by Lloyd Jones
We roll slowly to a stop, not on the shoulder but where it is equally safe—in the middle of the road. Within minutes a goat dragging a cart has appeared. Some small children with shaven heads stare at us while we stare at the statue.
We leave Mentor stamping the cold from his feet on the road. A small bridge crosses the railway line built especially for pilgrims to sit at the heroine’s feet. During the construction of the railway Shkurte had died after an embankment collapsed on her. Enver immediately seized on the tragedy for ‘photo opportunities’. Newspapers showed him clasping the shoulders of Shkurte’s father, a poor bewildered villager. Poetry was written about Shkurte. And in the ultimate of glories, she was made a member of the Party posthumously.
Until recently, Tirana Television started its nightly broadcasts with pictures of Shkurte Vata’s statue. The musical accompaniment was a specially commissioned score.
Zerena says this changed only recently. Her husband, Palli, a cameraman, was asked to film sky. Nowadays the programs start with a vapid blue sky and the national anthem.
Lushnje begins promisingly enough with a decorative line of palm trees on the outskirts of the town. So unexpected, so persuasively cheerful are the palms that they almost deny Lushnje’s reputation as the ‘capital of concentration camps’.
The best view of Lushnje is to be had from the restaurant on the hilltop overlooking town. It is called Blerimi, ‘the blooming flower’. From up there the eye seeks out the coastline, which on the map lies a further forty or fifty kilometres to the west. To the naked eye the horizon is lost in a mauve-coloured paste: Italy is rumoured to lie in that direction.
The official view, also obtained from the Blerimi, takes in the Myzeqe, in better years a checkerboard of maize and wheat, the food bowl of Albania, but at this time of the year it is uniformly tan.
The other thing to note is what appear to be clusters of dark rock dotting the Myzeqe. These are settlements—officially, state farms. Alternatively, they are camps, exile camps, stunted bits of city that have been relocated to the flat countryside. Even here, for all its abundant space, the regime has insisted ‘one family’s floor is another family’s ceiling’, and, as in the city, the crude Stalinist housing models have been replicated.
As we enter Lushnje, standing beneath the last palm tree is an old man in an overcoat. Mentor pulls over, presumably to ask directions. Then, inexplicably, everyone gets out of the car.
Brikena kisses the stranger on both cheeks.
‘This is Doctor Cabey. My uncle. He has lived here all his life.’
Brikena’s uncle has nothing much to add to this. We shake hands and he returns his hands to his overcoat and we start over the road to a line of three-storey apartments. We follow the doctor around the back of the building, across a scruffy yard. Chickens peck over a stony ground. A vile black smoke blowing across the yard without neighbourly concern is apparently from the bakery.
We trudge up the stairs behind her uncle, to a tiny apartment. The doctor and his wife share the apartment with an adult son, who Brikena had warned me would be very keen to practise his English on me. He turns out to be an anaemic boy with a gravel rash over his chin which I suspect could be cleared up with a good soapy wash. Somehow he has acquired a tape of Talking Heads and is anxious for assurances that, in the West, Talking Heads are held in high esteem.
He fondles the tape and I tell him what I can.
In reply he repeats his one and only incantation, ‘David Byrne. He is very, very good, I think. Yes?’
The doctor’s wife—Mrs Cabey, I suppose it is, since she is never introduced—has prepared a table. There are sawn loaves of dark Albanian bread, goat cheese and olives marinated with peppers and oil. The toilet, I discover, is in the kitchen, a long-drop unceremoniously sited before the stove so that the doctor’s wife has to lean over the gaping porcelain hole to move the pots about the Primus stove.
She agrees, ‘It is a very small house.’ They had had the opportunity of a larger apartment on the lower floor but turned it down. ‘We worried that our conversations might be overheard from the street, that we would be overheard and put in prison,’ she says.
Soon Brikena’s friend, the English teacher, arrives. A broad-shouldered, handsome man in his mid-thirties with a high glistening forehead, Kadris is immaculately turned out in white collar and tie, a suit ‘from abroad’, and polished black shoes. He appears to be, as Brikena might put it, ‘a serious man’.
He begins on a humble note, apologising for his English. To my ear it sounds fine, every bit as good as Brikena’s.
‘This is the first time that I use it on a native speaker of English. Up until now I have a very good reputation for speaking the language.’
We sit down to eat, and throughout the meal the doctor says little, even to Brikena. Some vital cord broke in him long ago. He listens and confirms another’s viewpoint with a nod, or purses his lips together to indicate a difference.
Kadris is anxious to know of reaction in Tirana to the Democrats’ withdrawal from government. Sali Berisha’s actions have disappointed him.
‘Better to dance with the devil you know,’ he says. ‘The Socialists can do anything now.’
The doctor clears his throat and everyone looks his way expectantly, as if to will him on. He has something to say about the corrupting effect of power, and offers this epiphany: ‘Wherever you go in the world the political leaders are the same. The grapes see each other and ripen.’
The doctor’s refuge, I discover, is his study, a tiny world of white pillows, medical texts, texts on semiotics by Brikena’s late father and stuffed birds, of which there are too many to count. Stout-chested birds with glass eyes, which the doctor has glued onto plastic branches. Small birds, field tinkers, long-legged birds from the marshes—all of them stuffed and without song.
I had thought of going directly to Gjaza, but by the time we have finished up at the doctor’s it has already become dark. I say goodbye to Brikena and Zerena and watch the Volvo grow small in the distance, beyond the last palm tree. Kadris mentions that the leader of the Lushnje Democrats is waiting to meet me: Kutjim Gina. The doctor’s last duty will be to hand me over to ‘Mister Gina’.
We wander through town, past the hotel and the adjoining café, and as we pass, a quick glance in the window reveals the Lushnje menfolk in British Telecom jerseys. Men lined up at the espresso machine, others sitting around the tables—in dark blue ribbed jerseys. It suddenly occurs to me that Don might be staying at the same hotel.
It is five minutes’ walk to the Democratic Party Headquarters, a chapel-size building. A steep goat track straggles up a small rise above the deserted marketplace.
Kutjim Gina has been waiting for us. He is a wiry man with snow-white hair above a tanned face rutted with worry lines. Kadris tells me that Mister Gina used to be an economics professor, and this is a surprise, because he doesn’t look as if he has spent a single working day inside.
Best of all, Mister Gina has been apprised of our plans. Arrangements have been made. The Democratic Party car, a gift from the government when pluralism was introduced, will be at our disposal.
‘You may go to Gjaza. You may go wherever you wish.’
With the arrival of the car, Mister Gina had explored parts of the Myzeqe he hadn’t known to exist.
He takes my notebook and writes down the names of the camps near here—Gradishte, Savra, Rrapes sector, Grabiau, Plyk, Dushkt. He writes down the number of families in each. To Tchermë, he adds ‘Tchermë immigrants’—these are poor souls who have sought out the camps for a better life.
We part company with the doctor, who assures me that with Mister Gina I’m in the best possible hands, and we watch him poke his walking stick distrustfully ahead of himself down the goat track, heading home, back to his silent world of stuffed birds.
23
WHEN THE LUSHNJE chapter of the Democratic Party formed at Mister Gina’s house on January 3, 1991, it was decided by all those in atte
ndance that democracy’s first duty would be to restore truth-telling, that from this point on ‘an orange would be, in fact, an orange’. And an apple would return to being an apple and ‘not a creation of Enver Hoxha’.
Mister Gina said it was well known that the Party of Labour was in crisis. ‘They forced the people to attend their meetings. These meetings were filmed.’ The next day they would ask, ‘Please, tell us why you did not applaud at the meeting?’ Sometimes they paid people to applaud at meetings, and sometimes people applauded ‘because they needed the money or else they were afraid of losing their jobs’.
The day after the local chapter of the Democratic Party formed in Lushnje, with Mister Gina installed as its leader, twenty-two thousand people had poured into Lushnje Square. They were, in large part, political exiles who had swarmed out of the backwaters of the Myzeqe to hear of their new freedom. At least they were free now in the technical sense. Those who still had homes in other parts of the country were free to return to them, but this freedom extended only to those exiled in the last ten years. For the rest, those generations born to the camps had no other place to return to. They were free, but in the material sense nothing was about to change. For the moment, however, freedom as an abstract idea was intoxicating.
People wept and applauded, and those who raised the Democrat salute were later identified in film taken by the sigourimi and arrested. Perversely, sixty people who had walked to Lushnje to hear of their freedom ended up being arrested for responding inappropriately.
Since that time Mister Gina had travelled to every camp in the Myzeqe. He knew their inhabitants. He had met with every exile. Their biografis were all known to him.
‘They are all Democrats,’ he said.
Mister Gina insisted on inspecting my room in the one and only hotel. He wanted to satisfy himself that I would be comfortable.
On the stairs Kadris confirmed for me: ‘There are no other English staying in the hotel.’
We followed a girl with a torch up the stairs into the dark recesses of the hall. A smell of sewage grew nearer. Other women hotel workers emerged along the dark walls, unhurried.
We came to my room. Mister Gina elbowed ahead and tried the light—with the inevitable result. He sent the young girl off, and until she returned with a bulb from another room I stood with Mister Gina clicking his tongue like a locust.
After a long silence the girl came back. She shone the torch at the ceiling. Mister Gina climbed onto a chair and replaced the bulb, and the light came on.
‘Perfect,’ I said.
Unfortunately there is no flush or running water, except between the hours of 3 and 6 a.m. I discovered this at 7 a.m., and more alarming, I traced the evil smell in the hall to a tide of raw sewage which has risen from the bowls of the communal toilets just two doors away from my room.
My window gives onto a courtyard filled with rubble and debris and, quite improbably, an old Russian lorry propped up on bricks and trapped by walls on all four sides. This morning, when I pull the curtain back, a silver-haired man in an officer’s uniform full of sharp creases is slowly mounting the steps to the outside landing. He looks a forlorn figure. He walks with his head down, and behind his back, in his hands, he carries a pair of white parade-ground gloves.
24
FROM THE CAR park of the Blerimi you can see a road straight as a needle laid across the plain. It is the road to Fier and in this direction we carry on for about twenty minutes, before pulling off onto a loose metal road and heading south.
Mister Gina explains the countryside as we pass through it. Some of it has been sown in cotton. Most of it lies unsown. Here is Krutje, the first cooperative farm in Albania and the model on which others were built, a watery maze of sticks and hanging plastic and low-lying buildings. A woman in a plastic raincoat walks a farm track carrying a large fish.
In Kavajë I’d heard it mentioned that Lenka was from here.
‘Lenka, so you’ve heard?’ says Mister Gina. He is evidently pleased.
We drive on without further landmarks, and the deepening isolation is measured by every pothole along the road.
By the time we turn off into a muddy track which brings us to Gjaza, we are no farther than forty minutes’ drive from Lushnje.
The track into Gjaza ends in a ditch and fields. Three-storey apartment blocks stand to one side of the track. On the other side is the old Albania to which the exiles have been banished. Hidden underneath trellises of grapevines are tiny whitewashed huts, and from here mobs of tiny, grubby-faced children swarm out to greet us. Following at their rear are the parents—the men in blue cotton pants and jackets. The women come to the doors of the huts to see what the fuss is all about.
Right away I find myself looking around for a tall, stooped figure with a scarred forehead.
Children tug at my jeans and laugh. A short man with a dark pudding bowl of hair is shaking hands with me. Sali Agolli introduces his brother, Xhelaodin, and the next thing I’m being propelled down a garden path to their hut. I glance back to see Kadris holding up his trouser legs so the cuffs don’t get muddied.
An old woman dressed in black cotton orders us inside. This is Asie, the elderly mother of Sali and Xhelaodin. She is impatient for us to pass through her doorway and is shouting at her sons to get us in here. This morning the temperature must be near freezing and the old woman has just finished washing and swabbing down her stone floors.
Kadris is doing his best to bring this momentum to a halt. The older brother, Sali, has taken my hand in his, while he listens intently to Kadris. The old woman starts up again, but this time the son raises his hand to silence her. The mother catches my eye and touches a cup to her lips and laughs. She beckons me inside, but at that moment Kadris pulls me back the other way.
‘This man, Shapallo,’ Mister Agolli wishes to ask, ‘is he an exile, here in Gjaza? What height is he?’ Mister Agolli gazes up at me, politely intent, but there is a discouraging lack of light in those eyes.
I start to describe the high forehead and the pleasant countenance of the statues. A very tall man—they nod. But the bit about film-star looks and excellent teeth is lost on them.
The Agolli brothers would like to help, I can see that. They listen to Kadris’s description. Sali scratches his chin and glances at his younger brother, who draws a line down his forehead. He leaves his finger there and for the moment watches me, and then it all sinks in. Sali rocks his head back. He speaks excitedly with his brother and then Kadris is tipping me through the doorway out of the old woman’s grasp. The two brothers have hurried ahead. We leave the garden and walk to the end of the muddy track.
When I stop, the kids following behind crash into the backs of my legs. Kadris places a hand on two heads and with a few gentle words the children stay put and watch as we pick our way across the ploughed rock-hard fields.
Ahead of us, the tails of Sali’s cotton jacket flap up and down over a back which is raw with cold.
About one hundred metres of open field separate us from a tiny whitewashed hut all on its own. Sali arrives ahead of us and throws the door wide and stands there with an arm extended, like a real-estate agent. There is the faint smell of recent habitation and a sprinkling of hay over the floor, but no Shapallo.
He was here as recently as one month ago. Since then he had moved to Savra, a collection of brick buildings we passed on our way here, a few kilometres outside Lushnje. There are tiny scrapings on the wall above the bed. I move in for a closer look at the word ‘Petra’. The name of Sali’s pet goat.
He was nine years old when he scratched the name against the wall. The Agollis had been exiled from Peshkopi when the state needed victims as examples of what happened to those who opposed collectivisation. They were declared ‘by the will of the peasants’ to be class enemies.
For ten years, the five-strong Agolli family had bedded down on the floor each night. In time they had received permission to build their present hut and, after working in the fields all day, wo
rked at night to build their new house out of mud bricks.
After the family moved the hut was used for storing winter feed. When Shapallo moved in, there was a little hay scattered over the floor. Another two months and he would have found the old bed frame buried under with winter feed stacked to the door.
In July the maize stood tall as a man’s midriff, and leading up to harvest heads like those belonging to swimmers nodding out beyond the breakers moved through the yellow maize. Sali told how as a child he had watched the adults’ towering height above the maize being gradually whittled down as the maize grew taller and humbled its masters. The maize started out from under the soles of their feet and grew like a malignant weed until it had reapportioned the world. Late in summer it was cut down and the grey soil re-emerged. A natural cycle. And much like a tide which sweeps back and forth, maize had its own wandering instincts, changing the colours of Gjaza from yellow to grey and the depth of the land that was traversed, daily, from shoulder to ankle height, back and forth, a shifting colour and texture.
The maize was at shoulder height the morning Shapallo made his appearance; and not since childhood, that Sali could remember, had a figure so dominated the maize at this time of the year.
There was no fuel for the tractors and threshers, so they were using scythes and moving through the maize swinging the scythe from left to right, occasionally standing up to relieve a crick in the lower back. On one of these occasions Sali had straightened up in time to see ‘a man drowning’ at the edge of the field, as Shapallo, with flailing arms, fell headlong into the crop.
They assumed he was a highlander. But for all his height, the highlander was light as a feather. Sali and his brother carried Shapallo inside the hut and laid him out on the rusted springs of the bed frame.
A cup of water from the spring dribbled over his chin. After a while Shapallo came round. He tried to sit up but his elbows fell out from under him like matchsticks.
The Agollis and the rest of the exiles hadn’t known what to make of Shapallo. At another time, during the seventies, they would have assumed he was a spy. But it had become quickly obvious that he knew nothing about livestock or horticulture. He appeared to have the manners of someone from the city, but no one could be sure about that, either, other than those perhaps with long memories.