Biografi

  He did not eat ravenously. Another exile gave Shapallo a precious egg. To the astonishment of the exiles, the highlander nibbled at the cap, and then, for reasons of either exertion or taste, pushed the rest aside and sipped water with a mint leaf.

  A chair was found for the stranger and Shapallo spent his mornings sitting in the sun at the edge of the fields. He grew stronger. But at night the exiles were kept awake by a terrible hacking cough.

  A fortnight passed. Shapallo had grown strong enough to collect his own water from the spring.

  Soon after this he had turned up at the Agollis’ door to ask for work.

  The fields had entered a new cycle and the yellow straw had already been cut away from the earth. Small fires had to be lit, and the earth split and opened up. They worked with shovels and picks in a line which moved mechanically across the field, and Shapallo, despite his advancing years, kept up.

  They tilled the fields—got everything ready. Then one day the brigadier walked across the field to tell them they had no fertiliser or seed. The exiles dropped their shovels and walked silently back to their huts.

  Since late September, Gjaza had waited expectantly for the onset of winter. The Agollis were waiting to see what the regime would do next, whether they would be left to starve. September passed. October, November they waited. The exiles picked their small plots of grapes and made raki. They tended the odd farm beast, a cow or a goat. Children in rags and bare feet pushed unwilling cows across the mud to the roadside grasses. Everyone waited to see what winter would bring.

  Word soon arrived in Gjaza that foreigners had reached Lushnje. A tall man was handing out blue jerseys. Children were posted at the roadside, outside Gjaza, to watch for the man bearing jerseys.

  Another rumour spoke of the Red Cross taking food, clothing and medicine to the exiles in Savra. The aid was selective. Everything was going to the exiles.

  It was medicine that Shapallo needed most. He waited for the aid to arrive, and while he waited the nights grew longer and colder and his cough grew worse. Each morning the younger Agolli brother went to the hut expecting to raise a grey blanket over a corpse.

  Late October, the nights had become so bad for Shapallo that he couldn’t wait any longer. One fine morning he had set out to walk to Savra to present himself to the foreigners. That had been six weeks ago, and there had been no word of him since.

  In Gjaza, at least one other exile was waiting anxiously to hear back from her old backgammon partner.

  25

  THE SMALL OIL heater gives off a smell stronger than its heat. In Gjaza there is no wood. There is electricity but no heaters.

  Frieda apologises for her hoarseness. Her forehead is damp with sweat—for days she has been stuck with a cold.

  From somewhere she has found some lipstick. She has on a smart suede jerkin and a lovely cream jersey spun with natural wool—which is perhaps what she would have worn had her old life been allowed to proceed. Frieda attended primary school in Italy, a French college in Austria. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family and was well travelled at an early age. Italy. Vienna. She lived in a house with high walls, carpeted rooms with tall windows and silver trays. For the last twenty years, however, she has worked as a seamstress for two dollars a month.

  Little of the exile’s life would appear to have rubbed off on her spirit. There is nothing bitter in her face. There is none of that heavy-heartedness that has made Doctor Cabey such a figure of despair. In the doctor’s study Frieda would be the plover, chesty, spirited.

  On the way to Frieda’s hut Kadris told me that she was a doctor’s daughter and that sometimes she used to play backgammon with Shapallo. But I can’t very well go straight to the point of discussing Shapallo. Mister Gina also knows of Frieda. He said her family held some kind of record for the years spent in prison and exile. At such times I noticed Frieda’s name mentioned—not with pity as much as with awe.

  In 1946 her father was arrested and his private clinic in Tirana was confiscated. He was released after three months, but his impertinence in asking for his property to be returned brought him ten years in jail.

  Another branch of Frieda’s family had fought in the mountains against the Communists, and from these cousins she had inherited bad biografi.

  Her biografi also revealed that her family had lived near the French consulate in Tirana, and during the time of the Zog regime the French consul had been a family friend.

  In 1949 Frieda was accused of working for the French Secret Service and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. She was still in prison when, in 1954, her mother was released without a place or home to go to. One of the old family servants tried to take her in, but the regime intervened and she was thrown out in the street and left to sleep in churches and beg for bread.

  Frieda leans forward, she taps my notebook. She says, ‘My mother’s name is Marta Doda.’

  In 1960 Frieda joined her father in Lushnje, where he had been sent to work. Although she was forbidden to leave the town, the sixties were Frieda’s only years of freedom since she was a girl.

  In the early seventies she was picked up in another sweep through the country’s biografis. She leans forward with the date the way she had when she supplied her mother’s name— ‘July 6, 1972.’

  Without warning the police arrived at her door and told her to get her things together. She asked where she was being sent to. The police shrugged. They said it was none of their concern.

  She asked then if she could say goodbye to her father, who by this time was blind and ill.

  The police said, ‘What does this mean? We do not understand “goodbye”.’

  Frieda was thrown in the police van and driven to Gjaza. Two months later, she received word that her father had died.

  ‘Now,’ she says, smiling brightly, ‘what would you like to know about Shapallo?’

  ‘Well, anything. What did he tell you about himself?’

  ‘You must know this yourself, that he had been an actor, yes. He mentioned some difficulties…’

  I asked to see the backgammon board, and she laughed.

  ‘There is no backgammon board! We had to imagine a board. One thing you must understand, exiles have nothing if they don’t have memories.’

  Frieda told me about a journey she had made as a newly pardoned exile back to her old neighbourhood. She had travelled with friends to Tirana, where she discovered her old house had passed on to the Minister of the Interior.

  She knocked on the door, and a teenage girl answered. The Minister’s daughter reluctantly stepped aside for Frieda and her exile friends.

  Frieda looked in at the guest room, then the sitting room. She noticed the changes. The sitting room, for example, had been divided. The Minister’s daughter asked how she knew the house so well. Frieda calmly told her, ‘This is my house.’

  The teenager tried to frighten Frieda by reminding her that her father was the Minister of the Interior.

  ‘Then she asked me, if this was indeed my house, then why had I left it…?’

  ‘I had to explain to this girl, the Minister’s daughter, that I had been in exile.

  ‘Then she asked me for proof that the house was mine. I showed her the documents and she became very frightened. It was a wonderful moment.’

  Frieda says, ‘According to the law I will get my house back. The Parliament decided that all confiscated property would be returned to the owners from before the war.

  ‘You will be returning to Tirana. Will you please tell the Minister of the Interior that we are long overdue in switching houses. Tell him I am ready to give him my cot in Gjaza. I have been here twenty years—it is enough.’

  And she laughed, a wonderful smoker’s laugh.

  It is time we were under way. Mister Gina has booked a table at the Blerimi. But as we make our way from Frieda’s, men in blue cotton uniforms come to the edge of bamboo fences. Or else with blank faces they stand in our path, and we are held up with more stories, still more biogr
afi.

  One man wants to tell me that he was expelled from school nearly forty years ago for laughing. ‘It was the day Stalin died, but I had no idea. None of us knew,’ he says plaintively. ‘I happened to be laughing at a boy with a hole in his pants. I knew nothing about Stalin at that moment. I was nine years old.’

  Another whose face is horribly disfigured with sores suppurating with pus and black cancerous growths presents himself as a ‘freedom fighter’. He is so repulsively ugly that I cannot bear to look at him. Politely I take down his details as Kadris supplies them—until the older Agolli brother and Mister Gina drag me away to the car, and Kadris, after conferring with Sali, says the man is a spy.

  ‘A weak character,’ says the older Agolli, bowing in the window. ‘He will stay. He has no place to go. No other life. As the camp population goes down he will remain to the last.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘My friend, every day we stay here reminds us of the past. But along with this spy we have no place to go to, either.’

  26

  MISTER GINA HAD booked a table. He had had in mind a special lunch in the upstairs room of the Blerimi, but clearly the reservation slipped the minds of management.

  Puddles lay over the floor, and through a broken pane in the door leading out to a patio a cold wind was blowing. The tablecloths hadn’t been changed in days.

  So we popped back downstairs to where a kind of warmth collected among the smoke and the close-set shoulders and chairs pressed together. Down here we huddled, and the raki took instant effect. As Kadris remarked, ‘The sun shone most brilliantly on our insides.’

  Kadris was in a better mood now. The interpreting and endless translation at Gjaza had left him exhausted. Towards the end of our time with Frieda he had grown impatient, snapping his replies when asked to repeat something or to help with disentangling a muddled sentence, which was often hazy and jammed just like the pictures Albania had received of the outside world.

  ‘When we first came here we had to help drain the swamp of bodies.’

  And while Frieda smiled moistly, Kadris, hunch-shouldered, with his hands rammed home deep in his coat pockets, had swung his knees around and snapped, ‘Boulders. I said “boulder”!’

  ‘Boulder?’

  ‘Boulders!’

  It was an exhausting business, which had contributed to the silence during the drive back to Lushnje. Mister Gina smoked a cigarette meditatively in the front, and in the back Kadris leaned away from me, his head inclined toward the window to discourage my asking questions.

  No one had said anything until about ten minutes out from Lushnje, when the driver announced, ‘Savra.’

  In the dim light some women were digging a trench in a field. A muddy track ran down one side of it and there was just time enough to catch a glimpse of the familiar reddish buildings at the end of it. I would have liked to stop and have a look around. But Kadris closed his eyes. Mister Gina blew smoke at the road ahead. And the driver’s foot fell upon the accelerator pedal with renewed purpose.

  We ate hungrily from a plate of schnitzel and cold chips, peppers and onions, and for the first time I found myself divining the gentler properties of raki, which reminded me of pastis and liquorice.

  In the declining light and through the misted windows the view of the Myzeqe softened, and with it the view of the hills outside distant Fier dissolved to darkness.

  Kadris was pointing out of the window, and rather futilely I was searching the murk for the distant hilltop, for the Ardenice Monastery, where Kadris had worked as a tourist guide. It wasn’t a job that he had actively sought.

  ‘One day I was told I would no longer be required to teach literature. I was asked to be a guide. Usually,’ he said, ‘this was not a job to fall to someone of my biografi.’ Contact with foreigners was considered a perk, like access to good food and good wine.

  ‘And you should know,’ he added, ‘the restaurant was the best in all of Albania. Absolutely the best. This is so. But at the same time the job held many risks. Many, many risks.’

  On clear days, he said, looking south from the hilltop one can see the oil wells.

  ‘The foreigners would ask me, “Please, Kadris, will you tell me, what are those tall constructions in the distance?”

  ‘Of course, I could not say, “Those are oil wells.” Somebody might overhear and I would be accused of betraying state secrets.

  ‘So naturally, I would answer: “Please, what constructions?

  I do not see anything but the beautiful Myzeqe.”’

  He rested a hand on his glass, as if to steady himself. ‘All my life I have lived in Lushnje. No one ever mentioned these labour camps.’

  By the time we motored down the hill from the Blerimi the main street of Lushnje was deserted, the café below the hotel was closed, and the only person out was Doctor Cabey’s son. We had to stop and wind down the window to receive the limp handshake of the Talking Heads fan.

  He was well. We were well. And we carried on.

  Kadris said the job of looking after the restaurant and hotel food supplies for Lushnje had fallen to the doctor’s son; the job had fallen to him because no one else could be trusted.

  But it was also a fact, he continued, that so far the director of restaurant and hotel food had lost three warehouses to ‘bandits’.

  I wondered if we might head out to Savra. We might at least find out if Shapallo was still in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Why wait until morning?’

  ‘Yes, yes, why not,’ he agreed, his tie loose and eyes bright with raki.

  Mister Gina twisted round in his seat.

  ‘Savra?’

  For the benefit of the driver he pointed a finger at the windshield and we moved on to the outskirts of town, where we felt the bump across the railway lines and pushed into the night of the countryside.

  After a short distance we find the long dirt track into Savra. As soon as we pull up, a group of men appear from the shadows and we all climb out. We huddle and stamp our feet while Kadris takes charge. For some reason the conversations are conducted in whispers. There are many hands to shake, and in the dark we are passed from one group of exiles to another, and at changeovers there is more handshaking and incomprehensible exchanges before finally we are brought to a small house belonging to an exile.

  There, the conversation continues—some of it, whenever the whim takes Kadris, is passed on.

  We meet Gani Hoxha, first brought to Savra as a two-year-old in the fifties. After a life spent in dormitories, Gani had moved to this house just eighteen months previously.

  His wife is introduced, a woman from Kukës whose biografi had received a devastating blow after it was learned that her uncle was ‘the leader of free Albanians living in Belgium’. But in recent months the uncle had turned benefactor and the living room featured a new carpet, a television set and a fridge.

  Another woman, dumpy and with prematurely grey hair, whom I would guess to be in her early to mid-forties, smiles shyly over her coffee. She coughs up the little bit of English she knows: ‘I am sorry. I have no English.’

  The food and the raki are taking a toll. I have my mind set on bed back at the hotel, when Kadris stands up. I join him, under the impression we are about to leave. Instead, once again I am invited to shake the hand of the woman who has no English. Only this time Kadris explains, ‘This is Leila. She has been looking after your friend Shapallo.’

  ‘Mister Shapallo.’ She nods, and with two quick brushstrokes Leila describes Shapallo. She raises her hand high above her head and with her forefinger drags the nail down the centre of her forehead.

  27

  LEILA THOUGHT IT was too late to disturb Mister Shapallo. She motioned us to sit down again and I forgot all about her earlier shyness. Instead of waking Shapallo at this hour, she would try to describe his arrival in Savra.

  Leila knew why Shapallo had made his way here. But by the time Shapallo had arrived in Savra, the aid and medicine had come throug
h and gone—first the Italians, then the British and the Red Cross.

  It was nightfall. Nobody was up to guide a straggler off the road. In Savra there were no outside lights, and Shapallo had wandered onto the path leading to the old dormitories and fallen into a trench. In the morning he was found by children, who ran off with news of a stranger lying dead in the ditch.

  By the time she had got to him, Shapallo was sitting up in the trench, like a man taking a bath.

  The man in the ‘bath’ gazed back at her. She asked him where he had come from—and Shapallo had to think about this before answering, ‘Topojani.’

  The crowd peeled away, and the few remaining hands assisted Shapallo from the ditch. He could hardly stand, to support himself, and it took three of them to steer Shapallo to the doorway of the nearest abandoned dormitory.

  The ceiling was low and Leila described a figure bowing his head, like a figure burrowing into a headwind.

  Curiously, nothing of Shapallo’s resemblance to the late and departed Emperor was mentioned. It had been the same thing at Gjaza: no comparison had been made. No one had been jolted to recognition. In Gjaza, on the other hand, there was no television or newspapers, or radio, but surely a few exiles would have seen postage stamps.

  Leila had simply gone to the aid of an old tramp. There was no royal swagger, such as Zog had taken with himself into exile, tipping London hotel staff with bits of gold. Nor had there been an attempt on Shapallo’s part to pass himself off as a wandering prince who had found shelter among the lower orders.

  Leila had seen an old man, wasting away, who curled up on the floor of the dormitory, clasping himself against the cold.

  Leila and Gani left him there asleep and went around the exiles asking for, and taking, whatever could be spared—a mattress, some blankets, clothing. Gani brought him a shaving razor, and Leila a bucket of water and some tallow to rub against his face. And when the sun dropped past its midday point and began to catch the plastic over the windows, Gani had stood Shapallo up before the reflection and helped to shave him.