My whole life felt like a bid to break away from the grip of my predecessors with their endless grievances, step after step, road after travelled road – as if awakening and seeing the light of the Lake for the first time.
On the bar stereo was playing the 1989 Italian pop song ‘Felicità’ by Al Bano and Romina Power, and all three of us hummed along to it. Italian music seemed to follow you everywhere on the Albanian side of the lake. It took me straight back to my teens full of anguish but also hope; and the splash of the lake on pebbles, the gentle, utterly un-besa-like faces of Liridon and Lazar, the very fact of being here, filled me with bitter-sweet hope: that not everything was doomed, after all. Not for as long as the Lake was here, and a few people who hadn’t run out of goodness. The Lake was a constant reminder of that.
The fishermen were returning after ten hours on the water, with a haul in their nets. They would give it to their sons to sell, the boys on the road holding out whole trouts in the rain. Lazar rose to photograph them.
Albania no longer felt other to me. It felt like a lost homeland I was slowly remembering. While at first glance this side of the lake had appeared diminished, now everything was enriched with meaning.
‘I’ll walk you home,’ Liridon said, and we walked along by the water, past the new and the old ruins, past the Hotel Enkelana, past Mr Bimbli who was writing in his ledger. We mingled with the people of Pogradec greeting each other under the chestnut trees, and the beautiful seller of corn on the cob, a woman my age, smiled at me for no special reason, revealing a dark mouth with the teeth gone, an old woman’s mouth.
Because the suffering here had been fathomless, any grace that transcended the suffering had a particular beauty.
While we’d stood on the lookout point above the monumental tombs, Liridon had told us the following legend:
In the river valley below, once upon a time, there had been a village under a rocky mount called Hallmi. The mount was still there, Liridon pointed it out. Excavations had revealed the remains of a settlement, likely destroyed by an earthquake. The village was haunted by an evil bird which came out of the mount at regular intervals and cursed it. The villagers took turns to stand sentinel at the gates, and counter the bird with words of forgiveness for their village. The bird went away, until next time. But one day, a villager returned from abroad, and was chosen to stand guard. He was tired and irritable, and when the bird came out and cursed the village, he cursed it right back.
‘And so magnified, the curse worked. Mount Hallmi collapsed and buried the village,’ Liridon smiled, but a shadow passed over his face.
In the morning I sat on my balcony clinking the echoey spoon against the coffee mug.
Lazar and Liridon had returned from their years at university in cities with better job opportunities. They’d done it out of love for their town, for the lake and the mountain, a wish to be part of its healing. While others were busy laundering money in concrete hotels and driving Mercedes bought with money from drug and prostitution rings abroad, Lazar and Liridon were guardians of the Lake, full of forgiveness for their town.
There comes a point for us all when our inner reality, projected outwards, becomes the only reality we have.
The streaks on their faces and foreheads made them look as if they were wearing masks. Gjorg imagined how his own mourners would look when they had gouged their faces. He felt that from now on the lives of all the generations to come in the two families would be an endless funeral feast, each side playing host in turn. And each side, before leaving for the feast, would don that blood-stained mask.
Ismail Kadare, 1978
LIBERTÀ
‘Up past the second fortress,’ said Bashir Arapi in his Australian-accented English. ‘Keep in mind that it was all forest back then. That’s where I spent the last night and the last day, the 2nd and 3rd of July 1975. I had the boat with me, in a bag. Dismantled.’
He’d been sixteen years old. Looking at this bald man in an angora sweater and loafers, his heavy features, cosmopolitan manner, and countless businesses to his name, I would never have guessed that he was one of the sixteen individuals who made history as the only successful lake escapees during the Hoxha era. They were the ones mentioned by Tanas Spassé, and others: the family in a boat made in a basement, at night, without nails so as not to make hammering noises and alert the neighbours.
We had driven to the end of town, past The Club, to see the hill where the Arapi family had made their Houdini-like escape.
‘Of course the moment the decision was made, we knew we were ninety-nine point nine per cent dead,’ Bashir said.
A chill fog fell on the lake. A boat horn tooted as if from a past era: it sounded close to the customs house at the jetty, but I couldn’t see it.
We drove back to the other end of the waterfront, to his quiet bar by the beach. We sat down with non-alcoholic drinks and he began to tell me his story.
The Arapi were an old Pogradec family, but they were marked as ‘enemies of the people’ the moment in 1949 when Bashir’s grandfather had walked over the Dry Mountain, down Mean Valley and into St Naum Monastery. After staying with relatives in Ohrid, he sailed to Australia. Back here, his wife and young sons were interned in a detention camp as ‘enemies of the people’, like Tanas Spassé’s family. They eventually returned to Pogradec, but the stigma remained, ensuring that one of the sons, Fatos – seven years old when his father escaped – had an early taste of injustice, but also the secret joy of his father’s escape.
In early photos, Fatos Arapi is a skinny, narrow-faced, blue-eyed boy; in later photos, he has a charmer’s smile and a rakish fag in his mouth. He married at seventeen, still childlike on his bike and without his bride’s family’s approval, for he was the son of an ‘enemy’. His bride came from another old Pogradec family, but they were quick to disown her completely, out of fear of being associated with ‘enemies’. She moved, symbolically, to the other side of the river, and never saw her family again, or if she did, they wouldn’t speak to her. Terror had assumed more power in people’s minds even than clan loyalty – a true accomplishment of tyranny in a clan-based culture. Looking at photos of the couple, where she appears with the heavy features that Bashir would inherit, her fair hair braided into Heidi-like plaits, I am struck by the fact that not once is she photographed smiling, as if by the time Bashir was born, she was already regretting taking this extraordinarily difficult road. For Fatos was no ordinary man.
In Hoxha’s era, you became a political prisoner for any number of trumped-up reasons – from annoying your neighbour who could fabricate the right lie about you, to falling out with a friend who might be an informer, to listening to foreign radio stations; or, in the case of a relative of Lazar’s who did ten years in a labour camp, for saying that Yugoslav-made socks were better. Although Fatos’s first sentence (at the age of nineteen) was short – nine months, during which Bashir’s sister was born – within a year he was re-arrested, this time on a serious charge: planning to escape by boat. His best friend had turned out to be an informer, and it was immaterial that the ‘plan’ was fictitious. Once a charge against you was uttered, it became true, and Fatos was sentenced to thirteen years’ hard labour. He did ten of those, the last four at Spaç, the prison of the one-thousand-seven-hundred-year sentence.
Bashir and his sister grew up without a father. An indelible childhood memory is visiting Dad in Spaç – after a three-day journey by bus, foot and lorry into the bleak mountains, they would be granted an hour with Dad, though the guards reserved the right to refuse access to a prisoner, depending on their mood.
‘Those mountain passes were like hell,’ Bashir said.
There is a haunting oil portrait of Fatos unshaven, bruised around the eyes but with his mouth set in determination, against an Arabian-blue background, as if the Lake was peeking over his shoulder even in prison. It was painted in 1966 by a fellow inmate, clearly a professional artist, on a piece of fabric torn from a prison shirt.
; After the ten years of forced labour, he returned home but new obstacles were put in his way. A qualified welder, he was employed in a nickel factory above the lake – one of today’s ruins – but when he offered to build a crane to make life easier for the workers, the factory director fired him for being too clever. Enverizm was based on making life as difficult as possible, and keeping people as passive as sheep. Fatos was out of work. The only money father and son could make was by chopping trees in the hills and selling them as logs. Which was, of course, illegal.
‘I was fifteen and I said to Dad, Why don’t we escape? This is so unfair! And he slapped me. He said Don’t ever say that in the street or we’ll land another ten years in Spaç. Say only nice things about our country.’
One day, a telegram arrived from a cousin in Ohrid. It had taken months to reach them by the time the censors at both ends had checked it. There’s a parcel to pick up, it said. Bashir and his grandmother went to the post office where a parcel was waiting for them, with wondrous items in it: silk stockings, seashell necklaces, gifts from the family in Ohrid. The customs fee, however, was equal to six months’ pay and they couldn’t afford to pick up the parcel, which was left for the customs officers’ wives to enjoy. But they read the subtext behind the parcel: Fatos’s father was in Ohrid, over from Australia, and this was a message from him that they must try to cross the border, sooner rather than later.
In fact the family had already made one attempt a couple of years earlier – they had started walking over the Dry Mountain one foggy night (with their three children), but the fog had unexpectedly lifted and they’d had to turn back. Now Fatos snapped into action. The decision was taken overnight with his wife and his two brothers (but not their wives).
‘They said: It’s time to go. There’s no life here.’
The building of the boat began in a basement, with a stolen tent that would cover the precarious rudimentary wooden skeleton held together not by nails but by rope, wire, glue and nylon stockings.
‘Mum stitched the canvas that went on top,’ Bashir said. ‘We built the boat in nine nights.’
When it was done, they dismantled it, put it into bags, and carried the bags at midnight up to the top of the hill, past the second bunker. Bashir was to guard the boat.
‘That night and the following day, I had no food or water. But I was fine. I was excited.’
On the evening of 3 July, the fifteen other members of the family began to arrive, all from different directions, so as not to attract attention. A lie was involved too: Fatos’s two brothers hadn’t told their wives about what was to happen, for fear that someone would let something slip; they could not afford doubt and fear to sink the three families before they’d had their chance at rowing to freedom. Instead, the two wives were told they were off to a wedding that evening, and wore their best clothes. When they arrived at the top of the hill – God knows how they walked in their high heels – their shock must have been profound, and their terror too, but there was no turning back.
There were several children and a baby in the ‘wedding’ party. The task of making it to the lake shore, reassembling the boat and rowing across the lake under the sweep of searchlights and under the nose of customs patrol, border army patrol and Hoxha himself, who was staying at his summer residence at the time, was still ahead of them. It was an act so daring as to be almost insane.
‘Either by boat or by the government, we knew we were ninety-nine point nine per cent dead.’
But one crucial thing was in their favour that night. Fatos had observed the movements of the border army units for years, and he’d noticed that during the dictator’s holiday sojourns, all security was focused on the Villa. As a result, the army units in town were reduced. Furthermore, the giant projector lights that swept the lake’s surface every two to three hours were reduced to only once a night – because their reflection from the surface of the lake onto the Villa disturbed Hoxha and his entourage.
‘By midnight, the boat was ready. Me and my dad and uncles carried it down the hill, and took shelter in the reeds.’
After their escape, the enraged authorities eradicated all the reeds and cut down the trees on the hill. At the last moment, when the women and kids were making their way down the hill and across the coastal road, the baby cried: two men on bikes overheard them and stopped to ask where they were going at this late hour. A tense exchange took place, during which Bashir and his father and uncles, hidden in the reeds, had considered attacking the two men or even killing them and concealing their bodies there, but miraculously, disaster was averted when the women persuaded the cyclists that they were Gypsies out late gathering wood.
All sixteen of them were now in the fragile boat, tightly packed, no room to move, and Bashir and one of his uncles started rowing. The boat was untested. It could have disintegrated at any moment.
It took them eight hours.
‘It looks close in a straight line,’ Bashir said. ‘But we had to row out as far away from the Albanian shore as possible, because we didn’t know when the searchlight would sweep the lake.’
If caught by the border army, they would not only be imprisoned for life – the men probably executed – they’d be tortured first. The children would be sent to dire orphanages and ‘correction homes’. Nobody would be spared. At one point, one of the kids, infected with the collective dread, started howling. She couldn’t be consoled, it was a physical reaction. And of course sound carries with preternatural clarity over the lake. Her mother tried in vain to stifle her cries.
‘Throw her overboard,’ her father said to his wife. ‘Or we all die.’
There was a moment of agony, then Fatos said:
‘No. We die together or we live together. We don’t get separated.’
Somehow, the girl stopped crying. The lake was kind to them that night.
‘And that’s how we did it,’ Bashir leaned back in his chair and grinned.
I leaned back in my chair too. I felt exhausted.
‘We arrived at St Naum Monastery drenched.’
A local saw them, and realising where they had come from, fetched an Albanian-speaker from the Village of Mean People. The two locals, awed by the family’s courage, offered them a lift in their vans all the way to Slovenia – the northernmost republic of Yugoslavia. But the family wanted to see their relatives in Ohrid and report to the Yugoslav police – do it legitimately at this end, at least, not hide like criminals.
‘We stayed in Ohrid for a few weeks. My dad and uncles were kept in custody for three weeks. The women and us kids were put up in some wagons in a lakeside camping ground. The women were crying every day. We didn’t know what was happening. Maybe they were torturing the men?’
They were given meals at the nearest hotel. Holidaymakers and waiters stared at them in awe. Word of their escape spread.
‘We made the Yugoslav news. The first and last family to escape Albania by boat.’
Not only that, but a newspaper published the date of their escape each year, as a commemoration – and a propaganda coup against Albania. Hoxha had isolated his country from the whole world. The boat is now on display in a national museum. Eventually, the Arapis left Yugoslav soil and flew to Australia, where Grandad was waiting for them. But since 1949 Grandad had only just made ends meet, and was not able to offer a base to his family, or even a loan.
A new chapter began for the Arapi family in Sydney, and this time the star was not Fatos, but Bashir. Sixteen years old and without a word of English, he started as a labourer in a foundry. Ten years later, he was the owner of a thriving textile factory, and a millionaire. He did it on nothing but wits and chutzpah, through what can only be described as entrepreneurial genius. And he had his father’s desperate drive for freedom, self-fulfilment, and the courage to struggle against impossible odds. After all, what did he have to lose?
‘In Pogradec while Dad was in jail, no one talked to us. Mum had no work. We were watched all the time. We were pariahs. But I figured ho
w to make a few pennies.’
The family had had a vegetable patch and grew onions. Bashir had sold them in the morning, and in the evening went into the hills to gather wood. Having begged one of his uncles to give him a mule for the logs, he had sold the donkey to his father’s friends during the night (because it was illegal) and continued carrying the logs on his back. He also sold apples from their garden to the Young Pioneers camp near the elite Villas. The same Pioneers camp where young Tanas and his brother had collected dry bread.
Albanian men in Australia, he said, married women from the Greek, Italian or Turkish diaspora. That must have been because most of the Albanians were men – solo exiles like Bashir’s grandfather, some of whom had left their families behind, to mop up the mess for one thousand seven hundred years.
‘I came back to the lake in the 1980s and stayed in Ohrid. That’s where I met my wife. She is from an Albanian family who escaped to Yugoslavia in 1948.’ During that visit, Bashir went to St Naum Monastery and looked at his hometown of Pogradec through binoculars. It was the closest he could get. The end of the Hoxha regime was nowhere in sight.
There was something so extreme about the Albanian agony that it made me think of ancient tragedies, of a black-clad female chorus intoning ‘Ninety-nine point nine per cent dead’.
I kept scrutinising photographs from the war, in which Enver Hoxha appears as a chubby thirty-year-old partisan, and looking for signs of incipient monstrosity in his expression, but all I could find were plump features and a small, greedy mouth. In one photo, he reclines on the grass with fellow partisans and British mission officers, smiling benignly. And yet, within months of this photo, Hoxha would turn against his British allies in a Machiavellian volte-face. Already the Communists were bitter enemies of the Albanian National Front, Balli Kombëtar. The British war government, with Cairo as its regional base, turned a blind eye to local politics and kept dropping ample arms supplies for the Albanian resistance, meant for both the Balli Kombëtar and the Communists – but it was the latter who benefited from the supplies.
To the Lake Page 23