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  Hysen had also taught my mother how to play chess, and her family encouraged her to join the city’s club, because she could get tracksuits for free and travel to tournaments. At twenty-two, she became the national chess champion, and she defended the title for a few years. I remember the rhythmic sound of her heels as she paced a large hall in the Palace of Sports, where she trained teams of youngsters, gliding from one row of tables to the next, accompanied only by the tick-tock of the large wooden chess clocks placed between the players. She observed each game for a few minutes without saying a word, and if a child was about to make a mistake, she would raise her index finger and tap once or twice on the threatening knight or bishop, then proceed to inspect the next table. “It’s a sport for the brain,” she would say when she encouraged me to play, and she took it as a personal offence when I waited for her to be distracted with other children and ran away to watch ping-pong in a different room. “The beauty of chess,” she insisted, “is that it has nothing to do with biography. It’s all up to you.”

  When my mother was ill, she had a tendency to describe changes in her body with the same monotonous and dispassionate precision with which she explained the basic rules for moving chess pieces on the board. She always described only what happened, never how she felt about it. She hardly complained; I never saw her cry. She emanated supreme confidence and absolute authority—the kind enjoyed by those who somehow manage to convince others that it would be against their self-interest to question their subordination to her. She was always in control. Always, except once: when I was born. On the morning of the day she was due to be admitted to hospital, she locked herself in the bathroom, trying to style her hair like someone she had recently seen on television, a woman who had just become the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister. Since my mother hardly ever brushed her hair, let alone styled it, this was a clear sign of, if not panic, unprecedented anxiety.

  On 8 September 1979, Zëri i Popullit, the Party’s official organ, reported an attack by the racist Rhodesian government of Abel Muzorewa on Mozambique, criticized new nuclear explosions at U.S. testing sites, highlighted a recent case of corruption among Houston police officers as a prime example of the degeneration of capitalism, and denounced child exploitation in Madrid textile factories. A long editorial condemned Voice of America and Novosti as weapons of ideological aggression by the world’s two largest superpowers. The foreign news page included a message of solidarity with the ongoing strikes around the world: naval workers at the port of Rotterdam, mechanics at British Leyland, teachers in Peru, Costa Rica, and Columbia. I was born at ten a.m.

  It had taken my parents a few years to conceive—more or less since the Helsinki Accords were signed in August 1975, as my father liked to point out. When I was born, my chances of survival were put at thirty per cent. My parents dared not give me a name but celebrated the hospital number I was assigned: 471. Only dead babies did not receive numbers, and since I was not dead yet, there was life to celebrate.

  “We had been grieving for decades,” my grandmother later said. “When you were born, there was hope. Hope is something you have to fight for. But there comes a point when it turns into illusion; it’s very dangerous. It all comes down to how one interprets the facts.” So 471 was enough to give my family hope, but only just.

  My mother and I were divided the minute I was born: she stayed in the maternity ward until she recovered from her operation, and I was sent to a different hospital, where I lived attached to various machines, showing no signs of improvement until my grandmother decided to ask for permission to take me back home. When I left the incubator, aged five months and just under three kilograms (about six and a half pounds), the size of a newborn, the odds of my survival had increased to fifty per cent. “About the same as the American diplomats in Tehran,” my father later joked, “but if Nini had not insisted, you might have been held hostage for longer.” The fact that my grandmother’s request had been accepted was a good sign for our biography.

  In the early months of my life, the single bedroom my family rented from a former cooperative worker was transformed into an intensive care unit. My father brought wood from the garden to keep the fire going, my mother stayed up late sewing clothes for me, and my grandmother sterilized everything that caught her eye: cutlery, scissors, pots and pans, but also unrelated things like hammers and pliers. Visitors were prohibited unless they came wearing masks, but since masks were scarce, they soon disappeared altogether.

  “In any other family, she wouldn’t have made it,” Dr. Elvira, who regularly came to check on my health, declared on my first birthday. “Congratulations! You can stop calling her 471. Look at those chubby cheeks. Better call her ‘stuffed pepper.’ ”

  I must have been given strange immunity boosters when I was little, because with the exception of those first few months, I hardly ever became ill again. As a child, I was sick so rarely that I came to idealize disease, to think of convalescence as some kind of prize distributed to only a chosen few, wondering what challenges one had to overcome to be worthy of a high temperature, a chesty cough, or even just a plain sore throat. Whenever an infection did the rounds in my class, I asked the children who had been out of school if I could give them extra hugs in the hope of catching their illness. On the rare occasions when I succeeded in contracting something, I stayed at home, sipping bay-leaf tea, and asked my grandmother to tell me the story of how 471 survived to become the stuffed pepper. “What’s my biography like?” I wondered. “You were a premature child” was always her first sentence. “You came before we were ready. Apart from that, your biography so far is as good as it gets.”

  It was only when Elona lost her mother in circumstances very similar to the ones my mother and I had survived that I realized things could have gone differently for us too. I started to think of my life as a miraculous adventure story. But Nini never admitted to it being a miracle; she always rejected the possibility that things could have gone otherwise. She recounted the first few months of my existence with such an exact attribution of cause and effect that it sounded more like the analysis of a scientific theory or a reconstruction of the laws of nature than a description of events that could have taken a different course. Success was always due to the right people making the right choices, fighting for hope when it seemed justified, and interpreting the facts in such a way as to distinguish hope from illusion.

  In the end, my grandmother said, we are always in charge of our fate. “Biography” was crucial to knowing the limits of your world, but once you knew those limits, you were free to choose and you became responsible for your decisions. There would be gains and there would be losses. You had to avoid being flattered by victories and learn how to accept defeat. Like the moves in chess my mother used to describe, the game was yours to play if you mastered the rules.

  * “Who is riding so late on a night so wild? A father is riding and carrying his child.”

  4

  UNCLE ENVER IS DEAD

  “SOMETHING AWFUL HAPPENED,” our nursery teacher, Flora, said, urging all the five- and six-year-olds to sit on coloured wooden chairs laid out in a semicircle. It was 11 April 1985. “Uncle Enver has . . . has . . . left us . . . forever.” She uttered those words as if on her last breath herself, as if this were the last sentence she would muster. After that, she dropped into one of the small chairs herself, holding a hand on her heart as if it hurt, shaking her head, taking deep breaths: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. A long silence followed.

  Then Flora stood up with great resolve and rubbed her eyes. During those few minutes of quiet, she had turned into a different person. “Children,” she said solemnly. “Listen carefully. It’s very important that you understand. Uncle Enver has passed away. But his work lives on. The Party lives on. We will all continue his work and follow his example.”

  We spoke extensively about death that day. My friend Marsida, whose father repaired shoes but whose grandfather had been the head of the local mosque before rel
igion was abolished, said that in the olden days people believed that we don’t really die when we die. Of course, we replied, of course we don’t die. All our work, like Uncle Enver’s, continues to live.

  But Marsida protested that this was not what she had meant. She had not meant to say that our work lives on while we are dead. Instead, she meant that when people die, there is a part of them that continues to live, and that goes off to a different place, depending on how you had behaved during your life. She could not remember what that part was called. Her grandfather had explained it to her.

  We were incredulous. A different place? “How can anyone go anywhere when they are dead?” I said. “When you’re dead you can’t move. They put you straight into a coffin.”

  “Have you ever seen a dead person for real?” Marsida asked.

  I told her I had not. But I had seen coffins. And I had seen where they go, very deep underground, with the help of ropes. I saw them when we visited my grandfather’s grave at the cemetery on Sunday. I had even seen children’s graves. I once scratched the marble of one with a piece of glass I found on the ground, and my grandmother scolded me. There was a black-and-white photo on the gravestone, showing a smiling little girl who was wearing a large ribbon that looked a bit like mine. She had died by falling from a tree. Nini told me that this is why we have cemeteries, so that we know where dead people are and we can visit their graves and talk to them about how we are continuing their work.

  Marsida replied that she had seen coffins too, many times. She had seen not just the ones made for grown-ups, which were black; once she had also seen a small coffin, which was red and less heavy to lift than the others because only one man was needed to carry it.

  Then another friend, Besa, who was slightly older, joined the conversation. She had seen a dead person for real. She had seen her uncle. She had peeked through the keyhole into the room where he was waiting to be washed and dressed in his best clothes before being put into his coffin. There it was, open, ready, right next to him. He lay still across the sofa. He was as white as chalk, and had blood on his head because he had just fallen off an electricity pole at work. “My aunt complained that nobody had closed his eyes when it happened,” she said. “There’s no way any part of him could have gone anywhere.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “My grandmother told me that when people die and we bury them, insects feed off their bodies, then they melt into the earth and become compost, which is needed for other things to grow, like flowers or plants or whatever. They can’t go anywhere,” I insisted.

  “Plus, dead people stink,” Besa added. “When my uncle died, I heard my aunt say that the funeral had to be organized quickly because if we didn’t bury him right away, he would start stinking.”

  “Yuck,” I said. “We once had salami in the fridge that started stinking after a power cut. It was so stinky my dad was running around the house with a clothes peg clipped to his nose and his mouth wide open, gasping for air, crying, ‘Help! Help!’ ”

  Everyone giggled. Teacher Flora heard us and sent us to stand in the corner, to reflect, she said, on how we could possibly laugh on such a sad day for our nation. When I returned home and told my grandmother that Uncle Enver was dead, and that I had been sent to stand in the corner because of rotten salami in our fridge, I could not hold back the tears flowing down my cheeks. I don’t know if it was embarrassment at being scolded on the wrong day, the sadness for the loss of Uncle Enver, a combination of both, or perhaps something else, entirely unrelated.

  That first conversation about death and what happens afterwards was repeated in school several years later. Teacher Nora told us that in the olden days people gathered in large buildings called churches and mosques to sing songs and recite poems dedicated to someone or something they called God, which we had to distinguish carefully from the gods of Greek mythology like Zeus, Hera, or Poseidon. Nobody knew what that single God looked like, but different people had different interpretations. Some, such as Catholics and Orthodox Christians, believed that God had a child who was also half human. Others, the Muslims, thought that God was everywhere, from the smallest particles of matter to the entire universe. Others still, the Jews, thought that God would create a king who would save them at the end of the days. The prophets they recognized were also different. In the past, religious groups had bitterly fought each other, killing and maiming innocent people over disputes about whose prophet was right. But not in our country. In our country, the Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Jews had always respected one another, because they cared about the nation more than they cared about their disagreements on what God looked like. Then the Party had come, more people started to read and write, and the more they learned about how the world worked, the more they discovered that religion was an illusion, something that the rich and powerful used to supply the poor with false hopes, promising them justice and happiness in another life.

  We asked if there is another life after we die.

  “There is not,” said teacher Nora with characteristic conviction. She explained that it was all a way to make people stop fighting for their rights in the only life they had, so that the rich could benefit.

  Capitalists, who did not necessarily believe in God themselves, wanted to keep him because it made it easier to exploit workers and blame a magical being rather than themselves for the misery they caused. But once people learned to read and write, and the Party was there to guide them, they stopped relying on God. And they also stopped believing in all kinds of other superstitions, like the evil eye or carrying garlic to avoid bad luck, which were so many ways of pretending that people were not free to do what was right but were controlled by supernatural forces. Fortunately, with the help of the Party, we could finally understand that God was just an invention to make us afraid and reliant on those who pretended to have the power to translate the word of God, or to explain his rules.

  “But it was hard to get rid of God completely,” teacher Nora said. “Some people, some reactionaries, kept believing in him.” When the Party was strong enough to fight them, voluntary action was taken to transform all the places of worship into spaces for youth training and development. Churches became sports centres; mosques became conference halls. “This is why not only is there no God,” teacher Nora said in conclusion, “but we also no longer have churches and mosques. We destroyed them all.” She raised her voice slightly. “We must never return to those backward customs. There is no God anywhere. No God, no afterlife, no immortality of the soul. When we die, we die. The only thing that lives eternally is the work we have done, the projects we have created, the ideals we leave to others to pursue on our behalf.”

  I sometimes thought about teacher Nora’s words on my way back from school, as I walked past the building that housed the Party’s headquarters and looked up towards one of the windows. I looked up instinctively, because that is what I had always seen my mother do, each time we walked past the building. I repeated her gesture. For some reason, I associated the Party headquarters with God, and with thoughts about the afterlife. It all started the time we were returning home from our usual Sunday outing and I was cycling behind my parents when I overheard my mother whisper to my father, “No, not the window with the flowerpot, the other one. He shouted, ‘Allahu akbar!’

  “Allahu akbar,” she repeated.

  “Who is he?” I asked while still pedalling. “What does ‘allahu aka’ mean?”

  My father turned abruptly. “Nothing,” he replied. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You just said ‘allahu-aka,’ ” I insisted, riding ahead and stopping my bike in front of him.

  “It is a very bad habit to listen to grown-up conversations,” my father said, visibly irritated. ‘Allahu ak-bar’ is what people who believe in God used to say, to recognize and celebrate his greatness.”

  “Do you mean like ‘Long live the Party’?” I asked.

  “God is not the same as the Party,” my father explained. “Allahu akbar is
what people of Muslim faith would have spoken in prayers. You know about different religious beliefs because teacher Nora explained it to you in the moral education class,” he said. “ ‘Allah’ meant god in Arabic.”

  “Do we know any people who were Muslim in the olden days?”

  “We are Muslim,” my mother replied, pulling out of her bag a handkerchief to clean off the mud she had just spotted on my shoes.

  “We were Muslim,” my father corrected her. “Most people in Albania were Muslim.”

  I asked if Muslims believed in the afterlife. My mother nodded while still bent down, scrubbing the tops of my shoes.

  “Then they were just as silly as all the other people who believed in a different God,” I said, wriggling out of my mother’s hold to cycle at full speed ahead.

  Whenever I passed by the Party’s headquarters on my way back from school, I thought about the man who had been shouting “Allahu akbar!” from the fifth-floor window. How bizarre, I thought, that all these religious zealots disagreed with one another about what exactly God looked like, and yet all believed that parts of us will survive after we die. If there was one thing that could convince us children of the irrationality of religion, of the ridiculous nature of belief in the existence of God, it was the idea that there could be a life after the one we had. In school we were taught to think about development and decay in evolutionary terms. We studied nature with the eyes of Darwin and history with the eyes of Marx. We distinguished between science and myth, reason and prejudice, healthy doubt and dogmatic superstition. We were taught to believe that the right ideas and aspirations survive as a result of all our collective efforts, but that the lives of individuals must always come to an end, like the lives of insects, birds, and other animals. To think that people deserve a different fate than the rest of nature does was to be a slave of myth and dogma at the expense of science and reason. Science and reason were all that mattered. Only with their help could we find out about nature and the world. And the more we knew, the more we could explain and control that which at first seemed mysterious.