WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS

A Tale of the Line

Devoll, Albania — the Sixteenth Year of the Withdrawal (2046)

Elira Vangjeli Short story. Përmet, June 2046.

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. — Matthew 6:21

The sea is his, and he made it. — Psalm 95:5

I

In the sixteenth year of the Withdrawal there stood, where the Bilisht road climbs out of the Devoll plain and crosses the line, a row of nineteen houses which appeared on no map, and which everyone in the plain called Qafa e Thanave — the Pass of the Cornels — because of the cornel-cherry thickets that reddened there every autumn as if the hillside had been splashed with wine.

The houses had been built quickly, in the second and third years, out of the stones of sheepfolds and the timbers of barns, by people who did not intend to stay long and who had now stayed fourteen years. They stood in a single file along the road, all facing west, which visitors from deeper in the slow zone found strange, since the weather came from the west and any sensible house in that country turns its shoulder to it. But the people of the Row had not built their houses to be sensible. They had built them so that each front window looked down the road, across the young forest that had once been wheat, to the low hills where their villages were; and a house, whatever the builders say, is always built by the heart, and the heart of the Row lived on the other side of the line.

The line itself was nothing to look at. That was the first thing every stranger said, and the people of the Row had long ago stopped answering. It was a surveyor’s line: a stitch of whitewashed stones going up over the shoulder of the hill and down into the plain, set out in the first summer by government men with instruments, who had measured — so it was said — one hundred and nine kilometres inland from a sea that none of them could see and that most of them had never seen, and had found that the invisible sea reached to here: to this ditch, this hawthorn, this stone. On the road there was a wooden pole on a pivot, painted white and red like the poles at old customs posts, and a hut with a stove where the warden sat, and a bell on a bracket. Nothing else. No wall, no wire, no watchman but old Petro Naska with his ledger, and above it all the enormous, empty, unmoving sky, which kept the line better than any army in the history of the world had ever kept anything.

In the last house of the Row but one, the house with the quince tree, lived Vasilika Kondi, the widow of Kristaq Kondi of Shënepremte, and she was eighty-two years old.

She woke, as she had woken all her life, before the light. In her youth this had been a virtue; now it was merely a habit that had outlived its reasons, like most of what remains to the old. She lay for a moment in the dark listening to the house — the settling of the stove’s last embers, the mice in the roof whom she had given up evicting and now merely supervised — and then she rose, because lying in bed after waking had always seemed to her a form of lying in general.

She lit the lamp. In the Row there had been no current since the beginning; the poles still marched along the road with their dead wires, and swallows nested on the transformer box, and the children of the Row, who had never seen a lamp that lit without fire, called the poles “the crosses” and could not be persuaded that they had once carried light the way an irrigation channel carries water. Vasilika did not miss the current. She had lived her first ten years without it and supposed she would manage the last ten the same way. What she had never stopped missing, in sixteen years, was something she was ashamed to name even to herself, and so we shall name it for her: it was the sound of an aeroplane on a summer evening, very high, going somewhere — the little silver thorn of it, drawing its white thread across the blue. Not because she had ever flown. Because it had been company. The sky in those days had been full of people going somewhere, and now the sky was the emptiest thing in the world, emptier than the villages, and it went all the way up.

She raked the stove, fed it two pieces of oak, set the water on, and while it heated she made up her bag. This was done in a fixed order, and the order was the whole of her housekeeping, for the house at the Row she kept as a soldier keeps a billet, but the bag she kept as a church keeps its altar. Into it went: the small bottle of oil for the grave-lamp, stoppered with a whittled plug of Kristaq’s making; a box of matches wrapped against damp in a twist of waxed cloth; the short knife with the yellowed handle, for weeding; a heel of yesterday’s bread and a lump of white cheese in a rushnik, the embroidered cloth she had woven as a bride; a second, smaller piece of bread with no cheese, which had its own purpose; a flask of water; her wooden comb; and, in spring and summer, whatever the season had sent up that Kristaq had liked — the first cornel blossom, a handful of cherries, a sprig of basil from the pot on the sill. In February, the month of his death and his name-day both, she carried instead a little dish of kollyva, the boiled wheat of the dead, sweetened with honey and studded with walnuts, and this she made the night before with her sleeves pinned back, saying the names.

She drank her chicory coffee standing up, looking out the west window. The light was coming. Over the low hills the sky had gone the colour of whey, and against it she could see — she could always see, her eyes had kept faith with her better than her knees — the notch in the ridgeline where the walnut tree stood behind the church of Shënepremte, four kilometres and a little more beyond the line. Under the walnut was the grave, and in the grave was Kristaq, and it was to Kristaq that she went now, as she went every day that God and the weather permitted, and had gone for fifteen years; so that the children of the Row, who did not remember the world, believed going-in to be simply a thing that old women did, the way storks stand on one leg, and had to be taught in school that it had ever been otherwise.

She tied her kerchief — black, for she had never left off her mourning, not out of display but because putting on a colour would have been a statement, and she had no statement to make — took her stick from behind the door, took the bag, and went out into the cold sweet air of the morning.

At the third house Ramiz Osmani was already in his yard, splitting kindling on the block, in his shirt, with his cap on. He was sixty-eight, broad, red-faced, a Bektashi from Vranisht on the plain, and he had been Kristaq’s friend for forty years before he was her neighbour for fourteen, which made him, as he said, twice related to her, once by friendship and once by wall.

“Off to work, zonja Vasilika,” he said, as he said every morning. It was their liturgy.

“Somebody must keep the place,” she said, as she said every morning.

“Tell Kristaq the raki’s cleared. Tell him it’s better than his.”

“I’ll tell him you said so. He’ll know it for a lie.”

Ramiz laughed, set another billet on the block, and split it, and the sound of the axe followed her down the Row like a small clock striking, and it was, in fact, by such sounds and not by any machine that time was told at Qafa e Thanave, where nobody’s watch had ticked for years: by Ramiz’s axe, and the bells of the flocks going out, and at evening the warden’s bell at the pole, rung at last light for anyone still inside the line — one long peal that rolled westward over the empty land like a mother calling children in from a field at dusk. The whole Row lived inside that bell as inside a promise. Everything before it was day, and belonged to the living and to their errands among the dead; and everything after it belonged to the sky, and no one went to see what the sky did with it.

II

At the pole, Petro’s granddaughter Lena had the ledger open on the shelf of the hut window, and was blowing on her fingers, for the morning was sharp although it was already April.

The ledger was a thick grey book of the kind that shops had once used for accounts, and it was the sixth of its line; the first five stood in a row on a shelf in the hut, swollen with damp and importance. On the left-hand page one wrote the name and the hour of going in; on the right, the hour of coming out. That was the whole of it. The ledger commanded nothing and forbade nothing; the pole itself lifted for anyone; you could climb through the ditch a hundred metres away and no one would stop you, and the boys of Bilisht sometimes did. The ledger existed for one reason, which Petro had understood in the first year before anyone else: so that at dusk, when the bell had rung and the light was going, the living would know whether all the living were out. It was not a law. It was the Row counting its people, as a shepherd counts sheep at the fold, and in fifteen years the count had failed only twice, and both times the Row had stood all night in the road in silence, looking west; and of those two nights we shall speak in their place.

“You’re the first, gjyshe,” said Lena. She was sixteen, dark-browed, with her grandfather’s slow hands, and she wrote a very fine copperplate that she was proud of, having little else to write. She had been born in the February of the waiting — in that strange pocket of weeks between the message and the arrival, when the whole world held its breath — and so she belonged to what the schoolteacher called, out of the almanacs, the between-born: the ones carried under one sky and delivered under another. There were only three of them at the Row, and the old people, without ever agreeing to it, treated all three with a kind of tenderness, as one treats things made in a hard winter.

“Vasilika Kondi,” Lena said aloud as she wrote, though she had written the name some four thousand times, “in at — six and fifty.”

“Put fifty-five,” said Vasilika. “Your clock is proud.”

“The clock is Grandfather’s and it doesn’t lie.”

“It’s a clock. Lying is all it knows. Write fifty-five.”

Lena wrote fifty-five, because at the Row the difference between sixteen and eighty-two settled every argument, and lifted the pole, and said what she said every morning, which was also liturgy: “Out before the bell, gjyshe.”

“Before the bell,” said Vasilika, and stepped over the whitewashed stones, and was inside.

Nothing changed, of course. That was the thing that had taken longest to learn, that the first step inside the line was a step onto grass exactly like the grass outside it. The wind did not drop. The larks went up out of the old wheat exactly as larks had always gone up. God’s country did not know it was forbidden; only men knew, and the knowledge lived in the body, not in the land: a very slight lifting, between the shoulder-blades, of a weight one only noticed at the moment it returned each evening. Vasilika had walked in fear the whole of the first year, in prayer the second, and now she walked in the fear and the prayer both, worn soft, the way the stones of a threshold are worn, so that they had become simply the shape of the road.

The road itself was dying beautifully, as roads do. The asphalt of the old motor road had cracked into plates, and grass stitched every seam, and in places the plates had heaved up over the roots of the poplars like ice over a spring flood. Sixteen springs had gone over it. The fields on either side, which had been beans and wheat and the famous apples of the plain, had gone first to thistle, then to briar, and were now going, with the patience of a whole century compressed into one long exhalation, to forest: wild pear, hawthorn, oak no taller than a man but numberless, marching down from the hills to take back the plain their grandfathers had been driven from. Roe deer stood in the young oak at dawn and watched her pass without moving more than their ears. Once, in the third year, she had met wolves on the road — five of them, at a slant, mid-morning — and she had stood still with her heart slamming and her stick held crosswise, and the wolves had looked at her with their yellow eyes precisely as the deer did, without fear and without appetite, as at a colleague, and had gone on. They had the whole emptied width of the world from here to the water, a hundred kilometres of it, stocked with boar and deer and the descendants of every escaped sheep in the district; an old woman with a bag of bread did not figure in their economy. Still she had sat down afterward on a milestone until her knees came back, and had told Kristaq about it before she told anyone living, which was the correct order.

Half an hour in, at the fork by the ruined pump-house, she stopped, as always, and did two things. She looked south, where far off across the plain, blue with distance, lay the roofs of Korça — the whole city of it, minutes only inside the line at its eastern gate, hours deep at its western; the tiled roofs, the poplars, the dome of the cathedral catching the first sun exactly as it had caught it when forty thousand people had lived beneath it. The city stood open-eyed and empty, like a person who has died looking at something. Day-parties still went in — the line ran so close that the cathedral could be reached, prayed in, wept in, and left, all with the sun high — and from its farther, deeper streets the Recovery carts still came out on summer days loaded with archives and iconostases for the mountain depots; but no smoke had risen from those roofs in sixteen years, and the storks owned the chimneys of the whole city, and their nests on the chimney-pots looked from this distance like the fur hats of an army bivouacked on the rooftops, asleep.

And then she turned her back on the city and looked at the sky, all of it, from rim to rim, and made sure of what was not there, and crossed herself, and went on up the smaller road into the hills, to Shënepremte.

The village began, as it had always begun, with the spring and its stone trough, still running, still cold enough to ache the teeth, and the trough green with weed now and the flags around it broken by the roots of a fig that had planted itself the year of the leaving and was now a tree. Then the first houses. She knew every house and every house knew her. There were thirty-one hearths in Shënepremte, and she could have said — and on winter evenings at the Row, when the young ones asked, she did say, in order, going up the street, the way one says a psalm — whose house was whose, and who had built it and in what year, and what was carved over which door, and which roofs had fallen (nine now; the snow of ‘41 had taken four in one night, and she had heard them go, or believed she had, a soft quadruple thunder across the line in the dark, and had lain awake the rest of the night as if four more of her people had died) — and which houses stood whole, waiting, their windows filmed like the eyes of old dogs, their door-keys hanging on nails in kitchens a day’s ride away, in Bilisht, in Prilep over the mountains, in the Row; because almost no one had locked up, in the end. You do not lock a house against the sky, and it had seemed to all of them, that March, that to turn a key would have been to say something none of them was willing to say.

Her own house she did not look at. This must be understood at once about Vasilika Kondi, because it was the strangest thing about her and the truest: in fifteen years of days spent in the dead village, she had entered her own house four times. The grave she could bear. The grave was honest; it had taken what it had taken openly, and gave back a fixed place where love could stand. But the house — the house had kept everything and gave back nothing: his coat on the peg keeping the shape of his shoulders, the whetstone worn hollow in the middle like a saddle, her loom with the rug half-woven in it, red and black, exactly half, forever half. The grave said he is here. The house said he was just here — and that, as every widow in the world could have told the philosophers, is the sentence that kills. So she passed her own blue gate with her eyes down, touching the gatepost with two fingers as one touches the shoulder of a sleeping person — I’m going by, don’t wake — and went up the lane to the church.

The church of Shën e Premtja — Saint Paraskevi, the martyr, Saint Friday as the old people said — stood at the top of the village inside its low wall, whitewashed once, stone-grey now, small and thick-walled and half as old as the faith itself, with its apse to the east and the great walnut behind the apse, and under the walnut, in the walled yard where six generations of the village lay, the grave of Kristaq Kondi: a low mound long since gone to turf, kept clipped like a rich man’s lawn by one pair of old scissors; a marble cross, modest, ordered from Korça in the last winter that Korça sold marble; and on the cross two names. KRISTAQ SPIRO KONDI, 1957–2029. And below it, cut at the same time, in the same hand, by her instruction and over her son’s objections: VASILIKA KONDI, 1964– , and then smooth stone, waiting, patient as only stone and wives are patient.

She set down her bag on the flat rock that had become, over the years, her table, her pew, and her second home; and she stood a moment with her hand on the warm marble, catching her breath from the hill; and then she said what she said every morning, which was the oldest liturgy of all:

“Erdha,” she said. I’ve come.

III

While she weeded — and there was always weeding; the turf of a grave, like grief itself, is never finished, only tended — she talked to him, in the low, running, half-voiced way in which she had talked to him across the kitchen for forty-six years, and the talking loosened memory as rain loosens soil, and the memory that came up that morning, because it was April and the pear was in bloom by the churchyard wall, was the memory of the well at the lower threshing floor, in the April of 1983, when she was nineteen.

She had known who Kristaq Kondi was, of course; in a village of thirty-one hearths there are no strangers, only degrees of silence. He was of the upper village, nine years older than she, and he was already then what he would be all his life: a broad, deliberate, sparing man who did everything a beat slower than other men and had never once in living memory had to do anything twice. He was the best carpenter in three villages and kept eleven hives of bees at the field called Qershiza, and it was said of him, as the highest praise that country gave, that his word and his joinery were the same thing: you could hang a door on either.

That April the well-rope at the lower floor had frayed, and the bucket had gone down, and the young men had spent a morning fishing for it with hooks and poles and a great deal of advice, and had failed, and gone to lunch. Vasilika had come to the well at noon with her mother’s jugs and found only Kristaq there, alone, lying flat on his stomach on the well-curb with his arm down the shaft, not fishing but listening — turning a grapple by feel, a centimetre at a time, with his cheek against the stone and his eyes shut, the way a doctor listens to a chest. She stood and watched him for what she later swore was a quarter of an hour and he later swore was two minutes. He never looked up. At last there came from deep in the earth a small, sullen, watery clunk, and his shoulder rose, and hand over hand, unhurried, as if hurry might still offend the bucket, he brought it up into the light, streaming, and set it on the curb.

Then he looked at her, and considered her carefully, the way he considered timber, and said:

“It wasn’t lost. It was just down.”

That was all. He shouldered the coil of new rope he had brought and went off up the lane, and Vasilika stood by the well with her jugs and understood, with the terrible clarity of nineteen, two things at once: that she had just been told the whole of the man, and that she was going to marry him. It took a further year, because his mother wanted a girl from Hoçisht with orchards, and because Kristaq did nothing in less than a year, courtship included; he courted the way he glued — set the pieces true, clamp, and wait. But in the October of 1984 the go-between came to her father’s house with the raki and the ritual sentences, and in the May of 1985 she was married in a blue dress in the office of the cooperative, under the photograph of the leader of those days, by the secretary Llambi, who read the articles of the family code in a voice of official sorrow, as if the code itself regretted everything.

That was the wedding the state saw. The other wedding — the real one, as she had called it in her heart for sixty years — the state did not see, and had it seen it, several people would have gone to prison, and one of them a priest.

It took place eleven nights later, in the third hour after midnight, in the storeroom of Kristaq’s uncle’s house, among the seed potatoes, by the light of one candle set inside a tin so that not even the keyhole should show it. There were seven people present, counting God. Father Efthim, who had been the priest of three villages until 1967 and had been ever since, in the state’s ledgers, a warehouse clerk in Bilisht, came on foot over the hill by the shepherds’ path, in a workman’s coat, with everything that was needful in a fishing-bag: the book, the cross, the two crowns of brass wire and cloth flowers that had crowned every secret bride in the district for twenty years, and which lived, between weddings, buried in a churn of maize flour. He was a small dry old man with tremendous eyebrows, and he married them in a whisper, the whole crowning service entire, not one word forgiven, for — as he said afterwards, drinking his single raki with his hand still unsteady — “God whispered the world into being, He can hear a whisper back.” When he came to the walking, the three circlings of the table that stand for the dance of Isaiah and for eternity, there was no room among the potato sacks to walk in a circle, and so the seven of them turned in place, shuffling, holding candles, in a room two metres by three, and Vasilika, turning, with the brass crown on her hair and Kristaq’s hand dry and enormous around hers, had thought: the whole of heaven is watching one potato store in Devoll, and nowhere else on earth tonight is there anything worth watching — and sixty years had gone by, and she had buried the priest and the uncle and the mother-in-law and the candle-tin and the man himself, and she had never changed her mind.

The crowns Father Efthim had left with them, “until wanted” — it being safer to scatter such things — and they had lain wrapped in the rushnik in the bottom of her dowry chest through everything: through the raids of the bad years, through the move to the Row, where the chest had come out on the cart with the icon-corner hidden inside it. They lay there now. She had told Ramiz, one evening last winter, in the middle of talk about nothing, where they lay and what they were, and Ramiz had listened, and nodded, and asked no question, and poured; and she had been satisfied, in the way of old people who have posted a letter the reader will understand when it arrives.

“Your mother,” she said aloud to the grave, pulling a groundsel out of the turf and shaking the soil from its roots, “wanted the Hoçisht girl to her dying day. Forty years at my table, and every autumn: their quinces were bigger. God rest her, she was right. Their quinces were bigger.” She set the groundsel on the weed-pile and smoothed the turf. “But their girl couldn’t have done this,” she said, “and wouldn’t have come. So there it is, mother-in-law. There it is.”

The bees went over the wall in the sun, from the hives’ wild daughters in the church’s south wall, of whom more shall be said, to the pear blossom and back, stitching the morning together; and the light moved slowly round the walnut, as it had moved when the walnut was a sapling and the Turks held the plain, and as it would move when nobody at all held it; and by the time the sun stood over the ridge it was ten o’clock, and time for bread.

IV

It should be told here, because without it nothing in this story can be rightly weighed — not the grave, not the icon, not the quality of Vasilika’s patience with the sky — that Shënepremte had already once before, within living memory, been forbidden something by a power that did not explain itself; and that the something, that time, had been God.

It happened in 1967, when Kristaq was ten. The men came from the district in a green truck in the spring of that year, with papers, and the papers said what all the world knows now from the histories: that religion was abolished; that the state of that day, first on all the earth, had made itself officially a state without God; that every church and mosque and teqe in the land was closed, confiscated, and re-assigned to the uses of the people. It was done in Shënepremte in one afternoon. The bell — the old bell, with the Greek letters round its waist, that had been paid for in 1878 with the wool-money of the whole village — was lowered from the little tower with ropes and taken away in the truck, to be melted, everyone said, though no one ever met a man who had seen it melted. Father Efthim was read a paper declaring him a parasite, and reassigned to Bilisht to count sacks. The icons were carried out into the yard and stacked, and there was a discussion by the truck, which the village stood and watched from a decent distance, in silence, in its work clothes, the way people watch a flood: nothing to be done, and one’s whole life going by on the water.

The icon of Saint Paraskevi did not go into the stack, because it was not there to be stacked, having left the church the previous midnight inside a sack of bran on the shoulder of Spiro Kondi, Kristaq’s father, sexton of Shënepremte, a man so silent that his silence had been given, by the village, the standing of a natural feature, like the ridge or the north wind. What Spiro had heard, or guessed, or been told by the saint in a dream — this last was his wife’s version — was never established, because he never discussed it, then or after. It was only known that when the men from the district inventoried the church of Shënepremte, the inventory listed the great icon of the patroness as “missing, presumed removed by persons unknown in the disorders of the war,” and that the men, having quotas and a long day and eleven more villages, wrote it so and drove on; and that from that midnight in 1967 until a morning in April of 1991 — twenty-four years — the martyr Paraskevi of Rome, painted in egg and gold on walnut boards two hundred years before by a wandering master from Grabova, dwelt in the tenth hive at Qershiza.

The tenth hive was Spiro’s making, and it was a true hive in every outward part, weathered like its nine sisters, standing in the row with them under the cherry trees, facing south. But its lower body was blind — a shallow false chamber, and beneath that a dry, dark, wax-scented vault lined with sheep’s wool, where the icon lay wrapped in linen and oilcloth; and its upper body was live, and full of bees. Spiro chose bees over rafters and wells and dung-heaps — all the hiding places that were bought and sold in whispers in those years, and that the searchers knew as well as the hiders — on the strength of a single observation which he communicated to his son, once, in eleven words, as they stood together by the hives the summer before he died: “A man will put his hand anywhere. Except where it’s stung.”

He was right for twenty-four years. The searches came — twice in the terrible year when the priest of a village to the south was shot for a baptism, and once in 1975, and the searchers were not fools; they had steel rods for the dung-heaps and long eyes for fresh mortar. They walked the row of hives at Qershiza with the bees boiling about their heads, and asked how much honey the cooperative took, and wrote it down, and did not put their hands anywhere. Kristaq, who from the age of ten kept the bees beside his father and inherited them and the secret together, said in his old age that he had never once, in all those years, been afraid at the hives — nowhere else was safe, but there he wasn’t afraid — because he had worked it out as a boy, in the way boys work out the world and are not wrong: the saint is watching the bees, and the bees are watching the saint, and whoever comes must get past both.

So the village lived. It is not for this story to say all that those years were; the histories say it, and say it truly, and yet — as Vasilika had told the schoolteacher at the Row, who collected the old people’s memories in a copybook — the histories say it the way a map says a mountain. On the map is the mountain’s name and height. On the mountain is the wind. In the wind, for twenty-four years: children who crossed themselves inside their mouths, with their tongues, where it could not be seen; Easter eggs dyed red in secret and called, if anyone asked, a custom of the spring, very old, nobody remembers why; the word Pashkë itself unsaid, and in its place, among the women at the fountain, a phrase — “when the year turns sweet” — that the police could stand next to and never hear; funerals at which no priest stood, and yet, as the coffin was lowered, some old aunt would begin a long, wandering, tuneless keening in which, buried the way the icon was buried, whole phrases of the forbidden psalms lay hidden, and the young police recruit standing by heard only an old woman crying, and it was that too. God, forbidden the front door, had come in through the lament, the way — Vasilika would say to the schoolteacher, and the schoolteacher, being between-born, wrote it down without fully understanding it, which is how all scripture is transmitted — the way water comes into a house: you may forbid the pipe, but you will not forbid the damp.

And in the April of 1991, when that world had ended as worlds end, suddenly and shabbily and with everyone claiming to have expected it, the village of Shënepremte assembled at the field called Qershiza behind Kristaq Kondi, aged thirty-four, who walked ahead carrying an unlit candle; and Kristaq lifted off the live upper body of the tenth hive with his bare arms as the bees poured over them like water — he was never stung; the village took this for a wonder, and Kristaq maintained flatly, to the end of his life, that it was because he did everything slowly, and perhaps both are the same fact — and unscrewed the false floor, and brought up out of the dark, before them all, the linen bundle; and unwound it there in the open daylight of a lawless and unforbidden morning; and the saint came out of the wrappings with her small stern golden face utterly unchanged, smelling — every witness said it, and said it still, those who lived, at the Row and in Prilep and wherever the village’s seed was scattered — smelling overwhelmingly of honey and of wax: as if she had not been hidden at all, but had merely stepped, for twenty-four years, into the next room, where candles were.

They carried her up the village with the women keening the open keening now, the words out of hiding too, and set her in the stripped and whitewashed church upon a table, there being no iconostasis yet and no bell and no priest — Father Efthim came the following Sunday, on foot over the hill by the shepherds’ path as he had come to the weddings, but openly now, weeping openly, in a cassock twenty-four years folded — and the church of Saint Friday began again, on a Tuesday, with nothing but walls, one icon, and every living soul of thirty-one hearths inside it.

Vasilika finished the turf, sat back on the flat stone, and looked a long time at the church — at the south wall, where, in the masonry just below the eaves, there was a dark seam in the stones, and in and out of the seam, in the April sun, went the bees.

They were the great-great-granddaughters, in some vast bee-degree, of the hives at Qershiza. In the second summer of the Withdrawal, a swarm had crossed the dead village — she had seen it herself, a brown comet with a noise inside it — and had gone into the south wall of the church, into some hollow the centuries had left there, and stayed. They were still there. They filled the wall above the buried dead with the low, working, continuous sound that is the sound of neither joy nor grief but of continuing; on hot June days the whole wall hummed like a hive, because it was one; and once a year, in August, on the day of the Transfiguration, Vasilika took from the seam one comb of honey, no more, cutting it with Kristaq’s hive-knife, unveiled and unstung — the village at the Row took this for a wonder, and she maintained flatly that it was because she did it slowly.

“Your father hid the saint with the bees,” she said to the grave, “and now the saint hides the bees. Accounts close, Kristaq. They take their time, but they close.”

V

Of what Vasilika did all day in the dead village — for she went in soon after six and came out before the bell, and that is a long day for a grave two paces square — the people of the Row had theories, and the theories were all correct, and all insufficient.

She kept the graves: that was the visible part. Not his only. It had begun in the second year with the grave of her mother-in-law, which lay in the same row and could hardly be weeded around; then with the grave of Llambi the secretary, who had married them under the leader’s photograph and lain since 2019 under a cross — for he had died asking for one, having spent his last years apologizing to everybody, in order, alphabetically almost, and the village had decided that a man who apologizes that thoroughly has done a Christian’s work whatever his papers said; then, year by year, as it became known in Bilisht and Prilep and among the scattered that the widow Kondi went in daily, the letters had begun to come. They came by the cart-post, in envelopes of every age and thickness, and they all said the same thing in different hands: You will know our plot, by the wall, the third from the elder tree. If it is no trouble. And folded inside, sometimes, a banknote, which she gave to Lena for the school; and sometimes only a pressed flower, or nothing, which she kept.

So she had become — without appointment, stipend, or title, in the way all real offices are filled — the sexton of Shënepremte, as her father-in-law had been; sexton of a parish of the dead with a congregation of the scattered; and on the eve of the Soul Saturdays, four times a year, she boiled wheat at the Row half the night, and carried in the kollyva in a cloth-covered basin, and went from grave to grave through the whole yard putting a spoonful on each, saying the name of each — she needed no list; the list was in her the way the psalms had been in the laments — so that on those Saturdays every soul of Shënepremte was fed and named, and the yard, if you had stood at the gate and half-shut your eyes in the smoking of the little candles, was full.

That was the visible part. The rest was smaller and larger. She kept the spring clear at the trough, cutting the weed back with the yellow-handled knife, because a village’s spring is its pulse and she would not have it stop while she lived. She noted the roofs after every storm, and the state of the church tiles, and once a year, in deep summer when the timber was dry, she did a thing that was against the rules — for there were rules, unwritten but hard, that the day-goers everywhere had worked out in the first years, by trial and by grief: carry nothing out that is not yours; mend nothing; sow nothing; build no fire after noon; be no one’s guest overnight, not even your own — the sense of all of which was one sense: you may visit; you may not resume. The distinction ran finer than any law of man had ever run, but the day-goers had learned to walk it, feeling its edge underfoot as a mower feels a stone through the scythe: you might clip a grave’s turf, for that was mourning; you might not scythe the churchyard for hay, for that was harvest. And once a year Vasilika broke, or bent, the rule against mending: she climbed — at eighty-two; Ramiz had forbidden it, Lena had forbidden it, her son had forbidden it in three letters, and the forbidding had regulated nothing but the amount she mentioned it — the short ladder that lived behind the woodshed, and re-set the slipped tiles over the church apse, over the place where the wall paintings were; ten tiles, perhaps twelve; an hour’s work, done slowly. She had reasoned it out with herself in the second year and never re-opened the case: the rule’s sense was do not resume living here; the tiles were not for the living; whoever kept the ban could see — she used exactly that word, see, having concluded long ago that it saw everything, seeing being obviously its whole nature — could see perfectly well that an old woman patching a roof over a dead saint’s face was not moving back in. And it may be that she was right, and it may be that she was never noticed, and the difference between those two, as we shall have cause to say again, is the whole theology of the age, and nobody living can split it.

At ten she ate her bread and cheese on the flat stone, and the second piece of bread, the one with its own purpose, she broke and scattered at the yard gate for the vixen.

The vixen had come first three winters ago in the snow, thin as a lath, and had sat at twenty paces watching her eat with an attention so total that it amounted to a form of address. Vasilika had thrown bread that first day out of ordinary mercy, and thereafter out of contract, for the vixen was there the next day at the same hour, and the next, and had come, with the years, to fifteen paces, then to ten, and now to the gate itself, where she sat with her tail wrapped round her feet, narrow and russet and precise, and took what was thrown, and ate it with small clean motions, watching the old woman throughout; and Vasilika talked to her as she talked to the grave, and called her Zonjusha — the Miss — “because,” she explained to Lena, “she comes every day, takes everything, gives nothing, and looks at me as if I were the one being fed. That’s a young lady from town or I never saw one.”

After the bread there were the hours that had no name, and these were the true hours, the ones the theories at the Row reached for and missed. She sat on the flat stone with her back against the warm wall of the church, above the bees, beside the grave, and she was — there is no other way to write it — at home. Not in memory; memory was the coin of the place but not the substance. The substance was presence, of a plain kind that shamed all argument: here, within one small walled yard, were her husband, her people, her saint, her bees, her walnut, her spring below and her hills around, all in their places, all keeping — under the strangest dispensation ever laid upon the earth — a perfect and absolute peace. The world called this place forbidden. She had given up, years ago, trying to make the word attach. Forbidden was what the state had made of God in 1967: a thing punished at the front door and smuggled at the back. This was another matter entirely. This was the quietest country on earth, and she its day-citizen, and at times, in the drowse of noon, with the wall humming behind her shoulder like a sleeping beast, the arrangement felt less like exile than like a very old story she had always known: the garden, and the flaming sword that turns every way; only the sword, this time, had been set — no one knew why, and she had stopped asking — to turn aside, between sunrise and dusk, for the sake of the ones who came weeping; as perhaps, she thought, it had always done, and the story had just never mentioned the widows, stories mentioning widows last of all.

At half past three by the sun she rose, put the little grave-lamp in order, and lit it: a wick in oil in a glass, set in the marble socket Kristaq’s cross had been carved with. It would burn four hours, five in still weather, and go out in the dark long after she was home behind the line; and that was the plan and the whole point of it. In the first year she had tried to contrive lamps that would last the night, and had stood one evening at her window at the Row, watching the far notch of the ridge where a spark of her making trembled in the enormous forbidden dark, and had been suddenly ashamed — not afraid: ashamed, as one is ashamed of shouting in church. The dead did not need her light overnight; the wanting had been hers, a fist shaken at the dusk. Since then the lamp was filled to a measure: it kept him company through the gold of the evening and the grey, and died out honestly with the day.

“Even the flame keeps the law,” she told Lena once, at the pole, signing out. “Everything in there keeps it. The bees are in the wall by dark, the vixen’s in the earth, the lamp dies by itself. Only men ever needed telling twice.”

Then she kissed the cross, and the smooth waiting half of the stone below her own name — this she did without drama, as one pats a pillow in passing — took up bag and stick, and went down through the village and out along the road with the light behind her, and was written into the right-hand page of the ledger, in copperplate, before the bell.

VI

Kristaq Kondi died on the ninth of February, 2029, in the last winter of the former world, and this, as nearly as his widow ever assembled it — and she had assembled it many hundreds of times, on the flat stone, the way one re-strings the same beads — is how it was.

He was seventy-one that winter and had never been sick in a way that respected him back; illnesses came to him and grew discouraged. But in the autumn something had begun, not a pain, he said, a slowness under the slowness — he, the slowest man in Devoll, complaining of slowness; she should have heard it, she told the stone; a man complains last of all of the thing he is, and when he does, God is folding the work up — and through the winter he tired on the hill, and stopped twice where he had never stopped, and the doctor in Bilisht listened to his chest a long time the way Kristaq had once listened down the well, and said the word that in that country is said with the eyes first: heart.

He took the news as he took weather. He came home and told her at the table, factually, between the soup and the bread, and then he did what he did in all things, which was to put his affairs true the way he put a door true, without haste and without stopping. Only afterwards did she see the winter whole and understand that she had watched a man tidy the world before handing it back. He re-set the grave-stones of his father and mother, which frost had tilted. He went over the roof of the church — it was he who had always kept the tiles; she had inherited the ladder along with everything else — and over their own roof, and over the widow Katina’s, uninvited, saying her chimney drew badly, which was true but had been true for nine years. He paid the tinsmith what was owed and collected from no one. He mended her shoes, both pairs, and oiled the loom, and filled the woodshed to a depth that outlasted him by two winters, so that for two winters she warmed herself at his foresight and wept every time she took a log, which he had certainly not intended, or had certainly intended; with Kristaq the two came to the same thing.

And on the eighth of February, a still, iron-grey afternoon with old snow underfoot, he walked out to Qershiza to the bees.

She went with him. She always said afterwards I went with him, though in fact she had followed him, with his scarf, angry at him in the ordinary conjugal way that is nine-tenths terror, and had caught him up at the field, and they had stood together in the snow before the row of hives — eleven still, the tenth long since live through all its body, the false floor never removed; “let it stand,” he had said years before, “a house that hid a saint shouldn’t be made ordinary again” — and Kristaq had gone down the row in the great cold silence, bending to each hive in turn and laying his ear against it, listening, with his eyes shut, exactly — she had thought it then, at the time, not later; the memory was of thinking it then — exactly as he had listened down the well forty-six years before. Here and there he tapped the wood softly with one knuckle, and waited, and there answered him from inside each hive a brief rising hum, the sound of the winter cluster answering the world, the sound a hearth would make if a hearth could speak; and he straightened up from the last hive and stood looking down the row, and said — and these came to be, not counting small words at bedtime, of which the record is only hers and shall stay hers, his last words on any matter of substance:

“The bees are wintering well.”

He said it as a man signs a completed inventory. Then they walked home in the dusk, his arm through hers — which itself should have told her; it was always her arm through his — and he ate, and slept; and in the first light of the ninth she woke because the house was too quiet, the quiet of a stopped clock, and his sleep beside her had gone deeper than sleep, into that stillness that no one mistakes who has once seen it, and that she, who had laid out her mother and his and half the old women of the parish, did not mistake now. He had gone in the small hours, without waking her, without — the doctor said — waking himself: the heart had simply stood still between one beat and the next, as a man pauses on a threshold; the slowest man in Devoll had died at the pace of his life, and his face in the lamplight held nothing but a fixed and courteous attention, as if, on the way out, someone had spoken to him and he had stopped, politely, to hear the whole of it.

Of the funeral she kept, the way one keeps things after an explosion, fragments with bright edges. The snow began at dawn and fell straight down all day without wind, big flakes, unhurried, his kind of snow. The village dug the grave behind the apse in relays, the ground iron for the first spade’s depth and kind beneath. Father Foti came from Korça — young Papa Foti, as the old still called him, though he was grey — and the church was too small, as it had been too small since 1991, and the men stood in the yard in the falling snow with their caps off, and the snow stood on their hair and did not melt, so that the whole yard seemed to have gone white-headed in an hour. Ramiz Osmani stood at the graveside with the Christians — he had asked her leave, at the gate, formally: “He was my friend before either of us knew you, zonja; may I stand?” and she had taken his arm and stood him beside her — and wept the loud unashamed Bektashi tears that do a widow more good than all the correct silences, and at the meal after, raised his glass and said what everyone afterwards agreed had been the true eulogy, the priest’s excepted: “Forty years I bought honey from this man. He never once weighed it in my favour and he never once weighed it in his. Go and find me the second such scale in Albania. Go and look.”

And one fragment more, which she had shown to no one for years, until the year she showed it to Lena, and we shall come to why. At the moment the coffin went down — cypress, his own boards, planed by his own hand years since and stood waiting in the workshop rafters, because of course he had; a carpenter who let another man make his box would answer for it — at that moment, through the low grey ceiling of the snow-clouds, unseen, an aeroplane crossed, high to the south-east, on the corridor the airliners used in those days between the west and the Bosphorus; and its long soft thunder rolled over the village and over the open grave and over the bowed white heads, and not one head lifted. Not one. The sky in those days was furniture. It rumbled, and men went on with the burying, and the sound faded toward Turkey, full of travellers asleep over their little screens, none of whom looked down, none of whom would ever know they had flown over the last winter of the world that flew.

Within a year — she had said this to Lena at the pole, one autumn evening, signing out, in the matter-of-fact voice in which the largest things get themselves said at last — within a year, that same village, what was left of it, scattered along a surveyor’s line, would stand out in its yards by night, all of them, old and young, to stare up at a sky with nothing in it at all: no thread of light crawling among the stars, no blinking crumb of an aeroplane, nothing moving that God had not moved; the whole roof of the world swept, in one season, back to Abraham’s sky. And the silence of it, said Vasilika — the silence had been the thing; you could stand an hour and the sky never cleared its throat; and old men who had not wept at the evacuation wept at that, at the clean starry silence over Devoll, because a sky can be furniture for seventy years and then one night, emptied, become again what it had been for every generation of the dead in that churchyard: the visible edge of the mystery, leaning close over the roofs, over the line, over everything, attending.

“He was spared that,” she said to the grave, as she said always when the beads came round to this one. “You were spared that, Kristaq. You died under the old sky, with the whole world still stitched together, and the sea still ours, and Sotir still a bus-ride off, and nothing in the air but weather and Turks. Ninety days more and you’d have heard the stones talk.” She smoothed the turf over him, slowly, twice, as one smooths a blanket over a sleeper in a cold room. “I have never settled it,” she said, “whether you left early to be spared it, or whether it waited for you to leave. The priest says neither. The priest says God’s timing isn’t a corridor with doors. Well. He buried you in the snow and he’s buried half the world since in worse, and if it comforts him to say so, let him say so. A wife knows a well-timed exit when she sees one. You always did go out ahead of the rain.”

VII

The voices began on a Sunday in the middle of December, 2029, ten months and five days after his death, and Vasilika heard them first in Ramiz Osmani’s kitchen in Vranisht, because Ramiz had the good radio.

She had gone to Vranisht that day about a debt of honey — the last of Kristaq’s crop, which she was selling off hive by hive, having promised him nothing about the bees and therefore keeping them anyway — and she was still at the table when Ramiz’s grandson burst in from the yard with his eyes white all round like a colt’s and said the radio was broken, and every radio was broken, and it was talking. They went in — half of Vranisht went in, within the hour, until the kitchen could not hold them and the window was opened so the yard could hear — and Ramiz’s radio, a heavy grey German set with a green tuning eye, stood on its shelf under the photograph of his father, saying, in a level voice, in Albanian, the thing it said.

Much has been written since about the voice — that whole sciences died and were born in a month over it; that it spoke, they said later, six and a half thousand tongues and left out none, not the greatest, not the least; that it gave to the palace and to the goat-path the same words in the same breath. Vasilika, who was there, in the kitchen, on the third day of the world hearing it, retained past all the commentary three plain facts, the way a woman retains the facts of a birth while the men in the next room discuss names.

The first was the Albanian itself. It did not speak the radio’s Albanian, the ironed Tirana speech that the village had listened to for a lifetime the way one listens to officials, from underneath. It spoke — and here the kitchen had gone very still — their Albanian: the Tosk of the plain, round and open, with the very vowels of Devoll in it; and old Fatime, Ramiz’s aunt, ninety-one, deaf to everything softer than a doorslam, had stood up trembling at the third repetition and said, “That is my mother’s voice,” which was not so, and was the exactest thing said in Albania that winter. And the men who had gone down to Bilisht in the following days brought back what the wireless-men and the schoolmasters had established between them, dialling across the bands: that on one frequency it was saying the same words in Gheg, in the speech of the north, mountain-hard; and elsewhere in the Vlach of the shepherds, who had never in the history of their patient people been addressed in Vlach by anyone who was not selling them something or moving them off a hill; and in the Macedonian of the Prespa villages; and in the Greek of the minority and the Romani of the settlements at Korça — every tongue of that small crowded country given its own mouth, none first, none footnoted; so that — as the schoolmaster at Bilisht said, and was quoted for years — “for the first time since Babel, nobody in the world is waiting for the translation.”

The second fact was the words. She learned them that afternoon the way the whole earth learned them, entire, in one hearing, and they never afterwards left her, and on the flat stone by the grave she could say them still, evenly, the way one says a psalm one has made peace with:

The first waters, that were before you, are forbidden you now: the seas, and their coasts, and the sky over you, and the dark beyond the sky. Withdraw from them. You have until we come. We are coming slowly, so that you may go gently.

Then a silence with a shape to it, and then the whole again, and again — five minutes and a handful of seconds to the round, the wireless-men said, always exactly; you could set bread by it; and the world, that winter, did.

And the third fact was the smallest, and she had never told it to anyone but the grave. It was that her own first thought, before fear, before wonder, before Sotir far off in Greece — her first thought entire, in the kitchen, at the third repetition, with the tuning eye glowing green and the yard crowding the window at her back, had been: Kristaq is missing this. Not thank God he is spared it; that came later and stayed; but first, before everything, with the force of a hand laid on her shoulder: the one thing in seventy years worth hearing has come to the world, and he is ten months into the ground and missing it, and tonight I will have no one to sit across the table from and not-talk about it with. She had gone out of Ramiz’s crowded kitchen into the yard and wept there by the woodpile, and the household, seeing an old widow weep on such a day, thought they understood, and were kind, and were wrong; she was not weeping at the end of the world; she was weeping because the end of the world had come, and it was a thing that had happened to her marriage, like everything else since 1985, and would have to be carried home to an empty house like everything else since February.

Of the winter that followed — the winter of the waiting, while the astronomers counted the stones inbound and said late March with high confidence, and the world did in three months every foolish and holy thing it knew — the plain of Devoll had its share, in miniature. Salt vanished from the shops of Bilisht in a week, then flour, then candles, then, absurdly, buttons; and the same women who had emptied the shelves stood in the same queues denouncing the hoarders. The bus from Korça ran full eastward and empty back westward, and then the ticket-office stopped selling westward tickets at all. Marriages that had been ripening for years were concluded in days — there were four weddings in Devoll in January, a month no one weds in — because the young, with that soundness of instinct that the old call recklessness, had understood at once that whatever was coming, one had better meet it already holding somebody’s hand. The churches were full, and the mosque at Bilisht was full, and the teqe was full, and — this Vasilika kept always among the credits of humankind, for she had seen it with her own eyes at the great mixed funeral of the Progri clan that February — the full congregations did not once, in that whole province in that whole winter, turn upon each other; the imam and Papa Foti were seen walking the Bilisht road together deep in talk, wearing between them, said the wits, more beard and more trouble than any two men in Albania; and when a preacher of some new fright arrived from the coast crying that the stones were this devil or that judgment and that the neighbours’ prayers were to blame, the plain heard him out with its old, deep, peasant courtesy, gave him bread, and did not come back the second evening, so that he moved on to try the mountains, where it is said the courtesy was briefer.

And in the middle weeks of that winter came the letter from Sotir, and then Sotir himself.

He came overland in February, by the buses that still ran and then by a lorry and the last stretch on foot over the pass with snow to his knees, her one son, forty-three years old, a builder’s foreman in Greece since the terrible year of the pyramids had blown the young men of Albania across the borders like chaff — came with a rucksack and a face she read from a hundred metres, at the turn of the lane, and read rightly: he had come to pack his mother.

They had eight days, and they spent them as mothers and sons spend such days: lovingly, at cross purposes, over lists. Greece, he said, was madness itself — the whole shore of it, and Greece is mostly shore, was to be given up; his own town near the gulf was under notice; the roads north were already filling; he was moving the family inland over the border, to the high country by Prilep where his wife had cousins and where a builder would shortly be worth his weight in bread — and his mother was coming with them, and there was an end of it. And Vasilika listened, and cooked for him, and mended everything of his she could reach, and agreed with every separate sentence, and at the end of the eight days had not packed so much as a spoon; and on the last evening, by the stove, the truth had its hour.

“You will not come,” he said. Not a question any longer.

“I will go as far as I must,” she said, “and not a step past it. They have drawn their line a hundred and nine kilometres up the country, your schoolmaster says. Then I will live at kilometre one hundred and ten. If your father lay two hundred kilometres in, I would live at two hundred and one. This is not stubbornness, Sotir; look at me; this is arithmetic. The message says withdraw. It does not say forget. If it had said forget —” and here, his mother, sixty-five that winter, calm as the table between them, said the only sentence of her life he was never able to repeat aloud, even to his wife, without stopping midway — “if it had said forget, then it could have burned me where I stood, for I would not have, and we would have learned early what they do with the ones who can’t.”

He went back over the pass alone. It is right to say — for this story does not deal in villains, having found none in that country in those years — that he went with her blessing sewn into his coat in the old way, and that he wrote thereafter faithfully, twice a year and at Pascha, letters that took a season to arrive and arrived; and that in the deepest ledger of his heart, where a man keeps what he does not audit, he was — like the sons of all the women of that line, and there were, as the world learned, very many such women — one part ashamed of leaving her, and one part certain no force on earth could have shifted her, and one part, the part he audited least, obscurely proud, as a man is proud of a mountain in his district that will not get out of the weather’s way.

VIII

The stones came at the end of March, exactly as the astronomers had promised — it was the last appointment the old world kept, and it kept it to the hour — and of their coming Vasilika saw what everyone in the plain saw: nothing. No fire crossed the sky over Devoll. The sky over Devoll was overcast. It was announced by the radio, in the shrinking hours when the radio still had announcers, that the objects had taken up their stations; and then, that spring, the radio changed. Not the voice of the stones — that never moved; it kept the channel it had taken the first night, and kept it thereafter and forever, a single steady repetition, unhurried, unanswerable, like a lighthouse; it was everything else that went. The human stations, one by one that spring, fell quiet — not all at once, and not by any decree, but as the coasts they broadcast from were given up, so that listening across the dial in those weeks was like walking through a great house at evening while someone ahead of you, room by room, put out the lamps.

What the enforcement was, the plain learned the way the plain had always learned everything: late, sideways, and in the form of stories with people in them. There was no bombardment of Devoll; there was never a bombardment of anywhere, in the sense the old wars gave the word. There was the news, arriving on foot and swelling as it walked, of the ports: of ships that had put out from harbours in defiance or in desperation and had been touched — that was the word the stories settled on, touched — each by its single needle of light out of the overcast, and opened to the sea, cleanly, as a knife opens a sack; of the thirteen towns — everyone on earth, within that year, could say the thirteen towns in their own tongue, and no one said it lightly — thirteen towns of the stubborn coasts, warned and warned again, that would not empty, and that the waters had then risen over in one night apiece, quietly, with no wave, the sea coming up the streets like a landlord who has knocked long enough; and of Rome, where — the priests told it, having it from the Church’s own couriers — the old Pope had refused to leave his city, and the precincts of his palace had been struck around him with a precision that spared his person to the last, until his heart, not the stones, made the ruling; and it was said that the new Pope, chosen on the road by cardinals in buses, was an Ethiopian, and had taken his whole court to Hungary, of all the kingdoms of the earth, to a small city on a river; and the plain of Devoll, hearing this over its fences, had nodded slowly and found it, on the whole, sound — a Church that had lost its address keeping its head; there was a proverb about it; there was a proverb about everything that spring.

But the ports were far, and the thirteen towns were far, and Rome was far. What was near was the line.

The government men came up the Bilisht road in the last week of April with their instruments and their whitewash, working fast — they were doing the whole country that month, and the whole country is nearer the sea than a man likes to think, until he sees it chalked; when the maps went up at last on the wall of the commune office, the plain stood before them in silence, for Albania, on those maps, had become a ribbon: everything west of the mountains, given up; Tirana, given up; Durrës, Vlora, Shkodra, given up; the whole webbed lowland where two Albanians in three had lived, inside; and the country that remained ran along the eastern frontier like the selvage of a bolt of cloth after the cloth is cut away — and indeed, in the writings of the learned in after years, selvage is what all such remnant bands, on all the continents, came to be called; though the plain, which had no time for cloth-talk, said then and says now simply te vija: at the line.

And the line, on the wall of the commune office, ran through the plain of Devoll itself. It entered from the south over the shoulder of the mountain, crossed the Bilisht road at the pass where the cornels grew, and went north through the fields; and Korça, queen of the plain, with her boulevards and her beer and her cathedral and her forty thousand, lay west of it, inside, by a margin so slender that men walked out from her eastern quarters to the chalk marks and back before supper, just to have done it. And in the hills west of the line, four kilometres and a little more inside, plainly legible to anyone who knew where to look, which was everyone, lay Shënepremte.

Of the leaving of Shënepremte, on the twenty-sixth of May, 2030 — the stones’ notice, all that spring, was patient; the light-needles fell only where defiance was flagrant, and the emptying of the deep zones went on into the summer under that terrible courtesy, we are coming slowly, so that you may go gently — of the leaving, this much, and Vasilika at the grave did not often say more, because more did not go into words:

It was a green morning after rain. There were eleven carts, four lorries that had made it up from Bilisht on the last of the fuel, and the animals driven loose behind. The village had sat up all the previous night in the church, the whole of it, with the saint lit and Papa Foti come from Korça — Korça herself emptying around him — to serve the vigil; and toward dawn the talk had come round, as it had come round for weeks, to the icon, and the village had settled it forever in ten minutes. Some were for carrying her out to safety inland. And then the widow Katina, of all people, the mildest woman in the parish, had stood up in her black and said: “She did not leave in ‘67. Men with papers came for her that time too, and she went into the bees and stayed on her own ground and outwaited them. Now you’d have her run from these ones? She is not our luggage. She is our landlady. Leave her her house; we are the tenants here, not she” — and the word tenants, which was to have such a history in the mouths of that age, fell on the church like the right key into a lock, and the thing was done: the saint stayed. She hangs there yet.

Then the morning, and the loading, which was like all the evacuations of that spring on all the roads of the earth, and of which the histories, having so many to choose from, record chiefly the one great human fact that the plain, too, had noticed from the first day: that it was the grandmothers who commanded. No one had appointed them. But panic cannot organize a cart and grief cannot mind six children and pack a trousseau, and the grandmothers of the world, it turned out, could do all three at once, having each of them buried enough of their lives already to know exactly what a household is when it must fit in a box: and so on every road out of every coast on earth that spring, the columns moved at the pace, and under the eye, and by the word, of small fierce old women enthroned on the leading carts with the infants and the icons and the deeds of houses being left to the foxes — so that the newspapers, in the last season in which there were newspapers to name things, had named that migration once and for all: the Grandmothers’ Evacuation. Vasilika had ridden the third cart of Shënepremte with two babies on her lap, neither of them kin to her, and the key of her house on its string around her neck, under her dress, where a cross sits; and she had not looked back at the turn of the road, having promised herself that one thing; and the not-looking had lasted to the second turn, and no farther; and what she saw, standing up in the cart at the second turn, holding the babies, was the village entire in its hollow of hills, green after rain, blue smoke still rising perfectly straight from three chimneys where the stoves had been left burning — because you do not pour water on a living fire when you leave a house forever; every woman on the carts knew that law, older than the stones, older than the saints — the smoke standing up straight into the still morning like three candles on an altar nobody would clear; and beside her old Katina looking with her; and neither of them wept, then; and Katina said, in the flat voice of the plain that is what that country has instead of weeping: “Now it is His again. Sixty years He lent it me.” And the cart went down over the pass, through the chalk marks, past the place where the pole and the ledger and the bell would be, into the rest of her life, which measured, from that turning, four kilometres and a little more.

One man stayed. This also belongs to the truth of that morning, and the plain has never let it fall out of the story, because the plain is honest and because of the dog.

Llazar Bendo, eighty-eight, of the house by the upper spring, wifeless, sonless — the wars and the emigration between them had swept his branch bare — had sat that morning on his own doorstep with his stick and his dog and had said no to the carts, to the priest, to the village in a body, and finally to Vasilika, whom they sent up last because he had danced at her wedding. He was not raving; she always said that first; he was the calmest man in Devoll that day. “I am not defying anybody,” he told her, and gave her raki out on the step, correctly, host to guest, as if the morning were ordinary. “Tell them that below. I am eighty-eight, my girl. I have moved for the Italians, for the Germans, twice for the Party, and once for my son’s wife, God forgive her. This is the sixth eviction and I am declining it, that’s all. Whoever they are, they say they are coming slowly. Good. Let them find me sitting down.” And he had raised his glass to her — “to your Kristaq, who was the only man in this village who could hang a gate” — and she had kissed his hand and gone down the hill, and that was the last that any living person saw of Llazar Bendo.

He had until the first of July; the whole deep zone did; the voice on the single band had said so all that spring, patiently, in Tosk. On the night of the second of July — a clear night; half the Row-to-be, sleepless in its borrowed rooms and haylofts around Bilisht, was out of doors — a single line of light stood for one instant between the sky and the hills westward, so brief that a blink erased it, and a sound reached the plain a little afterwards, not like thunder, they all said; like one beat of a great drum with a cloth over it; once; and nothing more. In the morning the men went in — it was in going in after Llazar that the plain first learned, before any pope had ruled on it, that the day would be permitted them — and they found the village of Shënepremte standing whole and unbreathed-on, every roof, every gate, the saint in her church; and at the house by the upper spring, the doorstep empty and swept — and on the stones where the old man had sat, a mark: a shadow of a seated man, printed pale on the stone, the way a long-laid carpet prints a floor; and of Llazar himself, nothing else at all, then or ever; and his stick leaning by the door untouched; and his dog sitting in the yard.

The dog they brought out. He was a black-and-tan ram-herd of the old plain breed, and he came with the men without being called, gravely, looking back only once, and he lived thereafter eleven years at the Row, where he belonged to everyone and slept at no one’s hearth twice running, as if keeping a rotation only he had the list of; and the Row fed him to bursting all his days and called him nothing but Llazari’s dog, and when he died in his sleep in the winter of ‘41 the Row buried him at the foot of the pass on the west side of the line — Petro walked in with the spade himself, on a good bright morning, and was written in the ledger, P. Naska, in, with dog — so that he lies in the forbidden ground facing the village, at his post; and if the reader finds it strange that a plain which lost the sea, the capital, and half its people should tend so carefully the story of one dog, then the reader has never lost everything at once, and must take on trust from those who have that the great griefs are carried precisely this way: one dog at a time.

IX

That the dead village could be visited at all — that the ban, which vaporized a seated man from his own doorstep at two in the morning, would suffer an old woman to weed a grave at noon — was not decreed by anyone, explained by anyone, or, in the beginning, believed by anyone. It was found out, the way a ford is found out: by the ones who could not wait for the bridge.

The men who went in after Llazar came out unstruck. Then it was the herdsmen, after strayed stock, in and out by daylight, hats in hand under the open sky, walking — every man of them said it after — the way you walk in church. Then the widows. By the first autumn there was a path; by the first winter, a custom; and the custom crossed the world faster than the news that carried it, because it was being found out everywhere at once, at every line on every continent, by the same kind of people driven by the same kind of arithmetic. The rule beneath it, never spoken by the sky, was assembled by mankind out of a thousand ventures and some scattering of griefs — for there were griefs; the rule has its martyrs, who tested where its edges lay, the sleepers, the lingerers, the first roof-menders of the resuming kind; their stories travelled too, and were the fence — and when assembled it proved simple enough to be taught to children with one hand: the day is lent; the night is kept. You may enter with the sun and you must leave with it. You may mourn; you may not move back. You may visit your whole life long; you may not stay one dark.

And in the second winter the priests caught up with the people — this is said without disrespect; it is the usual order, and the priests said so themselves — when word came over the mountains of what the new Ethiopian Pope in Hungary had written for his own flock: that the churches of the forbidden coasts remained holy and were not to be stripped of their God; that his own rule for his own lost Rome was to enter by daylight, as a pilgrim, and leave as a guest, before nightfall; a discipline his people had begun to call the law of the day. And the bishops of the Orthodox, taking counsel that same season in their own councils inland, blessed for their people what their people were already doing — the Church, said Papa Foti, has always known how to arrive breathless and pronounce the race well run — and appointed the order of it: the liturgies by daylight on the feasts of the abandoned parishes, the antimension carried in and carried out, the memorials at the graves; so that what the widows had begun as trespass ended sanctioned as pilgrimage, and the ledger-keepers and the bell at dusk grew up around it, and the whole strange institution of the day — which the learned of the continental commissions were to fill libraries with, under one name and another — settled at Qafa e Thanave into the shape Vasilika now inhabited, and had inhabited so long that Lena’s copperplate hand was the third to keep her name.

Her own first return she made in the April of 2031, in Bright Week, the week after the first Pascha of the exile — which the parish of Shënepremte, boarding among cousins and strangers about Bilisht, had kept together in the church at Vranisht, lent them whole for the night by the Muslims of Vranisht, who whitewashed it themselves beforehand, saying, when thanked, that a house does no work lying empty; and at midnight, at the Christ is risen, the mosque’s lamps had been lit too, all of them, in salute across the dark plain, and everyone had seen it, and no one has forgotten it, and it is fair that the reader should know such things happened in those years alongside everything else that happened.

She walked in on the Tuesday of Bright Week with three other widows and the eldest of the Progri sons for escort, all of them silent the whole four kilometres; and found the village green and shuttered and dreaming, and the church cool and dim and inhabited — the saint in her place, the smell of old incense holding the room the way it holds all such rooms, as if the last service had merely paused; and behind the apse, under the walnut just leafing, the grave, thirteen months old, wintered over, waiting; and the turf on it, when she knelt and laid her hands on it, was — she had told no one this either, for years, and then told Lena — was warm; only with the plain April sun, as any turf beside it; she knew that; she was no mystic, and would sooner have been caught stealing than caught trafficking in signs; and nevertheless her two hands on the warm turf had known, past all correcting, in the oldest tongue the body has, the one the stones themselves had not troubled to learn because it cannot carry a lie: he is here, and this is home, and everything else is address.

She stood up from the grave that Tuesday sixty-six years old, a woman who had lost in fourteen months her husband, her house, her village, her country’s shape, her world’s sky, and the sea she had seen twice; and she was never afterwards heard, by anyone, at the Row or the pole or the grave, to call herself unlucky. When the new schoolteacher, years later, gathering memories in his copybook, pressed her on it — gently; he was a good boy; but he was between-born, and wanted the arithmetic of the old world explained — she gave him the accounting she had made on that first walk out, at the pace of an old woman going downhill, between the village and the chalk line, and it has a place at the end of this chapter, because everything at the Row that this story tells of was built on some version of it, nineteen houses’ worth:

“Write it this way. They took the sea. I had seen it twice. They took the sky. I had never been up in it. They took Tirana; I was there once, in ‘88, and it rained. Now weigh the other pan, and mind your sums. My husband, my dead, my saint, my spring, my walnut — four kilometres, and the day lent me to walk them, every day of my life, free, with the larks singing. Boy, when the Party wanted my church, it took the church, the bell, the priest, and the word Easter out of my mouth, and lent me nothing back, not one hour of one Sunday, for twenty-four years. These ones in the sky took the horizon and left me everything I ever loved inside a morning’s walk. I don’t say they are good. God knows what they are; that’s His file, not mine. I say I have dealt with worse landlords. Write that. And write your letters plainer; that copybook looks like rain on a window.”

X

In the May of 2046 — to return now to the year of this story, from which the dead, as is their privilege, have led us so far astray — the Recovery came at last to Shënepremte.

Vasilika heard the cart before she saw it: iron tyres on the broken road, a sound out of her childhood, climbing the village street at the hour when the street had for sixteen years held nothing louder than the vixen. There were three men and a mule, and the cart bore on its side, stencilled, the crossed keys-and-quill of the church commission and the mark of the continental archive over the mountains at Manastir; and the eldest of the three, a dry precise deacon with spectacles mended at the hinge with wire, presented to her — finding, to his visible relief, a human being in authority, for the day-goers were the acknowledged wardens of all such places, and the commission’s own instructions said to seek them out — a warrant on grey paper, with stamps, listing what they were come to carry out of the church of Saint Paraskevi to safety inland: the parish registers from 1878; the Gospel book; the panels of the iconostasis, such as were sound; and — item the fourth, in a clerk’s hand that had never been stung in its life — the icon of the patroness, walnut, 18th c., Grabova school.

What passed at the church over the following two hours the deacon’s protocol records in the flat tongue of protocols, and this story will record less flatly. They were not enemies; that must be said at once, and Vasilika said it always when she told it. They were good men at a good work — half the commission’s own families were coast families; the young one, Andon, who kept the inventory book, had been carried out of Durrës at the age of four on his grandmother’s back and remembered of the sea only, he said, a blue line over her shoulder and everybody crying — and the work was needed and she knew it: the damp takes the registers, the beetle takes the panels, and a roof, one winter or another, wins its long argument with an old woman on a ladder. She helped them with her own hands. She found them the registers, dry in their chest — she had moved that chest twice herself over the years, chasing a leak — and she held the corner of the Gospel book’s wrapping while Andon sewed it into sacking, and she told them which panels were sound and which the beetle had already had, and her word and the deacon’s probe agreed every time, which established between her and the deacon, in the freemasonry of exact people, a respect that made what followed possible.

What followed was item the fourth.

She did not weep, or bar the door, or invoke anything. She asked the deacon for ten minutes of his warrant’s time, and sat him down, with his men, on the flat stone by the grave, in the sun, above the humming wall; and standing before them in her blacks, with her hands folded, in the voice in which depositions are given, she told them what the reader already knows: 1967; the sack of bran at midnight; the tenth hive; the twenty-four years; the searches; the eleven words of Spiro Kondi; the morning in April of 1991, and the smell of honey. It took ten minutes. She had it, after a lifetime, to the length of a warrant’s patience.

Then she said: “Now write what you like. But write it knowing this. That icon has been evacuated once already, sirs, the only time it consented to be — one midnight, one kilometre, into a hive, when men with papers came for her. She has now seen off those men, their Party, their state, and, saving your presence, their whole century. In ‘30 the village voted her our landlady and left her in possession. If your commission rules that she goes over the mountains to a shelf in Manastir, I am an old tenant and I will not fight the bailiffs. But I will tell you what my father-in-law would have told you, in fewer words than I: some things are kept safe by walls, and some things are what the walls are kept safe by, and a man had better be sure which he is loading on the mule.”

There was a silence of some length on the flat stone, filled by the bees. Then the deacon took off his mended spectacles, and polished them, and looked for a while at the south wall, where the dark seam was, with the traffic of the light going in and out of it; and being, as has been said, an exact man, he rendered an exact judgment.

“The commission’s warrant,” he said, “instructs me to secure item four against loss.” He put the spectacles back on. “I find item four to be in the custody of a standing parish, under a maintained roof” — a pause here; the ghost of a look at the ladder behind the woodshed; nothing in the protocol — “guarded day and night, as it has been continuously since 1967, by the same family firm. I shall record it: inspected in situ; condition good; secure; custodian appointed. Your name, zonja, for the register?”

And that is why, in the great inventory of the continental archive at Manastir, among ten thousand entries of things carried out of the drowned and the emptied places of three peninsulas, there stands one entry of a thing left where it was; and against it, in Andon’s young hand, a name and an office no schedule of the commission had provided for, invented on the spot and never afterwards regularized, because nobody had the heart: Kondi, Vasilika, widow — sexton of the day. They ate her bread and honey before they went — the honey of the wall; the deacon ate it slowly, and looked at nothing, and said, when he had finished, “I shall not put this in the protocol either” — and the cart went down the dead street with its iron ringing, with the registers and the Gospel and six panels, and the saint stayed; and the bees, who had voted first and longest ago, went on with the work.

XI

In June there were the boys.

She heard them before she saw them too — boys carry farther than carts — down in the orchards below the village: three voices, cracking with the age that cracks them, raised in the immemorial tone of boys egging each other past a fear. She came down the lane quietly — an old woman in black in a dead village has, when she chooses, the approximate stealth of the vixen, and knows it — and stood at the orchard wall, and watched.

They were from the Bilisht side, twelve or thirteen years old, in by the ditch as boys had always come in, and they were doing nothing worse than everything: pelting each other with green apples, walking the wall-tops, daring one another up to the black doorways and back. Whole-cloth, all three — born entire into the after-world, with no thread of them woven under the old sky; the term was the schoolmasters’, from the almanacs, and the plain had taken to it because the plain had needed some word for these children to whom the sea was a fable of the grandmothers and an aeroplane a picture in a schoolbook, these children who were not haunted, who walked into the forbidden coast the way boys walk anywhere, because to them it was not the drowned world, it was only ever the world, with some parts of it emptier than others and all the emptiness ordinary.

The tallest of them, on the wall-top, saw her and froze, and fell off the wall, and the three of them stood before her in the nettles in the posture in which boys have stood before old women in black since black was invented.

She looked them over for the traditional interval.

“Whose are you?” A muttering of Bilisht patronymics; one of them, it emerged, a great-nephew of the tinsmith Kristaq had paid in his last winter, which settled the boy’s standing at once, debts running in the blood both ways. “Does anyone know you’re in?” Silence, which meant no, which meant the ditch, which meant that if a boy turned an ankle in a cellar the dusk would come down on him with no name in any ledger. She let that sit on them, visibly, without saying it — it said itself; the whole plain was raised on Llazar and the sleepers; even the whole-cloth had the fence of those stories, if not the grief inside it — and then, judgment being one thing and June another, she took them up to the churchyard and fed them.

They ate like threshers — bread, cheese, the first cherries she had brought for the grave, “he’ll spare them; he had brothers” — and they asked her, sideways at first and then in a crowding rush, the things they could not ask the schoolmaster because the schoolmaster had a syllabus and could not be interrupted: whether the wolves would take a boy (no, but the boars in the maize-thickets would, and she told them where not to walk, exactly, which was worth more to them than the whole day’s scolding); whether there were dead in the houses (no; the plain had carried out its dead and its living both; the houses were empty as Sunday pockets, and lied about it no worse); whether she had seen the light that took old Llazar (yes; and she told it plainly, the drum-beat and the swept step and the dog, and the three of them went still in the way she trusted, the stillness that is the fence going up in a young head where before there had only been a story); and then the tinsmith’s great-nephew, Miri, the smallest and the darkest of them, hugging his knees, asked the one the others had been shouldering each other toward all along:

“Gjyshe. What was the sea like?”

So Vasilika Kondi, on the flat stone, with her back against the humming wall and her dead at her side, told the whole-cloth about Durrës in the August of 1987: how she and Kristaq had gone down for a cousin’s wedding, two days, the only journey of their marriage; how the smell of it reached the bus before the sight of it, salt and rot and brightness, a smell with no relative in the mountains; how the size of it did something to the head that she would not lie about and call pleasant, the first hour — the plain seen from the pass at least sits still, but that thing moved, all of it, all the way to the rim of the world, without once needing rest — and how Kristaq, the carpenter, had stood at the edge of it in his good trousers rolled to the knee, silent the better part of an hour, and had then delivered the one review anyone ever got out of him: “There’s no grain to it. I don’t see how He holds it together.” And how in the evening the whole shore had filled with people doing nothing, thousands upon thousands doing nothing, in the sea’s presence, as if it were an emperor; and the lights of the ships out on the dark of it, unhurried, going to Italy, going to Egypt; and how she had woken at the cousin’s before dawn and gone down alone, one woman on the whole grey shore, and had put her hands in it and tasted it off her own fingers, the water that was before us, and it had been cold, and had tasted — she gave them the truth, having nothing else in stock — of tears; exactly of tears; as if the world had been crying since it began and the mothers had never let it be mentioned.

The boys walked her out to the line that afternoon, all three, unbidden, one carrying the bag and two contending for the stick, and were entered in Lena’s ledger going out having never been entered coming in, to Lena’s severe copperplate disapproval; and from that June until the end of this story there was firewood split and stacked against Vasilika’s wall at the Row that she never once caught being delivered, though she rose before the light; boys’ honour keeping, as it keeps its debts, invisibly, and with interest.

XII

In July, in the white heat, a pilgrim of the stones came up the road from the south, walking the line.

They were not common in Devoll, but they were known; the world since the Withdrawal had bred wanderers as a wet year breeds frogs, and among them, along every line on every continent, moved the people of the new devotions — line-walkers, coast-mourners, criers of this and that — with their pamphlets and their staves; the plain fed them, heard them, and did not enrol, the plain having, as it said, religions already, and paid up in all of them. This one was young, sunburnt raw at the neck, with a northern Gheg voice and a canvas satchel of tracts, and he was walking the whole line of Albania, he said, south to north, praying at each crossing toward the water; and the dusk caught him at Qafa e Thanave, and it was at Vasilika’s step that he asked, because hers was the house with the quince, and the weary go to fruit trees as bees do.

She fed him at her table — soup, bread, the wall’s honey — and Ramiz came across with his raki, as Ramiz came across most evenings and infallibly when there was a stranger to be weighed; and the boy, having eaten, and being of the age and the calling that must testify or burst, testified: and his doctrine, shorn of an hour’s ornament, was this — that the stones were shepherds; that mankind was the flock, long strayed on the drowned margins, now folded home into the uplands for its good; that the ban was not a punishment but a pruning, love in its winter shape; and that the day would come — the tracts had it in a woodcut, the sun rising out of a sea with figures kneeling on the shore — when the flock, proven, would be led back down to the water and given it again, forever.

Ramiz turned his glass in the lamplight and heard him all the way out, which at the Row was the immovable first law of theology.

“Well,” he said at last, comfortably, “here is what our hoxha in Bilisht preaches, and you can set it beside yours on the shelf; my house keeps a long shelf. He says these years are an ihram — you know the word, boy? When the pilgrim binds on the white cloth at the boundary of the holy places, and from that hour, till the pilgrimage is accomplished, he must not hunt, must not uproot the green thing, must not shed blood, must not so much as scratch where it itches, saving your presence — not because the desert is angry with him, but because he has crossed into a country where everything already belongs to God, and his hands must learn it. The whole world, says our hoxha, has been put into ihram — the sea, the shore, the sky, all declared haram, bound off, not against us but ahead of us — and mankind is walking the long pilgrimage in the pilgrim’s cloth, and he calls these years the Long Ihram, and says the grandfathers of our grandchildren will still be walking it, and that the courtesy we keep at the line is the courtesy of the pilgrim, and will be reckoned to us.” He filled the boy’s glass, which the boy’s doctrine apparently permitted, doctrine in Albania being seldom so strict as that. “It is a good sermon. I have heard it forty times and it improves. And I notice, boy, that it and yours agree in everything except what no one can check.”

The pilgrim turned to Vasilika then — the young always turned to Vasilika last and hardest, sensing the true tribunal — and asked her what she held the stones to be; and the answer she gave him was given afterwards up and down the line, Ramiz seeing to that, and deserves its place near the end of this story, being as close as she ever came to a confession of faith:

“I’ll tell you what I told the schoolmaster’s copybook. I don’t know what they are, and neither do you, and neither does the hoxha, and neither does Papa Foti, and the difference between me and the rest of you is that I have stopped renting rooms in my head to the question. Shepherds, wardens, angels, bailiffs — son, I am eighty-two; I have been governed in my one life by a king’s leavings, the Italians, the Germans, the Party, the democrats, and now the sky, and not one of them ever asked me, and under every one of them the same things needed doing: the bread, the dead, the garden, the guest. That’s my catechism, there, in your bowl. The stones speak six thousand tongues; you tell me they said love in all of them; the hoxha says patience; the priest says wait and see; and my Kristaq, who said less than any of them and was wrong less often, would have listened to the whole evening with his thumbnail in the table-grain, and said at the end: It wasn’t lost. It was just down. Sleep on the settle, boy. In the morning I’ll show you the one thing in this parish I’d walk a line for, and you can pray at it in any direction you please.”

And in the morning she took him in with her — his first step ever inside a line; he made it, she reported, like a cat crossing wet grass — and stood him before the saint in the cool of the church, and told him the hive and the honey while the wall hummed; and the pilgrim of the stones looked a long time at the small stern golden face that had outwaited the last ban from inside a beehive, and then did the thing that made her give him her blessing and a second loaf at parting, doctrine notwithstanding: he took off his hat.

XIII

It remains to tell of that year’s autumn, and this chronicle would gladly go straight to it; but honesty requires the fog first — the fog of the September before, the last autumn of the old order of her strength — because it was the fog that showed the Row, and, though she buried the knowledge with her usual efficiency, Vasilika herself, how the land lay.

It came on one of those days that begin gold and lie about it. She had stayed past her hour — the walnuts were dropping, and she was gathering them off the graves into her apron, his and Katina’s and the Progri stones’, a sexton’s perquisite as old as sextons — and the fog came up out of the Devoll valley not as weather comes but as water comes into a field, silently, at the ankles first; and by the time she had crossed herself and taken the road, the world was gone to the second hedge, and going.

She was not lost; she could have walked that road blind, and in effect did. But fog eats pace as it eats distance; twice she went into the ditch-grass feeling for the verge; and the light began to go early inside the grey, and there rose up in her then — she was honest with herself about it afterwards, on the flat stone, where all her honesty was kept — not the simple animal fear of the dusk-law, though that was present and correct, but a worse and stranger thing: the sudden knowledge of how the story would read. Old woman, warned by everyone, caught by night inside the line gathering walnuts. The stupidity of it. Kristaq had died with his affairs true as a hung door, and she was to be a cautionary tale told to whole-cloth children, a smudge on a doorstep, a second dog. Anger got her the last kilometre — anger has walked more old women home than sons have — and then, out of the grey ahead, low and swinging, came a yellow blur, and the bell above it ringing not the single dusk peal but over and over, wildly, unliturgically; and it was Lena, of course, out past the pole with her grandfather’s storm-lantern, ringing and walking and ringing, sixteen years old and white to the lips and forbidden by every rule of the ledger to be one step west of it; and the copperplate entry for that day reads, in a hand that starts severe and does not finish so: V. Kondi, out at last light. Delayed by fog. All out. Thanks be to God — the last four words being the only editorial in six ledgers, and Petro let them stand.

The Row said nothing to her that evening, which was how the Row said everything; Ramiz split her kindling for a week without being asked, conversation being thereby rendered unnecessary; and at Pascha — Pascha fell late that year, in the leafing of the walnut — the letter came from Sotir, the good thick spring letter, with the pressed mountain crocus from little Taqi as always; and in it, folded small, in her son’s foreman’s print that pressed through the paper, the paragraph she had known for some years was on its way: Mother. The cousins have the lower house standing empty, dry, with a stove. Taqi is fourteen and asks for you. I am asking for me. You have kept faith with the dead for sixteen years and God has seen it. Come and keep a little with the living, while the living can fetch you.

She carried that letter in her bag for eleven days, which for Vasilika Kondi was the equivalent of another woman’s month of weeping; and she answered it, finally, not at her table but on the flat stone, aloud, to the third party in the matter, before ever a word went on paper.

“He asks in kindness,” she said to the grave, “and he asks in your voice, which is his low trick and he doesn’t know it. And I’ll tell you what I can’t write to him, because it would take him wrong. It isn’t that I can’t leave you. You’re dead, Kristaq; I say it to your face; you of all men never needed minding. It’s that from Prilep I couldn’t reach you. Here — look —” and she laid her hand flat on the turf, the old gesture, the first gesture — “here, the whole world they left us is four kilometres wide, and everything of mine is inside it: you, the saint, the spring, my dead, my door, my quince, my fox, my ledger-girl, that Bektashi grindstone and his raki. A day’s walk, rim to rim, and the day is lent to me, every morning, at the pole, by name. Over the mountains I’d have the lower house, dry, with a stove, and Taqi’s face — and a hundred kilometres of good permitted country between my hand and this grass, and no lending in it anywhere. They banned the coasts, Kristaq, and the whole world wept for its horizon. I never had a horizon. I had you. A woman’s country is where her hand can rest — the priest read it at your forty days and I have tested it sixteen years and it is so: where the treasure is, the heart goes and lives — and my treasure, God be thanked and no complaints filed, is four kilometres from my stove, inside the lending, under the walnut. Let them ban the sky over it. They lend me the day. I’ll die a rich woman.”

Then she went home and wrote to Sotir a short letter in her large old hand, and it said that the fog had been nothing, that the boys of Bilisht kept her in wood as if she were a bread-oven, that he was to send her measurements for Taqi’s feet, socks not being knitted by guesswork; and that she would see them, God willing, at the feast in July; and love; and it said nothing else at all, and Sotir, reading it in Prilep with his thumb at the fold, understood the whole of what it did not say, having had, after all, sixty years of instruction in the dialect.

XIV

The feast of Saint Paraskevi falls on the twenty-sixth of July, and on that one day of the year the village of Shënepremte rose from the dead.

It had risen so every July since the second year, and the order of its rising was by now as fixed as the order of a liturgy, which in part it was. In the last grey before sunrise the road below Qafa e Thanave filled — carts from Bilisht and the plain villages, walkers from the Row, the mule-litters for the lame, and this year the hired lorry that had ground over the pass from Prilep the evening before, bringing the far parish home: eleven families of the scattered, and among them, swinging down over the tailboard before it had fairly stopped, a foreman going grey at the temples with his mother’s own impatience in his shoulders, and behind him a boy of fourteen, whole-cloth, black-browed, carrying — because his grandmother had sent the measurements and his mother had seen the chance — a parcel of new socks to be approved by their maker.

At the pole, Petro himself came out for the feast, in the jacket that appeared annually like a saint’s relic, and the ledger did not attempt names on that morning; the entry for the twenty-sixth read, every year, in whichever hand kept it, simply: The parish. In with the sun. And the parish went in with the sun, up the greened road, past the pump-house, two hundred and some souls under the larks, the priest’s vestment-case going ahead on the quietest mule, the antimension — the portable altar-cloth with its sewn relics, without which no liturgy can be served and with which any room on earth can become one — riding before Papa Foti like the ark it was; and the whole-cloth children ran the verges as children run all processions, and were called back from the boar-thickets by name, and the widows walked together in a black seam through the middle of it, and Vasilika walked at the head of the widows, at the head of everything, in her place; for on all other days she went in as a woman going to her husband, but on the feast she went in as what the archive at Manastir said she was, sexton of the day, and the village entered its village behind her.

Of the day itself, what is there to say that the reader’s own feasts have not said? The church could not hold them; it had never held them; the yard held them, as yards do. Papa Foti served with the doors and windows wide, so that the liturgy stood in the middle of the congregation like a well in the middle of a field, and everyone drank from where they stood — among the graves, along the humming wall, up on the churchyard wall itself, boys in the walnut. The saint looked out over her parish from her stand by the doors, dressed in the embroidered veil that lived fifty-one weeks of the year in Vasilika’s chest at the Row and rode in, every feast, wrapped in the bridal rushnik. The singing was the old plain singing, the men’s low drone under the women’s line like earth under a road; and at the memorial after the liturgy, when the kollyva was blessed — a washtub of it; she had boiled wheat for three nights; Lena’s mother and the widow Katina’s granddaughters under her command like a ship’s crew — the whole yard said the names of the whole yard, Papa Foti reading from the sexton’s list in her large old hand, Llazar Bendo among the rest, at which no one crossed themselves less; and the dead of Shënepremte were that day, as the priest said every year in the same words, which had stopped being words and become part of the feast, “not visited, but attended upon; for the banished sea has its day-law, brothers, but love has never needed one; love keeps no coast.”

Then the tables. They went up on trestles in the yard and down the lane, and the food came out of the hampers in the tide that no ban had ever stemmed, and the day-law itself seemed to lean back against the warm wall and doze: lamb from the permitted side, pies of the old pans carried in and carried out, the wall’s honey on the priest’s bread by the sexton’s own hand, Ramiz’s raki going down the tables in its annual triumphal progress (“the Christians drink it faster on their feasts than we do on ours; I have kept figures”), and the talk of two hundred people who were, for six hours, not scattered: the births named, the betrothals inspected, the Prilep prices deplored, the dead brought up to date. Sotir sat by his mother the whole meal — she noticed, and filed it, that he had reached the age of touching her sleeve when he talked, which had been his father’s — and Taqi, the socks approved and the approval borne with dignity, was taken by his grandmother after the meal on the full tour: the spring, the school-corner where his father had sat, the blue gate held shut by its two fingers of habit — she did not go in, and the boy, watching her face, did not ask; whole-cloth is not blind — and last, up behind the apse, the grave; where the boy who bore the name stood before the stone that bore it twice, once filled and once waiting, and read it, and went quiet; and then did a thing none of them had put him to, that his grandmother spoke of to the vixen and the stone but never once to the living, holding it too dear for handing round: he knelt, and set his young palm flat on the turf, exactly on the place — no one had ever shown him; there was nothing to see — exactly on the place where her palm went, and kept it there a while, as one keeps a hand on a beast that knows him; and then he stood and said, in his Prilep-schooled Tosk, matter-of-fact, to the stone and the walnut and the day at large: “I’ll come every year. When I’m grown, every year. Somebody from us will always come.” And the bees went along the wall, and far down the yard someone laughed at something of Ramiz’s, and the enormous sky stood over the small full churchyard all afternoon and did not say no.

At four the leaving began — the reverse of the morning, the feast’s one bruise, never mentioned and never missed: the hampers lighter, the children suddenly tired, the lorry loading in the lane, the village dying its annual evening death with the ease of long practice. Vasilika stood at the churchyard gate as sexton and saw her parish out, taking farewells like tithes; and Sotir held her a long moment at the tailboard and said into her kerchief, “At Pascha I’ll send the measurements for his shoulders; he grows like a debt,” which was Kondi for everything; and the lorry ground away east with Taqi’s arm out of the back of it until the turn took him; and by six the street was hers, and the vixen was at the gate for the feast’s scandalous leavings, and the veiled saint was wrapped again in the bridal cloth to ride home in the sexton’s bag; and Vasilika Kondi went out at last light past Lena’s ledger — The parish. Out with the sun. All out. — the richest woman, exactly as she had claimed, on either side of any line in Albania.

XV

The autumn that followed was long and gold, one of the great autumns of the plain, and Vasilika went through it growing lighter.

That is the word the Row used afterwards, when it understood; at the time it used easier ones. She was well; she was better than well; her knees that had complained for a decade fell silent, the way pain does sometimes near the end, taking its hand off the shoulder as if its message were delivered; and she moved through October with a kind of unhurried dispatch that Ramiz, who watched her over the wall as one shepherd watches another’s weather, could find no fault in and did not like. She was setting things true. She did not know it — or she knew it the way the body knows rain, below the level of the saying — but the Row had seen a winter of it once before, in another person, in 2029, and Ramiz had been that man’s friend.

She gave Lena the loom-rug — the red and black one, the finished one, off her own floor — “for the chest; a girl who can write like print will marry a man with cold feet; it follows”; and she paid the tinsmith’s account, which stood at nothing, and left it standing at credit; and she told Ramiz, one evening on the step, in the middle of talk about cabbages, where in the chest the brass crowns lay wrapped in the rushnik, and what Father Efthim had said about God hearing a whisper back, and that the crowns, when wanted, went with her — “in with me, mind, not on the cross; brass on marble is vanity” — and Ramiz heard it as he had heard about the crowns the first time, without a question, and topped up her glass, and answered only, after a while, “The raki will be better next year”; which she counted, correctly, as the paper signed.

And her days at the grave that October were long and full of a peculiar plenty. The walnuts dropped and were gathered; the vixen came to five paces, then to three, and once took bread, delicately, from the flat stone itself, a thing three winters of diplomacy had not achieved; the wall’s bees flew late and heavy in the warm noons, drunk on the last of the ivy bloom; and her talk to Kristaq ran clear and easy, without the old snags of grief, the way a river runs in autumn, low and transparent over everything it has carried all year. She told him the feast again, day by day; she told him Taqi’s palm on the turf; she told him the socks had been two sizes out and the boy would have his father’s feet, God help the household budget; and on the last day but one she did a thing she had not done in fifteen years: she went in at the blue gate.

The house received her the way the church received the parish: as if the pause had been a breath. She stood in the kitchen a long time. The coat on its peg had given up his shape at last, years since, and hung now like any coat, and she found she could look at it. The whetstone lay in its dish. The loom stood with the other rug in it, the unfinished one, red and black, exactly half, and the shuttle parked in the shed where his… where her hand had left it in the February of 2029, and the wool gone pale along the top of the weave where seventeen years of daylight had crossed it. She touched the warp, which still held its tension — he had strung it; of course it held — and she said, aloud, in the empty house, without sorrow, in the voice of a woman confirming an arrangement: “I’m not taking anything. I never was. It was all only lent anyway, the whole of it — the house, the sea, the sky, you, me. Lent, and the day to walk it in. It’s a good lease, Kristaq. I’ve no complaints for the landlord.” And she set the two fingers of habit against the doorpost on her way out — going by; don’t wake — and drew the blue gate to behind her, and did not look back, and this time the not-looking held.

The last day was the twenty-ninth of October, and it was the finest day of that fine month, and every particular of it was afterwards assembled by the Row — from Lena’s ledger, from Ramiz’s eyes, from the boys who had passed her on the road — and fitted together and kept, the way the fragments of a feast-day cup are kept, because the cup broke on a feast.

She went in at seven, “in fine fettle” (Lena), carrying besides the bag a small covered basin (the last kollyva of the year; the Saturday of Souls fell that week) and wearing under her kerchief, Lena noticed and was told sharply not to notice, her good one, the church one. She was passed on the road by the boys going in after walnuts — Miri carried the basin as far as the fork — and she reached the churchyard by nine, and did the yard entire, every grave its spoonful and its name, the sexton’s full office, unhurried, in the gold light with the whole warm wall humming beside her; and at noon she ate her bread and the wall’s honey on the flat stone, and fed the Miss, who came to three paces and sat with her tail wrapped round her feet a long while, as if there were no hurry anywhere in the world; and there was none.

And in the early afternoon — this the reader must have as she had it, plainly, without lament, for it was the gentlest hour of her life and she knew it while it was passing, which is given to almost no one — in the early afternoon a great ease came over her, the ease of a task fully done, of a house set true, of an account closed by both parties and witnessed; and she thought she would rest a little against the warm apse wall before starting back, there being hours yet, the light standing golden in the walnut and the bees going over her head to the ivy, and she said so, comfortably, aloud, to the company: “I’ll sit a minute, Kristaq. The day’s lent till dusk.”

And resting there, with her hand fallen open on the turf of the grave, on the exact place, she found the afternoon growing very wide and very still, in the way the sea had been wide — but kind now, and with a grain to it after all, she must remember to tell him that, He held it together with love, that was the grain, you could only see it from here — and the light in the walnut was the light of the leafing April of 1983, and the hum of the wall was the hum of the tenth hive with the saint asleep inside it, and the whole lent world stood at that pitch of gold the plain reaches once a year for a quarter of an hour; and out of the great ease, unsurprised, at its own pace, in the voice that had come up from the well forty-six years before with the found bucket streaming in the sun, came the one word she had walked four kilometres every day of sixteen years to be within reach of:

“Erdhe?” You’ve come?

“Erdha,” said Vasilika. I’ve come.

And what she had all her life heard called dying was not there; there had been some mistake about that, evidently, which did not surprise her either, the world having been wrong before about landlords; there was no line at all, at the last, and no dusk to beat, and nothing forbidden anywhere; there was only the walnut, and the warm wall, and the day — lent, lent, and at the very end of the lending, given.

The sun went down at its hour. The vixen came at dusk and sat a while at three paces, watching, with her tail wrapped round her feet, and then went away to the earth under the pump-house. The grave-lamp, filled that noon to its measure, burned gold in the socket through the long blue evening, over the still figure and the two names, and died out honestly with the last of its oil, a little before midnight.

Even the flame kept the law. And whatever it is that keeps the ban and reads the dusk — which saw, we must suppose, all of this, as it sees everything under that sky — made, all night, over the whole width of the forbidden coast, no light and no sound; knowing, it may be, the difference between the quick and the dead better than we do; or bound, it may be, by some codicil of mercy in its own sealed instructions; or — and the plain, which had the fact before it and has debated it at every stove since, has settled nothing further — simply finding, in the churchyard of Shënepremte that night, no one who could in any honest language be said to be remaining, but only, as always, the lawful dead of the parish, at home, and all of them, now, in.

XVI

At the Row, the bell rang at last light, one long peal westward, and Vasilika Kondi did not come to the pole.

Lena stood at the ledger until the writing went grey in front of her, the left-hand page with its morning entry — V. Kondi, in at six and fifty-five — and the right-hand page empty; and then she ran, not for her grandfather, but along the Row to the third house; and Ramiz Osmani came out onto his step with his cap in his hand and looked west a long time at the ridgeline, at the notch where the walnut stood black on the last red of the sky, and said, quietly, in the voice of a man reading a letter he has carried unopened for a year: “So. She’s stopped where the treasure is.”

What the law of the day exacted of them that night, the Row paid in full, and it was the heaviest tax the day-law ever levied on anyone, everywhere, in all the years of it: the waiting. No one may go in at night; no one went in; and no one slept. The Row stood or sat in the road before its doors, all nineteen houses of it, wrapped against the cold, facing west, the way it had stood twice before in its history; and Petro kept the lamp burning at the pole all night, against every regulation of his own devising, “so that if she was on the road she’d have a star to steer by”; and the older ones watched the dark over Shënepremte for the thing they remembered from the night of Llazar, the standing line of light, the drum-beat; and it did not come; and towards the small hours Ramiz, who had said nothing for a long time, said to the road at large what the road at large was afraid to hope: “There’ll be no light. Lights are for the ones who stay against their will or the ones who stay in defiance. She’s neither. She’s just gone home out of visiting hours.” And a little after that, old Petro was heard to say, to no one, in the dark: “Write it that she went in. Don’t write that she didn’t come out. There’s a difference, and the book will hold it.”

At first grey, Ramiz went in.

He went alone; that had been settled on the step at midnight without discussion, in the way the Row settled things; Lena lifted the pole for him, and wrote — her copperplate very careful, because careful was all she had to give — R. Osmani, in at first light. After V. Kondi, and he carried the spade, and a clean linen sheet of his late wife’s weaving, kept white in a chest twenty years for he had never said what, and, in his coat, the brass crowns wrapped in the bridal rushnik, fetched from the chest with the quince-tree key that hung, as all the Row’s keys hung, where all the Row knew. He walked the four kilometres at the pace of the country, neither slow nor fast, bare-headed the whole way, and the larks went up out of the old wheat around him exactly as always, the day-lent country attending to its business, the vixen sitting at the orchard corner to watch him pass; and he came up through the village and round behind the apse in the level early gold, and found what the reader knows he found, and stood before it a while with his cap in his hand.

She sat against the warm south wall as if against the flank of a resting animal, her hand open on the turf, her kerchief — the good one, the church one — in order, her face holding what his friend’s face had held seventeen years before in the lamplight: a fixed and courteous attention, as of one who has stopped, politely, to hear the whole of something. The bag stood by her, packed for the road home. The lamp had burned to its measure and gone out. And Ramiz Osmani, who had wept loudly and correctly at every funeral of forty years, wept at this one silently and incorrectly, sitting on the flat stone beside her through one whole turning of the shade, because there was no hurry — the day was young and lent — and because a man does not dig his oldest friend’s wife into the ground before he has sat with her once more, quietly, as neighbours sit.

Then he worked. The ground beside Kristaq’s mound, on the waiting side, under the smooth half of the stone, was October-soft and had, moreover — he understood as the spade went in and met no stone larger than a fist, the earth almost helping, almost showing the way — been chosen forty years deep by the same order of foresight that had filled a woodshed two winters past its owner’s need. He dug it true, at the pace of the country; the bees went over him all morning to the ivy; and at noon he stopped and ate bread by the wall like a workman, because she would have made him. He wrapped her in the white linen, doing all things gently and none of them, God and the reader forgive him, entirely by any rite, being a Bektashi burying an Orthodox in a Christian yard under an open ban with no priest nearer than Korça’s line — and he laid the brass wedding crowns on her breast, inside the linen, the two of them together, bound with the rushnik’s ends, saying as he did it the only sentence of the whole day he ever repeated afterwards: “There. Crowned once in a potato store and once under the sky. No queen in Europe had two such coronations.” And he lowered her with the spade-haft and the linen’s strength and his own, into the true grave, beside the true joiner, and filled it, and squared the mound, and set the turfs back over it like tiles.

Then he stood at the foot of the two graves that were now one grave, and prayed. He said the Fatiha first, in the Arabic his grandfather had set in him, his palms open before him — Lord of the worlds, the Merciful, the Compassionate — because a man in extremity reaches first for the rope his own well has; and then, slowly, in Albanian, learned across sixty years of feasts at Christian tables the way grapevines learn a neighbour’s wall, he said the Ati ynë, the Our Father, all of it, to the end, forgive us as we forgive, and deliver us from the evil one; and if he mixed the order of anything, this chronicle is confident that the two prayers, which have been going up interleaved from that plain for five hundred years, found their way together as they always had. Last, he took out his knife, and on the smooth waiting stone, below her name, in the space the carver had left, he cut — deep enough to hold, for he had hung gates with Kristaq Kondi and knew what a true line was — the one thing wanting: the year. Only the year; the day was hers and the day’s; and besides, as he said, the stone already carried, in its two names and its one date now answered by the other, everything the parish would ever need to read there, which was: waited for; come.

The sun was standing well down the west when he finished, and the law’s discipline took him by the shoulder like an old sergeant, kindly, and turned him for the line. But he went first into the church, and stood a minute before the small stern golden face of the landlady of the place, and told her — out loud; there was no one to mind, and Bektashis have never believed God checks papers at the door — that her sexton was in the yard now for good, and the tenancy all in order, and the honey to be taken gently, once a year, by whichever hands the parish sent; and then he did the last thing, the thing the plain has told ever since wherever the story is told, so that it has become the story’s seal: he took the bell-rope of the little bell that Kristaq had rehung in 1991 — the young bell, the second bell, that had rung the saint home out of the beehive — and he rang it. Three times three, the old full toll of the parish for the death of one of its own, unhurried, at the pace of the country; and the nine strokes went out over the empty gold village and the drowned-in-grass fields and rolled down the whole width of the forbidden coast, over the storks’ city of Korça, toward the sea a hundred kilometres west that no one living had seen in sixteen years — the sea doing, out beyond everything, whatever the sea now did, with no witness but its Owner — and at Qafa e Thanave the whole Row came out of its doors at the sound and stood in the road facing west, bareheaded, the whole-cloth children quieted in the middle of their games; for a bell rung inside the line had never been heard in all the years of the day-law, and has never, that this chronicle knows, been heard since; and the sky over the plain of Devoll took the nine strokes into its enormous keeping, and, as at everything else that was done in that churchyard, said nothing.

Ramiz Osmani came out at last light exactly, the pole rising for him, and stood while Lena wrote. She closed the right-hand page of the day — R. Osmani, out before the bell — and then she looked up at him, and at her grandfather in the hut door, and drew her pen once, lightly, through nothing at all on the left-hand page of the morning before, and beneath the entry that would never now be answered — V. Kondi, in at six and fifty-five — she wrote, in her finest copperplate, the finest line in six ledgers, the line the Row reads to strangers to this day when strangers ask what the ledgers are for:

Did not come out. Was home already.

And the reader who has come this far with the widow of Shënepremte shall have, in place of a moral — she distrusted morals, as she distrusted all goods that travel too light — only the report of the following July. At the feast of Saint Paraskevi in the year ‘47, the parish went in with the sun, two hundred and some souls and one lorry from Prilep; and Papa Foti read the sexton’s list in her large old hand, with two lines added at the bottom in a foreman’s print; and the kollyva was boiled that year, three nights running, under the command of a girl with a copperplate hand who had inherited a loom-rug and an office together; and behind the apse, under the walnut, a boy of fifteen knelt and set his palm flat on the new turf of the doubled grave, on the exact place, and stayed so a while, keeping his word a year at a time, as his line kept everything; and the wall hummed above them all in the July sun, and the vixen watched the feast from the orchard corner, and the lamp on the grave was filled that evening to its measure by young hands and left burning as the parish went out with the light — golden, lawful, mortal, sufficient — over the two names and the one closed account: and it went out by itself, honestly, at its own hour, far into the forbidden dark; for even the flame kept the law, and the law, as she had always maintained, was in the end only this — that the day is lent, that the night is kept, and that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also, and no power in the sea or the sky has ever yet been able to prevent it.