Chronicle in Stone Read Online Free PDF Page B

kerchiefs lay a world of green that couldn’t be found in our part of the city: cabbage, onions, lettuce, milk, fresh eggs, cheese, parsley. And in the midst of it all, the clinking of coins. Questions and answers. “How much?” “How much!” Murmurings. Curses. “May you drop dead before you eat them!” “This’ll pay for your doctor.” So much poison flowed over the lettuces and cabbages! Where worms crawled, there crept death . . . “And how much is that?”
    We walked on. At the far end of the market an Italian soldier sat playing a harmonica and making eyes at the girls. We were back at the cinema. There was no film that day.
    We went home. On my way upstairs, I heard my youngest aunt laughing. She was sitting on a chair, jiggling one leg and laughing loudly. Xhexho looked over to Grandmother two or three times, but she only pursed her lips as if to say, “What can you do, Xhexho? That’s how girls act these days.”
    My father came in. “Did you hear?” my aunt said to him at once. “They took a shot at the King of Italy in Tirana.”
    “I heard at the coffee house,” my father said. “The assassin had hidden his pistol in a bouquet of roses.”
    “Really?”
    “They’re going to hang him tomorrow. He’s only seventeen.”
    “Oh, the poor boy,” Grandmother sighed.
    “The end of the world.”
    “Too bad he didn’t get him,” my aunt shouted out. “The roses got in his way.”
    “Where do you hear such things?” my mother asked in a tone of reproach.
    “Here and there,” was all my aunt would say.
    Xhexho adjusted the kerchief on her head, said goodbye to Grandmother and Kako Pino, and left. Kako Pino left soon after. My aunt stayed on for a while.
    I went up the two flights. There was still some activity in the streets. The last people were going home from the market. Maksut, Nazo’s boy, was carrying a cabbage that looked like a severed head. He seemed to be smiling broadly.
    The peasants had started packing up. Soon their black cloaks would darken the streets — Varosh, Palorto, Hazmurat, Çetemel, Zall — and the highway and bridge too, as they made their way back to the villages that we never saw. The city, like a tethered horse, would swallow up the greenery they had brought. But all that soft green, that meadow dew and tinkle of cowbells, was not enough to soften the city’s harshness. They were leaving now, their black cloaks dancing in the twilight. The cobblestones flashed their last sparks of anger under the iron horseshoes. It was getting late. The peasants had to hurry home to their villages. They never even turned to look back at the city, alone now with its stones. A muffled ringing rolled down the hill from the citadel. Every evening the guards checked the window bars, striking them rhythmically with iron rods.
    I saw the last of the peasants crossing the bridge over the river and I thought about the strange division of people into peasants and city-dwellers. What were the villages like? Where were they and why didn’t we ever see them? To tell the truth I didn’t really believe the villages existed. It seemed to me that the peasants were only pretending to go to their villages, while actually they weren’t going anywhere, just crouching behind the scattered bush-covered hillocks around the city, waiting out the long week for another market day, when once again they would fill the streets with greens, eggs and the tinkling of bells.
    I wondered how it was that it had occurred to people to pile up so many stones and so much wood to make all those walls and roofs and then call that great heap of streets, roofs, chimneys and yards a city. But even less comprehensible were the words “occupied city”, which came up more and more in the grown-ups’ conversations. Our city was occupied. Which meant that there were foreign soldiers in it. That much I knew, but there was something else that bothered me. I couldn’t see how a city could be unoccupied. And anyway, even if