Biografi (23 page)

Once, in the fields outside Seman, I think it was, in Apollonia, Shapallo tried to convince a farm worker that he was not a ghost. But the man stuck out his hands to prevent Shapallo from venturing any closer.

I imagine a smiling beneficence had seen Shapallo through. The sea of bewildered faces parting, the landscape opening up, and Shapallo, both amused and regretful, like the condemned actor forever remembered for just one role, taking his resigned grin off in the direction of the darkening range of hills.

One night earlier this year he had entered a village to look for food and found Enver's statue toppled in the square. His first thoughts were to hold an act of God responsible. He looked closer. Enver's arms were tied behind his back, and painted over the raised cheek was the word
mut
, or shit.

A week later, near Elbasan, he had picked up a newspaper used by a truck driver to wipe his hands after changing a tyre, and there, beneath oily thumbprints, was a photograph of ‘hooligans' swarming into Embassy Row.

I seem to recall back in Tirana virtually every black market commodity carried a Greek label. People spoke of the ‘highway' up from Greece and I had imagined lanes of traffic and convoys of trucks travelling through the night.

But the highway I had expected is a country road. Down the other side of the mountain we arrive at a junction: another five kilometres south lies the Greek border; eighteen kilometres in the opposite direction is Gjirokastër.

We're the only traffic, and the only change from the jack-knifing road which brought us over the mountain is that it now has fewer bends. A moment ago, the headlights picked up the black skin of a river and we've stuck beside it since.

We pass under small villages stapled to the hillside above the road. Sometimes we catch a solitary light. But most of the way is covered in darkness before the start of the concrete housing blocks announces ‘new Gjirokastër'. The whereabouts of ‘old Gjirokastër' are a mystery.

We have to wind down the windows to listen for sounds of habitation, more like woodsmen than motorists with a map. A light snow is falling and we can hear the dull sounds of an axe biting into damp wood. Then Kadris sights a tiny cluster of glow-worm lights high, high above the road.

We climb to a grand-looking hotel that sits at the foot of the old fortress walls; then the road closes up to a cobbled lane full of sharp bends and exquisite wood and lead-light boutiques. Here is the imprimatur of private ownership. A pipe shop. A bar. A bakery. None open at this hour, but a heartening sight nonetheless.

We have zigzagged our way to an area above the fortress walls to find the house of the local Democrat leader, an old university buddy of Kadris's. The snow is falling heavily and the prospect of a night sitting upright in the Volvo is a daunting one.

Kadris's friend, like all the other Democrats I have met, is an economics teacher. A dark, slim man in his early thirties. In the hotel the Democrat takes the hand of a rather formidable woman behind the desk and coaxes from her an acceptable deal—Kadris, Mentor and Shapallo will pay in leks, but I must pay in dollars, in advance.

There are signs pointing to the dining room; another promises a bar. But the only voices we hear are our own. The Democrat apologises for everything having closed down so early. But the hotel staff fear for their security.

Gjirokastër, Brikena had told me, was ‘an intellectual town'.

‘There is also the possibility of vandalism and windows getting smashed,' continues the Democrat.

‘But why?'

‘Debate. Argument,' he says. ‘It is the biggest problem for our party to explain that after fifty years of unified Party stand on everything, healthy debate is not the same thing as anarchy.'

We have two rooms at the end of a long, carpeted corridor. We are the only guests on the second floor. Miraculously the rooms are heated. The shower works. There is hot water! And a fluffy eiderdown on each bed. I drift off, watching the snow fall on an owl sitting on a bare branch in the window.

39

LAST NIGHT'S HOPES of finding food have come to nothing. This morning we were late getting downstairs and the restaurant had run out of bread.

On a more pleasant note Gjirokastër is beautiful. I think Enver must have drawn the line here, since the grubby housing blocks, like an invading army, have got no further than the bottom of the hill.

Outside, it is pure mountain air. Shapallo has his coat collar pushed up around his ears—not sure as to what he would value more at this moment, a cup of coffee or total invisibility. On the way to Enver's house we stop at a shop filled with Greek merchandise and sightseers. I buy some brandy and chocolate, and a scarf for Shapallo.

The mountain behind Gjirokastër is buried in a grey mist. Underfoot are pink and grey bricks. The houses are the colour of old snow. The slate on their roofs is a dark, wet grey. Outside each house people have lit small fires under their frozen water pipes.

We find Enver's old house easily enough. For years it was a shrine; now, we discover, it is an archive.

This morning a boy of sixteen or seventeen guards the door. In his hands he has a rifle dating back to the partisans' campaigns. His tousled brown hair is filled with snowflakes, which have been falling all morning. His eyes and nose are running. His hands are numb with cold.

Kadris gives him a piece of chocolate, and for the moment the rifle dangles like a shoulder bag while he licks his fingers.

We slip in the door and immediately come up against a second line of defence, a well-dressed woman who has managed to escape the usual drab custodian's uniform. The conversation runs a predictable course. First the official line—it is quite impossible for anyone to visit, since the archive is closed.

‘Yes, yes, of course,' says Kadris; then he asks me for a dollar.

The woman quickly pockets it. But she is not particularly pleased to have done so. She has some harsh words for the boy soldier, who, covered with shame, returns to his post with his chocolate fingers.

The invitation is to look. We must not touch the cartons. A few minutes is all she will allow. Time, she says, ‘to soak up the atmosphere'. The woman's mutterings chase us up the stairs.

One wall has been devoted to a photographic display, and Shapallo is most interested in this. There is Enver, the studious youth. Enver at the beach, where the future leader with ‘the film-star looks' already seems inordinately aware of the camera, more so than he is of the sun on his shoulders and back.

There is the famous smile which at a glance was said to have ripened fruit; this same thing for which women forgave his occasional rudeness.

The photograph that has interested Shapallo so much is one of Enver standing with a group of comrades. Enver is the only one not listening to the photographer's instructions. The rest of the comrades smile into the lens, whereas Enver, arms folded, is uncharacteristically glancing off to somewhere in the wings.

Something has caught his attention, and fifty years later in a different time and place he and Shapallo appear to be exchanging glances: youth contemplating old age or, just as likely, old age glancing back down the same road.

We move along to the oil paintings—most of them studies of Lenin kindly listening to the problems of peasants; or at his writing desk, in a pensive mood, smiling at the brilliant thought still to be completed on the sheet of paper.

The oil studies of Lenin are succeeded by a photograph of the ‘bookish' Enver, studying at Montpellier University; books pile up on a corner of his desk. A pipe smoulders away at his elbow.

We stop before a glass-framed article from
L'Humanité
, the French Communist Party newspaper. The thing confusing Shapallo is the by-line of Lulo Malessori, the pseudonym behind which Enver had unleashed his attacks against King Zog.

The custodian explains this to Shapallo, and the matter of Zog's withdrawal of Enver's scholarship at Montpellier. Enver's shift to Paris; his brief sojourn in Belgium.

But it is only the pseudonym which interests Shapallo, this confection of another identity which had left Enver free to explore a different kind of life. He is completely entranced.

The custodian is making searching glances toward the stairs and checking her watch. She tries to take Shapallo's elbow, but he won't budge from this remnant of Enver's life as Lulo Malessori.

The woman appeals to Kadris. We really shouldn't be here. It was an exceptional circumstance.

‘Please,' she says.

Kadris takes Shapallo by his arm, and the woman pushes him from behind down the stairs.

There are some sharp words for the boy-soldier blowing on his frozen fingers, and the door cracks behind us.

Snowf lakes melt on the pink and grey cobblestones. The smoking grey slate rooftops have grown darker.

40

PALLI KUKE TELLS the story of filming Enver during one of his last visits to Gjirokastër.

Enver had come to visit with an old relative and Palli's job was to get footage of the prodigal son returned home sitting in a relative's backyard. The secret police had already been through the place. The water had been tested, the coffee had been prepared well in advance and the cameras began to film Enver at leisure.

Everything was proceeding nicely. The Great Leader was halfway through telling this woman, his relative, that despite the years marching on they were both still very strong.

But the woman refused to humour him.

‘No, no,' she said. ‘We are so very old.'

Enver smiled tolerantly. ‘Why,' he said, ‘I will live to be one hundred.'

‘No, no!' cried the old crone. ‘I tell you, we are all finished!'

Ramiz and Nexhmije exchanged anxious looks. Palli kept his eye hard against the lens. He could feel the tension among the aides and the variously employed secret police. Everyone was panicking as to what would happen next.

There was no way to stop that old woman until Ramiz skil-fully intervened. To everyone's relief Ramiz said to Enver, ‘Of course you will live to one hundred, because that is in your family line. But you will get another twenty years from socialism.'

Everyone immediately relaxed and applauded Ramiz's promise to Enver that he would live to the ripe old age of one hundred and twenty.

41

BEFORE LEAVING GJIROKASTËR I had bought some Greek beer and we drank it while tracking a river valley the thirty kilometres to Tepelenë. Mentor had the car heater billowing warm air to the back and everyone was in a good mood, glad to be out of the weather, and soon the bottles were rolling on the floor, back and forth, under our feet.

We had left behind the snow clouds and everything was grey and purple, with streaks of green pasture sown among rocks on the valley sides. Shapallo said this is how Topojani had appeared in his thoughts over the years.

In spring, after the last rains, the women picked herbs off the rocks. Shapallo's Topojani resisted the usual seasonal changes. It was always spring. In spring the children were always leading the goats and sheep back up to higher ground to nibble at the green wet from the melted snow. The bumps in the road made his head jog with happy memories.

He laughed aloud one time, opening his eyes with surprise. He reeled something off in a hurry, and Kadris dutifully passed on that ‘Mister Shapallo had temporarily lost himself in Topojani'.

A few kilometres later, Shapallo asked if we could carry on to Tirana. He said he would like to see Munz.

After that Mentor drove like an old nag with its nose turned for home. We sped through Tepelenë, a grey nondescript village where Lord Byron, in 1809, had spent a few nights as the guest of Ali Pasha. The pasha had praised Byron's small, delicate fingers. In return Byron had been moved to write of the virility of the people in ‘Childe Harold':

Where is the foe that ever saw their back?

Who can so well the toil of war endure?

South of Fier we strike the oilfields. Partly congealed oil slicks dribble into slack rivers, and before a factory wall with a beautiful mural of paradise, a Chinese truck rests on its axles.

We catch up with some traffic, Russian and Chinese trucks filled to the gunwales with secondhand washing machines and fridges, and rugs. The passengers squat down in the back between appliances, red-eyed and miserable with cold. All of them with towels wrapped around their heads from crossing the icy passes between Greece and Albania earlier in the day.

The way is flat and featureless. Men warming their gloved hands over small fires on the shingle flats look up at our passing.

By early afternoon we are back on the road between Fier and Lushnje. Rising above the unsown fields is Savra, grey and slab-like. In a few minutes we are tearing past, Shapallo with his arms folded and his eyelids at half-mast.

Now, without any need to stop at Savra, I just want to get it over with and get back to Tirana. To get over the yawning familiarity of the countryside. The gaunt figures pedalling across flat farm paths. The dismal light and the bitten-down roadside stumps.

‘Kavajë,' announces Mentor.

He raises his hands off the steering wheel to await instruction. Kadris waves him on.

We had gone through Lushnje the same way, feeling like fugitives, no one quite able to bring themselves to mention Leila and Guria, or Doctor Cabey sitting alone in his study with his stuffed birds. I thought of Mister Gina, his sadly etched face rallying to a smile in the small aperture of our back window.

We reached the Durrës/Tirana junction with the last of the daylight. Another thirty minutes and a tidal ring of abandoned factories and the first of Tirana's housing blocks popped up. We were all dozing when Mentor braked suddenly for a cart and horse. While we slid across the road, the horse-and-cart driver trotted on, the back of the driver's head and the rear of the horse's arse bobbing together.

Mentor switched on the engine and there was a terrible noise of loose metal parts being shaken up in a can—and that was the end of the gearbox.