Free Read online

  They were enormously fond of each other, but they could not have been more different. They had first travelled to Albania as adults, Nini to work for the government and Cocotte to find a husband. Cocotte didn’t like the Greeks or the Turks, and she didn’t like Jewish men—although she admitted reluctantly that the latter were “the last intelligent people left in Salonica.” It turned out she didn’t like Albanians either, or at least her parents continued to object that So-and-so was uncultured, or insufficiently wealthy, or politically unreliable, and as a result she never married. She had an imaginary husband called Rexhep or, in French, Rémy. “Unlike your grandfather,” she used to say in my grandmother’s presence, “Rémy never brought me any trouble.”

  The weeks when Cocotte visited were the only times I spoke French without reluctance. Otherwise, I hated it. It was not my language. My grandmother was not French. I did not understand why it was inflicted on me, why they taught me to speak French first, and then Albanian. I hated it when the children on the street were mobilized by Flamur to make fun of my broken Albanian, like when I called the slices of apple we ate as a snack des morceaux de pommes. Their parents were usually more supportive, but even they seemed perplexed when my grandmother called me home at the end of the day and they heard me give a summary of our activities in a language they could not understand. “Why French?” I heard one of them ask my grandmother one day. “Why not Russian, or English, or Greek? There are so many possibilities.” “I don’t like the Greeks,” my grandmother said. “And I don’t speak Russian or English,” she added, perhaps to indicate her hostility to imperialism.

  The time I hated French most of all was when I had to appear before a special educational committee to prove that I was ready to start school. One did not normally have to take a test to go to school—an education was compulsory and began between the ages of six and seven. A few weeks before the start of the academic year, teachers would divide into teams of three or four and walk around town, knocking on each door to make sure all the children had been enrolled. The Party took pride in having abolished illiteracy at record speed, and there were often reports on television of how old women from remote villages in the north were now able to read, and to sign documents with their names rather than a simple cross. There was much excitement in the weeks before the start of the academic year; happy children queued in the Pioneers’ shop, and parents gossiped with one another in the classrooms where textbooks were sold. On the first day, everyone wore shiny, bright uniforms and showed off their new haircuts and flocked to the streets carrying flower bouquets. As our teacher Nora said: “In imperialist countries we tend to observe this enthusiasm only during the sales period.” Nobody knew what a “sale” was, but it felt like a stupid question to ask.

  AT THE END OF the summer of 1985, I was keen to start school. My mother had taught me to read and write, partly as a way to improve my Albanian, which was still broken because everyone spoke French to me, and partly so that I would no longer need help reading an old book of translated Russian fairy tales that had once belonged to her. My sixth birthday fell a week after the official start of the year, and my parents bought me a red leather rucksack. I liked it at first, until I realized that all the other children had been given brown or black school bags, mostly to be carried by hand. Only a few went over the shoulders. The brown and black bags were sold in the Pioneers’ shop shortly before the beginning of each school year, alongside black uniforms, red scarves, and all the usual paraphernalia: notebooks, pens, pencils, rulers, compasses, protractors, PE kits. The red rucksacks were in limited supply. They appeared in the warehouses for only a couple of days and usually sold out before reaching the shops. Mine became yet another thing I had to explain about myself: things like the embroidered dresses with lace hems I wore on May Day or for Sunday walks; the white leather shoes, handmade to measure by Marsida’s father, who was a shoemaker; or my hand-knitted coat, which had been designed after a model found on the torn pages of a children’s fashion magazine smuggled from somewhere in the West.

  When I realized the red rucksack would open a new front of bullying, I became reluctant to go to school. For a few days, fortune was on my side. No school in town was prepared to bend the rules to allow me to join early. My family insisted. They thought I was ready, and that I would be bored at nursery. They were advised to obtain special authorization from the educational section of the Central Party Committee. One evening in late August, at the end of the committee’s official business, we appeared in front of a panel of Party officials to make our case.

  My parents had been preparing for the meeting for several days. They had rehearsed what they would say, tried to anticipate the questions they would face, and told me to repeat all the poems I knew about the Party and Uncle Enver, as well as the new partisan songs I had learned in nursery. I remember all of us advancing nervously towards the Central Party Committee building, my parents leading the way and my grandmother holding my hand while we walked a few metres behind. I wore a bright red dress and held tight under my right arm a brown folder that contained the book with which I had learned to read, plus another with numbers and exercises in elementary maths. At one point, halfway through our march, my mother turned to see how far behind we were lagging, then suddenly emitted a loud sound between a howl and a shriek. “White!” she said. “It is white!” Her face filled with horror, she pointed to the ribbon that held up my ponytail. My father said nothing but, without waiting for further instruction, turned around and sprinted back to the house. A quarter of an hour later, he was back, breathless, holding a red ribbon in one hand and his asthma pump in the other. He was told there was no time for pumps. We all walked up the flight of stairs that led to the office of the education section, and I was scolded for whistling the tune of the new partisan song I had learned earlier that day.

  In the meeting, my father gave the opening speech. He did not say that it would have been unreasonable to keep me from school for a whole year simply because my birthday fell a week after the registration date. He said he knew that a Communist society valued education more than anything, and that the Party would be loyally served by such a keen representative of the younger generation of revolutionaries, so keen she had expressed several times the desire to start school as soon as possible. Of course, he said, he was aware that the final decision rested with the Party, and that the Party would decide fairly in any case. However, my parents had the presumption to believe that my enthusiasm at least deserved a hearing.

  He said all this as he looked straight at the portrait of Uncle Enver on the wall, as if he had been talking to our leader rather than the people in the room. One member of the panel tapped his fingers on the desk while staring into the void, a second took notes while occasionally glancing at my mother’s linen dress, a third looked at my grandmother as if he had already seen her somewhere. The fourth, a woman with short hair and an austere charcoal-grey suit, kept her gaze fixed on the red flag that sat on the desk, with a mysterious half-smile stamped on her face.

  At the end of all the speeches, the reading and maths tests, and after the poem recital, the panel looked sceptical. They sighed, rolled their eyes, raised their eyebrows, then regarded each other. The man who had been gently tapping on the table with only three fingers now started to tap faster with both hands, making a noise that sounded like rain. It did not go unnoticed. The man who had been alternating note-taking with glancing at my mother’s dress dropped his pen and started to stare at him instead.

  It was my grandmother who decided to break the silence. With her eyes on the third panel member, who she seemed finally to recognize, she said:

  “Comrade Mehmet speaks French. Lea can read in French too. Perhaps you would like to give her something to read in French?”

  “We can’t test that,” the woman who had been smiling replied. “We don’t have any books for children here. Certainly, no books for children en français,” she added half-mockingly.

  “Perhaps she can read fr
om one of the works of Comrade Enver,” Nini volunteered. “I can see a translation of selected works on the shelf,” she added, while the man called Mehmet nodded.

  A book was brought down, opened at random, and I read out loud a few lines. Then I stumbled on one word, the only word I can still remember: collectivization. I kept struggling to pronounce it.

  “Collevization,” I said. “Collectivation,” I corrected. “Collectivis—” I could no longer finish the word. I felt completely stuck, and my eyes filled with tears.

  At that point, the panel started clapping, spontaneously, all at once. “You are very bright!” Comrade Mehmet exclaimed. “This is very difficult to read, even in Albanian. You can teach your friends. You can even teach them how to read in French. Did you know that Uncle Enver used to be a French teacher in school when he was young? Are you going to be like him?”

  I nodded. “I have read all the books that Uncle Enver has written for children,” I said, licking the tears and snot on my lips. “I know what collectism means, it means that we all work better when we share things, I just can’t pronounce it.”

  That evening the panel approved the decision to lift the age restriction for starting school and sent us away with a letter explaining the exceptional circumstances under which it had been taken. My parents walked home ecstatic, with animated talk of how lucky we had been to stumble on Comrade Mehmet, to whom my grandmother had given French lessons many years ago in Kavajë, the little town where my father’s family lived before I was born. They tried to buy beers to celebrate, but the week’s supplies in the shop had run out, so they turned to the home-made raki we kept, inviting the Papases over for meze. They raised toasts, not to the Party but to my education, and gulped one shot of raki after another, joking and laughing out loud until well past midnight.

  For my part, I felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment: pride because I would soon start school, and embarrassment because I was still unable to pronounce collectivization. I had kept trying since we’d left the Central Party Committee building, and I’d kept on getting it wrong. When Mihal asked me to sing a song in French, instead of complying, as everybody expected, I declared how much I hated the language. I had hated it, I said, from the first day I was in the crèche, when the other nursery children insisted that I was not like them because I spoke only French. My fear now was that the same thing would happen when I started school, that I would not be able to make new friends because I spoke French. Besides, I did not understand why we had to speak a language nobody else understood, the language of a country we had never visited, and where nobody we knew lived.

  “Did you hear what the comrade on the education panel said?” Nini asked, trying to convince me. “Uncle Enver also spoke French. He studied in France for many years. He also taught it to children like you. French is an important language, the language of the great writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment, and France is the country of the French Revolution, which spread the ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity, about which you will learn in school.”

  I shook my head in protest.

  “You already know about the French Revolution. You watched Cosette at the puppet theatre, and you said how much you liked it, remember?” Nini insisted.

  I was still thinking about the nursery, but her mention of Cosette made me resolve to confess all the details I had not yet dared reveal: how children lifted up my dress, pulled my ribbons, and called me Comrade Mamuazel, how they scorned the way I walked and teased me for the expressions I adopted, all because of my French. For the second time that day, I burst into tears.

  “You must not speak French if it makes you unhappy,” Nini said. Our neighbours nodded in approval.

  From that day, and with the exception of the weeks during which Cocotte visited us, French was officially abolished. My grandmother spoke it to me only in one of three cases: when I played late with a friend and she wanted to discreetly encourage me to stop; if she herself was furious and wanted to let off steam; and as a way of scolding.

  7

  THEY SMELL OF SUN CREAM

  I STILL ASSOCIATE ALL our efforts to learn from the outside world with Dajti, the name of the isolated mountain range that surrounded our capital and dominated its landscape as if it had captured it and was holding it hostage. Dajti was physically remote but always with us. I never visited it. I still don’t know what “receiving from Dajti” meant—who received what, from whom, or how. I suspect there was a satellite or TV receiver up there. Dajti was in every house, in every conversation, in everyone’s thoughts. “I saw it last night through Dajti” meant: “I was alive” or “I broke a law” or “I was thinking.” For five minutes. For an hour. For a whole day. For however long Dajti would be there.

  When my father became frustrated with the programmes on Albanian television he would declare, “I am going to see if we can get Dajti.” He would then climb up onto the roof, twist our antenna this way and that, and shout through the window, “How is it now, is it better?” To which I would answer, “Same as before.” A couple of minutes later, he would shout again: “What about now?” And I would shout back, “Gone! It’s completely gone! It was better before.” Then I would hear him swear, followed by metallic sounds that suggested he was still fiddling with the antenna. The more impatient he became, the less likely the signal was to return.

  In the summer the situation improved, at least in theory. With good weather, we had two options: Dajti and Direkti. Direkti, the direct signal, could be picked up from Italy, thanks to our proximity to the Adriatic. In my mind, Dajti was the god of the mountains and Direkti was the god of the sea. But Direkti was much more whimsical than Dajti. With Dajti, once you got the antenna right, you knew that the signal would be lost only at the time of the telegiornale, the Italian news programme. Direkti was deceptive. When things worked out, even the telegiornale was accessible, from beginning to end. On other days, Direkti went from being “a looking-glass,” as my father called it to indicate his satisfaction with the visibility, to absolutely nothing, a grey screen occupied by shaking spiderwebs.

  This meant that when there were important football matches on television, such as Juventus playing at the end of the Serie A season, my father had to face a dilemma: either go with Dajti and expect the signal to be reliable but not ideal or take his chances with the fickle “looking-glass” of Direkti. He often fell for the latter, but having to own the consequences of a potentially misleading decision made him extremely anxious. On such days, he climbed the roof with sadness, like someone about to confront an adversary whose superiority was known. “I’m going up to look at the antenna,” he would say, with resignation in his voice and occasionally a touch of despair. On the relation between my father and the antenna—the psychological dramas, the dynamic of attraction and repulsion they fostered, the subtle balance between triumph and defeat—depended every vital piece of information from abroad that my family received, from the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II to rumours of a break-up between Al Bano and Romina Power after the latest Sanremo festival.

  Without Dajti and Direkti, there was little to watch on television. On weekdays, the six p.m. story time and the animated film that followed were both a struggle. They coincided with Yugoslav basketball, and the only form of compromise with my father was to switch channels every five minutes. There was more on Sundays: puppet theatre at ten a.m., with a children’s film immediately after, then Maya the Bee on Macedonian TV. Then you just had to accept whatever luck brought: a programme of folk songs and dances from different regions of the country, a report about cooperatives that had exceeded the five-year-plan target, a swimming tournament, the weather forecast.

  Things got better when Foreign Languages at Home began to be broadcast at five p.m. The programme played daily on Albanian television and was therefore immune to the arbitrary power the antenna exercised on our lives. In addition to English, there was French, Italian, and also “Gymnastics Under Home Conditions.” I never tried the l
atter. We had plenty of exercise every morning at the start of classes, when the whole cohort of teachers and pupils gathered in the schoolyard to practise toe touching, arm rotations, and quad stretches, followed by swearing loyalty to the Party. But I followed all the language programmes with great enthusiasm, especially the Italian one. Imagine how much more I would enjoy the cartoons on Rai Uno, I told myself, if I could figure out what they were about.

  Foreign Languages at Home was the subject of intense discussion in the playground. There was always something to learn, not only about foreign languages but also about foreign cultures. I remember an intense discussion about shopping in England, as revealed in a supermarket scene where a mother read out a grocery list and her children had to identify the matching items on the shelves. Pasta, check. Bread, check. Toothpaste, check. Soft drinks, check. Beer, check.

  And so we discovered that there was no need to queue. That anyone could choose any food they liked. That the shelves were overflowing with goods, but customers in the shop bought so much they could not even carry it. That people presented no food vouchers and seemed to have no limits on what they could buy, and in what quantity. We wondered why, if people could purchase food anytime they wanted, they chose to stockpile it.

  Most puzzling of all was how each food item had its own label. Instead of displaying a generic name, like “toothpaste,” “pasta,” or “beer,” it contained what looked like the name or surname of a person: Barilla pasta, Heineken beer, or Colgate toothpaste. This also seemed to apply to the supermarket itself. Why couldn’t a shop simply be called Bread Shop, Meat Shop, Clothes Shop, or Coffee Shop?