A Girl in Exile

by Ismail Kadare

  Rudian put on his heavy overcoat and wrapped his scarf round his neck. The roar grew ever more deafening.

  The truck came nearer. You could see the statue’s legs and a part of its trunk. One of the people on top, with a lit cigarette, laughed for the cameras. Another appeared to be hitting the statue’s jaw.

  What, meanwhile, was the body deep in the earth doing, Rudian Stefa thought, as its image was desecrated?

  The truck was almost below his windows. Soon the head would appear, cracked and dented.

  The majority are under the earth, he thought, their bones broken, trickles of blood down their faces, and the poisoned cup in their hands. Explaining it to them would be the hardest of all.

  The statue’s head was directly below the window. The skull had split, and you could see the hollow interior.

  ‘Unreal mockery, hence,’ he said to himself.

  The howls from the crowd below rose and fell.

  The right eye of the bronze figure – huge, black and unnatural – seemed to be weeping.

  THREE MONTHS LATER. LINDA B.

  Of all the sounds above ground, almost none penetrated to the depths of the earth where Linda B. still rested in the corner of the cemetery in the little provincial town.

  The Albanian regime was tottering but its laws remained in place, especially the regulations governing prisons and internment. One of these laws was extremely strange, and many people believed it must be unique to Albania. This law concerned political prisoners and internees who died before completing their sentences. Their bodies, even though vacated by their souls, had to continue serving their sentences in the grave, wherever they happened to be, until the end. Only after the expiry of the term of their sentence did their families have the right to exhume them from the cemeteries designated by the state, and take them wherever they wished.

  The regulation, or rather the principle that the law applied identically below the ground as above, should have been the first to be revoked, but would apparently have to wait to be the last. The only persons not subject to this law were those who had served life imprisonment or had been shot. These two categories of prisoners were outside time, especially the limits of time in the legal sense.

  Although prisoners and internees were subject to the same obligations on the basis of the same enforcement of the law above and below the earth, one distinction was made between them. All decisions regarding prisoners were applied individually, but because internment applied to entire families, decisions for releasing internees were also valid for their families as a whole.

  Families generally consisted of many members, and some old people or infants would always die during the internment. So the famous ‘directives’ listed the names of the released family members in two separate columns: those in this world and those in the next.

  The directive reached Linda B.’s parents not only five years to the day after its predecessor, but almost at the same hour, just before noon.

  For the first time Linda B.’s parents took the envelope from the postman with indifference. Linda was no longer with them, and the directive had lost all meaning. They studied the state emblem on the envelope with dulled minds. What use was freedom now that they had lost their daughter? Furtively they even hoped the answer might be negative as before. Let them remain there in that backwater, where their daughter also lay.

  But they felt they were committing a sin, and asked God to forgive them. Piously, they prayed again. It was not just because of their son that this feeling came, there was something more. ‘What else could it be?’ Linda’s mother cried aloud. What else could it be but Linda?

  She tried in vain to find peace. From deep down, obscurely, came an answer to her question. Of course it must be Linda. They could not leave, abandoning Linda there. With moist eyes, they tried to make sense of the directive that their son held in his hand: ‘Her name is here, Mum, next to ours.’

  After the initial shock, the meaning of what had happened grew clearer. They would not leave Linda. Indeed, their move, if they made it, would be more for her sake than their own.

  Linda, under the earth, in the double shackles of the state and death, suffered more than her family above. If they couldn’t free her from the chains of death, they could at least cut the heavier pair, the chains of the state.

  They spent that whole unforgettable week dealing with documents. Linda’s were more complicated, from the exhumation permit to be issued by the municipality down to the final certificate from the Interior Ministry, quite apart from the medical records. They wandered from one office to the next and often found themselves visiting the grave. The girl seemed impatient, so her mother would whisper the same words: ‘Just a bit longer, my dear.’ All four of them would leave soon, as if setting off for the cinema or a Sunday picnic.

  Distant cousins in Tirana informed them that they had found a plot in the capital’s western cemetery, outside the city in the direction of the sea.

  They finally left one day in late May, all four in a small van. Three of them sat in the sideways seats, with Linda’s narrow coffin between them.

  It was a fine day with a gentle breeze. They had fixed Linda’s hairgrip to the coffin as its only decoration. She had not taken it off after the farewell ball and they had found it in the mud outside the school.

  Road signs announced where villages and towns began and ended. The van left them behind. Albania seemed extraordinarily big.

  They craned their heads to read the first signs with unfamiliar names – Motel Europa, Café Bar Atlantic – to find out if they had now left the internment zone.

  There was no sign anywhere to tell them this. ‘I don’t think there ever was,’ Linda’s mother said faintly. Her father said nothing, but her brother read the signs out loud: ‘Café Vienna . . . Two Queens Hotel . . .’

  The noise of the van’s engine suddenly changed. The road ran uphill, but not steeply enough for the motor to gasp like this and emit such skeins of black smoke. The van barely moved, and the husband and wife studied again the landscape on either side, this time their faces pale with fear.

  They didn’t speak but later admitted to each other they had all sensed at the same time that the internment zone ended there, and the mute earth, in whose depths news arrived late, did not want to let their daughter’s body leave.

  The van recovered its normal speed. There was still the same May freshness, and Albania now seemed endless. They stopped a couple of times at small roadside cafés and ate and drank something with the driver. Linda’s mother tried not to draw attention to herself, but glanced anxiously at the van parked to one side by the entrance.

  Late in the afternoon they passed Durrës beach with its many villas and tourist hotels, their dance floors still empty.

  The capital city showed signs of its approach, yet seemed further away than ever. Numbly they watched the telephone poles receding behind them, and looked at the farms and the helicopters in the small military airfields. Dusk was falling. Linda’s father and brother surreptitiously observed her mother’s cheeks. She had coped better than they had expected. It was only when the lights of Tirana appeared in the distance that first her shoulders and then her entire body shook with sobbing until she leaned forward and collapsed, huddled over the coffin. Amidst her sobs she spoke Linda’s name, and sometimes, barely able to form the words, ‘My daughter, my daughter.’

  TWO MONTHS LATER. PREMIERE

  With the roar of applause ringing in his ears, he sat down in the chair where after premieres writers would usually autograph copies of their new play. The table was the same as in previous years, with its cherry-coloured baize, vase of flowers and glass of water.

  He signed books according to the familiar ritual, rather wearily, cool with everyone, whether strangers or acquaintances. A souvenir from Rudian Stefa, or With best wishes from R. St.

  There was also a covert ritual to the queue. People wore a special smile, as if passed on loan from one person to the next. Acquaintances who were u
ncertain if Rudian would remember them made sure he did. Some asked for a dedication with their name. Some were celebrities. Llukan Herri, above all. Colleagues, of course. One friend visiting from Germany, another from Canada. Foreign diplomats. Journalists. Migena holding her fiancé’s hand. Both of them worked for the private television station Plus Channel. Most stood in silence, among them the investigator, whom Rudian had not seen for years.

  The endless queue was exhausting.

  A sweet voice said for the second time, ‘Can you inscribe it with my name?’ ‘Of course,’ he replied. Before he raised his head the unknown girl said her name: ‘Linda B.’

  Don’t.

  There was only this exclamation inside him, nothing else.

  The impulse to raise his head was immediately supplanted by its opposite: a heavy chain weighing it down.

  Don’t, he said to himself again, but still without a clear reason. Don’t look at her.

  An irresistible longing, like an ocean of molten wax, enough to cover one half of the planet, flooded his entire body. And at the same time, the reason fought through a mist to make itself clear. Don’t, if you don’t want to lose her.

  The book was in front of him and his hand began the inscription with awkward stiffness: For Linda B., a souvenir from the author.

  Don’t, he said to himself for the last time. However intense your longing and your desire, don’t do it.

  The order against making that old mistake was still in force. He obeyed.

  As if blind, he raised the book with one hand while keeping his head lowered. He waited for her to reach for the book. The girl took it in her hand and just for a moment their cold fingers touched in that dark void.

  Mali i Robit–Paris

  Summer–winter, 2008–2009

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  Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,

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  Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s “PEN Translates!” programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas www.englishpen.org

  Copyright © Ismail Kadare 2016

  English translation copyright John Hodgson 2016

  Ismail Kadare has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Harvill Secker in 2016

  (First published in the United Kingdom by Random House in 2016)

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781846558467