Chronicle in Stone Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand. Apart from the movies, which were for children and the frivolous, there were only two places you might get to see a fight, usually on Sundays: the gypsy district and the square behind the mosque, where the porters divided up their earnings. Other fights were accidental and usually broke out in unpredictable places. And recently a lot of fights had not lived up to the pre-match invective. More than once I had heard onlookers complain, “Bah, in our day they knew how to break bones,” and then walk off disappointed. Only the Gypsies and the porters really fought hard and kept almost all the promises they’d made in the run-up to the fight.
    The slaughterhouse seemed to be a new amusement, so I didn’t argue.
    As we trudged up the cobblestone street, we saw Javer and Maksut, Nazo’s boy, coming down. They weren’t talking to each other and looked cross. We didn’t say anything either. Maksut had always had eyes that bulged out of their sockets, and I didn’t like looking at him. One day I heard a woman arguing with a neighbour, and when she screamed “May your eyes burst from their sockets” I thought of Nazo’s boy right away, and now, every time I saw him I felt that his eyes might pop out and roll along the cobblestones and I might accidentally step on them and burst them open.
    “What’s the matter?” asked Ilir. “What’s the frown for?”
    “It’s Nazo’s boy. When I see him it turns my stomach.”
    “Isa doesn’t like him either,” Ilir said. “Whenever his name is mentioned, Isa frowns just the way you did.”
    “Really? So Isa thinks his eyes are going to pop out too?”
    “Are you crazy?”
    I let it drop.
    There was a man coming towards us down the street, draped in a blanket, carrying a lump of bread wrapped in a piece of cloth. It was Llukan, whom people called The Shadow.
    “So, you’re out of jail!” a passer-by said to him.
    “Yes, I’m out.”
    “When are you going back?”
    “And why shouldn’t I go back? Prisons are made for men.”
    Since the days of the Turks, Llukan had been in prison dozens of times for petty crimes. Everyone always remembered him trudging down the street from the citadel in just that way, with a brown blanket over his shoulders and in his hand some meagre victuals wrapped in a handkerchief.
    “So, Llukan, you’re out again!” someone else said.
    “Sure am, friend.”
    “You could have left the blanket up there. You’ll be back soon enough.”
    Llukan responded with a flood of insults. The further away he went, the louder he shouted.
    We walked towards the centre of town. The streets were full of alien sounds. It was market day. Peasants were converging on the square from all over. Horseshoes clacked, slid and sparked on the cobblestones. On the hills villagers drew their horses by the bridles, their sweating, panting bodies merging with those of their animals as they dragged them upwards.
    The windows of the great houses were shut tight on both sides of the street. Behind them the wives of the agas sat on soft cushions and held their noses, felt faint, and nearly vomited, complaining about the stench of the peasants wafting in from the street. Plump, with white round faces, they rarely ventured out into the city. They protested that the closing of the border with Greece had kept them from getting the eels from Lake Ioannina that were so good for their rheumatism. They found the peasants repugnant and never mentioned them without first muttering “excuse the expression,” as they did when saying the word “lavatory”. In fact, they were quite dismayed by the times they lived in, and sat in rows on their cushions sipping coffee endlessly and yearning for the return of the monarchy.
    Some Italian soldiers stood guard at the cinema, watching people go by. We carried on up the street. The shop signs stretched out one after another. Tinsmith. Barber. Addis Ababa Café. Saddles. Vinegar. And a poster that began with the words “I order” in big