Biografi (21 page)

I wondered if he could imagine himself visiting Italy, now that his son Eloni was there, and the old brigadier suddenly came alive.

‘Never! I am too old to go anywhere.'

‘My father does not wish to go to Italy,' Paitim said.

‘Italy!' said the old woman, rolling her eyes and weaving a spell with her hands.

There was one place, however, that the old brigadier dearly wished to visit.

‘Yes?'

‘Vlorë.'

At the mention of Vlorë, Baria came and stood by the brigadier's side and held his hand.

The brigadier explained, ‘I would like very much to go back to Vlorë so I might imagine how everything was when I was a young officer.'

Along with five thousand other decommissioned officers in the early fifties, and without a job to turn to, he had ‘answered the call of the State to drain the swamp at Savra'. When the brigadier arrived here, there was one dwelling filled with prisoners from Albania's border skirmishes with Greece. The Greeks were the first to drag boulders out of the swamp, and in quick succession wave after wave of exiles had arrived, until the population of Savra had ballooned to three thousand.

We had come to the end of the coffee and raki and Turkish delight when the old brigadier unfolded his legs and spoke at length with Kadris.

‘The brigadier asks if you intend to return to Italy?'

‘Yes,' I said, which clearly was the answer he had hoped to hear. The brigadier slapped his knee. He conferred with Baria, then he passed on his request to Kadris.

‘The brigadier asks that you will take a letter to his son. I believe, too, he asks that you write him as to what you see. He does not believe Eloni's reports.'

Later, in the evening, Leila approached me with Kadris sheepishly in tow.

‘I told Leila about your plan to visit the brigadier's son in Italy. She asks that you do the same for her sons.'

Guria, hovering nearby, immediately snatched a sheet of paper from my notebook and began to scribble a note to her three grandchildren. She dashed it off with an angry kind of flourish. Whereas Paitim had sat down and, red faced with concentration, written, ‘My dearest Eloni…'

On this, my last night in Savra, I finally ‘meet' Leila's husband. It was a chance thing. I was out on the landing when the door alongside the bathroom opened, giving me a start. I was so used to it being closed that I'd come to think of it as an extension of the wall. Briefly we stared at each other before the stranger wordlessly retreated, pulling the door shut.

Whenever I had asked after Xherat I had got back an evasive answer. Sometimes Leila would flutter her fingers and make a
pffiff
sound as if Xherat had dissolved into thin air. Or else she would parry the question and bluster: ‘We are a family of women!' And Guria would then unwittingly bolster the smokescreen by testifying to her daughter's strength with remarks such as, ‘She was born with a pick axe across her shoulder.' Until we moved right off the trail with Kadris, also, chipping in, ‘You know, Leila is a very strong woman.'

But this evening, when I ask Leila about the stranger out on the landing, she says it is her husband. She makes some general announcement which sends Guria into a high-spirited cackle. Leila blushes as Kadris mischievously shares with me what I wasn't supposed to hear. ‘Leila wonders why you must know everything.'

In the mid-seventies, Petrit Dume, a distant relative of Leila's, was accused of being accomplice to a failed coup d'état. Dume's biografi was thoroughly examined and this investigation reverberated down various bloodlines.

The ‘preferred job' in animal husbandry which had made Xherat such a good catch for Leila in the first place was taken from him and he was sent to work out in the fields. The
sigourimi
, eager for more damning evidence against the ‘accomplice' to the failed coup, took Xherat and Leila in for questioning.

They questioned each separately. Eventually the
sigourimi
surprised Leila by repeating things back to her which had passed strictly between her and Xherat. Of course she had denied ever saying these things about the relative. But she worried nonetheless as to how the
sigourimi
had come to know the things they put to her.

Leila didn't budge from her position; the interrogations were stepped up. The
sigourimi
wanted her ‘evidence'. They wanted her to repeat the things she had already allegedly said about Dume. They were determined that she be their second witness.

Finally, with their patience at an end, the
sigourimi
played their trump card.

They interrogated Leila and Xherat together. This time, when she refused to comply, the
sigourimi
walked to the window and turned their backs, and Xherat said to her, ‘Why don't you just admit to the things you have said to me?'

For a moment she was stunned. It was also the moment, Leila said, that she decided to divorce her husband.

Weeks passed, months, and the story emerged that Xherat had been promised his old job back in animal husbandry if he would provide the
sigourimi
with additional information against Leila's relatives.

‘I could not believe that my husband would do such a thing.' She recalled from a ‘romanciful' book she had read many years earlier how the hair of a jilted lover had turned white overnight.

‘At the time I read this I did not believe it possible. But this same thing happened to me.'

For thirteen years Leila had refused to speak to or acknowledge the man who lived behind the door next to the bathroom. There was no other place for Xherat to go.

In the morning Leila stood on the landing to wave goodbye. Stooped in the doorway behind her were Guria and Beatrice, with little Donatella trying to squeeze through their legs. To their right was the door to Xherat's room. That closed door in Savra, I think, signalled the worse kind of exile.

37

THE DISTANCE FROM Savra to Vlorë, the place of the retired brigadier's youth, is no more than seventy kilometres. Enver and Nexhmije used to have a holiday house there. It was from Vlorë that Enver had hurried back to Tirana in a panic after delegates to the 1958 Tirana Congress were encouraged to speak openly, and some, to Enver's horror, had done exactly that. Vlorë was also one of the landing places during the Italian invasion. Another more compelling reason to go to Vlorë is its location on the coast. The Albanian Riviera starts at Vlorë, and on Cliff 's map the road immediately climbs over the imposing Coraun mountain range to spill down the other side to the ocean. This is the road on which Shapallo's surgeon and hairdresser had met their end, and the same road to which, many years later, Shapallo had turned to seek anonymity.

Shapallo has come along with us. We asked him last night, and before Kadris had finished explaining that we would be gone two days, Shapallo bounced up from his bed and grabbed his coat. Then the old man had wondered what the delay was about. Tonight. Tomorrow. It made no difference to him.

As we passed the turnoff to Gjaza I looked to see if it registers with Shapallo. Nothing. He doesn't turn his head a whisker.

Half an hour later we enter Fier, where a large crowd is mobbing a bakery door. People are hoisted up on shoulders to reach through the iron bars of the bakery window. Kadris said there had been something on television last night about there being less than six days' supply of flour left in the country.

Further on in town, concrete bunkers compete with free enterprise stalls for the best vantage points in the marketplace. There is more food in Fier than I have seen in a while. Unsuspecting ducks are cycled home. Hand-held turkeys dangle upside down. The flightier chickens are tied to bike carriers.

The main street is lined with phoenix palms. A small park is filled with pines. Then we're back to the continuum of drab concrete housing blocks. Where they end, the concrete bunkers resume. Then they too come to an abrupt halt, like flora suddenly unable to flourish because of a sudden change in soil conditions. A few kilometres on and the bunkers return, thickening up near a massive fertiliser works.

From Leven, a state farm, the road narrows to a toothpick and it's a straight run to the coast. We pass by acres of rusted tunnel housing. Glasshouses lie smashed. There is no wind, not so much as a breeze to disturb the dead flaps of plastic.

From his recollection, Shapallo says the area was ‘once wonderful eating'.

On Cliff 's map the area we are passing through is Apollonia, represented by a rich green landscape, which in the millennium before Christ had formed a gateway to the Balkan highlands and Macedonia.

Nearer to Vlorë the road twists through a small range of hills. The hillsides, terraced with olive trees, lie abandoned. A weedy undergrowth is reaching up to the lower branches, and on many of the trees the olives remained uncollected.

On Cliff 's map Vlorë has been allocated a sun umbrella and it's easy to see why. The town is cupped by hills thick with olives. Even the crude housing blocks have less impact here. The relief is open-ended, because here, at last, is the sea. Small waves gallop up to a long, thin strip of tree-lined beach. Presumably in summer umbrellas get a chance to flourish in between the concrete bunkers built at regular intervals along the beach and as far as the eye can see.

The startling thing is I don't recall having seen anyone as we passed through Vlorë. In town we did a quick tour of the old statue sites. Everything had been torn down and we didn't come across another soul. Kadris said everyone was at home eating lunch. Then, after further consideration, he thought the rest may have gone abroad, to Italy.

Where the road begins to hug the beach it is possible to glance up the hill, to where the treetops fall short of concealing a remnant of Albania's architectural past. The tiled rooftop of Enver's summer house can just be seen.

The road climbs to a promontory, and on its furthest point, fenced off from the road, is the former grand residence of Hynsi Kapo, one of the few trusted friends of Enver's who was allowed to share in power. At the time of his death he had risen to become the Second Secretary of the Politburo. He is remembered mostly for his having gone to a natural death.

Surviving that memory is his three-storey clifftop residence which would not disgrace itself on the French Riviera. But here, because of its solitariness and on the heels of the Soviet housing models, it is all the more extraordinary.

Succeeding it a few kilometres on is a modestly sized memorial to ‘Albania's Youth' whose devotion to the three disciplines—the military, education and ‘voluntary work'—was responsible for carving terraces on steep hillsides.

A short distance on, Kadris points out where the students lost their lives.

We have left the coast for a valley with the ancient name of Orikum. It is lush at the entrance and snow-capped at its head. In between are the most beautiful streaks of purples and greys, soft and unworldly, like the colours found in rainbows. Here and there, the odd stone cottage, but no people, and few signs of domesticity. A goat chewing its cud looks up at our passing.

Where the road begins to climb, the valley walls close up and on the far slopes, which are sheer vertical drops, bits of terracing cling in patches; elsewhere, the terraces have subsided, dropped away as if over a waterfall, some with uprooted young trees sticking out from the spill. The older, dead ones look like bony hands.

The first vehicle of the day, an old Chinese truck, appears around the bend up ahead. A green cab belching chocolate-coloured smoke that swirls away to a kite tail. The passengers stand on the back, each person's hand resting on the shoulder of the one in front. They have come down from the pass and their heads are wrapped in see-through plastic.

Balancing on the very top of the Llogara Pass is a patch of pale blue sky. We wind down the windows and the wind feels clean. For the moment it feels as though we have left Albania. We are down to a crawl—Mentor as usual persevering with too high a gear—when Shapallo rests a hand on Mentor's shoulder, and this downward pressure slowly brings the car to a halt.

The Volvo is breathing heavily—a hissing from the radiator. Otherwise it is incredibly still. We look for eagles.

Soon we climb out. Shapallo withdraws to the side of the road with his hands clasped behind his back.

A whisper in my ear from Kadris: ‘Mister Shapallo wishes to have lunch now.'

Leila has prepared some balls of spicy rice. They come wrapped in pages from her library of Enver's works. One page is headed ‘Decoding the Chinese'. Another, ‘Meetings with Stalin'.

Enver raises Mao's complaint that he had felt ‘like a schoolboy' in Stalin's presence, whereas he had felt himself treated to a great man's humility. He talks of their sharing a meal together. Stalin sends away the help and the two men serve each other. Later, Stalin is at pains to show Enver the toilet. In the garden, on a walk, he worries over the younger man's dress, whether he is warm enough. The page ends there, stained with rice.

Shapallo is squinting across the valley floor. What I had mistakenly thought of as a landslide of rocks, he tells me, is in fact a village twinkling in the sun.

Now of course I can see—the layering of rocks and the breathing spaces in between.

Shapallo says he visited the village about ten years ago. He can't recall its name—and on Cliff 's map it doesn't even exist. It was during one of the Emperor's illnesses and Shapallo had travelled through the night to open a school in the village. The villagers threw wild roses in his path, and Shapallo recalled his trailing sooty red- and burgundy-coloured petals after the colours of the national flag. And later, when it came time to leave, he was amazed to find the villagers digging holes to plant rose shrubs over the ground which had received his footsteps.

Several years later he returned to the village. This was after the Emperor's death and Shapallo had grown a short beard to cover Enver's ‘genial chin'. He leaned on a walking stick and covered his head with a highlander's bright neckerchief. He was given itinerant's work and paid with food to collect firewood.