Free, p.19
Free, page 19
These new ideas were all about freedom, though no longer the freedom of the collective—collective had in the meantime become a dirty word—but of the individual. There was this lingering suspicion, or perhaps residual cultural memory, that without social control, greater individual freedom would entail the freedom of individuals to harm themselves. That social control, it was now assumed, could no longer be entrusted to the state. This gave greater urgency to the need to embrace civil society. Civil society was supposed to be outside the state but also something that might replace it; it was supposed to emerge organically but also had to be stimulated; it was supposed to bring harmony while acknowledging that some differences could never be resolved. Civil society was made of many different community groups and organizations, which sprang up like friendships in a Socialist queue, some as a result of local initiatives but most with help from our foreign friends. One of the problems of our country, one often heard, was that we didn’t have a functioning civil society. It wasn’t clear if we had had it in the past and it had been captured by the Party, like Cronus swallowing his children at birth, or if we ought to create it from scratch. In any case, it felt safer to proceed as if both were required, getting Cronus to vomit his children back out and producing the vibrant social life that would enable individuals not just to organize spontaneously, exchange ideas, interact with one another, and create spaces for both mutual learning and commercial exchanges but also to protect themselves from the upcoming dangers.
My teenage years were years of hyperactivism in civil society. Like many others, I was not blind to the benefits. Those were both spiritual and material. With the debating teams of the Open Society Institute, for example, you could discuss such motions as “Capital punishment is justified” and learn about the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Debating “Open societies require open borders,” you could learn about the function of the World Trade Organization. With the Action Plus information campaigns about AIDS, you could kill an afternoon eating free peanuts and drinking Coca-Cola in the former ping-pong room of the Palace of Sports. With the Friends of Esperanto, there were promises of travelling to Paris. With the Red Cross, one could hang around when distributing groceries to families in need and get a free packet of rice. This was different from the rice we used to borrow from our neighbours: firstly, there was more of it; secondly, it came from the West; and thirdly, it contained a “use by” date, which informed you of when you were supposed to eat it, usually the week before.
My friend Marsida started a Koran reading group. Her family had left Albania on the Vlora but been shipped back, like everyone else. When her father’s shoe workshop was converted into a nightclub, he lost his job and decided to train to become an imam, following in his father’s footsteps. Marsida taught me the Surah Al-Ikhlas:
Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Raheem
Qul huwa Allahu ahad
Allahu assamad
Lam yalid walam yulad
Walam yakul-lahoo kufuwan ahad.*
One of the best surahs to learn, she said, was the declaration of the attributes of God: unity, authority, and eternity. It took twelve seconds to say it out loud but, according to the Prophet, reciting it was the equivalent of knowing one-third of the Koran. When she translated it, and I learned that Allah is the one to whom we turn for support, I decided to join the mosque so I could hear more about the Muslim God.
“Did you pray for me to find a job?” my father joked when I told him that I’d added the mosque to the list of my civil society activities.
“It won’t help,” I replied. “You need to change the font on your CV. You need to switch from Times New Roman to Garamond.”
It worked. I don’t know if it was the prayer or the change of font—or perhaps my mother’s new political connections—but my father was offered a job around the time of my fourteenth birthday. He was hired to manage Plantex, a state company that had previously dealt with the export of medicinal plants but whose immediate target was the reduction of its huge debt.
My father accepted the job after receiving multiple reassurances that his predecessor had taken care of all redundancies. He was excited about the prospect and felt ready to tackle the challenge.
His post-Communist record in handling the finances of our family spoke for itself. A few weeks prior to his hiring by Plantex, he had managed to pay back the money we had borrowed when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter on 4 November 1980. I remember the date because this is how my family recorded the last loan my uncle had made.
When I think about it now, my father’s professional transition from planting trees to raising money strikes me as a bit like sending Pinocchio to the Field of Wishes. But there was nothing especially arrogant or unusual about the confidence he felt; his attitude to finance was one the entire country shared.
We had no savings in 1993. Lending between relatives and neighbours was slowly disappearing, in part because there was now the possibility of travelling abroad or of spending what one saved, which had seldom been the case in the past. And in part because people’s incomes had started to differ sharply, so there was a risk that knocking on someone’s door to ask for help might single you out as a loser. What used to be called “workplace lotteries,” a form of credit pulled together through voluntary contributions from salaries to help colleagues buy a washing machine or a television set, was also disappearing. Personal transactions were anonymized; lending companies and insurance agencies were on the rise. My family didn’t trust these companies enough to deposit any savings with them, or to rely on them for loans. “Do you remember the chapter on bankruptcies in César Birotteau?” my grandmother would say, as if citing fictional characters from Balzac’s Comédie Humaine constituted definitive proof of the immorality of the credit system. My mother had more nuanced views on the topic. It would have been fine, she suggested, if we also owned investment real estate, like her family had done in the past. Later on, she changed her mind, but in the meantime, we continued to store the little money we saved in the inside pocket of my grandfather’s old coat, “to bring good luck.”
The coat was one of the few things that worked the same way under capitalism as it had under socialism. We kept ourselves afloat. My grandmother started giving children private French and Italian lessons. Word soon got around that she had not learned her languages with the help of songs and films, like everybody else, but had studied in a French lycée. As a result, there was soon more demand for her lessons than she could satisfy. Our bedroom was transformed into a classroom, complete with folding tables and chairs, an easel, chalk, and verbs that stayed permanently conjugated on the board, as if to immortalize the actions they described: je viens d’oublier; tu viens d’oublier; il / elle vient d’oublier. I felt as if I had taken up permanent residence in school. My father collected the cash at the end of each lesson, combining grace with authority in soliciting late payments, and managing our finances with a disciplined frugality one would have never in the past associated with him. My grandmother thought he had a natural talent for business, just as much as my mother. In reality, he was terrified of debt. He used to say that debt is like a beast who sleeps in socialism, like everything else, but stays awake in capitalism. We had to kill it, before it killed us. He gave himself no rest until we had repaid all the money we owed. Once he’d eliminated one species of beast, he felt ready to face the next. Hence his enthusiasm for the next heroic mission: saving Plantex.
My mother bought him a black tie decorated with tiny white elephants in the second-hand market, and mended my grandfather’s jacket and trousers. On his first day of work, my grandmother, who had never before shown any religious inclination, made him kiss the Koran three times before leaving the house, “just to be on the safe side.” Between our recent financial record, the elephants on the tie, the good-luck outfit he wore to the office, and the respect paid to Allah, there was only one front left from which misfortune could strike: his lack of proficiency in English.
Initially, this seemed like a trivial worry. My father was fluent in five languages. He spoke French, which he had learned as a child, like everyone else in the family; he had mastered Italian by reading smuggled copies of Pirandello’s Novelle per un Anno; and he had won Russian competitions, back when our country still maintained good relations with Moscow. With the support of his Russian and visual help from Yugoslav television, he’d also taught himself Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, which he claimed was the same as Bulgarian. He could not have known that none of this would compensate for what he came to consider the greatest mistake he had ever made: failing to learn English. Not only did he take no comfort in his other languages, but he began to treat his fluency in them as the manipulative work of malevolent forces, who had turned him away from the only idiom he really should have learned. “If only I’d watched Foreign Languages at Home,” he would often say to me, holding his head in his hands. “If only I’d studied the Essenshel.”
“It’s called Essential English for Foreign Students,” I pointed out, correcting him.
That upset him even more. “You were lucky, Brigatista. You started with English in school because we’d already split with the Soviets. I only did Russian.” English became his new demon, the nightmare that kept him awake. “They will arrive before long,” he would say with a tremor in his voice, “the foreign experts. They will be here soon, and I won’t be able to communicate.” Then again, later: “I’ll be sacked as soon as the government changes. I know it. I have no English.”
“But, Zafo, you can learn it,” my grandmother gently answered him. “And you have French—Brussels is important, you know, since we’re about to join the European Union. There are a lot of people who learn French still.”
“Yeah, the French still learn it,” my mother mocked. “They learn it twice. Once as a native language, and the second time as a foreign one.” She felt superior because she had some basic English, thanks to Nona Fozi, who had been to an American boarding school for wealthy girls before the war. “But it’s true, learn it!” my mother ordered. “Don’t waste your time worrying.”
My father didn’t usually “waste time” worrying. It was the opposite—it was floating from one set of worries to the next that helped him mark the passage of time, that structured events and shaped expectations. Worrying was the default condition of his existence, a predicament as natural as breathing and sleeping. He would have found a reason to feel anxious about his new job, even if something much less vital than English had been at stake. The problem with English was not that he worried, but that nobody could offer reassurance. Nobody could say it didn’t matter.
At first, he confronted the challenge the same way he’d done in the past: by getting himself a dictionary and picking a book to translate. This effort soon failed. Perhaps because he realized that he could not rely on the languages he knew to help him make progress. Or perhaps because the book in question was The Complete Works of Shakespeare, in a nineteenth-century luxury edition that seemed to have escaped the confiscation of family belongings only so as to humiliate my father half a century later.
After that, I tried to persuade him to join the afternoon English programme I had enrolled in. It was called the Cambridge School and offered free tuition. In return you had to write fifty or sixty letters to random addresses in the United Kingdom. Each participant in the course received a package with several photocopied pages from a telephone book and could select the recipients. In the letters, we introduced ourselves and our families, attached a photograph or two, expressed the desire to make friends abroad, and asked for money to sponsor the English course. I was assigned the letter F. I never found out what the next step would be after receiving a reply, since I never heard back. It was like throwing eye-drops into the ocean. There were rumours that some participants had found financial assistance, and that others had been invited to visit or study in the United Kingdom. But nobody ever saw the evidence, since the people who received such invitations did not bring the letters to class, in case someone less lucky would “steal the sponsor’s address.” In my case, the benefits were restricted to improving my English. Each letter had to be different, and this helped me find a variety of formulations to express what were ultimately the same elementary facts. My father was enthusiastic too. But when he came to enrol, he was informed that the programme was limited to children and teenagers. It was unlikely, he was told, that anyone would reply to letters sent from middle-aged Albanian men. Needless to say, this dragged him even further down.
Hope came in the form of a fortuitous meeting on the bus home from work with a group of young Americans. Probably marines, he said—that was how he’d heard them introduce themselves. One could see it in the discipline with which they carried their black rucksacks, in the tight-fitting trousers, the crisply ironed white shirts, the clean-shaven faces, and the short, impeccably cut hair. The marines had approached my father to ask for directions. He tried to explain that he did not understand a word, but he must have also conveyed the sadness with which he lived with that predicament. They wrote something on a piece of paper and slipped it into his pocket. They organized free English classes in the evening, they said, and he was welcome to enrol.
He joined the class at his first opportunity. He was extremely satisfied with the arrangement. He met people he knew, including our neighbour Murat, the shoemaker, now training to become an imam. Not only was my father making fast progress learning English from native speakers; the textbooks they used were also interesting in their own right. He learned about something called the Church of Latter-day Saints, and about a new doctrine he had never heard of before. Just like Islam, it permitted polygamy. The debates in class were always very profound, very substantial, my father reported, never about the kind of trivialities you would expect in an elementary English class. Several attendees defended the superiority of the prophet Mohammed, who, unlike Jesus, had never had the temerity to suggest that he was the son of God; he was only one prophet among many, but with the advantage of being the last and, therefore, the most right. My father didn’t take sides. He had read somewhere that matters of reason and matters of faith could not be adjudicated using the same criteria. But he enjoyed listening and arbitrating. Some of the people in the course could be quite aggressive in their critique of the Latter-day Saints, he said. Murat invited the marines to check out the old mosque, which had been converted back from being a youth centre, recently renovated with the help of Muslim friends from Saudi Arabia.
In fact, they were not actually called marines, my father had learned. His English comprehension was so poor, he had misheard on the bus. They were called Mormons. They said they were missionaries, but there was some controversy in my family as to the exact nature of their mission. My father thought they only wanted to teach English; Nini insisted that if they only wanted to teach English, they would call themselves not missionaries but teachers. Missionaries were called missionaries because their mission was to convert people to their religion. “It’s all part of civil society” was my mother’s contribution to the conversation, as if the mere mention of those two words could end all religious disputes.
“Poor boys,” my grandmother sighed.
“Poor boys indeed,” my father replied. “It’s very unfair to say they’re trying to convert people. They’re in the minority in that class, and always have to defend themselves. It’s Murat and his friends who are trying to convert them to Islam.”
“That’s what I mean,” my mother said. “It’s all part of the debate.”
“Poor boys,” Nini repeated.
From that day on, whenever my father attended his evening English class, she would say he’d gone to see “those poor boys.”
* “In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious and the Most Merciful / Allah is One and Indivisible / Allah is the one to whom we all turn for support / He has never had offspring, nor was he born / There is no one comparable to him.”
17
THE CROCODILE
MY FATHER ALSO PRACTISED his English with “the poor man,” initially known as the Crocodile. His name was Vincent Van de Berg. He had been born in The Hague but had lived abroad most of his life. He, too, was a missionary of sorts. He worked for the World Bank. He didn’t walk around carrying the Bible in a rucksack; in its place, he had a pink newspaper called the Financial Times. He carried it in a small leather bag which also transported a fancy computer, the first computer I had ever seen. He had moved to Albania to advise the government on various privatization projects. He was an “expert”—the kind of expert my father had rightly predicted we would soon come to meet, and for whom he felt the urgency of learning English.
Vincent was an expert on societies in transition. He also lived in his own kind of transition. He was always on the move from one transitional society to the next. He had been a resident of so many different countries that I remember only one question that embarrassed him even more than when we asked him how much he earned: where had he previously lived? He was unable to recall the names of all the different places he’d visited. He shrugged slightly, squinted, and paused, staring into the void. He gazed at the horizon as if waiting for the clouds to gather in the shape of the globe, to form a map that would help him see all the countries he had crossed. He scratched his head and almost blushed when he said, with a mysterious half-smile, between the regretful and the apologetic: “Oh many, many countries. So many. In Africa, in South America. In Eastern Europe. Now in the Balkans. Everywhere. I’m a citizen of the world.”
Vincent was largely bald, though he had some patches of short grey hair, and sported large spectacles with thin silver frames. He wore dark blue jeans and short-sleeved shirts that looked a bit like those of the U.S. Marines, except that instead of a pocket they had a tiny crocodile. The crocodile was made of cloth, always stared in the same direction, and had a wide-open mouth and sharp teeth that seemed disproportionately large compared to the rest of the body. Van de Berg changed his shirts frequently, and wore a different colour every day, but the crocodile was a fixture. I joked that perhaps he was fond of crocodiles because they reminded him of all the exotic places he’d visited. My father replied that it was more likely to help people recognize Vincent. When Van de Berg came to live in our neighbourhood, everyone called him the Crocodile, until something happened which earned him the nickname of “the poor man.”
