Biografi (8 page)

In the park opposite the Rozala, I found a new flower bed planted with shemsir bushes covering up the footprints of Lenin's statue. Stalin had gone the same way, but not without a lengthy struggle. First ropes had been tried to haul him down, then explosives. Finally it had been left to city workers to remove Stalin during the hottest part of the afternoon. I found a number of flagstones marking Stalin's old place on the piazza. The surrounding tiles looked centuries old, whereas the newer ones had a rain-swept quality.

Respect for the partisans had ensured the survival of a striking bronze sculpture on the other side of the Rozala, commemorating the ‘five heroes who resisted the German advance in the fields of Vigut'.

From the ‘Heroes of Vigut' the eye travels down a wide avenue and pulls up at a pile of stones and flowers. I strolled down there, pestered by a small boy on a bike who kept on at me. ‘Are you a cross?'

‘No,' I said, something I'd never have dreamed of telling Nick.

Puzzled, the boy rode off.

The pile of stones and flowers had been placed ostentatiously, and as with the former positioning of Stalin in the piazza, there was no avoiding it. Drivers of horse carts, as well as the new private taxis, confronted the choice of going one way or the other around the stone pile. This small pathetic monument forced every driver to pause a moment and consider the changing order.

This morning's edition of
Shkodra
(previously known as
The
New Life
) commemorated the birthday of democracy's first martyr, twenty-four-year-old Arben Broci. Along with three others, Broci had been shot dead outside the Party Headquarters in April.

Directly opposite Broci's pile of stones are the remains of the headquarters, its entrance blackened and charred. Inside, the scale of destruction is breathtaking. After the shootings the crowd turned on the building.

The floor tiles had been ripped up, likewise the foundations, even the plumbing.

The wall cladding had been clawed off, picked clean, the windows smashed. On each floor itinerants had left behind piles of human shit and graffiti: Enver mounting his wife, Nexhmije. Or Nexhmije, legs apart, playing with herself alongside an angel with a harp.

It is National Independence Day and back in the Rozala the lobby fills up with old soldiers and cigarette smoke, the sense of special occasion bolstered by the smell of hair oil and shoe polish. Someone hands me a flier drawing attention to a public meeting to be hosted this evening by an American representative of King Leka.

Later in the morning I follow after the old soldiers pouring out of the Rozala with their Fedoras, their stylish cigarette holders, their frayed suits.

A substantial crowd has already gathered between the ‘Heroes of Vigut' and a theatre balcony, where the microphones are being set up.

On the edge of the crowd a young man, turning over sausage meat on a hot coal range, wraps my kebab in a page torn from the works of Enver Hoxha. The page in which my kebab comes wrapped is headed, ‘Failed Strategies' and it reads: ‘We knew he was bound to come to a bad end…Several times we appealed to him to join the National Liberation Movement, but he didn't want to, and…he was shot like a stray dog.'

Some of the ‘stray dogs' from the Hoxha era are gathered on the balcony.

First up is Victor Martini, leader of the political prisoners from the Shkodër area. He spent fifteen years in prison. His proposal to rededicate the ‘Heroes of Vigut' memorial to those thousands killed by the Communists draws the biggest roar of approval.

Pjeter Arbori, after thirty years in prison and recently emerged as the leader of the Democrats in Shkodër, reminds the crowd of the dangers of returning the Socialists to power. This morning's
Shkodra
had ridiculed the Socialists' first conference of five days earlier with the headline: HOXHA ELECTED FIRST SECRETARY OF SOCIALIST PARTY. Six years had elapsed since the Great Leader's death, but disciples were still thick on the ground, and many suspected the Socialists' leader, Ramiz Alia, of being a puppet in Nexhmije's control.

When Arbori reminds the crowd of the Socialists' true allegiances, the crowd begins to chant, ‘Hitler/Hoxha, Hitler/Hoxha…'

A poet takes the microphone. His voice is soft and uncertain. He addresses the microphone rather than the crowd: ‘We are about to remove the bandages. But what is it that we will find? New skin or a scab?' The crowd takes a moment to digest this. There is some shuffling. In the brief silence the poet apparently suffers a crisis of confidence, because next thing he tears the microphone off the stand and like a demagogue, begins to shout, ‘Democracy! Democracy!'

Now he has the crowd with him.

But it was time to find Nick's parents' house. Nick had written down his address, but in the hotel all I get from the staff are varying expressions of hopelessness. ‘Tetori' is a mystery. I ask for a street map, but no such thing exists. One of the waiters stares at the address an inordinate length of time until he is satisfied that he has never heard of it. Another takes me by the wrist and leads me outside. We walk over to the ‘Heroes of Vigut', where he shades his eyes from the sun and points vaguely in the direction of Greece.

I stop a car travelling at barely faster than idling speed. A cigarette butt dangles from the driver's lips. I regret it as soon as I hand over the notebook with Nick's address. The driver has a wild-eyed look about him. ‘Tetori.' He nods. His eyes do a sideways shift to the passenger door.

Shkodër is a maze of tight streets and narrow lanes, some with names, some without. We enter spaces never intended for cars, lanes with high walls of rounded stones, full of promise because of their confined possibilities. But these tight spaces invariably deliver us to a wide boulevard or avenue, and the search begins all over again. Shkodër grows larger by the minute.

Finally I have to beg the man to let me out. Finding Nick's address has become a matter of pride for him.

I wave him to the side of the road. It has come to this. The driver shrugs and pouts. He is sorry, but he is sorry about my lack of faith, too.

I start asking directions all over again. This time a short, dapperly dressed man in a suit and tie threads his arm through mine. He apologises for his lack of English and wonders whether I can speak French, Italian, German or Russian?

I make a rash claim to ‘having some French'.

‘
Ah bien!
' He is delighted. He is a professor of languages. Simon Pepa.

Yes, but the Markus' address? I push my dog-eared notebook under his nose—and he nods happily.

His thumb and forefinger pinch the air. We are very close.

‘
Près. Près.
'

We walk for another ten minutes. It is a pleasant neighbourhood. We are back among the lanes. The last gold of the grapevines hangs on to rusted trellises. Small cottages of alabaster and stone sit like blushing brides behind walls and fences at eye level.

At some point the Professor tips me at his elbow and we enter a small cottage. I ready myself to embrace the Markus, only to find myself being introduced to the Professor's wife.

I am his first foreigner, he proudly announces.

It is already two in the afternoon. At best I have another two hours to find the Markus. After dark it'll be a hopeless task.

The Professor's twenty-year-old daughter presents a glimmer of hope. She is a beautiful, honey-skinned girl with big brown eyes. In a strange barking voice she explains in English that she attended middle school with Nick's younger brother, Arben. I had confused her the first time when I referred to Nick instead of Ardian.

‘So you know the Markus?'

‘Very well. Ardian's grandmother lives two doors down.' She says Nick used to spend his summers there.

The Professor smiles triumphantly and I begin to relax.

At Nick's grandmother's house, a woman in her mid-thirties comes to the door. As soon as she sees me, she wraps me in a warm hug. Nick has sent word ahead.

She sends her two daughters, Alma and Nicoletta, to escort me to the Markus' house. The address is in the very neighbourhood I had cruised through with the wild-eyed driver earlier in the afternoon. At the time I couldn't understand why he kept asking after the ‘Markus' instead of the name of the rruga. We arrive back here on dark.

The truck driver's house is larger than the Professor's house. There is no resemblance at all between Nick, the aesthete, and his father, a ponderous grey man in his fifties. The father quietly retreats behind his wife's excited welcome. Nick's brother speaks a little English.

I spill out the contents of my bag, but there is no rush to inspect the radio or the books. Nick's father takes the cigarettes and walks out of the room with them.

Mrs Marku brings in a tray of coffee. Since I am invited to dinner, Nick's father, who is putting on his coat and hat, has decided that it will be a tediously long evening if we can't understand each other. Nick's brother, Arben, explains that his father will fetch his niece, Mimi, a schoolteacher, who lives five kilometres away. Through the window, in the lengthening shadows I glimpse Mr Marku setting off on his bicycle.

Meanwhile I get to see the bedroom which Arben now has to himself. Dragging out a carton from under his brother's bed, Arben says he was surprised to find how much Nick had hidden from him.

There are a few treasured pages of
The Financial Times
and
The
Independent
cadged from the tourists Nick had fished for with his quick piercing glances in the gardens across the Rozala. On two occasions he had brought tourists to the house, something his father discouraged, since the risk was considerable, and there had been arguments, and promises from Nick that he wouldn't do it again.

In the carton were Nick's notebooks. One was entitled ‘English from TV'. Another contained German phrases. With these snatches of language he had lured foreigners to the ‘blind spot' behind Lenin's statue.

Nick quickly befriended them with his intelligence. Foreigners would one day be his way out. He had amassed a huge correspondence. Letters to the Red Cross in half a dozen European countries. Letters from his ‘family' in Holland, Germany and England. Pinned to his bedroom wall was a large map of the North Yorkshire moors, with a dotted line to indicate the trail hiked by his English friends.

It was extraordinary what he had collected. The words to pop songs. Western icons faithfully listed—Michael Jackson, Samantha Fox, Phil Collins, Duran Duran, Joe Cocker, Elton John. A street map of London and the Underground map. A red pen traced the blue route from Victoria Station to Islington Station. Nick had everything planned ahead. The moment he arrived in Heathrow he would find his own way.

His friends had sent his fare money tucked away in a secret compartment of an envelope. In one letter advising Nick of the arrangements, there was this reassurance: ‘Don't worry, Phil knows about these kinds of things.' I imagined two or three slightly goofy English lads with daytime computer jobs and sea cadet backgrounds, thrilling to Nick's cause.

People had sent him books. Nick had translated ‘The Final Problem' from
The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes.
He had pencilled in translations down the column margins of Robert Burns and Walt Whitman.

The notebooks, the treasured sections of English newspapers, the letters—all in one sense, at least, belonged to a life already abandoned. In Rome, unless he discovered some vices, there would be no need to lead a life as furtive as this one.

Before, in the bedroom, Arben told me about Nick's involvement in last winter's demonstration. Their cousin Kolec had been one of the organisers and Nick had begged to be included. The plan had been to pull down the statue of Stalin. On the day of the demonstration two thousand brave souls gathered in the piazza. Police with guns took up positions on the rooftop of the Rozala. But, incredibly, they only shot film. They filmed everything, and the next day they began their arrests.