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  “It’s about him again,” I said, ignoring his reproach, my voice still high but starting to tremble. “It’s Ypi the quisling. I am not going to school tomorrow. I am not going to waste my time explaining that we have nothing to do with that man. I’ve already told everyone before, I’ve said it over and over. But they will ask again, they will, as if they’d never heard, as if they don’t know. They will ask again, they always do, and I’ve run out of explanations.”

  I had recited that monologue before, each time fascism came up in history or literature lessons or in the moral education class. My family always refused to let me skip school. I knew they would refuse this time too. I could never explain to them what it was like to feel the pressure from my friends. I could never explain to my friends what it was like to live in a family where the past seemed irrelevant and all that mattered was debating the present and planning for the future. I could not explain to myself the lingering feeling I had then, and which I am able to articulate only now, that the life I lived, inside the walls of the house and outside, was in fact not one life but two, lives that sometimes complemented and supported each other but mostly clashed against a reality I could not fully grasp.

  My parents stared at each other. Nini looked at them, then turned towards me and said, in a tone of voice intended to be both firm and reassuring:

  “Of course you will go. You have done nothing wrong.”

  “We have done nothing wrong,” my mother corrected. She stretched her hand to the radio to indicate that she wanted to listen further, and that my presence in the room would soon no longer be welcome.

  “It’s not about me,” I insisted. “It’s not about us. It’s about the quisling man. If we had someone whose heroism we could celebrate, I could mention him in class and people wouldn’t be so obsessed with asking about my relationship to that other Ypi. But we have no one, no one in our family, not even in the extended family, no relative who ever tried to defend our freedom. No one has ever cared about freedom in this house.”

  “That’s not right,” my father said. “We have someone. We have you. You care about freedom. You’re a freedom fighter.”

  The dialogue was playing out as it had countless times before: my grandmother arguing that it would be irrational to miss school just because of a surname, my father deflecting attention with a joke, and my mother eager to return to whatever I had inconveniently interrupted.

  But this time, something unexpected followed. My mother suddenly let go of the radio, stood up, and turned towards me. “Tell them Ypi did nothing wrong,” she said.

  Nini frowned, then stared at my father, perplexed. He reached for his asthma pump and tried to avoid her eyes, turning towards my mother with an expression of concern. My mother stared back fiercely, her eyes flashing with anger. She had the air of someone who has calculated her actions to be disruptive. Ignoring my father’s silent reproach, she continued where she had broken off:

  “He did nothing wrong. Was he a Fascist? I don’t know. Maybe. Did he defend freedom? It depends. To be free, you have to be alive. Maybe he was trying to save lives. What chance did Albania have to stand up to Italy? It was dependent on it in every way. What was the point of bloodshed? The Fascists had already taken over the country. The Fascists controlled the markets. It was Zog who gave them shares in all the major state companies. Italian goods arrived long before Italian weapons. Our very roads were built by Fascists. Mussolini’s architects designed our government buildings long before his officials occupied them. What they call the Fascist invasion . . .”

  She paused, twisting her mouth in a sarcastic smile as she pronounced the word invasion.

  “This is not the time,” Nini interrupted. She turned to me. “What matters is that you have done nothing wrong. You have nothing to fear.”

  “Who are they?” I asked, confused and curious about my mother’s words. I could not understand everything she had said but was intrigued by the length of her intervention. It was quite unlike her to engage in extensive explanations. It was the first time I had heard my mother offer opinions about politics and history. I had never known her to have any.

  “They say Zog was a tyrant and a Fascist,” my mother continued, ignoring both my question and Nini’s warning. “If you comply with one tyrant, what is the point of fighting another? What is the point of dying to defend the independence of a country that is already occupied in all but name? The real enemies of the people— Don’t pull my sleeve,” she said, interrupting herself, and turned aggressively to my father, who was now very close to her and had started to breathe heavily. “They say he was a traitor, well . . .”

  “Who are they?” I asked again, increasingly puzzled.

  “They, they are . . . she means the revisionists,” my father rushed to explain on her behalf. Then he hesitated and, not knowing how to continue, changed the topic: “I asked you to reflect in your bedroom. Why did you come out?”

  “I reflected. I don’t want to go to school.”

  My mother gave a snort of derision. She left the table and started banging pots and pans and smashing cutlery into the sink.

  THE MORNING AFTER, NINI did not wake me for school as usual. She did not say why. I knew something was different, that something had happened the day before, something that changed the way I looked at my family and thought about my parents. It is difficult to say if what happened was related to my encounter with Stalin, the radio programme, or that prime minister whose exploits, death, and presence in my life I tried in vain to ignore. I wondered why my father had whispered when he’d discussed the protest with my grandmother. Why had he not called them hooligans? I also wondered why my mother had tried to justify the actions of a Fascist politician. How could she have sympathy for an oppressor of the people?

  In the following days, the protests multiplied. Now state television knew them by that name too. Initiated by university students in the capital, they spread to the rest of the country. There were rumours that workers were preparing to walk out of the factories and join the young people on the streets. What had started as a wave of unrest about economic conditions, with students lamenting the shortage of food, poor heating in dormitories, and frequent power cuts in lecture halls, soon turned into something else: a demand for change whose exact nature was unclear even to those calling for it. Prominent academics, including former Party members, gave unprecedented interviews to Voice of America, explaining that it would be a mistake to reduce the grievances of the students to economic matters. What the movement campaigned for, they explained, was the end of the one-party system and the recognition of political pluralism. They wanted real democracy and real freedom.

  I had grown up believing that my family shared my enthusiasm for the Party, the desire to serve the country, the contempt for our enemies, and the concern that we had no war heroes to remember. This time it felt different. My questions about politics, the country, the protests, and how to explain what was going on found only curt, evasive answers. I wanted to know why everyone demanded freedom if we were already one of the freest countries on earth, as teacher Nora always said. When I mentioned her name at home, my parents rolled their eyes. I started to suspect that they were not in the best position to answer me and that I could no longer trust them. Not only did my questions about the country go unanswered; I now also wondered about what kind of family I had been born into. I doubted them, and by doubting, I found that my grip on who I was began to slip.

  I am now aware of something that I did not understand clearly at the time: the patterns that shaped my childhood, those invisible laws that had given structure to my life, my perception of the people whose judgements helped me make sense of the world—all these things changed forever in December 1990. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that the day I hugged Stalin was the day I became an adult, the day I realized I was in charge of making sense of my own life. But it would not be far-fetched to say it was the day I lost my childhood innocence. For the first time I wondered whether freedom
and democracy might not be the reality in which we lived but a mysterious future condition about which I knew very little.

  My grandmother always said that we don’t know how to think about the future; we must turn to the past. I started to wonder about the story of my life, of how I was born, of how things were before I was there. I tried to check back on details I might have got confused, too young to remember them correctly. It was a story I had heard countless times before: the story of a fixed reality in which I had gradually found my part, however complicated. This time it was different. This time, there were no fixed points; everything had to be remade from scratch. The story of my life was not the story of the events that had occurred in any particular period but the story of searching for the right questions, the questions I had never thought to ask.

  *  “You’re here at last! We’ve been waiting for two hours! Your mother is already back! Papa went to look for you at school! Your brother is crying!”

  3

  471: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

  I COME FROM A family of what my teacher Nora used to call “intellectuals.” “There are too many children of intellectuals in this class,” she would say in school, with a vaguely disapproving look on her face. “An intellectual,” my father reassured me, “is simply someone with a university education. Don’t worry, though. Ultimately, everyone is a worker. We all live in a working-class state.”

  Although both my parents were officially “intellectuals,” because they had gone to university, neither had studied what they’d wanted to study. My father’s story was the more confusing of the two. He was gifted in the sciences and while still in secondary school had won Olympiads in maths, physics, chemistry, and biology. He wanted to continue studying maths but was told by the Party that he had to join the real working class because of his “biography.” My family often mentioned that word, but I never understood it. It had such wide applications that you could not make out its significance in any particular context. If you asked my parents how they met and why they married, they would answer: “Biography.” If my mother was preparing a file for work, she would be reminded, “Don’t forget to add a few lines about your biography.” If I made a new friend in school, my parents would ask each other, “Do we know anything about their biography?”

  Biographies were carefully separated into good or bad, better or worse, clean or stained, relevant or irrelevant, transparent or confusing, suspicious or trustworthy, those that needed to be remembered and those that needed to be forgotten. Biography was the universal answer to all kinds of questions, the foundation without which all knowledge was reduced to opinion. There are words after whose meaning it is absurd to enquire, either because they are so basic that they explain themselves and everything that is related to them or because you might be embarrassed to reveal that, after so many years of hearing it, you still don’t understand something that should have been obvious all along. Biography was like that. Once the word was said, you just had to accept it.

  My father was an only child. His official name was Xhaferr, like the Albanian quisling, but everyone called him Zafo, which spared him having to apologize each time he introduced himself. Zafo had been raised by his mother. In 1946, when he was three years old, my grandfather, Asllan, who I never met, left him to go to university somewhere; this was part of his biography. When Asllan returned after fifteen years, the family held a party to celebrate it and Nini wore lipstick. My father had never seen his mother with lipstick and declared that he did not recognize her, that she looked like a clown and that she would no longer live with them. Then he had a huge fight with his father; Nini wiped off her lipstick and never wore make-up again. The two men continued to have arguments over the years. My father refused to recognize Asllan’s authority, while my grandfather said that my father’s willpower was “like butter” and that he was merely living like “a satisfied pig.” Nini liked to report her husband’s full sentence: “It is better to be a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig.” But my father never looked particularly satisfied. Instead, he had frequent anxiety attacks, which usually came when his asthma deteriorated and which he did his best to conceal.

  Zafo had contracted asthma as a child, around the time when he and Nini were asked by the Party to move out of their house and into a mouldy barn. This, too, was part of their biography. My grandfather was not there when it happened, but he apparently later pointed out that a lot of people had asthma and that my father should not complain too much. He also said that my father should thank the government every day that we were under socialism. If we lived in the West, my father would have become a tramp, singing bobdylan songs under a bridge to make money. I found that part mysterious too, not only because nobody ever explained what bobdylan was but because my father was completely tone-deaf and had never played any instrument. Instead, he was obsessed with two things, both of which he tried to teach me: how to dance “like little Ali” and what he called the “magic of Vieta’s formulas” to solve algebra problems. The first was a set of boxing moves, but the training tended to stop just when I thought I had mastered them because my father ran out of breath. The latter could go on for days, sometimes even weeks, and his excitement about Vieta’s formulas grew in proportion to my frustration.

  THE CONFUSING PART IN my father’s biography was not that he had been told that he could not go to university but that he had ended up going in spite of this. A few days before the beginning of the academic year, he appeared in front of a panel of doctors, and my grandmother told the panel that unless my father was allowed to study at university he would kill himself. Then the panel asked him a few questions and sent him home with a letter that instructed the relevant officials to authorize him to continue with higher education. He could not study maths because then he might become a teacher, and he was not allowed to become a teacher because of his biography. He was sent to do forestry, but it was clearly good enough for him, since he never tried to kill himself. Instead, he commuted to Tirana from Kavajë, the little town where his family lived, alongside many other families whose biographies were similar to theirs.

  If maths was one of my father’s greatest passions, there was nothing in the world my mother loathed more. This, too, was unfortunate, because not only did she have to study maths at university, she also had to teach it to secondary school children. The fact that my mother could be trusted with a teacher’s role whereas my father would not be suggested that her biography was better than his, though only marginally, because if it had been much better, they would not have married each other. My mother loved Schiller and Goethe, went to concerts of Mozart and Beethoven, and had learned to play the guitar with the Soviets who visited the House of the Pioneers before we broke our alliance with them just after their Party’s Twentieth Congress. She was authorized to study literature, but her parents encouraged her to switch degrees because they struggled financially; with a science degree, she could get a scholarship.

  My mother was the third of seven children: five girls and two boys. Her mother, Nona Fozi, worked in a factory that made chemicals, and her father, who we called Baçi, cleaned gutters. In the few photos we have of my mother as a child, she appears extremely slim, fragile, and with dark circles under her eyes, as if she were anaemic. She never spoke about her childhood, but it must have been miserable because when my father once suggested watching a historical documentary about the Great Bengal Famine, she replied, “Zafo, I know what hunger is, I don’t need to watch it on television.” She was mostly hostile to television. The only programme for which she made an exception was Dynasty, on the Yugoslav channel, not necessarily because she followed the plot but because she liked to inspect the interior decoration. “It’s very pretty,” she would say, with a longing expression. “Very, very pretty.”

  My mother’s family lived and shared their earnings with two grandmothers and a first cousin of her father’s called Hysen, who had been with them since he had been orphaned at the age of thirteen. My mother was extremely fond of Un
cle Hysen. When she was brought home from the maternity hospital one day during the war, Hysen refused to call her by her name, Vjollca, declaring that she was as beautiful as a doll. That gave her the nickname Doli, by which everyone called her. Hysen had been to boarding school in Vienna and had taught her how to dance the waltz and how to recite Goethe’s “Erlkönig” in German. Sometimes my mother would go around the house declaiming, “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind,” alternating between a very loud voice for the question and a hushed tone for the answer.* I’d always assumed that the poem told the story of a child who could not fall asleep, until she recited the whole thing to me one winter night while there was a storm outside our window and we roasted chestnuts on the fire. She then translated it, and I can still feel the chills down my spine when I remember the last two lines: “He reaches his home with trouble and dread, with the boy in his arms; but the boy is dead.”

  My mother and Hysen also shared a passion for making cars, boats, trains, and planes out of scrap paper—all to be sent on imaginary travels. Hysen suffered from some kind of mental illness and had frequent strokes, and after each stroke he fell into a deep sleep, almost like a coma. When he woke up, he spoke only German, then a mixture of German and Albanian, and when he was well enough to leave the bed, he and my mother would draw maps of our town, Durrës, circling particular areas of land around it, marking buildings and roads, then making paper boats, which, he claimed, carried the family’s gold. The boats were all named after Teuta, the ancient Illyrian queen who had sent pirates to fight the Romans, though each had a different number: Teuta I, Teuta II, Teuta III. My mother said Hysen prepared for what he called “the time of peacey.” In the time of peacey, he promised, my mother and her siblings would move to a castle, wander around on the land they owned, mount racehorses, and dress like princes and princesses. Whenever Hysen told her the story of what they could expect once “peacey” arrived, my mother forgot that she had gone a whole day without eating.