Free, p.22
Free, page 22
Trouble could take many forms. One might get killed by a car, like my classmate Dritan, who was walking by the beach one evening and got run over by a young man teaching himself to drive his uncle’s Audi. Or one might disappear without a trace, like Sokrat, Besa’s father, who suffered from a limp and worked with a dinghy. Each night, he helped smuggle people to Italy, then returned to sleep in his bed, except for the night he didn’t. And all sorts of small accidents could happen to you, like hitting a broken lamppost on a dark street while walking or falling into a manhole whose cover had just been stolen for its steel. Or one could be harassed all the way home by hungry stray dogs. Or it could be drunken men, or boys placing bets on how girls would respond to catcalling. For my parents, these were not real problems. We were in transition, after all. We just had to be patient. And there was always something one could do to avoid those misfortunes. One could simply stay indoors.
And so I did. I locked myself up in my bedroom and spent long afternoons chewing on sunflower seeds. To say that I was bored would risk making the condition interesting by qualifying it, by attaching a description to a mass of events in which nothing deserved to stand out. Time was the eternal return of the same. The clubs I used to attend as a child, for poetry, theatre, singing, maths, natural science, music or chess, had all come to an abrupt end in December 1990. In school, the only subjects to be taken seriously were the hard sciences: physics, chemistry, maths. For the humanities, either new classes were introduced, such as when Market Economy replaced Dialectical Materialism and we had no textbooks at all, or, as with the history and geography material, they still described our country as “the lighthouse of anti-imperialist struggles around the world.” I finished my homework quickly and was left wondering how to kill the time that remained. We now had a telephone line, and I spoke to friends, then read novels in bed, often shivering under a blanket, with a candle lit above my head. The electricity continued to run out, and on some winter evenings the cold bit harder than the sadness.
Every forty-five minutes my grandmother would walk in without knocking, carrying a glass of milk or a piece of fruit. “Are you okay?” she would enquire. I’d nod. She’d heard of a new Western disease called anorexia, which struck teenage girls. She had no idea how it spread or why, but she had decided that if she forced me to eat at regular intervals, I would be safe. When I negotiated to swap her snacks with my own supplies of sunflower seeds, she demanded to see the shells. The intervals got extended to ninety minutes. “We’re so lucky,” she would say to herself, apropos of nothing, as she left the room. I guessed she was referring to the glass of milk, for which we were no longer required to queue.
A few pubs and clubs had started to open. Most of them belonged to people smugglers, drug dealers, or sex traffickers. These were all mentioned as normal occupations, the same way one would have explained in the past that so-and-so was a cooperative worker, a factory employee, a bus driver, or a hospital nurse. Often labels from different eras attached to the same people. “That one, the man in the BMW with the dark windows, that one is Hafize’s son,” neighbours would gossip while sipping coffee on the balcony. “He used to work in the biscuit factory. He was laid off before they closed for good. He managed to cross into Switzerland. He’s in business now. He does imports-exports. Cannabis, cocaine, that sort of thing.”
I was allowed to visit clubs only for daytime parties, where the curtains were brought down so that we could act like it was dark, punch and cigarettes were smuggled in, and my peers played a new game imported from abroad called Spin the Bottle. I joined in and pretended not to notice the contorted faces of the boys when the bottle pointed in my direction, or not to hear their moaning voices when my turn to kiss them finally came: “I don’t kiss men!” they would say. “I’m not gay!”
I didn’t know yet who or what gay was, but felt embarrassed to ask. That I looked like a boy, there was no doubt. We were no longer required to wear uniforms in school; we could do what we wanted. Just as the other girls were smuggling make-up into the school toilets and reducing the length of their skirts, I embraced oversized trousers and my father’s checked Socialist shirts. Just as they started straightening their hair and dying it blond, I asked the barber to cut mine short. They rebelled against their families by mimicking Madonna in “Material Girl”; I rebelled against the ribbons and lace mine had imposed by turning into a poster girl for the Cultural Revolution. My nickname at home switched from Brigatista to Gavroche. At school it went from Mamuazel to the Vase (for the word qypi, which rhymes with Ypi), not so much on account of my body shape, which was as slim and frail as always, as the clothes in which it swam.
I often wondered if things would be different if Elona were still around. I sometimes saw her father with his new wife and their new child, and I registered how he pretended not to recognize me. Perhaps Elona too had embraced heavy make-up, false nails, and miniskirts. Perhaps she too had dyed her blond hair even blonder. Perhaps she was allowed to be outside after sunset. Perhaps she had recently discovered Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov.
In the winter of 1996, I saw Arian, the boy—now a young man—who used to live on my street and with whom Elona had ran away. His parents had extended their house by purchasing the next one along, which used to belong to Marsida’s family; they, in turn, had left the neighbourhood to rent a smaller place in a different part of town. There was something eerie about the sight of him, standing by the door of the same house where Marsida and I used to find shelter as children whenever Arian appeared on the street. He had grown long hair that covered his shoulders and wore a thick gold necklace, a dark leather jacket with a skull stamped on the back, leather trousers, and heavy black boots covered in silver chains. He drove a large Mercedes-Benz, which he had brought back from Italy to leave with his parents. The car started with a loud, grating sound. There were now fewer children playing in the streets, but when they heard the sound of the car they all ran back inside, just as children had always done when Arian appeared. There was no sight of Elona. I didn’t dare ask.
I missed my friend. I wanted to tell her that the woman from whom we’d bought sunflower seeds near our school had disappeared, but that her place had been taken by a cute boy of around ten who sold bananas and cigarette packets. I wanted to tell her that the valuta shop had closed, but you could buy the red bra she liked everywhere; and in the second-hand market you could buy it for the price of two bananas or five cups of sunflower seeds. I wanted to tell her that even I needed a bra now, just as my grandmother had warned us that it would happen soon, that our bodies would change, just like our minds. My grandmother had also said we might start to develop what she called des amitiés amoureuses. I wanted to ask Elona if she had figured out what an amitié amoureuse was, if that was what she had with Arian, or if she had ever heard of a much more raw, lonely, and painful thing, something the books called love.
Life was less constrained but no less grim in the summer, when the school closed. In June 1995, after a week of the same ritual of going to the beach, returning home for lunch, taking a siesta in the afternoon, and the obligatory early-evening walk along the waterfront to see my friends, who gossiped while parading in their new summer dresses, a disaster occurred. My grandmother had warned me that there was only one category of boys I must never, under any circumstances, fall in love with: children of former secret service agents. That summer it happened, twice. I felt so guilty that I decided to increase my visits to the mosque. I contemplated wearing a veil, but my family prohibited that too. There is a difference between religion and fanaticism, Nini said. Since more girls were turning up at the mosque wearing veils and I did not want to stand out, I switched to a new religion: Buddhism. I discovered it by reading my grandfather’s old Larousse dictionary when I ran out of books. I added meditation sessions to my daily schedule, but I never learned to meditate without crying. I was haunted by tales of the persecution my family had endured at the hands of Sigurimi agents, a thought which not only didn’t help me fall out of love with their sons but made that love more desperate.
“Our Leushka has become like young Werther,” my father joked, ignorant of the cause of my tears. “Don’t cry,” Nini reproached. “Crying never helped anyone. If I had ever thought about crying, I wouldn’t be here. I would have thrown myself under a train or joined my cousins in the mental asylum. Do something. Read another book. Learn a new language. Find some activity.”
I started to volunteer for the Red Cross and got involved in a project at the local orphanage. Every morning, we would take the children to the beach and, along with the carers, look after them while they messed around in the sand or splashed in the sea. “It will help you put your life into perspective,” my grandmother said to encourage me. “You don’t realize how lucky you are. There’s a lot of misery out there.”
“Remember,” my mother told me, the day I started my volunteer work at the Red Cross, “the orphanage is not where it used to be. The old building has been returned to the owners.”
Whenever my mother said “owners,” she meant the previous owners. The state, for her, could never be considered an owner of anything, only a criminal entity built on the violent appropriation of other people’s hard work. I remembered the surname of those owners from the boundary maps of her family properties scattered across the floor of our house. “These maps make such a big mess,” my grandmother would complain while cleaning. “They make Zafo’s asthma worse. He’s allergic to dust. A hundred times I told Doli, a hundred times. She brings them from the land registry and leaves them lying around. If you want to take them to court, fine. Nothing is going to come out of these properties. They’re just lines drawn on paper.”
BUT THE ORPHANAGE WAS not just lines drawn on paper. The previous owners had successfully reclaimed the building from the state, then sold it to some kind of church. The orphanage had moved to new premises: three rooms in a derelict two-floor building. It possessed little natural light, a distinctive smell of sour milk, and an unnatural silence in the hour of the afternoon nap that was broken only by the gnawing of mice on the ground floor. The number of abandoned children had grown in recent years, ranging from newborns to preschoolers. They came from the local area, and when they reached the age of six, if they had not already been adopted, they would either be returned to their parents, if they were willing to take them back, or sent to an orphanage for older children in the north.
Many of the carers I remembered from my previous visits with Elona had been made redundant or left the country. I recognized only one of them, Teta Aspasia, a bubbly middle-aged woman who used to be in charge of the babies’ room and gave Elona and me water with sugar as a treat when we went to see her sister. “You’ve grown up!” she exclaimed. “Baby Mimi is so grown up too. She’s in a different orphanage now, up in Shkodra. The father never shows up. Her grandparents visit her every now and then. They agreed to her adoption by a Canadian couple. Then the Canadian couple decided to take the Gypsy twins. Remember the little Gypsies in the babies’ room, the ones with the parents in prison? The parents came out after an amnesty in 1990, but they were accused of trying to sell the twins as soon as they were released. They went straight back in. They’ve got no chance. It’s very hard to place Gypsy children. Nobody wants them. People will say, ‘Please, no Gypsies; they’re hard to control, they steal everything.’ One of the twins turned out to have some kind of handicap, a mental problem, I can’t remember exactly what. The ones with disabilities are even harder to place. The Canadians were seeing Mimi, but then they got asked if they would like the twins. We asked everyone; nobody wanted them. It was incredible when they agreed. They were probably religious people. The director thought Mimi would be easier to place, but she’s still in Shkodra. Your friend, her sister, also used to send letters—”
“Elona?” I exclaimed. “Do you know where she is? What she does?”
“We haven’t heard from her for a while,” she said. “Letters take forever now, if they make it. She called a couple of times. Yes, I know what she does. One of the carers who now lives in Milan recognized her near a train station. She works. Up and down the pavements. You know what I mean. She left with the exodus, with some boy from here. He works too. He is involved in some kind of trafficking, women I guess, he probably started with her. . . . You have to go, sweetheart, the Red Cross van is downstairs, they’re waiting. The van is like new. It’s a donation from the French. The little ones are so excited. They’ve never seen the sea before. They’ve hardly been out in the sun, poor things. We have no garden in this building. You have to be careful they don’t get sunburnt. I brought some olive oil from home. Don’t take their clothes off immediately, we should wait a couple of days. Here, take Ilir. He’s all ready to go. Drita will be coming with you.” She pointed to her colleague. “Ilir is in the morning shift. You will like him; he’s very sweet. His mum is like your old friend. She looks a bit like her too, she does the same work. Ilir, come here, meet Lea, she’s going to take you to the beach.”
I was still digesting the news about Elona, but had no time to ask. Ilir was hiding outside the door. When he heard his name, he walked in, shyly at first, then with more confidence. He was a chubby little boy of around two, with curly hair and big brown eyes. “Mama,” he whispered when he came closer, as if he was about to let me into his deepest secret. His face lit up, and his pupils dilated. “Mama here . . . Mama—”
“No, not Mama,” Aspasia interrupted him. “Not Mama, darling. Mama is still in Greece. This is Lea, she will take you to the beach.” She turned towards me. “I’m surprised he remembers her; last year is the only time he’s seen her—she came to visit regularly every day for a week or so. She sends pictures, though; we’ve shown him. You don’t look like her, maybe just the age. How old are you, remind me? Fifteen, yes, that’s what I thought, his mum is a little older, perhaps seventeen. Same age as your friend. Like Elona, but she works in Greece, not in Italy.”
Later that day, I also learned the full story of Ilir’s mother, as she had told it earlier to the carers. She was raped by her boyfriend, then her boyfriend’s friends. She was smuggled out to Greece soon after delivering the baby, which she insisted on keeping. She dropped Ilir at the bottom of the stairs of the orphanage when he was around three weeks old, wrapped up in a blanket, with a box of clothes, some bottles of milk, and a letter in which she promised to collect him on his sixth birthday. She called and wrote regularly, and sent money to buy presents. The carers were confident that she would come back. Ilir was not on the adoption list. He, too, knew that his mother would return to collect him one day. When he saw me, he must have decided the day had come.
“Ilir go Mama,” he insisted. “Ilir go Mama beach.”
“Not Mama, darling. You will go to the beach with Lea. This is Lea, not Mama, Mama is in Greece. Mama will be back soon,” Aspasia corrected him again. Then she turned to me. “You need to insist on this. Explain you’re not his mama, okay, just one of us. They do this sometimes; they call us Mama. We have to be very strict. Otherwise, they become attached, they don’t let you go home at the end of the day, it’s very difficult. Try to explain it to him, okay? Tell him Mama is in Greece; she left us money to buy a toy for his birthday, and for the New Year. He understands that.”
But Ilir never understood. Or perhaps he never accepted it. After a few visits in which I would play with him, read stories, or take him to the beach, he became more insistent. “Mama here!” he would shout every time he saw me. “Go Mama beach!” Then, when it was time for me to leave, he would cling to my leg, throw himself to the floor, and kick his carers, insisting that I should either stay with him or take him with me. “Bring Ilir home,” he would cry. “Mama take Ilir.” He became increasingly difficult to handle in my presence: he refused to come out of the water at the beach, eat his food, or go down for his naps. When I tried to leave, I noticed that my bag had gone missing or my sandals had disappeared. It could have been normal toddler behaviour, except that babies at the orphanage never cried, and toddlers never threw tantrums. The problem, the carers explained, consisted in my presence, in his attachment to me. Ilir didn’t have to be miserable like that; he would be fine if I just kept out of sight. I was asked to reduce my visits to the toddler room and moved to a different area of the building, one with younger babies, who forgot people more easily.
Then the summer came to an end. The weather changed, the project ran out of funding, and I stopped my visits. I don’t know what happened to Ilir; nor did I ever hear anything else about Elona or her sister. I sometimes wondered if Elona was still on the streets, and if Mimi had found Canadian parents. I returned to the bedroom I shared with Nini, where, at regular intervals of ninety minutes, my grandmother walked in without knocking, despite the closed door, carrying a glass of milk and a piece of fruit. “We’re so lucky,” she would say to herself each time as she left.
20
LIKE THE REST OF EUROPE
AT FIRST, IT WAS going to be my mother who would run to become an MP in 1996. She had been a member of the party since the day it was founded. She knew everyone in party circles; she’d even read the manifesto. We called it the party, even though it wasn’t the Party: it was the Democratic Party of Albania, the former Communists’ main opponent in elections. Still, everyone understood what we meant. There was no danger of my family supporting the former Communists. There was only one party for us, just as there was only one party for them.
At that point, my mother had been politically active for five years. She endorsed the party’s main slogan, whose disarming simplicity concealed decades of frustrated aspiration: “We want Albania to be like the whole of Europe.” When my mother was asked what “the whole of Europe” stood for, she summarized it in a few words: fighting corruption, promoting free enterprise, respecting private property, encouraging individual initiative. In short: freedom.
