Biografi (19 page)

Shapallo quoted from a traveller's journal: Lord Montague, a visitor to Louis's Versailles, had counted more than two hundred pictures and statues of Louis in his house and garden. ‘He is strutting in every panel and galloping over one's head in every ceiling…and if he turns to spit he must see himself in person or as his vice regal, the Sun.'

He closed with a description of a drawing Thackeray had done of Louis. The drawing, if I have understood this correctly from Kadris's sweaty translation, contained three figures. On the left, Thackeray portrayed the young King as a tailor's dummy, with a wig, false calves and high-heel shoes. In the centre he had drawn a small bald man called ‘Louis'—to the right, a sketch of the combination of the tailor's dummy and the little bald man, and Thackeray had captioned the drawing: ‘Louis, the King. The greatest actor of Royalty the world has seen!'

‘When I read that,' said Shapallo, ‘I experienced real hope. Of course, I must tell you that I had known I would have to act, like an actor, but until that moment it had never occurred to me that Enver had been doing the same.'

32

ONE OF ENVER Hoxha's favourite camera hands had been Zerena's husband, Palli Kuke. One night before starting south I met at the Hotel Tirana and Palli had told me about his work.

Every camera angle had to be approved by the Press Board of the Central Committee of the Party, and this office had direct contact with Ramiz, who filled a kind of producer's role.

Only the right side of Enver was to be filmed: Palli said Enver had a problem with his left eye. ‘It was slightly smaller.'

Specific rules determined how close Palli could go with the camera. ‘You could never go so close as only to get the head— the shot had always to contain the body so his wrinkles wouldn't show.'

Enver had to be presented as youthful, so Palli was obliged to use filters to soften the image.

‘He was a great master at working the camera. A great actor and a director with extraordinary capacities,' said Palli.

‘We could tell by Nexhmije's eye if everything was perfect or not,' he said.

Nexhmije always stood behind Enver, as consort, but also as wardrobe consultant and director's assistant. Nexhmije had to make sure everything was in place on the set before the show could begin.

‘On this occasion we had made all the preparations in the Hoxha residence. Everything,' he recalled, ‘was ready. The word came that Enver and Nexhmije were on their way up the street.

‘You should understand,' he said, ‘it was as if the air moved when they came into a room. The camera hands were the only ones allowed to move around but we had to move in such a way as to prevent creating an air current.

‘I was moving very slowly so as to show that I was not aware of what I was seeing or hearing. When, quite unexpectedly, Enver changed course. This was completely unscheduled. Enver did not enter the house as planned but went to sit in the park opposite. This set off a terrible confusion inside the house.

‘Now, as Enver reached the park he started toward a bench. His intention was clear. He was going to sit down.

‘At that moment, a huge man I had seen in the house rushed out with a pillow. He arrived just in time, and as Enver lowered himself the huge man placed the pillow, and quickly disappeared so that Enver would not feel embarrassed.

‘Such things, we did not film.'

‘Enver's death? Oh. Oh. Oh.' He clasped a hand to his cheek. ‘Everything on television had to be about Enver. Nexhmije was director and our instructions were to show only film which would suggest a catastrophe was about to follow.

‘I was with Enver to the end. Even in death. The cameraman had to be there with the body.'

33

THIS MORNING THE windows in Leila's apartment are misted over, and white. I can hardly move for the cold. The session with Shapallo last night straggled on into the small hours. Shapallo lost his shyness around Leila and she joined us and upheld a polite but formal interest, to begin with. But as the evening wore on, she corrected Kadris's dates and told her own stories. We had a bottle of raki to warm our insides and soon we were laughing and conversing easily. At some point Guria appeared at the door to say she had found some bedding. And after that, we were better able to relax, without any further thought to the walk ahead of us, back to Lushnje.

I don't know what hour it was when we bade Shapallo farewell. Leila had already retired. Our last view of Shapallo was from the window, of the old man crouched over his Bunsen burner, warming his hands, his great coat hanging from his shoulders, looking less like an Emperor than a shag lifting its wings, ready for flight.

There's some rustling coming from the other side of the wall. It's the mystery room between Leila's door and the communal toilet. Donatella, Fatmir's eighteen-month-old daughter, is up. I hear her shrieks and wide-eyed voice and Guria's purring from the other room.

I wear everything to bed. All I have to take off are my boots. Kadris has the couch on the other side of the room. He falls asleep with his tie still knotted. A corpse in a suit buried beneath Leila and Guria's black coats.

A horse coughs in the fields, and then it is quiet again.

I get up at first light and wander outside. A line of women scarved up against the cold shoulder their picks and shovels out to the fields. Stumbling after them is a man in blue trousers and a blue jacket. He has just spotted me, and can't believe his eyes.

I wave, and he turns after the women.

The faint beginnings of a sun draw the cold up from the earth; it rises through the thick soles of my Dolomites. These same conditions are all but ignored by a girl of about fourteen walking by in a cotton shirt. Her hard young breasts point ahead and she trails a head of dirty hair on her shoulders. She's carrying a prize in her hand—a piece of bread sprinkled with sugar, a far cry from when the murals on the walls of the bread and fruit shops were hidden by piles of food, and children threw grapes in the air, like peanuts.

During his years in the block Shapallo had not wanted for anything. The times when the Emperor was unwell Shapallo had been obliged to skip a meal so that, together, Hoxha and he might grow wan and stingy-mouthed at the thought of food. Otherwise, as in a child's world, everything was provided for.

As in a child's world he did as told—for instance, he must fix his eye on an imaginary face at the very edge of the crowd. On the rare occasion of a crowded room he must resist the entrapment of detail and instead focus on doorways and distant walls.

These instructions had come from Tef, the smiling official, who gave Shapallo every encouragement to think of himself as Emperor.

On his arrival in the block, Shapallo was given a dressing gown. He was also given Chinese underclothing. A pair of sandals for indoor wear. A cap like Enver's. Several double-breasted suits of grey flannel, and that was it. Clothes for public occasions. Otherwise in private he lived in a dressing gown and sandals to prevent another identity emerging through a second change of clothing.

He had been in the block three months, and this particular day, which was the Emperor's birthday, Tef showed up with flowers, sweet Williams, for Shapallo.

Weeks, months passed by, and the offical provided Shapallo with other little surprises. Sometimes he turned up with chocolate. Or ice cream. Enver liked chocolate and ice cream. At other times there were books by Enver's favourite authors— Jerome K. Jerome, Jack London, Shakespeare and Dickens. Dickens, especially. But more often he brought Shapallo chocolate, Turkish delight, and sometimes confectionery from abroad, wrapped in bright-coloured crepe paper and bows.

‘I have no family,' he told Shapallo one time, smiling with embarrassment.

In 1970, Tef arrived with a television set and together, like a couple of aging boardinghouse indigents, they sat downstairs to watch the New Year Music Show. Every so often, as Shapallo recalled, the camera would leave the musicians and singers on stage and search among the audience for Enver's straight back and ready smile. And whenever this happened, Tef would chuckle and push the chocolates in Shapallo's direction.

A young woman was singing. She wore her hair long, gypsy-like, and bell-bottom jeans and a halter neck which left her stomach bare. This was extremely risqué. She was singing a love song, and when the cameras moved up close to her face, Shapallo said, he saw the grownup features of his oldest daughter, Vata; the same pear-shaped cheeks, he said, the big brown eyes which had so often stood by the door to his clinic, watching him, quiet as a shadow, sometimes for as long as half an hour before he would look up with a start and notice her.

He began to call to the woman on television, calling out his daughter's name.

At that moment the cameras returned to mingle in the audience. Shapallo breathed out and sat back in his chair, and as he did so, he noticed that Tef had been watching him with concern, his face drawing to a professional judgment. Shapallo had felt reasonably sure that for all his generosity and his gifts, Tef was still an official who made out reports, just as he was confident there were others, whose faces he never saw, with an interest in his ‘progress'.

On this occasion Shapallo nodded silently, and the danger passed.

Last night he explained that his daughters were eight and ten when he was abducted. He had volunteered this information— tapping the side of his head to add: ‘But in here they continued to grow to adulthood, to marry and have children.'

In absentia, Shapallo had continued to celebrate their birthdays, construct conversations, even arguments. In this world he continued to have family responsibilities. He worried after them. At one time he had even considered, that is to say he had imagined, plans for their leaving Albania.

There had been few opportunities for Shapallo to notice the drift of the country outside of the block. His visits were too short for him to form an impression. But he had noticed slight but quite palpable changes in the crowd. The devotion of the earlier years had dissipated. There was still a sea of flags, but these were now held in hands which had lost all feeling.

He started to notice the general neglect. The buildings needed painting. It seemed that everything outside the block had gone into a slouch, as though the stitching that ran throughout the city had started to unravel. He overheard the gardener complain to the soldiers that there was no meat, and the soldiers complain back that machinery lay idle for want of parts.

Shapallo seemed to think it was around the early eighties that a radical change was introduced into his diet. Meat and fish were virtually eliminated, and a monotony of soups was forced upon him.

The Emperor was dying and, accordingly, a sort of cheerful emaciation was expected of Shapallo. Already, at Tef 's insistence, Shapallo relied on a walking stick. On the same advice, these days he allowed himself to be bodily assisted to the rostrum, to take in a parade. He was to smile at the silliness of all the fuss and give every indication that recovery lay just around the corner.

But on television, Shapallo noticed, the Emperor moved slowly and painfully. No longer did the cameras lovingly soak up detail of Enver's favoured side, but caught him at oblique angles before flitting off elsewhere.

One night there appeared a stooped and frail old man standing on a beach. In one hand Enver held an orange; his other hand pointed to the horizon, to where the cameras obediently sought out the ‘true boundary between suffering and dignity'.

Toward the end, less was asked of Shapallo. The organised mass rallies were fewer. Increasingly the Emperor's appearances were for a television audience: footage of his walking through a sunny olive grove, of his standing between two farm workers, like a gold medallist, or in a classroom, sitting snuggled up to a litter of infants dressed in blue smocks.

It had been around this time that Shapallo had started to construct plans to send his family abroad. He toyed with the idea of a wealthy uncle in Italy, but there were unforeseen problems with that scenario. A wealthy uncle on its own was a fairly distant proposition, but Italy, as a place, its smells, its quality of light, its tastes, was unfathomable. There was nothing for Shapallo imaginatively to latch on to, and so in the end he could not bear to send his family away to a world which he couldn't begin to imagine and, therefore, was effectively barred from entering.

34

THIS MORNING I invited Leila to the Blerimi. Mentor was due to arrive from Tirana, and I had thought about driving into town for lunch with Leila and her mother. Kadris explained the plan, and Leila, with vague intention, picked up a hairbrush. Thoughtfully she held out a grey strand of hair, then she let it go.

‘What is this Blerimi?' she asked.

Kadris described the restaurant above Lushnje with the views of the Myzeqe, and he made as if to kiss the grease of hot schnitzel off his fingertips. But he might as well have been explaining plans for Leila to visit her father's grave in New York. The hairbrush was put aside and she said she could not go to this restaurant, because she had never been to a restaurant. She didn't know what to expect—she did not like surprises. There was no persuading her, and Guria went along with Leila's decision.

If the Blerimi lay outside the boundaries of everyday experience, then Savra, equally, had caught Kadris unawares—he seemed affected by the stories he had heard.

We waited another hour and decided to set out on foot for the market in Lushnje to stock up.

It was another cold day, but tolerable in the absence of any brutal wind blowing over frozen fields. Leila walked between me and Kadris; she held her shopping basket out in front as though loitering down a supermarket aisle. The previous March, she said, this same bare road had been thick with people, among them her three sons.

She spoke of the fantastic rumours which had buzzed about Savra on the day of the exodus, and how on Tirana Television they had learned of a ‘small number of hooligans' commandeering a number of ships in Durrës.