Biografi (12 page)

Fatos Kongoli had been in the director's chair for less than three months. His office was impressively large, but bare, as though still waiting for Fatos to make his presence felt. It was also very cold. It was late afternoon and Fatos still hadn't shed his overcoat.

His hands never left his pockets as he crossed the off ice blowing small white clouds of breath ahead of him.

‘I am sorry. My English is not very good.' He excused himself for a moment and returned with one of his English-speaking editors, Brikena.

I mentioned my interest in biografi—which drew a chuckle from him.

Fatos explained how it was the director's right to see all the files of the publishing house's employees. Before he assumed the position, it had occurred to him at odd times of the day—sometimes at night in bed, or while walking to work in the morning—that finally, in a matter of days, he would be able to take a look at his own file. His curiosity mounted, overwhelmingly so, blotting out all other thoughts. But in the end, drawing pleasure from denial, he had resisted.

‘I decided I could not bear to see what my friends had said about me.'

In another two months, he said, the files office would be closing forever. After that, the only files on record would be of a résumé nature.

Brikena went out to organise some coffee and we passed a pleasant afternoon in Fatos's office. He was something of a raconteur. His eyes bulged, his hands shaped the air, and an unending smile lit the tops of his teeth. At one time he had been a journalist. Unfortunately his biografi was affected by his composer father's friendship with a director of broadcasting who was purged in the early seventies. Fatos was temporarily retired from his job at the newspaper and sent to work at the Elbasan metallurgy plant. Two years stretched to three, after his former newspaper employer would not take him back.

He left to work at a cement factory and spent all his spare time going from one Party office to another, trying to get his old job back. Finally he was given a chance as a children's book editor. But even here was a potential minefield.

‘Only fables about animals were acceptable. It had to be about the rabbit, or better still'—he laughed—‘the “collective of rabbits” who fought the big bad wolf.'

Brikena had also started off in children's books, and one of her first tasks had been to plan a new edition of Grimm's fairy tales.

The problem was, she said, ‘fairytales about kings, queens and witches were not allowed to be published.'

The book, like so many other politically dicey books, had been held up in production for eight years.

‘Only, in this case, I was very glad for this to happen. You can imagine how an Albanian edition of Grimm's fairy tales would have read.'

For a number of years Brikena and Fatos had been privileged readers of Western literature denied a wider audience. Fatos, with a great curve of smiling teeth protruding his bottom lip, confessed to a great fondness for William Boyd.

‘
An Ice-Cream War
I liked very, very much.' He slapped his thigh and laughed at his memory of the silly, pompous English colonel.

Brikena blew another smoke ring at the ceiling and considered. Graham Greene's
The Comedians
she particularly liked. Greene's Haiti, she felt, very much resembled Albania.

‘Now, this was one that nearly made it through to publication, but passages had to be left out because the biografis of the two lovers had made the editor-in-chief very nervous.

‘You remember, there was the daughter of the Nazi and the son of the Communist. The affair might suggest that Communism and Nazism were on an equal footing.

‘The editor-in-chief wanted the lover of the Communist to have a clean biografi.'

I asked about Kadare, his standing, and the mere mention of his name had Fatos rock back in his chair and clap his hands.

‘Kadare and William Boyd,' he said. ‘I like both very much.'

When Fatos was a teenager, it had been Kadare's poems that steered him towards literature.

‘Unfortunately for me, around the time I was about to begin university Enver Hoxha gave a very important interview. He was asked, were he to have his life all over again, what career he would have chosen.

‘Enver said, “Why, I would like to be a mathematician. There can be no higher calling. A mathematician or a scientist.”

‘This was devastating news,' Fatos said, ‘because my father took me aside. And even though his background was in the arts he knew I would never be able to truly develop as a writer. “Fatos,” he said. “I think you should study mathematics.”'

Fatos laughed happily. There didn't seem to be any bitter memories.

‘So,' he said, ‘I became a very bad mathematician.'

‘Of course,' I ventured, ‘some say Kadare was a propagandist.' I mentioned
The Great Winter
, which Mimi's husband had roundly disdained. But Fatos knew both sides to the story.

‘It's true,' he conceded, ‘that he glorifies Hoxha, but you must know that if it were not for Hoxha, Kadare would have been crucified.

‘I was a journalist at the time and there was talk among hardliners and the
sigourimi
that Kadare was at an end. This was true. He was in great danger.

‘Of course Hoxha knew this—he was at Elbasan to open the metallurgy plant. A crowd had gathered, and quite unexpectedly a Party functionary stepped forth from the ranks of the workers to ask Hoxha's opinion of
The Winter of the Great Loneliness.
Did Comrade Enver think it worthy?

‘Hoxha considered. He thought it was not a book to be “lightly dismissed”.'

And here, Fatos held up a finger.

‘In fact, he went further. He said, “Of course, it has its faults, but Kadare is a good writer.”'

Fatos leaned forward in his chair, his smiling teeth clenching his bottom lip.

‘These words saved Kadare's life. Or, at the very least, saved him from prison.' Fatos was sure of that.

‘In the book, although Hoxha was glorified, socialism was directly attacked. Being intelligent as Kadare is—by attacking socialism in the Soviet Union he indirectly attacked socialism in Albania. But he could do this only by glorifying Hoxha. This was very clever.'

The writers and critics held a meeting to debate the changes Kadare might make to his text. Hours of debate followed, from which there emerged a solitary change—
The Winter of the Great
Loneliness
was shortened to
The Great Winter.

I walked Brikena home. Her apartment was on the other side of
the sprawling ‘black market' in the direction of Mount Dajti.

It was already dark and the way poorly lit. We had to feel our way over uneven ground. When we could, we walked along what we hoped was the centre of the road. Every so often the hooves of a horse and cart drew up behind—a driver mumbled a greeting—before the hooves melted into the night.

The biggest change since pluralism was the noise, said Brikena.

‘All day long,' she complained. ‘Buses, trucks, and the cars! It used to be so quiet.'

Brikena and her husband, George, had moved into Brikena's mother's house. Brikena's linguist father had died some years ago, and an aunt had moved in to make up the numbers.

We walked around the back of a three-storey building to the courtyard. Brikena said to look out for the oil crates, blackened wire boxes containing used oil bottles.

In total darkness we climbed three floors to the apartment, the comforts and imported tastes of which I hadn't expected. But then Brikena had spent a short period in Germany, and George, before marrying, had studied in France for five years. He was headed back there in another fortnight.

Brikena had warned me in advance that George was without any interest in politics. ‘George is a cynic.' She told me this as we were climbing the stairs. If it was true, then this attitude struck me as a privileged sensibility. Why waste time thinking about what didn't affect you? I thought back to Gjyzepina's poor brother-in-law with his dreams of France, and Clement's father's desperate pleas to various Party officials to tell him what he could do to improve his biografi. But I liked George. He had a big open face and was ready to laugh and kid around at the drop of a hat. We sat in the old linguist's book-lined study. There were comfortable armchairs and free-standing lamps.

I told George how plastic flowers had been glued to the dead wood of the shrub growing in the foyer of the Dajti, and he clasped his hands and started to recite the joke about the President and the Democrat leader being in each other's pocket.

Sali Berisha asks Ramiz: ‘Are you satisfied with all the terrible things I have been saying about you?'

And Ramiz answers: ‘No, no. Please, you must tell more!'

Brikena said disapprovingly, ‘George is not a serious person.'

In Brikena's estimation this was a damning thing to say about anybody. I had noticed she wasn't comfortable laughing. A schoolgirl twittering emerged from the cool intellectual and she reacted as if she had been caught out, covering her face until she had regained control. Brikena was more comfortable tilting her head back and blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling. She did not wish anyone to think of her as being frivolous.

Brikena's mother, a tiny woman dressed entirely in black, had prepared a dish of delicious savouries wrapped in vine leaves. On a mantle was a photograph of her in the forties, as a partisan. She had looked like Ginger Rogers in battle fatigues. The photograph had been taken in the mountains. Next to Brikena's mother another woman has a belt of ammunition slung over her shoulder. It seemed a happy occasion. The older woman took the photograph from her daughter's fingers and grinned at it for a moment.

I asked Brikena to ask her mother to tell us a little about her partisan experiences.

But Brikena answered for her. ‘I have asked her this many times and she always answers the same way.'

‘Yes?'

‘She says it was like being in a film. A movie. It happened, and then you wondered if it had.'

The vivacious young woman in the photograph stood up unsteadily. George took hold of her arm while she corrected a troublesome knee. She gathered up the dishes and carried them out to the kitchen, where there was some excited chatter, no doubt the aunt wanting to know what had been said, and then hoots of laughter.

19

I HAD BEEN in Albania only ten days, and already Bill's appetites were fast becoming my own. I couldn't afford the dollar restaurant in the Dajti. The worst time was at night, when, even if I wasn't particularly hungry, eating and drinking were the only things to do. Sometimes I caught a glimpse through the dining-room doors of the sparkling array of beer and wine glasses, and of Bill and the aid workers sawing up lettuce and mayonnaise and braised cutlets which had been flown in from Italy.

For a handful of leks a vendor in the park opposite the hotel dropped a copper scoop into a sackful of blackened sunflower seeds, which is what the half-starved soldiers nibbled in their hands all day long. Sometimes I unwrapped the cake from Nick's mother and stared at the yellow oblong, until I thought better of it and returned the cake to its newspaper wrapping.

Some of the lek cafés offered beer, which came in small brown bottles without labels. But it had missed some vital stage in production. It tasted yeasty and bitter, and was undrinkable.

Hungarian chocolate from a white-coated woman who had set up shop in a kind of plastic igloo in the park usually kept me going through the day.

The artists and writers' building had a café downstairs. Brikena had taken me there. It had the atmosphere of an old hunting lodge. Wooden tables with red tablecloths covered in cigarette burns spread over a rambling ground floor and mezzanine area. A few tables were occupied by figures hunched in conversation. But there was nothing to eat or drink. They had run out of coffee late the previous afternoon.

Another café, Hungarian-owned, had started up across the road from the writers' building. Every day it drew sightseers to its doors. Faces pressed against the window in quiet awe of the shiny chrome and plastic surfaces inside. You sat in there eating small, sweet cakes and tried to prevent yourself from looking up at the drawn faces and salivating mouths at the window.

This morning I manage to get the table just beyond the end of the window. It is the only table that is humanely possible to eat at, but you still get to hear the odd slap and thump of a hand and shoulder against the plate-glass window.

A solidly built Hungarian minds the door, opening it just wide enough to let patrons through. His job is to identify paying customers and snatch them from the ragged mob on the pavement. There is a mad scramble, and the customers, like peas from a pod, are expectorated through the narrow angle of the doorway. We all arrive inside the beautiful shining chrome bar the same way, slightly dishevelled from the rough handling. Women bend down to recover their handbags and personal effects from the floor, and pat down their hair.

And this is how Munz arrives, lurching through the door, his eyes wide with disbelief, like a freshly hooked fish. The bright imported lights catch the beady perspiration beneath his eyes while he fumbles around for his glasses.

‘Well,' he says, still breathing hard as he sits down. ‘I have a very big surprise for you.'

He reaches inside his coat and slaps a tatty old envelope on the table.

‘It's him. Shapallo?'

‘He's alive?'

‘Yes, of course. I must say I am very glad to have been proven wrong. Perhaps,' he says, ‘you will still get to meet our friend.'

I start to ask him half a dozen questions at once until he shuts me up.

‘I cannot tell you how sorry I am to have to admit this. For some months I have had a notice of a registered letter waiting for me at the Postal and Telegrams Off ice. I never thought for a moment…Well, I thought perhaps it is something from Germany. But Shapallo? No. Never.' Then, rather sheepishly, Munz confessed to having misplaced the notice.