The oil studies of Lenin are succeeded by a photograph of the ‘bookish’ Enver, studying at Montpellier University; books pile up on a corner of his desk. A pipe smoulders away at his elbow.
We stop before a glass-framed article from L’Humanité, the French Communist Party newspaper. The thing confusing Shapallo is the by-line of Lulo Malessori, the pseudonym behind which Enver had unleashed his attacks against King Zog.
The custodian explains this to Shapallo, and the matter of Zog’s withdrawal of Enver’s scholarship at Montpellier. Enver’s shift to Paris; his brief sojourn in Belgium.
But it is only the pseudonym which interests Shapallo, this confection of another identity which had left Enver free to explore a different kind of life. He is completely entranced.
The custodian is making searching glances toward the stairs and checking her watch. She tries to take Shapallo’s elbow, but he won’t budge from this remnant of Enver’s life as Lulo Malessori.
The woman appeals to Kadris. We really shouldn’t be here. It was an exceptional circumstance.
‘Please,’ she says.
Kadris takes Shapallo by his arm, and the woman pushes him from behind down the stairs.
There are some sharp words for the boy-soldier blowing on his frozen fingers, and the door cracks behind us.
Snowf lakes melt on the pink and grey cobblestones. The smoking grey slate rooftops have grown darker.
40
PALLI KUKE TELLS the story of filming Enver during one of his last visits to Gjirokastër.
Enver had come to visit with an old relative and Palli’s job was to get footage of the prodigal son returned home sitting in a relative’s backyard. The secret police had already been through the place. The water had been tested, the coffee had been prepared well in advance and the cameras began to film Enver at leisure.
Everything was proceeding nicely. The Great Leader was halfway through telling this woman, his relative, that despite the years marching on they were both still very strong.
But the woman refused to humour him.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘We are so very old.’
Enver smiled tolerantly. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I will live to be one hundred.’
‘No, no!’ cried the old crone. ‘I tell you, we are all finished!’
Ramiz and Nexhmije exchanged anxious looks. Palli kept his eye hard against the lens. He could feel the tension among the aides and the variously employed secret police. Everyone was panicking as to what would happen next.
There was no way to stop that old woman until Ramiz skil-fully intervened. To everyone’s relief Ramiz said to Enver, ‘Of course you will live to one hundred, because that is in your family line. But you will get another twenty years from socialism.’
Everyone immediately relaxed and applauded Ramiz’s promise to Enver that he would live to the ripe old age of one hundred and twenty.
41
BEFORE LEAVING GJIROKASTËR I had bought some Greek beer and we drank it while tracking a river valley the thirty kilometres to Tepelenë. Mentor had the car heater billowing warm air to the back and everyone was in a good mood, glad to be out of the weather, and soon the bottles were rolling on the floor, back and forth, under our feet.
We had left behind the snow clouds and everything was grey and purple, with streaks of green pasture sown among rocks on the valley sides. Shapallo said this is how Topojani had appeared in his thoughts over the years.
In spring, after the last rains, the women picked herbs off the rocks. Shapallo’s Topojani resisted the usual seasonal changes. It was always spring. In spring the children were always leading the goats and sheep back up to higher ground to nibble at the green wet from the melted snow. The bumps in the road made his head jog with happy memories.
He laughed aloud one time, opening his eyes with surprise. He reeled something off in a hurry, and Kadris dutifully passed on that ‘Mister Shapallo had temporarily lost himself in Topojani’.
A few kilometres later, Shapallo asked if we could carry on to Tirana. He said he would like to see Munz.
After that Mentor drove like an old nag with its nose turned for home. We sped through Tepelenë, a grey nondescript village where Lord Byron, in 1809, had spent a few nights as the guest of Ali Pasha. The pasha had praised Byron’s small, delicate fingers. In return Byron had been moved to write of the virility of the people in ‘Childe Harold’:
Where is the foe that ever saw their back?
Who can so well the toil of war endure?
South of Fier we strike the oilfields. Partly congealed oil slicks dribble into slack rivers, and before a factory wall with a beautiful mural of paradise, a Chinese truck rests on its axles.
We catch up with some traffic, Russian and Chinese trucks filled to the gunwales with secondhand washing machines and fridges, and rugs. The passengers squat down in the back between appliances, red-eyed and miserable with cold. All of them with towels wrapped around their heads from crossing the icy passes between Greece and Albania earlier in the day.
The way is flat and featureless. Men warming their gloved hands over small fires on the shingle flats look up at our passing.
By early afternoon we are back on the road between Fier and Lushnje. Rising above the unsown fields is Savra, grey and slab-like. In a few minutes we are tearing past, Shapallo with his arms folded and his eyelids at half-mast.
Now, without any need to stop at Savra, I just want to get it over with and get back to Tirana. To get over the yawning familiarity of the countryside. The gaunt figures pedalling across flat farm paths. The dismal light and the bitten-down roadside stumps.
‘Kavajë,’ announces Mentor.
He raises his hands off the steering wheel to await instruction. Kadris waves him on.
We had gone through Lushnje the same way, feeling like fugitives, no one quite able to bring themselves to mention Leila and Guria, or Doctor Cabey sitting alone in his study with his stuffed birds. I thought of Mister Gina, his sadly etched face rallying to a smile in the small aperture of our back window.
We reached the Durrës/Tirana junction with the last of the daylight. Another thirty minutes and a tidal ring of abandoned factories and the first of Tirana’s housing blocks popped up. We were all dozing when Mentor braked suddenly for a cart and horse. While we slid across the road, the horse-and-cart driver trotted on, the back of the driver’s head and the rear of the horse’s arse bobbing together.
Mentor switched on the engine and there was a terrible noise of loose metal parts being shaken up in a can—and that was the end of the gearbox.
He sprung the bonnet, but the engine was lost in the dark and poor, wretched Mentor leaned his head against the raised lid. He refused to leave the car. He worried that if he deserted it here overnight it would be picked clean and left a corpse. We left him in his car and walked silently for about ten minutes, before a bus pulled over.
Shortly after, we arrived in Tirana, careering into Skanderbeg Square like every other bus I had seen arrive—spectacularly, as though arriving in an arena, the whole body swaying on broken suspension and spilling all the passengers to one side of the bus—an old man with just two teeth grinned inches from my face. Something soft pushed against my groin. I looked down and in the old man’s hands was a duck, large, white and composed like the ones I had seen in Fier, tied to bicycle carriers.
The bus lurched to a stop. Together with the old man and his duck I fell through the doors.
Kadris held on to Shapallo’s arm and helped him down.
Across the square the sea of money changers bobbed up to the doors of the Tirana Hotel. Opposite the darkened Palace of Culture the lights were on in the mosque. From a first-floor window in the side of the museum building, a tired tape of Michael Jackson’s Bad blared over the heads of the money changers. In a completely unexpected way Tirana felt welcoming, even exhilarating. The lights were out—the result of yet another power cut—but the people were abroad in numbers, hopeful and expectant of so
mething happening.
Kadris was laughing—Shapallo had wanted to know what had become of Enver. There was a hole in the night where the eighteen-foot statue had previously stood and Shapallo wanted to wander over and inspect the curled-up tear in the metal.
I said to Kadris, ‘Let’s get a beer at the Dajti.’
We had to push Shapallo through the various zones, past the fringe of begging gypsy children, the expensive red taxis, the soldiers who stood on the hotel steps as if it were the presidential palace, through the revolving doors into a lobby crowded with smoke and talk.
Kadris went to tighten the knot in his tie, as always mindful of his tidy appearance. But I noticed a layer of grime around his white collar, and the cuffs of his trousers were caked with dried mud from Savra. I hadn’t shaved once in all the time away from here. My skin hadn’t seen a cake of soap either.
A waitress carrying a fax on a silver tray passed under Shapallo’s nose with a look of disgust.
There were women with fur stoles. Men with shiny black shoes and buttoned-up coats. Businessmen from the former bloc countries rocked on their heels, their thin lips unable to suppress the delight they felt at the longing, around them, for their sharp clothes. These intensely felt jealousies of a high-school prom attached to every glance.
Conversation hummed along in half a dozen languages. But one familiar voice singled itself out. His back was turned to me. The elbows of his ski jacket fanned out as his hands circled the air.
‘They do this veal coquette thing. You know, done up in breadcrumbs and butter. And some kind of antipasto with eggplant I’m sure they stole from someplace. Tomatoes, chives, olives…with a little parmesan sprinkled.’
One of the aid people caught my eye, said something, and Bill turned at the elbow. He turned right the way round, then squinted through his spectacles.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘There you are!’
Then he held out a hand and I introduced Kadris and Shapallo, and Bill said, ‘Oh yeah, glad to meet you.’
42
WE WERE IN Tirana only another four days, but in that time we ran about like tourists.
On the second morning back, I walked Kadris across town to the railway station. We’d been in touch with Mentor the previous day. His car was waiting for parts to be sent by his nephew in Italy. In the meantime, he had returned home and was paying a neighbour fifty leks a night to sleep in the car and keep watch.
I was sorry to see Kadris go, but he had a wife and four-year-old child waiting for him back in Lushnje. Before leaving he introduced me to one of his former English students, Diani, who worked in the university publishing house. Diani was a small, feisty bundle of energy who lived with her soccer-coach husband in an apartment towards the bottom end of the Boulevard of Martyrs.
She had clapped her hands and yelped with excitement when she learned I had been in Kukës.
‘Did you find it beautiful? Oh, and the lake,’ she said. ‘It is my favourite place in all of Albania.’
She described where she had lived there, in one of the apartments near the playground with the rusted Ferris wheel. On the other side of the playground was a soccer field, and her apartment overlooked that.
‘Kukës is where I met Raffi,’ she said. ‘I used to stand on my balcony and watch him kick the ball.’
Kadris and I said our goodbyes. He promised to look out for Leila. On the steps of the bus he had another inspiration. Perhaps even take her some food?
His bus started to fill up and Kadris disappeared under a cargo of boxes and poultry, and I was able to slip away.
With Munz and Shapallo, one afternoon we found Shapallo’s old house. A German oil executive was living there now. His wife answered the door but refused us entry. So we stood in the garden and Shapallo had to place for us the dull earthenware pot that had brimmed with sweet Williams. We stood before the wall where the soldiers had stood, and where in summer faint brown clouds of insects hovered overhead, stuck in the aroma of the banana-fruit nectar and wisteria.
He and Munz got along in French.
Shapallo said to Munz, ‘I don’t remember these curtains.’ We turned to the window. Shapallo waved and the oil executive’s wife pulled a face. A light rain began to fall and Munz put his arm through Shapallo’s to hurry him along.
Shetitone Donika Kastrioti is the rruga on the very perimeter of the block, divided from the Boulevard of Martyrs by a park with the triple busts of the patriots from whom the rruga takes its name. We were walking there, past the Italian villas and ministries, when Munz pointed out Enver’s son-in-law. He was one of a number of men lounging outside the wrought-iron fence of one of the villas.
I hadn’t given much thought to the Hoxha family. Besides Nexhmije, I knew Enver had left behind two sons and a daughter. I had assumed that they had fled the country. As for Nexhmije, in Shkodër I had heard her variously rumoured as dead, exiled to Greece, or living in great luxury in Paris.
Munz laughed dismissively.
‘Nexhmije is alive and well. In fact she is living in this very street.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Why not? I don’t know the exact house, but it is in this street.’
Shapallo stood detached, his hands clasped behind his back and without much of a clue as to what we were talking about.
‘She is in this street,’ Munz continued, and then broke away. He caught up with a woman leaving the gate of a villa up ahead.
Munz explained that the woman was from the Libyan embassy.
She nodded to a three-storey white slab building next door to the Libyans.
‘Yes. That is Nexhmije,’ she said.
It all seemed so improbably easy. I looked back in the direction we had come, but the son-in-law had disappeared.
I said to Munz, ‘Is she sure?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He added, ‘Nexhmije’s whereabouts is no great secret, at least, not in Tirana.’
The woman from the embassy was eager to help. She ran back inside to retrieve a telephone number, but returned apologetic. The number she had was the old one for the former Hoxha compound.
I asked Munz to check just one last time. The reply was sharp: ‘Nexhmije! Yes, I have seen her for myself.’
The white building gave nothing away. On every floor the curtains were drawn. Munz read my thoughts, and chuckled. ‘Another time.’
We wandered across the park opposite the Dajti and took shelter under a tree out of the drizzle. A man had driven his Fiat into the artificial lake and was washing it down with soapy water. A steady breeze blew the suds across the lake to the far side.
Munz thought it would be a good idea for Shapallo to visit Enver’s tomb, so we took one of the red taxis up to the shrine, which overlooks the city.
It was more exposed on the knoll, and the soldiers guarding Enver’s remains blew on their fingers. They complained to Shapallo about the low pay they got compared with the ordinary police, who they claimed received special cigarette and raki allowances on top of their regular wage. They were a discontented lot. Guarding Enver’s bones was not the job it used to be.
In the past, when the relieving shift came on, the old shift had to depart, walking backwards, and without taking their eyes off the tomb until the new guard was in place. But a slackness had slipped into the job ever since Enver’s statue in Skanderbeg Square had been hauled down and urinated on. It was a curious conversation, which Shapallo relayed back through Munz, as the soldiers spoke about a loss of pride and the low morale which had entered the job.
Shapallo wandered around the tomb. He was a good deal more interested in Enver’s burial place than he had been in the house in which he had spent all those years as Enver’s double. At one point he placed a foot on the tomb and a soldier was sufficiently moved to stamp out his cigarette and with his rifle steer Shapallo back to a respectful distance.
It was during the ride back to Munz’s apartment, where Shapallo was staying, that he started to discuss with Munz the Sun King’s death. It
was all passed on by a startled Munz: how, at the moment of death, Louis’s bedchamber had been turned into a butcher shop. Shapallo, as was his wont at such times, spoke slowly and assuredly, like a lecturer, shaping his sentences and stacking them on end with the palms of his hands.
The butchering was standard practice, explained Shapallo. The surgeons carrying out the autopsy had discovered half the Sun King’s upper jawbone was missing. The dissection further revealed evidence of a prodigious appetite: a huge royal stomach and intestines, twice the normal length. A tight-fitting shoe when finally prised from one foot had those gathered around Louis’s bedchamber gagging on the foul smell of gangrenous flesh.
Munz said to me, ‘I had not heard him speak of Louis before.’
But Shapallo was not finished. Munz sat back and he continued.
He had sometimes wondered, he said, had he intercepted a bullet during those years he was the Emperor’s decoy, and were he subjected to the same intense autopsy as Louis, whether his captors would have found stamped over his grey matter a town plan of Topojani, with every cottage and family represented.
Later that evening I found Munz waiting for me down in the lobby. As I approached he said, ‘I think he wants to go back.’
Topojani wasn’t on Cliff ’s map, but Bill had heard of it.
‘Remote. Difficult,’ he said.
Topojani was one of the villages on Mustaph’s circuit. A week before our visit to Kukës, Mustaph had tried with a truck to get to Topojani but had found the road washed away.
‘Who’s wanting to go?’ he asked.
‘Petar Shapallo.’
‘That old guy? You mean the guy you were telling me about?’ He smiled. ‘No shit.’
Then he thought for a moment. ‘If you can wait a couple of days. We’ve got a “shoe drop” planned for Shishtavec. It’s up on the border. If we don’t get there soon we won’t at all because of winter. Leave it with me,’ he said.