“Long may you live, zonya!” said he, touching the astrakan fez in salute.
“Long may you live, Ahmet Mati!”
They rode past the pictured mosque, down the street of little shops and cafés, closed now, past the cemetery with its toppling turbaned gravestones. At the barracks they stopped. For a moment Ahmet spoke with the chiefs who gathered around his horse. Then he rode on, out on the road to Durazzo, and behind him went his hundreds upon hundreds of fighting men. It was the sunset hour; the mountains and the sky were beautiful, and the little owl was beginning to call from the Cypress of the Dead. The prayers of the hodjis rose to Allah from the tops of the white minarets.
The moon was late that night, and mountains and plains were covered with darkness when the rifles began to crackle on the hills. Little flames of rifle fire ran along the tops of the hills like flickering lightning. It was as though the hills were crackling with electricity.
We stood in the courtyard of our house, watching them. Government House was dark; the engine was no longer running. The little owl called from the Cypress of the Dead. Sied Bey came through the gate and said to us in French that he feared there would be trouble again in Tirana that night; might the women and children of his family stay in the Red Cross house? There was his old mother, who was ill; his sister, and many children of his brothers and his cousins, little children. They had come in that day from his estate, where the fighting was. Did we think the Red Cross would give them shelter till morning, under the American flag?
They came behind him, through the darkness, and we said we would take them to the Vocational School. Sied Bey could not leave his post at Government House. There were the two veiled women, and nine women servants carrying rolls of bedding, and so many little girls in voluminous trousers, with chains of gold coins on foreheads and necks, and so many very small boys in Turkish trousers and Scanderbeg jackets, that we never counted them. We got them all into the Red Cross dining room, where there was space for them to sleep on the floor, and we offered them cigarettes and coffee. Within the dining room the sound of the rifle fire was no louder than the soft crackling of burning wood.
The older woman, worn and wrinkled and pale with illness, sat on the cushions arranged for her by a servant, accepted the cigarette which another servant had put in a long jeweled holder, and smoked silently. But the younger one, throwing back her veil with a violent movement, startled us by the revelation of a strong, beautiful face and eyes full of anger. She spurned the cushions, she walked up and down like a furious animal in a cage.
“Pardon me,” she said, suddenly, in perfect English. “Forgive me. You are good to shelter my mother. But I—but I am not made to stay here, to stay here in a house, when there is fighting. Do you hear the rifles?” She struck her clenched hand against the edge of the table, and blood came on the knuckles. She walked up and down.
“Do you think I cannot fight?” she said. “Ask my brother. Ask the Serbs if I can fight. There is not a man in Albania who knows a rifle better than I. They did not keep me in a house when the Serbs came! I was out on the hills with the men when the Serbs came. And now—now when traitors, when men who sell their honor for money, are murdering Albania, I must sit in a house! I must sit on a cushion!” She stamped on the cushion. “I, who have killed nineteen Serbs with these hands! I must stay with my mother, because she is ill. Let Sied stay with my mother. I have a rifle; I want to fight! Do you hear the rifles?”
We were appalled. We were speechless before that infuriated woman who had killed nineteen Serbs with her hands. We went away, leaving her walking up and down, while her mother silently smoked and the children watched from their heaps of rugs.