Chronicle in Stone by Ismaíl Kadaré Page A

black letters it read: “Air-raid shelter for 90 persons”.
    There were no other signs in our street. We had never seen anything but a few posters giving city ordinances, and they peeled off in two or three days, soaked by the rain and torn by the wind. Obscene graffiti were occasionally scrawled on the walls of houses in chalk or charcoal. But not often. The first real placard was the one nailed to the right of our door.
    That day passers-by stopped in front of it and those who could read explained it to the others.
    “Is this house for sale?”
    “No, Grandpa. It’s about something else.”
    “What?”
    “It says we should come and hide in this cellar when the planes drop their bombs.”
    “Really?”
    I stood at the door smiling at passers-by as if to say, “See, that’s what you call a house.” I was very proud. There were many large and beautiful houses in our neighbourhood, but none of them, not Çeço Kaili’s or Bido Sherifi’s or even Mak Karllashi’s mansion had a plaque like this one. It meant that ours was the strongest of all.
    I kept smiling, but to my disappointment no one seemed to pay any attention to me. Except for Harilla Lluka, who when he caught sight of me took off his hat with the greatest respect and nodded in my direction. They said Harilla Lluka was the biggest coward in the neighbourhood.
    But the indifference of the adults didn’t bother me much. I stayed there at the door and waited impatiently for Ilir to come by. Only a few days before, we had had a long argument about whose house was stronger. We often used to make bets of that kind with each other. Just before that we had been fighting about how far the king could throw a stone. I said he could throw a stone as far as Holy Trinity hill, while Ilir was adamant that he couldn’t throw it further than the riverbank. At the very most, as far as the bridge, but certainly no further.
    Who knows how long this argument would have gone on if we hadn’t acquired a new topic for our squabbles! We fought even harder over the relative strengths of our houses, and could have gone on with that fight for a very long time. We might have insulted each other, or even turned to fists or stones, if those strangers hadn’t shown up that fine morning and put up the plaque with those marvellous words: “Air-raid shelter for 90 persons”.
    Probably out of spite, Ilir never showed up. He must have heard about the plaque and sneaked home through the alley.
    I waited a long time, then finally got bored and went in. I went straight downstairs to the cellar and stood looking respectfully at its thick walls, which hadn’t been whitewashed in ages.
    Until then the cellar had never been an important part of the house. We used it to store coal or to slake lime. Compared to the main room two flights up from the ground the cellar was a kind of scullery maid. This main living room had six big fine windows as tall as my father, and a grainy, mottled ceiling of carved wood. A lot of housekeeping went on in this room. My mother would wash and scrub the floorboards until they shone like wax. The curtains on the windows were white with lace borders, and the room was ringed by low wooden ledges covered with thin mattresses, where old women would sit when they came to visit, sipping their coffee and making sage pronouncements. It was easy to see why the other rooms, even the hallway, were jealous of the main room. Envy could be detected in their constricted windows with their sills out of true and in their hunched, narrow doorways.
    But everything changed the day the bombs started falling. The windows in the main room were shattered. The room got upset and lost its looks, while the old cellar, tranquil and kind, cared little about what was going on outside.
    I felt sorry for the main room, now abandoned by everyone. During the bombing, while the thick walls of the cellar didn’t even vibrate, I felt bad for the main room all alone up there, for I knew it was