Biografi (17 page)

The next morning we follow Leila along the mud paths to Shapallo's dormitory. Another overcast day. But to the southeast it is clearer, and we can see the mountains there spotted with snow. This is where the wind is coming from, against which we're defenceless.

A scarf is the only measure she has taken against the wind and the cold. Over her shoulders the fields are a frozen sea of mud.

She has some coffee for Shapallo, and a piece of precious meat. Schnitzel, or even fowl.

I have the letter of introduction from Munz, which I haven't let go from my hand, in my pocket. Even Kadris is slightly nervous. He keeps adjusting his tie and riding the collar button over his Adam's apple, blowing on his hands and shuff ling his feet.

From behind the screens dogs or some other creatures stand on their hind legs and scratch at the bamboo, and pant after our passing shadows.

Leila stops to say that, really, she would have preferred to have given Mister Shapallo some advance warning of our visit. Then she passes on something to Kadris which surprises for its protective tone. ‘Mister Shapallo,' she says, ‘is an intensely private man.'

We enter a small courtyard, where Leila calls out to Shapallo; and without waiting pushes on the door. We go through.

There is a trace of recent heat: there is the faintest smell of kerosene.

A sheet of plastic flapping in the window is the only distraction from the figure sitting in bed. His knees are drawn up, a grey saddle blanket is pulled around his shoulders. And no matter how much I have prepared myself for this moment it still comes as a shock to find so abundantly alive the features from the postage stamps and the monuments, from the busts and the schoolbooks, the paintings and photographs.

Equally, the rather gruesome L-shaped scar tissue does nothing to encourage comparison. The Emperor, everyone says, had beautiful skin.

We shake hands—Shapallo not exactly wholeheartedly, and me with the charlatan's smile of a politician visiting a hospital wing.

I'm not sure where to start. Kadris, taking the matter into his own hands, begins to explain something. Then Leila pushes in and hands Shapallo his coffee. Shapallo suddenly perks up. He leans forward and Leila sits the pillows up behind him.

The easiest thing would be to hand over Munz's letter and let Munz explain. Shapallo nods for me to lay the envelope on the bed beside him. It appears he is not about to give up his coffee while it is hot, and of course, two hands are required to tear open an envelope.

It is not going at all how I would have liked, how I had imagined. The seating arrangement is the immediate problem. There is nothing to anchor us to this room. We have to stand, and along with the barrenness of the room we add to its temporariness, as though what I want to know might be gleaned over a brief question-and-answer session, after which we will jump on our bikes and disappear as mysteriously as we arrived.

A short moment passes, and I wonder whether the strain of silence has become unbearable even for Shapallo, because next he hands the coffee back to Leila and tears open Munz's letter.

We watch while he reads—we follow him all the way down the winding path to the end. Then he drops the letter and looks up in amazement.

‘New Zealand? New Zealand?' he asks.

Suddenly he is very excited. He is full of questions. Mainly to do with Munz. Is he here? Shapallo tries to look around us, lest Munz is about to spring through the door and surprise.

Shapallo wants to know when we can expect Munz. Is he sitting outside in a car? Will he be arriving tonight, tomorrow?

Originally Munz had intended to make the trip, but at the last moment a visiting trade delegation grounded him. Besides, he didn't think he'd be of use to Shapallo in Lushnje. He was better positioned to be of help in Tirana, if indeed it was help that Shapallo wanted.

All this is explained to Shapallo.

‘Ah, Tirana.' A nod of recognition.

Then I get Kadris to explain to Shapallo how I had read about him in a newspaper.

Shapallo is amused to hear this. He and Kadris weigh in on some topic. I get the feeling Shapallo has asked where New Zealand is, because I hear ‘Australis' mentioned, and the old man flops back against the pillows and glances at the wall with all this new and unexpected information.

It's difficult to know the best place to start. That is to say, which life to begin with. The one as the dentist, the one as Hoxha's shadow, or Shapallo's current circumstances.

Then Kadris gives me the hurry-up. ‘Ask what you wish to know. Mister Shapallo is waiting…'

So I begin on a rather lame note and ask whether he ever met Hoxha.

Once, he says, and turns back from the wall with a smile.

Nothing was said, nor was he given any advance warning.

‘Like you,' he says, with a friendly smile. But as he laughs his eye catches Leila and his mood changes.

Something sharp is said, and Leila responds by gathering up the dishes. We wait until the door closes, then Kadris explains what just passed.

‘Mister Shapallo did not wish Leila to know about his past. No one in Savra, he asks, must know. You say people in New Zealand know, yes? This is incredible. But in Savra, no. May I tell Mister Shapallo that you understand this, perfectly?'

‘Perfect.'

‘But there is another problem.'

He pauses there to get the rest from Shapallo, and is obviously pained by the next piece of news.

‘Yes,' he says very earnestly. ‘I am the problem, because as Mister Shapallo says, I must know everything in order for you to know. It is complicated, I think.'

‘Yes.'

We agonise over that one for a few minutes. I'm completely lost for a quick answer.

But it is Shapallo who lets us off the hook. He coughs for our attention. He sits further up in bed. I receive a sympathetic smile before Shapallo turns his attention to Kadris.

For the next few minutes Shapallo explains himself quietly, while Kadris answers with impassioned assurances. Kadris's words, which are lifted from his heart, are met by Shapallo's sober nods. The end of the problem is signalled by a short burst of relieved laughter from Kadris.

‘Mister Shapallo was very worried of me. He thought I might be
sigourimi
.'

Shapallo is less than mirthful, but reassured, I think, and we resume where Shapallo left off.

‘Mister Shapallo also wishes to say this happened many, many years ago. Another lifetime.'

A door had opened, and in strode a number of men. Only one he recognised—a tall man with a tanned face and excellent teeth.

The man with the excellent teeth had smiled, and that was it. The Great Leader turned on his heel and left the room.

28

FROM THIS FIRST encounter I take away the year in which Shapallo was yanked from his old life and fitted out with the Emperor's features.

Shapallo's abduction, curiously enough, coincides with the year of Harry Hamm's visit; on that occasion the most spectacular clue to Albania's changed relationship with the Soviet Union is an abandoned building site in downtown Tirana.

The Palace of Culture had been intended as a kind of matching colossus to the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Khrushchev personally delivered the blueprints, and in 1960, the first spade of dirt had been turned over. Three years later Harry Hamm wrote of cranes standing in ‘mournful silence'. Everywhere he went, he found the hotels empty.

Just one year earlier five hundred ‘engineers and shock brigade workers' from the Ukraine, from Moscow, from Swerdlovsk, from the Urals, had checked into the Dajti. Now, in Tirana, and up and down the ‘Albanian Riviera' as well, the hotels have been abandoned by Eastern European vacationers who, the previous year, had responded in droves to the colourful posters of the Ionian Sea.

‘The Cyrillic script ceases to appear in hotel registers,' writes Harry Hamm. The May Day speeches criticise the Soviet deviationists' path; the eyes of the crowd listening in Skanderbeg Square scan the skies over Tirana for a reply from the giant neighbour to the north.

Fake landscapes are painted: rocket launchers and anti-aircraft guns appear on mountain slopes; armies of men, like small plastic figures that fall out of cereal boxes in the West, stand in Albanian valleys.

Against these measures, a cardboard cut-out for the esteemed leader is perhaps the least extravagant precaution. Around this time, as I recall, I first heard the voice of Tirana come from Cliff Dalziel's shed.

29

ONE DAY A man from Kukës had arrived in Topojani, out of the blue, to take Shapallo's photograph. The request of the Party, the photographer explained, and Shapallo shrugged off the inconvenience.

He mentioned the episode to his wife, how he had stood before the wall of his clinic while the photographer sheltered under a dark blanket, but then thought no more of it.

Time passes, and one day men in military uniform turn up at his clinic.

This time Shapallo has a patient with him; smiling confidently down at his patient, to eyes full of trust above a mouth stranded wide, Shapallo says he will be right back.

He washes his hands—this, from habit—and follows the men outside to a waiting jeep.

The soldiers invite him to get in the back and Shapallo obliges. Everyone is exceptionally polite. The driver comments favourably on the day. The wind is from the direction of the coast, sticky with tanning oils—momentarily the men fall silent.

Shapallo is offered a cigarette. When he declines the soldier reacts with surprise. These are the small human moments which can fill an abyss of worry. And again, when a goat stands its ground in the track, preventing the jeep's passage, all the men in the jeep laugh—even Shapallo. Soon the jeep has to cautiously chop down a gear for children playing over the track, and again Shapallo is reassured. Clearly he is among men with children of their own. Theirs is a shared perspective and he thinks no harm can possibly come to him.

Since there were no vehicles in Topojani, perhaps twice a year Shapallo would walk into Kukës. On foot it was a journey of seven or eight hours, longer if there was bad weather. Over the years he had come to know every bend, the change of sound where the river leaves the valley floor and plunges vertically into noisy, turbulent pools. There are vistas to look forward to, places to rest, and elsewhere, the long, exposed stretches without shelter from the burning sun.

Shapallo described all these places—landmarks quickly accounted for in the jeep. They pass lines of people and mules from neighbouring villages—with their ‘maps' of rest stops, places for toilet, places off the track to feed the mules, to rest up. And the thing that had amazed Shapallo was the way the jeep just swallowed up the passing landscape. Time condensed. There had been none of the familiar sense of entering into and departing; instead, the horizon just kept flicking over like a deck of cards, until, unbelievably as Shapallo described it, there it was, already, the end of the gorge and the sprawl of the plain.

In Kukës, while getting out of the jeep he catches a glimpse of his dentist's coat in the side mirror and he hopes aloud that this ‘business' will not take long. To one of the soldiers standing outside a barrack-like building, he mentions that he has a patient waiting back at the clinic. The soldier nods, but then looks away without interest.

Shapallo described the office he was shown to. There is a wooden desk, a few chairs. A room which doesn't get day-to-day use. An ashtray has not been emptied.

And there, pinned to a wall, is a line of photographs. There is no need to step closer. The photographs have been enlarged, and at first glance Shapallo passes them off as military interest in topography.

But the ridge, he discovers, is his nose. The hollows are his eyes. These are the features which stare back from his shaving mirror each day. Only they have been enlarged, apparently in an attempt to see deeper into his face, and this is the biggest shock for Shapallo, this idea of his face opened up and pored over as if it were a map belonging to someone else.

The two officers who join Shapallo a few minutes later are courtesy itself. They regret the inconvenience of it all. They wish they had been able to give prior notice, but they hope he will understand the sensitivity and the urgency surrounding this ‘business'.

Shapallo says no, he doesn't understand. He doesn't understand any of it. He tells the officers he has a patient waiting for him back at his clinic. Furthermore, there is his family to consider. They will surely be worried. It is already late, and now, no doubt, he will have to stay overnight in Kukës.

The two officers exchange a look; one feels in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, which he pushes across the desk.

But Shapallo isn't interested. He announces that he is leaving. That he has had enough of this intrigue. He has a patient waiting. His family…

He pushes his chair out noisily. He starts for the door. And now his hand is on the doorknob.

‘Comrade Shapallo,' says one of the officers; his voice is unhurried and calm. ‘Comrade Shapallo, please come here and sit down.'

‘It is not necessarily bad news,' says the other officer.

‘No?'

‘No.'

‘Mister Shapallo,' continues the first officer, ‘you have been chosen for a very special task.'

30

WE POPPED BACK to Leila's apartment, having tired Shapallo out. He said we were welcome to come back later, but by the time we reached the door his eyelids were closed.

It is colder in Leila's flat than it is outside. All the past winters have collected in its cold plaster walls, and the old kerosene heater is hopelessly outmatched.

In the doorway Leila's mother, an old woman dressed in black from head to toe, smothers Kadris in kisses and then treats me to the same enthusiasm, clasping her hands around my neck and dragging my head down to rub her face against my cheek.

The main room is oppressively crowded with pillows, blankets, eating utensils and clothing. From this debris rises an American sweatshirt in red, white and blue, and Leila's thirteen-year-old daughter, Beatrice, shyly says hello.