Biografi (14 page)

The Party sent Lenka Cuko, a former peasant who had risen through the ranks to become one of the dozen most important Politburo members, described by Sali as ‘a woman with an idiot's face and black eyes'.

‘The meeting was historic,' he said. ‘If for no other reason than Lenka was accustomed to respect and she got none.'

The meeting was held within a week of the protests at the stadium and outside Party Headquarters. Lenka was accompanied by another official, Muho Asllani, the first Party Secretary of the Durrës area. Sali explained the factory's problems, the difficulties the workers were having in trying to feed their families, and Lenka responded, ‘We have not come here with our pockets full of money.'

The workers then detailed the food shortages—each worker was down to a cupful of milk a day.

‘You need to understand,' said Sali. ‘This was the first time workers had the courage to mention such things to Party leaders.'

Officially all was rosy. Unofficially, the phrase on everyone's lips went
Mish—ish—sh
[Meat—none to eat—but don't repeat— only whisper].

One of the workers then asked Lenka, ‘Why don't you allow the people to have cows at home?'

‘What!' reacted Lenka. ‘Do you want to turn Albania into the Soviet Union—a revisionist country?'

The workers grew more insistent. They began to put forward demands. At which point Lenka and Muho retreated, suggesting that the discussion had been sabotaged by ‘political enemies'.

Further meetings with the ‘block men' followed, but nothing was resolved, and the factory finally stopped working shortly after the meeting with Lenka.

From this moment the nail factory workers began to take things into their own hands.

A truck from Skrapar, a Communist stronghold in the south, which had arrived at the factory for nails, was hijacked. A number of younger workers took the truck and drove to the library, where they smashed the windows and loaded the truck with the works of Enver Hoxha, and a message for the driver: ‘This is what we have to give to the people of Skrapar—not nails.'

Traffic from Gjirokastër, Enver's birthplace, was routinely stopped in town and the question asked of the drivers: ‘Who are you for—democracy or Enver?'

Summer was near and people started to crowd the beaches. Wary of the behaviour that had occurred in the soccer stadium, the Party sent uniformed police to watch over the bathers.

The rest of April, May and June passed peacefully enough. But on July 8 the regime struck back. The
sampists
, highly paid shock troops of the Minister of the Interior, arrived in Kavajë. In the afternoon they turned up at Golem Beach and went about their business. Men were beaten up and women stripped of their clothing and bathing suits. From the beach they rolled into town picking people off the street and locking them in their grey panel vans.

One who resisted was Josef Buda, twenty-one, who, standing with his fiancée at the entrance to town, was shot dead. The
sampists
took Buda's body to the centre of town and dumped it on the street.

The townspeople wrapped the body in a sheet and carried it to Buda's parents' house. The next day the funeral cortege outnumbered the entire population of Kavajë. The coff in, covered with the bloodstained sheet from the previous day, was borne through the streets by thirty thousand mourners. From the cemetery the funeral procession continued on to the Party Headquarters, where the mourners set fire to the building and set alight police cars and the cars of Party functionaries.

For a month afterwards, Kavajë was surrounded by tanks and police. For two months the
sampists
camped outside the town. By then, however, protest had broken out in all parts of the country—Shkodër, Tirana, Korcë, Elbasan. Everywhere the statues of Stalin and Hoxha were being smashed.

22

FOR ALL ITS efforts and heroism, Kavajë would appear to have benefited very little. Before moving on to Lushnje we drove past the other big plant, a glass factory. Its windows had been smashed. The padlocks and chained gates had rusted and the stillness of the factory spoke of abandonment. The only place to have recently seen money spent on its construction recently was the newly built Party Headquarters.

While we were still in Kavajë, Brikena, in front with Mentor, suddenly twisted around and gazed longingly back to a horse-drawn cart.

‘Milk!' she said. ‘I am sure that was milk.'

South of Kavajë the road twists around hillsides planted in olive groves. From the air, according to Mentor, the trees have been grown so as to spell ENVER HOXHA.

A little farther on we meet up with the railway line, another triumph of the Albanian Youth, built back in the sixties and seventies. Here Zerena leans forward to point out ‘Shkurte Vata'. The statue is of a young woman with her right arm raised, her hand balled up in a fist.

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 attendance 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.