Biografi (18 page)

The television set is a surprise. Leila explains it is a gift from her father, Ali Starova, who also, as it emerges, is the reason for the family's exile to Savra. When Kadris asks Guria when the last time she saw her husband was, the old woman slaps a hand over her heart and howls at the ceiling. Then she scuttles off to find a photograph.

It is an old black-and-white wedding photograph of a young and strikingly good-looking woman and a slim, dark man. This is the man she married, and of whom her memories have not advanced beyond 1944. He led well on the dance floor in those days.

The other photograph she shows us is a Polaroid she received in 1982. Here is Ali some forty years later. The Polaroid had been taken in his living room at home, in New York City. Ali sits at one end of the couch, one arm draped poignantly over the vacant place beside him. On his other side—at bookshelf height—stands a small, artificial Christmas tree.

Here, surely, is a life impossible for Guria to conceive. I seem to be looking at a man familiar with popcorn, and baseball on television and the subway connections to various parts of the city. It is staggering to think of this man sharing a piece of history with these two women in Savra. The man in the Polaroid gives the impression of being more than a little out of shape, but by the same token comfortable with his condition. A man resigned to fate is what I'm getting at; Guria's husband did not look like an enemy of the people.

Leila pours the coffee, then sits down beside her mother to explain the story of the man in the Polaroid.

Ali Starova had been a follower of King Zog. After liberation the Communists turned on the enemies within, and because the collaborators and royalists were perceived to have lived under the same roof, Ali was caught in the roundup.

He spent four years in jail, in Korcë, before escaping to Yugoslavia. With Ali gone, the regime looked to see what he had left behind.

Guria spoke of the camps she and Leila had passed through. She ticked them off on her fingers—Valiasa, Carrik, Kamez and Pluk—her crinkly old eyes blinking at the mention of each one.

She described how she used to scavenge grain from the fields—a teaspoonful at a time.

In the late fifties she had received word from Ali. He was in France, of all places. There was just that one letter, and then a twenty-five-year silence. She assumed Ali had died, because there was no word until 1982, when she received a letter and the Polaroid of a plump man, bald, jowly, and with glasses. The television set and some money had quickly followed. But in 1986 a friend of Ali's in New York wrote to inform Guria of her husband's death. And that was her marriage.

Leila had married in Pluk, some time in the seventies. She had married another exile, the son of a man accused of waging ‘propaganda against the regime'. Surprisingly, the son's biografi had been overlooked. Xherat had been given a ‘preferred job' in animal husbandry, and this oversight, so Guria had reasoned at the time, could only be good for Leila's biografi and those of future generations.

Leila had had three sons by Xherat. A few months earlier, the boys had sent their mother a photograph from Italy. In the photo, Eduart, Markelian and Fatmir have met with a crowd of boat refugees under a fountain in Rome. Despite their new clothes, all the Albanians appear to be stunned by their new circumstances. There is an unmistakable longing, as well—and it comes of the refugees, fifteen of them, all at once drawing in their breath to stare bleakly down the tunnel of the camera lens.

I thought back to what Shapallo had said about his first years in the block, the distress the image in his shaving mirror caused him and his desperate recall of the blown-up photographs in Kukës, this ‘looking-glass' and link back to his old life, to Topojani. Every moment alone he had entered the photographs and retraced an imaginative journey back up the remote mountain gorge, to his other life as a dentist, husband and father, and each time, he said, the patient hadn't left the clinic and he was just able to resume where he had left off.

And much later, back at the hotel in Lushnje, lying on my bed and trying to ignore the stench along the corridor, I thought back to life on Kansas Street and Cliff 's crude attempt to cut off his past.

A few days before I was due to fly out, I had called round to say goodbye to Cliff.

Bess had answered the door. She thought Cliffy was out and checked with a glance down the steps. But there was no light on in the basement. I had already looked. So she said, ‘Oh dear, you had better come in.'

We sat in the living room, Bess on the edge of an armchair, carefully studying me.

‘You know, I barely remember you at all,' she said. ‘Not really. I remember your uncle and aunt. And, of course Louise…I am sorry for what happened. But we weren't close. People tended to feel uncomfortable around Cliffy.'

‘Cliff 's quite a character,' I said, and Bess thought about that.

‘Of course, things haven't turned out the way I once thought they would.' And here, she managed to laugh. ‘My father, he used to say to me, “Bess, make a wish.” Well, Cliff was not that kind of man. As you know, he worked with his hands.'

This was my first time in the house proper, and over the hearth I noticed a line of dark squares on the wallpaper.

Bess said, ‘You're looking to where our photographs used to hang. Cliff took them all down. Not that it has made any difference. They might as well be up.'

She inclined her head toward a gilt-edged picture stand. There was a hole where the photograph used to be.

‘Shame about that one. It was the only one we had of Cliff and his parents in Sheffield. That's in England. Cliff was once English, as you might well have been aware.'

Bess said she used to like to sit in the chair where I was now.

‘When the children were young, I could alternate between the green hills out the window and the black chimneys of Sheffield.'

Suddenly Bess had stopped and caught me off-guard, with a smile. She just wanted to say how happy she was that I had thought to visit. She was glad I had come.

‘There's not the same opportunity to talk when Cliff 's around,' she said.

Then she put on the jug and returned with a tray.

She sat down, once again balancing on the edge of her armchair. ‘There is something else I would like to talk about,' she said.

She gazed back at the wall, to another blank space, and prised from it another story. We went from one vacated space to another. Bess explained them all. The holiday snaps. The children's triumphs, from backyard play to graduation, Cliff at a ham radio operators' convention. ‘It's a shame you can't see for yourself. But Cliff is the short one. The tall man with the badges pinned to his hat is from Anchorage. I remember Cliffy saying he was the one in regular contact with Russian fishermen in the Kurile Islands.'

From what Bess had to say, I had imagined the photographs showing Cliff progressively impatient with the photo taker. Increasingly, I imagined Cliff half in and half out of photographs, wanting to take leave of the situations he is obliged to participate in, and all the time craving a different life.

Of the happier times there had been photographs of Cliff and Bess with the kids at the beach—collecting agar out of the red and white seaweed tossed up on the south Wairarapa coast; a more summery one of the family lolling among the sandhills and grass at Riversdale; Cliff looking up from hammering in a tent peg; Cliff with a 1960s sun-glazed contentment, as he carries his shoes and socks across the mud flats at low tide.

I found Bess gazing at the far end of the wall, and for the life of me I could not superimpose over that abandoned square a picture of Cliff on skis. In fact, I found it difficult to believe in any of the faded blocks of wallpaper coloured in by Bess.

I wondered where the photographs were, and whether I might see them for myself. I asked Bess this, and her eyes froze.

‘Don't you see? This is what I have been trying to tell you. Cliff took them all down.'

‘Yes, but I thought, perhaps if I could see them?'

Bess shook her head at my slowness.

‘Cliff burnt them. Every single photograph that was up there.' It had happened a few weeks after his retirement.

‘Cliff took down all the photographs and incinerated them.'

31

‘THE ONLY THING I felt then was that I was King, and born to be one. I experienced next such a delicious feeling, hard to express…'

It was the occasion of Shapallo's first public outing as the Emperor's understudy, and as his motorcade entered the Tirana football stadium, the crowd rose to its feet with a deafening cheer.

He was introduced to the players from both teams, and as he moved along their line the players bowed, or smiled so easily and willingly that Shapallo, out of gratitude for their easy acceptance of him in the Emperor's clothes, smiled handsomely back.

At the correct moment, and as he had been drilled to, he took a step backwards and glanced skyward to summon a dark speck in the west which grew to a squadron, and seconds later, planes swooped low and noisily over the stadium.

The conjuror's timing was excellent on this occasion, but Shapallo was mindful that he could never outdo the Emperor. It was said that during a trip to a drought-stricken area, Hoxha had raised a hand and stroked life-giving rain from the dusty air.

Timing was the essential thing here. The proof of the pudding. In the event of an earth shudder, it would best be seen to concur with some prescient acknowledgment from the Emperor; a tilt of the head, a momentary withdrawal from conversation to reflect, a hand raised as if to summon forth, a quickly withdrawn smile—these were to be accepted as godly commands. If it had rained, then surely it was a case of the Great Leader having divined that the moment was right.

At the soccer stadium Shapallo had allowed his eye to wander, at first unwittingly animating large sections of the crowd wherever his gaze happened to pause, then more wilfully tempting first himself and then the crowd, encouraging a thousand voices to chant, ‘May every day be a birthday for Enver!' The noise caused even the players down on the pitch to gaze up at the terraces. A tilt of his head sent a flutter through several thousand flags.

Encouraged, Shapallo waved—and the crowd, they adored him. Shapallo said he had never before felt so loved.

Some minutes later, he shook his head, and the watchful crowd expressed for him his disappointment at a missed opportunity. Down on the field the players hung their heads.

Now the crowd was on its feet, chanting—wishing Shapallo a long and happy life. May he prosper. May the sun always single out the Great Leader with its warmth. And as he was ushered by anxious officials and minders towards the car down on the pitch, Shapallo had thought of his patients, the way they used to come to the door silent with dread—and God willing, afterwards left, shaking him by the hand. He got in the back of the limousine happily reassured in the knowledge that he had pleased.

Many of the questions I have for Shapallo revolve around the business of being king. How, for example, do you abandon one life which has left its marks while laying claims to having lived another? I would have thought that physical resemblance to the Great Leader would serve Shapallo well only at a distance.

These things of course had concerned Shapallo too, as he was especially mindful that his continued existence and plausibility went hand in hand.

He mentioned one of his minders, a man called Tef, who had stuck it out with him from start to finish and never failed to refer to him in any other way but ‘Comrade Enver'. In the early days Shapallo had asked for newsreels of Enver Hoxha so he could study the Emperor's mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. He'd asked Tef for photographs that might show the Emperor on the front foot, or surprised, or magnanimous.

‘And?'

We happened to be sitting on Shapallo's bed at this moment, like birds on a wire, and Shapallo reached across Kadris to tap my knee.

‘Nothing,' he said.

Instead, Tef had brought him books on French culture and history, and he had reminded Shapallo, ‘Remember, Comrade Enver, you are partial to all things French.'

So he read voraciously—everything that Tef brought him. Poetry. Novels. Books on the French language. He read to fill in the time. But, later, his appetite grew and he started to read with increasing awareness that he had been set on a quest.

It had taken some time, years in fact, for Shapallo to arrive at the place Tef had hinted, but one afternoon in 1970 Shapallo had sat down with a new book. He was only a few chapters into
Mémoires
when he put the book down and began to pace up and down in his room, greatly agitated by his arrival in the court of the Sun King, and of course, by the knowledge that everything he needed and wanted to know was here at his fingertips.

For the next hour Shapallo reeled off the Sun King's axioms, as if they were his own.

He described Louis's vain pleasure in singing in private passages of opera prologues which were full of his praises. Even at public dinners, with his entire court present, Louis would shamelessly hum these praises between his teeth.

Louis had had a medal struck with a globe of the world balancing on the tip of his sword, and with the motto:
Quad
libet licet
: I can do with it what I please.

To the poet who composed the finest sonnet in praise of the King, Louis awarded a medal of himself, represented in the figure of the Sun, despatching clouds and chasing away the night birds and monsters.

Upon the gate of one of the Jesuit colleges in Paris, Louis struck out the name of Jesus, whose rule of order was set on every Jesuit-owned building, and substituted his own name instead.

Louis had depended on an extensive network of spies, the most important source being the post office chief, since royal omniscience extended to weeding out the slightest complaint or contempt for the King—a throwaway phrase was often enough.