Chronicle in Stone Read Free

became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
    The old Hoxha family house was converted into a Hoxha Museum in the 1970s. It was blown up by protesters in 1997. The family home of Ismail Kadare described in this novel has also been destroyed, by an accidental fire that swept through the neighbourhood in 1999. Plans are in hand for a faithful reconstruction of it.
    The great citadel remains unchanged and its eerie vaults now house a museum of military hardware. On the open-air esplanade of the fortress described in this book stands the decaying fuselage of a US spy plane that had the misfortune to wander into Albanian airspace more than thirty years ago.
    David Bellos
Princeton, NJ
2 December 2006

A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION
    Most letters of the Albanian alphabet are pronounced roughly as in English. The main exceptions are as follows:
c ts as in curtsy
ç ch as in church
gj gy as in hogyard
j y as in year
q ky as in stockyard or the t in mature
x dz as in adze
xh j as in joke
zh s as in measure

It was a strange city, and seemed to have been cast up in the valley one winter’s night like some prehistoric creature that was now clawing its way up the mountainside. 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 grey slates like gigantic scales. It was hard to believe that under this powerful carapace the tender flesh of life survived and reproduced.
    The traveller seeing it for the first time was tempted to compare it to something, but soon found that impossible, for the city rejected all comparisons. In fact, it looked like nothing else. It could no more support comparison than it would allow rain, hail, rainbows, or multicoloured foreign flags to remain for long on its rooftops, for they were as fleeting and unreal as the city was lasting and anchored in solid matter.
    It was a slanted city, set at a sharper angle than perhaps any other city on earth, and it defied the laws of architecture and city planning. The top of one house might graze the foundation of another, and it was surely the only place in the world where if you slipped and fell in the street, you might well land on the roof of a house — a peculiarity known most intimately to drunks.
    Yes, a very strange city indeed. In some places you could walk down the street, stretch out your arm, and hang your hat on a minaret. Many things in it were simply bizarre, and others seemed to belong in a dream.
    While preserving human life rather awkwardly by means of its tentacles and its stony shell, the city also gave its inhabitants a good deal of trouble, along with scrapes and bruises. That was only natural, for it was a stone city and its touch was rough and cold.
    No, it was not easy to be a child in that city.

ONE
    Outside the winter night had wrapped the city in water, fog and wind. Buried under my blankets, I listened to the muffled, monotonous sound of rain falling on the roof of our house.
    I pictured the countless drops rolling down the sloping roof, hurtling to earth to turn to mist that would rise again in the high, white sky. Little did they know that a clever trap, a tin gutter, awaited them on the eaves. Just as they were about to make the leap from roof to ground, they suddenly found themselves caught in the narrow pipe with thousands of companions, asking “Where are we going, where are they taking us?” Then, before they could recover from that mad race, they plummeted into a deep prison, the great cistern of our house.
    Here ended the raindrops’ life of joy and freedom. In the dark, soundless tank, they would recall with dreary sorrow the great spaces of sky they would never see again, the cities they’d seen from on high, and the lightning-ripped horizons. The only slice of the heavens they would see henceforth would be no bigger than the palm of my hand, on the occasions when I used a pocket mirror to send a fleeting memory of the endless sky to flicker on the surface of