Biografi (9 page)

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?'

It all seemed to have been so simple. Now, she said, she no longer felt the same. ‘I have never loved him. We live as if by arrangement.'

The Markus, none the wiser for Mimi's sad confession, raised their glasses for a toast. Mimi smiled and met each of their glasses with her own.

Mimi said she had grown up with a portrait of the Great Leader in her family's living room. It was hung on the wall opposite the window where people passing by could see Enver prominently displayed.

‘My father,' she said, ‘recently took down the portrait because in Albania, as you know, we have run out of glass.'

13

IN THE MORNING, as Mimi had promised to arrange, Nick's old schoolteacher Gjyzepina Lulgjuzay is waiting down in the lobby. She appears matronly, in a man's jacket, a thick plaid skirt and flat shoes.

We are a little wary of each other at first.

Gjyzepina begins by running through the morning newspapers. In one paper a cartoon has Albania separated from its borders with Greece, Macedonia and Montenegro, merrily sailing for Europe while a chain anchored to a sickle stretches to breaking point.

Gjyzepina laughs—revealing just two yellowing teeth in her mouth. She suddenly remembers this, and up comes her hand and an unguarded moment sadly trails off to embarrassment.

We wander off to the piazza. Gjyzepina talks about Nick. Of course she remembers him. Nick was one of her best students.

It is National Liberation Day, but unlike yesterday's National Independence Day, there is hardly a soul about.

Cliff had sketched a quick map of the piazza and its surrounding attractions for me. The Atheists Museum should be the two-storey building opposite. But according to Gjyzepina, the museum has been abandoned. The icons have been returned to the churches. For a brief time the Atheists Museum was home to the Democrats, but the protests following the Socialists' unexpected election victory earlier in the year had blocked the piazza and the Democrats were moved to a former church kindergarten.

‘It is not far from here,' she says.

Rruga Ndre Mjeda is a narrow, winding lane which begins behind a café. We catch up with people trailing through the doors of San Antonio.

Up until a year ago the church had been a gymnasium. The concrete bleachers are still in place at the rear of the church. Voices whisper in darkness. In the foyer there is just enough light to make out photographs of priests and bishops tortured and executed by the regime.

Cliff had told me to look in the Atheists Museum for the photographs of priests armed with machine guns firing into groups of partisans.

The priest's house alongside the Church of San Antonio is a pile of rubble. Sparrows hop nervously between lumps of plaster and concrete, an area of waste stretching up to the doorway of the old kindergarten, now the Democrats' office.

Rruga Ndre Mjeda comes out at the old Cathedral of Shkodër. We arrive in time to see a donkey carrying rubble out of the cathedral doors. With the help of Italian money, the cathedral is in the process of reverting from a volleyball court. There, above the altar, the time clock is still attached. Back outside the cathedral a mob of teenage girls surrounds an Italian priest. He's wearing designer sunglasses and his tanned cheeks bulge with pleasure at all this attention.

Two old Albanian priests stand off at a short distance, basking in the sunshine. We learn that both had been jailed—one for ten years. But neither will talk about his experiences.

‘God forgives,' the older one says. ‘We must look to the future.'

Another fifteen minutes' amble and we come onto kisha e Volreve Katolike, the Catholic cemetery, in the Skanderbeg district, a poor, run-down area on the edge of town. Newly painted white crosses hide under the shade of trees. Work in the chapel had started the previous November, two months before the first demonstrations against the regime.

Gjyzepina hadn't believed at first what she heard about people bringing the church bell out of hiding and turning up with paint and brushes.

‘We were afraid to see who was building the church. Even me! To tell the truth, I put a handkerchief over my head and came here in the night with my brother to see for myself.

‘After all these years,' she says. ‘I think the rebuilding of the church was the people's way of telling the Party that we could do anything without first asking them.'

Alongside the photographs of the slain priests in the Church of San Antonio had been others of Shkodër's first public Mass, coming nearly twenty-five years after the regime declared the country to be the world's first atheist state.

Before a terrif ied congregation the priest that day—the previous November—observed, ‘I see it written in your eyes. You are ready to die.'

We wander about the graves under the trees. Some carry photographs of the dead. Where a portrait hasn't been available, a drawn arrow indicates the deceased, a smiling face at the back of a family gathering; with those who had been older, or gravely ill, it sometimes seemed that they were already posing for their headstones. The other graves, the ones without headstones and for a long time lost in overgrown grass, have re-emerged, their grave markings defined by carefully placed whitewashed pebbles.

Another country was emerging through grainy, poorly reproduced photographs appearing daily in newspapers, testifying to some wrongdoing, or defending after forty years some slander by the Party on someone's parent, grandparent, sister, brother, aunt or uncle. Family pride, as much as it had always done in Albania, was seeking to put right old wrongs.

Right up until King Zog's era, defending family honour offered grounds for taking another's life. Shkodër had been notorious for its blood feuds. An imagined slight, ‘high words' at a card game, was often enough for a man to shoot his neighbour dead. Vengeance was routinely expected and a man might stand vigil near his neighbour's house for days, a rifle laid across his knee, in order to exact the blood ‘owed' him.

Joseph Swire tells of sharing a room at the old Hotel International with Avni Rustem, the man who assassinated Zog's Turkophile uncle, Essad Pasha, in Paris in 1920. The French convicted Rustem of political murder and fined him one franc. Rustem returned to Albania, where his countrymen rewarded him with a pension. Swire described a ‘little pale-faced man in threadbare tweeds…' He liked him. Rustem cheerfully told Swire over his newspaper that he was waiting for his death, for Essad's blood had to be avenged. Six weeks later he was shot down in Tirana by a hireling of Essad's family, ‘a thick man with a red face' whom Swire says he met several times in 1930 near his house ‘with an innocent umbrella in his hand'.

The priests and the teenage girls were gone when we wandered back past the cathedral. Not a soul was about, even at the residential end of Rruga Ndre Mjeda. Shkodër's population turns indoors between the hours of one and three.

A mangy cat lying in a doorway raised its head as we passed. A single vendor had chosen to stay with his five or six copies of Albert Camus'
The Outsider
, which was enjoying the runaway success of a newly released hot title.

It was at the bottom end of the rruga that we came upon a small crowd lined up outside an open door.

The building seemed to be some kind of shrine. A new enterprise, something like Bill would imagine, a highly popular café even crossed my mind.

‘It is not these things,' says Gjyzepina. ‘It is…How do you say…?'

She thought for the moment, concentrating with the effort.

‘It is the house of biografi.'

‘A house?'

‘No. Not a house exactly. An office.'

We chewed around some more, before nailing it down to the office for political prisoners.

I preferred Gjyzepina's original choice.

‘House of biografi did you say?'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘This is the place.'

14

IN A BACK room of the house of biografi there is a desk and two chairs. The registrar sits before a huge open ledger, into which he enters the details of the person sitting opposite.

The room is filled with surviving relatives. Adult children with stories of parents carried off in the night. Wives who have lost touch with their husbands. Or solitary men and women, former prisoners and exiles whose lives were confiscated under the old regime, have been lining up in Rruga Ndre Mjeda to tell their story.

Two lines form in this small cool room of alabaster. One behind the registrar's desk, and another line before me and Gjyzepina.

It just happened this way, a story for the ledger and another for me. They present their lives as though they are little more than damaged houseware, bits of crockery; as if to say, Here, do with it what you may.

In Albania when lives disappeared it was more often than not through a trapdoor called ‘Article 55', shorthand for ‘agitation, betrayal and propaganda'. The first time I ask a man who had been jailed for ten years for the evidence, some details please of his ‘betraying the people', he doesn't quite understand.

‘The evidence? The evidence is they said I betrayed the people.'

Then he says, ‘When they said “Ten years”, it felt to me that they had kissed me on both cheeks.'

One woman refuses to come further than the doorway. She is halfway through giving her details when she loses her nerve. The registrar assures her that she is amongst friends. She mustn't feel afraid.

‘It is not for myself that I feel afraid,' she says. ‘I am afraid for my children.'

The
sigourimi
recently dynamited some houses in her street. She does not want her house to be next. She says she is sorry; she cannot go through with her story. It is still much too dangerous.

Luchia Cole steps forward. She had worked in a bakery. In the late seventies, during one of the country's periodic convulsions, the biografis were pored over for likely victims and it was discovered that Luchia's father had escaped the country in 1951. After eleven months of interrogation, Luchia ‘confessed' to her crime and was jailed for eight years under Article 55.

Gjenovefa Vilaku is here on her husband's behalf. Before their marriage, before they had even met, her husband was studying in Yugoslavia, where he fell in love with a Hungarian student. After his return home his letters were intercepted and he was accused of ‘collaborating' with a foreign agent. A death sentence was commuted to seven years.

The day of his arrest, his uncle, a priest, was executed.

He was jailed a second time for ‘agitation and propaganda' after the
sigourimi
found a ‘second witness' who was a spy in prison.

‘Where is your husband now?'

‘Germany.'

When word of the rush on Embassy Row trickled up to Shkodër, the entire family packed up, ready. At the last moment, Gjenovefa's mother fell sick and she elected to stay behind. The next she heard from her husband was a postcard from Hamburg.

Bepin Dacaj's father, at the age of sixty, was jailed for thirteen years after discussing democracy with ‘friends' in the piazza of Shkodër. Sent to Ballsh Zejmen, the professor of English had his teeth broken and forks stuck up behind his fingernails.

‘They tortured my father until he confessed. He had a heart ailment and couldn't endure it.'

The professor's wife then divorced him to preserve the ‘correctness' of her biografi. Nevertheless, she and Bepin were forced into an exile's life in Elbasan, where for fifteen years he worked as a farm labourer.