The False Apocalypse Read online

  Chapter III

  Knuckledusters

  The next morning, still in bed, Qorri heard Ben Kumbaro calling him from below in an ominous voice. He went to the window and saw Ben with one leg over the crossbar of his bicycle, his expression more sombre than usual.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘They beat up Edi Rama and Lad Myrtezaj, knocked them round the head with knuckledusters.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Late yesterday evening as they were going home from Noel’s.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘They’re out of danger, but it’s serious. Especially Edi.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘The hospital stitched them and sent them home.’

  ‘So their lives aren’t in danger.’

  ‘No.’

  Qorri put on his overcoat, rammed his beret crookedly on his head, pulling it more firmly than usual from behind, and hurried downstairs. He unlocked his bicycle from the banister and set off with Ben for the house of Edi Rama’s parents, where Edi had gone after they discharged him from the hospital. Some unknown men, hooded and masked, had been waiting for him in a dark place near Edi’s apartment, just past the place where Artan Imami, had dropped him in his car. They let Delina go and attacked the other two with knuckledusters. Lad had escaped lightly with a cut on his head but they gave Edi a much rougher time, and he arrived in the hospital with deep gashes in his scalp and a broken nose. He was now improving, but was in deep shock, and his head was swathed in bandages.

  Qorri listened to this story from Ben, perched on his bicycle, and racked his brains for the reason behind this attack. He was also fearful for himself. He recalled the faces of the police chiefs at a dinner he had recently attended, and the drunken expression of Deputy Prime Minster Shehi as he left Noel’s. These were the people that must have given the signal for the attack, yet Qorri did not want to believe it. Did they know about their conversations with the Alliance and their plans to create a united front? Did they want to crush this front before it was even born? He would rather believe that they had been attacked because of their quarrel with a neighbour in the apartment block opposite, who had complained after seeing two artists dancing naked in their house, on the grounds that that this outrage to family values had obliged him to keep his curtains drawn. But that had been a long time ago, last summer. No, it was naive to think that this attack was not linked to what was happening all over the country. It was a sign and a threat to them all.

  For the past three or four years, Berisha’s media had been stirring up hatred against intellectuals who protested against the PD’s behaviour since coming to power, calling them anti-Albanian, traitors, spies and homosexuals. They had even dreamed up new labels such as ‘Greco-Slavic-Orthodox’, which summed up the vulgarity that had taken root in the first anti-communist political party. Edi Rama had been among the first to be attacked for his writing. Now that the government felt threatened, it was translating hate speech into direct action. But who had selected Edi Rama, and who had carried out the attack? Was this the impulsive act of some fanatic emboldened by the climate of hatred, or had it been done under orders? Unfortunately, the second possibility seemed more likely.

  ***

  The home of Edi Rama’s parents, an apartment on the third floor of a communist-era block, was open to visitors as if to receive condolences. Visitors came and went in the living room and kitchen, while Edi himself lay in one of the bedrooms.

  Qorri went in to see him. As he approached the bed, he was afraid he would be unable to bear the sight of Edi’s disfigured face. And so it turned out. Edi’s face was horribly blackened and swollen, half covered by two bloodstained bandages in the form of a cross over his broken nose. His black eyes were barely visible on either side. Even his lips were grotesquely swollen. He struggled to speak but in vain, but only a kind of stutter came from his mouth. A wave of mixed emotions swept over Qorri, of a kind he had rarely experienced, like a failure of the nerves under the assault of all those contradictory feelings of horror mixed with despair, pity, and powerlessness to respond.

  He did not stay long but returned to the adjacent room where he found many friends and acquaintances.

  ‘We’ve got to do something. Something has to be done,’ he heard Delina say, to him and to everyone there.

  Qorri stood doubtfully, as if waiting for someone else to take a decision.

  ‘All I can do is write an article in Koha Jonë,’ he replied, seeing that no better suggestion was forthcoming.

  Edi Rama, after being attacked, had done something that impressed Qorri greatly, and was a gift to the press. In the disfigured state that he was, his face smeared with blood, he had not waited for the ambulance but had knocked at the door of a neighbour, a photographer, and asked him to take his picture. Qorri picked up the shots that the photographer had developed that same night. Blood trickled down Edi’s brow and from his nose, where the knuckleduster’s blows had fallen, and spread over his face, staining his white open-necked shirt, and dripping onto his trousers. Yet the man who had suffered these bloody blows was still on his feet, reminding Qorri of the legend of a murdered man who walks away carrying his severed head in his hands.

  Qorri took the photo with him and asked Delina to give him a floppy disc with the article Edi had mentioned at Noel’s. He mounted the bicycle he had left at the bottom of the stairs, and set off again, thinking about what he would write. He was so distracted that more than once he failed to avoid the ubiquitous potholes in the Tirana streets. The heavy traffic at that hour made them hard to avoid and several times the bicycle threw him into the air.

  Chapter IV

  Facing the Unknown

  ‘Shocking Under Dictatorship, Shocking in Freedom’ was Qorri’s headline in Koha Jonë on 24th January, above the photo of Edi Rama’s bloodied face. ‘Men in black hoods with iron bars and knuckledusters carried out a barbarous attack on Edi Rama and his friend Vladimir Myrtezaj, the painter and lecturer at the Academy of Arts...’

  The article tried to convey the public outrage, not only at the attack on two artists and intellectuals but at the national crisis caused by the collapse of the pyramids. ‘People are anxious to see how the political parties will find a way out of the impasse into which they have driven the country. The barbarous attack on Rama and Myrtezaj shows that the government has opted for the path that has led Albanians throughout history to kill each other.

  In conclusion, Qorri mentioned a letter that he and a group of inmates had sent from prison to Sali Berisha at the beginning of the ‘90s, in which he mentioned the proverb, ‘Eyes see better after tears.’ ‘I hoped that he too would be among those who had wept. But Sali Berisha seems never to have shed a tear in the last few years. God help him!’

  At the end of that bitterly cold January, the hostility between the government and the opposition reached a new pitch. Berisha had every faith in the Albanians’ atavistic fear of the State. Down the generations, they had learned to be scared of three things: fire, water, and the State. Under communism this fear had seeped into their very marrow. The opposition still trusted that they would not be as frightened as before, because Albania had opened up and they could not so easily be ruled by violence as they had been in the past.

  Both sides were venturing into unknown territory.

  The future was ever more unpredictable because of the appearance of another protagonist on the stage, whose strength nobody could assess: the furious mob of people who had lost their money in the pyramids, and whose fear had evaporated at the same time as their dreams of wealth. Recently, when the police forces charged the protesters to disperse them, they had for the first time come up against a hail of stones, along with an overturned, blazing police car.

  Albanian Television’s dramatic report pointed out the danger to society posed by these people and warned that the State would use all possible means to maintain order.

  ***

  The winter cold did nothing to cool the
se passions, and these increasing acts of violence were a dangerous omen.

  Several days after the attack on Rama and Myrtezaj, Qorri sat down to draft a memorandum for which he hoped to gather as many well-known signatures as possible.

  It was time for Albania’s intellectuals to state some blunt truths. The great financial deception was only part of an even greater political deception. Within a few years, the Democratic Party had transformed itself from a hope to a threat. Abandoned by its intellectual supporters, it was now a rump of ex-communists who had now turned into anti-communists, with a contingent of former victims of persecution who allowed themselves to be manipulated by a state that was crushing the first green shoots of democracy.

  The stone throwing and fires were not just because people were furious at losing their money but also because their patience had been abused. They had seen the government first behave like a bandit and then set itself up as a judge. Any people who were not allowed to demonstrate peacefully would one day resort to using stones and fire. The country needed an authority based on trust not fear, and this could only come from a parliament elected by a free vote. The traditional destructive cycle of ‘crime breeding crime’ had to be broken.

  Qorri’s memorandum in this spirit was addressed to President Berisha and his party but also to the opposition, calling on them to rise above power struggles and to construct an alternative. It called on the army and the police not to allow themselves to become instruments of one political group against another, and it appealed to the whole of public opinion. Copies were sent to the embassies in Tirana. In conclusion, he appealed to people to continue their peaceful protests, avoiding outbreaks of violence and ignoring the provocations of the secret police.

  The number of signatures was not large. What Qorri in one of his articles had called the ‘pilot fish’ (a large category of the former communist intelligentsia) were frightened. Fish of this kind have no fins to steer themselves, so in compensation nature has given them very strong lips. They clamp these lips onto sharks that carry them along until they find a pocket of warm water where they can float. These fish had now torn their lips away from Berisha, because he had left the warm waters. But he was still strong enough to punish them. So they had not attached their lips to a new host. They were biding their time.

  And so there were barely sixteen signatories. Besides Qorri, they included four former political prisoners and Kurt Kola, the chairman of the Association of Former Political prisoners, and Daut Gumeni, Qorri’s neighbour in Kindergarten Nr. 19. There was also the theatre producer Ben Kumbaro, as well as Edi Rama, and Artan Imami, who had been at the table that dramatic evening at Noel’s.

  The memorandum was published in Koha Jonë.

  Chapter V

  Proposal (In Grey and White)

  Nobody knew why Berisha’s opponents made the Bar West their headquarters. It was perhaps mere chance that this bar, located in the Park of Youth, now entered its heyday.

  In the early ‘90s the opening of any private bar or restaurant in Tirana was an event. These cafés and bars, that suddenly sprouted up one after another in huts erected in public parks, were halfway houses in the transition to private property. Every proprietor tried a new gimmick, and their owners were entrepreneurs who usually had links to central or local government or paid a bribe for a permit. The most varied selection of bars and restaurants was in the Park of Youth in the city centre. The population hurried to sample every new venue, each more modern than the last, and changed their favourites from one month to the next like fashionable clothes. With extraordinary speed every square inch of the park, once the pride of the city with its tall trees and variegated greenery, was crammed with bars and kiosks. The trees and grass withered and died. Plate glass and aluminium predominated, while other bars imitated caves or grottoes. There were also arcades with fruit machines, Ping-Pong halls and discotheques. The dark alleys between them became hangouts for drug dealers and for use as outdoor urinals.

  Bar West was on the northern edge of the park, opposite the Defence Ministry. It was the same street on which Noel’s was situated, after it crossed the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation. The bar was sheathed in plate glass that extended to the pavement and enabled prospective clients to see who was inside before entering, and also allowed customers to keep an eye on passers-by. You could leave your bicycle outside without fear of it being stolen. Inside there was central heating in winter and air conditioning in summer, both novelties in Albania.

  The proprietor was a trim young lad with vertical gel-stiffened hair. He had been a wrestler in the time of communism and then the bodyguard of PD Prime Minister Meksi. But he had kept up his friendship with several deputies of the Alliance who frequented the bar. Some people said these deputies were only customers because of the many opponents of Berisha who went there. These premises gained a reputation, and their regulars gave each bar its soul and defined its political allegiance. The cafés became the nodes of a news network that spread throughout the capital city; the most powerful news medium in the country, more so than the newspapers or the sole State television channel. The network had already been established under the communist regime, and now that the cafés were more numerous, they had increased in strength and influence.

  Bar West was the hub of the opposition media network. This was where journalists, intellectuals and the most media-savvy opposition politicians met. Here anti-government news was commented on and disseminated. Almost all the journalists of Koha Jonë, university teachers, unemployed writers and poets, and those who had turned themselves into journalists and politicians, drank their coffee there. Shvarc came here because Noel’s was empty in the morning. Foreign journalists turned up, fishing for Albanian newspapermen and opposition leaders to interview.

  ***

  On that day at the end of January, when Qorri entered Bar West, he saw an extended table from which tobacco smoke rose in even thicker wreaths than anywhere else. Around it sat a group of opposition types normally found at separate tables. Some journalists at the adjacent table had also joined the conversation.

  The table’s leading smoker was Meidani, the general secretary of the Socialist Party and former professor of physics at Tirana University. At the end of the ’80s, the Communist president Ramiz Alia had invited him to become a member of his presidential council, and after this he had become chairman of the first electoral commission for multi-party elections, until he agreed to join the Socialist Party and became its secretary. Majko had been one of the students in the anticommunist movement of December 1990 but had switched to the Socialist Party. Some said he had done this because there had been a lot of competition in the PD at the beginning and nobody had taken any notice of Majko, and others said that he had chosen the Socialists under the influence of his father, a military man strongly connected to the old Albanian Party of Labour. He was very young, and always smiling as if delighted at having become so important so soon.

  These two were both important people in the Socialist Party because they served to show the public, and especially foreigners, that the old communist Party of Labour, now called the Socialist Party, had changed its stripes and brought new people into its ranks.

  When Qorri came up to their table, Majko stood up, smiled, shook his hand, and said, ‘Congratulations.’ Qorri was taken aback.

  ‘Don’t spoil our day,’ Majko said before Qorri could utter a word. ‘We’ve elected you to represent the Left.’

  Qorri remembered the conversation in Noel’s a few days before.

  ‘Take a seat,’ they said to him, drawing up a chair.

  Qorri sat down to find out more. They told him of their plan to create an alliance of all the parties and associations against Berisha. It was to be led by three former political prisoners. Kurt Kola, the chairman of the Association of Former Victims of Persecution, had agreed to be one of them. The other two would be Daut Gumeni, to represent the right-wing parties, and Qorri for the left-wing Further decisions would be made a
t their inaugural meeting.

  ‘I can’t give an answer now. I’ll think about it,’ Qorri said to them.

  ‘Don’t spoil our day,’ Majko said again, speaking for them all. ‘Say yes.’

  Qorri looked around and his eyes involuntarily fell on a table where ‘the cook’, was sitting as always with ‘the spook’. No doubt these two knew something about this conversation, he thought. The eyes of Berisha’s security service, the SHIK, were ever present at Bar West. The powerful SHIK had inherited the aura of the omnipresent Sigurimi secret police.

  The short, thickset ‘cook’ earned his nickname because he was said to have worked at one time in a students’ canteen. The ‘spook’ was tall and bald, always making impassioned remarks to journalists about their articles. The two sat there almost all day. Both were said also to have been Sigurimi informers. Qorri knew the ‘spook’ because his brother had been in prison too. Somebody had told Qorri that the ‘spook’ had been forced to become an informer after his brother’s arrest, but someone else claimed that he had been recruited earlier, and was partly to blame for his brother’s fate. With all the rumour and speculation, it was impossible to know the truth. Everything to do with the Sigurimi and the people who worked for it was shrouded in secrecy. The ‘spook’ was the most fervent of anti-communists, like many whom the regime had both oppressed and humiliated by turning them into spies. ‘You were in prison with my brother,’ he had said to Qorri one day at a table in Bar West. ‘And so I must tell you that I’ve started working for the SHIK. I was out of work. But please keep this to yourself.’ At the West, everybody knew that the truth was not as he had told Qorri, because he did indeed have a day job. But this job was a cover, and every day he sat in the bar on duty. It was hard to understand just why people who had suffered under the rule of dictatorship looked for employment with the very agency that inherited the mantle of the Sigurimi: was it revenge, or simply because they could not escape its clutches? Rumour had it that the networks of the old Sigurimi and Berisha’s secret services to a large extent overlapped. Some swore that only the controllers had changed, and that former subordinates had been promoted to controllers. It was an impenetrable underground world.