Biografi (24 page)

He sprung the bonnet, but the engine was lost in the dark and poor, wretched Mentor leaned his head against the raised lid. He refused to leave the car. He worried that if he deserted it here overnight it would be picked clean and left a corpse. We left him in his car and walked silently for about ten minutes, before a bus pulled over.

Shortly after, we arrived in Tirana, careering into Skanderbeg Square like every other bus I had seen arrive—spectacularly, as though arriving in an arena, the whole body swaying on broken suspension and spilling all the passengers to one side of the bus—an old man with just two teeth grinned inches from my face. Something soft pushed against my groin. I looked down and in the old man's hands was a duck, large, white and composed like the ones I had seen in Fier, tied to bicycle carriers.

The bus lurched to a stop. Together with the old man and his duck I fell through the doors.

Kadris held on to Shapallo's arm and helped him down.

Across the square the sea of money changers bobbed up to the doors of the Tirana Hotel. Opposite the darkened Palace of Culture the lights were on in the mosque. From a first-floor window in the side of the museum building, a tired tape of Michael Jackson's
Bad
blared over the heads of the money changers. In a completely unexpected way Tirana felt welcoming, even exhilarating. The lights were out—the result of yet another power cut—but the people were abroad in numbers, hopeful and expectant of something happening.

Kadris was laughing—Shapallo had wanted to know what had become of Enver. There was a hole in the night where the eighteen-foot statue had previously stood and Shapallo wanted to wander over and inspect the curled-up tear in the metal.

I said to Kadris, ‘Let's get a beer at the Dajti.'

We had to push Shapallo through the various zones, past the fringe of begging gypsy children, the expensive red taxis, the soldiers who stood on the hotel steps as if it were the presidential palace, through the revolving doors into a lobby crowded with smoke and talk.

Kadris went to tighten the knot in his tie, as always mindful of his tidy appearance. But I noticed a layer of grime around his white collar, and the cuffs of his trousers were caked with dried mud from Savra. I hadn't shaved once in all the time away from here. My skin hadn't seen a cake of soap either.

A waitress carrying a fax on a silver tray passed under Shapallo's nose with a look of disgust.

There were women with fur stoles. Men with shiny black shoes and buttoned-up coats. Businessmen from the former bloc countries rocked on their heels, their thin lips unable to suppress the delight they felt at the longing, around them, for their sharp clothes. These intensely felt jealousies of a high-school prom attached to every glance.

Conversation hummed along in half a dozen languages. But one familiar voice singled itself out. His back was turned to me. The elbows of his ski jacket fanned out as his hands circled the air.

‘They do this veal coquette thing. You know, done up in breadcrumbs and butter. And some kind of antipasto with eggplant I'm sure they stole from someplace. Tomatoes, chives, olives…with a little parmesan sprinkled.'

One of the aid people caught my eye, said something, and Bill turned at the elbow. He turned right the way round, then squinted through his spectacles.

‘Hey,' he said. ‘There you are!'

Then he held out a hand and I introduced Kadris and Shapallo, and Bill said, ‘Oh yeah, glad to meet you.'

42

WE WERE IN Tirana only another four days, but in that time we ran about like tourists.

On the second morning back, I walked Kadris across town to the railway station. We'd been in touch with Mentor the previous day. His car was waiting for parts to be sent by his nephew in Italy. In the meantime, he had returned home and was paying a neighbour fifty leks a night to sleep in the car and keep watch.

I was sorry to see Kadris go, but he had a wife and four-year-old child waiting for him back in Lushnje. Before leaving he introduced me to one of his former English students, Diani, who worked in the university publishing house. Diani was a small, feisty bundle of energy who lived with her soccer-coach husband in an apartment towards the bottom end of the Boulevard of Martyrs.

She had clapped her hands and yelped with excitement when she learned I had been in Kukës.

‘Did you find it beautiful? Oh, and the lake,' she said. ‘It is my favourite place in all of Albania.'

She described where she had lived there, in one of the apartments near the playground with the rusted Ferris wheel. On the other side of the playground was a soccer field, and her apartment overlooked that.

‘Kukës is where I met Raffi,' she said. ‘I used to stand on my balcony and watch him kick the ball.'

Kadris and I said our goodbyes. He promised to look out for Leila. On the steps of the bus he had another inspiration. Perhaps even take her some food?

His bus started to fill up and Kadris disappeared under a cargo of boxes and poultry, and I was able to slip away.

With Munz and Shapallo, one afternoon we found Shapallo's old house. A German oil executive was living there now. His wife answered the door but refused us entry. So we stood in the garden and Shapallo had to place for us the dull earthenware pot that had brimmed with sweet Williams. We stood before the wall where the soldiers had stood, and where in summer faint brown clouds of insects hovered overhead, stuck in the aroma of the banana-fruit nectar and wisteria.

He and Munz got along in French.

Shapallo said to Munz, ‘I don't remember these curtains.' We turned to the window. Shapallo waved and the oil executive's wife pulled a face. A light rain began to fall and Munz put his arm through Shapallo's to hurry him along.

Shetitone Donika Kastrioti is the rruga on the very perimeter of the block, divided from the Boulevard of Martyrs by a park with the triple busts of the patriots from whom the rruga takes its name. We were walking there, past the Italian villas and ministries, when Munz pointed out Enver's son-in-law. He was one of a number of men lounging outside the wrought-iron fence of one of the villas.

I hadn't given much thought to the Hoxha family. Besides Nexhmije, I knew Enver had left behind two sons and a daughter. I had assumed that they had fled the country. As for Nexhmije, in Shkodër I had heard her variously rumoured as dead, exiled to Greece, or living in great luxury in Paris.

Munz laughed dismissively.

‘Nexhmije is alive and well. In fact she is living in this very street.'

‘No.'

‘Yes. Why not? I don't know the exact house, but it is in this street.'

Shapallo stood detached, his hands clasped behind his back and without much of a clue as to what we were talking about.

‘She is in this street,' Munz continued, and then broke away. He caught up with a woman leaving the gate of a villa up ahead.

Munz explained that the woman was from the Libyan embassy.

She nodded to a three-storey white slab building next door to the Libyans.

‘Yes. That is Nexhmije,' she said.

It all seemed so improbably easy. I looked back in the direction we had come, but the son-in-law had disappeared.

I said to Munz, ‘Is she sure?'

‘Yes, of course.' He added, ‘Nexhmije's whereabouts is no great secret, at least, not in Tirana.'

The woman from the embassy was eager to help. She ran back inside to retrieve a telephone number, but returned apologetic. The number she had was the old one for the former Hoxha compound.

I asked Munz to check just one last time. The reply was sharp: ‘Nexhmije! Yes, I have seen her for myself.'

The white building gave nothing away. On every floor the curtains were drawn. Munz read my thoughts, and chuckled. ‘Another time.'

We wandered across the park opposite the Dajti and took shelter under a tree out of the drizzle. A man had driven his Fiat into the artificial lake and was washing it down with soapy water. A steady breeze blew the suds across the lake to the far side.

Munz thought it would be a good idea for Shapallo to visit Enver's tomb, so we took one of the red taxis up to the shrine, which overlooks the city.

It was more exposed on the knoll, and the soldiers guarding Enver's remains blew on their fingers. They complained to Shapallo about the low pay they got compared with the ordinary police, who they claimed received special cigarette and raki allowances on top of their regular wage. They were a discontented lot. Guarding Enver's bones was not the job it used to be.

In the past, when the relieving shift came on, the old shift had to depart, walking backwards, and without taking their eyes off the tomb until the new guard was in place. But a slackness had slipped into the job ever since Enver's statue in Skanderbeg Square had been hauled down and urinated on. It was a curious conversation, which Shapallo relayed back through Munz, as the soldiers spoke about a loss of pride and the low morale which had entered the job.

Shapallo wandered around the tomb. He was a good deal more interested in Enver's burial place than he had been in the house in which he had spent all those years as Enver's double. At one point he placed a foot on the tomb and a soldier was sufficiently moved to stamp out his cigarette and with his rifle steer Shapallo back to a respectful distance.

It was during the ride back to Munz's apartment, where Shapallo was staying, that he started to discuss with Munz the Sun King's death. It was all passed on by a startled Munz: how, at the moment of death, Louis's bedchamber had been turned into a butcher shop. Shapallo, as was his wont at such times, spoke slowly and assuredly, like a lecturer, shaping his sentences and stacking them on end with the palms of his hands.

The butchering was standard practice, explained Shapallo. The surgeons carrying out the autopsy had discovered half the Sun King's upper jawbone was missing. The dissection further revealed evidence of a prodigious appetite: a huge royal stomach and intestines, twice the normal length. A tight-fitting shoe when finally prised from one foot had those gathered around Louis's bedchamber gagging on the foul smell of gangrenous flesh.

Munz said to me, ‘I had not heard him speak of Louis before.'

But Shapallo was not finished. Munz sat back and he continued.

He had sometimes wondered, he said, had he intercepted a bullet during those years he was the Emperor's decoy, and were he subjected to the same intense autopsy as Louis, whether his captors would have found stamped over his grey matter a town plan of Topojani, with every cottage and family represented.

Later that evening I found Munz waiting for me down in the lobby. As I approached he said, ‘I think he wants to go back.'

Topojani wasn't on Cliff 's map, but Bill had heard of it.

‘Remote. Difficult,' he said.

Topojani was one of the villages on Mustaph's circuit. A week before our visit to Kukës, Mustaph had tried with a truck to get to Topojani but had found the road washed away.

‘Who's wanting to go?' he asked.

‘Petar Shapallo.'

‘That old guy? You mean the guy you were telling me about?' He smiled. ‘No shit.'

Then he thought for a moment. ‘If you can wait a couple of days. We've got a “shoe drop” planned for Shishtavec. It's up on the border. If we don't get there soon we won't at all because of winter. Leave it with me,' he said.

43

NEXHMIJE IS LIVING above a customs house. I made the discovery when I returned this morning, with Diani, to the building next door to the Libyans.

The neglect so evident outside the block had found its way inside Nexhmije's new address. In the courtyard weeds sprouted around broken bits of concrete, and around the back of the building an old car crouched on flat tyres.

A crowd stood in the drizzle up to the back door. Diani was a little terrier. She shouldered her way through and collared the boy on the door.

We hustled through and the boy closed the door after us. We found ourselves in a stairwell littered with rubbish. I could see down the stairs to the basement where aid parcels from relatives living overseas had arrived. Scrawled over the cream walls were: BORN WILD, BLAZE OF GLORY, STING.

‘You want Nexhmije?' The boy pointed up the stairs. Then he bounced ahead in his jeans and on the second floor knocked on the door with youthful impudence.

‘It's Alban. Open the door!' Then he started to call out for ‘Aunty Nexhmije'.

A woman's voice answered on the other side. After further exchanges, the door opened to a cautious gap and the face of an old house servant appeared. She looked me up and down. Then she told Diani that Nexhmije was busy at this moment and that we should return at five o'clock with the proper documentation.

A letter from Cliff was my only introduction. He had written on a ‘Friends of Albania' letterhead asking that the Albanian authorities extend every courtesy to me. In Rome, when the consul had asked for something other than my passport, I had offered Cliff 's letter and then nervously looked on as the consul's eye travelled down the page to nod with approval at Cliff 's presidential signature.

By four o'clock it is already dark and the rain which has threatened all day is bucketing down. Another power cut has plunged the city into darkness. The money changers have been dispersed indoors. The gypsy beggars have given up for the day. Just the rifle barrels stick out in the rain from the doorways of the government buildings.

We plunge through empty streets ankle deep in surface water. The concrete drain or canal which dissects Tirana is roaring in the dark.

There are a few grey vans parked on Shetitone Donika Kastrioti; otherwise the rain has driven indoors the soldiers who usually stand in the gardens. We enter Nexhmije's gate and wade through puddles to the back of the customs house. The rain has whittled the crowd down, but a brave lot remains pushed up to the door under umbrellas. I can smell their wet hair as they part to let the foreigner though.