Leila had had three sons by Xherat. A few months earlier, the boys had sent their mother a photograph from Italy. In the photo, Eduart, Markelian and Fatmir have met with a crowd of boat refugees under a fountain in Rome. Despite their new clothes, all the Albanians appear to be stunned by their new circumstances. There is an unmistakable longing, as well—and it comes of the refugees, fifteen of them, all at once drawing in their breath to stare bleakly down the tunnel of the camera lens.
I thought back to what Shapallo had said about his first years in the block, the distress the image in his shaving mirror caused him and his desperate recall of the blown-up photographs in Kukës, this ‘looking-glass’ and link back to his old life, to Topojani. Every moment alone he had entered the photographs and retraced an imaginative journey back up the remote mountain gorge, to his other life as a dentist, husband and father, and each time, he said, the patient hadn’t left the clinic and he was just able to resume where he had left off.
And much later, back at the hotel in Lushnje, lying on my bed and trying to ignore the stench along the corridor, I thought back to life on Kansas Street and Cliff ’s crude attempt to cut off his past.
A few days before I was due to fly out, I had called round to say goodbye to Cliff.
Bess had answered the door. She thought Cliffy was out and checked with a glance down the steps. But there was no light on in the basement. I had already looked. So she said, ‘Oh dear, you had better come in.’
We sat in the living room, Bess on the edge of an armchair, carefully studying me.
‘You know, I barely remember you at all,’ she said. ‘Not really. I remember your uncle and aunt. And, of course Louise…I am sorry for what happened. But we weren’t close. People tended to feel uncomfortable around Cliffy.’
‘Cliff ’s quite a character,’ I said, and Bess thought about that.
‘Of course, things haven’t turned out the way I once thought they would.’ And here, she managed to laugh. ‘My father, he used to say to me, “Bess, make a wish.” Well, Cliff was not that kind of man. As you know, he worked with his hands.’
This was my first time in the house proper, and over the hearth I noticed a line of dark squares on the wallpaper.
Bess said, ‘You’re looking to where our photographs used to hang. Cliff took them all down. Not that it has made any difference. They might as well be up.’
She inclined her head toward a gilt-edged picture stand. There was a hole where the photograph used to be.
‘Shame about that one. It was the only one we had of Cliff and his parents in Sheffield. That’s in England. Cliff was once English, as you might well have been aware.’
Bess said she used to like to sit in the chair where I was now.
‘When the children were young, I could alternate between the green hills out the window and the black chimneys of Sheffield.’
Suddenly Bess had stopped and caught me off-guard, with a smile. She just wanted to say how happy she was that I had thought to visit. She was glad I had come.
‘There’s not the same opportunity to talk when Cliff ’s around,’ she said.
Then she put on the jug and returned with a tray.
She sat down, once again balancing on the edge of her armchair. ‘There is something else I would like to talk about,’ she said.
She gazed back at the wall, to another blank space, and prised from it another story. We went from one vacated space to another. Bess explained them all. The holiday snaps. The children’s triumphs, from backyard play to graduation, Cliff at a ham radio operators’ convention. ‘It’s a shame you can’t see for yourself. But Cliff is the short one. The tall man with the badges pinned to his hat is from Anchorage. I remember Cliffy saying he was the one in regular contact with Russian fishermen in the Kurile Islands.’
From what Bess had to say, I had imagined the photographs showing Cliff progressively impatient with the photo taker. Increasingly, I imagined Cliff half in and half out of photographs, wanting to take leave of the situations he is obliged to participate in, and all the time craving a different life.
Of the happier times there had been photographs of Cliff and Bess with the kids at the beach—collecting agar out of the red and white seaweed tossed up on the south Wairarapa coast; a more summery one of the family lolling among the sandhills and grass at Riversdale; Cliff looking up from hammering in a tent peg; Cliff with a 1960s sun-glazed contentment, as he carries his shoes and socks across the mud flats at low tide.
I found Bess gazing at the far end of the wall, and for the life of me I could not superimpose over that abandoned square a picture of Cliff on skis. In fact, I found it difficult to believe in any of the faded blocks of wallpaper coloured in by Bess.
I wondered where the photographs were, and whether I might see them for myself. I asked Bess this, and her eyes froze.
‘Don’t you see? This is what I have been trying to tell you. Cliff took them all down.’
‘Yes, but I thought, perhaps if I could see them?’
Bess shook her head at my slowness.
‘Cliff burnt them. Every single photograph that was up there.’ It had happened a few weeks after his retirement.
‘Cliff took down all the photographs and incinerated them.’
31
‘THE ONLY THING I felt then was that I was King, and born to be one. I experienced next such a delicious feeling, hard to express…’
It was the occasion of Shapallo’s first public outing as the Emperor’s understudy, and as his motorcade entered the Tirana football stadium, the crowd rose to its feet with a deafening cheer.
He was introduced to the players from both teams, and as he moved along their line the players bowed, or smiled so easily and willingly that Shapallo, out of gratitude for their easy acceptance of him in the Emperor’s clothes, smiled handsomely back.
At the correct moment, and as he had been drilled to, he took a step backwards and glanced skyward to summon a dark speck in the west which grew to a squadron, and seconds later, planes swooped low and noisily over the stadium.
The conjuror’s timing was excellent on this occasion, but Shapallo was mindful that he could never outdo the Emperor. It was said that during a trip to a drought-stricken area, Hoxha had raised a hand and stroked life-giving rain from the dusty air.
Timing was the essential thing here. The proof of the pudding. In the event of an earth shudder, it would best be seen to concur with some prescient acknowledgment from the Emperor; a tilt of the head, a momentary withdrawal from conversation to reflect, a hand raised as if to summon forth, a quickly withdrawn smile—these were to be accepted as godly commands. If it had rained, then surely it was a case of the Great Leader having divined that the moment was right.
At the soccer stadium Shapallo had allowed his eye to wander, at first unwittingly animating large sections of the crowd wherever his gaze happened to pause, then more wilfully tempting first himself and then the crowd, encouraging a thousand voices to chant, ‘May every day be a birthday for Enver!’ The noise caused even the players down on the pitch to gaze up at the terraces. A tilt of his head sent a flutter through several thousand flags.
Encouraged, Shapallo waved—and the crowd, they adored him. Shapallo said he had never before felt so loved.
Some minutes later, he shook his head, and the watchful crowd expressed for him his disappointment at a missed opportunity. Down on the field the players hung their heads.
Now the crowd was on its feet, chanting—wishing Shapallo a long and happy life. May he prosper. May the sun always single out the Great Leader with its warmth. And as he was ushered by anxious officials and minders towards the car down on the pitch, Shapallo had thought of his patients, the way they used to come to the door silent with dread—and God willing, afterwards left, shaking him by the hand. He got in the back of the limousine happily reassured in the knowledge that he had pleased.
Many of the questions I have for Shapallo revolve around the business of bein
g king. How, for example, do you abandon one life which has left its marks while laying claims to having lived another? I would have thought that physical resemblance to the Great Leader would serve Shapallo well only at a distance.
These things of course had concerned Shapallo too, as he was especially mindful that his continued existence and plausibility went hand in hand.
He mentioned one of his minders, a man called Tef, who had stuck it out with him from start to finish and never failed to refer to him in any other way but ‘Comrade Enver’. In the early days Shapallo had asked for newsreels of Enver Hoxha so he could study the Emperor’s mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. He’d asked Tef for photographs that might show the Emperor on the front foot, or surprised, or magnanimous.
‘And?’
We happened to be sitting on Shapallo’s bed at this moment, like birds on a wire, and Shapallo reached across Kadris to tap my knee.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
Instead, Tef had brought him books on French culture and history, and he had reminded Shapallo, ‘Remember, Comrade Enver, you are partial to all things French.’
So he read voraciously—everything that Tef brought him. Poetry. Novels. Books on the French language. He read to fill in the time. But, later, his appetite grew and he started to read with increasing awareness that he had been set on a quest.
It had taken some time, years in fact, for Shapallo to arrive at the place Tef had hinted, but one afternoon in 1970 Shapallo had sat down with a new book. He was only a few chapters into Mémoires when he put the book down and began to pace up and down in his room, greatly agitated by his arrival in the court of the Sun King, and of course, by the knowledge that everything he needed and wanted to know was here at his fingertips.
For the next hour Shapallo reeled off the Sun King’s axioms, as if they were his own.
He described Louis’s vain pleasure in singing in private passages of opera prologues which were full of his praises. Even at public dinners, with his entire court present, Louis would shamelessly hum these praises between his teeth.
Louis had had a medal struck with a globe of the world balancing on the tip of his sword, and with the motto: Quad libet licet: I can do with it what I please.
To the poet who composed the finest sonnet in praise of the King, Louis awarded a medal of himself, represented in the figure of the Sun, despatching clouds and chasing away the night birds and monsters.
Upon the gate of one of the Jesuit colleges in Paris, Louis struck out the name of Jesus, whose rule of order was set on every Jesuit-owned building, and substituted his own name instead.
Louis had depended on an extensive network of spies, the most important source being the post office chief, since royal omniscience extended to weeding out the slightest complaint or contempt for the King—a throwaway phrase was often enough.
Shapallo quoted from a traveller’s journal: Lord Montague, a visitor to Louis’s Versailles, had counted more than two hundred pictures and statues of Louis in his house and garden. ‘He is strutting in every panel and galloping over one’s head in every ceiling…and if he turns to spit he must see himself in person or as his vice regal, the Sun.’
He closed with a description of a drawing Thackeray had done of Louis. The drawing, if I have understood this correctly from Kadris’s sweaty translation, contained three figures. On the left, Thackeray portrayed the young King as a tailor’s dummy, with a wig, false calves and high-heel shoes. In the centre he had drawn a small bald man called ‘Louis’—to the right, a sketch of the combination of the tailor’s dummy and the little bald man, and Thackeray had captioned the drawing: ‘Louis, the King. The greatest actor of Royalty the world has seen!’
‘When I read that,’ said Shapallo, ‘I experienced real hope. Of course, I must tell you that I had known I would have to act, like an actor, but until that moment it had never occurred to me that Enver had been doing the same.’
32
ONE OF ENVER Hoxha’s favourite camera hands had been Zerena’s husband, Palli Kuke. One night before starting south I met at the Hotel Tirana and Palli had told me about his work.
Every camera angle had to be approved by the Press Board of the Central Committee of the Party, and this office had direct contact with Ramiz, who filled a kind of producer’s role.
Only the right side of Enver was to be filmed: Palli said Enver had a problem with his left eye. ‘It was slightly smaller.’
Specific rules determined how close Palli could go with the camera. ‘You could never go so close as only to get the head— the shot had always to contain the body so his wrinkles wouldn’t show.’
Enver had to be presented as youthful, so Palli was obliged to use filters to soften the image.
‘He was a great master at working the camera. A great actor and a director with extraordinary capacities,’ said Palli.
‘We could tell by Nexhmije’s eye if everything was perfect or not,’ he said.
Nexhmije always stood behind Enver, as consort, but also as wardrobe consultant and director’s assistant. Nexhmije had to make sure everything was in place on the set before the show could begin.
‘On this occasion we had made all the preparations in the Hoxha residence. Everything,’ he recalled, ‘was ready. The word came that Enver and Nexhmije were on their way up the street.
‘You should understand,’ he said, ‘it was as if the air moved when they came into a room. The camera hands were the only ones allowed to move around but we had to move in such a way as to prevent creating an air current.
‘I was moving very slowly so as to show that I was not aware of what I was seeing or hearing. When, quite unexpectedly, Enver changed course. This was completely unscheduled. Enver did not enter the house as planned but went to sit in the park opposite. This set off a terrible confusion inside the house.
‘Now, as Enver reached the park he started toward a bench. His intention was clear. He was going to sit down.
‘At that moment, a huge man I had seen in the house rushed out with a pillow. He arrived just in time, and as Enver lowered himself the huge man placed the pillow, and quickly disappeared so that Enver would not feel embarrassed.
‘Such things, we did not film.’
‘Enver’s death? Oh. Oh. Oh.’ He clasped a hand to his cheek. ‘Everything on television had to be about Enver. Nexhmije was director and our instructions were to show only film which would suggest a catastrophe was about to follow.
‘I was with Enver to the end. Even in death. The cameraman had to be there with the body.’
33
THIS MORNING THE windows in Leila’s apartment are misted over, and white. I can hardly move for the cold. The session with Shapallo last night straggled on into the small hours. Shapallo lost his shyness around Leila and she joined us and upheld a polite but formal interest, to begin with. But as the evening wore on, she corrected Kadris’s dates and told her own stories. We had a bottle of raki to warm our insides and soon we were laughing and conversing easily. At some point Guria appeared at the door to say she had found some bedding. And after that, we were better able to relax, without any further thought to the walk ahead of us, back to Lushnje.
I don’t know what hour it was when we bade Shapallo farewell. Leila had already retired. Our last view of Shapallo was from the window, of the old man crouched over his Bunsen burner, warming his hands, his great coat hanging from his shoulders, looking less like an Emperor than a shag lifting its wings, ready for flight.
There’s some rustling coming from the other side of the wall. It’s the mystery room between Leila’s door and the communal toilet. Donatella, Fatmir’s eighteen-month-old daughter, is up. I hear her shrieks and wide-eyed voice and Guria’s purring from the other room.
I wear everything to bed. All I have to take off are my boots. Kadris has the couch on the other side of the room. He falls asleep with his tie still knotted. A corpse in a suit buried beneath Leila and Guria’s black coats.
A horse coughs in
the fields, and then it is quiet again.
I get up at first light and wander outside. A line of women scarved up against the cold shoulder their picks and shovels out to the fields. Stumbling after them is a man in blue trousers and a blue jacket. He has just spotted me, and can’t believe his eyes.
I wave, and he turns after the women.
The faint beginnings of a sun draw the cold up from the earth; it rises through the thick soles of my Dolomites. These same conditions are all but ignored by a girl of about fourteen walking by in a cotton shirt. Her hard young breasts point ahead and she trails a head of dirty hair on her shoulders. She’s carrying a prize in her hand—a piece of bread sprinkled with sugar, a far cry from when the murals on the walls of the bread and fruit shops were hidden by piles of food, and children threw grapes in the air, like peanuts.
During his years in the block Shapallo had not wanted for anything. The times when the Emperor was unwell Shapallo had been obliged to skip a meal so that, together, Hoxha and he might grow wan and stingy-mouthed at the thought of food. Otherwise, as in a child’s world, everything was provided for.
As in a child’s world he did as told—for instance, he must fix his eye on an imaginary face at the very edge of the crowd. On the rare occasion of a crowded room he must resist the entrapment of detail and instead focus on doorways and distant walls.
These instructions had come from Tef, the smiling official, who gave Shapallo every encouragement to think of himself as Emperor.
On his arrival in the block, Shapallo was given a dressing gown. He was also given Chinese underclothing. A pair of sandals for indoor wear. A cap like Enver’s. Several double-breasted suits of grey flannel, and that was it. Clothes for public occasions. Otherwise in private he lived in a dressing gown and sandals to prevent another identity emerging through a second change of clothing.
He had been in the block three months, and this particular day, which was the Emperor’s birthday, Tef showed up with flowers, sweet Williams, for Shapallo.