Free Page 5

  “Do you understand?” I remember saying to Nini amidst the tears, on the day Enver Hoxha died. “Uncle Enver doesn’t live any more. His work will live forever. But my wish to meet him will never be granted.”

  My grandmother urged me to eat lunch. She kept praising the byrek she had made. “I tried it myself,” she said. “It’s delicious.”

  I wondered how she could eat on such a day. How could one even think about food? I was not hungry. I was too sad. Uncle Enver was gone forever. All his books, which I loved, would remain unsigned. We didn’t even have a photo of him in our living room. I would miss him terribly. “I am going to cut a photo from the book he has written for his pioneer friends and frame it,” I announced. “I will put it by my bedside.”

  Nini stopped insisting about lunch. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m not hungry either—I only tried one bite.” She was, however, determined to prevent me from cutting out the photo. “We don’t vandalize books in this house.”

  THE FUNERAL TOOK PLACE a couple of days after. There was a lazy rain, after a long spell of sunshine. We stared at the television screen, which showed thousands of people lined up on both sides of Tirana’s main boulevard to watch the funeral procession: soldiers in tears, old women wailing and scratching their faces in despair, university students staring with an empty gaze. The images were accompanied by a symphonic march. The news reporter said little and spoke slowly, like a wretched Sisyphus who has been tasked to comment while rolling his boulder up the hill. “Even Nature mourns the loss of one of the greatest revolutionaries of our time,” he said. A long pause followed. Only the notes of the funeral march could be heard. “Whenever Comrade Enver appeared on the dais on the First of May, the weather changed, the sun came out from behind the clouds. Today, even the skies cry. The rain mixes with people’s tears.”

  My family watched in silence.

  “The country mourns the loss of its most eminent son,” the reporter went on, “the founding father of the modern Albanian nation, the clever strategist who organized the resistance against Italian fascism, the brilliant general who defeated the Nazis, the revolutionary thinker who steered clear of both opportunism and sectarianism, the proud statesman who resisted Yugoslav revisionist attempts to annex our beloved nation, the politician who never fell for Anglo-American imperialist plots, and who never surrendered to Soviet and Chinese revisionist pressure.” The camera focused on the coffin, covered by a large Albanian flag, then on the grief-stricken faces of members of the Politburo, then on the new general secretary of the Party, who was about to give a speech. The music continued. After another pause, the commentator recovered his strength and spoke again: “Comrade Enver worked both for the nation and for international proletarian solidarity. He knew that the only way forward is national self-determination, coupled with a relentless fight against the internal and external enemies of socialism. Comrade Enver has now left us to continue the struggle without him. We will miss his brilliant guidance, his wise words, his revolutionary passion, his warm smile. We will miss him. The pain is great. We must learn to turn the pain into strength. We will do it tomorrow. Today the pain is simply too great.”

  “I know!” My mother suddenly broke the silence. “I kept wondering about it. It’s from Beethoven’s Third Symphony. The funeral march. It’s Beethoven.”

  “No, it’s not,” my father replied instantly, as if he had been waiting for her remarks all along. “It’s from that Albanian composer. I can’t remember which one. But I have heard it before—it’s not new,” he added, with the enthusiasm he manifested only when an opportunity to contradict my mother appeared.

  “Zafo, you have no clue,” my mother said. “You are completely tone-deaf. When was the last time you even went to a classical music concert? The only music you listen to is the sound of the sports programme on the radio. The background music is from the second movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica. It’s called ‘Funeral March.’ ”

  He was about to contradict her again when Nini interfered to confirm that my mother was right. “It’s from the symphony Beethoven started to compose in honour of Napoleon. I recognize it too—Asllan was very fond of it.” Reference to my grandfather always settled family arguments.

  “Will you really take me to pay my tribute at the grave?” I asked, with tears in my eyes, paralysed in front of the moving images on screen and wondering why, instead of crying, my family was talking about music.

  “This Sunday,” my grandmother replied, vaguely distracted.

  “Will visitors be allowed as soon as this Sunday?”

  “Not to Uncle Enver’s grave, no,” Nini corrected herself. “I thought you meant your grandfather’s.”

  “All the work collectives will pay tribute to Comrade Enver’s grave in the coming weeks,” my father said. “When it’s my turn, I’ll take you.”

  For a few weeks, I looked forward to that visit. One afternoon, my father returned from work announcing that he had been to Tirana, to visit Uncle Enver’s grave. “You have been?” I asked with a mixture of anger and disappointment. “You said you would take me. You broke your promise.”

  “I tried,” my father replied apologetically. “We left early in the morning, with the first train, and when I came to wake you up, you were sleeping, you didn’t hear me. Nini tried to call you too, and you just stirred and turned over. It was late, and I had to leave. Don’t worry, stuffed pepper. I’m sure there’ll be another time.”

  I was inconsolable. I sobbed and said that my parents clearly did not love Uncle Enver as much as I did, that they probably did not love him at all. It was a lie that they had called me that morning, I said, because if they had told me the night before that we were about to visit his grave, I would not have slept at all and I would have jumped out of bed straight away. The truth was that they didn’t care; they cared neither about visiting Uncle Enver’s grave nor about keeping his photo in our living room. I had asked millions of times to have a photo of Uncle Enver framed, and they had never brought me one. All my friends had photos displayed on their bookshelves, I complained; my friend Besa even had a large photo of herself on Uncle Enver’s lap during the last Congress, when she brought him a bouquet of red roses and recited a poem for the Party. I had never been to any Congress, and we had nothing.

  My parents tried to reassure me. They loved the Party and Uncle Enver as much as I did, they said. The only reason his photo was missing from our living room was that we were waiting to have it enlarged. We needed a properly nice frame, my mother added, which would have to be tailor-made. The ordinary wooden frames one could find in the art shop were not worthy of Uncle Enver. “We are working on it,” my father also emphasized. “It was going to be a birthday surprise.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “You won’t do it for my birthday,” I said, wiping away my tears. “I know it. You’ll just forget. You don’t love Uncle Enver. You clearly don’t miss him, because if you missed him, you would already have a small photo, and you would also buy a large one.”

  My parents seemed alarmed. They stared at each other.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” Nini said. “I have met Uncle Enver. I met him many, many years ago, when your grandfather and I were still young. The two of them were friends. How could I not love him if we have been friends?” She promised that one day she would show me the letters they had exchanged. “But,” she said,” you must promise something in return: that you will never again say, to us or to anyone else, that we don’t love or miss Uncle Enver. Tu vas me donner ta parole d’honneur, yes?”*

  * “You will give me your word, yes?”

  5

  COCA-COLA CANS

  MY FAMILY ACCEPTED THAT some rules were less important than others and that some promises could become obsolete with time. In this they were no different from other people, the rest of society, or even the state. Part of the challenge of growing up was finding out which rules faded over time, which were trumped by other, more important oblig
ations, and which ones remained inflexible.

  Take grocery shopping. There was always a queue. It always formed before the distribution lorry arrived. You were always expected to join, unless you had befriended the shopkeeper. That was the general rule. But there were also loopholes. Anyone was allowed to leave the queue so long as they found an appropriate object to replace them during their absence. It could be an old shopping bag, a can, a brick, or a stone. Then there was another rule, eagerly endorsed and promptly enforced: namely, that once the supplies arrived, the object left to act as your representative immediately lost its representative function. It did not matter if you had left a bag, can, brick, or stone in your place. The bag was just a bag; it could no longer be you.

  Queues divided between those in which nothing happened and those in which there was always something going on. In the first case, upholding social order could be delegated to objects. In the second case, queues were lively, noisy, and boisterous; everyone had to be present and all limbs were in motion as people tried to catch sight of the counter, see how much was left of what had just arrived, and as the shopkeeper looked around for any friends in the queue they might need to prioritize.

  During part of my training to navigate the queue system, I once asked why we had to leave a stone in the cheese queue so we could join the kerosene queue to leave a can there, since nothing was happening in either of them. This was when I learned that queues could go on for an entire day, and sometimes the night, or several nights, and it was essential to let shopping bags, kerosene containers, or appropriately sized stones take on some of the representative functions that would otherwise have to burden their owners. Objects in the queue were regularly monitored, and participants took turns to ensure that the representative bags, cans, or stones were not inadvertently removed or replaced by unauthorized items. In the very rare cases in which the system broke down, fights erupted and queues turned nasty, brutish, and long. People fought bitterly over stones that looked similar, or net bags that had been cheekily replaced with cloth sacks, or kerosene cans that had unexpectedly doubled in size.

  Behaving respectfully in the queue or joining forces to uphold queuing standards could mark the beginning of lasting friendships. A neighbour you met in the queue or a friend you made while sharing supervisory duties would soon become someone to whom you turned in all kinds of adversity: if an elderly person in your household was unexpectedly ill and you needed child care, or if you discovered you had run out of sugar in the middle of making a birthday cake, or if you needed someone with whom to swap food vouchers, since you might have built up a stock of some items but run out of others. We relied on friends and neighbours for everything. Whenever the need arose, we simply knocked on their door, regardless of the time of day. If they did not have what we were looking for or if they could not help with whatever we needed, they offered substitutions or recommended another family who might be able to help.

  This subtle balance between following rules and breaking them also applied to other areas. It applied if you turned up to nursery or school wearing a uniform that seemed creased or, worse, had stains, or when the barber or your parents cut your hair in a style that might be thought imperialist, or if you grew your nails beyond the accepted length or varnished them with an unusual, revisionist colour, such as very dark purple. The same principle, as I discovered later, also applied to more general questions, such as whether men and women were effectively equals, whether the opinions of lower- and higher-ranking Party members carried the same weight, to what extent jokes about the Party and the state might have serious implications, and, as in my case, with whom it was appropriate to share observations about photos in your living room.

  The trick always consisted in knowing which rule was relevant when and, ideally, whether it became looser as time passed, if it had ever been meant quite as seriously as one thought, or if it was very demanding in some aspects but less so in others—and how one might know the difference so as to avoid finding out too late. The mastery of the subtle boundary between following rules and breaking them was, for us children, the true mark of growth, maturity, and social integration.

  For my part, I discovered one late evening in August 1985 that the promise I had made to my parents never to reveal their indifference to photographic memories of our leader was strictly binding, so strict that every other promise paled in its presence. It was at the end of a day I had spent mostly in the top of a fig tree, in the Papases’ garden.

  The Papases were our closest neighbours, a couple in their mid-sixties with children who had already left the house by the time I was born. My mother had made friends with the wife, Donika, when they had joined forces against a woman who they believed wanted to take their place in the kerosene queue. Like my mother, Donika had a tendency to mistrust people, and the first impression one got from her was of hostility. She was short, round, often quarrelled with neighbours, and had a bad reputation with children, although with me she was unusually sweet. Before retiring, Donika had been a post office worker. She had spent a lot of her life shouting, “Alo, alo!” over broken telephone lines, and as a result, she had developed a tendency to turn every vowel into an a and to pronounce the end of each word in an elongated way, as if she were ringing an alarm bell: Alaa, alaa, alaa. Or if she was calling my mother, Doli: Dalaa, Dalaa, Dalaa.

  Donika’s husband, Mihal, was a highly respected local Party official with a thick moustache that looked a bit like Stalin’s. Mihal had fought in the war, destroyed many enemies, and collected a dozen medals, which I was more delighted to play with than he seemed proud to own. I was fascinated by the story of a Nazi soldier he had killed, a blond man called Hans, to whom Mihal had offered water to wash the blood from his mouth while he was on his last breath. Hans had refused, continuing to mutter, “Heil Hitler” instead. I asked Mihal to describe how he had killed Hans, but he preferred to talk about the last thing he remembered of him: his thin moustache, a moustache that had not fully grown yet, he said. “My own moustache had not grown either,” he added, and I was puzzled by how he described Hans almost with affection, as if he were recalling a long-lost friend with whom he’d shared fond memories, rather than a mortal foe whose life he had taken.

  The Papases lent us money regularly, looked after me when my parents and grandmother were gone, and held a spare key to our house. I spent long summer evenings in their garden, eating grapes off their vines before joining them for dinner, where Mihal would give me a little taste of his raki and let me jump off the table wearing his old partisan cap. There was a spectacular view onto the sea from their garden, and there was a gigantic fig tree with delicious fruit. Mihal had told me that by climbing that tree one could watch the sunset and count the boats entering and leaving the harbour. But I was always reluctant, because I kept thinking about the little girl whose grave was next to my grandfather’s who had died after falling from a tree.

  That day at the end of August 1985, however, I summoned the courage to climb the tree. But it was not to watch the sunset or count the boats in the harbour that I pushed myself to reach the top. It was in protest. That whole summer, my family and the Papases had not spoken to each other. In late June, my mother and Donika had had a falling-out, one which had escalated into a fight that involved everyone else, and by the end of which I was the only member of my family with whom the Papases still spoke.

  The reason for the falling-out was a Coca-Cola can. One day in mid-June, my mother had bought an empty can from another teacher in her school, for the equivalent of what you would shell out for a painting of our national hero Skanderbeg in the tourist shop. She spent the afternoon deliberating with my grandmother about where to put it and, since it was empty, whether to adorn it with a fresh rose from the garden. They had decided that though the rose was an original idea, it would distract from the aesthetic value of the can, and so they had left it bare, on top of our best embroidered cloth.

  A few days after this discussion, the can disappeared. Then it reappeare
d on top of the Papases’ television.

  The Papases had access to our house, knew about my grandfather’s old coat, in whose pocket all our money was kept, and had helped us obtain permission from the Party for the private construction of our house. I had the impression that they knew a lot of things about our biography too, but I never asked them what, since I did not quite understand what biography meant and did not want to embarrass myself. Mihal, who was still active in local Party circles, always helped my parents sort out administrative issues and defended them both in Party meetings and at those of the local council.

  Participation in the local council was compulsory for everyone in the neighbourhood, but membership of the Party was selective, open only to people with good biographies. My parents were not allowed to be members, but Mihal was a veteran, and his views on the merits of different candidates carried a lot of weight. He had once almost blocked another neighbour, Vera, from joining because in one of the council meetings she had alleged that my family were reactionaries making excuses about cleaning on Sundays. Sunday cleaning was in theory optional, but in practice it was one of those cases where the norm meant the opposite of how it was announced. When my parents had been new to the neighbourhood, they had struggled to interpret the recommendation in the right way. They’d soon learned.

  My family and the Papases spent a lot of time with each other: they cleaned the street together on Sundays and helped out other neighbours when a wedding or funeral had to be organized. Weddings were usually held in people’s gardens, with hundreds invited. Everyone mobilized to help make dinner, to bring benches and tables from the local schools, or to arrange the place where the orchestra would play music into the night. Our two families always carried the benches together and sat next to each other during the dinner and celebrations. The children stayed up till dawn, singing and dancing, and when the festivities reached their peak, the guests would make their way close to the bride, waving a one-hundred-lek note, which they would lick and slap on her forehead, as custom required. Mihal always slapped leks on my forehead too, saying I danced better and was more intelligent than the bride.