The city had always had a reputation for arrogance. There were different explanations for this. Viewed in the most charitable light, its pride was an aspect of its isolation. The supporters of this theory, conscious of its obvious inadequacy, would hasten to add that "isolation" in this context required some qualification. The city was surrounded by a farreaching hinterland with which it was on poor terms and the inhabitants of this hinterland considered the city alien, if not their actual enemy. At its back to the north, among the endless mountains full of foxes and wolves, lay the rugged and apparently innumerable villages of Lab?ria. To the east beyond the river and its valley lay the villages of Lunxh?ria, which were also irritating to the city but for the opposite reason: because of their gentleness. Then there were the Greek-minority villages stretched along both sides of the river valley to the south. The Greek peasants who worked the land as sharecroppers were treated with disdain but perhaps provoked the city even more. The subtle irritation they caused was felt more during the hours of sleep than by day, and there was no reason for it at all. The presence of these Greeks was like a temptation to sin, leading the residents of the city into prejudiced opinions against not only the Greeks, but Hellenism as a whole, the state of Greece, its politics, and even its language.
To complicate this patchwork further, in the very middle of the territory, or more precisely between the city and the Greek-minority area, lay Lazarat, the most stubborn and vicious village imaginable. Historians, unable to account for its rancour towards Gjirokast?r, said only that this malice did no harm, as long as the city bore the brunt of it and prevented it from seeping further into Albania.
It was said that on dark nights the lights of Gjirokast?r, though faint and distant, so irked the villagers of Lazarat that they fired guns in the direction of the stone city.
According to other more cautious chroniclers, the origin of this enmity lay in the tall houses in whose upper storeys the ladies of the city were believed to live. Behind the roughcast walls, the ladies observed their own unbending rituals. Rarely seen in public, they were the city's secret rulers.
The city itself was inured to all this and sought neither conciliation nor agreement with anyone. Faced with such general hostility, any other city might perhaps have attempted to ally itself with one neighbour against another, for instance with Lab?ria against the Greek minority or Lazarat against Lunxh?ria. But Gjirokast?r was not as wise as it should have been. Or perhaps it was wiser. It came to the same thing.
Not only did the city refuse conciliation, as a warning it illuminated its prison at night. This prison was inside the castle, at the stone city's highest point. With this baleful light, which travellers compared to a malignant version of the floodlit Acropolis of Athens, Gjirokast?r sent its message to its entire hinterland, Lab?ria, Lazarat, Lunxh?ria, and the Greeks: here you will all rot, without distinction, without mercy.
This threat was not an idle one if one remembered the three hundred imperial judges - unemployed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire - who bided their time at home.
The reinstatement of these pitiless judges would turn even the most sweet-tempered of cities, let alone Gjirokast?r, into a wild beast. People were heard to say that if even Lunxh?ria exerted her charms in vain, nothing could mollify this city. The lights of the churches of Lunxh?ria twinkled and their bells pealed at Easter and their women and their freshwater springs were of rare sweetness. The stone city was not as blind as it appeared; it took note of everything. Sometimes girls or young brides vanished from the villages of Lunxh?ria. Their neighbours searched for them everywhere, in the streams, in ravines and among the shepherds' shielings. Eventually a soft sigh like the rustle of silk would suggest firmly that they must have ended up in the tall houses of the city.
It was never proved whether men of the city had in fact abducted these women. Were the girls kidnapped or had they drifted like butterflies, of their own free will, close to the formidable gates of the houses, until one day they were sucked in, never to emerge again. Nobody knew what went on inside. Were they wretched there or happy? Perhaps their dream of becoming ladies had come true. Or perhaps they themselves had been only a dream, and nothing else.
This was how things stood just before the Germans arrived. The old conviction that Albania, when faced with danger, would come to its senses and forget its internal strife proved ill-founded.
Three days before the vanguard of the Wehrmacht crossed the state frontier, the situation was as follows. The villages of Lunxh?ria with their sweet springs and lovely girls closed in on themselves and seemed determined to take no notice of the Germans. Their main concern in any invasion was the forcible seizure of brides; the reports that the Germans were not noted for this (and indeed, at least according to the leaflets dropped from the sky, would respect the traditional Albanian virtues) was sufficient to allay any fears of what would come from foreign occupation.
The Greek minority, seeing that this army had crushed the state of Greece, kept their heads down and prayed to God they would not be noticed. But for the villagers of Lazarat, the very fact that the Germans had thrashed the Greeks, whom they could not abide under any circumstances, was enough if not to arouse their admiration, at least to soften any animosity against the aggressors.
In Lab?ria the situation was different. The villagers' opinions for or against communism were transformed instantly into feelings for or against the Germans. As always, when they ran out of arguments they reached for their guns. As they had more bullets than words there was little chance of an end to the quarrel.
The same questions that were fought over with such commotion and brutality in the villages of Lab?ria were debated more delicately in the city of Gjirokast?r itself. In its elegant third-floor drawing rooms, binoculars were passed from hand to hand to observe the main road along which "the war was coming".
There were two schools of thought. As expected, the communists were calling for war, fervently, and soon. The nationalists were not opposed to war but were not inclined to either fervour or haste. In their view excessive zeal was more characteristic of Russia than Albania and there was no reason why Albania should rush into war blindly, without considering her own advantage. Germany was indeed an invader, but Red Russia was no better. Besides, Germany was bringing home Kosovo and ?am?ria, while Russia offered nothing but collective farms. In contrast, the words "ethnic Albania" in the German leaflets not only failed to conciliate the communists but actually provoked them. Their impatience for war probably did come from Russia. This was only natural for they were led by two or three Serbian chiefs for whom the phrase "ethnic Albania" was a red rag and worse.
These opinions changed with every passing hour and were expressed most bluntly in the city's cafés. On one sentiment everyone could agree. Pass through, Mr Germany, like you promised, in transit. Don't provoke us, and we won't provoke you. Achtung! You've already thrashed Greece and Serbia. That's your business! Give us Kosovo and ?am?ria, jawohl!
Of all these predictions, the worst came true. On the highway at the entrance to the city the German advance party was fired on. It was neither war nor appeasement, just an ambush. The three motorcyclists of the advance party made a sharp U-turn and sped back in the direction from which they had come. The shooters also vanished, as if swallowed up by the bushes.
The news soon reached the city's cafés and everybody scrambled for the shelter of their own homes. As they hurried off they exchanged parting shots, some reviling the communists for staging a provocation and then scarpering, as they did so often, and others denouncing the cowards who would stop at nothing to appease the wolf.
Even before the heavy gates of the houses closed, the news had spread: the city would be punished for its treachery. What stunned everybody was not the punishment itself, but the way it would be carried out. It was an unusual reprisal: the city was to be blown up. Of course this was frightening, but the first response was not fear but shame.
It took some time to sink in. The stone houses with their title deeds, the three hundred imperial judges, the houses of the ladies and with them the ladies themselves with their silken nightdresses, their secrets and their bangles, would fly into the air and fall from the sky like hail.
As if to avert their eyes from this appalling vision, the citizens fell back on their recent quarrels. "Look what the communists have done to us." "It's your own fault. You thought you'd won Kosovo and ?am?ria." "It wasn't us, it was you, pretending you would fight." "What, so we'd do the fighting while you stood back and watched?" "We didn't say we'd fight, you did. You lied." "You're on the warpath? Stay where you are. Fight, or sit tight, just don't move!"
In this way they snapped at each other until the argument eventually returned to the unresolved matter of who had fired on the Germans. The silence that followed was wearisome, and so back they came to the manner of their punishment: being blown up. This was of course an appalling prospect, but the men of the city felt there was something unspeakably and particularly shameful about it. Cities everywhere had been punished down the ages, and indeed, if you thought hard, this had been the number one calamity throughout history. Cities had been besieged, deprived of food and water and bombarded; their gates had been battered, their walls demolished, their houses burned to ashes and flattened, their sites ploughed and sown with salt so that no grass would ever grow again. Many cities have met their end, despairing, but with courage. To be blown up was something else.
Finally, the men understood where their feeling of shame came from. This reprisal seemed to them an insult to their manhood. "Isn't this a sort of punishment for women?" went the talk round the tables. "Or am I wrong?" The essential idea was easy to grasp instinctively but hard to explain. Being blown into the air and made to leap and caper - all this was women's stuff. In short, the stone city, so proud of its manly traditions, had been marked out to die like a woman. How delighted the despised villages around the city would be. Or would they feel sorry for Gjirokast?r? In any event it would be too late.
At this point the men's hearts sank and their voices failed. They turned their heads away so as not to burst into tears like the women, who, being women, were already weeping.
*
In the gathering dusk something for which there was still no word crept over the city.
Those who were determined to flee left for the villages of Lunxh?ria or the Broad Mountain, where they thought the wolves and foxes would be more hospitable.
The rattle of the approaching tanks could be heard and after waiting so long, many people thought that this protracted roar was the explosion, a newly-invented way of being blown up, German-style.
Finally the German tanks appeared, moving in a black, orderly file along the highway. The first tank halted at the river bridge, rotated its turret and aimed its barrel at the city. The second, third, fourth and all the others did the same, in sequence.
Even before the first shell was fired, Gjirokast?r's inhabitants had understood not only the tanks' message but the whole situation. The stone city had fired on the German Army's advance guard. Now it would be punished according to the rules of war, which took no account of how cultivated, ancient or crazy a town might be.
The first shell flew through the air above the roofs just as an old man of the Karagjoz house announced, "I'll not be blown up, I'll make a dash for it before you blink. But this is torture, neither one thing nor the other!"
The shells fell first on the outskirts and then by careful degrees approached the centre and people in the shelters made their final wishes, uttered what they thought were their last words, prayed.
Then the bombardment suddenly stopped. The first inquisitive people who emerged from the cellars were astonished to find the city still there and not in ruins as they had imagined. But this fact was easy to grasp compared to the next piece of news, which concerned the cessation of the shelling and was strange and baffling. One of the inhabitants had apparently waved a white sheet from a rooftop, nobody could tell exactly where. He had signalled to the Germans the city's surrender. While lots of people accepted this as truth, many thought it must have been a mirage.
Meanwhile the rumble of the tanks had started again. Now they were slowly climbing towards Gjirokast?r.
Dusk fell at last and under the cover of darkness harder questions were asked. Who had raised the white flag? The original question of who had fired on the German advance party now seemed naive and childish. People sensed that it would soon be answered and plenty of men would boast of this feat, while whoever had waved the white sheet would vanish into obscurity.
There was no way of identifying the man or even the house from whose roof the flag had been raised. "Somewhere in that direction," hazarded those who claimed to have seen it. Other people tried to guess who it might have been but when asked to pin down his name, or at least the roof, they all shrugged their shoulders as if this shame, if that is what it could be called, was too great to be borne by a single person, or a single roof.
Everybody agreed on this and so they felt relieved when someone found an explanation for what had happened, one that dispelled every suspicion of blame. The explanation was very simple: no search would ever discover the person or ghost who had raised the flag of surrender. The September wind had pulled a white curtain out of a window left open when the occupants of the house sought shelter in the cellar, and blown it back and forth in front of the eyes of the Germans. The inhabitants of the city could finally be reassured that neither cowardice nor, worse, attempted treason had set this flag fluttering. Destiny itself in the form of the wind had done the necessary job.
