Free, p.13
Free, page 13
Then he returned to his room. An hour later he repeated the action, checking the news in the kitchen and stopping by the door to inform us of the new figure. Forty, he said. Later: Fifty. Each time, there was a sound from under the bed covers, like a cheer one tried to suppress. “It’s going up,” my grandmother whispered, pulling the duvet up slightly from the bed we shared, as if it were midnight. “I don’t think it will get to one hundred,” my father replied. At that point, the cheer became louder, and impossible to censor. “We must go back to sleep,” my grandmother said.
It was not a deep sleep. Just a light doze of the kind that one can order oneself to fall into, sometimes in the hope of reviving a pleasant dream, sometimes to suppress the reality that awaits. That time, the dream mixed up with the news. It was a dream about electoral turnout.
We wanted it to go up. But it had to go up slowly, not all at once. More importantly, it had to stop short of ninety-nine per cent. A turnout of close to one hundred, declared early in the day, would have meant that elections were neither free nor fair, that they were just as they had always been. In the past, on Election Day, everybody in my family was up at five in the morning. By six, they were already queuing at the voting booth. By seven, they had voted. By nine, the results had been announced. “Every vote of the people is a bullet to our enemy,” went the official slogan. My parents had figured that the earlier they showed up, the less likely they were to be suspected of reluctance to fire bullets.
Usually, we were among the first to arrive. The queue for voting was similar to that for milk; it started in the middle of the night, but with the difference that there were no bags, cans, or stones placed the night before to substitute for potential voters. Everyone was present in person. There was no loud shouting, no attempt to identify people you knew, and it did not feel as if things were about to descend into chaos from one moment to the next. The orderliness and sense of calm anticipation displayed by the whole thing had led me to conclude that voting was intrinsically more rewarding than buying milk. The mood certainly seemed brighter. In my parents’ case, it was so bright that the only way I thought I could match their enthusiasm for voting was to come up with something only I could do. Sometimes I recited a poem for the Party in front of the election panel, and sometimes I prepared a flower bouquet to place in front of the ballot box, right next to Uncle Enver’s photo.
The last elections I remembered under socialism occurred in 1987. I wrote the poem I would read myself, because if I was too young to vote, I thought, the poem could be considered my bullet. But I agonized over what kind of missile I had come up with, and if it could be considered sufficiently powerful to destroy our enemies. My grandmother reassured me of the poem’s quality, but my parents tried to moderate my expectations by explaining that they did not know if there would be time to recite it. It would depend on the queue, they said.
It had still been dark when we left the house. I felt anxious and tightened my grip on my father’s right hand, which was sweaty, like mine. We waited in the queue outside the voting office, and when the booth opened and our turn came, a panel member handed my father a white sheet with a typed list of names from the Democratic Front, the only organization that was allowed to file candidates. Without looking, my father marked the sheet, folded it twice, and dropped it into the red box. His eyes were fixed on the panel member, who, in the meantime, was preparing a sheet for my mother, the next person in line. Then my father greeted him with a nod of the head. The man on the panel answered with a raised fist. I raised my fist too, as I always did if I saw another fist raised.
I don’t have any memory of reading my poem. I must have changed my mind about its quality at the last minute, or maybe my parents found a cunning way to remove me from the premises without humiliating themselves even further.
Now, with free and fair elections, everything was different. We didn’t have to wake up early. There would be no queue. Nobody would care if we voted or not. We had the whole day to vote, and if we did not feel like it, we could choose not to vote at all. Everyone lingered in bed, as if they were still deciding whether it was worth disrupting one’s sleep to go to the polls and, if so, who to vote for.
The evening before, everyone had lined up the clothes they would wear. My grandmother, who I had only ever seen dressed in black because she was in mourning for my grandfather’s death, had pulled a blouse with white polka dots out of a wooden trunk. The last election she’d dressed up for had been in 1946. She’d also worn a hat then, she said, and a pearl necklace. She joked that the hat was probably still hanging in the wardrobe of the National Film Studio, where most of the clothes confiscated from bourgeois families had ended up.
My parents debated whether to vote early or to wait. Nobody could predict how the elections would unfold. The 1946 elections kept coming up. They had not ended well. Shortly afterwards, both my grandfathers had been arrested and the rest of the family deported. Could history repeat itself?
“It was a different world then,” my father pointed out. “The Soviets had won the war in 1946. Now they’ve lost it.”
“The Soviets, yes,” my mother replied, visibly irritated. “The Soviets were finished this time last year. Where were you instead?” she asked. The question was rhetorical because she then adjusted her voice to deal the final blow: “Preparing the 1 May parade.”
My father shook his head with mysterious conviction. “Enver is finished. The Party is finished,” he insisted. “We’re not going back.”
A few weeks before, the statue of Enver Hoxha in the capital’s main square had been toppled. Students had started a hunger strike to demand renaming the university, at that point still called “Enver Hoxha.” As Party officials hesitated on the best way to respond, proposing a referendum of all the students, conflicts continued to escalate.
But the Party was not finished. From the Party, it would soon become a party. One of many. It would contest for seats in Parliament with other groups, each of which would have its own candidates, its own newspapers, its own programmes, its own list of names. Some of these names were of people who had once been members of the Party but had recently switched camps. Other people remained loyal. The fact that the Party could break up and multiply like that, that it could be considered both the cure and the disease, both the root of all evil and the source of all hope, gave it a mythical quality that would be considered for many years to come the cause of all misfortune, a dark spell cast to make freedom look like tyranny and to give necessity the semblance of choice. Setting yourself free from its all-encompassing presence was like chewing on the rope you suddenly noticed between your teeth. The Party had gone, but it was still there. The Party was above us, but it was also deep inside. Everyone, everything, came from it. Its voice had changed; it had acquired a different shape and spoke a new language. But what was the colour of its soul? Had it ever become what it was always meant to be? Only history would tell, but at that point, history had not yet been made. All we had were new elections.
“Voting is a duty,” Nini had said the night before the opening of the polls. “If we don’t vote, we let other people decide for us. It ends up being the same as before, the same as slipping a single list of candidates into the ballot box without reading it.”
I thought about her words on the morning of the election. Why did my parents hesitate to vote? Why did they not simply go out to savour the freedom they’d been longing for? The staged yawning, the theatrical sleep, and the faux indecision all gave the impression that what they had wanted all these years was not for concrete things to happen but for abstract possibilities to remain available. Now that something specific was within reach, my family feared losing control. Instead of exercising the freedom of choice that elections were assumed to bring, they tried to keep that choice free from contamination. Perhaps they wanted to avoid committing to a specific individual or policy that might turn out to disappoint. Or perhaps they worried that if the same results were brought about through the actions of millions of other voters, who had different principles and motives, their hopes would turn into illusion.
My brother and I waited a little longer and charged into my parents’ room. We found them lying stubbornly in bed, stiff, wrapped in a blanket of refusal to face reality. Covered in white sheets from head to toe, they looked like hospital patients who’d just been drugged in preparation for surgery. We went closer, studying them with bewilderment. When they noticed that we were there, they rolled over onto their other sides. Then a voice came from under the sheets: “Go away. It’s not time.”
We returned to our room, and I started listening to the radio. The news programme announced that groups of people in remote villages of the south had occupied the streets; they were holding photos of Enver Hoxha, shouting pro-Communist slogans, and warning voters that it would not be long before the country came to regret this day. Journalists labelled these nostalgic protests “counterprotests,” to distinguish them from the real protests against the government that had taken place in the weeks before. “Peasants,” my grandmother commented. “What do they know?”
The groups, composed of peasants, workers, and members of the militant Communist youth, were in fact officially called “Volunteers for the Defence of the Memory of Enver Hoxha.” They had started to assemble a few weeks prior to the election, when Hoxha’s statue had been destroyed. “Busts may be removed, but the figure of Enver Hoxha cannot be toppled,” the Party headquarters had stated in response. But the counterprotesters could not halt the course of events. Like people hanging off cliffs, they clung to the few remaining symbols of the country’s Communist legacy. They feared the future too, in part. But unlike my family, many of them still identified with the past. The Party had always spoken in their name and acted on their behalf. My family was a victim of state violence. They had been the midwives.
The counterprotests would last only a few more months. What had started as a series of reforms was increasingly labelled as revolution. In any other revolution, there would have been oppressed and oppressors, winners and losers, victims and perpetrators. Here, the chain of responsibility was so intricate that there could be only one camp. Executing leaders, imprisoning spies, or sanctioning former Party members would have fuelled the conflicts even further, sharpening the desire for revenge, spilling more blood. It seemed more sensible to erase responsibility altogether, to pretend everyone had been innocent all along. The only wrongdoers it was legitimate to name were those who had already died—those who could neither explain nor absolve themselves. All the rest turned into victims. All the survivors were winners. With no perpetrators, only ideas were left to blame. Communism was considered a vision so hopeless for some, so murderous for others, that the sole mention of the word would be met with either scorn or hatred. This revolution, the velvet one, was a revolution of people against concepts.
When my family decided the time to vote had come, the polls were about to close. We rushed outside, where many people were greeting each other by raising two fingers in the shape of a V, the new symbol of freedom and democracy. My brother and I found it surprisingly easy to replace the fist with the two fingers. My mother had clearly practised before. My father seemed hesitant at first. My grandmother, whose upper-class demeanour had never really gone away, probably thought it all beneath her. Or perhaps, like the Allied forces that had invented it, the V sign hadn’t reached Albania in 1946.
Campaigners on the street handed us stickers with the logo of the opposition party, a blue P, which stood for “Party,” curled inside a D, which stood for “Democratic,” as if it had found shelter there. I had never seen stickers before. I carried several on my chest and left some on the shop windows, creating a welcome optical illusion that the shops had something to sell. I also stuck one or two on the doors of the very few cars parked along the road. When we entered the voting room, my brother tried to place a sticker near the ballot box. That was met with disapproval, so he had to content himself with surreptitiously gluing it under the table.
The results came the morning after. The opposition’s defeat was crushing. The Communists, the future Socialist Party, emerged triumphant, with more than sixty per cent of the vote. My mother declared that the elections had been neither free nor fair. The entire campaign, she said, had been organized by the Party. It was absurd to expect it to both regulate a competition between itself and other parties and try to win the election at the same time. The whole thing was a fraud.
That turned out to be harsh, or at least harsh by the standards of the tourists who had in the meantime descended on our country, armed with notepads and television cameras, and who now went by the name of the “international community.” Their official explanation, which set a precedent for official explanations that were considered authoritative only if they came from the international community, was different. They argued that the opposition parties had had little time to prepare and had struggled to file candidates in rural areas, and that since the old dissidents had been jailed and only recently released, it had been too late for them to run for office.
The months that followed saw protests and unrest increase everywhere. In the north, unidentified shots during one of the many demonstrations killed four opposition activists. The transition to liberalism was now sealed with blood. Democracy had its martyrs. A few weeks later, mine workers, organized in newly independent trade unions, called a hunger strike. The character of their demands was economic rather than political. Both the Party and the opposition now agreed on the need for reforms; they differed only on the mode of implementation. In place of the old Socialist slogans, a new formula emerged, one whose purpose was to explain and reassure, to warn and prescribe, to rouse the spirits and soothe the injuries. That formula captured everything, from the tragic reality of food shortages and factory closures to the perceived necessity of political reforms and market liberalism. It was made of two words: shock therapy.
The term came from psychiatry: shock therapy involves sending electric currents through a patient’s brain to relieve the symptoms of severe mental illness. In this case, our planned economy was considered to be the equivalent of madness. The cure was a transformative monetary policy: balancing budgets, liberalizing prices, eliminating government subsidies, privatizing the state sector, and opening up the economy to foreign trade and direct investment. The market’s behaviour would then adjust itself, and the emerging capitalist institutions would become efficient without great need for central coordination. A crisis was foreseen, but people had spent a lifetime making sacrifices in the name of better days to come. This would be their last effort. With drastic measures and goodwill, the patient would soon recover from the shock and enjoy the benefits of the therapy. Speed was of the essence. Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek replaced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels almost overnight.
“Freedom works,” U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told a spontaneous crowd of more than three hundred thousand gathered in the capital to welcome the first state visit by an American official. The spirit of the new laws, Baker emphasized, announcing the support of the United States for the transition to freedom, mattered as much as their letter. Both his government and private American organizations would be involved to help get things right. They would help us construct “democracy, markets, and a constitutional order.”
The new government did not last long. Pressure from the international community, increasing looting and violence on the streets, and deteriorating economic conditions forced the Party to call new elections. Within a year, the country was again in campaign mode. This time, the forces advocating swift change had longer to prepare.
One afternoon, Bashkim Spahia, a local doctor and former Party member turned opposition candidate, knocked on our door, visibly agitated. He was wearing a charcoal-grey jacket cut in the style favoured by Leonid Brezhnev; under it he had on a purple T-shirt with pink writing across in the middle, above matching purple trousers. The writing was in English. It read: “Sweet dreams, my lovely friends.”
Bashkim asked if my father owned any grey socks he could borrow for a few months. He had been knocking on every door, he said. He explained that for the election campaign, the U.S. State Department had distributed brochures containing important advice on what aspiring members of Parliament ought to wear. “Apparently, only dark socks are acceptable, grey or black, but better grey,” he added, visibly distressed. “I only have white socks. They also say I need a sponsour for my campaign. What sponsour are they asking about? I don’t even have socks to wear!” he exclaimed in despair.
My parents invited him in for coffee. They tried to explain that the advice could not have come from the State Department; perhaps it came from the U.S. embassy. Even then, the embassy might be flexible. Bashkim shook his head. He was inconsolable. His son had translated the leaflets, he insisted, and had assured him that they bore the imprint of the Department of State. He would never be able to win his seat back from those dirty Communist bastards without the right colour socks.
On the night his victory was announced, we spotted him in a television debate wearing the thick grey woollen socks my grandmother had knitted for my father. My family was particularly proud to have contributed to Bashkim’s victory. They bore no grudges; they were happy to overlook the fact that his wife, Vera, had once complained to the local council that my parents were reluctant to clean the street on Sundays. Nor did they hold it against Bashkim that he never returned my father’s socks. Within a short period of time, our local doctor went on to become not only a charismatic politician but also a highly successful businessman. He swapped “Sweet dreams” for a Rolex watch and replaced the Brezhnev jacket with Hugo Boss. I bet he started wearing silk socks too. We rarely saw him again, and even when we did, it was only from a distance, as he slammed the door of his dark, shiny Mercedes Benz, surrounded by mighty bodyguards. It would have been imprudent, as well as implausible, to get closer and accuse him of wrongfully appropriating my father’s socks.
