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

could be discerned dimly, as if
it were scared to emerge.
    The music of a gramophone was the first thing that seeped through. Then, slowly, and with great effort, people recalled the nightmare of the hostages. The fact that eighty people had lived
through the horror of this experience, minute by minute, should have left no room for speculation or error but the hostages did not all tell the same story. Some did not want to admit that they had
been hostages, perhaps fearing that in a second wave of arrests they would be told, “You, sir. This is the second time we’ve arrested you.” Other people who had not been hostages
were thirsty for fame. They claimed that they had been present facing the machine guns on the city square and were so persuasive that they were believed more readily than genuine hostages.
    This confusion added to the general mystery surrounding the events of the day. Out of force of habit these were called “unforgettable”, although so many deserved to be forgotten.
They were recalled to mind one by one but more and more tentatively. What about the partisan ambush at the entrance to the city? God knows what really happened there. There were no eyewitness
accounts and there was no physical evidence apart from two black skid marks on the asphalt, where it was thought the German motorcycles had turned back.
    Probably there really had been an ambush, which the communists called heroic and the nationalists considered a provocation, but it was equally plausible that the whole incident had been invented
by the Germans to justify their tactics of terror.
    The ambush could be interpreted to the credit of all three parties, but the same could hardly be said of the incident of the white sheet, which was taken as a sign of surrender to the Germans.
It was easy to call it a mirage but seen by whom, the inhabitants of the city or the German Army?
    Obviously Gurameto’s famous dinner was the biggest mystery of all. It had started as Big Dr Gurameto’s fairy-tale reunion with his German college friend. But the rest went beyond any
fairy tale. The invitation to dinner, the gradual release of the hostages, not to mention the climax at dawn in the Gurameto house, the motionless Germans laid out in deathly sleep in the drawing
room and the doctor’s daughter, thinking she had poisoned them, and then the Germans slowly stirring, resurrected as if at Easter time, not one Christ but a whole cohort of Christs. This was
not just a disgrace to the house but a blasphemous parody.
    All these events might have been accepted as imaginary had it not been for one detail: the music of the gramophone. This music had blared all night and everyone had heard it. It might have been
taken for a crazy whim on the part of Gurameto, of a kind familiar to the city, where the more respected its citizens were, the more impulsive they were likely to be in their caprices. And yet it
was hardly likely that Dr Gurameto would get it into his head on the night of the German invasion to play his gramophone in hermit-like seclusion.
    Unable to account for this extraordinary hiatus, people inevitably suggested the influence of some force majeure , like the Double Night. It was as if, after lying in wait for a thousand
years, this monster had finally descended to enfold forty or more hours in its arms, seizing a whole day like a wolf snatching a sheep, and had vanished again into the infinite depths of time.
    But as people’s heads cleared, so their eyes regained their proper vision. On either side of the iron gates in the city square hung two long flags with the swastika in their centre. Above
them was a huge banner in both Albanian and German, appealing for recruits to the newly founded Albanian gendarmerie. A long queue of elderly men had formed by the side entrance before dawn. The
German sentries stared in astonishment at their strange gowns and cloaks to which were pinned unheard-of insignia and stripes. These were the old judges of