Biografi (15 page)

People wept and applauded, and those who raised the Democrat salute were later identified in film taken by the
sigourimi
and arrested. Perversely, sixty people who had walked to Lushnje to hear of their freedom ended up being arrested for responding inappropriately.

Since that time Mister Gina had travelled to every camp in the Myzeqe. He knew their inhabitants. He had met with every exile. Their biografis were all known to him.

‘They are all Democrats,' he said.

Mister Gina insisted on inspecting my room in the one and only hotel. He wanted to satisfy himself that I would be comfortable.

On the stairs Kadris confirmed for me: ‘There are no other English staying in the hotel.'

We followed a girl with a torch up the stairs into the dark recesses of the hall. A smell of sewage grew nearer. Other women hotel workers emerged along the dark walls, unhurried.

We came to my room. Mister Gina elbowed ahead and tried the light—with the inevitable result. He sent the young girl off, and until she returned with a bulb from another room I stood with Mister Gina clicking his tongue like a locust.

After a long silence the girl came back. She shone the torch at the ceiling. Mister Gina climbed onto a chair and replaced the bulb, and the light came on.

‘Perfect,' I said.

Unfortunately there is no flush or running water, except between the hours of 3 and 6 a.m. I discovered this at 7 a.m., and more alarming, I traced the evil smell in the hall to a tide of raw sewage which has risen from the bowls of the communal toilets just two doors away from my room.

My window gives onto a courtyard filled with rubble and debris and, quite improbably, an old Russian lorry propped up on bricks and trapped by walls on all four sides. This morning, when I pull the curtain back, a silver-haired man in an officer's uniform full of sharp creases is slowly mounting the steps to the outside landing. He looks a forlorn figure. He walks with his head down, and behind his back, in his hands, he carries a pair of white parade-ground gloves.

24

FROM THE CAR park of the Blerimi you can see a road straight as a needle laid across the plain. It is the road to Fier and in this direction we carry on for about twenty minutes, before pulling off onto a loose metal road and heading south.

Mister Gina explains the countryside as we pass through it. Some of it has been sown in cotton. Most of it lies unsown. Here is Krutje, the first cooperative farm in Albania and the model on which others were built, a watery maze of sticks and hanging plastic and low-lying buildings. A woman in a plastic raincoat walks a farm track carrying a large fish.

In Kavajë I'd heard it mentioned that Lenka was from here.

‘Lenka, so you've heard?' says Mister Gina. He is evidently pleased.

We drive on without further landmarks, and the deepening isolation is measured by every pothole along the road.

By the time we turn off into a muddy track which brings us to Gjaza, we are no farther than forty minutes' drive from Lushnje.

The track into Gjaza ends in a ditch and fields. Three-storey apartment blocks stand to one side of the track. On the other side is the old Albania to which the exiles have been banished. Hidden underneath trellises of grapevines are tiny whitewashed huts, and from here mobs of tiny, grubby-faced children swarm out to greet us. Following at their rear are the parents—the men in blue cotton pants and jackets. The women come to the doors of the huts to see what the fuss is all about.

Right away I find myself looking around for a tall, stooped figure with a scarred forehead.

Children tug at my jeans and laugh. A short man with a dark pudding bowl of hair is shaking hands with me. Sali Agolli introduces his brother, Xhelaodin, and the next thing I'm being propelled down a garden path to their hut. I glance back to see Kadris holding up his trouser legs so the cuffs don't get muddied.

An old woman dressed in black cotton orders us inside. This is Asie, the elderly mother of Sali and Xhelaodin. She is impatient for us to pass through her doorway and is shouting at her sons to get us in here. This morning the temperature must be near freezing and the old woman has just finished washing and swabbing down her stone floors.

Kadris is doing his best to bring this momentum to a halt. The older brother, Sali, has taken my hand in his, while he listens intently to Kadris. The old woman starts up again, but this time the son raises his hand to silence her. The mother catches my eye and touches a cup to her lips and laughs. She beckons me inside, but at that moment Kadris pulls me back the other way.

‘This man, Shapallo,' Mister Agolli wishes to ask, ‘is he an exile, here in Gjaza? What height is he?' Mister Agolli gazes up at me, politely intent, but there is a discouraging lack of light in those eyes.

I start to describe the high forehead and the pleasant countenance of the statues. A very tall man—they nod. But the bit about film-star looks and excellent teeth is lost on them.

The Agolli brothers would like to help, I can see that. They listen to Kadris's description. Sali scratches his chin and glances at his younger brother, who draws a line down his forehead. He leaves his finger there and for the moment watches me, and then it all sinks in. Sali rocks his head back. He speaks excitedly with his brother and then Kadris is tipping me through the doorway out of the old woman's grasp. The two brothers have hurried ahead. We leave the garden and walk to the end of the muddy track.

When I stop, the kids following behind crash into the backs of my legs. Kadris places a hand on two heads and with a few gentle words the children stay put and watch as we pick our way across the ploughed rock-hard fields.

Ahead of us, the tails of Sali's cotton jacket flap up and down over a back which is raw with cold.

About one hundred metres of open field separate us from a tiny whitewashed hut all on its own. Sali arrives ahead of us and throws the door wide and stands there with an arm extended, like a real-estate agent. There is the faint smell of recent habitation and a sprinkling of hay over the floor, but no Shapallo.

He was here as recently as one month ago. Since then he had moved to Savra, a collection of brick buildings we passed on our way here, a few kilometres outside Lushnje. There are tiny scrapings on the wall above the bed. I move in for a closer look at the word ‘Petra'. The name of Sali's pet goat.

He was nine years old when he scratched the name against the wall. The Agollis had been exiled from Peshkopi when the state needed victims as examples of what happened to those who opposed collectivisation. They were declared ‘by the will of the peasants' to be class enemies.

For ten years, the five-strong Agolli family had bedded down on the floor each night. In time they had received permission to build their present hut and, after working in the fields all day, worked at night to build their new house out of mud bricks.

After the family moved the hut was used for storing winter feed. When Shapallo moved in, there was a little hay scattered over the floor. Another two months and he would have found the old bed frame buried under with winter feed stacked to the door.

In July the maize stood tall as a man's midriff, and leading up to harvest heads like those belonging to swimmers nodding out beyond the breakers moved through the yellow maize. Sali told how as a child he had watched the adults' towering height above the maize being gradually whittled down as the maize grew taller and humbled its masters. The maize started out from under the soles of their feet and grew like a malignant weed until it had reapportioned the world. Late in summer it was cut down and the grey soil re-emerged. A natural cycle. And much like a tide which sweeps back and forth, maize had its own wandering instincts, changing the colours of Gjaza from yellow to grey and the depth of the land that was traversed, daily, from shoulder to ankle height, back and forth, a shifting colour and texture.

The maize was at shoulder height the morning Shapallo made his appearance; and not since childhood, that Sali could remember, had a figure so dominated the maize at this time of the year.

There was no fuel for the tractors and threshers, so they were using scythes and moving through the maize swinging the scythe from left to right, occasionally standing up to relieve a crick in the lower back. On one of these occasions Sali had straightened up in time to see ‘a man drowning' at the edge of the field, as Shapallo, with flailing arms, fell headlong into the crop.

They assumed he was a highlander. But for all his height, the highlander was light as a feather. Sali and his brother carried Shapallo inside the hut and laid him out on the rusted springs of the bed frame.

A cup of water from the spring dribbled over his chin. After a while Shapallo came round. He tried to sit up but his elbows fell out from under him like matchsticks.

The Agollis and the rest of the exiles hadn't known what to make of Shapallo. At another time, during the seventies, they would have assumed he was a spy. But it had become quickly obvious that he knew nothing about livestock or horticulture. He appeared to have the manners of someone from the city, but no one could be sure about that, either, other than those perhaps with long memories.

He did not eat ravenously. Another exile gave Shapallo a precious egg. To the astonishment of the exiles, the highlander nibbled at the cap, and then, for reasons of either exertion or taste, pushed the rest aside and sipped water with a mint leaf.

A chair was found for the stranger and Shapallo spent his mornings sitting in the sun at the edge of the fields. He grew stronger. But at night the exiles were kept awake by a terrible hacking cough.

A fortnight passed. Shapallo had grown strong enough to collect his own water from the spring.

Soon after this he had turned up at the Agollis' door to ask for work.

The fields had entered a new cycle and the yellow straw had already been cut away from the earth. Small fires had to be lit, and the earth split and opened up. They worked with shovels and picks in a line which moved mechanically across the field, and Shapallo, despite his advancing years, kept up.

They tilled the fields—got everything ready. Then one day the brigadier walked across the field to tell them they had no fertiliser or seed. The exiles dropped their shovels and walked silently back to their huts.

Since late September, Gjaza had waited expectantly for the onset of winter. The Agollis were waiting to see what the regime would do next, whether they would be left to starve. September passed. October, November they waited. The exiles picked their small plots of grapes and made raki. They tended the odd farm beast, a cow or a goat. Children in rags and bare feet pushed unwilling cows across the mud to the roadside grasses. Everyone waited to see what winter would bring.

Word soon arrived in Gjaza that foreigners had reached Lushnje. A tall man was handing out blue jerseys. Children were posted at the roadside, outside Gjaza, to watch for the man bearing jerseys.

Another rumour spoke of the Red Cross taking food, clothing and medicine to the exiles in Savra. The aid was selective. Everything was going to the exiles.

It was medicine that Shapallo needed most. He waited for the aid to arrive, and while he waited the nights grew longer and colder and his cough grew worse. Each morning the younger Agolli brother went to the hut expecting to raise a grey blanket over a corpse.

Late October, the nights had become so bad for Shapallo that he couldn't wait any longer. One fine morning he had set out to walk to Savra to present himself to the foreigners. That had been six weeks ago, and there had been no word of him since.

In Gjaza, at least one other exile was waiting anxiously to hear back from her old backgammon partner.

25

THE SMALL OIL heater gives off a smell stronger than its heat. In Gjaza there is no wood. There is electricity but no heaters.

Frieda apologises for her hoarseness. Her forehead is damp with sweat—for days she has been stuck with a cold.

From somewhere she has found some lipstick. She has on a smart suede jerkin and a lovely cream jersey spun with natural wool—which is perhaps what she would have worn had her old life been allowed to proceed. Frieda attended primary school in Italy, a French college in Austria. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family and was well travelled at an early age. Italy. Vienna. She lived in a house with high walls, carpeted rooms with tall windows and silver trays. For the last twenty years, however, she has worked as a seamstress for two dollars a month.

Little of the exile's life would appear to have rubbed off on her spirit. There is nothing bitter in her face. There is none of that heavy-heartedness that has made Doctor Cabey such a figure of despair. In the doctor's study Frieda would be the plover, chesty, spirited.

On the way to Frieda's hut Kadris told me that she was a doctor's daughter and that sometimes she used to play backgammon with Shapallo. But I can't very well go straight to the point of discussing Shapallo. Mister Gina also knows of Frieda. He said her family held some kind of record for the years spent in prison and exile. At such times I noticed Frieda's name mentioned—not with pity as much as with awe.

In 1946 her father was arrested and his private clinic in Tirana was confiscated. He was released after three months, but his impertinence in asking for his property to be returned brought him ten years in jail.

Another branch of Frieda's family had fought in the mountains against the Communists, and from these cousins she had inherited bad biografi.

Her biografi also revealed that her family had lived near the French consulate in Tirana, and during the time of the Zog regime the French consul had been a family friend.

In 1949 Frieda was accused of working for the French Secret Service and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. She was still in prison when, in 1954, her mother was released without a place or home to go to. One of the old family servants tried to take her in, but the regime intervened and she was thrown out in the street and left to sleep in churches and beg for bread.