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

the former empire, who hoped to find
employment. From the folds of their robes peered their letters of appointment and copies of their judgments and rulings with their seals and signatures, from all their different postings throughout
the boundless Ottoman dominions.
    The Albanian interpreter in the ground-floor office found it hard to render into German their records of service, in which the old men placed so many hopes. These described the variety of
sentences they had handed down, not just usual ones like beheading and hanging but more sophisticated ones like skinning and dismemberment alive, drowning in vats of boiling water or tepid water in
a tank with two snakes. There were other forms of drowning (one involving a monkey) and two ways of being buried alive: one with the legs and part of the trunk under the earth and the head and
chest above, and one the other way round. At this point the German officer interrupted the Albanian interpreter with a tactful expression of thanks, adding that Germany had its own forms of
punishment and the Third Reich was not a Mongol empire, an expression that struck the old men as “not in very good taste”.
    Meanwhile the city’s newspaper Demokratia had reappeared, full of news from the capital. Albania, following its liberation by the Third Reich, had cast off the hated Italian yoke
and had been declared a sovereign state. A government had been formed headed not by the famous Mehdi Frashëri, as hoped, but by a respected gentleman named Biçaku. Indeed, a Regency
Council had been set up with four members, one for each religious community, evidently in expectation of the return of King Zog I. In even larger type came news of the unification of Kosovo and
Çamëria with Albania and a headline announcing the restoration of the ancient Albanian flag: the real standard of Skanderbeg was to be used again, with the black eagle and without the
lictor’s fasces, which were a bitter memory of Italy.
    Other reports described the spread of Albanian-language schools in Kosovo, supported by research that demonstrated the superiority of Albanian to most other Balkan languages and sometimes the
superiority of the Albanian race itself.
    When read to the accompaniment of the rousing strains of the hurriedly assembled municipal band, which played every day, the news seemed easy to believe. But when dusk fell and the communists
scattered their leaflets, it all became more questionable. The leaflets urged the people not to trust the occupiers, who were merely throwing dust in the Albanians’ eyes with their talk of
Kosovo and Çamëria and their flattery of the Albanian race. The communists claimed that the nationalists and royalists were preparing to do a deal with the Germans. The leaflets ended
with the words “Now or never!” Both the communists and the nationalists made use of this phrase. In fact it had been current for more than a century, which made it hard to work out when
“now” and especially “never” might be.
    A fraction of this would have given anyone sleepless nights but it was particularly those citizens who hated anarchy and yearned for law and order who made their way to the city square each
morning with bloodshot eyes, to sit in the cafés and read the newspapers as the music played.
    Besides the news, the government announcements and the music, there was something else that made everyone think back to peacetime with a pang of nostalgia. Each morning the two famous surgeons,
Big Dr Gurameto and Little Dr Gurameto, walked to the city hospital, just as in the time of the Albanian monarchy and in the time of the triple Italian-Albanian-African empire. Now, under what some
people were calling Teutonic Albania, there was a new hospital set up in the house of Remzi Kadare, the same house that its owner had lost at cards three months before.
    The general conviction was that as long as these two doctors remained (with all their ups and downs, gramophones and dinners