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  I remembered vaguely something called the Berlin Wall protest the year before. We had talked about it in school, and teacher Nora had explained that it was related to the fight between imperialism and revisionism, and how they were each holding a mirror to the other, but both mirrors were broken. None of it concerned us. Our enemies regularly tried to topple our government, but they failed just as regularly. In the late forties, we split up with Yugoslavia when the latter broke with Stalin. In the sixties, when Khrushchev dishonoured Stalin’s legacy and accused us of “leftist nationalist deviationism,” we interrupted diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In the late seventies, we abandoned our alliance with China when the latter decided to become rich and betray the Cultural Revolution. It didn’t matter. We were surrounded by powerful foes but knew ourselves to be on the right side of history. Every time our enemies threatened us, the Party, supported by the people, emerged stronger. Throughout the centuries, we had fought mighty empires and shown the rest of the world how even a small nation on the edge of the Balkans could find the strength to resist. Now we were leading the struggle to achieve the most difficult transition: that from Socialist to Communist freedom—from a revolutionary state governed by just laws to the classless society, where the state itself would wither away.

  Of course, freedom had a cost, teacher Nora said. We had always defended freedom alone. Now they were all paying a price. They were in disarray. We were standing strong. We would continue to lead by example. We had neither money nor weapons, but we continued to resist the siren call of the revisionist East and the imperialist West, and our existence gave hope to all the other small nations whose dignity continued to be trampled on. The honour of belonging to a just society would be matched only by the gratitude felt for being sheltered from the horrors unfolding elsewhere in the world, places where children starved to death, froze in the cold, or were forced to work.

  “Have you seen this hand?” teacher Nora had said, lifting up her right hand at the end of the speech with a fierce look on her face. “This hand will always be strong. This hand will always fight. Do you know why? It has shaken Comrade Enver’s hand. I didn’t wash it for days, after the Congress. But even after I washed it, the strength was still there. It will never leave me, never until I die.”

  I thought about teacher Nora’s hand, and the words she had spoken to us only a few months ago. I was still sitting on the ground in front of Stalin’s bronze statue, collecting my thoughts, trying to summon the courage to lift myself up and retrace the steps back home. I wanted to remember her every word, to evoke her pride and strength when she’d told us how she was going to defend freedom because she had shaken Uncle Enver’s hand. I wanted to be like her. I must defend my freedom too, I thought. It must be possible to overcome my fear. I had never shaken Uncle Enver’s hand. I had never met him. But maybe Stalin’s legs would be enough to give me strength.

  I stood up. I tried to think like my teacher. We had socialism. Socialism gave us freedom. The protesters were mistaken. Nobody was looking for freedom. Everyone was already free, just like me, simply exercising that freedom, or defending it, or making decisions they had to own, about which way to go home, whether to turn right or left or to walk straight. Perhaps also, just like me, they had stumbled near the port by mistake, ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps when they saw the police and the dogs, they were simply very afraid, and the same could be said for the police and the dogs, that they were very afraid in turn, especially when they saw people running. Perhaps both sides were simply chasing each other without knowing who was following whom, and that is why people had started to shout, Freedom, democracy, out of fear, and uncertainty, to explain that this was what they did not want to lose, rather than what they wanted.

  And perhaps Stalin’s head was entirely unrelated. Perhaps it had been damaged in the night by the storm and the rain and someone had already collected it so that it could be repaired and would soon bring it back like new to take its old place, with the sharp, smiley eyes and the thick, friendly moustache covering the upper lip, just as I had been told it looked, just as it had always been.

  I hugged Stalin one last time, turned around, stared at the horizon to gauge the distance to my house, took a deep breath, and started to run.

  2

  THE OTHER YPI

  “MAIS TE VOILÀ ENFIN! On t’attend depuis deux heures! Nous nous sommes inquiétés! Ta mère est déjÀ de retour! Papa est allé te chercher À l’école! Ton frère pleure!” thundered a tall, slim figure all dressed in black.* Nini had been waiting at the top of the hill for more than an hour, asking passers-by if they had seen me, nervously wiping her hands on her apron, squinting harder and harder to try to spot my red leather rucksack.

  I could tell my grandmother was angry. She had a bizarre way of scolding, making you feel responsible, reminding you of the consequences your actions had for others, listing all the ways in which the pursuit of other people’s goals had been disrupted by the selfish prioritizing of yours. As her monologue in French continued unabated, my father, too, appeared at the bottom of the slope. He raced up the hill panting, holding his asthma pump like a miniature Molotov cocktail. He kept looking behind his back as if he suspected he was being followed. I hid behind my grandmother.

  “She left the school after cleaning,” my father said, hurrying towards my grandmother. “I tried to retrace her steps. I couldn’t see her anywhere.” Visibly agitated, he paused to inhale from his pump. “I think there’s been a protest,” he whispered, indicating with a gesture that he would continue his explanation inside.

  “She’s here,” Nini replied.

  My father breathed a sigh of relief and then, noticing me, turned severe.

  “Go to your room,” he ordered.

  “It was not a protest. They were uligans,” I muttered as I walked through the courtyard, wondering why my father had used that other word: protest.

  Inside, I found my mother occupied with a large house-cleaning operation. She was in the process of bringing down from the attic things that had not been seen for years: a sack of wool, a rusty ladder, and my grandfather’s old books from his university years. I could tell she was agitated. She had a tendency to channel her frustration by finding new domestic chores; the greater the frustration, the more ambitious the scale of her projects. When she was angry with other people, she would say nothing but would bang pots and pans, curse the cutlery that slipped to the floor, fling trays into cupboards. When she was angry with herself, she would rearrange the furniture, drag tables across the room, pile up chairs, and roll up the heavy carpet in our living room so she could scrub the floor.

  “I saw uligans,” I said to her, eager to share my adventure.

  “The floor is wet,” she replied in a menacing voice, tapping my ankle twice with the damp end of the mop to indicate that I ought to have left my shoes outside.

  “Or maybe they weren’t hooligans,” I continued, untying my shoelaces. “Maybe they were protesters.”

  She stopped and gave me a blank stare.

  “The only hooligan here is you,” she said, raising the mop head from the floor and waving it twice in the direction of my room. “We don’t have any protesters in this country.”

  My mother had always been indifferent to politics. In the past, only my father and my grandmother, his mother, had followed it closely. They spoke often about the Nicaraguan revolution and the Falklands War; they were enthusiastic about the start of negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa. My father said that if he had been American and called up during the Vietnam War, he would have refused the draft. We were lucky that our country supported the Vietcong, he often emphasized. He had a tendency to make fun of the most tragic things, and his jokes about anti-imperialist politics were legendary among my friends. Whenever I invited them for a sleepover and we laid out mattresses on the bedroom floor, he would poke his head through the door at the end of the evening, and say, “Sleep well, Palestinian camp!”


  With recent developments in the East, or what we called “the revisionist bloc,” something felt different. I could not say what it was. I vaguely remembered hearing about Solidarnos´c´ once on Italian television. It seemed to concern workers’ protests, and as we lived in a workers’ state, I thought it would be interesting to write about it in the “political information” newsletter we had to prepare for school. “I don’t think it’s that interesting,” my father said when I asked him about it. “I have something else for your newsletter. The cooperative in the village where I work surpassed the target for wheat production set in the current five-year plan. They didn’t make enough corn, but they made up for it with wheat. They were in the news last night.”

  Whenever protests came up, my family became reluctant to answer questions. They looked either tired or irked and they switched off the television or lowered the volume to the point that the news became unintelligible. Nobody seemed to share my curiosity. It was obvious that I couldn’t rely on them to explain anything. It was wiser to wait until the class on moral education in school and to ask my teacher Nora. She always gave clear, unambiguous answers. She explained politics with the kind of enthusiasm my parents showed only when commercials featuring soaps and creams appeared on Yugoslav television. Whenever my father caught an advert on TV Skopje, especially if it was an advert for personal hygiene, he would immediately shout, “Reklama! Reklama!” My mother and grandmother would drop whatever they were doing in the kitchen and sprint to the living room to catch the last sight of a beautiful woman with a delightful smile on her face who showed you how to wash your hands. If they were held up for a while and arrived when the adverts were over, my father would declare apologetically, “It’s not my fault—I called you, you came late!” and this usually marked the beginning of an argument about how they were late because he never helped with anything around the house. The argument would soon turn into an exchange of insults, and the insults might deteriorate into a fight, often with Yugoslav basketball players continuing to score points in the background, until the next lot of adverts came up and peace was restored. My family always squabbled about everything. Everything except politics.

  In the bedroom, I found my brother, Lani, sobbing. When he saw me, he wiped away his tears and asked if I had brought any biscuits.

  “Not today,” I replied. “I didn’t walk that way.”

  He looked as if he was about to cry again.

  “I have to stay here,” I said. “To reflect. Do you want to hear a story? It’s about a man on a horse who looked like the spirit of the world, but then his head was chopped off.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” he replied, new tears flowing onto his cheeks. “I’m scared. I’m scared of people with no heads. I want biscuits.”

  “Do you want to play Teachers?” I offered, feeling vaguely guilty.

  Lani nodded. He and I loved to play Teachers. He would sit at my desk, pretending to be a teacher, and scribble notes while I prepared my homework. He was especially keen on history lessons. Once I had memorized the events, I would repeat the text out loud with dramatized dialogues between the main historical characters, often impersonated with the help of my dolls.

  That day, both the characters and the events were familiar. We were studying the occupation of Albania by Italian Fascists during the Second World War, focusing on the complicity of the country’s tenth prime minister. That man, an Albanian quisling, as teacher Nora called him, was responsible for the transfer of sovereignty to Italy after the flight of King Zog. Zog’s rule, and all that followed from it, marked the end of Albanian aspirations to become a truly free society. After centuries of servitude under the Ottoman Empire, and decades of struggle against the Great Powers, who sought to partition the country, patriots from all regions came together in 1912, defying ethnic and religious differences, to fight for independence. Then Zog, teacher Nora explained, eliminated his adversaries, concentrated power, and declared himself king of the Albanians, until the country was occupied by Fascists, with the help of Albanian collaborationists. On 7 April 1939, the official date of the Italian invasion of Albania, many soldiers and ordinary citizens bravely fought Italian warships, facing artillery shells with few weapons of their own, until their last breath on the defence lines. However, other Albanians—the beys, the landowners and commercial elites, those who had previously served that exploitative and bloodthirsty king—now rushed to greet the occupying forces, eager to take positions in the new colonial administration. Some, including the country’s former prime minister, even thanked the Italian authorities for liberating the country from King Zog’s heavy yoke. A few months later, this previous prime minister was killed by an aerial bomb. His life as a traitor who had collaborated with the king and his death as a Fascist scoundrel were the subject of my history assignment that day.

  There was huge excitement when we talked about fascism in school. There were animated discussions, and the children almost burst with pride. We were asked if we could bring in examples of relatives who had fought in the war or supported the resistance movement. Elona’s grandfather, for example, had, at just fifteen, joined the ranks of the partisans in the mountains to fight against the Italian invaders. After liberating Albania in 1944, he had moved to Yugoslavia to help the resistance there. He often came to speak to us about his time as a partisan and how Albania and Yugoslavia were the only countries to have won the war without the help of Allied forces. Other children mentioned grandparents or great-uncles and great-aunts who had supported the anti-Fascists with food and shelter. Some brought to class clothes or personal objects that had once belonged to young relatives who had sacrificed their lives for the movement: a shirt, a hand-embroidered handkerchief, a letter sent to the family only hours before execution.

  “Do we have relatives who participated in the anti-Fascist war?” I asked my family. They thought hard, rummaged through family pictures, consulted with relatives, then came up with Baba Mustafa: a great-uncle of the second cousin of my uncle’s wife. Baba Mustafa had held the keys to a local mosque, where he sheltered a group of partisans one afternoon after their attack on a Nazi garrison when the Italians had left the country and been replaced by Germans. I enthusiastically recounted the episode in class. “How is he related to you, again?” asked Elona. “What was he doing at the mosque? Why did he have the keys?” enquired another friend, Marsida. “What happened to the partisans after?” a third, Besa, wanted to know. I tried to answer the questions as best I could, but the truth was that I hadn’t been given enough details to satisfy my friends’ curiosity. The discussion became confusing, then uncomfortable. After a few exchanges, both my relationship to Baba Mustafa and his contribution to the anti-Fascist resistance started to look marginal, then exaggerated. By the end, it was difficult for me to suppress the impression that even Nora had quietly concluded that he was a product of my imagination.

  Every fifth of May, the day on which we commemorated heroes of the war, delegations of Party officials visited our neighbourhood to offer their renewed condolences to the families of martyrs, and to remind them of how the blood of their loved ones had not been spilt in vain. I sat by our kitchen window and observed with bitter envy my friends, dressed in their best clothes, carrying large bouquets of fresh red roses, waving flags, and singing resistance songs while leading the way to their houses. Their parents lined up to shake hands with Party representatives, official photos were taken, and the albums that arrived a few days later were brought to the school to be put on display. I had nothing to offer.

  It was not enough that my family had no Socialist martyrs to commemorate. The Albanian quisling, the country’s tenth prime minister, the national traitor, the class enemy, the deserving target of hatred and contempt in class discussions, happened to share a surname with me and a name with my father: Xhaferr Ypi. Each year when he came up in the textbooks, I had to patiently explain that even though the surname was the same, we were not related. I had to explain that my father was named a
fter his grandfather, who simply happened to carry the same name and surname as our old prime minister. Each year, I hated that conversation.

  I held my breath while reading through the history assignment, then thought for a moment and stood up in anger, clutching the book in one hand. “Come with me,” I ordered Lani. “It’s about the other Ypi again.” He followed me submissively, still suckling the pen with which he had been drawing. I slammed the door behind myself and marched towards the kitchen.

  “I am not going to school tomorrow!” I announced.

  At first, nobody noticed. My mother, father, and grandmother were lined up on the same side of the small oak table, facing away from the entrance, sitting precariously on three folding chairs placed tightly next to each other. Their elbows rested on the table, the palms of their hands covered their temples, and their heads leaned so far from their centre of gravity that they looked like they were about to detach. All three seemed engrossed in a mysterious collective ritual involving an enigmatic object that their figures shielded from view.

  I waited to hear the reaction to my verdict. Nothing but a hushing sound came back. I stood on my toes and bent my head forward. At the centre of the table, I recognized the family radio.

  “I am not going to school tomorrow!”

  I raised my voice, taking more steps into the kitchen, with the history book open to the prime minister’s photo. Lani stamped one foot on the floor and looked at me complicitly. My father twisted brusquely with the guilty expression of someone caught in a subversive act. My mother turned the radio off. I heard the last two words before the sound disappeared: “political pluralism.”

  “Who told you to leave your bedroom?” My father’s question sounded like a threat.