Free, p.14
Free, page 14
12
A LETTER FROM ATHENS
SOMETIME IN JANUARY 1991, before the first free and fair election, my grandmother received a letter from Athens signed by someone she had never heard of, a woman called Katerina Stamatis. Before we opened it, we brought the envelope to show our neighbours. A small crowd gathered in the Papases’ house. Donika, who had worked in the post office all her life, was handed the letter. She stood in the middle of her living room, surrounded by curious faces, their gazes fixed on the thin, creamy paper, where Greek characters written in ink lined up like hieroglyphs of the future.
I knew that Donika could not read Greek. Only a few weeks before, she had asked my grandmother to translate the list of ingredients on the back of a bottle containing a yellow liquid. It had been brought to her as a present by a cousin who had recently travelled to Athens. She had washed her hair with what she assumed was foreign lemon shampoo, then felt an unusual tingle which made her head itchy. My grandmother’s translation revealed the cause to be an exotic, previously unknown substance called dishwasher liquid.
Donika studied the envelope quietly for several minutes, inspecting the front and back. Her solemn pose cast an expectant silence over the room. Only the sound of wood crackling and burning in the stove could be heard. She put the envelope under her nose and sniffed it in various places, each sniff followed by a deep breath out. She shook her head, then clicked her tongue with disapproval. Then she inserted her index finger under the flap, holding the outside part under her thumb. She dragged both fingers along the edges of the envelope, with a slow, sullen movement and a frown of concentration, as if the act of sliding caused her a pain she was obliged to contain. Once the inspection had been concluded, she looked up with an expression of dismay that, as she began to speak, slowly converted to anger.
“It’s been opened,” she announced, looking towards the door. “They’ve opened it.”
The silence in the room transformed into a collective murmur.
“Bastards,” my mother finally came out with.
“They haven’t just opened it once. Several times,” explained Donika.
“Yes, obviously,” her husband, Mihal, retorted. “It’s not like they’ve hired new people to work in the post office. They just do what they’re used to doing.”
Some neighbours nodded. Others disagreed.
“Post office workers should be instructed to stop opening letters,” Donika replied.
“Privacy,” my mother said. “Privacy is so important. We never had any privacy before.” Then she suggested that nothing would happen before the post office was privatized. Only privatization could respect privacy.
Everyone agreed that privacy was important. “Not just important—it’s your right. It’s a right,” Donika explained, her voice charged with all the wisdom and authority she had accumulated during the many years spent opening envelopes.
After that, my grandmother was invited to read the letter out loud, translating it word for word. The sender, Katerina Stamatis, claimed to be the daughter of Nikos, a business associate of my great-grandfather’s. Nikos, she wrote, had been with my great-grandfather when he’d died in Salonica in the mid-fifties. The woman wondered if my grandmother would be interested in taking legal action to reclaim the properties and land that had belonged to her family in Greece, and she offered help in pursuing the matter. My grandmother said the surname sounded vaguely familiar. It was no scam.
Nini had last seen her father at her wedding, in Tirana, in June 1941. After the war, “the roads were closed,” as she put it, and although she remembered receiving a telegram from Athens announcing her father’s death, she had not been granted a passport to attend the funeral; nor did she know anything about the circumstances of his passing. She recalled how she had learned of the death, almost forty years ago, at a time when she was working in the fields during the day and giving French lessons to the young son of a prominent Party official in the evening. On the day she received news about her father’s death, they were going over possessives, and when asked to make a sentence using “your,” the little boy said: “Your eyes look red.” That little boy later became a prominent Party official himself, the same Comrade Mehmet who was on the panel that gave me permission to start school early.
In her letter, Katerina wrote touchingly about the loyalty of her father, Nikos, to my great-grandfather. She recalled how she had promised Nikos on his deathbed to contact my grandmother, should circumstances in Albania ever change. The affair, she added less emotionally, would be very lucrative for both families. She was prepared to host my grandmother in Athens, accompany her to the relevant archives, and assist her in contacting lawyers who would help investigate the matter.
My grandmother reacted to the news as if she had rehearsed for the part all her life, knowing that it was just that: a part that at some point she would be asked to play. Her mind turned to a different kind of financial consideration. Ever since obtaining permission from the Party to build a private house on the street where I grew up, my parents had been heavily in debt. They owed cash to everyone: my uncle, my mother’s colleagues, and some distant relatives in other towns. That day, Nini and my parents sat down to discuss with the neighbours whether it was likely that my grandmother would get the visa, and to make various calculations: how much money my family still owed, what my parents had left over at the end of each month, what my grandmother’s pension amounted to, and whether she could afford to make the journey to Greece. They laid out as much detailed information as they could, and it soon became clear that our savings barely sufficed to cover any unexpected expenses for even a day in Athens, let alone the cost of the flights and the visa application fee, as well as the inevitable other travel contingencies for a two-week trip.
In the past, my grandmother had shown me a document from when our country was still a kingdom, with a black-and-white photo of herself stapled on cardboard above a few lines with information about her height, hair and eye colour, place and date of birth, and birthmarks. The passport was kept in the same drawer that stored the Eiffel Tower postcard and my grandfather’s letter to Enver Hoxha after his release from prison. My grandmother’s face in the photograph had a serious expression which would have been considered pompous if she had looked more than seventeen years old. Her hair was cut extremely short, in a style intended to suppress the impression that it was any style at all. Her lips were tightly clenched in what seemed like a concerted attempt to suppress a smile. Her whole pose conveyed an effort to convince the viewer that the answer “female,” after the question concerning gender, was entirely coincidental, if not some kind of administrative error.
“This is what we need,” my grandmother had often said. “This is called a passport.” Passports, she had explained, decided whether roads were open or closed. If you happened to have a passport, you could travel. If you did not, you were stuck. Only a few people in Albania could apply for a passport, usually to travel for work. And since the Party decided what counted as work, we simply had to wait. “You can add a child’s photograph to it,” she had added. “If I ever receive one for a trip, I will take you with me.”
In December 1990, it became clear that what my family had been waiting for was not for the Party to authorize our passports but for those passports to survive the decline of the Party, just as they had survived the exile of the king. But when the letter from Athens arrived, and I overheard the grown-ups in Donika’s living room make their patient calculations about whether my grandmother and I could afford the journey, a new feeling of confusion took hold of me. I discovered that being in possession of a passport had never been enough, that the passport was only the first and most immediate obstacle in a series that became increasingly abstract, and increasingly removed from us. For the roads to really open, we needed a visa, the issuing of which, it turned out, could not be guaranteed either by the old Party, which was on its last legs, or by the new parties that had recently formed. Yet more upsetting was the fact that even if we succeeded in obtaining a passport and a visa, neither came with any funding for the trip. How were we then supposed to travel abroad? It took a surprisingly long time to reach the logical conclusion. We could not.
A few days passed, and the letter from Athens, carefully folded back into its envelope, found its place on the low table in our living room, next to a vase and a packet of cigarettes we kept there to offer guests. Nobody had the courage to put it in the drawer, since in that drawer only our past lived, and we liked to think of the letter from Athens not as the past but as the present, even the future, though a distant one. My mother looked after it like a recently domesticated animal that retains the capacity to bite. She cautiously wiped the dust off the table and ensured that no drops of water from the flower vase would fall on the letter, which we now called “Keti,” after its sender. The rest of us wouldn’t go close. We tiptoed around it, occasionally gave it a furtive glance, but mostly we pretended to ignore its presence. Once or twice, it became the trigger of family arguments about what form the response should take so as not to immediately foreclose the possibility of future travel, the occasion of reprimands about what we could have done to better manage our finances in the past, and the source of speculations as to whether there was someone who might loan us money to whom we were not already in debt.
JUST WHEN WE HAD abandoned hope, the solution was provided by my other grandmother, Nona Fozi. She had come to visit for my brother’s birthday, and when she noticed Keti lying on the table, she asked what had come of our preparations for the trip to Athens. Nini sighed.
“It’s harder for us to go to Athens than it was for Gagarin to go into orbit,” my father joked.
“Comrade Stamatis has promised to pay for the ticket,” I interrupted to explain, anxiously. “We managed to find money for the visa. But we can’t travel all the way to Greece without any money as backup, in case something goes wrong.”
“Mrs. Stamatis,” my mother corrected me. “Not Comrade. She’s not your comrade. The rest is true.” She then turned to her mother.
Nona Fozi left the house in haste, before she had time to finish her coffee or eat her portion of the birthday cake. She returned half an hour later with something tightly gripped in her right fist, which she waved from a distance like a Communist salute. When she reached the table where Keti lay, she opened her hand and, with immaculate precision and a proud look in her eyes, dropped five Napoleonic gold coins onto the envelope. They fell to the table with a tinkling sound, a far cry from the thud our leks made when they dropped on the floor, a sound as foreign and removed from us as the coins’ possible source. Nobody had ever known that Nona Fozi still owned gold. My mother had sometimes wondered if her parents had hidden some gold before the family’s belongings were expropriated. She doubted it, she’d said, since even when they were desperately hungry, the gold reserves were mentioned purely hypothetically, as if the mere idea sufficed to fill their stomachs. Now Nona Fozi said that she had tried to save some gold from being confiscated and had kept it safe for the day when the roads would open. “There,” she told Nini, with the visible satisfaction of someone whose foresight has been proved right. “Now you can travel. Inshallah your gold will multiply.”
My father took the coins to the bank to be converted into paper money. Soon after, he returned with a hundred-dollar bill he had received in exchange. Intense discussions followed about where to hide the note so that it would neither be spent nor get lost. At one point there were fifteen neighbours crammed into our living room, volunteering to lend us wallets of different periods and sizes, all of which, after careful inspection, were declared unsafe because “everybody knows the West is full of pickpockets.” After ruling out various options—the bottom of the suitcase, the pages of a book, the inside of an amulet—a unanimous decision was reached to sew the bill into the hem of my grandmother’s skirt, with the recommendation that she take the skirt off only for sleeping and never wash it.
On the day of our departure, the whole road came to bid us farewell, each family of neighbours contributing some item we might need for the journey: byrek wrapped in newspaper, garlic bulbs to bring good luck, the names (but not the addresses) of long-lost relatives to look up in case the Stamatis family failed to show up. In the car, my grandmother kept rearranging her skirt in order to ensure that the one-hundred-dollar bill was still there. She did this with a dignified expression and a fake half-smile that said: “I am fully aware that a lady doesn’t walk into an airport fiddling with her skirt.” At one point in the departures area, our greatest fear seemed to have materialized. “I can’t feel anything,” Nini said in a panicked voice. We rushed to the bathroom, and since she couldn’t bend to look through the minuscule hole in the hem, I had to stretch out on the floor to see if the note was still there; it was, only slightly wrinkled, as if to manifest its disappointment about leaving the bank only to end up inside my grandmother’s skirt.
The departure lounge in the airport was largely empty. There were only a few foreigners waiting for their flights and purchasing items from the small store located at the entrance, which looked similar to the valuta shop but with the difference that you could pick out items from the shelves yourself. My grandmother commented that the shop assistant smiled like a spy. “How do spies smile?” I asked her. “Like this,” she replied, making a grimace with her mouth without showing her teeth. “It looks like a normal smile,” I said. “Exactly,” my grandmother replied. “That’s the point.”
Scattered around the place were police officers in blue uniforms. One agent looked at the sticker on the passport, which I had learned was our visa, then stamped it. Others waited for us while we deposited our bag to be searched. “Bastards!” I whispered, recalling my mother’s reaction when she’d discovered that the letter from Athens had been opened. Nini looked perplexed.
“Nobody cares about privacy in this country, do they?” I said after the inspection was finished. “I guess they haven’t hired new people to work at the airport.”
On the plane I saw a plastic bag for the first time in my life. The air hostess asked if we were new to air travel, then handed it to me with instructions to use it if I needed to vomit. I spent the rest of the journey asking myself whether I was ready to throw up, and I was concerned at the end that it hadn’t happened. We were served lunch in plastic containers, but we had our own byreks to eat. We saved the lunch boxes in case we were hungry later, although also because the plastic cutlery and plates looked like nothing we had seen before and we wanted to bring them back home to use for special occasions. “So pretty,” my grandmother commented. “They didn’t make them like this before the war. I don’t remember this material.”
When we arrived in Athens, my grandmother encouraged me to start a diary. I made a list of all the new things I had discovered for the first time, meticulously recording them: the first time I felt air-conditioning on the palms of my hands; the first time I tasted bananas; the first time I saw traffic lights; the first time I wore jeans; the first time I did not need to queue to enter a shop; the first time I encountered border control; the first time I saw queues made of cars instead of humans; the first time I sat down on a toilet instead of squatting; the first time I saw people following dogs on a leash instead of stray dogs following people; the first time I was given actual chewing-gum rather than just the wrapper; the first time I saw buildings made of different shops and shop windows bursting with toys; the first time I saw crosses on graves; the first time I stared at walls covered by adverts rather than anti-imperialist slogans; the first time I admired the Acropolis, but only from the outside because we could not afford the entrance ticket. I also described at length my first encounter with tourist children as a tourist child myself, when I learned with surprise that they did not recognize the names of Athena and Ulysses, and they laughed because I did not recognize the image of an apparently famous mouse called Mickey.
Our hosts, Katerina and her husband, lived in a rooftop flat in Ekali, a wealthy suburb in northern Athens, where spacious gardens with neatly cut grass and swimming pools could be seen through the gates that separated their villas from the world outside. The Stamatis had no swimming pool, but they had something even more eccentric: five different-sized fridges, scattered in several rooms, not one of which was a Yugoslav Obodin. Two of the five contained only drinks, and one contained only soft drinks, including Coca-Cola, which was not distributed simply in the cans I was familiar with, but also in plastic bottles. I developed a habit of waking in the night to open the fridge and drink Coca-Cola, partly because I found the taste addictive but mostly because I could never decide if the drink in the can tasted exactly the same as that in the bottle and, if so, why both were sold. Our hosts had encouraged us to help ourselves to food and drink whenever we felt like it, but my grandmother had severely prohibited me from doing so and instructed me never to ask for treats. She pinched my thigh under the table if she noticed I was about to request an extra banana or glass of soft drink; or if I was farther away from her, she muttered something in Albanian behind her teeth, clenched in a pretend smile adopted to mislead others about the nature of our exchange. Like a spy, I thought. As for her, she barely ate. This, in turn, prompted Katerina’s husband, Yiorgos, the largest man I had ever seen, who owned a factory for making loofah sponges and had acquired the shape of a loofah sponge himself, to regularly exclaim over meals: “Forty-five years of Hoxha’s rule have contracted your stomachs to the size of an olive!”
We visited Salonica and found the old French lycée where my grandmother had studied. The building now housed company offices. To me, it looked like a bank, similar to those I had seen in Western films. Nini remembered one by one the names of the most popular boys in her class; she had shared cigars with them during breaks. She also remembered her old teachers, in particular a certain Monsieur Bernard, who had forecast that her future would always be bright if she did not smile too much and kept her hair short. She had rigorously stuck to both pieces of advice, she said, but it turned out that Monsieur Bernard’s prediction was a little off.
