Biografi

  Somewhere along the road to Durrës his truck had blown a tyre. The refugees were told to get out of the truck and wait on the side of the road. And while the spare was being fitted Shapallo had wandered away from the carousel of lights.

  In the letter he speaks of being ‘drawn back into the night’.

  Munz could only speculate there. He had taken off his glasses and thought about it in the café for the moment, not seeing the hordes pressed and smudged against the window. He thought that perhaps Shapallo’s age had something to do with it.

  ‘The way old people wander off from nursing homes and lose their way.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It is very curious. He was so eager to get away.’

  For the next two nights Shapallo had wandered across the coastal marshland. Gjaza, by the sound of it, had simply lain in his way.

  The letter spoke of his stumbling on some farm buildings. A barn, I imagine. In the pitch black of night he clawed at a timber siding until a door gave way. In the letter Shapallo describes his ‘blindman’s walk’—with outstretched hands he got no further than three paces. Then he dragged his hands down the wall to a metal bed frame with springs, which he fell upon with total abandonment.

  In the morning he took stock of his bearings. It was a stone floor. Other than the bed there were no other furnishings. He walked to the window. The sun had risen half an inch above the horizon and there were men and women in blue uniforms digging trenches across a field of grey mud.

  The letter mentions at length an odd little domestic detail, as if his discovery that he had left a trail of mud from the door to the bed suggests some larger truth. Shapallo confesses to feeling suddenly overcome by housekeeping anxiety. He describes his finding a stick and scraping the mud out the door; and then, straightening up, his eye travels across the marshland to the coast and for the first time he begins to entertain thoughts of staying on.

  Four of us are to travel to Lushnje. Brikena for one, and her friend Zerena, another editor at the Naim Frasheri. Brikena has been magnificent. Her neighbour, Mentor, will drive us. Furthermore, her uncle, who lives in Lushnje, is expecting us. She has also rustled up a translator, a schoolteacher she knows from university days. For the first time in a while the cards seem to be falling right.

  Lushnje is an easy hour-and-a-half drive. All the same, we meet nice and early in the courtyard at the Naim Frasheri, and while we are waiting for Mentor to fill up the tank, we slip into the café by the ground-floor bookshop.

  Everyone is depressed by last night’s news that Sali Berisha is withdrawing his Democrats from the governing coalition. Berisha cited irreconcilable differences, among them the Socialists’ reluctance to arrest Nexhmije and put her on trial and Ramiz’s refusal to bring the election date forward.

  The marshland mentioned by Shapallo in his letter stretches from the coastline south of Durrës to the small, rolling hills that stay with us all the way to Lushnje.

  We’re travelling in the comparative luxury of an old beat-up Volvo, which Mentor’s nephew sent him from Italy. ‘I am not ashamed to say this,’ he says. ‘But for forty-five years I work, and for what? My nephew escapes to Italy, and after a few months’ work has enough for this beautiful car.’

  ‘He is very reliable,’ Brikena assured me. ‘Some of them, I can tell you, are madmen. They think they can drive, when in fact…’

  Mentor’s technique lies at the other end of the spectrum from Teti’s. We rabbit-hop out of Tirana in fourth gear at twenty kilometres an hour.

  Brikena tosses her head back and expels a mouthful of smoke, as the first of the countryside rolls by.

  ‘It’s so good to get out of the city. So good,’ she says, and I look back to see what I can make of Tirana, growing lower and lower in the rear mirror, now a footprint at the bottom of Dajti. It’s hard to escape the feeling that Brikena’s city weariness has been acquired from some other place.

  Within half an hour we’re at the Durrës turnoff, to head south. Just beyond the fork are scores of Italian lorries parked in a compound behind barbed wire. There is no other traffic, and because of this, one expects to come across a road barrier any moment. Or to be overhauled by an official grey van and flagged down.

  It is hard to conclude anything at all about the passing landscape. It is obviously untenanted and, for that matter, unwanted. The marshland is only a few feet above sea level. From the road you can sense its edge and the proximity of the beach.

  From one of Cliff ’s photographs taken at Durrës I seem to recall the beach being white and sandy and otherwise deserted but for Cliff, its only idler, with his out-of-season paleness, and I remember feeling in the photo the undeniable privilege of being there.

  Harry Hamm’s visit to the beach in Durrës thirty years earlier found it almost deserted. He had stayed at the Adriatic Hotel and describes coming down to breakfast and finding at a table two Americans having the news in the Party newspaper Zeri I Popullit read to them. ‘The Americans,’ Hamm noted, ‘took noticeable pains to avoid contact…’

  The Americans lay on the beach. The woman rubbed oil into the man’s back. And later, the woman’s shrieks of delight carried emptily and went unheeded as she was chased from the water by the man pretending to be a shark. The woman ran up the beach—like a Crusoe figure arriving at a deserted world.

  In Sarandë, Hamm caught up with them. In the hotel register he found their words of praise for the socialist reconstruction attributed to an ‘American Workers Delegation’.

  A dark loam replaces the sand as the road bends inland from the coast.

  By the roadside, tree stumps have been bitten and chewed down by men wielding axes for wood chips to fire their stoves.

  To see these woodchip barometers down so low is an ominous sight—a few of the trunks are level with the ground and we are still to face the brute cold of winter.

  In another thirty minutes we are at Kavajë.

  Until now Kavajë had not reckoned in my thoughts or plans. But Zerena, it is, who casually mentions: ‘You should know that this town is known throughout Albania. Official cars couldn’t pass through here without their windows being smashed.’

  ‘This is true,’ says Mentor. ‘In Kavajë you gave the Democrat sign or you didn’t get through.’

  In dribs and drabs Kavajë’s brave defiance is established. Mentor’s foot has lifted off the gas and we’re back to bunny-hopping, our heads and necks jerking comically in opposite directions. We stall, finally and appropriately, while Zerena is explaining a soccer match which sparked the public demonstrations against the regime. And there, in the main street, without fear of obstructing traffic, Mentor lights a cigarette and adds where he can to Zerena’s account.

  ‘The match was between Kavajë and the Minister of the Interior’s side,’ Zerena thinks. ‘The crowd did not like the referee’s decisions and became very, very angry.’

  Mentor is less certain. ‘There was a soccer match,’ he says. ‘This is a fact. But I do not recollect the referee in this…’

  ‘Perhaps I am wrong about the referee,’ says Zerena. ‘But what is also a fact is after the game the crowd threw the works of Enver Hoxha on to the soccer field.’

  ‘Ah that, yes,’ agrees Mentor. ‘Kavajë is a very brave town.’

  Zerena, who has been watching me take down notes, asks, ‘You are interested in Kavajë?’

  The reason she asks is that she is a friend of the director of the nail factory.

  ‘He can tell you everything,’ she says.

  The Volvo croaks back to life, and within a few minutes we draw up at the gates of the nail factory. Zerena asks that we wait. She will go and find Riza and perhaps, as Zerena calls it, we will have ‘an exchange’.

  In a few minutes she returns with a big smile. At her elbow is Riza Hoxha. The invitation is for coffee.

  ‘There is time. In Albania it is the only thing that we have in abundance,’ jokes the director.

  The nail factory, like every other factory in the country,
has ground to a halt. With Riza is Sali Volgi, the previous director— up until two weeks ago.

  Inside the gates we climb to an outside landing which is at eye level with the workers’ flats and forests of TV aerials. The only noise in Kavajë, a town of twenty-eight thousand, belongs to the feathery cussacking of pigeons roosting in the gutterings and eaves of the surrounding white-bricked warehouses.

  The factory café is empty and, like an old food safe, bare but for the crumbs and the lingering smell of food long since eaten. We sit at a table covered with a soiled oilskin cloth, and an old man in a white jacket brings a tray of coffee—and, surprisingly, an armful of oranges.

  An element of formality and seriousness follows as I am bodily assisted from my chair and placed next to Sali. Happier with this new seating arrangement, he opens a small black folder in which he has recorded three months of rebellion in Kavajë, which earned it a reputation as something other than the place where nails are made.

  21

  ON THE AFTERNOON of March 22, 1990, the students in Tirana hauled down the monolithic statue of Enver in Skanderbeg Square.

  But in Kavajë, preceding the students’ action by two or three hours, as Sali was quick to point out, the busts of Enver were attacked and destroyed. Ramiz Alia’s portrait, which had hung from the town’s one set of traffic lights, was set on fire. In the nail factory workers placed a tyre around Enver’s statue in the factory yard and set fire to it.

  Three days later a soccer match drew a huge crowd to the stadium. Word had been given that at the conclusion of the soccer match everyone would stand and shout.

  The Party Secretary for Kavajë, Agron Tafa, who was also a former vice-director of the Ministry of the Interior, was relying on his presence to have an intimidating effect. But immediately the game was over, and as Tafa prepared to leave, he was fearlessly baited by the crowd. Since Tafa had once been a horse-and-cart driver the football fans were shouting, ‘Hey, Agron, from cart driver you have become a shepherd!’

  Then people began to chant and throw the works of Enver Hoxha onto the field. This was something new. Protests of this kind, of any kind for that matter, were unprecedented.

  After this, Sunday matches were very well attended. A football crowd organises itself and enters the stadium with a frivolous spirit. It was Kavajë’s only means of getting a crowd together without the risk of organising one.

  The day after the soccer match at which Tafa was insulted, Kavajë witnessed its first demonstration. It was late afternoon and two hundred young men gathered near the Party Committee building. They had requested a favour from the electrical workers: not to switch on the streetlights until they were given the word. The demonstrators hid their faces with jackets and shouted for ‘freedom and democracy’, and a chant went up comparing Enver with Hitler. Patriotic songs were sung, songs from the turn of the century, when the country was struggling out from under the Ottoman yoke. This went on for forty-five minutes. The demonstrators then moved off to the town centre, where still more young people gathered.

  Inside the tiny apartments the boiling water was stilled on the Primus. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. People sat on the edge of their chairs, and inclined their good ear towards the windows. It was incredible. The people in the apartments exchanged glances. Nobody dared to speak. Those down in the street were chanting. And then it all ended, like a shower of rain that passes quickly over a city.

  As soon as the protesters left the centre the lights came on, but nobody in the apartments dared to go out. Nobody could trust the silence. They waited, and their suspicions soon bore fruit, as they heard the tyres of the police vans driving slowly through the empty streets.

  Midnight, at an urgent meeting held at the Kavajë Party Headquarters, it was ‘officially’ decided that the disturbance had been ‘caused by fifteen to twenty hooligans’. Sali, attending in his capacity as the nail factory director, remembered the faces of alarm and their ‘lying to deceive themselves as much as the record’. The Party secretaries from different plants were instructed to educate the workers, and a small token price was exacted in the form of two arrests.

  At the meeting Sali signalled his intention to resign from the Party.

  ‘In March 1990 this was considered a dangerous action,’ he said. ‘They asked me to think it over.’

  By now, word of the Kavajë demonstrations had spread to Tirana and Shkodër and Elbasan. Sali travelled around the country. ‘Wherever I went,’ he said, ‘when people found out I was from Kavajë they were curious to know how the protest had been achieved.’

  The nail factory, which employed twelve hundred workers, had had its share of problems. For two years it had languished because of the shortage of materials. The economy was fast winding down. The metallurgy plant at Elbasan had stopped sending steel to Kavajë for nails, and this had led to nail workers being laid off without pay.

  Sali sent off letters describing the problem to Party leaders in Tirana. There came no reply. He despatched more letters and telegrams until, finally, the Party leaders agreed to visit. Until this time no one had dared to contradict the official position that, in Albania, paradise had been achieved.

  The Party sent Lenka Cuko, a former peasant who had risen through the ranks to become one of the dozen most important Politburo members, described by Sali as ‘a woman with an idiot’s face and black eyes’.

  ‘The meeting was historic,’ he said. ‘If for no other reason than Lenka was accustomed to respect and she got none.’

  The meeting was held within a week of the protests at the stadium and outside Party Headquarters. Lenka was accompanied by another official, Muho Asllani, the first Party Secretary of the Durrës area. Sali explained the factory’s problems, the difficulties the workers were having in trying to feed their families, and Lenka responded, ‘We have not come here with our pockets full of money.’

  The workers then detailed the food shortages—each worker was down to a cupful of milk a day.

  ‘You need to understand,’ said Sali. ‘This was the first time workers had the courage to mention such things to Party leaders.’

  Officially all was rosy. Unofficially, the phrase on everyone’s lips went Mish—ish—sh [Meat—none to eat—but don’t repeat— only whisper].

  One of the workers then asked Lenka, ‘Why don’t you allow the people to have cows at home?’

  ‘What!’ reacted Lenka. ‘Do you want to turn Albania into the Soviet Union—a revisionist country?’

  The workers grew more insistent. They began to put forward demands. At which point Lenka and Muho retreated, suggesting that the discussion had been sabotaged by ‘political enemies’.

  Further meetings with the ‘block men’ followed, but nothing was resolved, and the factory finally stopped working shortly after the meeting with Lenka.

  From this moment the nail factory workers began to take things into their own hands.

  A truck from Skrapar, a Communist stronghold in the south, which had arrived at the factory for nails, was hijacked. A number of younger workers took the truck and drove to the library, where they smashed the windows and loaded the truck with the works of Enver Hoxha, and a message for the driver: ‘This is what we have to give to the people of Skrapar—not nails.’

  Traffic from Gjirokastër, Enver’s birthplace, was routinely stopped in town and the question asked of the drivers: ‘Who are you for—democracy or Enver?’

  Summer was near and people started to crowd the beaches. Wary of the behaviour that had occurred in the soccer stadium, the Party sent uniformed police to watch over the bathers.

  The rest of April, May and June passed peacefully enough. But on July 8 the regime struck back. The sampists, highly paid shock troops of the Minister of the Interior, arrived in Kavajë. In the afternoon they turned up at Golem Beach and went about their business. Men were beaten up and women stripped of their clothing and bathing suits. From the beach they rolled into town picking people off the street and locking them in their
grey panel vans.

  One who resisted was Josef Buda, twenty-one, who, standing with his fiancée at the entrance to town, was shot dead. The sampists took Buda’s body to the centre of town and dumped it on the street.

  The townspeople wrapped the body in a sheet and carried it to Buda’s parents’ house. The next day the funeral cortege outnumbered the entire population of Kavajë. The coff in, covered with the bloodstained sheet from the previous day, was borne through the streets by thirty thousand mourners. From the cemetery the funeral procession continued on to the Party Headquarters, where the mourners set fire to the building and set alight police cars and the cars of Party functionaries.

  For a month afterwards, Kavajë was surrounded by tanks and police. For two months the sampists camped outside the town. By then, however, protest had broken out in all parts of the country—Shkodër, Tirana, Korcë, Elbasan. Everywhere the statues of Stalin and Hoxha were being smashed.

  22

  FOR ALL ITS efforts and heroism, Kavajë would appear to have benefited very little. Before moving on to Lushnje we drove past the other big plant, a glass factory. Its windows had been smashed. The padlocks and chained gates had rusted and the stillness of the factory spoke of abandonment. The only place to have recently seen money spent on its construction recently was the newly built Party Headquarters.

  While we were still in Kavajë, Brikena, in front with Mentor, suddenly twisted around and gazed longingly back to a horse-drawn cart.

  ‘Milk!’ she said. ‘I am sure that was milk.’

  South of Kavajë the road twists around hillsides planted in olive groves. From the air, according to Mentor, the trees have been grown so as to spell ENVER HOXHA.

  A little farther on we meet up with the railway line, another triumph of the Albanian Youth, built back in the sixties and seventies. Here Zerena leans forward to point out ‘Shkurte Vata’. The statue is of a young woman with her right arm raised, her hand balled up in a fist.