Biografi (10 page)

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.'

We filed into the living room, the scene of last night's drinking and fun, some of it at Vladimir's expense. Mimi said the Party had thought Vladimir too dangerous to be a card-carrying member.

I suspect he might draw pleasure from such a reputation. The very idea of it seemed to be tucked inside his cheek.

It was terribly awkward to begin with. Mimi's husband drum-rolled his fingers along the top of the couch. He spread his legs and planted his feet wide. He had the couch to himself and we were his audience.

He tapped a little tune out on the couch; then he looked up and spoke quickly to Mimi.

She said, ‘Vlady wishes you to ask him anything you wish. Anything at all.'

‘Anything?' I checked with Mimi. I wondered what she had returned home with last night. ‘He is aware that I know he is
sigourimi
?'

There was some mocking laughter from Vladimir when he heard the word.

‘Ask me,' he said, apishly thumping his chest.

I described to Vladimir the faces I had seen in the little room off Rruga Ndre Mjeda. I passed on some of the stories I had heard of lives destroyed by lies and deceits. The ‘friend's' evidence. The jacked-up ‘second witness'. The creation of a martyred caste.

I mentioned the example of Kolec Jak Simoni, whose story was still fresh in my memory. He had been jailed ten years under Article 55 after speaking among ‘friends' of escape. He had no idea who these supposed friends were. The conversation had never taken place. Then in 1978 he received another ten-year sentence after the biografis were opened and it was discovered that Kolec had two relatives who had escaped the country back in the fifties.

Mimi, of course, had to pass all this on. Her husband listened with interest. He perched on the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, staring off into the distance.

It was too much to try to defend, and to his credit he didn't even try. Instead, for the next hour or so he explained the role of the
sigourimi
in all of this. He counted off on his fingers the points he wished to make.

First, any information is valuable. It is not important who the informant is—only the information. Nor was there any verification of the information.

‘For example, I betray you to the
sigourimi
. The matter is taken up between you and them. I am forgotten.'

This point, he said, had been unique to Albania.

Second, under the guidance of the Great Leader, the revolution had to express everything. Nothing could be concealed.

Thirdly, he said, promotion within the
sigourimi
depended on gathering information and informants. Promotion was not supported by financial gain, but a moral or political purity was created. ‘The Party asked the
sigourimi
to find enemies. When they could not find real enemies they had to invent them.'

‘You understand what Vlady is saying,' said Mimi. ‘Had we continued to go on this way, the country would have consumed itself.'

Vladimir said the system had been like an alter ego. He could not tell Mimi these things because she, in turn, might tell her relatives.

By now I had the feeling he was doing more than simply explaining a concept to a stranger. There was a sense of sharing an intimate confidence; shortly afterwards he excused himself to go outside to smoke a cigarette.

‘I have never heard him mention these things before. This is the first time ever,' Arben whispered excitedly.

It was extraordinary that a simple task such as explaining an institutional concept could take on such a personal dimension.

Nick's father didn't want it to proceed any further. This kind of talk distressed him. While Vladimir was out of the room he told Mimi he wanted the conversation to shift to something more pleasant. I had the feeling he was operating in the old climate of fear, where it was better to know nothing because information invariably meant complicity. You learned something and immediately were tainted by it. Either you became a threat because of what you knew or you were made a victim because of it.

Mrs Marku was ready to serve dinner. Another bottle of wine was dusted off. To appease Nick's father we discussed books.

I brought up Kadare for discussion, Dossier H, but its mention produced only a scowl. Kadare, in Vladimir's view, had disgraced himself by leaving the country. This was not an uncommon view. Even Gjyzepina was critical.

Yesterday, while walking up Rruga Ndre Mjeda, I had asked for her opinion of Kadare. She said, ‘How can we say he wrote honestly? Perhaps he fought for democracy with his heart and mind, but he forgot to express it.'

Vladimir put down his fork and with his fingers pulled a chewed hunk of meat from his mouth. Then he held up a greasy finger to make his point. Kadare, he said, was a propagandist.

‘Yes,' said Mimi. ‘My husband is referring to
The Great Winter
, the novel in which Enver Hoxha is the main character. The hero.'

Vladimir patted Mimi's shoulder. She had on the same black dress as last night. Mimi looked at where he had left a grease spot; Vladimir dove back into his food.

I wondered who Vladimir thought was behind the gunfire at night.

‘Bandits,' he said, with his mouth full, and went on eating. This time Arben did not contest it.

After Mimi and Vladimir left, Nick's mother wrapped a cake in a towel and placed it in my hands.

‘My mother would like you to take the cake to Nick in Rome,' Arben explained.

It was a special cake which the Catholics in the north of the country baked to celebrate Easter. In the past, Arben explained, they had had to bake the cake secretly, even going to the extent of burying the eggshells in the backyard so the neighbours wouldn't see them in the rubbish and tell the
sigourimi
.

‘Vladimir?' I asked.

Arben nodded.

‘Vladimir,' his mother said.

16

THE NEXT MORNING the entire delegation is there to see me off—Gjyzepina, Clement, Arben, Nick's parents.

True to her word, Gjyzepina has gone off to search the neighbourhood for someone to accompany me to Tirana. She turns up with Marcello, a greying twenty-nine-year-old student returning to university in Tirana.

The bus, in fact, is an old lorry which draws up to the meat market at great speed, splashing ditch water over the bloody carcasses displayed on the pavement.

Fifteen or twenty passengers are already standing on the tray, and because I am the inexperienced foreigner and because I am surrounded by fifteen to twenty willing hosts, I'm pushed with Marcello to the front of the tray to lean up against the cab. Marcello tells me this is the most sought-after place—here it is warm and secure.

Within a short time, out in the countryside, my head is a block of ice. And what was exhilarating has lost its edge. Behind us the other passengers' eyelids are half-closed, their faces red with cold, their hair swept back off their foreheads by the breeze. They stand with their legs apart and their hands placed on the shoulders of the person in front of them.

Arben said we would be in Tirana in a couple of hours, no more.

Now Marcello tells me it's likely to be ‘three, four hours, perhaps'.

Every so often there is a respite as we slow up behind a horse and cart. Briefly, the icy breeze subsides and we thaw out in the still air. It is possible again to feel the sun and imagine the greenness either side of the road in flower or baked in midsummer. The season of postcards. Then we're off again, lurching, the tray leaping potholes with its human cargo. The words of Marcello's uncertain English suddenly pop up shrilly or are blown away into the jet stream, and it is some time before I understand that he is trying to tell me about the
sigourimi
.