Biografi (20 page)

‘Then Eduart had tuned in to RAI and the Italians were saying something very different,' she said.

The Italians had spoken of thousands clambering aboard ships.

‘Thousands! They did not mention “hooligans”.'

She asked me to tell her about Italy. The letters she had received so far were spare of detail. She wished to know more. She listened attentively. And of course, she asked me the question which Bill had told me is asked every foreigner: ‘How poor are we?' Television. She wanted to know how many channels there were in Italy. She had heard it said that in America people watched television in the toilet. Could I please confirm this?

I thought back to the living-room scene we had left in Savra with Guria, Donatella and her mother, Hava, watching
Bonanza
off a Yugoslav channel. Lorne Greene was speaking English, but the subtitles had been in Serb.

In Rome I had looked up Franco Leonardi, the television writer for
Il Messagero
, who was in no doubt of television's role in the boat exodus. He believed that a powerful transmitter built in Puglia to relay the signal to southern Italy had had the unexpected benefit of strengthening reception across the Adriatic. In the cluttered Old World off ices of
Il Messagero
Franco described how Albania had at last seen the truth about the outside world.

The twin realities were starkly obvious: since the regime had given up on jamming reception, an exile seated in a cold room in Savra could watch commercials about Lancias, ankle-deep carpet and beautiful women lowering themselves into sunken baths foaming with bubbles. If they looked up from the set, out the window, they saw mud and no prospects.

Eventually the white pebbles at the bottom of the hill ranges grew to the size of apartment boxes. Soon after, we were stepping over the railway lines and onto the main road through Lushnje.

We stopped by the hotel. I spared a thought for my things in my room upstairs. But I could not bear to go up there and touch base, even briefly.

The woman crouched inside the small candlelit cubicle thought Mentor was down at the railway station.

‘A mechanical problem,' said Kadris.

In Lushnje there are two markets. There is the one in the square beneath the Democratic Party Headquarters. The other is by the railway station, a sprawling area of dust and trucks.

Canvas awnings are unhooked at the back of trucks, and out climb cold, weather-bitten travellers who have journeyed in from surrounding villages.

The men leap down casually, limber as gymnasts, eager to put arrival behind themselves and blend in. The women, with the huge bags and encumbered with babies swaddled in blankets, are left to struggle out on their own; on one foot they balance, dangling their free foot below for the step, while their husbands gaze off in another direction or else cup their hands to get their cigarettes lit.

Eventually we spot the Volvo, its rear axle propped up on top of a pile of stones and Mentor, trustingly, stretched out underneath to tie on the exhaust pipe.

Kadris addresses Mentor's feet—they give a small kick, and in a jiff Mentor has wriggled out. The sight of us is the cause of great distress or sublime pleasure, I'm not sure which. He buries his face in Kadris's chest and gives a heart-rending apology for our having had to walk from Savra, but some tragedy had befallen his car in the night.

He had started out with the relatively minor inconvenience of a puncture, but had made things worse by driving on it from the hotel to the garage here. The Volvo, lopsided and with a battered wheel rim, seemed to indicate the fate of every toy that had been sent home from Italy.

The man in the garage rolled out the wheel rim. He'd made a pretty good job of hammering it back to shape. It just remained for his son to return with a bike tube from home. Bicycle tubes were the country's sole remaining source of rubber.

We were there another hour before the garage man's son showed up. In that time a truck which had driven up from the Greek border arrived with brandy, cigarettes, pasta, kerosene, goat meat, chocolate, girlie calendars and television sets.

I bought some brandy, some meat and rice, and half a dozen bottles of kerosene.

After Mentor fitted on the wheel there followed a strange Byzantine quest for tomatoes and onions. Mentor was particularly aggressive in this pursuit. In the lowering gloom of the afternoon we drove to different parts of Lushnje, from one house to another, and in due course found ourselves on the road headed south to Berat.

In a short while we left the road and followed a farm track for a time, until it ended in a lean-to cobbled together from loose rocks. We stayed in the car, our shoulders jammed together for warmth, while Mentor in his city shoes marched belligerently around the back of the dwelling, yelling out for the occupant. When he returned to the car he stuck a package under Kadris's nose.

It smelled like cat piss, but Kadris dreamily inhaled.

‘I have not had goat cheese for many, many months,' he said.

Later, back in Savra, in Leila's flat, the goat cheese was consumed in the kind of ritual silence that marks the end of a famine. Shapallo ate noisily, sucking and nibbling at the crumbling cheese between his forefinger and thumb. He sucked the cheese off his fingertips and turned his attention to the brandy, while Mentor told us a story about a priest who had been ordered by the Party to stand before his congregation and renounce his faith.

The wily old priest did as the Party asked, and addressed the congregation, but he ended his retraction saying, ‘Listen very carefully. From now on, you must do as I do.'

‘That night,' said Mentor, ‘the priest escaped.'

We all laugh, except for Shapallo. I can see him turning it over in his head. The priest escapes. Yes. The priest escapes… where?

‘He escapes,' said Mentor simply.

35

SHAPALLO HAD BEEN instructed on the protocol should he be cut down by an assassin's bullet. And he had been instructed to keep in mind that he should make light of his injuries while he lay in public view, since the real emperor would survive. In the messy event of a car bomb, then all that went out the window.

It is easy to imagine a life spent behind walls in the block obsessively plotting, yearning for the Emperor's death. But curiously, by his own admission, Shapallo had hardly given it any thought. His teeth bit and he cast a thin look as if this was the wildest idea.

‘Remember,' he said, ‘I was the one who was supposed to die.'

The night Hoxha died, Shapallo was awakened by an intruder. A hand shoved rudely against his mouth. There was the click of a torch.

Shapallo paused, and briefly looked up from his account.

It was Tef, he said.

‘I knew Hoxha was dead, or something terrible like that,' he said.

And a moment later it was confirmed that something calamitous had indeed occurred, when Tef for the first time abandoned his official distance.

‘My dear old friend,' Tef had started.

There was so little time. There he was, about to be cast back out to the real world, and yet absurdly, Shapallo suddenly felt consumed with worry over small, insignificant details.

Tef had thought to bring with him a package of clothes. But Shapallo found the trousers too short in the leg. He fussed about. He was disappointed in the colour of the shirt Tef had chosen. It was an army officer's shirt and Shapallo didn't like the flaps over the pockets.

He was given money. A map. And finally, the official offered his real name.

‘Your family,' he started. But when he didn't add anything, Shapallo guessed.

‘Dead?'

The official nodded.

‘My girls?'

‘Dear Shapallo. A month after you came here.'

An hour later they slipped from the house. The door from the garden creaked open and the official pushed him out to the street. Numb with grief, and like an aging Rip van Winkle, Shapallo had groped through the block without a clue in which direction his best hope lay.

The Topojani of his imagination, which had sustained him all these years, was gone. His daughters' marriages, and the grandchildren he had gained—all that had been stripped away. He mourned the loss of a world, as much as he grieved for his family.

It was very late, but there were lights on in many of the villas in the block. In one window, the sight of a woman pressing her hands to her face reminded him of his own grief, and in his hour of release he found himself weeping for his children.

Tef had warned him to look out for soldiers and police, but Shapallo said he walked without a care. He felt that he couldn't be hurt any further; he had lost the capacity to fear. Soon the ground turned rough. The city sank deeper into night, and he realised that he had left the block behind. But already, after the years of captivity, he found himself out of breath, and he felt the new rawness of blisters forming over his heels and ankles.

That first night of ‘freedom' Shapallo had crawled into a bomb shelter in a children's playground. He described the shelter overgrown with weeds, the soggy darkness and its stink of old urine. It was damp underfoot, and without a satisfactory place to lie down he had simply leaned against a wall and dozed off.

He woke on the ground covered in slime and with one side of his clothing wet through. From the world above, he could hear the rusted seesaws groaning and the children's squealing and the pitter-patter of tiny feet. Hours later, a shaft of light made it to the top steps of the bomb shelter entrance. Shapallo waited until he could no longer hear children's voices, and when all was quiet he went and sat on the step farthest from the entrance and dried himself in the sun.

He waited until sundown before leaving the bunker. On the outskirts of the city a roadblock forced him off the road.

He slipped through the courtyard of a housing block. In the dark he upset a number of oil bottle crates and he ran with fright from the noise, down a short slope, and sank ankle deep into the fields.

Under these circumstances Shapallo hadn't found much use for the map. The dark bulk of a mountain stood out against the lighter skyline and he started in its direction. For hours he walked away from the city. And when he could not take another step he had sat down in a field and smelled soybeans and alfalfa. He smelled the countryside and breathed in its vastness. For the first time since leaving the block he ‘listened' to his hunger, and while lying on his back he had reached out and stuffed alfalfa into his mouth, like a farm animal.

36

ON MY FOURTH day in Savra, I was surprised to find the brigadier sitting up to Leila's table, with a coffee. I recognised him immediately as the same man I had seen stumbling through the ground mist the other morning.

He was a shy man in his late thirties. He had a round face with thin black hair which lay lifelessly to one side. A sparse stubble covered his chin. I could find nothing in his appearance that suggested privilege.

But it was a surprise, all the same, to find him under the same roof as an exile.

‘We are all friends,' Paitim said, and glanced away nervously.

Leila certainly thought about it. She looked up, as if she had espied something very delicately balanced in the distance about to fall—and she let it go.

She got up from the table; the brigadier held out his cup and Leila silently refilled it.

The brigadier blushed and smiled, as if to say, ‘You see?'

He explained to Kadris how he had helped Leila in the past, pleading with and finally bribing officials to allow Leila's two eldest, Fatmir and Eduart, to attend middle school. Both times it had cost Leila three months' wages from working in the fields. This morning Paitim was visiting Leila for news from her boys in Italy.

His youngest brother, Eloni, had fled to Italy on the same ship that had taken Leila's sons, the children of exiles.

Later in the day, at Paitim's invitation, we got to meet the retired brigadier.

Despite Paitim's assurances that Leila would direct us to his family's apartment, Leila wasn't sure where the brigadier's family lived. Only seventy metres of rough ground separated the brigadier's building from the exiles' living quarters. Leila knew the building. She pointed it out but laughed at the suggestion that she come with us.

She waved us on, and turned back.

Paitim, who met us at his family's door three floors up, was at a loss to explain Leila's shyness.

‘We burn under the same sun and shiver when it is cold. We experience the same crowded conditions.'

All of what he said was true. The old brigadier had two of his son's wives and their children living with him, so that he and his wife had to sleep in the kitchen at night. Nevertheless, there was the feeling of space and outlook in the brigadier's family quarters. The outstanding difference that immediately took my eye were the works of Enver Hoxha, which lined a shelf, as they had the one above Cliff 's bed in Kansas.

I had heard mixed reports of the old brigadier, ranging from ‘fair' to ‘prickly.' One time Gani Hoxha's wife had demanded to know why the exiles weren't being paid as much as the other workers, and the brigadier had remonstrated, ‘What! Do you want the Americans and the imperialists to march through here next?'

He was a small, neat man seated in a cross-legged yoga position on the couch. He stared out the window to the mountains in the south, dappled with snow, meditating on the points raised by his wife.

She was angry about the exiles ‘having everything'. By everything, she meant other possibilities. Links with the outside world.

‘Their relatives abroad send them things. We have nobody abroad, therefore,' she said conclusively, ‘we have nothing.'

Paitim added that his father had been a ‘distinguished brigadier', always at pains not to favour the farm workers over the exiles.

The old brigadier accepted this tribute quietly. We were having a hard time of it prising him from his interest in Trebeshina, the mountain range in the window. His wife, Baria, had been brought up in a village lost in the long mountainous folds which were dipping into shadow.