In 1949, as a twenty-two-year-old, he had slipped into Greece over the Dardha Mountains near Korçë. Three times Gjomarkaj and his companions were ambushed. Gjomarkaj took bullets in his body—one bullet smashed his right leg leaving him helpless and immobile. Fortunately for him his companions had refused his invitation to shoot him.
Gjomarkaj met me in the lobby. His prim, dark trousers and tan sports coat suggested restraint and minimal fuss. He held out a hand.
‘This way, please.’
On the first floor we paused admiringly before a huge colour photograph, even larger than the one of the Pope downstairs, of Radio Vaticana’s transmitter towers located about twenty kilometres outside Rome.
Then Gjomarkaj held open a door into a long corridor. As far as the eye could see, signposted above each office door were the various languages of Radio Vaticana’s broadcasts—Croat, Polish, Czech, Slovaccio, Ukrainian and so on, the length of the corridor and resuming up on the next floor. Next to Lithuanie was Gjomarkaj’s patch, Albanie.
‘Here,’ he said, standing aside for me to enter his office, ‘here you see the free Albanie.’
Gjomarkaj’s scarlet flag—like the one I had imagined in the expatriates’ bar—sported the black-and-gold-braided eagle. The top of his filing cabinet was dotted with smaller Albanian flags from the pre-Communist era. On the wall behind his desk was a photo of Gjomarkaj’s predecessor, ‘an extremely provocative broadcaster’ killed by Albanian agents on via del Tratone near il Messagero in 1976.
In this way and others, Gjomarkaj took heart that the broadcasts were getting through. And then there had been the death threats, of course. Always a good sign. But even more encouraging were the letters sent by balloon. Listeners to Radio Vaticana’s Albanie Service released balloons whenever the wind blew east to west. Some, he said, had even reached Switzerland.
I could imagine Gjomarkaj’s grudge quietly festering away and never letting up. Whereas, by comparison, the strength of Nick’s convictions could be alarmingly volatile.
One afternoon at the monastery he told me how a chance meeting with a Dutch evangelist in the park across from the Rozala Hotel had led him to embark on a kind of blood feud against Stalin. With the friar passively looking on, Nick listed the ingredients for his home recipe for dynamite to blow up the statue of Stalin in the Square of Shkodër. The Dutch evangelist had had some shattering news for Nick. He had not been baptised, and therefore, whispered the Dutchman, there could be no possibility of Nick making it to heaven.
As he told me this, Nick’s face grew more grieved. His face turned whiter than usual and his lips quivered.
‘Do you not see? Hoxha tried to deny me eternal life!’ he shouted. I felt him waiting for me to agree and offer solace. It was a similar uneasiness to the one I had felt when Gjomarkaj had suddenly opened the door to the Radio Vaticana chapel and watched me to see if I would cross myself.
Still, Nick had been more than helpful with names and contacts. He had fitted me out with a useful working knowledge of whom to seek out and whom to avoid. The former tended to be old priests with twenty, thirty years of prison under their belt. A sure sign in Nick’s estimation of both their innocence and the strength of their conviction. He had written his family to expect me. I could hardly refuse, therefore, his request that I deliver a carton of cigarettes for his father, a radio for his younger brother, and for his mother, some Franciscan literature.
The reason I had come to Shkodër was Nick.
12
IN THE MORNING I stepped into a stinking toilet to avoid Terry and Don in the hall. I waited for their noisy departure in the lobby before coming down the stairs. It was a glorious day. Blue skies. Not quite warm. White splashes of sunlight caught patches on Taraboshi and Cukali, the mountains fringing Shkodër.
In the park opposite the Rozala, I found a new flower bed planted with shemsir bushes covering up the footprints of Lenin’s statue. Stalin had gone the same way, but not without a lengthy struggle. First ropes had been tried to haul him down, then explosives. Finally it had been left to city workers to remove Stalin during the hottest part of the afternoon. I found a number of flagstones marking Stalin’s old place on the piazza. The surrounding tiles looked centuries old, whereas the newer ones had a rain-swept quality.
Respect for the partisans had ensured the survival of a striking bronze sculpture on the other side of the Rozala, commemorating the ‘five heroes who resisted the German advance in the fields of Vigut’.
From the ‘Heroes of Vigut’ the eye travels down a wide avenue and pulls up at a pile of stones and flowers. I strolled down there, pestered by a small boy on a bike who kept on at me. ‘Are you a cross?’
‘No,’ I said, something I’d never have dreamed of telling Nick.
Puzzled, the boy rode off.
The pile of stones and flowers had been placed ostentatiously, and as with the former positioning of Stalin in the piazza, there was no avoiding it. Drivers of horse carts, as well as the new private taxis, confronted the choice of going one way or the other around the stone pile. This small pathetic monument forced every driver to pause a moment and consider the changing order.
This morning’s edition of Shkodra (previously known as The New Life) commemorated the birthday of democracy’s first martyr, twenty-four-year-old Arben Broci. Along with three others, Broci had been shot dead outside the Party Headquarters in April.
Directly opposite Broci’s pile of stones are the remains of the headquarters, its entrance blackened and charred. Inside, the scale of destruction is breathtaking. After the shootings the crowd turned on the building.
The floor tiles had been ripped up, likewise the foundations, even the plumbing.
The wall cladding had been clawed off, picked clean, the windows smashed. On each floor itinerants had left behind piles of human shit and graffiti: Enver mounting his wife, Nexhmije. Or Nexhmije, legs apart, playing with herself alongside an angel with a harp.
It is National Independence Day and back in the Rozala the lobby fills up with old soldiers and cigarette smoke, the sense of special occasion bolstered by the smell of hair oil and shoe polish. Someone hands me a flier drawing attention to a public meeting to be hosted this evening by an American representative of King Leka.
Later in the morning I follow after the old soldiers pouring out of the Rozala with their Fedoras, their stylish cigarette holders, their frayed suits.
A substantial crowd has already gathered between the ‘Heroes of Vigut’ and a theatre balcony, where the microphones are being set up.
On the edge of the crowd a young man, turning over sausage meat on a hot coal range, wraps my kebab in a page torn from the works of Enver Hoxha. The page in which my kebab comes wrapped is headed, ‘Failed Strategies’ and it reads: ‘We knew he was bound to come to a bad end…Several times we appealed to him to join the National Liberation Movement, but he didn’t want to, and…he was shot like a stray dog.’
Some of the ‘stray dogs’ from the Hoxha era are gathered on the balcony.
First up is Victor Martini, leader of the political prisoners from the Shkodër area. He spent fifteen years in prison. His proposal to rededicate the ‘Heroes of Vigut’ memorial to those thousands killed by the Communists draws the biggest roar of approval.
Pjeter Arbori, after thirty years in prison and recently emerged as the leader of the Democrats in Shkodër, reminds the crowd of the dangers of returning the Socialists to power. This morning’s Shkodra had ridiculed the Socialists’ first conference of five days earlier with the headline: HOXHA ELECTED FIRST SECRETARY OF SOCIALIST PARTY. Six years had elapsed since the Great Leader’s death, but disciples were still thick on the ground, and many suspected the Socialists’ leader, Ramiz Alia, of being a puppet in Nexhmije’s control.
When Arbori reminds the crowd of the Socialists’ true allegiances, the crowd begins to chant, ‘Hitler/Hoxha, Hitler/Hoxha…’
A poet takes the microphone. His voice is soft and uncertain. He addre
sses the microphone rather than the crowd: ‘We are about to remove the bandages. But what is it that we will find? New skin or a scab?’ The crowd takes a moment to digest this. There is some shuffling. In the brief silence the poet apparently suffers a crisis of confidence, because next thing he tears the microphone off the stand and like a demagogue, begins to shout, ‘Democracy! Democracy!’
Now he has the crowd with him.
But it was time to find Nick’s parents’ house. Nick had written down his address, but in the hotel all I get from the staff are varying expressions of hopelessness. ‘Tetori’ is a mystery. I ask for a street map, but no such thing exists. One of the waiters stares at the address an inordinate length of time until he is satisfied that he has never heard of it. Another takes me by the wrist and leads me outside. We walk over to the ‘Heroes of Vigut’, where he shades his eyes from the sun and points vaguely in the direction of Greece.
I stop a car travelling at barely faster than idling speed. A cigarette butt dangles from the driver’s lips. I regret it as soon as I hand over the notebook with Nick’s address. The driver has a wild-eyed look about him. ‘Tetori.’ He nods. His eyes do a sideways shift to the passenger door.
Shkodër is a maze of tight streets and narrow lanes, some with names, some without. We enter spaces never intended for cars, lanes with high walls of rounded stones, full of promise because of their confined possibilities. But these tight spaces invariably deliver us to a wide boulevard or avenue, and the search begins all over again. Shkodër grows larger by the minute.
Finally I have to beg the man to let me out. Finding Nick’s address has become a matter of pride for him.
I wave him to the side of the road. It has come to this. The driver shrugs and pouts. He is sorry, but he is sorry about my lack of faith, too.
I start asking directions all over again. This time a short, dapperly dressed man in a suit and tie threads his arm through mine. He apologises for his lack of English and wonders whether I can speak French, Italian, German or Russian?
I make a rash claim to ‘having some French’.
‘Ah bien!’ He is delighted. He is a professor of languages. Simon Pepa.
Yes, but the Markus’ address? I push my dog-eared notebook under his nose—and he nods happily.
His thumb and forefinger pinch the air. We are very close.
‘Près. Près.’
We walk for another ten minutes. It is a pleasant neighbourhood. We are back among the lanes. The last gold of the grapevines hangs on to rusted trellises. Small cottages of alabaster and stone sit like blushing brides behind walls and fences at eye level.
At some point the Professor tips me at his elbow and we enter a small cottage. I ready myself to embrace the Markus, only to find myself being introduced to the Professor’s wife.
I am his first foreigner, he proudly announces.
It is already two in the afternoon. At best I have another two hours to find the Markus. After dark it’ll be a hopeless task.
The Professor’s twenty-year-old daughter presents a glimmer of hope. She is a beautiful, honey-skinned girl with big brown eyes. In a strange barking voice she explains in English that she attended middle school with Nick’s younger brother, Arben. I had confused her the first time when I referred to Nick instead of Ardian.
‘So you know the Markus?’
‘Very well. Ardian’s grandmother lives two doors down.’ She says Nick used to spend his summers there.
The Professor smiles triumphantly and I begin to relax.
At Nick’s grandmother’s house, a woman in her mid-thirties comes to the door. As soon as she sees me, she wraps me in a warm hug. Nick has sent word ahead.
She sends her two daughters, Alma and Nicoletta, to escort me to the Markus’ house. The address is in the very neighbourhood I had cruised through with the wild-eyed driver earlier in the afternoon. At the time I couldn’t understand why he kept asking after the ‘Markus’ instead of the name of the rruga. We arrive back here on dark.
The truck driver’s house is larger than the Professor’s house. There is no resemblance at all between Nick, the aesthete, and his father, a ponderous grey man in his fifties. The father quietly retreats behind his wife’s excited welcome. Nick’s brother speaks a little English.
I spill out the contents of my bag, but there is no rush to inspect the radio or the books. Nick’s father takes the cigarettes and walks out of the room with them.
Mrs Marku brings in a tray of coffee. Since I am invited to dinner, Nick’s father, who is putting on his coat and hat, has decided that it will be a tediously long evening if we can’t understand each other. Nick’s brother, Arben, explains that his father will fetch his niece, Mimi, a schoolteacher, who lives five kilometres away. Through the window, in the lengthening shadows I glimpse Mr Marku setting off on his bicycle.
Meanwhile I get to see the bedroom which Arben now has to himself. Dragging out a carton from under his brother’s bed, Arben says he was surprised to find how much Nick had hidden from him.
There are a few treasured pages of The Financial Times and The Independent cadged from the tourists Nick had fished for with his quick piercing glances in the gardens across the Rozala. On two occasions he had brought tourists to the house, something his father discouraged, since the risk was considerable, and there had been arguments, and promises from Nick that he wouldn’t do it again.
In the carton were Nick’s notebooks. One was entitled ‘English from TV’. Another contained German phrases. With these snatches of language he had lured foreigners to the ‘blind spot’ behind Lenin’s statue.
Nick quickly befriended them with his intelligence. Foreigners would one day be his way out. He had amassed a huge correspondence. Letters to the Red Cross in half a dozen European countries. Letters from his ‘family’ in Holland, Germany and England. Pinned to his bedroom wall was a large map of the North Yorkshire moors, with a dotted line to indicate the trail hiked by his English friends.
It was extraordinary what he had collected. The words to pop songs. Western icons faithfully listed—Michael Jackson, Samantha Fox, Phil Collins, Duran Duran, Joe Cocker, Elton John. A street map of London and the Underground map. A red pen traced the blue route from Victoria Station to Islington Station. Nick had everything planned ahead. The moment he arrived in Heathrow he would find his own way.
His friends had sent his fare money tucked away in a secret compartment of an envelope. In one letter advising Nick of the arrangements, there was this reassurance: ‘Don’t worry, Phil knows about these kinds of things.’ I imagined two or three slightly goofy English lads with daytime computer jobs and sea cadet backgrounds, thrilling to Nick’s cause.
People had sent him books. Nick had translated ‘The Final Problem’ from The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes. He had pencilled in translations down the column margins of Robert Burns and Walt Whitman.
The notebooks, the treasured sections of English newspapers, the letters—all in one sense, at least, belonged to a life already abandoned. In Rome, unless he discovered some vices, there would be no need to lead a life as furtive as this one.
Before, in the bedroom, Arben told me about Nick’s involvement in last winter’s demonstration. Their cousin Kolec had been one of the organisers and Nick had begged to be included. The plan had been to pull down the statue of Stalin. On the day of the demonstration two thousand brave souls gathered in the piazza. Police with guns took up positions on the rooftop of the Rozala. But, incredibly, they only shot film. They filmed everything, and the next day they began their arrests.
Nick hid all his books, his English newspapers, and waited for the police to call. Ten of his friends, Kolec included, were rounded up.
Kolec was interrogated repeatedly. The film taken by the police had caught Nick’s shoulder and the police insisted to Kolec that he could identify the shoulder in the film.
Kolec held out; finally the police gave up and sent him to Qale-Barit to work as a miner. No sooner had
Kolec arrived than he organised a hunger strike. The prison was closed down and the prisoners sent elsewhere, Kolec to Burrell.
Then in July he was given an early release and granted a visa to travel to Italy.
Arben has a photograph of Nick and Kolec at a restaurant in Padua. Their glasses are raised. A bottle of wine has been drunk. Nick is in a T-shirt, his face radiant with summer health. A freer spirit is evident here than the pale student patrolling the cold monastery floors in Rome.
Before Mimi arrived, Arben had asked me not to mention the demonstration, Kolec, or Nick’s involvement. Mimi’s husband is sigourimi. A very dangerous man, said Arben.
Mimi turned out to be completely unguarded. She laughed a lot. Her eyes brimmed trustingly beneath purple eyeliner…I thought of her sitting on Mr Marku’s handlebars—pedalled across Shkodër to interpret for a foreigner. I thought of Mr Marku patiently waiting with his bike while his niece scrambled to put on makeup and a favourite, knee-length black dress.
‘You like it?’ She was pleased. ‘Vlady bought it for me. He buys all my clothes,’ she said.
‘Really?’ I said. Then I asked how she had met her husband, while pretending not to notice the nervous glance exchanged between Arben and his father.
But Mimi was unconcerned by my curiosity. She said they had met on a bus. Vladimir was attending the special Ministry of Internal Affairs school in Tirana. Mimi was studying political philosophy in Tirana. They had met on the bus returning to Shkodër.
She said matter-of-factly, ‘I can not tell you anything about his work, because he does not tell me anything.’
It was later, after we had put away the last few bottles of Nick’s father’s wine, the product from his backyard vine, that Mimi started to wonder herself how she had come to marry into the sigourimi.
She shook her head. ‘We met on the bus.’ She shrugged. Then she laughed. Nick’s mother, happy that Mimi was making the evening such a success, kissed her niece on the cheek.
‘I met my husband on the bus. He asked to see my biografi. After that, we got married. Perhaps it happens differently in the West?’