The Fall of the Stone City Read Online Free

According to our traditions, my house is open to everyone, friend or foe.”
    This interpretation showed what a fine man Big Dr Gurameto was and a cheer went up, if a silent one. “Bravo for Big Dr Gurameto, the toast of Gjirokastër!’ Simultaneously
everyone derided his counterpart, Little Dr Gurameto. “Down with the little one! To hell with him, a disgrace to the neighbourhood and our whole city!”
    But this conjecture proved short-lived. It was next reported that Dr Gurameto was not holding an engagement party. His dinner was not intended as a slap in the Germans’ faces. On the
contrary, he was hosting it in their honour. He had invited these foreigners in order to say, “They greeted you with bullets at the gates of the city this morning, but I’ll welcome you
with food and wine and music!”
    A storm of fury blew up against the doctor. Many people said they had always known he would be unmasked as the Germanophile he was and others cursed him as the Judas of the city. They were
correspondingly profuse in their praise for Little Dr Gurameto. At least the little one was cowering in the dark like everybody else, long-suffering but heroic, the pride of all Albania, whether
Greater Albania or not!
    It was plain to see that not a peep came from the darkened house of Little Dr Gurameto, while the big doctor’s house was ablaze with light, the music grew louder and above its strains the
shouts of toasts and cheers in German could be heard.
    The big doctor’s supporters, eager to exonerate him from this charge of treason, resorted to the suspicion that his mind had given way. Someone in this story had obviously lost his wits
but nobody could tell if it was the doctor, the Germans or both.
    Meanwhile, to spite the doctor’s admirers, the anti-Big Gurameto faction, more venomous than ever, asserted that the music was interspersed with machine-gun fire and that hostages were
already being killed, not in the city square but in the cellars of the doctor’s house.
    Others went even further, claiming that hostages the Germans especially wanted, such as Jakoel the Jew, were being led out of the cellars to be shot then and there in the dining hall, for sport!
In other words, shoot them, slice open their bodies on the table, remove the organs for brave German soldiers and raise a toast to Albanian–German friendship.
    This extravagant fantasy, especially the vision of Big Dr Gurameto with his surgical instruments cutting up bodies during dinner, brusquely restored people to their senses and the city thereby
regained the faculty on which it had prided itself for the last six centuries at least.
    It was true, though, that Dr Gurameto’s house was brightly lit and echoed to the sounds of merriment, with Brahms followed by Lili Marlene. And at the same time, machine guns were being
lined up in the city square and trained on hostages handcuffed in pairs, who shivered in the dampness of the night. The weather was cold. A bitter north wind blew down the Gorge of Tepelene, as it
always did when destiny took a turn for the worse. The hostages stood waiting. No gun had yet fired and the helmeted soldiers now and then lifted their heads in surprise towards the music. But it
was the hostages who were the most bewildered and uncomprehending as they listened.
    There could be no more extreme opposites than that grim square with its expectation of death and Big Dr Gurameto’s house with its singing and champagne, yet soon, inexplicably, it was
assumed that the machine guns and the music, however far apart they might be, were mysteriously linked. But what was the connection between them, and did it promise good or ill?
    As the sound of the gramophone slowly faded, so did the anguish of speculation about the dinner. The city could recall many extraordinary banquets of all kinds down the centuries, some joyful
and others disgusting: guests had tried to throw themselves from the rooftops in their euphoria, had fired at each