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  In late summer my mother and Mihal would often pool their resources to make raki together. During those long days distilling the fermented grapes, waiting for the alcohol to drip from the spout, and testing how strong or weak the raki was, they would talk about the old times. I once overheard my mother mention the port in our town in the thirties, and say to Mihal that the largest boat her family had owned was still being used for exports. I was confused and later asked Mihal what it meant. But he said they had been talking about arka and not varka (crates rather than boats), then asked if I wanted to dance on the table, where he was eating meze.

  I mention all this to emphasize that my mother would have never dreamed of accusing the Papases of theft, had it not been for the fact that the stolen object was a Coca-Cola can. At the time, these were an extremely rare sight. Even rarer was the knowledge of their function. They were markers of social status: if people happened to own a can, they would show it off by exhibiting it in their living room, usually on an embroidered tablecloth over the television or the radio, often right next to the photo of Enver Hoxha. Without the Coca-Cola can, our houses looked the same. They were painted the same colour; they had the same furniture. With the Coca-Cola can, something changed, and not just visually. Envy came between us. Doubts started to emerge. Trust was broken.

  “My can!” my mother exclaimed when she went to return the rolling pin Donika had lent her and saw the red object standing on top of the Papases’ television. “What is my can doing here?”

  Donika squinted as if she couldn’t see my mother’s index finger pointing at the can, or as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “It’s mine,” she replied proudly. “I bought it recently.”

  “I bought it recently,” my mother repeated, “and look where it’s ended up.”

  “Are you saying I stole my can?” Donika demanded, confronting her.

  “I am saying that your can is actually my can,” my mother replied.

  That day, she and Donika argued like never before. They started in front of the television but came out onto the road, screaming insults and waving their arms, Donika brandishing the rolling pin, while everyone stood watching. Donika shouted that my mother was nothing but a bourgeois dressed in teacher’s clothes, and my mother shouted back that Donika was nothing but a peasant dressed as a post office worker. After a while, a witness was brought in: a neighbour who worked at the nearby cigarette factory, and confirmed that she had sold the empty can to Donika a day after my mother had bought hers.

  At that point, my mother offered a formal apology. Donika and Mihal were so offended that they did not accept it. They turned their backs and walked to their house, and they stopped calling out their window to invite my parents for morning coffee. When they overlapped in the shopping queue, they ignored each other, and once Donika even pretended not to recognize the excellent large stone my mother used as her representative when she left the queue, even though it had come from the Papases’ garden. We never discovered who was responsible for stealing our Coca-Cola can, but we concluded that it was unsafe to buy another, however much it improved our living room. I seized the opportunity to request a photo of Uncle Enver to replace the Coca-Cola can on top of our television—a request my parents again ignored.

  During that summer, the Papases still let me climb the trees in their garden, but they no longer invited me for dinner. When I asked Mihal if I could play with his medals and partisan cap, he said we would do it another time. “It’s about dignity; they trampled on our dignity,” I overheard him say to Donika one day. I started to suspect that the Papases were not really peeved about my parents’ accusations related to the Coca-Cola cans but were upset about something else, something more important, the sort of thing my parents could never replace or make amends for. I was heartbroken. I hated to see Donika walk past my mother in silence at the cheese queue, and I missed her reedy, thin voice calling my mother from the window when she made coffee: Dalaaaa, Dalaaaa, kafaaaa, kafaaaaa. My parents were heartbroken too, only they did not know what else to say to apologize.

  After a couple of weeks like that, I thought I would take matters into my own hands. I decided to hide in the Papases’ garden, pretending to be lost so that my parents would go searching for me. I figured that if the Papases saw how the whole neighbourhood mobilized to look for me, and how upset my parents were to have lost their precious first child, perhaps they would join the search, and perhaps our families would be close again, the same as they were when they shared cleaning tasks or sat at the same table at weddings.

  The strategy worked. After hours of looking everywhere—except for the branches of the fig tree, where they thought I would never go—my grandmother was in despair. My father was roaming the street, shaking, his asthma pump in his hand, and even my mother—who never cried—was almost in tears. When the Papases saw her, they forgot all about Coca-Cola cans. Donika hugged my mother, who never accepted being hugged, and told her that it would all be fine, that they would soon find me again. It was at that point, observing everything from the top of the tree, that I decided our two families were now reconciled. I climbed down the tree carefully, but still getting cuts and scratches on my knees, and when I showed up with blood dripping from my legs, and tears flowing from my eyes, to reveal the details of my plan, everyone was moved beyond measure. I explained that I had climbed the fig tree and had got lost on purpose. I could no longer bear to see how my family and the Papases ignored each other in the queues. I said I wanted to sit next to them again at the weddings, and to play with Mihal’s cap, and to jump off their table onto their sofa. The Papases then declared, “Never mind, all is forgiven and forgotten,” and even my grandmother nodded, she who always resolved disputes by declaring in French, “Pardonner oui, oublier jamais”: Forgive, but never forget.

  That evening my parents invited the Papases for meze again. They drank raki and laughed heartily at how silly they had been to let Coca-Cola cans come between them. Mihal licked a one-hundred-lek note and stuck it on my forehead. I had been very clever and brave, he said, to go to the top of the fig tree. He also noted later that Coca-Cola cans were produced in imperialist countries and they might have reached Albania as corrupting devices, introduced surreptitiously by our enemies to break the bonds of trust and solidarity. At the point in the evening when he mentioned this, it was no longer clear if he was serious, but I remember everyone laughed, drank more raki, toasted the end of imperialism, and laughed some more.

  Donika, however, was extremely serious when she offered my mother her own Coca-Cola can. She said that they could take turns in displaying it, keeping it for two weeks on top of one television and two weeks on the other. My mother refused, insisting that we absolutely did not deserve such kindness. On the contrary, my mother said, if we still had our own Coca-Cola can, she would offer it to Donika, so that Donika could use hers for salt and my mother’s for pepper, just like those fancy matched sets of shakers that sometimes appeared in Dynasty. Donika replied that there would be no need, that Coca-Cola cans had started to become a bit too common after all; it was the white and orange cans that were really sought after now, though she could not remember what they were called, something to do with “fantasy” or “fantastic.” Then she praised the cloth on top of which the can had stood, saying it looked much nicer without anything, that my mother had embroidered the tulip so beautifully it would have been a shame to cover it.

  “We were going to have a photo of Uncle Enver on that one,” I interrupted cheerily amidst the noise. “But they never want anything to do with Uncle Enver—they keep promising to put a photo there, and they never do it. I don’t think they like Uncle Enver,” I said, playing with the hundred-lek note Mihal had just given me, emboldened by his remarks about how clever I had been.

  That changed the mood in our living room. Everyone froze. My mother, who had been laughing with Donika and saying nice things about how much she missed the baklava Donika made, stopped speaking and looked intently at her, as i
f trying to guess her thoughts. Nini, who was in the little kitchen extension preparing more food, came out holding a bowl of washed cucumbers. Her hands were trembling. My father, who’d been helping himself to more olives and cheese from the shared platter, dropped the fork. For a short while, only the mosquitoes dancing around the lamp in our living room could be heard.

  Mihal frowned. He then turned to me with an extremely serious, even severe look on his face. “Come here,” he said, breaking the silence, urging me to sit on his lap. “I thought you were a clever girl. I just praised you for how clever you were today. What you just said is not what clever girls say. It was a very stupid thing to say, the most stupid thing I have ever heard from you.” I blushed and felt the heat burning my cheeks. “Your parents love Uncle Enver. They love the Party. You must never again say these stupid things to anyone. Otherwise, you don’t deserve to play with my medals.”

  I nodded. I had started to shake and was about to burst into tears. Mihal must have felt the motion of my body on his knees and regretted his tone. He softened his voice. “Now, don’t start crying,” he said. “You’re not a baby. You’re a brave girl. You will fight for your country, and for the Party, when you grow up. Your parents sometimes make mistakes, like with the Coca-Cola can, but they are good, hard-working people and they are bringing you up well. They have grown up under socialism, and they love the Party and Uncle Enver too. Do you understand? You must never repeat what you said.”

  I nodded again. The rest were still silent. “Come,” Mihal said. “Let’s raise another toast. To your future without Coca-Cola divisions.” He picked up his glass, but before drinking, he interrupted himself, as if something else, something very important, had occurred to him. “You must promise me that if you ever again have silly ideas like that about your family, you will come and tell me. Me—nobody else, not even Auntie Donika. Do you understand?”

  6

  COMRADE MAMUAZEL

  “COMRADE MAMUAZEL, HALT IMMEDIATELY, you’re under arrest!”

  Flamur stood in front of me with his arms and legs wide, holding a cane about three times as long as he was tall in his left hand, and with his right clutching something small I could not see.

  “Give me your Juicy Fruit,” he ordered.

  “Let me check,” I replied, removing the silky red ribbon that held up my hair, then reaching for my school bag. “Let me check. But I’m not sure I have Juicy Fruit. I might have Wrigley Spearmint or Hubba Bubba.”

  “You do,” he said. “I saw Marsida give it to you yesterday.”

  “I don’t have Juicy Fruit,” I insisted. “I can give you Hubba Bubba. They look similar.” I fished a flattened piece of a coloured gum wrapper from the pocket of my dress and held it under my nose for a few seconds to demonstrate how fresh it was. The paper smelled better than the usual blend of rubber and sweat; you could almost be reminded of the real thing. Flamur let go of the cane he was holding and opened his right fist, displaying his own collection of wrapping papers, checking what was available.

  “It’s really fresh,” I insisted. He grabbed my paper and smelled it.

  “It’s goooood,” he said. “How old do you think it is?”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied. “But not more than three months. Maybe four. Depends on how many people have had it before and also—”

  “Well, yeah, that’s obvious,” he interrupted me aggressively. “Do you think you only know this stuff because you can speak French?”

  I had learned not to answer such provocations. I continued to stare at him, a supplicating look on my face. I was about to burst out crying, but if there was one thing that Flamur loathed more than girls with ribbons, it was “crybabies.” I knew that if I cried, I would lose my entire wrapping-paper collection.

  “You’ll be released from arrest once you tell me the password,” Flamur said, snatching the Hubba Bubba. “Don’t think, Mamuazel, I didn’t see you take off that ribbon.”

  “The password,” I whispered. “The password is ‘Death to fascism, freedom to the people.’ ”

  This is one of my earliest memories, from when I was about five. Perhaps I remember the scene with such precision because it played out in more or less the same form almost every day. Flamur was the second-most-dangerous bully in the neighbourhood. The most dangerous one, Arian, who was a few years older than us, rarely appeared on the street when we played. When he did, it was to confiscate someone’s jumping rope, or to interrupt a game of Hopscotch with instructions for the children to return to their houses because it was getting dark, or to order us to switch games from Fight-ball to Fascists and Partisans. Once everyone complied, he went back inside. We, on the other hand, continued to do as we had been told. Nobody knew what would happen if we did not follow his commands. Nobody had ever tried to find out.

  Flamur was a different sort of bully. He was always on the street, patrolling up and down from the end of school until late after dark. He was the youngest child in a family of five, and the only boy. His three older sisters lived at home and worked in the nearby cigarette factory. They all had different surnames starting with B: Bariu, Bilbili, Balli. Flamur was the only one whose surname did not start with B and was the same as his mother’s: Meku. Flamur claimed that his father was away, fighting the Romans and the Ottomans. When Marsida once had the temerity to suggest that we had stopped fighting these empires a long time ago, he cut her ponytail off with his scissors.

  When Flamur was alone, he would sit on the steps outside someone’s door, beating pans and belting out melancholic Gypsy love songs until the other children came out of their houses and gathered in the common play area. He decided which games we would start with, who was allowed to have the first go, who would have to sit out of a particular round because they had been caught cheating, and what exemptions had to be made to accommodate younger siblings—whom he also terrorized, by wearing an old brown sack with holes over his eyes to make him look like a ghost and unexpectedly grabbing them. He generally wore an oversized yellow-and-green top with Brazil’s flag on it and roamed the streets accompanied by a group of stray dogs whom he had named after famous players from Brazil’s national football team: Sócrates, Zico, Rivellino, and his favourite, Pelé, who was half blind and had some kind of skin disease. He hated cats, and if he found a stray kitten, he was very likely to dump it on the rubbish pile at the end of the road and burn it. He also hated girls with ribbons. He was the one who taught everyone else to call me Comrade Mamuazel—Mademoiselle—and ask for the password.

  One of Flamur’s older sisters had once been summoned by the Party in the local council offices because she hit Flamur so hard on his back with a chair that the chair broke. When my grandmother learned the news, she yelled, almost beside herself with anger, that violence against children was no different from the violence of the state.

  WHEN I WAS GROWING up, I knew that something about me was different but could not say what it was. My family, unlike Flamur’s, never smacked me. My mother usually stayed out of things: she disciplined with invisible authority. To my father, disciplining meant sending me for a few hours of “reflection” in their bedroom—or as I called it, with childish exaggeration, the “prison,” because it had no toys. Occasionally, I was allowed to take a book with me, and in those moments of wounded anger I would choose a novel that featured orphans, like Les Misérables, Alone in the World, or David Copperfield. But I never let the suffering of the main characters distract me from my own anguish or minimize the injustice of which I thought I was a victim. These stories fuelled wild fantasies about my family, and after a few hours of being lost in the lives of other children, I had even more questions about who I really was. Like the characters I read about, I fantasized about a change of fortune, the unexpected intervention of a benevolent stranger, or finding solace in the discovery of a distant relative.

  From my parents’ bedroom, I wrote long letters to Cocotte, one of my grandmother’s first cousins, who lived alone in the capital, Tirana, and oft
en spent the winter with us. I called them “the prison letters”: I numbered them, and often divided them by topic. In my letters, I complained about my parents’ harshness, how they spoke French to me on the street, without concern that my friends could hear, and how they always expected me to outperform everyone in school, including in subjects like PE, where I had no talent at all.

  Cocotte’s official name was Shyqyri, but she disliked it. She said it sounded too ordinary. Everyone in my grandmother’s family had a real name and a French nickname. She and my grandmother had grown up together in Salonica. They were Arnauts, as Ottoman Turks called Albanian minorities in the empire, but they spoke French to each other, as Nini did to me. Whenever Cocotte came to visit, she shared a room with me and Nini. She and my grandmother chatted late into the night, evoking remote places and their people: a pasha in Istanbul, émigrés from St. Petersburg, passports in Zagreb, food markets in Skopje, fighters in Madrid, boats in Trieste, bank accounts in Athens, ski resorts in the Alps, dogs in Belgrade, rallies in Paris, and opera stalls in Milan.

  During those frozen winter evenings, our tiny bedroom became a continent, a land of shifting borders, forgotten heroes of armies that no longer existed, deadly fires, exuberant balls, property feuds, weddings, deaths, and new births. I felt the urge to understand, to connect my childhood to that of Nini and Cocotte, to picture their world, to rearrange years that seemed without time, to remember characters I had never known, or to ascribe meaning to events I had never witnessed. I felt confused and sometimes frightened by the sheer chaos of the things I heard about, adults who had lost track of each other, boats that never sailed, children that never lived. But just when I thought my efforts to understand were about to yield results, Nini and Cocotte stopped speaking in French and suddenly switched to Greek.