When Ekonomi saw Klodi Spaqi decked out in red ribbons like girls, he muttered to himself: “Oh, poor thing, mother, poor thing!” Evisi came up to him and whispered in his ear, gripping his shoulder: “This is what they call: Babo’s house is on fire, while Klodi is getting his hair done.”
Të lidhura
None found
Usually God takes your mind first, and then the other things gradually! But Gaz Bardhi, you take everything all at once! You took Erzi first. He has turned into the angel Gabriel: he comes out of one file and slips into another!
Auntie, that cunning old woman, did nothing without first making sure; she played deaf and thought “what is it to me” about Vlora and Gysi. The latter, according to reports, had summoned her to the office to scold her over some permissions and issues in the South, and she had burst into tears. It was right there that she had had her heart broken. Ditmari swears that she is sensitive, that he knows her secrets and has suffered for it.
Sypetrit Malaj kept making noises from the back rows: bam-boom, boom-bam, as a result of stress and fear, until Niko turned to him: “Bravo to the Opposition’s firecrackers, for they have no smell, but you look as if you have eaten carrion, you wretch, may death scatter you, you had not a drop of mercy!” His stomach made noise like a harvesting machine!
Delina had a handkerchief soaked in apple cider vinegar, just like at the tear-gas protests! Every time she pulled it away, she let out a revolting cry.
Interior Minister Demo slipped in unnoticed, as befits a brave man, and left secretly! He was not looking for trouble! It is said that he will appear himself with a rifle over his shoulder, dressed in a fustanella and on horseback, like Osman Gazepi once did in Berat, to teach organized crime a lesson.
Gonxhe’s heavyset man—wider than he is tall, because in his mind he is cunning and a trader, although he knows neither reading nor writing—took a turn with mammoth elegance just to be seen and then left! In the corridor he said to someone: “What do I care? I have a frozen heart, because Gysi has summoned me to the office six times. Can you say no to him? Eh? One day I rebelled and gave him the slip: I told him I was in Butrint. He replied: ‘Fine, then I will wait until you return.’ What could I do? I went to him at midnight, and we each drank a glass of that famous wine! It was so tasty you could lick your lips.”
Those who had gone to his studio for benefits, to change positions, stood with their heads lowered like weaklings and with empty stomachs!
One of them muttered between his teeth: “Let’s form the association of ‘Gysi’s sons’ and protect each other from problems.” Another replied: “No, he was younger than us. Since we are his sons, let’s call it ‘The Holy Covenant’.” So it remained! Those who had ever eaten from him abstained.
Only Klosi came out to speak, like the goat that asked for horns and lost its ears; he stammered hoarsely two or three sentences, like whispers through baggy clothes! Then, swaying and dizzy, he sat back down! No one wished him “good luck”! Some whispered nasty words: it comes from insomnia, because vice torments him badly, of course!
Thursday’s session was utterly surreal; the entire honor of the majority fell on Qefsere’s shoulders! “Speak,” they told Koçi, “speak, for the sake of the whole world, show what you can do for our Babo in these difficult times, because if Etilda were here, she would overturn the government’s wooden bench like the ‘Mother Albania’ monument—would you lead us?”
“Come on, set it off!” they shouted at Nufi. “Launch your rockets, press the buttons, rouse yourself, you shameless one, fire them, burn them, reduce them to ash, and give all those brazen ones down there to the devil!!!”
“No, my friend, I am a peaceful man, a man of the pen and of thought; my weapon is culture,” he said, and hid under the table!
Pirro Dëngu looked at him with contempt. “If I were there, as in the old days, I would now bring the army and stop them; I would catch them with my own hands, and this matter would be closed with heads held high, because we have raised our backsides and lowered our heads,” he cried bitterly! A tear the size of a walnut fell to the floor!
“Call Karakaçi!” they shouted, “let him come and fight the battle, let him fight like Oso Kuka,” Bora suggested, while he himself played a little pipe.
“Eh,” Igli replied, “where would you find Enea Laraska (in the southern dialect, Karakaçe means magpie)!! He has swift feet and a fair face, but he hates speaking. Maybe he can use his finger,” Bora insisted.
“Eh, not for this business, comrade,” said Igli, “but for that other one—he can spin it!”
In this gloom and trouble, Shalsi, with his irresistible nonchalance, pulled out two slices of bread with butter and some pieces of sausage inside, and ate them as if he were on another planet! Then he even rubbed his belly! Fatmir Xhafa, just like in the song from Bregu, “the partridge that steps over vices,” vanished without being noticed, like a pharaoh.
With tears in their eyes, they begged Damos, like a sister and a friend: “Speak, come forward, because Neta will make you pancakes; come out and defend Babo, because the situation is alarming!”
“I would gladly do it,” he replied, “but I have my gym schedule. Babo has said: a sound mind in a sound body. Besides, he trusts Zeniqe, not me, so I cannot disappoint him; I have never let him down!!!”
Kostaqi saw things ever more clearly and suffered ever more deeply. “Ah, if only I were an MP there, I would show those scoundrels how I would roast them on a spit one by one, like the lambs of Luma,” and a vein was about to burst from his forehead and race across the fields like oil bursting from the ground!
“Bah, God forbid,” said Koçia after a long hesitation!
For this black day, we are left with Qefsere, who, as if risen from legends, walked with pride upon a speech prepared by others!
Some confused people repeated, as if in a fever, a strange word: “Chart, chart!” Kidi, supposedly to defend him, but in fact as if sticking a knife into him, said: “You are heartless, because you even remind him of the damage to his blood vessels!”
Braçja knocked, as on previous occasions, on the doors of the chronicle! He asked: “How do you know that Mamica and Tao went to Babo’s house?”
“Babo himself told us,” we answered, “he asked us as a favor to spread the word that Mamica has found the path of God and that you little troublemakers should put away your knives. Enough playing war games!”
Braçja blushed when we told him that Qefsere would receive him to make his self-criticism, accompanied by Erjo Mile as a witness, without flowers, without sweets, without a portrait. Then she would send him the concentrate!
Ervin Hoxha asked Ogi: “Shall I get up and make a scene for them?”
She stopped him: “Stay put, take notes and hand the list to the Chronicle, because you are not ready yet after the traumas you have been through! This is the most useful action.”
Erjon Malaj was pounding his temples with his fists: “What has come over me, what has come over me,” he shouted in despair!!! “Nobody is speaking; you are all hiding,” he complained. “You speak.”
“I don’t want to,” one of them replied, “because my grandfather died last year; I have the anniversary, and my heart is not in it.”
“You speak,” I said to another.
“Don’t turn it back on me, I dreamed last night that I bit my tongue off with my teeth, and now I am not in the mood.”
“Will you speak?”
“Ah, no, my mare has foaled in the village; I have a joy, come, let me treat you!”
Nobody would agree, and he wept: “Ah, uncle Tao, uncle Tao, how could you leave me alone on doomsday! May I go bald, may I, if I stayed with cowards,” he stammered!!
In any case, Tao is twisting the word; the naughty boy has set his eyes on Nikollaqi’s chair! He is waiting for October. Even Babo, with all the troubles that have beset him, had granted him a big, generous smile to illustrate something on Facebook, because he had sent the Albanian flag to safety, even with the radar turned off!
Let no one worry about Bledion Nallbase!
He had fallen into a great daze! He kept seeing Mamica in a blue dress that swelled her bust, as she puffed on a Toscano cigar, slowly and very sweetly, and he talked to himself! “As if Rutja has shrunk it!” If nothing else, he said, this battle must be won, so that he may have that dress as a shroud on judgment day!
Termeja came up to him and said: “Hold on, brother, no one has found the end of this misery. It is an endless forest! Oak after oak, the axe breaks.”
The evil eye of the socialists who were with Babo that night, and who looked at him with envy, had fallen upon Jorushi of Tabakë. His new trousers, like a cowboy’s, had unfortunately been torn near the shoes! For the poor man, that was enough, and they did not stop his rush!
The Leader’s deputy chairman, the Flamur government, complimented the “Chronicle” with measured words, unhurried, all weighed, so that it would deepen its self-criticism without falling into pessimism!
Meanwhile, Bernard Banushi, the chieftain of Toskëria, is weaving big plans, the smoke of which will rise above the chimney very soon!
