Biografi

by Lloyd Jones

  It all seemed to have been so simple. Now, she said, she no longer felt the same. ‘I have never loved him. We live as if by arrangement.’

  The Markus, none the wiser for Mimi’s sad confession, raised their glasses for a toast. Mimi smiled and met each of their glasses with her own.

  Mimi said she had grown up with a portrait of the Great Leader in her family’s living room. It was hung on the wall opposite the window where people passing by could see Enver prominently displayed.

  ‘My father,’ she said, ‘recently took down the portrait because in Albania, as you know, we have run out of glass.’

  13

  IN THE MORNING, as Mimi had promised to arrange, Nick’s old schoolteacher Gjyzepina Lulgjuzay is waiting down in the lobby. She appears matronly, in a man’s jacket, a thick plaid skirt and flat shoes.

  We are a little wary of each other at first.

  Gjyzepina begins by running through the morning newspapers. In one paper a cartoon has Albania separated from its borders with Greece, Macedonia and Montenegro, merrily sailing for Europe while a chain anchored to a sickle stretches to breaking point.

  Gjyzepina laughs—revealing just two yellowing teeth in her mouth. She suddenly remembers this, and up comes her hand and an unguarded moment sadly trails off to embarrassment.

  We wander off to the piazza. Gjyzepina talks about Nick. Of course she remembers him. Nick was one of her best students.

  It is National Liberation Day, but unlike yesterday’s National Independence Day, there is hardly a soul about.

  Cliff had sketched a quick map of the piazza and its surrounding attractions for me. The Atheists Museum should be the two-storey building opposite. But according to Gjyzepina, the museum has been abandoned. The icons have been returned to the churches. For a brief time the Atheists Museum was home to the Democrats, but the protests following the Socialists’ unexpected election victory earlier in the year had blocked the piazza and the Democrats were moved to a former church kindergarten.

  ‘It is not far from here,’ she says.

  Rruga Ndre Mjeda is a narrow, winding lane which begins behind a café. We catch up with people trailing through the doors of San Antonio.

  Up until a year ago the church had been a gymnasium. The concrete bleachers are still in place at the rear of the church. Voices whisper in darkness. In the foyer there is just enough light to make out photographs of priests and bishops tortured and executed by the regime.

  Cliff had told me to look in the Atheists Museum for the photographs of priests armed with machine guns firing into groups of partisans.

  The priest’s house alongside the Church of San Antonio is a pile of rubble. Sparrows hop nervously between lumps of plaster and concrete, an area of waste stretching up to the doorway of the old kindergarten, now the Democrats’ office.

  Rruga Ndre Mjeda comes out at the old Cathedral of Shkodër. We arrive in time to see a donkey carrying rubble out of the cathedral doors. With the help of Italian money, the cathedral is in the process of reverting from a volleyball court. There, above the altar, the time clock is still attached. Back outside the cathedral a mob of teenage girls surrounds an Italian priest. He’s wearing designer sunglasses and his tanned cheeks bulge with pleasure at all this attention.

  Two old Albanian priests stand off at a short distance, basking in the sunshine. We learn that both had been jailed—one for ten years. But neither will talk about his experiences.

  ‘God forgives,’ the older one says. ‘We must look to the future.’

  Another fifteen minutes’ amble and we come onto kisha e Volreve Katolike, the Catholic cemetery, in the Skanderbeg district, a poor, run-down area on the edge of town. Newly painted white crosses hide under the shade of trees. Work in the chapel had started the previous November, two months before the first demonstrations against the regime.

  Gjyzepina hadn’t believed at first what she heard about people bringing the church bell out of hiding and turning up with paint and brushes.

  ‘We were afraid to see who was building the church. Even me! To tell the truth, I put a handkerchief over my head and came here in the night with my brother to see for myself.

  ‘After all these years,’ she says. ‘I think the rebuilding of the church was the people’s way of telling the Party that we could do anything without first asking them.’

  Alongside the photographs of the slain priests in the Church of San Antonio had been others of Shkodër’s first public Mass, coming nearly twenty-five years after the regime declared the country to be the world’s first atheist state.

  Before a terrif ied congregation the priest that day—the previous November—observed, ‘I see it written in your eyes. You are ready to die.’

  We wander about the graves under the trees. Some carry photographs of the dead. Where a portrait hasn’t been available, a drawn arrow indicates the deceased, a smiling face at the back of a family gathering; with those who had been older, or gravely ill, it sometimes seemed that they were already posing for their headstones. The other graves, the ones without headstones and for a long time lost in overgrown grass, have re-emerged, their grave markings defined by carefully placed whitewashed pebbles.

  Another country was emerging through grainy, poorly reproduced photographs appearing daily in newspapers, testifying to some wrongdoing, or defending after forty years some slander by the Party on someone’s parent, grandparent, sister, brother, aunt or uncle. Family pride, as much as it had always done in Albania, was seeking to put right old wrongs.

  Right up until King Zog’s era, defending family honour offered grounds for taking another’s life. Shkodër had been notorious for its blood feuds. An imagined slight, ‘high words’ at a card game, was often enough for a man to shoot his neighbour dead. Vengeance was routinely expected and a man might stand vigil near his neighbour’s house for days, a rifle laid across his knee, in order to exact the blood ‘owed’ him.

  Joseph Swire tells of sharing a room at the old Hotel International with Avni Rustem, the man who assassinated Zog’s Turkophile uncle, Essad Pasha, in Paris in 1920. The French convicted Rustem of political murder and fined him one franc. Rustem returned to Albania, where his countrymen rewarded him with a pension. Swire described a ‘little pale-faced man in threadbare tweeds…’ He liked him. Rustem cheerfully told Swire over his newspaper that he was waiting for his death, for Essad’s blood had to be avenged. Six weeks later he was shot down in Tirana by a hireling of Essad’s family, ‘a thick man with a red face’ whom Swire says he met several times in 1930 near his house ‘with an innocent umbrella in his hand’.

  The priests and the teenage girls were gone when we wandered back past the cathedral. Not a soul was about, even at the residential end of Rruga Ndre Mjeda. Shkodër’s population turns indoors between the hours of one and three.

  A mangy cat lying in a doorway raised its head as we passed. A single vendor had chosen to stay with his five or six copies of Albert Camus’ The Outsider, which was enjoying the runaway success of a newly released hot title.

  It was at the bottom end of the rruga that we came upon a small crowd lined up outside an open door.

  The building seemed to be some kind of shrine. A new enterprise, something like Bill would imagine, a highly popular café even crossed my mind.

  ‘It is not these things,’ says Gjyzepina. ‘It is…How do you say…?’

  She thought for the moment, concentrating with the effort.

  ‘It is the house of biografi.’

  ‘A house?’

  ‘No. Not a house exactly. An office.’

  We chewed around some more, before nailing it down to the office for political prisoners.

  I preferred Gjyzepina’s original choice.

  ‘House of biografi did you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘This is the place.’

  14

  IN A BACK room of the house of biografi there is a desk and two chairs. The registrar sits before a huge open ledger, into which h
e enters the details of the person sitting opposite.

  The room is filled with surviving relatives. Adult children with stories of parents carried off in the night. Wives who have lost touch with their husbands. Or solitary men and women, former prisoners and exiles whose lives were confiscated under the old regime, have been lining up in Rruga Ndre Mjeda to tell their story.

  Two lines form in this small cool room of alabaster. One behind the registrar’s desk, and another line before me and Gjyzepina.

  It just happened this way, a story for the ledger and another for me. They present their lives as though they are little more than damaged houseware, bits of crockery; as if to say, Here, do with it what you may.

  In Albania when lives disappeared it was more often than not through a trapdoor called ‘Article 55’, shorthand for ‘agitation, betrayal and propaganda’. The first time I ask a man who had been jailed for ten years for the evidence, some details please of his ‘betraying the people’, he doesn’t quite understand.

  ‘The evidence? The evidence is they said I betrayed the people.’

  Then he says, ‘When they said “Ten years”, it felt to me that they had kissed me on both cheeks.’

  One woman refuses to come further than the doorway. She is halfway through giving her details when she loses her nerve. The registrar assures her that she is amongst friends. She mustn’t feel afraid.

  ‘It is not for myself that I feel afraid,’ she says. ‘I am afraid for my children.’

  The sigourimi recently dynamited some houses in her street. She does not want her house to be next. She says she is sorry; she cannot go through with her story. It is still much too dangerous.

  Luchia Cole steps forward. She had worked in a bakery. In the late seventies, during one of the country’s periodic convulsions, the biografis were pored over for likely victims and it was discovered that Luchia’s father had escaped the country in 1951. After eleven months of interrogation, Luchia ‘confessed’ to her crime and was jailed for eight years under Article 55.

  Gjenovefa Vilaku is here on her husband’s behalf. Before their marriage, before they had even met, her husband was studying in Yugoslavia, where he fell in love with a Hungarian student. After his return home his letters were intercepted and he was accused of ‘collaborating’ with a foreign agent. A death sentence was commuted to seven years.

  The day of his arrest, his uncle, a priest, was executed.

  He was jailed a second time for ‘agitation and propaganda’ after the sigourimi found a ‘second witness’ who was a spy in prison.

  ‘Where is your husband now?’

  ‘Germany.’

  When word of the rush on Embassy Row trickled up to Shkodër, the entire family packed up, ready. At the last moment, Gjenovefa’s mother fell sick and she elected to stay behind. The next she heard from her husband was a postcard from Hamburg.

  Bepin Dacaj’s father, at the age of sixty, was jailed for thirteen years after discussing democracy with ‘friends’ in the piazza of Shkodër. Sent to Ballsh Zejmen, the professor of English had his teeth broken and forks stuck up behind his fingernails.

  ‘They tortured my father until he confessed. He had a heart ailment and couldn’t endure it.’

  The professor’s wife then divorced him to preserve the ‘correctness’ of her biografi. Nevertheless, she and Bepin were forced into an exile’s life in Elbasan, where for fifteen years he worked as a farm labourer.

  Six months ago, Bepin had walked away from the camp. He set out for his father’s prison. But when he got there they could show him only his old cell. They didn’t know where they had buried him.

  For hour after hour I felt confronted by a ‘blood feud’ tradition perversely altered to where now the Party had adopted for itself the position of an aggrieved victim that was ‘owed blood’. The registrar said between four and five thousand people with ‘bad biografi’ were penalised or jailed every year. He invited me to multiply that number by forty-five years.

  The place-names I hear of in Rruga Ndre Mjeda can be found on any map: Spaq Mirdita, Kavajë, Elbasan, Fier, Lushnje. Each is accompanied by a black dot or a circle to indicate population size, a town or a village; a grape or pneumatic drill similarly identifies horticulture or mining.

  In that sense they are owned up to. They are places of sunshine and the grape on postcards, but have a second identity as places of exile and misery.

  I doubt whether Cliff could have visited the latter. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t. The photographs of Cliff in Albania show him laughing among friends at the beach in Durrës and Sarandë. On the map that Cliff gave me these places are identified by sun umbrellas.

  The house of biografi closes between one and three o’clock each day.

  ‘Business hours,’ says the registrar, without any humour intended.

  We wander out to the lane. The sheer weight of these histories is numbing. This morning a man, Zef Marana, broke down after describing how he had concealed the death of a cellmate in Burrell prison for five days so he could get the dead man’s food. He had been sentenced to fifteen years in jail after trying to swim across the Lake of Shkodër to Yugoslavia. He had got within three hundred metres of the Yugoslav shore when a boat drew alongside. Glancing up, he had seen soldiers with their rifles drawn.

  We are recovering in the sunshine in the rubble of the priest’s former house, when a woman in a plastic raincoat stops to speak with Gjyzepina, and it begins all over again.

  ‘This woman here,’ starts Gjyzepina; she has been given to understand that I am ‘collecting lives’.

  Pina Dushaj had worked in a liquor store near a hydroelectric plant. This had been around the time of Enver’s split from the ‘Chinese deviationists’. As many of the liquor store customers had been Chinese technicians, Pina was accused of ‘betraying the people’ and sentenced to thirteen years imprisonment in Kocova.

  In an act of self-preservation, her husband had divorced her. Her two children had been sent to an orphanage.

  The woman is finished with telling her story now, and there is an awkward moment, a feeling of an uneven transaction having run its course. It had been easier in the office, where another person was always on hand, ready to take someone else’s place. A momentum kept things going, and appalling as it seems, sometimes there had hardly been time to thank the person—in the absence of anything else suitable to say—before the next in line was bending down to correct the spelling of her name in my notebook.

  The woman continues to stand there, staring at this collector of lives.

  I ask her age. I can’t think what else to say.

  I write down fifty-seven, until Gjyzepina corrects me.

  ‘I said thirty-seven.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I am sure.’

  ‘What about the leather bits in her bag?’

  ‘She works at home as a seamstress for an Italian business.’

  And on it goes, to the point of banality. I ask after the bitten end of a stick of bread in her bag.

  Gjyzepina says Pina had waited in line for three hours for the bread.

  ‘It was either the bread or line up before the registrar in Rruga Mjeda. She could not decide.’

  Gjyzepina offers some gentle words and the woman nods that she understands the interview is over. We continue to sit on the rocks in the sun and watch the woman drag herself up the lane to the cathedral.

  ‘I also have a story to tell,’ says Gjyzepina.

  It concerns the engineer brother of her husband, Clement. The brother had worked on a hydroelectric plant.

  His supervisor had wanted to send him to France to study, so Clement’s brother set about learning French. He studied until late at night. Any time off work was given over to study. He was going to France. His friends knew this; his family. Everyone was proud. The departure time approached and rolled past. He was told he could not leave the country because of some difficulty with his biografi.

  ‘Clement’s father was very
distressed. He went to the Party. He said, “Please, I beg you, tell me what I can do to improve my biografi.”’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing. Clement’s brother had learned a language for which he had no use. This failing, too, was added to his biografi.’

  15

  THE MARKUS ARE waiting for me back in the Rozala. The glimpse through the doors is a forbidding one of the father, solemn and uncommunicative in his buttoned-up coat. The son is craning his neck to look for other company, another world to explore.

  Since it is dark, the Markus have forbidden me to walk alone. At night I must be accompanied, and on this point Nick’s father is surprisingly forthright.

  There are gunshots all night, and every night, he says.

  I had been woken by gunshots as early on as my first night in Tirana. Bill seemed to think it had to do with wedding ceremonies. ‘The guys get loaded and start trying to shoot the stars out of the sky.’ Some kind of tradition, he thought.

  I pass this on to a puzzled Arben.

  ‘I have not heard of this thing,’ he says.

  However, it is the father’s comment that bandits are responsible for the gunfire which draws a derisive reaction from the son.

  ‘It is the fault of the police. Everybody knows they do it deliberately to intimidate the people, to stop them gathering.’

  There was a surprise waiting at the Markus’ house. While still out in the street we could hear the music. Inside, the music blared from the new tape deck. Sprawled along the couch with his ear glued to the speaker was Mimi’s husband, Vladimir, a man in his thirties with a well-fed face. Chopped sideburns. Black trousers pulled tight over heavy thighs.

  Mimi intercepted me inside the door with a nervous handshake. Last night we had parted with the customary kiss.

  She started to say something, then gave up and went to plead with her husband to turn down the music.

  Arben hauled me into his bedroom door. ‘Please. Not a word about Vladimir’s work. Don’t ask him anything.’