An excerpt from the novel ‘Escape from Death’, authored by renowned Kosovar writer Zekerija Idrizi

THE THEOSOPHIST SISYPHUS AND STONE

Kristina, last night in a long and arduous visionary dream, I experienced the strangest dialogues in life. Shortly before dusk, I was in the mountains of Kodra e Trimave in Kaçanik (my father’s native village) when, suddenly, the heavens were torn by the echo of God’s roaring voice. Scary voice, as it flattened me to the ground and almost made me deaf.

GOD: “Ilir, you received heavy and deadly slaps from Me because of your sinful passions, leading a bohemian hedonistic life. In such a way of life you overestimated your personal self. My strike degraded you from the position of a poor king preacher to a poor waste cleaner on the streets of Berlin, so I delegated you on your shoulder the stone of the father of mankind, Adam (Adam), and the stone of Sisyphus, the hero of the absurd, to push it up the hills… Thus I punish my servants every time they disobey My commandments!

I: “My Lord, then, tell me, what the meaning of your hell is beyond compared to the earthly hell of mine??! My hell is so terrifying that Your hell would tremble with fear! … It would have been easier for me, if You had taken my soul and I rested forever in the sleep of the grave… Despite Your capital punishment for me, I will not give up my personal self, but I will follow the paths of moral catharsis to heal the scars of the soul…”

GOD: “This is how I have prescribed it. From the flowered cradle to the white shroud, when people lie in the eternal” sleep “of the grave, they are followed by a deep sigh in the form of woe, sigh and cry. You express this sigh deeply between the two cries: the first, when you are born and the second: when you die, I have not asked anyone about this determination of My Supreme Will. But the cries from “eating apples” (from sins) are even more unusual, more fatal, because they make people live like “dead corpses” among the living beings…”

I: “And I, alas, am such a dead corpse, that I live, both among the corpses and among the living beings!”

GOD: “And you, Ilir, how many times have you bitten the ‘forbidden apples’?”

Suddenly God departed and the stone appeared before my eyes. I asked it:

“Who are you? What are you doing here? ”

The Stone: “I am the” messenger “of God, your companion who will accompany you to the grave, even in eternity…”

ME: “Has anyone else pushed you up before me?”

The Stone:  “You are neither the first nor the last to push me up. Have you been exhausted by my heavy weight that you have been carrying on your shoulders for a long time? ”

I: “You are not tiring me. Already, I have been accustomed to you for years, although at first I had a hard time. I have even, surprisingly, fallen in love with you so much that I cannot live without you! But I have to say openly and honestly that I am tormented by that roaring voice of God, His severe rebuke and His fatal slap that struck me to the ground. Even today I cannot recover from that blow!”

The Stone “Tell me, before I tell you:” When did you have the hardest time with me in your life?”

I: “I had the hardest time when I looked at my children and out of irrational sadness I could not caress and hug them, as well as always, when I looked at the books in my library and I could not read them!”

The Stone: “What is your most terrifying and grotesque imagination when you are with me?”

I: “The most grotesque imagination with you is the phantasmagorical feeling, which manifests itself in the sense of a utopia that you will not go away from my neck and back even in the world of hell tomorrow till eternity! That is, the absurd idea that you and I will travel together forever. In these circumstances of contemplation, the verse of the holy books revolves around my head: “…then fear the Fire whose fuel is men and stones- which is prepared for those who reject Faith…!”

The Stone: “But what is your most comical image with me?”

I: “Always, when I play the role of the cyber, virtual Sisyphus,” making” fictitious friends at the ends of the globe, a time when I am really lonely, without a single friend in real life…”

I: “Tell me now: In which people have you had the most disgusting and tragic position?”

The Stone: “I had the most tragic position when I was in the possession of special people: writers, poets, artists, philosophers, dissidents, etc. Even more disgusting for me has been with those who have been and are like you: theologians, theosophists* and eccentric mystics. “With you, my burden is even heavier, to gain some more extreme weight in imprisoned intellectuals.”

I: “Are you talking about the intellectuals who suffered the most in the prisons of Goli Otok, Burrel and many, many others like them?”

The Stone: “Yes!”

The Stone: “I’m sorry Ilir, but I’m obliged to tell you that I will be your companion for life, even in the grave. I will be your monument, your epitaph on the grave, where it will be written: “Here rests the soul of the writer Sisyphus who was doomed to carry me on his shoulder his entire life!”

I: “Only one thing I will never forgive you!”

The Stone: “What is that?!”

Kosovar writer Zekerija Idrizi

I: “The fact that you put your heavy and bitter burden, not only on me, but also on the shoulders of my wife, Kristina. It was 2004 when, hugging each-other, we both wept bitterly, right after that spiritual calamity that, so severely, struck me. I will never forgive this! Moreover, you must remember, at that time we both cried, you and me. The Heavens, the stars, the oceans, the oaks, the flowers, and the whole universe wept. We all cried in wail, crying with sobs…”

The Stone: “I am sorry, here is nothing I could do! I am in charge of the task of stoning you, to make your heart like a stone and extremely cold with ice frosts …”

I: “I’m sorry, you will not succeed! This is because your glaciers are melting before my Promethean fire, which is so scorching that it melts the giant ice of the Alps and Antarctica … Then, with your pieces, I will strengthen the foundations of the giant civilization, creating the most magical arts from the absurdity that you produce … This, just as those imprisoned and banished intellectuals created pearls of all kinds, that you took in your mouth, who did not become stones, in that absurd life, but they became the vanguard of our civilization…

Suddenly, I woke up like a madman. My brain almost fled. I look at the clock on the wall; it shows midnight … Hell, I did not sleep until the early hours of the morning, cursing myself, my life and my disgusting fate. Even, exactly this time, I have cursed myself, the Sisyphus and the stone many times…”

“Cursed be Satan!” – I cried raving.

“Strangely enough, his diary, reminds me of that diary of the famous Jewish, Anna Frank (1929-1945), who, isolated for two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in north of Germany, threw in her diary all her critical thoughts and reflections on life, on this globe. But unlike her, who suffered the darkest and most frightening days of a spiritual and physical holocaust from Hitler’s Nazi-fascism, Ilir experienced a severe “holocaust” of the soul caused by the “emperors of God” on earth, by evil people dressed in angel’s clothes…”

[The novel ‘Escape from Death’, authored by Zekerija Idrizi, was published by Pristina (Kosovo, 2023), and has been translated by into English by Dritan D. Kardhashi]

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Published under International Cooperation with "Sindh Courier"