Weeks, months passed by, and the offical provided Shapallo with other little surprises. Sometimes he turned up with chocolate. Or ice cream. Enver liked chocolate and ice cream. At other times there were books by Enver’s favourite authors— Jerome K. Jerome, Jack London, Shakespeare and Dickens. Dickens, especially. But more often he brought Shapallo chocolate, Turkish delight, and sometimes confectionery from abroad, wrapped in bright-coloured crepe paper and bows.
‘I have no family,’ he told Shapallo one time, smiling with embarrassment.
In 1970, Tef arrived with a television set and together, like a couple of aging boardinghouse indigents, they sat downstairs to watch the New Year Music Show. Every so often, as Shapallo recalled, the camera would leave the musicians and singers on stage and search among the audience for Enver’s straight back and ready smile. And whenever this happened, Tef would chuckle and push the chocolates in Shapallo’s direction.
A young woman was singing. She wore her hair long, gypsy-like, and bell-bottom jeans and a halter neck which left her stomach bare. This was extremely risqué. She was singing a love song, and when the cameras moved up close to her face, Shapallo said, he saw the grownup features of his oldest daughter, Vata; the same pear-shaped cheeks, he said, the big brown eyes which had so often stood by the door to his clinic, watching him, quiet as a shadow, sometimes for as long as half an hour before he would look up with a start and notice her.
He began to call to the woman on television, calling out his daughter’s name.
At that moment the cameras returned to mingle in the audience. Shapallo breathed out and sat back in his chair, and as he did so, he noticed that Tef had been watching him with concern, his face drawing to a professional judgment. Shapallo had felt reasonably sure that for all his generosity and his gifts, Tef was still an official who made out reports, just as he was confident there were others, whose faces he never saw, with an interest in his ‘progress’.
On this occasion Shapallo nodded silently, and the danger passed.
Last night he explained that his daughters were eight and ten when he was abducted. He had volunteered this information— tapping the side of his head to add: ‘But in here they continued to grow to adulthood, to marry and have children.’
In absentia, Shapallo had continued to celebrate their birthdays, construct conversations, even arguments. In this world he continued to have family responsibilities. He worried after them. At one time he had even considered, that is to say he had imagined, plans for their leaving Albania.
There had been few opportunities for Shapallo to notice the drift of the country outside of the block. His visits were too short for him to form an impression. But he had noticed slight but quite palpable changes in the crowd. The devotion of the earlier years had dissipated. There was still a sea of flags, but these were now held in hands which had lost all feeling.
He started to notice the general neglect. The buildings needed painting. It seemed that everything outside the block had gone into a slouch, as though the stitching that ran throughout the city had started to unravel. He overheard the gardener complain to the soldiers that there was no meat, and the soldiers complain back that machinery lay idle for want of parts.
Shapallo seemed to think it was around the early eighties that a radical change was introduced into his diet. Meat and fish were virtually eliminated, and a monotony of soups was forced upon him.
The Emperor was dying and, accordingly, a sort of cheerful emaciation was expected of Shapallo. Already, at Tef ’s insistence, Shapallo relied on a walking stick. On the same advice, these days he allowed himself to be bodily assisted to the rostrum, to take in a parade. He was to smile at the silliness of all the fuss and give every indication that recovery lay just around the corner.
But on television, Shapallo noticed, the Emperor moved slowly and painfully. No longer did the cameras lovingly soak up detail of Enver’s favoured side, but caught him at oblique angles before flitting off elsewhere.
One night there appeared a stooped and frail old man standing on a beach. In one hand Enver held an orange; his other hand pointed to the horizon, to where the cameras obediently sought out the ‘true boundary between suffering and dignity’.
Toward the end, less was asked of Shapallo. The organised mass rallies were fewer. Increasingly the Emperor’s appearances were for a television audience: footage of his walking through a sunny olive grove, of his standing between two farm workers, like a gold medallist, or in a classroom, sitting snuggled up to a litter of infants dressed in blue smocks.
It had been around this time that Shapallo had started to construct plans to send his family abroad. He toyed with the idea of a wealthy uncle in Italy, but there were unforeseen problems with that scenario. A wealthy uncle on its own was a fairly distant proposition, but Italy, as a place, its smells, its quality of light, its tastes, was unfathomable. There was nothing for Shapallo imaginatively to latch on to, and so in the end he could not bear to send his family away to a world which he couldn’t begin to imagine and, therefore, was effectively barred from entering.
34
THIS MORNING I invited Leila to the Blerimi. Mentor was due to arrive from Tirana, and I had thought about driving into town for lunch with Leila and her mother. Kadris explained the plan, and Leila, with vague intention, picked up a hairbrush. Thoughtfully she held out a grey strand of hair, then she let it go.
‘What is this Blerimi?’ she asked.
Kadris described the restaurant above Lushnje with the views of the Myzeqe, and he made as if to kiss the grease of hot schnitzel off his fingertips. But he might as well have been explaining plans for Leila to visit her father’s grave in New York. The hairbrush was put aside and she said she could not go to this restaurant, because she had never been to a restaurant. She didn’t know what to expect—she did not like surprises. There was no persuading her, and Guria went along with Leila’s decision.
If the Blerimi lay outside the boundaries of everyday experience, then Savra, equally, had caught Kadris unawares—he seemed affected by the stories he had heard.
We waited another hour and decided to set out on foot for the market in Lushnje to stock up.
It was another cold day, but tolerable in the absence of any brutal wind blowing over frozen fields. Leila walked between me and Kadris; she held her shopping basket out in front as though loitering down a supermarket aisle. The previous March, she said, this same bare road had been thick with people, among them her three sons.
She spoke of the fantastic rumours which had buzzed about Savra on the day of the exodus, and how on Tirana Television they had learned of a ‘small number of hooligans’ commandeering a number of ships in Durrës.
‘Then Eduart had tuned in to RAI and the Italians were saying something very different,’ she said.
The Italians had spoken of thousands clambering aboard ships.
‘Thousands! They did not mention “hooligans”.’
She asked me to tell her about Italy. The letters she had received so far were spare of detail. She wished to know more. She listened attentively. And of course, she asked me the question which Bill had told me is asked every foreigner: ‘How poor are we?’ Television. She wanted to know how many channels there were in Italy. She had heard it said that in America people watched television in the toilet. Could I please confirm this?
I thought back to the living-room scene we had left in Savra with Guria, Donatella and her mother, Hava, watching Bonanza off a Yugoslav channel. Lorne Greene was speaking English, but the subtitles had been in Serb.
In Rome I had looked up Franco Leonardi, the television writer for Il Messagero, who was in no doubt of television’s role in the boat exodus. He believed that a powerful transmitter built in Puglia to relay the signal to southern Italy had had the unexpected benefit of strengthening reception across the Adriatic. In the cluttered Old World off ices of Il Messagero Franco described how Albania had at last seen the truth about the outside world.
The twin realities were starkly obvious: since the regime had given up on jamming reception, an exile seated in a cold room in Savra could watch commercials about Lancias, ankle-deep carpet and beautiful women lowering themselves into sunken baths foaming with bubbles. If they looked up from the set, out the window, they saw mud and no prospects.
Eventually the white pebbles at the bottom of the hill ranges grew to the size of apartment boxes. Soon after, we were stepping over the railway lines and onto the main road through Lushnje.
We stopped by the hotel. I spared a thought for my things in my room upstairs. But I could not bear to go up there and touch base, even briefly.
The woman crouched inside the small candlelit cubicle thought Mentor was down at the railway station.
‘A mechanical problem,’ said Kadris.
In Lushnje there are two markets. There is the one in the square beneath the Democratic Party Headquarters. The other is by the railway station, a sprawling area of dust and trucks.
Canvas awnings are unhooked at the back of trucks, and out climb cold, weather-bitten travellers who have journeyed in from surrounding villages.
The men leap down casually, limber as gymnasts, eager to put arrival behind themselves and blend in. The women, with the huge bags and encumbered with babies swaddled in blankets, are left to struggle out on their own; on one foot they balance, dangling their free foot below for the step, while their husbands gaze off in another direction or else cup their hands to get their cigarettes lit.
Eventually we spot the Volvo, its rear axle propped up on top of a pile of stones and Mentor, trustingly, stretched out underneath to tie on the exhaust pipe.
Kadris addresses Mentor’s feet—they give a small kick, and in a jiff Mentor has wriggled out. The sight of us is the cause of great distress or sublime pleasure, I’m not sure which. He buries his face in Kadris’s chest and gives a heart-rending apology for our having had to walk from Savra, but some tragedy had befallen his car in the night.
He had started out with the relatively minor inconvenience of a puncture, but had made things worse by driving on it from the hotel to the garage here. The Volvo, lopsided and with a battered wheel rim, seemed to indicate the fate of every toy that had been sent home from Italy.
The man in the garage rolled out the wheel rim. He’d made a pretty good job of hammering it back to shape. It just remained for his son to return with a bike tube from home. Bicycle tubes were the country’s sole remaining source of rubber.
We were there another hour before the garage man’s son showed up. In that time a truck which had driven up from the Greek border arrived with brandy, cigarettes, pasta, kerosene, goat meat, chocolate, girlie calendars and television sets.
I bought some brandy, some meat and rice, and half a dozen bottles of kerosene.
After Mentor fitted on the wheel there followed a strange Byzantine quest for tomatoes and onions. Mentor was particularly aggressive in this pursuit. In the lowering gloom of the afternoon we drove to different parts of Lushnje, from one house to another, and in due course found ourselves on the road headed south to Berat.
In a short while we left the road and followed a farm track for a time, until it ended in a lean-to cobbled together from loose rocks. We stayed in the car, our shoulders jammed together for warmth, while Mentor in his city shoes marched belligerently around the back of the dwelling, yelling out for the occupant. When he returned to the car he stuck a package under Kadris’s nose.
It smelled like cat piss, but Kadris dreamily inhaled.
‘I have not had goat cheese for many, many months,’ he said.
Later, back in Savra, in Leila’s flat, the goat cheese was consumed in the kind of ritual silence that marks the end of a famine. Shapallo ate noisily, sucking and nibbling at the crumbling cheese between his forefinger and thumb. He sucked the cheese off his fingertips and turned his attention to the brandy, while Mentor told us a story about a priest who had been ordered by the Party to stand before his congregation and renounce his faith.
The wily old priest did as the Party asked, and addressed the congregation, but he ended his retraction saying, ‘Listen very carefully. From now on, you must do as I do.’
‘That night,’ said Mentor, ‘the priest escaped.’
We all laugh, except for Shapallo. I can see him turning it over in his head. The priest escapes. Yes. The priest escapes… where?
‘He escapes,’ said Mentor simply.
35
SHAPALLO HAD BEEN instructed on the protocol should he be cut down by an assassin’s bullet. And he had been instructed to keep in mind that he should make light of his injuries while he lay in public view, since the real emperor would survive. In the messy event of a car bomb, then all that went out the window.
It is easy to imagine a life spent behind walls in the block obsessively plotting, yearning for the Emperor’s death. But curiously, by his own admission, Shapallo had hardly given it any thought. His teeth bit and he cast a thin look as if this was the wildest idea.
‘Remember,’ he said, ‘I was the one who was supposed to die.’
The night Hoxha died, Shapallo was awakened by an intruder. A hand shoved rudely against his mouth. There was the click of a torch.
Shapallo paused, and briefly looked up from his account.
It was Tef, he said.
‘I knew Hoxha was dead, or something terrible like that,’ he said.
And a moment later it was confirmed that something calamitous had indeed occurred, when Tef for the first time abandoned his official distance.
‘My dear old friend,’ Tef had started.
There was so little time. There he was, about to be cast back out to the real world, and yet absurdly, Shapallo suddenly felt consumed with worry over small, insignificant details.
Tef had thought to bring with him a package of clothes. But Shapallo found the trousers too short in the leg. He fussed about. He was disappointed in the colour of the shirt Tef had chosen. It was an army officer’s shirt and Shapallo didn’t like the flaps over the pockets.
He was given money. A map. And finally, the official offered his real name.
‘Your family,’ he started. But when he didn’t add anything, Shapallo guessed.
‘Dead?’
The official nodded.
‘My girls?’
‘Dear Shapallo. A month after you came here.’
An hour later they slipped from the house. The door from the garden creaked open and the official pushed him out to the street. Numb with grief, and like an aging Rip van Winkle, Shapallo had groped through the block without a clue in which direction his best hope lay.
The Topojani of his imagination, which had sustained him all these years, was gone. His daughters’ marriages, and the grandchildren he had gained—all that had been stripped away. He mourned the loss of a world, as much as he grieved for his family.
It was very late, but there were lights on in many of the villas in the block. In one window, the sight of a woman pressing her hands to her face reminded him of his own grief, and in his hour of release he found himself weeping for his children.
Tef had warned him to look out for soldiers and police, but Shapallo said he walked without a care. He felt that he couldn’t be hurt any further; he had lost the capacity to fear. Soon the ground turned rough. The city sank deeper into night, and he realised that he had left the block behind. But already, after the years of captivity, he found himself out of breath, and he felt the new rawness of blisters forming over his heels and ankles.
That first night of ‘freedom’ Shapallo had crawled into a bomb shelter in a children’s playground. He described the shelter overgrown with weeds, the soggy darkness and its stink of old urine. It was damp underfoot, and without a satisfactory place to lie down he had simply leaned against a wall and dozed off.
He woke on the ground covered in slime and with one side of his clothing wet through. From the world above, he could hear the rusted seesaws groaning and the chi
ldren’s squealing and the pitter-patter of tiny feet. Hours later, a shaft of light made it to the top steps of the bomb shelter entrance. Shapallo waited until he could no longer hear children’s voices, and when all was quiet he went and sat on the step farthest from the entrance and dried himself in the sun.
He waited until sundown before leaving the bunker. On the outskirts of the city a roadblock forced him off the road.
He slipped through the courtyard of a housing block. In the dark he upset a number of oil bottle crates and he ran with fright from the noise, down a short slope, and sank ankle deep into the fields.
Under these circumstances Shapallo hadn’t found much use for the map. The dark bulk of a mountain stood out against the lighter skyline and he started in its direction. For hours he walked away from the city. And when he could not take another step he had sat down in a field and smelled soybeans and alfalfa. He smelled the countryside and breathed in its vastness. For the first time since leaving the block he ‘listened’ to his hunger, and while lying on his back he had reached out and stuffed alfalfa into his mouth, like a farm animal.
36
ON MY FOURTH day in Savra, I was surprised to find the brigadier sitting up to Leila’s table, with a coffee. I recognised him immediately as the same man I had seen stumbling through the ground mist the other morning.
He was a shy man in his late thirties. He had a round face with thin black hair which lay lifelessly to one side. A sparse stubble covered his chin. I could find nothing in his appearance that suggested privilege.
But it was a surprise, all the same, to find him under the same roof as an exile.
‘We are all friends,’ Paitim said, and glanced away nervously.
Leila certainly thought about it. She looked up, as if she had espied something very delicately balanced in the distance about to fall—and she let it go.