'IT ALL HAPPENED TOWARDS THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR,' THE
cafe-owner began. The general himself had insisted on being told the prostitute's story by an actual inhabitant of the old, stone-built city, and no one, he was assured, knew all the details better than the cafe-owner.
They had read the prostitute's name only that morning, in the military cemetery on the outskirts of the town. Of all the remains they had located up to now she was the first woman they had come across and, when he was told some thing of how she came to be there, the general was curious to hear her whole story. Though perhaps he would have walked past her grave without a glance if it had not been for the marble headstone on it bearing the standard inscription : For Leader and for Country.
The general had in fact noticed the white stone from quite a distance. It inevitably caught the gaze among all those twisted, blackened, rotting wooden crosses, all those rusty helmets hanging at the heads of the other graves.
'A marble headstone!' the general had exclaimed. 'An officer? Perhaps even Colonel Z. ?'
They went straight over to the grave to read what was carved on the slab. It gave a woman's surname and Christian name, then her place of birth. She was from the same province as the general, though he did not tell anyone so.
'Yes, it happened right at the beginning,' the cafe-owner said in the tones of someone addressing a large audience. (For since he had told this story many times he had developed a particular narrative style for the purpose, introducing frequent parentheses enabling him to insert his own comments on the events. And with it a slightly rhetorical tone that nevertheless stopped short of actual grandiloquence.) 'I was one of the first to hear the news. Not that I have any particular interest in such matters, you understand but, because I was always here in the cafe working, I naturally tended to be one of the first to learn of any event affecting our town. And that was how it was on that particular day. The cafe was full when the rumour first started, and we never did find out who started it. Some said it came from a soldier who'd spent the night in our hotel here and got blind drunk. Others claimed that it originated from a certain Lame Spiri, who was always positively obsessed with such things. Not that it really mattered one way or the other. We were so amazed and shaken up that we didn't really care whether it was the soldier or that blackguard Lame Spiri that the news actually came from.
'I ought to add here that it wasn't easy to surprise us at that time. It was wartime for one thing, and we were hearing incredible, fantastic stories every day. And we all thought there was nothing left in the world that could sur prise us after that day when we saw the anti-tank guns and the anti-aircraft guns with their long barrels rolling through our streets for the first time, making such a terrible din that we all thought the entire town was about to come tumbling round our ears. And we were even more convinced when the aeroplanes started fighting right over our heads, not to mention a lot of other things that happened after that.
'And then for a time the whole town talked about nothing but the English pilot who was shot down just outside the town. I saw his hand with my own eyes, it was all there was left of him. I saw it when they showed it to the townspeople, out on the main square, with a scrap of his burnt shirt. It looked just like a piece of yellowed wood, and you could even see the ring on his ring finger.
'So we were used to hearing about things of that kind, and even the most unexpected events no longer had much effect on us. And yet, somehow the news that they were going to open a licensed brothel here shattered everyone no end. We were prepared for anything-but not for that. In fact the news was so surprising that a lot of people refused to believe it at first.
'Our town is a very ancient one. It has survived through many different times and many different customs but how could it ever have foreseen anything like this? How could it suffer such a terrible shame in its old age, our town that had always been a byword for honour all through the years? What was to be done? It was a terrible problem, and one that threw us all into distress and confusion. Something strange and new and terrible was creeping into our life, as if the occupation, the barracks crammed with foreign soldiers, the bombings and the hunger weren't a heavy enough burden upon us already. We didn't understand then that this was just another side of life in wartime, no different really, no better and no worse, than the bombings, the barracks, and the hunger.
'The day after the news first went round a delegation of elders walked in group to the town hall; and that night another group met in my cafe to prepare a petition to the fascist emperor's lieutenant-general in Tirana. For hours they sat there, round this very table, writing page after page, while a crowd of others stood around nearby, drinking coffee, smoking, wandering off on some business of their own, then coming back to ask how the letter was getting on. A lot of the women began to get worried and sent their children to make sure their husbands weren't beginning to get drunk. I can still remember those kids staring through the big windows there, bewildered by it all, their eyes heavy with sleep, then creeping away again, shivering in the wet and the dark.
'I had never closed the place as late as I did that night. At last the letter was finished and someone read it out. I don't remember too well exactly what they'd put in it. I only know that it said how for a great many reasons, all listed at length one after the other, the honest citizens of our town begged the Duce's lieutenant-general to reverse his decision to open a licensed brothel here, in the name of the honour and the prosperity of our ancient town with its noble traditions and its origins lost in the mists of antiquity.
'Next day the letter was despatched.
'Of course there were some people who didn't want any thing to do with a petition like that, and who were hostile in fact to any kind of letter or request at all to the occupying powers. But we ignored them. We clung firmly to the hope that something would be done for us. You must remember that this was still the beginning of the war, and there were still many things we hadn't quite cottoned on to as yet.
'But of course no heed was paid to our request. A few days later a telegram arrived: "Brothel to be opened for reasons of strategic order stop". The old postmaster who was the first to read it didn't grasp the meaning of the message immediately. Indeed, some people he showed it to said that it was written in one of those code languages they were always using then, and that it was meant to be incomprehensible. Someone even said categorically that it was to do with the opening of a second front, but that military terminology was always obscure. But of course none of all that was true, and the people who listened to the radio every evening all knew perfectly well what the expression "of strategic order" meant. So everything at last became clear: it wasn't a second front that was about to be opened but, beyond a shadow of a doubt, our brothel.
'A few days later further details filtered through. The brothel was to be opened and run by the occupying forces themselves, and foreign women were to be specially brought m.
'Needless to say, it was the sole subject of conversation in our town. Everyone was curious to know what this un known thing would be like, and above all what they-the women-would look like. The few men who had been abroad for any length of time pandered to the curiosity of the others, clustering wide-eyed around my tables, by telling them everything they knew on the subject. It wasn't hard to tell that they often supplemented genuine incidents in their lives with others that were less so. And it soon became a con test to see which of these storytellers could prove himself to be the most knowledgeable and produce the most amazing stories. To listen to them talk about Japanese brothels and Portuguese brothels, you would have thought they must know those countries like the backs of their own hands, and that they were in the habit of calling all the prostitutes in the world by their Christian names.
'Their listeners, especially the ones with grown-up sons, became increasingly worried and kept shaking their heads with more and more anxious looks. And the women, at home, were even more tortured by anxiety, and it was hard to say whether it was for their husbands or for their sons that they were most concerned. The older inhabitants regarded the promised event as the most fateful of omens and were now waiting, their hearts gripped by the darkest forebodings, for an even more terrible punishment to descend upon us from on high. It has to be admitted, of course, that there were some who were delighted, because as you know it takes all sorts to make a world; but no one had the face to actually display his pleasure openly. There were a number of husbands who didn't get on with their wives, for instance, and also a number who had always been given to skirt-chasing by nature. But above all there were the young men, the ones who weren't married yet, reading love stories all day long and hanging about all evening with nothing to do. Some people tried to console themselves and reassure everyone else by arguing that from now on the foreign soldiers wouldn't bother our girls anymore because they'd have their own. But people weren't that easily pacified.
'Even before the brothel was actually opened our mis fortunes began. Two people were arrested for having said publicly that this measure was being taken with the deliber ate intention of introducing foreign customs and corrupting Albanian morals, and that it was just part of a vast plan to destroy our country's identity and make it into a fascist state. From then on people spoke in lower tones; and when the future brothel was mentioned only the old men dared to give vent to their curses openly.
'At last they arrived. They were brought in by a camouflaged army lorry. I can recall the scene as though it was only yesterday. Dusk had just fallen and my cafe was full. At first I couldn't understand why so many customers were getting up from their tables and going over to the windows, peering out towards the main square. Then several of them rushed out into the street, and the customers still sitting down began to ask what it was all about. A lot of the tables were suddenly empty. It was the first time so many people had left without paying. So then I went outside myself, un able to restrain my curiosity. People were coming out of the cafe opposite too, and out of the hunters' club, and quite a crowd had already formed to watch the scene. The lorry had drawn up just by the town war memorial, opposite the town hall, and they had just clambered out of it. Now they were just standing looking around them with astonished eyes. There were six of them, and they seemed tired, stupefied by the long journey. The circle of bystanders was gazing at them with popping eyes, as though they were some sort of rare animal, but they, as they stood there exchanging comments with one another, merely returned our stares with calm and indifferent smiles. Perhaps they were a little taken aback at finding themselves so unexpectedly in this strange place, all carved out of stone, for it is true that our town does take on a slightly phantasmagorical look in the dusk, with the buttresses of the citadel and the dreaming minarets with their metal-covered spires gleaming in the setting sun.
'By now the square was filling up with people, in particular with a horde of children, who began hurling a few of the choice foreign words they had picked up from the occupying soldiers at them. The grown-ups shoo'd the children away, then stood observing them in silence. It was difficult for us at that moment to know exactly what it was we felt in our hearts. The only thing we did realize clearly that evening was that all the things we'd been told about the brothels in Tokyo or Honolulu bore very little relation to what was now meeting our gaze, and that the reality was something very different from all the stories we had been told, some thing much deeper, sadder, more pitiful.
'Escorted by a few foreigners, a town hall official, and a gaggle of children, the little flock made its way docilely over to the hotel. It was there that our town's strange hostesses were to spend the night.
'Next day they were installed in a two-storey house, surrounded by a small garden, right in the heart of the town. A notice giving the hours allotted to civilian and military clients respectively was put up on the door, though none of us actually saw it until later, since for the first few days the street remained as deserted as though it had been struck by the plague. No one even set foot in it anymore. And even later, when we did begin to use it again, that street seemed to us the ugliest, the most foul and sordid of all the streets in our town. We had the feeling that it was something alien, something sullied, something spoiled in some way-a fallen woman in short! But then a military policeman was posted there to make a note of any people he thought were deliberately avoiding it, and gradually, after a few days had gone by, it began to be used again; first of all just by children, then by adults too, because after all we all had our own affairs to attend to, and there just wasn't the time to keep on making long detours through the neighbouring streets. There were only a few of the old men who swore to heaven that they would never set foot in it again, no matter what happened.
'Those were dark and worrying days for all of us. Our town had never known any women of ill repute before, and even family scandals caused by jealousy or infidelity had always been rare. And now, so unexpectedly, there was this black spot in the very heart of the town itself. The shock that people had felt when they first heard the news was as nothing to their utter disarray now that the brothel was actually open. The men all began going home very early, and the cafe was always empty quite early in the evening. If husbands or sons did stay out late then their mothers or wives became frantic with anxiety. They were like a kind of tumour right in the centre of the town. It was noticeable that everyone's nerves were very much on edge, and a lot of the men and the youngsters were not always able to conceal a certain guilty look in their eyes.
'At first, I need hardly say, no one ever actually went into the brothel. And probably they found that rather surprising. They may have thought to themselves that these people they'd landed up amongst must be an odd lot if their men were so uninterested in women. But perhaps, on the other hand, they understood that they were foreigners here, and that they were looked upon with the same eyes as the troops occupying us, whom we considered as being wholly our enemies.
'The first to visit the brothel was that blackguard Lame Spiri. And that afternoon of his first visit the news got round so fast that by the time he came out again all the windows of the nearby houses were crammed full of people staring at him, their eyes popping out of their heads as though Christ had just risen again. And Lame Spiri just walked on arrogantly down the street without seeming in the least bit embarrassed. He even waved goodbye to one of them as she leaned out of her window and watched him walking away. It was just then that an old woman threw a bucketful of water down at him from her window; but she didn't manage to hit him. The other old women all made sour faces and cursed them with that gesture so characteristic of the women in our country: the arm stretched out, the hand raised, the spread fingers sighted on the person they are cursing. But the occupants of the brothel apparently didn't understand what was meant and just burst out laughing.
'That's how it was in the beginning. But then people began to get used to the situation. There were even some men, on suitably moonless nights, who began to pay secret visits to the house and its occupants that had caused us all so much distress. You might say that they were beginning to become part of our lives.
'Quite often, in the evenings, they used to appear out on their verandah. They would sit smoking their cigarettes and gazing up with absent eyes at the mountains all around them, doubtless thinking of their own country so far away. And they would stay there for a while, quite quiet in the half-darkness, until the muezzin had finished his singsong call to prayer from the minaret and the town's inhabitants had gone home.
'So that after a while our animosity against them faded. There were even those who felt sorry for them. They defended them by arguing that when all was said and done they had been conscripted, just like anyone else doing military service, and that they were only obeying orders. From time to time some misfortune would occur that could be attributed to them. As for example when a schoolboy was arrested one day because he'd been heard talking about "the militarization of whores". But was it their fault, poor creatures? What could they do about it?
'Little by little, you see, we seemed to have got used to their being there. People were no longer mortified when they encountered them by chance in a shop, or in church on Sundays-except for the old women, that is, who were still praying night and day for a bomb "from the English", as they put it, to fall and destroy that accursed house.
'And I think there were days when they longed for that to happen too.
'The Italian-Greek front wasn't far away, and at night we could hear the rumble of the guns. Our town was used as an overnight rest-point both for the units being brought up to relieve the battleworn troops at the front and for the latter coming back from it.
'Quite often a notice would appear on the door of their house reading: No civilian clients accepted tomorrow, and then everyone knew there was a troop movement due next day. Though in fact the notice was quite pointless, since no civilian ever went near the place during the day, and would be even less likely to do so if there were soldiers there. With the exception, of course, of Lame Spiri, who came and went as he pleased at all hours of the day and night.
'On those days we sometimes used to walk along the brothel street simply to have a look at the soldiers just back from the fighting, filthy and unshaven, standing in line out side. They never broke ranks, even when it began to rain, and it would undoubtedly have been much easier to dislodge them from their trenches than from their places in that dismal queue winding its interminable length along that street. To make the waiting in the rain bearable they made silly jokes, scratched at their lice, hurled foul language at one another, and squabbled about the number of minutes they were going to spend inside. It can't have been very gay for them inside-though of course they had no choice but to grin and bear it, because when it came down to it, they were under army orders too.
'As the afternoon drew on, so the queue would grow shorter. The last soldier would finally vanish, and the street would relapse into its usual calm. And most mornings after those overworked days they would appear looking sallow skinned and even more haggard than usual. It was as though their soldier-clients back from the front were unloading onto those poor girls all the weariness, the rain, the mud and the setbacks that they themselves had suffered in the trenches; so that they could then get up and go on their way refreshed and satisfied, relieved of a great burden, while they must perforce stay on here perpetually, in our town, a few miles back from that front, waiting for yet another batch of weary soldiers to arrive, interminably soaking up the bitterness of their retreat.
'And perhaps everything might have gone on for a long while in exactly the same way, perhaps nothing extra ordinary would have occurred-for as we all know life must go on. Perhaps they would have spent the whole of the war here in our town, watching their dreary days fade into dusk with the singsong call of the hodjas, and receiving those long lines of soldiers before fate scattered them-who knows where? Yes, things might perfectly well have turned out that way, if Ramiz Kurti's son had not suddenly broken off his engagement one fine day.
'Our town, as you see, is not a large one, and incidents of that kind cause a great stir. For it is a fact that there are very few towns or villages anywhere in the country where fewer divorces occur than here. So that the break between Ramiz's son and his betrothed was a very shocking matter. Several nights running all Ramiz Kurti's relations met in solemn conclave at his house in order to discuss the affair and bring pressure on the son, with all kinds of threats, to renew the engagement. But the son obstinately refused. Nothing in the world would make him give in to his family's demands. But worse still, he also refused to reveal the reason for his change of feelings, and all his relations' attempts to extort it from him were in vain. He spent every day in a state of prostration, not speaking, just lying thinking, and growing visibly paler and thinner as though under some evil spell.
'And meanwhile the girl's family were demanding explanations. All her relatives-and she had just as many as the boy-were also meeting in order to deliberate on the affair. And twice they sent messengers to Ramiz Kurti to ask him the reason for the rupture. But the motive had not yet been discovered, and both emissaries in turn left again very much put out, letting it be understood that they would not tolerate their family's honour being spurned in such a way. Which meant that they intended to exchange words for weapons before very long. And indeed shots were fired, but in circumstances very different from those now generally expected and feared.
'But it was at that point, just as the representatives of the
two families were holding their final discussions, just as the feeling was growing on both sides that the ancient friendship between the two families, sealed by the betrothal of the two young people in their cradles, was turning to hatred, that the true reason for the rupture was discovered. It was simple but shameful: Ramiz Kurti's son had entered into a liaison with one of the prostitutes in the brothel.
'Later we often racked our brains trying to guess the true nature of the boy's relationship with that foreign girl. Did he genuinely love her? Or was it she who had fallen in love with him? God alone knows what there was between them, for we never learned the truth.
'But on the evening of the very day we all heard the rumour, as dusk fell so Ramiz Kurti came down from the upper town, whitefaced, bareheaded, stick in hand, and made his way towards the brothel. His gaze was frozen like ice as he walked, and he must certainly have been partly out of his mind. And you can imagine the surprise they felt at seeing this whitefaced old man pushing the gate of their little garden open with his stick and walking in like that. They were sitting out on their verandah, and as the old man climbed the steps up to it one of them let out a burst of laughter. But the amused comments of the others were suddenly frozen on their lips, and a deathly quiet fell over the whole company. The old man pointed with his stick at the one his son came to see (apparently he recognized her by her hair) and the girl obediently trailed off upstairs to her room, assuming him to be just one more customer. The old man followed her. Then, as she was beginning to undress, the girl looked up and saw the old man's face, abnormally still, a staring mask, and she shrieked in terror. Perhaps the old man wouldn't have used his revolver if she hadn't cried out. Her shriek seems to have somehow jolted him out of his half stupefied state. He fired three times, threw the gun down, then walked out like a man drunk, completely ignoring the screams of the brothel's inmates.
'Three days later Ramiz Kurti was hanged. His son just vanished.
'It was October, and there was a cold wind blowing day and night down from the passes all around. Despite the circumstances of her death, despite the weather, a funeral with flowers, wreaths, music, and rifle salvoes was laid on for the victim. The fascists managed to round up a fair crowd of people from the streets and cafes and forced them to swell the cortege. We walked in silence with the wind flaying our faces. She had been placed on the back of a small army lorry in a fine red coffin. The military band played her funeral march, and her companions wept as they walked.
'The people of our town had never followed a foreigner's coffin before, to say nothing of the coffin of a woman from her walk of life. We felt somehow stunned, with a sensation of emptiness in our hearts. I looked up at the clouds, high in the sky that day, and as I walked I thought about her life and her fate. Who could say what destiny had driven that poor woman to follow so far in the wake of those helmeted soldiers, and then, after wandering from place to place in the hinterland of war, to arrive at last in our town-where she had been fated to end her days and drag down others with her, into ruin and even death?
'She was buried in the military cemetery, the "cemetery of brothers" as they called it, and over the grave they put up that marble slab you saw this morning. Then they carved the standard inscription on the slab: For Leader and for Country. The same words you see on all the soldiers' graves. 'A few days later an order arrived from the capital and the brothel was closed. I remember it as though it was only yesterday, that cold morning when they came out into the main square again, their cases in their hands, to wait for the lorry that was coming to take them away. All the people passing stopped to watch them. They stood huddled together, their coat collars turned up against the cold, rootless, more adrift in life than ever.
'They clambered up into the truck, and as it began to
move off so some of the people watching raised their hands and timidly waved. The girls in the lorry acknowledged those farewells; but in a way that bore little relation to what we might have expected from women of their calling. Their gestures were something very different, movements of the hand and arm that conveyed their bitterness and their lassitude. We stood there watching them go, yet without any sense of liberation. We had always assumed that we could mark their departure with some kind of celebration; but it was all turning out very differently. And what were we going to gain by their going? The war was raging all around us, the fascists were mounting guard on our very doorsteps, and there was nothing good for us to hope for from our occupiers.
'God knows where those unfortunate creatures were sent. Undoubtedly to some other small town near the front, some place where the troops moving up to the fighting and those returning from it would be halting for the night. And once again, no doubt, their existence would be filled with those long lines of tired and mud-spattered soldiers who would pour out upon them all the dank bitterness of their life at the front.'