We filed into the living room, the scene of last night’s drinking and fun, some of it at Vladimir’s expense. Mimi said the Party had thought Vladimir too dangerous to be a card-carrying member.
I suspect he might draw pleasure from such a reputation. The very idea of it seemed to be tucked inside his cheek.
It was terribly awkward to begin with. Mimi’s husband drum-rolled his fingers along the top of the couch. He spread his legs and planted his feet wide. He had the couch to himself and we were his audience.
He tapped a little tune out on the couch; then he looked up and spoke quickly to Mimi.
She said, ‘Vlady wishes you to ask him anything you wish. Anything at all.’
‘Anything?’ I checked with Mimi. I wondered what she had returned home with last night. ‘He is aware that I know he is sigourimi?’
There was some mocking laughter from Vladimir when he heard the word.
‘Ask me,’ he said, apishly thumping his chest.
I described to Vladimir the faces I had seen in the little room off Rruga Ndre Mjeda. I passed on some of the stories I had heard of lives destroyed by lies and deceits. The ‘friend’s’ evidence. The jacked-up ‘second witness’. The creation of a martyred caste.
I mentioned the example of Kolec Jak Simoni, whose story was still fresh in my memory. He had been jailed ten years under Article 55 after speaking among ‘friends’ of escape. He had no idea who these supposed friends were. The conversation had never taken place. Then in 1978 he received another ten-year sentence after the biografis were opened and it was discovered that Kolec had two relatives who had escaped the country back in the fifties.
Mimi, of course, had to pass all this on. Her husband listened with interest. He perched on the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, staring off into the distance.
It was too much to try to defend, and to his credit he didn’t even try. Instead, for the next hour or so he explained the role of the sigourimi in all of this. He counted off on his fingers the points he wished to make.
First, any information is valuable. It is not important who the informant is—only the information. Nor was there any verification of the information.
‘For example, I betray you to the sigourimi. The matter is taken up between you and them. I am forgotten.’
This point, he said, had been unique to Albania.
Second, under the guidance of the Great Leader, the revolution had to express everything. Nothing could be concealed.
Thirdly, he said, promotion within the sigourimi depended on gathering information and informants. Promotion was not supported by financial gain, but a moral or political purity was created. ‘The Party asked the sigourimi to find enemies. When they could not find real enemies they had to invent them.’
‘You understand what Vlady is saying,’ said Mimi. ‘Had we continued to go on this way, the country would have consumed itself.’
Vladimir said the system had been like an alter ego. He could not tell Mimi these things because she, in turn, might tell her relatives.
By now I had the feeling he was doing more than simply explaining a concept to a stranger. There was a sense of sharing an intimate confidence; shortly afterwards he excused himself to go outside to smoke a cigarette.
‘I have never heard him mention these things before. This is the first time ever,’ Arben whispered excitedly.
It was extraordinary that a simple task such as explaining an institutional concept could take on such a personal dimension.
Nick’s father didn’t want it to proceed any further. This kind of talk distressed him. While Vladimir was out of the room he told Mimi he wanted the conversation to shift to something more pleasant. I had the feeling he was operating in the old climate of fear, where it was better to know nothing because information invariably meant complicity. You learned something and immediately were tainted by it. Either you became a threat because of what you knew or you were made a victim because of it.
Mrs Marku was ready to serve dinner. Another bottle of wine was dusted off. To appease Nick’s father we discussed books.
I brought up Kadare for discussion, Dossier H, but its mention produced only a scowl. Kadare, in Vladimir’s view, had disgraced himself by leaving the country. This was not an uncommon view. Even Gjyzepina was critical.
Yesterday, while walking up Rruga Ndre Mjeda, I had asked for her opinion of Kadare. She said, ‘How can we say he wrote honestly? Perhaps he fought for democracy with his heart and mind, but he forgot to express it.’
Vladimir put down his fork and with his fingers pulled a chewed hunk of meat from his mouth. Then he held up a greasy finger to make his point. Kadare, he said, was a propagandist.
‘Yes,’ said Mimi. ‘My husband is referring to The Great Winter, the novel in which Enver Hoxha is the main character. The hero.’
Vladimir patted Mimi’s shoulder. She had on the same black dress as last night. Mimi looked at where he had left a grease spot; Vladimir dove back into his food.
I wondered who Vladimir thought was behind the gunfire at night.
‘Bandits,’ he said, with his mouth full, and went on eating. This time Arben did not contest it.
After Mimi and Vladimir left, Nick’s mother wrapped a cake in a towel and placed it in my hands.
‘My mother would like you to take the cake to Nick in Rome,’ Arben explained.
It was a special cake which the Catholics in the north of the country baked to celebrate Easter. In the past, Arben explained, they had had to bake the cake secretly, even going to the extent of burying the eggshells in the backyard so the neighbours wouldn’t see them in the rubbish and tell the sigourimi.
‘Vladimir?’ I asked.
Arben nodded.
‘Vladimir,’ his mother said.
16
THE NEXT MORNING the entire delegation is there to see me off—Gjyzepina, Clement, Arben, Nick’s parents.
True to her word, Gjyzepina has gone off to search the neighbourhood for someone to accompany me to Tirana. She turns up with Marcello, a greying twenty-nine-year-old student returning to university in Tirana.
The bus, in fact, is an old lorry which draws up to the meat market at great speed, splashing ditch water over the bloody carcasses displayed on the pavement.
Fifteen or twenty passengers are already standing on the tray, and because I am the inexperienced foreigner and because I am surrounded by fifteen to twenty willing hosts, I’m pushed with Marcello to the front of the tray to lean up against the cab. Marcello tells me this is the most sought-after place—here it is warm and secure.
Within a short time, out in the countryside, my head is a block of ice. And what was exhilarating has lost its edge. Behind us the other passengers’ eyelids are half-closed, their faces red with cold, their hair swept back off their foreheads by the breeze. They stand with their legs apart and their hands placed on the shoulders of the person in front of them.
Arben said we would be in Tirana in a couple of hours, no more.
Now Marcello tells me it’s likely to be ‘three, four hours, perhaps’.
Every so often there is a respite as we slow up behind a horse and cart. Briefly, the icy breeze subsides and we thaw out in the still air. It is possible again to feel the sun and imagine the greenness either side of the road in flower or baked in midsummer. The season of postcards. Then we’re off again, lurching, the tray leaping potholes with its human cargo. The words of Marcello’s uncertain English suddenly pop up shrilly or are blown away into the jet stream, and it is some time before I understand that he is trying to tell me about the sigourimi.
‘You are interested in such things. Gjyzepina told me.’
We slow down for another cart piled high with hay, and in the brief stillness his words and sentences are delivered in a comprehensible form.
Some years ago, he says, an off icer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs had approached him with a request for information. The question of refusal had to be balanced against con
sideration of his family’s prospects, and Marcello had tried to hedge.
Each day the same man had come to him with the same request. ‘Please, Marcello, what can you tell me? About anything, anyone. Tell me about your neighbour.’
Each day Marcello shrugged and said, ‘We’ll see.’ Time passes, and he begins to wonder if he has won this battle. The sigourimi stops visiting. The pestering ends. But shortly after this, Marcello learns that he is being tailed, that his conversations are being noted.
The lorry has started to move off again and Marcello is a torrent of words. The hay bales pass at eye level as the truck overtakes the cart. The breeze picks up, the passengers press together, words fly through the air.
This is the last bit that I catch: the final revelation. His neighbour had placed a listening device in the ceiling of his family’s living room.
‘My neighbour!’ he says.
The wind grew stronger and we herded closer together. Marcello stood tall with his shirt collar open to the bruising cold, and I crept away to thoughts of Cliff.
I had looked him up with the sincerest of motives. I had wanted information of the most obvious kind—where to go, some useful phrases: ‘Milk, no sugar, please.’ What to eat, what not to eat, whom to meet, whom to avoid. And as expected, Cliff had graciously come through for me.
There were the surprises that come with establishing contact with anyone after a number of years. I mean Cliff ’s behaviour, which, when all was said and done, I had thought no more than mildly eccentric. For example, his forceful invitation to exchange my shoes for his range of rubber jandals at the door. The jandals and the living conditions in the basement were curiosities, peculiar to Cliff. There had been no means, or even the thought, of tracing them to another place.
The ritualised hospitality, the boiling of water over Bunsen burners, the insistent invitations to eat more, more and more. The same worrying over details, the placement of cups and the order in which the coffee followed the raki, the cake coming after the sour pickles, the piles of rubber jandals behind every doorway—all the things I had thought peculiar to Cliff had popped up at Simon Pepa’s house, then again at the Markus’ and Gjyzepina’s.
And then there was Cliff ’s appearance. His period look. The wild mane of hair and the sideburns he’d grown to reconstruct himself in the image of Balkan Man. But none of this had seemed particularly obvious to me at the time. Bess had more than hinted: ‘How Cliff has changed.’ But nothing had quite the impact of those first glimpses at Durrës, those bedraggled locks of hair, the triangular sideburns and frayed bell-bottoms. Until then I had had no idea of the extent to which Cliff had entered into the spirit of his adopted homeland. But certainly after Durrës, and perhaps even before then, I had sneakily known that I wouldn’t be able to leave Cliff out of this.
Cliff had been helpful with contacts, one of them Illir Ikonomi, whom Cliff had described as responsible for writing replies to Radio Tirana’s worldwide correspondents.
I had found Radio Tirana a short distance from the Hoxha Memorial, in a residential street. Building had commenced on the new Italian embassy opposite, where a plainclothes man with an AK-47 patrolled that side of the street.
For an acquaintance of Cliff ’s, Illir was not at all what I had been expecting. A short, squat man with frizzy hair, he had met me in the lobby of Radio Tirana, wearing a denim jacket and jeans, in stark contrast to the darkly uniformed security guards who rigorously controlled the flow in and out of the building.
Of even greater surprise was his faint American accent. And a little later, in what suggested a remarkable transformation for a former broadcaster of propaganda, he mentioned in passing that he was now a stringer for Reuters.
We climbed the stairs to the foreign service floor. Radio Tirana broadcasts in twenty-two languages—among them Persian, broadcasts of which had started around the time of the Iranian Revolution, Illir said. In those days Tirana had been hopeful that the Iranian revolutionaries would choose the correct path. The broadcasts had been designed to guide them on this matter.
Cliff had shown me photographs of Radio Tirana’s transmitter towers outside Durrës. I remembered the way he put on his glasses and held up the towers as examples of brilliant Albanian engineering. But Illir now told me that the towers had been built by the Chinese.
Illir had started with Radio Tirana’s first broadcasts to China in 1978.
‘This was at a time when relations with China had deteriorated. There were ideological issues at stake,’ he said. ‘The duty of the China service was to try and convince the Chinese people that their path was the wrong one.’
However, the service failed to receive a single letter from China. Not even a postcard. There were some very sound reasons for this. One, he said, was that the broadcast was barely strong enough to be heard in China. Two, shortwave radio sets were rare items in China.
Illir seemed to find this amusing, too. The idea of providing a broadcast which had no hope of reaching its targeted audience had kept him fully employed for years.
Response to the station’s other broadcasts was considerably better. Radio Tirana received seven thousand letters annually.
‘Well, that’s not bad, is it?’
‘Radio Vaticana receives annually one hundred and twenty thousand letters,’ he said.
We wandered along the foreign service floor to the news room. Ancient Imperial typewriters sat on desks in a small cramped space. On the walls were old maps—on one it was still possible to find Rhodesia.
I happened to look out of the window and caught sight of a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder, walking over the rooftops.
Illir shrugged.
‘Security,’ he offered. Otherwise he had no idea what the man was doing, stalking the rooftops.
‘And this here is my desk.’ Then he turned and introduced me to the young man sitting opposite, at the ‘Turkish desk’.
In the studio, they were mixing the previous day’s ‘Beatles concert’ performed by Albanian musicians.
‘Why the Beatles?’ I wondered.
‘Why of course, to show the Beatles have arrived in Albania.’ He managed to grin.
17
AROUND THE TIME of the Beatles hits ‘Love Me Do’, ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, Harry Hamm, the first German reporter allowed to visit Albania since the war, had come away with descriptions of ‘golden busts of Enver between the palm fronds or the eucalyptus leaves…Enver’s picture was hung alongside the sleazy beer tent on the beach, as a pennant at the edge of a football field, or decorating an archaeological collection in a provincial museum—even walls of cowsheds on collective farms’. Hamm was continually surprised by organised groups ready to chant Enver’s name whenever the slightest opportunity arose.
Even now, six years after the Emperor’s death, it was still possible to find traces of the person Shapallo had had to measure up to.
The morning after I arrived back from Shkodër I wandered across to the Enver Hoxha Memorial. It was extremely cold, and a paper-thin ice cracked under the wheels of the few early-morning cyclists.
Although it had been given a new name, the new National Cultural Centre did nothing to conceal features which so manifestly honour a pharaoh. The huge pyramid-shaped edifice of glass and marble had been designed by Enver’s architect son-in-law, Klement Kolaneci. You enter at basement level and climb two flights of stairs to the main display area. Up until a few months earlier visitors had caught their breath here and gazed across the marble floor to a twenty-five-tonne sculpture of Enver.
The Emperor, in ‘deified form’, is still there to be seen in old postcards on sale downstairs. In these, a strip of red carpet marches across the marble floor to the feet of the seated Emperor. In the postcard sculpture, I noticed, Enver’s genial features had been given a firmer line; a feeling of intractability is further conveyed by the sculptor’s placement of a hand on each knee.
Since the Emperor was removed, the light th
at showers down from a copper ceiling, shaped into a star to reflect the world’s five continents, these days falls onto a faded block.
On the upper floors most of the display items had been removed—but not all. Enver’s Fiat Millicento, the one reputedly used by him during the war, was still there, a brilliant emerald finish with a black trim, as shiny as new, on flat tyres.
Around one corner the man himself gave me a terrible fright. A mere life-size sculpture of Enver standing, like a figure from a crowd, with his hands in his pockets.
Bits of sticking plaster covered the walls. Nearly all the photographs had been taken down and stored.
On the next floor, I did find a few photographs still up. One spectacular photo of a May Day procession showed thousands of Tirana schoolchildren moulded into the letters of PARTI ENVER marching down Stalingrad Boulevard.
The real surprise, however, was the library. It had been pretty much left alone. Obviously it had been designed to be viewed at a distance, a library as vista, rather than one in which books were meant to be picked up and handled, because every book in the Hoxha collection was not what it appeared to be. The chapters on Questions of Agrarian Politics in the Soviet Union bear a cover with the name Herman Melville. Alain Guerin’s Le Général Gris contains upside-down pages filled with sketches of generators. Emile Zola’s Reconte par sa fille considers political deviation in the Soviet Union. The Life of Tolstoy tackles the problems of collectivisation. Histoire de l’Art contains Stalin’s thoughts on Lenin. Robert Kemp’s Life of the Book turns out to be a dissertation on ‘liquidation of the Kulak [the wealthy peasant class] in the Soviet Union’.
Also in the library, a faded reproduction had been blown up to such a size that the screened dots were visible. The photograph had zeroed in on a section of Spanish Party of Labour supporters at a rally in Madrid. Presumably the photograph had earned its place as proof of the Emperor’s popularity abroad.
The overall desired effect had best been achieved in a video which pilgrims to the memorial were encouraged to buy as a souvenir of their visit. The video begins with a bird’s-eye view over the pyramid. Slowly the camera eye descends and we enter the ceiling to choral music, and there he is, the Emperor in a haze of golden light. The choral music fades away and in cathedral silence we are left to gaze, at a respectful distance, at Enver’s twenty-five-tonne presence.