Biografi
Inside the door we were shown into an austere living room. On one wall, a large colour portrait of Enver and herself standing outside their holiday home in Vlorë, one year before the Emperor’s death. Two bowls of plastic flowers stood on a coffee table. One wall was taken up with bookshelves, but few books.
I had thought to ask after Enver’s real library, but any possibility of this becoming a question-and-answer session was quickly dispelled by Nexhmije. She wanted to talk about old times, and to this end she had prepared a speech.
We hear about Albania’s isolation, and how the country’s drift toward China had come about after its abandonment by the West.
‘Abandonment by the West?’
In a strong, disapproving voice, she says, ‘Please let me conclude.’
Nexhmije continues—she continued, uninterrupted, for two hours.
It is a lengthy dissertation scrambled by Diani’s increasingly panicked translation to the point of incoherence. On she goes— out of control, and meeting my glances with petrified eyes that beg me not to ask what it is Nexhmije has just said.
And Nexhmije, none the wiser, presses on with her ‘howevers’ and ‘buts’ and ‘wherefores’, and in this way the entire post-war history of Albania is bridged.
I am scribbling down nonsense when the monologue suddenly terminates, and when I look up there is Nexhmije, composed and happy as a cat.
‘Did I talk too long?’ she asks. ‘I hope not.’
‘Noooo,’ replies Diani, her hands pressed to her knees, like a child wanting to please.
‘Good.’ The cat smiles.
She excuses herself then, and returns with a tray of coffee and raki.
She is pleased, very pleased, to have had the opportunity to speak with friends. It occurs to me that she is, of course, referring to Cliff ’s letter.
‘These days,’ she says. ‘I find myself in need of friends.’
We talk about television, her favourite programs. She doesn’t care for Yugoslav television. It contains too many American programs. She prefers RAI for its sober political discussions.
Nexhmije is in the middle of explaining an invitation she received to appear on a French show when a power cut pitches the room into darkness. Nexhmije, however, is ready for this. We both are, and Nexhmije reaches for a pen light the moment I flick on Bill’s torch. Our beams cross over the top of the coffee table and we laugh about that.
Nexhmije finds a candle from the sideboard. I hold the torch while she gets the candle lit, then she takes care to move the candle closer to where I have been sitting so that I can see my notes better.
This is not going the way I had wished. I note her frail ankles, the tidy composition of her hands. Nexhmije looks like somebody’s grandmother.
Does she have nightmares? Did she see the way the Ceausescus died—the unceremonious way Nicolae and Elena were backed up to a wall, the way they sagged to their knees like two sacks? These are the questions the victims of bad biografi had asked in Rruga Ndre Mjeda.
In October from a window in the Dajti Bill had watched a crowd of fifty thousand swarm up the Boulevard of Martyrs intent on violence, chanting, ‘Death to the widow!’
I quietly let Diani know that I would like to hear about Nexhmije’s dreams at night. What enters her head at four o’clock in the morning these days?
A look of terror comes into Diani’s eyes, and a slightly different question is asked.
Nexhmije, she says, is concerned for the young people. She worries about them. They have been a little spoilt, she feels.
‘As far as the economic and psychological changes are concerned, I am a little pessimistic,’ she says.
The young people have not realised how hard people in the West work. She doubts whether the youth are equipped with the right attitude to cope.
‘Perhaps we are to blame, like parents who keep their children indoors. Now the children want to go out and away from the family.’
She manages, somehow with a straight face, to explain why Albania had locked up its borders for so long.
‘We had not the possibility to allow people to go abroad because they did not have the funds.’
Of Albania’s isolationist path: this is the fault of the West. Where was the support from the West after her husband’s criticism of Khrushchev and the country’s split with the Soviet Union in the early sixties?
‘Not even Italy came to our aid.’
Long before Dubcek, before Lech Walesa, Comrade Enver had attacked Soviet imperialism. And what happened, she asked. China had been the only one to hold out a hand. Then had come the split with China, and ever since, Albania had been left to live off its reserves.
We leave, with Nexhmije waving us goodbye from her door. On the street, though, we glance back to a curious sight. The power is on in the apartments above and below Nexhmije’s. I am left with the rueful thought that perhaps halfway up that dim stairwell Nexhmije is thinking how well the interview went for her. She even agreed to a second visit.
Diani is ecstatic. ‘Did you see? She kissed me at the door!’
She makes a thing of flicking the kiss from her cheek. She agrees that her father will be very pleased.
Her father is an old partisan who spends his days in striped pyjamas prostrate before a television set. I had met him earlier in the day, and he had rolled off the bed and walked timorously over to a chest of drawers to get his old French pistol.
In her high piping voice Diani said, ‘My father wishes to tell you that this is the pistol he used in the War of Liberation.’
I turned the pistol round with elaborate care, and the old partisan received my compliments with an impatient nod of his head. He took the pistol back and plodded off to the drawers where he wrapped it in cloth; the party trick over, he fell back on his bed and grinned up at the Albanian folk music playing on the television. He would be very proud that his daughter had had an audience with Nexhmije.
48
TWO DAYS LATER, Nexhmije was arrested. The newspapers reported with some glee that she had been taken by surprise.
She had been about to enter the car which, each day, took her to the hearing into the alleged abuses of the former block men, when instead she was shown to another car.
‘Her wrists were embellished with bracelets she had never dreamed of…’ cheered the Sindikalist newspaper.
Several days passed before we caught up with Illir. This time around he was more talkative.
We bumped in to him outside his gate. He invited us up for coffee. Inside the door of Nexhmije’s apartment he tossed off his coat and pulled off his gloves like a man home from the office. He was spirited and worked up by what had happened.
Animated in that way of bush lawyers sure of their points, Illir began to cite the Helsinki Agreement in his mother’s defence. This was the same agreement to which his father’s regime had refused to be a signatory. Nexhmije, he argued, posed neither a threat to society nor an obstruction to the gathering of evidence. By the terms of the Helsinki Agreement she should not be in prison.
There were other problems. Nexhmije was having difficulties in obtaining the services of a lawyer—another delicious irony. One lawyer who had represented Nexhmije in seven hearings had suddenly abandoned her without a word. Another lawyer had taken up Nexhmije’s case only to inexplicably drop it. Nexhmije had tried to reach him, but he refused to take her calls. Still another lawyer had withdrawn because of threats.
In one of the hearings it had come down to Illir to represent his mother. That particular battle had been small beer. In May the previous year, Nexhmije had left the grand residence in the block for these six rooms above the customs house. But this apartment as well, the prosecutor had claimed, was unjustifiably spacious for just one person. So wily Illir had moved in with his wife and children.
At that stage the scoreboard read: Nexhmije 1, the prosecutor’s office 0.
Now Nexhmije was in a small cell in the prison near the railway station. The cell was without
a glass pane in its window, and without heat. Illir had visited with her only once, and that was to bring his mother fresh clothing and some French novels.
We sat in the same living room with Illir as we had with Nexhmije, and this time Diani’s translations were more collected.
‘Illir’s mother,’ she said, ‘had anticipated anything—even worse than prison.’
‘Worse?’
‘She had feared something from a street mob. She has no fear for herself but for her grandchildren.’
‘Of course.’
‘She is convinced that her trial will have nothing to do with the charges, that it will be a political one,’ added Illir. ‘My mother believes she will be the sacrificial lamb.’
49
IT WAS DRAWING close to Christmas now, although in downtown Tirana you wouldn’t have known it. The power cuts continued as more and more electric appliances were brought across the border, overloading Albania’s light-bulb electricity supply.
Thugs fought their way to the front of bread shops and sold loaves at a mark-up to those at the back, more often than not the elderly and infirm.
One morning Bill came down to breakfast with a long face. He had just heard from Kukës. The warehouse we had visited with Mustaph had been looted and set afire. A ten-year-old boy and a policeman had been killed.
The trees between Tirana and Durrës had been chopped down to the ground, and there was talk of another boat exodus.
It was time to look up Enver’s place of exile, and on the outskirts of Tirana, with Diani, I found the former Emperor undergoing ‘rehabilitation’. Inside a foundry warehouse, a statue of Enver was lying ill-temperedly, face and toes pointed in the same direction, a Napoleonic hand thrust behind his back. Alongside stood Lenin; his arms had been torn off. Dulla had been scrawled on another bust of Enver in support of the rumours that Enver had been gay in his youth.
And here was the prized find. In a small reserved area lay remnants of the magnificent block of marble from which Kristaq Rama had sculpted his pharaoh. The foundry foreman said the ‘new’ sculptors drop by and take what they need—and in this way the pharaoh has found himself re-created into ashtrays, lamp holders and small gift-sized elephants.
The new heroes were parked around the side of the warehouse. These were scaled-down busts of writers and poets who had led the Albanian renaissance during the Ottoman rule. Their bright new white alabaster surfaces had been left to dry out in the sun. Over their shoulders, across the railway line, the grey smudge dripping from the wintry branches belonged to the ugly housing blocks with their slit windows and cramped balconies stuffed with washing.
On my last Sunday in Tirana I did something that would have pleased Nick. I attended a church service in one of the classrooms of the University Publishing House. The congregation dribbled through the doors in their bright-coloured plastics and scarves. They shook out their umbrellas in the gloom of the foyer, where the light bulbs had long since expired, and where Diani’s friends, the German apostles, waited in their dark suits to direct the traffic by torch into the classroom.
People shuffled into place behind the trestle tables. Outside, a boy held a stick insect up to a broken window, and it started to rain. An older man in the next row dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. As his discomfort mounted, a medical student took his pulse and nodded that he was fine for a moment. But the man went on wincing; then the pain would pass, and from behind I could see the bright, laughing blue of his eyes as he peered through the folds of his handkerchief at the young German pastor promising eternity and peace in heaven. Beside him his granddaughter sat on a bench and peeled a hard-boiled egg.
The congregation stood to sing and I found it surprisingly moving—to be in a classroom with ordinary folk whose simple hope was for something better than what they had known.
Diani had shopped around. She had tried the Lutherans and the Catholics. She liked the apostles because they provided medicine and sweets to every child they baptised. She didn’t care for the American evangelical style which we had watched together on television, a crowd worked up to a fever at the Tirana soccer stadium during the summer.
‘Jesus is with us here, tonight. Can you say “Jesus”?’
Twenty-five thousand voices obediently roared back.
‘Let’s hear that again. Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Let’s all say, “Jesus is the Lord!” Let’s say “Jesus is the King of Albania!”’
Later, in the foyer, I met the apostles, Wilfred and Helmut; they poured scorn on the Americans.
‘They came through here—filled the stadium, put on a big show, and left town,’ said Wilfred. ‘We’ve been here six months. But we’re not here to hand out gifts and parcels. Their souls are the important thing.’
Diani skipped away from the publishing house, gaily ignoring the rain, and laughing aloud at the joke of Helmut’s name, which in Albanian translated to ‘poison’ and ‘shit’.
I caught up with her to say goodbye. It was impossible to thank her enough. I pressed an envelope of American notes into her hand and she ran off up the street crying.
A final night out with Bill at the Petronella, a new private-enterprise restaurant tucked away at the end of an alley off the Boulevard of Martyrs, ended with us both drinking too much Bulgarian red wine. He told me Albania was his ‘last duty’. A desk job in Washington awaited him on his return. Sharon? She does exist. Bill popped a photograph onto the table of an attractive woman in her early forties. Sharon was rolling a pebble back and forth under her sneaker while she smiled at the camera. In the Petronella, Bill, glass in hand, smiled back pissy-eyed.
A final visit to Fatos and Brikena, and afterwards a look in the door of the Naim Frasheri bookshop on the ground floor. On every shelf were newly translated copies of Webster’s American Biographies on ‘three thousand significant American lives’.
50
IN THE MORNING I climbed into a red taxi. Munz lowered his head in the window to make sure I had everything. Bags. Coat. Scarf. Passport. I had to unwrap Nick’s mother’s cake before he would believe that someone was actually taking food out of Albania.
‘To Italy of all places!’ he laughed. He was happy; he was going home soon.
Outside Tirana we slowed down for some broken glass and I happened to look out at the right time to catch Mentor’s Volvo, his neighbour asleep in the back, a pair of socked feet sticking up on the headrest of the front passenger seat.
In Durrës there was time to take the road winding up the hill from the old town to King Zog’s palace. As we drew up to a courtyard, a soldier with bad acne and a mouthful of food rushed out, waving his arms to block our way.
I wound down the window and pointed to Zog’s palace. ‘Is not Zog’s palace. Is President Ramiz’s summer house’. ‘Ramiz. Ramiz,’ said the driver tiredly.
From a vantage point beneath Zog’s palace, or Ramiz’s summer house, Illir Ikonomi, along with a Durrës friend and a Finnish journalist, had watched the frantic mobs swarm up and down the wharf in search of a ship to board. Rumour had turned them from one end of the wharf to the other, like lemmings.
Illir had told me about it in Tirana, how his friend had suddenly upped and left them on the hill to join the scene down on the wharves.
‘My friend had always wanted to travel,’ Illir said. ‘He often spoke of the foreign places he dreamed of visiting.’
Later in the day, Illir had gone to the man’s family home to break to the parents the news that their son had boarded a ship for Italy. He hadn’t yet started to explain when the son had turned up at the door with the full story.
On boarding the ship Illir’s friend had been asked his occupation. Everyone had voiced relief when he said, ‘Engineer.’
‘What luck,’ they said. ‘We’re looking for an engineer.’
He had tried to explain what he had meant by engineer, that he was a mechanical engineer—not a ship’s engineer. But nobody had wanted to hear this and he had been led down to the navigator’s ro
om—just to see what he could do to make the ship move.
Everyone aboard was getting nervous. They were anxious for the ship to depart before the situation changed. The mechanical engineer, aware of the urgency and against his better judgment, pressed a button and the ship began to move at a much faster speed than it should have, and minutes later the nose of the ship had struck the sea wall at the port opening.
There the ship stranded itself. Some of the would-be refugees had lowered themselves on ropes down the side and run along the sea wall, hopping from boulder to boulder. Others, too shocked to move, had sat down on deck and wept.
51
A LARGE CROWD had already gathered. The policeman checking passengers through leaned backwards against the tide of people. He saw my passport and nodded. I squeezed through and ran across no man’s land for the customs house, where other passengers had gathered with their luggage.
Here the minutes ticked away. A soldier at another gate kept directing us back to wait in line at the side of the customs building. The ship was due to leave in another thirty minutes. None of us knew what was required, or how to go about boarding the ship. Occasionally the door to the customs house would open and an official would come out to smoke a cigarette in the cold sunshine. I tried the door half a dozen times, but the officials always bolted it after themselves.
One of the passengers, an impatient older man in a grey suit, suddenly rallied his family. They picked up their suitcases and I followed them around the side of the customs building. About a hundred metres up ahead were the rest of the passengers. They had been herded together about fifty metres from the ship.
In small groups we were grudgingly let through. It was never clear when to go; it was a case of waiting until the backs of the soldiers were turned and sprinting for the hold. Or quite impulsively, four or five passengers would suddenly make a dash, and the soldiers would rush to that end of the crowd to prevent more passengers following suit. They raised their batons and the untidy fringes of the crowd fell back.