The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare

TB Man” produced a song in memory of his girlfriend, who had been run
over that April by the night-soil cart.
    I’m the gypsy of the institute
    In an awful plight
    Since the girl I loved
    Fell under a load of shite.
    The cultural officials chuckled but soon wiped the smiles from their faces. At their next meeting, which turned out to be fatal for them all, they agreed that private feelings involved not only
disease and filth, but also nobler sentiments. Unaware of how dearly he would pay for this later, the head of culture recalled an old women’s song.
    Sing, nightingale, sing tonight
    In our garden of delight.
    In your wings of song enfold us,
    If we slumber wake us,
    From all intrusion guard us
    From all detection hide us.
    The exclamations of how lovely, how delicate, what sensitivity, prompted the head of culture, as if with the devil at his elbow, to recollect another song describing the same women, this time
from the men’s point of view.
    Happy lads who woo them, happy lads who love them
    Happy lads who count them theirs . . .
    Retribution came swiftly at an emergency meeting of the Party Committee before the week was out. The meeting denounced decadent trends in the city, nostalgia for the overthrown feudal-bourgeois
order and the cult of declassed ladies, whose degraded songs were cunningly described simply as “women’s songs” instead of “songs of the elite”, as our literary
critics have classified them.
    Angry voices were raised. “Who’s at the bottom of this?” The head of culture fainted twice. Towards midnight the Party chairman made a start on his closing speech with a
quotation from Lenin. “Your most dangerous enemy is the one you forget.” He spared no one, not even himself. “Our enemies have caught us napping. Decadence, thrown out the front
door, has returned through the back window.” Before properly settling accounts with the notions of Nietzsche, perpetual motion and other perversities, the city was confronted with this
virulent plague: its ladies. It was no coincidence that this was happening at a time of renewed tension with Greece and that the US Sixth Fleet had been patrolling the Mediterranean for days.
“We will punish the culprits without mercy. Brace yourself for the worst.”
    Shortly after the meeting ended, towards two in the morning, the head of culture shot himself.
    THE CITY CONFRONTS ITS LADIES
    The bullet that claimed the life of the head of culture was also in a way the first shot in a war between the city’s new authorities and its ladies. For those in the know
it was obvious that the head of culture had died a victim of his own nostalgia for the ladies but, for reasons that remained unknown, this detail was quickly concealed and he was portrayed as their
opponent, indeed a sort of first martyr in this new battle.
    The meetings to denounce the ladies, unlike the usual ones, were conducted not only without cheering or music but with a sombre, even academic tinge that seemed appropriate to their subject.
This was especially true of the opening presentation entrusted to the elderly antiquarian Xixo Gavo, which, despite its imposing title “A Thousand Years of Ladies”, was merely a
recitation of an interminable list of the city’s ladies from 1361 until the previous week. Nobody in the audience understood what it was for but this did not prevent them from applauding the
old historian when the list, and with it his speech, came to an end.
    The other contributions more or less compensated for the shortcomings of the opening speech. One of them, “Ladies Under Communism”, not only surveyed, as the title suggested, the
fate of ladies everywhere in the communist camp, from Budapest to the former St Petersburg, Bratislava and even Shanghai, but explained why the ladies of Gjirokastër occupied a special
position in this vast field.
    This was also the most obscure part of the talk, which each listener interpreted in his or her own way. According to