Biografi

  Markelian had questions of his own—he wanted to know my reason for having spoken with the brigadier. What was behind my meeting with Eloni’s family?

  I assured Markelian that there had been nothing other than curiosity before my meeting the brigadier.

  He mulled that over; then he asked, What did the brigadier think of his son escaping to Italy?

  ‘He was crushed,’ I said, and they were cheered to hear this. Markelian got up and punched the wall happily.

  Then Eduart, with tears in his eyes, asked after his mother. On the telephone she sounds cold, he said. How had she seemed to me? Did she express a wish to go to America?

  I didn’t know the answer to that one. I wasn’t sure what they wanted to hear. It was like being back in Savra. The chill cold of the waiting room and its sullen occupants. Italy had done nothing for them. They had no jobs other than Fatmir’s dishwashing job at the restaurant. On RAI none of the commercials had mentioned unemployment. All they had succeeded in was bringing Savra’s hopelessness with them—they had been caught out, and all the blind corners of Savra had resurfaced. They showed no signs of knowing how to overcome it; their final failure was this seeming inability to re-create themselves. In that sense, they had only partially completed the journey.

  It all ended rather strangely in the square of Carsoli, outside a touristy pizza parlour, with the brothers requesting a photograph to send back to Leila of themselves raising the Fascist salute.

  Their grandfather, Eduart proudly explained, had collaborated with the Nazis. More to the point, given their deep distrust of the Communists, anything the Communists opposed must automatically be a force for good.

  The Ago brothers were not Fascists—just ignorant of the judgments the world had passed on Fascism. Forty-five years later, in this pretty alpine town outside of Rome, I tried to explain to three young men why the photograph could not be taken.

  54

  FOR NOW I didn’t know what to say or even how to begin a letter to Leila. But in the Honolulu airport I found something to send back to the old brigadier. A postcard of a very pretty Hawaiian girl with a lovely tanned hip and a big smile above a lei of frangipani. On the back, in ‘TV Italian’, I jotted down Eloni’s news for the brigadier. He was working!

  Shapallo I sent a postcard of an old-fashioned surfer on a Malibu board coasting in on a small Waikiki wave. His arms spread wide and joined by a big smile of white teeth: the surfer’s balance, at least for the moment, was perfectly assured.

  I had a postcard for Cliff, too, of the Emperor carved from the twenty-five tonne block of marble, and a few days later, back in New Zealand, I drove over the hill to Martinborough.

  The norwester had stopped at the dark line of hills running north, but white summer cloud continued to roll across a big clean sky.

  In Kansas I drew up outside Cliff and Bess’s. There was no sign of life in the windows. I walked around the house and came back to lean against the car. For a short while I listened to the iron roof crack and stretch in the heat before I noticed something new on the lawn—a second letterbox marked with the letter ‘b’. There was the old box and beside it this new clue that Cliff ’s life had finally parted company with Bess’s. Into this letterbox I slipped the postcard of the Emperor.

  One month later, in February, I received a letter from Kadris. Everything had fallen apart in Lushnje. Every time the doctor’s son turned his head, another warehouse was looted.

  He told a story about his neighbour who had joined in the looting of a truck outside of town. The neighbour had staggered off home with a heavy sack of grain, injuring his back in the process, only to discover he had looted a hundredweight sack of sugar.

  Kadris came to the point. Shapallo had failed to make it through the winter. In the first week of January Savra ran out of fuel and wood, the ground froze, and Shapallo’s emphysema grew steadily worse. Leila found him one morning bundled up in blankets propped against a wall. She had walked into Lushnje and left a message with Mister Gina. But it was another two days before Kadris got the message, and by then Shapallo was already buried in an unmarked grave behind the barracks of Savra’s first exiles.

  May 1992, Reuters in Tirana reports: Enver Hoxha’s tomb has been opened and the body taken to another part of the city for reburial in a commoner’s grave.

  AFTERWORD

  BY MICHAEL HEYWARD

  AT THE START of the 1990s, when he was in his mid thirties, Lloyd Jones made two journeys that would shape his writing for years to come. He had written a couple of novels set in New Zealand and a book of stories, but he was hungry to do something bigger. Even though he had travelled widely his experiences had fed his journalism rather than his fiction. Now he was ready to connect writing and travel in new ways.

  In August 1990 he went to Bougainville, a Pacific island in the thick of a brutal civil war with Papua New Guinea, which had been triggered by multinational copper mining on the island. Jones did write an essay about the conflict, for an Australian newspaper, but he also began to conceive of something much more ambitious.

  ‘There is a book to be told about the Bougainville fiasco,’ he wrote to his agent Michael Gifkins on 28 September 1990. ‘It has everything. Personal stories interlocked with post-colonial upheaval.’ Fifteen years later the Bougainville fiasco was translated into the extraordinary Mister Pip, a novel that explores our capacity for make-believe, to feel, as the narrator Matilda says, the breath of an invented person on our cheek. For the precise reason that it is a work of fiction Mister Pip makes the atrocities and attachments it describes more shocking and more moving than journalism ever could.

  A year after Bougainville, at the end of 1991, Jones went to Albania. What connected these worlds, about as different as two societies could be, was that they had both fallen over the edge into systematic practices of deceit, betrayal and savagery— though Albania had been falling for half a century, since Enver Hoxha took power in 1944. Under his remorseless rule, Albania had become a kind of ghastly Stalinist doll’s house. Even after Hoxha’s death in 1985 and the breaching of the Berlin Wall four years later Albania remained one of the most isolated and secretive societies on the planet. Jones ‘found a country which is but an hour’s flight from Italy but another century removed from Europe’.

  He spent six weeks in Albania in November and December of 1991, travelling with the photographer Bruce Foster, and saw a good deal of the country. Jones was shocked by its poverty, misery and repressive history, and described the suffering of the people as ‘a 50-year experience of emotional and intellectual brutality’. A book began to take shape based on his diaries and notes. At its heart it would bear witness to the ordinary Albanians whom Jones had met and interviewed, people who had been interrogated, tortured and imprisoned, whose lives had been distorted by the manic record-keeping of Hoxha’s regime. All Albanian citizens had their own biografi, a file that was maintained (and falsified if necessary) by the sigourimi, the secret police.

  At some point in the course of those six weeks Jones heard rumours about Hoxha’s double: a village dentist whose uncanny resemblance to the dictator had forced him into a life as a decoy for the absolute ruler. What had become of this obscure figure, a man whose life could have no meaning after the death of the dictator?

  These rumours were irresistible for Jones. They gave shape to the story the country was giving him. Was this double named Petar Shapallo? In Jones’s account Shapallo was the definitive Albanian, a man whose life had become a complete fiction, who had no identity except the biografi given him by the state, whose only existence was to inhabit the appearance of the absolute ruler, and who had lost everything—face, family, his very self—as a consequence.

  Shapallo comes to life in Biografi, a sad silent man, a figure in silhouette whose solitude and pain and grief are nonetheless indelible. ‘Apparently I was looking,’ Jones’s narrator tells us, ‘for a man with a straight back who placed each foot delicately, as if trying to tiptoe away from his shadow.
’ This quest gives Biografi its momentum, its power and its pathos. Shapallo is a heartbreaking figure, in sharp contrast to the indefatigable Cliff Dalziel tuning his shortwave radio back in Wellington, the New Zealander who has done everything in his own life to become Albanian.

  Jones wrote Biografi in a white heat over the space of about nine months. On 10 September 1992 he sent a completed draft to Gifkins, who immediately understood that Jones had done something ‘breathtaking’, a travel book with the power of a novel, comparable to the work of Bruce Chatwin. ‘Part of its strength is that its destination becomes clearer as you go (and once Shapallo is on board, it fairly hums).’

  Gifkins immediately set about finding publishers in London and New York. It didn’t take long. By November the British publisher Andre Deutsch had made an impassioned offer. ‘What makes it so very special,’ wrote Esther Whitby, Deutsch’s publishing director, ‘is not only the sensibility of the narrator… but the combination of an astonishing landscape (mental and physical) and a riveting mystery element which makes one think of something like The Quest for Corvo.’ In the US Gifkins’ sub-agent Sandra Dijkstra sold rights to Jonathan Galassi, editor-in-chief at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of the most celebrated imprints in American publishing. In Germany Hanser, with its prestigious list, agreed to publish the book. Fergus Barrowman at Victoria University Press would publish Biografi in New Zealand.

  Biografi was on the road to national and international success. Here was a travel book of true literary dimension. If it took the kind of narrative liberties (compression, alteration, arrangement) that are properly denied to non-fiction, it was in order to intensify the gruelling truths that Jones wanted to tell. But how much of it was made up? Asked this question before publication Jones ducked for cover, implying that somehow he had managed to blur fiction and non-fiction into each other. He was not going to draw back the veil on what he had done.

  ‘Had I set out to consciously produce a non-fiction work,’ he wrote on 22 January 1993, ‘following the strict edicts of journalism, Biografi would not be the work it is. Likewise, had I embarked on a wholly fictional course the result would not have been as successful. I’m not suggesting that Biografi is a new genre all on its own. The line I prefer is to dodge the question altogether…Above all else the book is an account of a journey.’

  Thus the book sailed towards its publication date, like a dinghy aimed at a waterfall. Deutsch was jubilant about its great find. It hired the poet and biographer Anthony Thwaite to edit the manuscript, commissioned a map of Albania and chose one of Bruce Foster’s photographs for the jacket. (Puzzlingly, however, Foster did not have a single photograph of Petar Shapallo.) Paperback rights were sold to Penguin. Michael Ondaatje asked to serialise Biografi in Brick, his celebrated Canadian literary journal. The Independent bought UK serial rights. Documentary makers were keen to recreate Jones’s journey. Biografi, touted as Lloyd Jones’s first work of non-fiction, would come out in New Zealand and in the UK in September 1993, and in the US at the start of 1994.

  The UK reviews of Biografi were enthusiastic. In the Independent on Sunday Mark Almond reported that ‘the story is seductively realistic’. John Simpson in the Daily Telegraph loved it and confessed, ‘I would gladly have exchanged 50 pages of Jones’s travels around post-Hoxhan Albania for a few more details about Shapallo. As it is, the passages where Jones meets him and talks to him are extraordinarily haunting.’ Any doubts of A. M. Daniels in the Times Literary Supplement were put to rest by the credibility of Jones’s key Albanian. ‘If I had not myself witnessed the lengths to which regimes such as Hoxha’s are prepared to go to cheat and deceive, I should have been inclined to dismiss Shapallo’s story as fanciful, and Jones as naïve for believing it.’ On the other hand Roger Clarke in the Observer lamented the author’s inability to get ‘to the heart of Shapallo’s tragedy…and regretted his failure to come up with something really unique and strange.’

  Then, on 5 September the dinghy duly went over the falls. Margaret Driscoll reviewed the book for the Sunday Times, confessing that she was ‘enthralled’ by the tale but telling her readers that Petar Shapallo was a concoction—something she had established with a few phone calls, one of them to Jones himself. ‘This spoils an otherwise extremely praiseworthy book,’ she wrote, ‘beautifully written, evocative and deft in its weaving of Albanian history through the villages and byways of the shattered country it is today.’

  Jones’s piercing act of imagination was made to seem like a grubby hoax rather than a Chatwinesque triumph. Confronted, the author conceded that Shapallo was a metaphor.

  It was one thing to understand that Biografi was a literary travel book. Jones alone—he had not given anything away even to Michael Gifkins—had known the truth all along. Petar Shapallo was a complete fiction. If Hoxha ever had a double, Jones never met him. In this sense not only is much of Biografi made up, but the thing that makes us turn the page, the quest to find the shadow man, is fictional. The narrative drive of the book is wholly invented from the moment of its wonderful opening sentence: ‘I was looking for Petar Shapallo but the face that had been Petar Shapallo’s had vanished under a surgeon’s knife.’ The Deutsch blurb aptly described it as a ‘highly original travel book’ and ‘a classic quest…mysterious, shocking, poignant, sometimes grimly funny.’ Biografi was not, however, as the blurb also asserted, ‘a gripping true adventure story’.

  Deutsch stood by Jones—‘We’ve marketed this book as a travel book, not an investigative scoop’—while wishing he had told them the whole story. The axe, however, fell in New York. Declaring that Jones had misrepresented the nature of his work, Farrar, Straus & Giroux took the devastating step of cancelling his contract. When word of this filtered back to New Zealand’s literary world, Jones became a momentary figure of scandal, and sales of his book fell away, despite the approval of local reviewers.

  Jones found the whole episode ‘an awful gut-wrenching experience’. He had whooped for joy at the news that Farrar, Straus & Giroux wanted to publish him. Now Biografi might be about to make him notorious. But the book was too good to fade away. Harvest, the classy paperback imprint of Harcourt Brace, offered to buy the US rights, and asked Jones to placate its legal department with a summary of what he had done. He gave them this statement on 27 March 1994:

  Biografi is a traveller’s story of a journey through Albania. There are areas of fiction-making interfaced with factual reporting and description.

  At the heart of the journey is a quest to find Petar Shapallo. This is make-believe biography after the spirit of the old regime which was in the habit of creating false dossiers. There are other literary reasons for Shapallo, namely he provides a metaphorical device around which the journey is made.

  The bulk of the book has been accurately observed. Particularly where political exiles or political prisoners are concerned. A huge effort under very trying conditions was made in order to ensure that I got down their stories correctly.

  Two major figures, however, Shapallo and Cliff Dalziel are fictions. Necessary fictions, of course. Cliff Dalziel is based on a real person who has a different name and lives in a different location.

  Shapallo is my imagined biography of a person rumoured to have lived in Albania.

  Those are the only fictions in the book.

  However, there are moments when Shapallo, a fictive character, is transposed onto events or journeys which actually took place and involved real people. (This is more Albanian than you can ever imagine.) For example the interpreter Kadris and the chauffeur Mentor and the political exile Leila are real people with real names and who, in my book, come into contact with Shapallo. Descriptions of Leila and Kadris are recognisably accurate. I haven’t gone into the same detail with Mentor. In the case of Kadris and Mentor I have not included their surnames.

  There is an aid worker called Bill in the book. I have pretty much drawn him as I found him. However, toward the end of the book he drives me and Shapallo to Kukës. Bill doesn’t ha
ve a surname. Nor have I popped words into his mouth, except once when makes a non-consequential reference to Shapallo and also he shakes Shapallo’s hand.

  Also, in Gjaza, an impression is given that the Agolli brothers (real people) came into contact with Shapallo.

  As for the rendering of history, again I like to think that I have been rigorously attentive to the sources listed at the end of the book.

  One final thing. The word ‘biografi’ refers to the Albanian system of files kept on every citizen during the Hoxha years. Frequently, false constructions were made where none had been intended. Files were also ruthlessly falsified to fit the official line. More importantly, over time the word ‘biografi’ had come to be synonymous with another word, fabrication. I hope this is helpful.

  Biografi was successfully (and uncontroversially) published in the US in October 1994. The New York Times Book Review called it ‘a gem of the genre’. It was serialised in the literary journal Grand Street, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and was named as a Best Book by Publisher’s Weekly. Hanser in Germany, undeterred by all the fuss, published Biografi as a travel fable, to glowing reviews.

  It may seem surprising that nobody asked how it was that so mysterious and significant a figure as Enver Hoxha’s double had remained unidentified until a visiting writer from New Zealand tracked him down in the space of a few weeks. Perhaps; but it is not surprising that many expert readers were compelled by Jones’s creation and believed that Shapallo was as real as the other Albanians in Biografi. Readers of the book now will have no trouble understanding how that happened.

  But what did Jones think he was doing? Why did he, by mixing up fiction and non-fiction without letting on, invite Driscoll’s attack? One answer is that the left hand of the writer ignored what the right hand was doing. The impulse to invent was as powerful as the urge to take notes. For Jones these seemed to be complementary rather than contradictory activities. He had crossed a line, but on the other side of it he could glimpse the mature novels he was yet to write. He could not go back.