Memories of War
Chronicle in Stone
Ismail Kadare
This is the story of a city torn apart by invading armies, narrated from the viewpoint of a child. The child's voice is so endearing that it is almost possible to overlook the horror of war.
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 our city wasn't occupied, wouldn't there be these same streets, the same fountains, roofs, and people? Wouldn't I still have my same mother and father and wouldn't Xhexho, Kako Pino, Aunt Xhemo, and all the same people come to visit?
The city, located in southern Albania, near the border with Greece, is occupied repeatedly in the course of the narrative, which is based on Ismail Kadare's recollection of events in his childhood growing up in Gjirokaster, the city of stone. The period is roughly 1939-1943, during which time the Italians, the Greeks, the Italians again, and the Germans took turns invading Albania. During this time the city was heavily bombed by the RAF which was allied with Greece against the Fascists. There were also several para-military organizations present all claiming to fight for an independent Albania and a very effective resistance movement made up of partisans who were mostly Communists.
But it is the city itself that holds the fascination of the young narrator and, through his descriptions, our own.
Everything in the city was old and made of stone, from the streets and fountains to the roofs of the sprawling age-old houses covered with slates like gigantic scales. It was hard to believe that under this powerful carapace, the tender flesh of life survived and reproduced.
His imagination wanders at times as he leans out the window of his house, which like all houses in the city clings to the side of a hill topped with a fortress.
He watches, rapt, as planes take off and land on the aerodrome constructed on a pasture used for grazing on the opposite bank of the river. He also peoples the roadway that follows the river below the town with invaders from the past: "I had heard that the First Crusade had passed this way a thousand years before."
The crusaders had marched down the road in an endless stream, brandishing their arms and crosses and ceaselessly asking, "Where is the Holy Sepulcher?" Lord Byron was another wayfarer who took this road. Like the Crusaders, he was going south, though "[t]hey say he was seeking not Christ's tomb but his own. Crusades and occupations aside, the real adventures in this story are taking place in the imagination of the boy and his friends. It is as much a coming of age story as anything else, the story of a young boy, leading an innocent life in a village otherwise cut off from civilization, in the midst of a global conflict. There is a point in the book where the boys see a globe for the first time and realize that the earth is round."The world is round, like a melon. I saw it at home. Isa bought it. Its round, perfectly round, and it spins without stopping." In spite of the morbidity of the events going on around him he is infatuated with life and especially with language.
"Something strange was happening to me lately. Everyday words or expressions, things I had heard dozens of times, were suddenly taking on a new meaning."
"I had entered the kingdom of words, where a merciless tyranny reigned."
Words and their corporeal entities, while not stone-like, still persist in our memories and between the covers of books. He reads Macbeth and he is transformed:
Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Decomposed into little black marks. Hair, eyes, legs and hands, voices, nails, beards, knocks on doors, walls, blood, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The l's, r's, o's, t's gallop over the page. They gather together to form a horse or a hailstorm. They gallop away again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a ghost. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running, Never stopping. Without end.
Stone endures and so do these black marks. Occupations come and go. They may endure so long as to seem interminable but the spark of life, "the tender flesh," fills the carapace of stone and when the breath of life fills the black marks, they become living stories.
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