mezini, who exposed the famous ‘Joint’.” Then Stalin would invite him to supper and perhaps even talk to him tête-à-tête.

  His intoxicated imagination stopped short before this climax. He was content to leave the details vague. At times, the scene of another supper threatened to superimpose itself, Christ’s perhaps. He knew about this from the Bible, which he had read and even underlined in red pencil while investigating Father Foti, the priest of Varosh. But more than anything else he remembered Gurameto’s dinner, which had started it all. He saw himself present sometimes as the man who was to arrest the mysterious guest and sometimes as this very guest himself, the all-powerful visitant from the grave.

  Don’t give up, he thought. There is still hope.

  It was 4 March and Stalin was still alive. Towards dawn they tortured Gurameto again. The operatives were sure he would sign.

  The day was overcast with frozen clouds shot through with a deceptive light. The radio carried classical music interspersed with listeners’ letters and statements from meetings of workers and soldiers. Wishes for a speedy recovery, threats to our enemies.

  The verses published in the press all mentioned Stalin’s laboured breathing. Everybody thought he was at his last gasp.

  Gurameto’s torture continued till dawn. The investigators no longer waited for anybody’s instructions. Late in the afternoon they searched his house again and seized his gramophone and records. Among them they found Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”, mentioned in the statements. They played it while the torture continued.

  For the prophecy to be fulfilled, the dead colonel’s words had to come true. “‘You’ll hear this music differently.’ Do you remember him saying that?”

  Shaqo Mezini rambled as if in a fever. Arian Ciu listened to him impassively, alarmed by his colleague’s recourse to the Bible.

  After two hours they both went to the hospital to fetch the surgical instruments that Gurameto had brought from Germany, each one with the initial “G” engraved on it. Arian Ciu did not need his colleague to explain that they would torture Gurameto with his own tools, to fulfil the other prophecy, seen in his dream, that he would be operated on with his own scalpels.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The news of Stalin’s death was broadcast shortly before noon. Shaqo Mezini was lying half-dressed on his bed after a strenuous night in the Cave of Sanisha when he felt his mother’s hand touch his shoulder. “Shaqo, Shaqo,” she said in a low voice. “Get up! He’s dead.”

  He leaped to his feet, seized first his revolver from the bedhead and then his overcoat, bounded down the stairs in twos and threes and ran out into the street.

  “Louder!” he thought, without knowing whom he might be addressing. His feet carried him instinctively to the office of the Interior Ministry. His mind was vacant. Then he realised that he had been talking to the loudspeaker. It was not blaring as loud as it should, nor did the mountains of Lunxhëria look sufficiently sombre. “Bad news for me,” he thought.

  At the office his heartbeat steadied. All his comrades were there. With bloodshot eyes and without a word, they embraced each other as they arrived, as if at a funeral. He wrapped his arms round Arian Ciu’s neck and could not suppress a sob.

  A hundred yards away the same was happening at the Party Committee. Decorated war veterans, angrily red-eyed, stood in groups in front of the door. Couriers entered the building, only to emerge with even grimmer expressions than before.

  At one o’clock a collective wail from the children went up from the yard of the primary school. Many people could stand it no longer and fled, shutting themselves up in their homes. Others who had taken to their beds during Stalin’s long illness struggled to rise from them.

  That afternoon people gathered in public halls and courtyards to listen together to the radio broadcast of the rally of mourning from the capital. The announcer’s trembling voice described the scene in Skanderbeg Square in Tirana, where the nation’s leaders knelt in front of the dead man’s statue. In a halting voice the Leader swore eternal loyalty on behalf of all Albanian communists.

  Some people fainted and were carried to the hospital. By the post office, Remzi Kadare, roaring drunk, pointed a finger at the emergency entrance. Amid his sobs of despair, he was telling a story that his listeners took to be about the big event of the day, but was in fact his recollection of the fatal poker game when he had lost his house.

  On other streets could be heard the shouts of unfortunate people as they were dragged by the hair to the Interior Ministry, accused of having laughed at the memorial rally instead of crying, although they swore blind they hadn’t been laughing at all but were as broken-hearted as everybody else. But for some reason their weeping had turned into a snigger. They were beaten all the harder.

  After the rally Shaqo Mezini told his colleague that his legs would not carry him any longer and he was leaving. They could call for him if necessary.

  At home he collapsed into a leaden sleep. When he woke up it was dark. He had a momentary sensation of being suspended in a void, above a kind of abyss of grief and fear. Stalin was gone. He no longer had . . . What else could he have? Speak!

  He shook his head, assailed by a cruel and unexpected recollection of the white stomach of his fiancée and the dark regions beneath her garters. He felt a pang at having had so little chance to savour them.

  The pain ripped through his chest and the scream he suppressed was more violent than the one that came from his throat. His idol Stalin was no longer in this
world; worse, his enemy Gurameto still was.

  What could be more unjust? Shaqo Mezini shuddered with a strange fear at the prospect of being left alone in this world of sorrows with this monster Gurameto. It was unthinkable. He imagined the doctor’s cynical smile. “He’s gone, your little father’s gone, he’s left you all.” And his flesh crept again.

  No, he thought. Never.

  With uncertain steps he left the house. The streets were deserted. A street lamp flickered but refused to die. The Interior Ministry building was in semi-darkness. The guard on night duty looked at him in pity. In the office he found a note from Arian Ciu, “I’m at home. Call me if anything happens.”

  A short time later the two men’s boots were heard, scraping against the cobbles on the street up to the castle. Neither of them spoke; it appeared that first one man and then the other were sleepwalking. They climbed for a long time, as if through clouds. Shaqo Mezini thought he saw the other man’s boots strike sparks, like the hooves of a horse he had once seen in childhood struggling to climb the cobbled street.

  The iron gates to the Cave of Sanisha creaked dolefully. Gurameto was lying just as they had left him, stretched out on the straw.

  Shaqo Mezini touched his knees with the toecap of his boot. “Wake up, Stalin’s dead!” The prisoner’s expression did not change under the pale light of the torch. The black patches and smears of dried blood gave his face the appearance of a crudely painted mask.

  “This makes you laugh, eh?”

  The mask did not change. Its expression could mean anything: laughter, grief, entreaty, anger, menace. (“When he heard the news of Stalin’s death, he laughed. Before my very eyes. I lost it. I couldn’t control myself.”)

  The investigator’s eyes wandered from his face to his bandaged hand. (“No, I was not trying to destroy evidence. I didn’t know his fingers had been cut off.”)