Free Page 8

  “Imagine,” Besa said, “having a shop called Ypi’s Meat or Marsida’s Coffee or Besa’s Bread.”

  “Probably the names of the people who made them,” I pointed out. “You know, like we have plastic produced by the First of May brigade.”

  Others contested that interpretation. Teacher Nora explained that outside Albania, people never knew the names of those who made things, the names of the workers. She told us that in the West one knew only the names of the factories where they were made, the people who owned them, their children, and their children’s children. Like Dombey and Son.

  The next perplexing topic was the function of shopping trolleys.

  “The trolley was to carry children,” I said.

  “Food,” Marsida corrected me.

  “Children,” I insisted.

  “Well, it was clearly used for both,” Besa said. “Did you see what the children smuggled into the shopping trolley?” she added, with the air of someone who can distinguish the relevant from the trivial detail. “The mother only discovered it at the end, when she had to pay. I think it was a Coca-Cola can.”

  “Yes, it was,” Marsida said. “She still went ahead and bought it for the children. They said they were thirsty. Maybe the shop didn’t have any water. Maybe they don’t have everything after all.”

  “I think it’s a drink,” I almost whispered, as if I were revealing a secret. “Those cans you sometimes see on top of people’s shelves, they’re to hold drinks.”

  Then Flamur, who was feeding left-over bones to his favourite dog, Pelé, interrupted us. “Blah blah blah,” he mocked. “Of course Coca-Cola is a drink—everyone knows it. I’ve tasted it before. I once saw a tourist kid drop a can in the bin, and I collected it. It was still half full, so I tried it. It’s a bit like the red aranxhata they sell on the beach, but for tourists.”

  Everyone looked at him with suspicion.

  “Then he saw me. He looked at me with angry, flashing eyes,” Flamur continued. He slightly raised his voice, the same way he did when he started a story about his dad fighting the Ottomans. “He was angry. Very angry,” Flamur repeated. “But he didn’t hit me. Instead, he started crying, and I returned the can, I returned it immediately. He cried even more, kicked it, jumped on it, and ruined it. I left it there. It was useless, wouldn’t even stand on a shelf.”

  We wondered if it had really happened. Teacher Nora had said that most of the tourist children who visited Albania were from the bourgeois class. They were famously nasty, so nasty that the nastiness of Flamur, and even Arian, paled beside it. Who knew what they were capable of doing to a can?

  “Do you think Flamur really took a can from a tourist child?” Marsida asked after Flamur had left.

  “It’s hard to say,” Besa replied. “He does spend a lot of time rummaging in bins to find leftovers for his dogs. He didn’t steal it. The child had dropped it in the bin.”

  “I don’t think it’s a true story,” I said. “I’ve never met any tourist children.”

  In school we were told not to interact with people who did not look like us. We were advised to change our route if we stumbled on tourists, and to never, under any circumstances, accept anything they might offer, especially chewing-gum. “Above all, beware of the tourist carrying chewing-gum,” teacher Nora insisted.

  Sometimes, from a distance, we saw the tourist children who visited the beach in summer, next to the Adriatik, the hotel for foreigners. A long trench in the sand separated the local beach from the foreigners’ one, but there were no trenches in the water. On those occasions, my cousins and I would swim near the tourist beach and practise diving or water jumps or somersaults to grab their attention. Sometimes we would sing an English nursery rhyme we knew, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”: “Ban ban backship, eni eni you.” They would stare back, with a look between confused and frightened, and my cousins would then urge me to say hello in French. I refused, at first. I refused not because teacher Nora had told us not to speak to tourists—I didn’t think the restriction applied in shallow water, where no chewing-gum could be traded—but because I still hated speaking French. If it was so great to speak French, I thought, I shouldn’t be teased for it. I shouldn’t be asked to speak it only when tourists were involved.

  “I don’t want to say hello,” I protested. “We don’t know them. They’re not going to answer. Plus, how do you know they speak French? They could speak something else.” But my cousins called me a wimp and a coward, and to show them I was not a coward I said a reluctant “Ça va?” The tourist children kept staring. I changed to: “Ciao!” They rolled their eyes. I added the only sentence I knew in German: “Woher kommen sie?” Where do you come from? I should have said, “Where are you going?” because that was the point at which they left. My cousins then said, “See, you scared them. You should have smiled.” “Please come back,” I muttered to myself, seeing the children disappear behind large multicoloured towels. I hated to see them disappear. I hated them for not answering. The only thing I hated more was that I had succumbed to the pressure.

  The tourist children had bright, unusual toys that looked so different from ours that we sometimes wondered if they were toys at all. They splashed around on floating mattresses displaying characters we had never seen, had strangely shaped buckets and spades and exotic plastic material we had no word for. They smelled different, a smell that was enticing in an addictive way, one that made you want to follow them, to go and hug them so you could smell it some more. We always knew when there were tourist children nearby because the beach smelled weird, a hybrid of flowers and butter.

  I asked my grandmother what it was. She explained that they smelled of sun cream, a thick white liquid used to protect people from the sun. “We don’t have it,” she said. “We use olive oil. It’s healthier.”

  From that day on, I had a name for the smell. “They smell of sun cream,” I said to my cousins one day at the beach.

  “I can smell it now,” one of them replied. “I can smell sun cream. They went that way. Let’s go. Let’s follow them.”

  We followed them until they disappeared with their parents, onto a tour bus or into a restaurant we had no permission to enter. Then only questions were left. What do they read? Do they enjoy Alice in Wonderland, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, or The Adventures of Cipollino? Do they also have to collect chamomile flowers to help factories make medical herbs? Do they challenge each other on who knows more names of Greek gods? On who can remember more sites of ancient Roman battles? Are they inspired by Spartacus? Do they compete in Maths Olympiads? Do they want to conquer space? Do they like baklava?

  I thought about foreign children with curiosity, occasionally envy, but often also pity. I felt especially sorry for them on Children’s Day, 1 June, when I received presents from my parents and we went to eat ice cream by the beach and to visit the funfair. On that occasion, they also gave me a yearly subscription to several children’s magazines. It was through these magazines that I learned about the fate of other children around the world. The magazine Little Stars was for children from six to eight years old, and on Children’s Day it ran a cartoon called “Our 1 June and Theirs.” On one side there was a fat capitalist wearing a fat top hat buying ice cream for his fat son, and on the floor next to the shop’s entrance two ragged children and a caption: “1 June never comes for us.” On the other side, there were Socialist flags, happy children carrying flowers and presents, holding their parents’ hands, waiting to buy ice cream in front of a shop. “We love 1 June,” their caption read. The queue was very short.

  In the late eighties, I also started to receive the Horizon, for teenagers. I was still young for it, but my father loved it because it featured a maths and physics challenges section, as well as a regular column about scientific and astronomic curiosities. Occasionally, he had to be reminded that he had bought the magazine for me and needed to pass it on. The Horizon frequently depicted Western children—never in such detail as to exhaust all possible
questions about their lives, but enough to provide a sense of how different they were. Unlike my world, theirs was divided: between the rich and the poor, the bourgeois and the proletarian, the hopeful and the hopeless, the free and the shackled. There were privileged, entitled children who, like their bourgeois parents, had everything they wanted but never shared it with the less fortunate, whose hardship they ignored. There were also poor and oppressed children who had to sleep rough, whose parents could not afford to pay the bills at the end of the month, who had to beg for food in restaurants and train stations, who could not attend school regularly because they were forced to work, who dug diamonds in mines and lived in shantytowns. There were regular reports about the fate of children in places like Africa and South America, and reviews of books about the segregation of black children in the United States and about apartheid.

  We knew we would never meet these poor children, humiliated and oppressed by the capitalists, because they could never travel. We sympathized with their predicament but did not think we shared their fate. We knew it was difficult for us to travel abroad because we were surrounded by enemies. Moreover, our holidays were subsidized by the Party. Perhaps one day the Party would be powerful enough to have defeated all our enemies, and would pay for everyone to travel abroad too. In any case, we were already in the best place. They had nothing. We knew we did not have everything. But we had enough, we all had the same things, and we had what mattered most: real freedom.

  In capitalism, people claimed to be free and equal, but this was only on paper, because only the rich could take advantage of the rights available. Capitalists had made their money by stealing land and plundering resources all over the world, and by selling black people as slaves. “Do you remember Black Boy?” teacher Nora explained when we read Richard Wright’s autobiography in school. “In the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a poor black person cannot be free. The police are after him. The law works against him.”

  We had freedom for all, not just for the exploiters. We worked not for the capitalists but for ourselves, and we shared the products of our work. We didn’t know greed or have to feel envy. Everyone’s needs were satisfied, and the Party helped us develop our talents. If you were particularly gifted in maths, or dancing, or poetry, or whatever, you could go to the House of the Pioneers and find a science club, or a dancing group, or a literary circle in which to practise your skills.

  “Can you imagine, if your parents lived in capitalism, they would have to pay for all these things,” teacher Nora would say. “People work like dogs, and the capitalist doesn’t even give them what they deserve, because, otherwise, how would he make a profit? Which means that part of the time they work for nothing, like the slaves in ancient Rome. For the other part, they receive a salary, and if they wanted their children to develop their talents, they would have to pay for private lessons, which of course they can’t afford. What freedom is that?”

  The tourists, however, could afford everything. When they visited, they found all they needed in the “valuta” shop, where only foreign currency could be used. The valuta shop was the place where dreams came true. Although—according to teacher Nora—they were not dreams but mere capitalist aspirations. The valuta shop was right next to the Museum for Heroes of the Resistance. Elona and I went to take a look at it each time we visited the museum with our school: on 11 January for the Anniversary of the Republic, on 10 February to commemorate the Youth Resistance to the Fascists, on 22 April for Lenin’s birthday, on 1 May, on 5 May, on 10 July, when we celebrated the founding of the People’s Army, on 16 October for Enver Hoxha’s birthday, on 8 November for the Anniversary of the Party, and on 28 and 29 November for Independence. We called the woman who sat by the counter “the Medusa” because she had curly, unruly hair and a hostile look that made you freeze on the doorstep and think twice before entering. The Medusa always kept Zëri i Popullit on the counter, open to the same page, and stared at the entrance while munching sunflower seeds. She had an uneaten pile of seeds on the left side of the newspaper, and the shells of the seeds she had already eaten on the right side. She peeled and ate the seeds without looking, her eyes never leaving the entrance to the shop.

  When we went inside, she said nothing, but she stopped munching. She stared at us in silence for a few minutes. Then, if it was winter, she would say: “What do you want here? Have you got any dollars? No. Then off you go. Close the door. It’s cold.” If it was summer, she would say: “What do you want here? Have you got any dollars? No. Then off you go. Leave the door open. It’s hot.” After that, she returned to munching her sunflower seeds.

  We never left immediately. We stared at the objects on display. Coca-Cola cans to fill entire bookshelves, even after stripping them of all their books to make space. Roasted salted peanuts, which must have been like roasted salted sunflower seeds but even tastier—otherwise why would you only be able to buy them with dollars? A Philips colour television, which looked exactly like the one that belonged to the Meta family, the only people in my neighbourhood who had a colour TV. “Have you got tickets?” they joked each year on New Year’s Day when around forty children sat in front of their Philips television to watch the Turkish version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There was a black MZ motorbike, magnificently displayed at the centre of the shop; it occupied most of the space and forced you to walk around it to reach the counter, the same way you would have had to walk around Lenin’s tomb in Moscow to reach the mausoleum exit. There was also a red bra with which Elona had fallen in love, even though she didn’t have grown-up breasts. I liked the sun hat.

  Some of the goods in the valuta shop resembled those that lorry drivers or sailors brought back from their journeys abroad as souvenirs for their wives and children or for the wives and children of relatives and neighbours: Bic pens, Lux soap, and nylon stockings. In rarer cases, they brought more expensive goods: T-shirts, shorts, and swimwear, paraded on the beach in the summer, making the human models who wore them stand out because of the name of the brand they carried: “the green Speedo man” or “the red Dolphin girl.” “You look like a tourist,” people would say to their friends. Mostly, it was meant as a compliment. Sometimes, it came as a warning. Very rarely, it might be a threat.

  A tourist did not look like one of us. A tourist could not be one of us. A tourist appeared rarely but was easy to spot. A tourist dressed differently. A tourist had their hair styled in an unusual way: cut in strange shapes, or not cut at all, or recently cut at the border on behalf of our state—a modest price paid by world travellers to visit a country whose own citizens travelled the world only in thought.

  Tourists visited in the summer months. They roamed the streets during the siesta hour, accompanied by the chirping sound of crickets and the hazy look of locals rushing home to catch the last of their afternoon nap. They carried multicoloured rucksacks filled with small plastic water bottles which turned out to be too small once they discovered the extreme heat, a heat that suffocated all lingering associations with the Soviet Union and reminded them of the Middle East. They were interested in everything: the Roman amphitheatre, the Venetian tower, the harbour, the old city walls, the tobacco factory, the rubber-making factory, the schools, the Party headquarters, the dry-cleaning shops, the piles of rubbish awaiting collection, the queues, the street rats, the weddings, the funerals, the things that happened, the things that did not happen, the things that may or may not have happened. Tourists held Nikon cameras, intent on capturing our past greatness and our present misery, or our present greatness and the misery of our past, depending on their point of view. Tourists knew that the success of their cameras in capturing anything at all depended mostly on the benevolence of the local guides, who, unbeknownst to them, were often secret service recruits. Tourists did not know just how entirely it was in the guides’ hands.

  A tourist never came alone; instead, they always appeared as part of a group. Years later, I discovered that the groups were of two kinds: the realists and the dreamers.
The dreamers belonged to fringe Marxist-Leninist groups. They mostly came from Scandinavia and were furious with the social wreckage that was called social democracy. They brought sweets to offer locals, who rarely accepted. They worshipped our country as the only one in the world that had managed to build a principled, uncompromising Socialist society. They admired everything about us: the clarity of our slogans, the order in our factories, the purity of our children, the discipline of the horses who pulled our carriages, and the conviction of the peasants who travelled in them. Even our mosquitoes had something unique and heroic—the ways of their bloodsucking, which spared no one, including the tourists themselves. These tourist groups were our international comrades. They wondered how our model could be exported. They always waved and smiled, even from a distance. They believed in world revolution.

  Then there was the second group, the restless Westerners, bored of the beaches on Lake Balaton and in Bali, moaning about how Mexico and Moscow had been invaded by tourists. They had joined niche clubs, and exclusive tour operators now sold them the ultimate exotic adventure: a place in the heart of Europe, just over one hour by plane from Rome and two hours from Paris. A place nevertheless so remote, with its hostile mountains, its dreamy beaches, its inaccessible people, its confusing history, and its complicated politics, that only the most spirited traveller would dare to make the trip. They came to crack the code, to discover the truth. But it was a truth they had already agreed upon. They had talked about it while sipping cocktails in Bali and downing shots of vodka in Moscow. The truth was political. They had no political views but one: socialism was contrary to human nature, anywhere and in any form. They had always suspected it. Now they knew it. They waved, too, sometimes. They did not smile so often. They also carried sweets and wanted to talk. Sometimes they managed it. The next time they tried, nobody returned the wave, nobody was interested in sweets. They would never be able to guess if the locals who shared their views with them were random passers-by or secret service agents. It could have been either. They knew it would be hard to tell. But they always tried.