WHERE IS MY BROTHER?
A TRUE STORY

Fragments

I cried for you as if you were dead,
I waited for you as if you were alive.

…That same year I finished writing a play entitled: Her, Him, and Her, which I later renamed Someone Came. The play was scheduled to be performed by the actors and actresses of the Institute of the Arts. The actors and actresses were all graduating seniors who were defending their diploma with their participation in the play. However, the production was halted because the play was considered to ‘modern’ by the regime. For the days following it, the theater was full of people still waiting to see the play. On stage: a deferred life, a youth that dared to dream of a different life, a youth that hoped. The play broke the paradigms of socialist realism. Its life was ephemeral. In the meanwhile, I began work as a journalist. My friends advised me not to take any other actions against the censuring of the play because it would only make my career as a journalist difficult.

One night, when we were coming back from a concert, Shpëtim said: “It’s better to have a forbidden play than a play that is performed night after night until it becomes boring. This way you are more interesting. Did you see how people were turning their heads your way? They were talking about you – a young girl with a play that surprised the public. They are still in shock; whatever you might be attempted to articulate in the play they would never understood it. Do you remember that night? They looked frozen; they didn’t know what to do until they finally understood it and clapped their hands together, not able to move or to leave. The whole theater was with you. I too would like to write plays. If you can do it, what is stopping me? I am more knowledgeable then you. How many pages was your play?”

“Fifty-five,” I replied.

“Okay, tonight I will be up late working.”

We were both living with my grandmother, our aunt, and her two boys. Shpëtim worked all night, and when I woke up in the morning, I found him asleep on the table. There were typed pages scattered everywhere. He woke up and murmured “Get them together; there are fifty-eight of them.” This was the play that he wrote. It was called Between Four Loves and he wrote it overnight. He was only twenty years old.

That day we made a plan.

“Listen,” he said, “take my play to the Institute of the Arts and present it as if it is yours. They know you now, but do not tell them that you wrote it overnight because they are mediocre and might not read it at all. There are some people there who, only because they are allowed to voice their opinions, think they are great producers. They want to direct plays with twenty-five actors, where everyone says two words and the play is over.”

I did what he said. That day I wore a deep cherry colored suit.

“Tie your hair back,” Shpëtim said. “They have to concentrate on the play more than on you; you are only in the background.”

Thus, I presented my second play. The director of the Institute, a polite and well-mannered man, welcomed me warmly. We decided to speak after the producers read the play. Not even a week passed when they called me. The director told me over the phone: “You surprised us. Come tomorrow; we will be expecting you!” I hung up the phone and laughed to myself.

The next day we both went to see the producers and the director. Shpëtim was worried. “I am going to wait for you outside,” he said. Be careful, you are the author.” Music and painting professors joined the discussion of the play. Looking very excited, they, with respect, shook my hand. They asked me to speak first. I had studied the play in the greatest detail, and I had to present it as if it was mine. After my speech, the directors started discussing. The play moved them because it was not only well written but thought provoking. “Excuse me for five minutes,” - I said and left the auditorium to go outside. My brother was sitting on the stairs.

“Come,” I told him and took him by his hand.

“This was not part of the plan!” he screamed as I pulled him by the hand.

“The game doesn’t make sense anymore; they think the play is excellent,” I said. When we walked in, everyone turned around to get a better look at us. “This is Shpëtim, the author of the play. I am his sister,” I introduced him. They did not know what to do: laugh or remain astonished. Shpëtim got over his shyness and began to talk about the core theme of the play. He even improvised a couple of scenes. He spoke with fervor and passion, and his ideas were abstract in an original way. In him everything spoke: his eyes, hands, lips—his body.

The discussion of the play finished late. Outside, in the street, artists surrounded him. Shpëtim was surprised that his play was bringing this kind of reaction. He had awakened minds. That day we were both very happy. We walked down the boulevard until we reached the park, famous for its largely student social gatherings.

“You are a writer. From now on, I don’t need my name anymore; they can call me Shpëtim’s sister.” We laughed until our bellies ached. People were walking; some were sitting on benches. It seemed to me that everyone was as happy as we were.

“If they decide to produce it, we will invite Mira. Era, the main character, is really her because just like Mira, her goodness has no limits. If you go inside her soul, you can get stuck. She has such beauty; one would be surprised. I am astonished at how much love she has to offer.” I let him speak; we both loved Mira a lot. It seemed in those moments he wished to have her close to him because she was very loving and affectionate.

Mira reminded us of home, our sick mother, our father who would do anything for her, and small Petrit that sways her bed back and forth, thinking she enjoyed it. They all sacrificed, in a way or another, for us, so that we could be successful in the world.

Everywhere, people spoke about the upcoming production of Shpëtim’s play. On the other hand, his poetry volume was forbidden from being published. Shpëtim did not get upset over it because he was too preoccupied with his play.

He became close friends with the people from the People’s Theater and the Theater of Opera and Ballet.

Meanwhile, the ballet master, Mr. A. Alija, became interested in Shpëtim’s work and invited him to work as a writer for the opera while he continued his studies in college. Thus, two problems were solved; he had money to continue his education, and his writing would improve tremendously.

Located in a wide boulevard there was a building with white marble columns and wide steps, which reminded me of the time when our government broke its relations with the Russian government. When this happened, the Russians stopped the construction of the building, which was later resumed by native specialists.

Shpëtim worked in one of the more modern rooms of the building, at which time, he wrote the play called The House 1961, which brought much controversy. The plot revolved around life in a camp, where the lives of the people living in it were intertwined. The characters did not think nor act the way the government wanted. In the play, he emphasized the idea that totalitarian governments used violence, which ultimately ruined the lives of many simple people. The fear and the suspicion that people felt in these countries clearly demonstrated how developing countries pretended to make great politics.

The play was a microcosm of Albanian life, and because of this, it did not have a chance of even making it to the theater. It traveled from one producer to another; no one daring to produce it.

Soon after this, Shpëtim wrote the play for the ballet called Kesiana, based on the Illyrians.¹³ Agron Aliaj, whose appearance was that of a good man, listened to Shpëtim with respect and admiration. Agron criticized his work, and Shpëtim made the appropriate changes. The next day, Shpetim prepared his new plays, new versions. Agron was marveled by Shpëtim’s work and expressed this to him in their many dinner meetings. They met near the Theater of Opera and Ballet, at the Durrësi Restaurant, to drink wine, talk about ballet, and most importantly, choreography. One would get surprised at Shpëtim’s imagination and creativity. He was ahead of his time; his mind traveled to distant lands, and if you went there with him, you felt like a kid, all over again. “I’m going to Agron’s house,” he said one evening. “Little Greta will be there, playing the piano. I like Greta, she is smart.”

During the winter he wore a black coat and covered his neck with a bright green scarf. When I visited him at the Theater of Opera and Ballet, people referred to him as “the young man with the green scarf.” There was a sort of extravagance in the way he dressed, but he never did it on purpose.

“Clean your shoes,” I would yell at him.

“What do you think, that I look like a peasant?” he would respond. Once I wanted to introduce him to a friend of mine who was from a nearby village. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to meet him. He is a peasant. Have you seen his chapped lips, as if he has eaten figs all day? That is how.

Often, during holidays or vacation, we went back home together. Our sick mother waited for us by the window; they were all happy for us. I remember that our father played the violin and mother and I danced. Her leg was better, but her arm was still not able to move. Shpëtim and Mira sang some Old Italian songs that my mother knew by heart before she got sick, and Petrit searched her closet. “Titole, check the closet because I think something fell,” mother would tell him. Petrit was the youngest, and she always tried to please him; plus he was the quietest of us all. We bothered him about this constantly, because he was very obedient. We all remember when my mother told him to stay on the couch, and he sat there for hours, until she told him to get up. Petrit had a healthy physique, unlike my father, who had been skinny all his life. Whenever, father saw Petrit playing soccer or basketball, he was pleased. Once, Shpetim accidentally spilled some hot tea on Petrit’s arm. No one was home. Scared, we tried to remove his shirt, and as the shirt came off, so did part of the outer layer of his skin. Petrit began to cry. Shpetim and I told him that he should not cry, especially when mother came back home. So, when my mother did finally get home and started curing his burn, even though Petrit was trembling from the pain, he did not cry. Instead, Mira cried for him. In first grade, mother was his teacher, so, at home, even before he said a word, he would say, “Permission to speak, teacher?”

My father always took an interest of what was happening in our lives, even though he had a lot of things on his mind. I remember that when I got paid for my play, I gave all the money to my mother who started dictating to me all the things that we needed to get for the house. Shpëtim and I went to buy the items on the list, and we spent all the money. He told my mother: “When I publish something, I will buy things only for you. I know that you like to dress nice, and I know what looks good on you. Afterwards, the both of us will go to the beach.” Tears started to form in her eyes. “Enough!” I interrupted, “You are getting her emotional. Your writings barely sell anyway.” My mother caressed his face.

* * *

In the beginning of March, Shpëtim and I went to buy gifts for Teacher’s Day, March 7, and Mother’s Day, March 8. When we went to visit her, we found many people in the house, former students who came to wish her a happy Teacher’s Day. She was pleased, but seemed tired. I was busy cleaning the house because I felt bad for Mira, who always took care of all the cleaning, while I was away studying. Shpëtim sat by my mother’s bed and spoke to her about his plans of becoming famous and how everyone would one day talk about him.

“And of course, people would talk about you too because after all you are my mother.” She listened to him, never complaining about the pain she was in. From a joyous person, she grew quiet and melancholic. So, we never knew what she was thinking; she kept everything inside. We stayed there for two days and came back to Tirana, where spring had arrived. It seemed as if it had urged the trees to bloom prematurely. The plains lay near the hills; behind them, the purple mountains closing in on the sun.

A week had not passed, since when we left our hometown, when our father informed us that our mother was gravely ill. She suffered another stroke that paralyzed her other leg and arm. We went back home immediately. When we arrived there, we found her lying lifelessly on the bed, propped up on pillows. Mira and Petrit were right next to her. “It’s nothing,” she said softly when I kissed her. “It will go away like the other one.” And she looked at me with her innocent eyes. I caressed her face and her sick arm. I fixed her hair, which did not have a single gray strand, even though she was forty-six years old. Shpëtim was pale.

“Laugh a little,” she said, “or are you afraid that the corner of your mouth will drop?” He smiled to catch his tears. Where did she find this strength to give us courage?

My father kept going in and out of the house. “He is tired,” my mother said. During those days she had no appetite at all. My aunt, her sister, came to see her. My mother only drank the fruit juice I gave her because she did not want to upset me. Shpëtim took the photo album and went through every picture with her. I was fixing something nearby when I heard Shpëtim ask her: “Whom do you love the most from all four of us?”

“You,” she responded.

“Why,” he asked.

“It’s because you are like me.”

At those moments, there was an unbelievable closeness between them. I walked in and out of the room, without being noticed. Shpëtim looked like my mother; except for his green eyes, which he inherited from my father. Her eyes were brown. Day by day, my mother’s situation worsened. The doctor didn’t give us any hope. My father and I decided to send Shpëtim away. We also sent Petrit to Berat, to stay with our aunt’s children. That night a friend of my mother, an Italian lady, stayed with us. My mother leaned on my chest. She moaned all night from the pain and kept her eyes closed. When dawn came, she opened them, and pointed at something outside the window.

“The plum tree,” I said. She shook her head.

“I’m going to cut a branch,” I said.

“No, I feel bad for it,” she said. Tears started to run down her face. She looked at me and called me by my childhood name, “Lina, Lina, Lina.” She leaned her head on my shoulder.

“She calmed down,” I said to myself.

“Give her to me,” her friend said and lay her down on the pillow.

“Leave the room,” she said. I obeyed her order blindly. As I reached the doorway, I came into my senses and thought to myself, so, this is death.

My father had gone to drink a shot of raki at a nearby bar. He was up all of that night. He came near the room.

“She is gone,” my mom’s friend said.

“Ah! How could I not be here?” he yelled. “She was in Adelina’s arms,” my aunt said, “Don’t feel any regret.”

“Come Mira,” I said. She hid her head in my chest and started bawling. We informed Shpëtim at midnight. He decided to keep walking in the streets until he found a car to take him back home. I saw him entering the walkway, but I couldn’t face him. He came in the room, sat by my mother’s feet and said, “Too bad, so young!” And he cried like a child holding his head with his hands.

“Do not enter the room,” I told my aunt. “Leave him alone with her.” It was March 23, 1972.

The house and the yard were full of people; a lot of them came. My mother was one of the oldest teachers of our small town, and many people—students and colleagues loved her. As was customary, near her deathbed stood the immediate family. The room was filled with women. noticed three women in particular: the secretary of the Communist Party, the principal of the school where my mother had taught, and the third woman was someone who followed them around. It was then that I remembered everything.

“And you, what are you doing here? Leave! My mother died because of you, and now after you have killed her, you come to cry for her. Out!” I yelled at the trio. They froze and didn’t know what to do.

“Don’t mind her,” my aunt said. “She is still in shock.” She turned towards me and whispered: “When someone dies, anyone is allowed to come to the wake, you cannot argue with tradition.”

I responded to her in a loud voice: “Does tradition also say that the murderer should cry for the victim? Your sister just passed away!”

Then I turned towards the trio and yelled: “Out!”

They got up. The whispers left the room and spread all around the house, the street, everywhere where there were people. I looked towards my mother; she was finally at peace.

My mother was from the town of Berat, the daughter of an Orthodox priest, who had worked in the town’s church. She had a sister that was married and had three children. In 1944, my aunt’s husband left Albania for America. She did not want to leave with him. Thus he was listed as a runaway. Although my aunt divorced him in court, she suffered for the rest of her life as the ex-wife of a runaway. My mother helped her as much as she could; my aunt’s daughter even stayed with us for four years.

During a teacher’s meeting at her school, my mother was criticized for her teaching techniques, because instead of teaching mathematics using examples of problems that talked about Vietnam War, (for example, how many American planes were knocked down), she used examples of problems using flowers and bunnies. My mother defended herself by saying that she was dealing with younger children and did not want to scare them. Meanwhile, Luçiana, one of the three women, who was young and had crooked legs, was very much into her career. She wanted to advance within the Communist Party by hurting my mother. “Where is your sister’s husband? Talk to us about him. Why did he leave the country? And the husband’s brothers, why are they in jail? For politics?” The meeting ensued for several hours.

That night my mother came home very startled. She feared that our family was going to be persecuted. “They are listening to our conversations,” she said. “Search the house.” She went to visit her sister in Berat to forewarn her. Her sister had a religious icon hidden behind a photograph. “Throw it away,” my mother told her. “They might come to search the house, and if they find it, the jail cell will be waiting for you.” My father tried to calm her down: “Please, Fotini,” he told her, “Don’t. You are getting us all worried.” It was during this time, that she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.

The trio, the “revolutionary vigilance,” appeared again at the funeral. Someone had to make a speech before the procession was over. Luçiana and the Communist Party she represented solved the problem. They chose a child to speak, and no one knew what he said because he started crying and kept repeating: “Teacher, teacher.”

Shpëtim slept in my mother’s bed that night while I slept with Mira and Petrit. We all fell asleep peacefully. In the morning, Shpëtim said: “When I go to sleep it’s like I die, and when I wake up it’s like I resurrect.” I thanked God for the peace he gave us that night.

They say her soul was with us that night. For many days afterwards, I pictured my mother in my mind, attempting to do the cross with her left hand that never obeyed her after the stroke. “Let me do it,” her sister would say. And she helped her do the cross.

* * *

Shpëtim and I returned to Tirana. It was April and it was raining heavily. Inside the white spring coat, I wore all black. During this time Shpëtim and I grew even closer. We went everywhere together, from restaurants, to libraries, to the streets. Once in a while we reminisced about our mother; and we always sensed her presence with us. During our outings together, Shpëtim had the habit of telling me about his ideas, even before he transcribed them to paper. It seemed that this helped him develop the story better. One of those evenings, he told me about a play he was planning to write.

“It’s all in my head, but I need to sit down and write it. Listen, if you are looking at some guy, let me know, so I know when I am talking to myself. How do you think I should start? The story starts in Italy. The year is 1943.” This was the first sentence of his new drama, Enemies, which he later renamed: In the Middle of the Sea. He wrote every day, sometimes for many hours. Meanwhile, he met with the actors and actresses of the People’s Theater and spoke to them about the play, and how it should be performed.

Amidst all of this, my father came to visit us. Shpëtim went out with him. They had coffee in a café, in another cognac and in another raki. My father was the only one that drank alcohol; Shpëtim did not drink. He introduced him to his artist friends—musicians, painters, and actors. They all greeted my father with much respect. Sandër Prosi, a well-known actor, called Shpëtim the father of the modern Albanian theater. At that time, Shpëtim was only twenty-one years old. My father was touched by Sandër Prosi’s comment. He was the sensitive type, who got emotional reading patriotic poems, and, therefore, this atmosphere moved him greatly.

These outings lasted two days.

“Are you convinced now of the type of son you have? Here is your daughter, go out with her. I don’t have time; I have to finish the play,” Shpëtim told my father. And that is what happened.

Within a month, he finished the play. It was given to the Council of Artists, and meanwhile the press announced that during the fall season, the People’s Theater was producing the play. Copies of it were printed and distributed; Shpëtim gave me one. I had only read it in separate pages; this was my first time reading it as a whole. I opened the first page, and I read the title “Enemies,” underneath it read: Dedicated to my mother. Now it was clear to me, why he was rushing to produce the play. In all of the pain, he found escape in writing his play. He poured out his creativity for her.

Along with June came the time of final exams. I was worried because I knew Shpëtim was not ready mainly due to the fact that he spent all of his time writing. One morning, he came to pick me up at the office where I worked as a journalist for a local newspaper. We walked down the boulevard.

“Tell me a little bit about the writers of Socialist Realism—when they were born, when they will die, and what they have written,” he said.

I answered his questions until we came close to the uni-versity’s building when he said: “Leave now because I have to go inside the temple.”

I went back at my job, somewhat worried. It was almost lunchtime and the photographer of the newspaper handed a Polaroid to me. “It is interesting. We will publish it in this volume, but we have to retouch it a bit,” he said. I was surprised to see that it was a photograph of Shpëtim explaining something with his hands. I met him for lunch at a restaurant. He was elated.

“Do you know what happened? When I went to pick up the final test questions, Professor Dalan Shapllo said to me: ‘Put that paper down Shpëtim, and let’s talk about literature. After all, we are colleagues.’ When the reporters from your newspaper came to ask about an excellent student, Dalan told them about me. If he had asked me about any of those writers you told me about, I would have surely failed.”

At this time, Shpëtim could no longer get paid from the Theater of Opera and Ballet. Apparently, one of the directors of the music program told him about a particular member of the Communist Party (who was famous for writing bad plays) who had expressed his desires regarding Shpëtim writing a play called: The house on the boulevard. Shpëtim was angry.

“Tell him that art is not life in a maternity ward. I cannot spend my time wastefully, writing about all the impregnated women.”

I don’t know what other words they exchanged, but I know that afterwards Shpëtim stopped getting paid. After many failed attempts, A. Alija and N. Zoraqi fixed the payment problem for him, and he continued to work at the theater. Nikolla Zoraqi was a very slow man in his manner of speech and his actions; however, he was a very good listener. Often, Shpëtim and he had coffee at the Cultural Center, where they discussed Enemies. Nikolla had to adjust to the quick way Shpëtim shared his thoughts. Nikolla told me: “Even though he did not study music, his intuition allowed him to capture mistakes in songs. He tells me when I am wrong and when I am right. It’s about the technicalities of my work. He has ears for music; he is a natural-born artist. I especially enjoy it when he sits next to me on the bench, while I am playing the piano. Whatever he says, he turns into sound. It always annoyed me when someone sat next to me while I worked, but his presence is like a background of sounds. I love this guy! There is a great man behind this great talent. It’s very rare when the two are present in a person. Do you know what he did to me in Saranda?¹⁴ Well, you know that we stayed there together for a week. The room faced the sea. He got up every morning, sat in the balcony and wrote. When I would woke up, he read to me parts of the play of opera and suggested that the music should resemble the wind which created all the ripples in the sea. Ok, I would tell him, but I did not have coffee or breakfast yet. I am a good worker, but Shpëtim is harder working than I. One day I told him, “We came here to see the sea. Let’s eat fresh fish and relax and when we get back to Tirana we can finish up the opera.”

“I have many things to do,” he said. “I don’t have time. I am in a hurry.” He said it with such seriousness that I stayed silent. And he is only twenty-one years old. What I regret the most is that he does not allow me to pay for anything, not even for a cup of coffee. I always accept thinking he will allow me to pay the next time, but it is just impossible.”

That is how Shpëtim was. Whenever we stayed with my aunt, he never accepted any food, not even a glass of milk, even though our grandmother begged him to drink it. I, on the other hand, accepted everything they offered me, and told him on numerous occasions to do the same. My aunt and my grandmother loved him a lot. One night when I was sent by the newspaper to another town, he came back late and did not have any keys for the front door. He knocked on the door softly and waited for someone to open it, but no one did and all the lights were off. He went back. He did not want to wake anyone up so he spent the night by the Lana River¹⁵. When my aunt found out about it, she was shocked. If it had been me, I would have woken up the whole neighborhood if it were necessary until someone let me in.

* * *

The work on the play started at the People’s Theater; each part divided among the actors and actresses. M. Luarasi, producer, who decided to put on the play, was very optimistic. The director of the People’s Theater, B. Kosova, an elegant well-dressed man with black hair, liked and appreciated Shpëtim a lot. “I never thought that everything that’s pure and noble could be found in a man—so talented, he has awakened so many hopes in all of us,” he said about Shpëtim. He helped Shpëtim a lot; he believed in his talent. The actors and actresses surrounded Shpëtim every night; the theater was full of excitement. I remember an older actor, in specific, a very talented man, named Kopi. He had a pale face, a long nose, and always wore an off-white jacket, and his hair was entirely gray. He had the habit of reinforcing each syllable when he spoke, so he always forced you to talk to him every time he saw you in the street.

“I’m not coming with you if he is around,” I told Shpëtim. “He is driving me crazy by stopping me to talk each time I see him.” Shpëtim laughed.

“Well, I am studying him. I am deciding which character he can be in the play,” he said. That was true. But there was another reason. Kopi always said: “Shpë-tim the fu-tu-re of art is you. Ge-ni-us.” Shpëtim was always happy when he heard this part. He was very young. “Do you hear?” he would say, “You are the only one that does not praise me.”

At the People’s Theater, everyone was discussing the play, among them, the talented and the non-talented. At some point, the latter started talking more, not only because they were more in number, but also because they were heard more. It was the time of mediocre people. Sometimes, an ‘actor’ who was considered by the regime as the “People’s Artist,” and who worked at the secretary of the Communist Party gave an opinion on how a certain play went against the principles of the party. Then that ‘actor’ would bring these views to the party’s committee and finally to the Central Committee.

One day, without telling Shpëtim, they arranged a meeting with the Council of Artists. One of these famous writers attended that meeting, and they decided not to work with Shpëtim’s play anymore. Instead, the producer, M. Luarasi, decided to work with a foreign play: Orpheus Goes to Hell.

One day, while Shpëtim and I sat on the steps of the Cultural Center where we met Mihallaq. “So, did you give up on the play?” Shpëtim asked him. Mihallaq did not respond. Shpëtim was playing with a rubber band that he had with him.

“Good luck!” Shpëtim said and we left.

“Why were you so nice to him? Why didn’t you tell him off?” I asked him.

“What was I supposed to say to him? That he is like this rubber band, which others choose to stretch and play with. I feel bad for him.” Shpëtim was moreso upset that Enemies, produced as an opera, was not performing. Instead, the composers choose another entitled: Commissar.

Why was Shpëtim’s play forbidden? It was about the artistic creativity during the 1970s and 1980s; it had nothing to do with socialist realism. To define it within those confines, it would have to been written in the fashion of expressionism. It is very strange that since Albanian literature was not similar to this style of writing, it was assumed that Shpëtim did not know this style. At that time, writing an expressionist work was not only an arduous job, but also considered a criminal act. It was the natural backlash of the artistic soul in front of the horror and the absurdity of the totalitarian reality that Shpëtim hated and was disgusted by. His play questioned with a surprising courage some of the main official dogmas, and it was best described as a protest against the arrogance of the dictatorship. The plot was full of tension, and of pity for the suffering of the human being at the hands of an authoritarian government. The source of the hostility was not the ethnic differences; people wish to have good relations with one another. Neither was it the different social ranks in a society because, after all, people can work things out. The road to the continuous hostility crosses the border where the ethical good and bad, the humane and the brutal, separate. Shpëtim sensed and expressed the tragic tension that exploded in the 1970s during the hallucinating plenums IV, V, VI and VII. This was the raison d’être for the play’s having been forbidden. Shpëtim’s principles were that the artist only obeys the orders of his own inner voice, not the mandates of official schemes and dogmas.

Thus, Enemies, being the first play that was of an expressionist style, did not only generate a lot of discussion, but also fame for the author. It was December; soon the New Year would arrive. Shpëtim went back home to see father. I was working at the newspaper of the Department of Education and Culture. Nearby, was the court house, a building that had grown old as time passed, which mainly dealt with civil cases. The people that spent hours inside and around the premises were mainly considered thieves and prostitutes. These kinds of people we were met with when Sadije and I went by the Court House. She knew that that day in court two artists - M. Luarasi and M. Jero - were being tried. In the room where the trial was taking place, there were many run of the mill people; none of them seemed to be an artist of any kind. We sat down. The wife of Minush, the play writer, sat behind us, stifling her cries. The defendants, especially Mihallaq, looked very pale. The judge was a man called Irakli, who looked like he had ignorance stamped all over his forehead. The district attorney, a blond man, behaved as if he was an art guru. The artists accused did not have a lawyer to represent them because many absurd things happen in a dictatorship. A couple of years prior to this court proceeding, the government decided to take the right to a defense lawyer away from defendants. M. Luarasi was being accused of producing the play written by Minush called Maroon Stains, which was considered counterrevolutionary, exuding a foreign style of writing. The author had studied in Hungary. In order to prove this, they brought in a witness, the director of the University’s library, who was now trembling before the judge. When it was Mihallaq time to defend himself, he said: “I know a young man who is talented and does not read any foreign literature, and yet his work is said to have a Western expressionist style.” He was about to say the name of the person he was referring to, when the district attorney told him frankly: “We don’t need names.” The case continued with Jero, and then they brought in the defendants. The court recessed. The next day, no one could enter the courtroom. The news spread and suddenly all of the artists in Tirana filled the waiting room and the steps of the courthouse.

We met back home for New Year’s Eve. I told everyone what had happened. I told Shpëtim how Mihallaq defended himself when he was talking about Shpëtim and how he could not say his name because the district attorney stopped him from doing so. Shpëtim listened attentively. This is what the Middle Ages must have felt like. In order to stop this upsetting discussion he said: “I have to do a lot of work writing Venema. Venema was another play he was working on, one which would later become a forbidden artistic piece.

This is what the play was more or less about: There is a gathering on a far-away island. Specialists from different countries of the world decide to conduct an experiment of how a socialist revolution would unfold on an island. In this gathering, the host informs them that the ship that brought everyone to the island sank. The symbolism was clear; the socialist revolution had failed.

“You really think that socialism is going to fail?” I asked Shpëtim, very surprised. It was the year 1973.

“Yes, he said, “Don’t you see all the violence and all these economical problems?” I stayed quiet. To tell the truth, I didn’t think it would fail, even after eighteen years, when it finally did in Albania.

Shpëtim graduated and started working at the Radio-Television Center in the cultural department as a writer, which he was very enthusiastic about. “We are going to make films,” he would say. While working with the producer, he began writing screenplays. The producer was a young man, married to a poet, and liked us both very much. When his daughter was born, Shpëtim was given the privilege to name her. One night, we took some food with us and went to his house. We had to cross three bridges; his house was near the third one. He was happy that we were there and that we had fun that night. We spoke until late about Korça¹⁶, the town where they were going to film the next documentary. Shpëtim spoke eagerly about the screenplay; his enthusiastic spirit infected us all. Mevlan, the producer, proposed that they leave for Korça as soon as possible because it was snowing there, and it was central to the plot of the film. We laughed for a while longer. I knew that Shpëtim felt the happiest when he thought people truly appreciated and treasured him. He would do anything for them. That night, I thought to myself: “Mevlan is lucky; he found someone to work with.” So, together they made the documentary Korça. It spoke about the people in the town, the snow, the cleanliness of the houses and places. While talking to the textile workers, a bird landed on one of them. The narrator in turn said: “And on them lies the heavy hand of the leader.” Shpëtim had not told me anything previous ly about that line. I watched the documentary on television, and I grew nervous and worried. At the entrance of the Radio-Television Center, I found him talking to a group of directors. I pulled him by his arm and said:

“Are you out of your mind? What was that heavy hand of the leader crap?”

“They didn’t notice.” he said. “Plus, they already showed it on television.”

“They might notice later.”

“Well, I can’t live in fear,” he concluded, “the documentary was liked; no one mentioned the heavy hand.”

At that time he also wrote the screenplay for the city of Nafta, Kuçova¹⁷. Both documentaries granted him the courage to write a third one about Berat. Those days, when they were filming Berat, he took a small crew to our house, which was close to the town. They ate and slept there. “My father is an artist,” he would say. “If you really want to know whether we did a good job on the documentary, we must ask his opinion. If tears form in his eyes, we will know that we did a good job. Don’t forget to speak to him about anything related to medicine because he reads a lot of medical books.”

Berat, Shpëtim’s hometown, was two thousand and five hundred years old. The documentary did not start with Tomorri Mountain which was covered in snow or with the mountain Shpiragu with its stripes, or with Osumi River which runs through the town. Instead, it began with the fortress and with the different names that the city had had. The film was enlightening. Berat is known as the city of a thousand windows; the houses and windows look like they are on top of one another. You can communicate not only through the little roads, but also through the many windows. I saw the movie in the studio and liked it. The night it premiered, I was away on business in Gjirokastra¹⁸. It was October and each year at this time, a folkloric festival took place in Gjirokastra, to commemorate the birthday and birthplace of our ‘leader,’ Enver Hoxha.¹⁹ I went there to write an article for the newspaper I worked for. I waited anxiously for the documentary to air only to find out that it was replaced by something else. I called Shpëtim the very next day. “They forbade it,” was the first thing he said. “We will talk when you get back.” I was shocked.

When I went back to Tirana, there were meetings held at the Radio-Television Center, to discuss the documentary. Like in all Shpëtim’s writings, the documentary emanated a sense of softness and humanity. At that time only films about enemies and wars were produced. Thus, Shpëtim’s creativity was very different from what was considered “popular.” With its purity, it was as if his style was mocking everything else that was going on, and so they attacked it “in its eyes, its soft flesh, its limbs, everywhere where it had life,” as Shpëtim, himself, wrote on top of the notebook he carried with him.

During those long meetings, Shpëtim found himself not only lacking friends, but artists as well. How could he protect Berat? They were ripping it off in pieces. In one of the meetings, a question was raised: “Why were the people in the documentary begging from one another?” This referred to a very humane scene in film, where the women of the town were passing several items to one another, such as pots and pans. “Why? Are we that poor?” said the director of the Center. They also debated over the scene from the war. An old man in the documentary said, “In war, we kept warm with the fire of the burning houses; in peacetime, we wash our clothes with their ashes.” It was merely a pacifist statement, against the war. “The Germans only burned down one house during the war; and these people are burning the whole town,” Shpëtim wrote in his notebook.

The only person who defended Shpëtim in the meeting was Ana. That was how they got to know each other. Ana was a pretty girl, a bit short, with blond hair, dark brown eyes, and red lips. At that time she had a slim figure. She majored in philosophy and was smart, something you could see from your first conversation with her. Her family was closely connected to the government. Her immediate family included her parents and a brother. Shpëtim had not told me yet of his relationship with Ana. He finished his year of probation and was getting ready to go to military duty. went to say goodbye to him. He was going back home for a month before he went off to the military. He missed Mira and Petrit and tried to make them happy. Especially after mother died, he was very careful with them. Mira started a temporarily job at the office of civil affairs. She still attended night school, which she changed when our mother was alive. After her death, she was alone at home in the morning, so my father found her a job. As always, she sacrificed for us and saved some money for Shpëtim to have when he went to military duty. “They arranged a real party,” he said later to me. Shpëtim told Mira that he loved Ana. He spoke to Mira about Ana and Mira felt really happy for him; it was in her nature to feel happy for others as if it had happened to her. When Ana went to our town to see Shpëtim, Mira cleaned the house, although she forgot to put out the good carpet. When Ana came to the house, the first thing she Shpëtim did was put out the good carpet. Shpëtim helped her do it. He told Ana, “I don’t want Mira to get upset. When she comes here, I want her to think that the carpet was already out. That’s how she likes it.” When he introduced Mira to Ana he said, “The best sister in the world. She does not know one thing though, that she walks around among usual people as if she was one of them,” and then he hugged her. Mira liked Ana; she never disliked anyone anyway. When it came to matters of the heart, she would say: “Leave him alone; he knows what he is doing.” She had— and still has—the good habit of being careful not to hurt anyone. This is where she and Shpëtim were similar, and where they differed from my father and me.

The last night of Shpëtim’s stay, my father became ill. He had pain in his kidneys. He told both Shpëtim and Mira to take him to the hospital, but they didn’t want to.

“What if there is nothing wrong with him? We will be embarrassed, they said, thinking that my father was a hypochondriac and not very objective.

“I am urinating blood,” he told them. Then they took him to the hospital. Shpëtim went to visit him the next day, but he was not allowed to get in.

“I’m leaving,” he mouthed from the glass window separating them...

“Have a safe trip,” said my father. And that is how they said goodbye.

Shpëtim came back to Tirana, and together we started to think of ways of to get him off from military duty. “I can’t stand it. They are going to shave my head, make me wear a uniform, and train day and night. I just cannot do it.” He spoke with H.P., the director of a military journal. Shpëtim said he would write a screenplay for the journal if they allowed him to stay in Tirana. We were together when Shpëtim was waiting to get an answer on the matter. He spoke to the director while I waited for him. When he came back, his face had changed. I remember his words as if it happened today: “They don’t want to keep me here, in Tirana. I don’t know the reason why; I am trying to think of why, but I can’t come up with anything.”

Who were they? He was talking about the Bureau of Internal Affairs; about its co-chair. That is whom the director of the journal had spoken to regarding Shpëtim’s stay in Tirana. Back then I didn’t think much of it, but later I revisited these words, who know how many times.

We continued our attempts at the military hospital. Shpëtim had already undergone two facial paralyses, so we tried to get him a medical note that would postpone his military duty. While this was happening, I saw Ana. It happened when I took the Laprake²⁰ bus; which was empty. I was in all black because I was still mourning for my mother. A blonde girl passed right in front of me. I thought that maybe it was Ana; Shpëtim had talked to me about her and what she looked like, but I had never seen her. At the station, Shpëtim sat at the edge of the road, and the blonde walked right next to him. I met Shpëtim and heard him say: “Come Ana.” It was her. I did not know what to think. We shook hands. We needed to make a phone call, so we went by the post office that was close to the poplar tree road

which takes you to the hospital, while Ana waited for us outside.

“Where did you find her?” I asked Shpëtim. His eyes filled with water and his face changed right away. I don’t know why, but I expected to see an extremely good-looking woman; Ana was somewhat short, so I was sort of disappointed. Later, Ana told me of a conversation they had about me.

“I didn’t like Adelina. Does she think she is better than me?” she told Shpëtim.

“If you plan to be with me, don’t even think of comparing yourself to her,” he told her. Ana said that from then on she knew what role I occupied in Shpëtim’s life. Then she shut up.

…Taking all of this into consideration, I began analyzing the events over and over again. Every day, on my way to work, at the newspaper, I noticed a middle-aged man with a mustache walking behind me. One day, I looked back, and the man stopped dead in his tracks, and pretended to be looking at the displays on the store windows. This happened for two consecutive months. Meanwhile, my father found out from a friend of his that all of my documents had been transferred to Naim Frashëri Publishing House³⁵ because I was leaving the newspaper. Worried, I spoke to the chief editor. He told me that that was not true. Only a month had passed since Shpëtim’s death.

October came and went. During a staff meeting at the newspaper, the possibility of firing someone was broached upon. The chief editor said: “There have been complaints from above, and we have to fire someone. I am personally thinking of Adelina. If you do not agree with me, then who do you think should go?” No one spoke. There was a ten minutes break and I went by a café to have some coffee. There were a lot of people there. Near the counter, I saw the party’s secretary, someone called Kiço, sitting with a man that had dark features. I remembered that I had seen this man at the festival in Gjirokastra, and Sadije had told me that he was an agent of the Sigurimi, who was also in charge of the Writers’ Association and the Board of Education. The secretary whispered: “It’s her!” and the man next to him looked in my direction.

I sipped my coffee slowly and went back to the dreadful meeting. I knew that the chief editor was not the person who was firing me. I had had a good relationship with him. He was a good journalist, wrote well, and the newspaper was only one of his many jobs. He also wrote the mayor’s speeches and reports. We used often to joke with him saying: “We, the women of Albania declare that…..” as he also wrote in those reports for the Women’s Congress. The chief editor seemed angry.

No one was saying “I will leave.” I got up, and, wrongly attacking him, said: “I’m the person you want to fire. This is not just about cutting out someone, or firing someone because he/she is not capable of doing their job. Why are you doing this? What complaints have you heard against me? Why did pick me? You are the one responsible for firing me.” He grew angry and said: “No, no! You have it all wrong. It’s just that there are some things that concern you…” He stopped talking as if scared to say more.

“Are you hearing this?” I asked Llukan, a military man who was sent to this meeting by the party. I asked him if he heard because I knew that chief editor, Sofo, would probably deny later what he had just finished saying.

“Yes,” he answered. “Tell us. What are these things because I don’t even know?” Sofo stayed silent. That’s what I needed to hear, exactly what Sofo said. In all that misfortune, I had to fight. I was weak physically, but a person finds the strength to fight in times of adversity. Sofo was told something about me, and that’s why he was acting that way.

When all this was happening at work, I left one morning to go to Vlora³⁶. Winter was approaching and the air was cold, the sky gray. The women of the Writers’ Association, which included my friend Sadije, had organized a picnic and I went with them. As soon as I arrived in Vlora, I separated from her and went to meet Dhori. I didn’t have a hard time finding his house. His mother was shocked when I told her who I was. Without being invited in, I sat down and told them I was going to wait until Dhori came home. After a little while, he came. This was Dhori Hanxhari, the man who Shpëtim was with when they went to wash clothes the day that the accident happened. He was the only witness to my brother’s death. Dhori was tall and slim, with fly eyes – that’s how they seemed to me. I hugged him and told him: “I’m Shpëtim’s sister. I want to speak to you. Let’s go outside.” Dhori looked at his mother. He moved his head as if he wanted to tell her not to worry. We went outside. First, we sat at Café Tourism. He asked the waiter for a coffee. The place did not seem appropriate for our conversation; Dhori agreed.

“My sister works here and everyone knows me. Let’s go!” He said. He paid and we left. We went by a road that even today I do not know where it is, I only remember it having an open canal and that there was barely anyone there. Dhori began to tell me what happened that night.

“Shpëtim took me to wash some clothes. It was hot and I wanted to go back, but he told me that he was going to show me a place where he wanted to make a movie. When we went by the pond, I took off some clothes and lay down on the rock. I fell asleep. When I woke up, I looked everywhere and did not see him. I looked towards the water, and there he was. I tried to get him out of there, but I couldn’t. Then I started running towards the military unit, which was closer than our unit. On the way there, I met a shepherd who went to inform everyone else, and two soldiers came and took him out of the water.”

I started to cry. I smoked a cigarette. At the time I had started to chain smoke; I would smoke two packs a day. I told myself: “It’s not the time for tears; it’s time for action.”

“Listen Dhori,” I said, “I am Shpëtim’s sister. Put yourself in his place and your sister in my place. You told me one version, but I have heard of a different one as well. Two villagers passed by to get some wood when you two were at the pond. After half hour or twenty minutes, they heard screams and came running towards the pond. I know what you screamed.”

“No, I did not scream,” he said. And then he added in a low voice: “The man I saw in the water did not seem like Shpëtim.” I held my breath and let him talk.

“When I went in the ambulance and saw his belt, I was shocked.” I did not continue to ask any more questions. We smoked a cigarette and parted.

I went back and met Sadie. She didn’t ask me anything. In the car I thought about Dhori’s version of the story. We arrived in Tirana late in the evening. I knew the words he screamed at the pond prior to our conversation. My aunt has a daughter who lived in Rrëshen³⁷. Someone who went to express their condolences at her house told her this version: “We went to cut some wood. On the way there we saw two young soldiers by the river. One was lying down and had covered his face with a newspaper, and the other was dressed looking towards the road. After twenty or thirty minutes, we heard screams. We left our axes and ran towards the river. We thought something happened to those young men that we saw. When we got there, we saw an ambulance and two men who were holding back one of the young men by his arms as he was screaming, “What have you done with him?” The whole place was surrounded.”

Those were the words Dhori screamed, and denied when I met him.

Mira and Petrit were waiting for me. They knew that I went to Vlora. We had formed our own little headquarters. I told them what had happened more than twenty times. They felt a little better. In the meantime, my father still lived with his brothers and was trying to move to Tirana. This was a year when the government arrested and jailed the highest number of people. My aunt came to see us in Tirana. I did not tell her what Dhori had said, but I asked her to go with me and meet the villager who heard Dhori scream: “What did you do with Shpëtim?” I asked for information on the villager’s name and his address, and we left to see him. My aunt knew his family; they lived near her daughter’s house in Rrëshen.

There was a big plain near his house. It looked like there had been corn planted there previously, but now it was almost wintertime, so you could only see the stems of corn. It looked ugly and abandoned. The house was the only one on that plain; it looked like a kulla,38 tall and with loopholes. The people that lived there were from the highland of Mirdita³⁹ and maybe that was why the house was built that way. The host and the hostess of the house, an elderly couple, welcomed us in. My aunt told them that we were there to meet Ndoi – that was the man’s name– who had been near the location where Shpëtim died and who shared his information with her daughter who lived nearby. We wanted to hear the story from his mouth. They sent someone to ask for him; he worked nearby. Some time passed and he wasn’t coming; I became worried. My aunt told them jokingly: “Get the dinner ready because it seems we are staying here tonight. We are not leaving without seeing Ndoi. We came all the way out here just to meet him.”

He arrived home very late. He told us a cleaner version, without cars near the pond and without Dhori’s scream: “What have you done with him?”

He apologized because that night he had to be somewhere. We did not ask him, we let him talk. It was like a two-edged sword. My aunt still believed that Shpëtim was killed.

They prepared our beds on the second floor. You could see the blackness of the night from outside the loopholes. It was freezing and the covers did not make me feel warmer. I got up, got dressed, and went back to bed wearing my jacket. I don’t know why, but I felt scared—the plain, the night, the two of us alone, in a strange house. The Sigurimi were capable of anything. They could kill me and organize some sort of accident. I was so involved in thinking about all of this that I was waiting for the door to open any minute and someone to take me.

My aunt was not sleeping either. She kept smoking; I could see the little red light coming from the cigarette. “She is strong,” I thought, “she has seen and suffered so much.”

Later on, she said: “Come here.” I went in her bed. “Oh, you are cold girl!” she exclaimed.

“I’m scared!”

“Don’t be stupid. He obviously met with them before coming to see us, and that was why he was late and spoke as if he was sitting on a bed of nails. Sleep, don’t worry. I will stay awake.” And a little later, as if she read my mind, she said, “I know it is not easy, but I have told a couple of people of our whereabouts. They can’t do anything to harm us.”

It became very quiet. When anything made the slightest noise, my ears perked up to hear it. I was so afraid that someone would come up the stairs, and so I held my breath under the covers and waited. I thought about all the storylines from the mystery books that I had read and everything was getting confusing in my head. I was thinking to myself: “I still haven’t discovered the truth. If I die now, who will?” I took it upon myself to learn the truth. I had a responsibility to my family to find out the truth, even if I died inside the kulla house.

When daylight peaked through the tiny window, I thanked God for helping me pass that horrible night. My aunt was frightened as well, but hid it well, as to not scare me. She, who loves coffee, refused to have it when the elderly woman offered it to us. “We are going to be late,” she said and we left.

It was early, a cloudy morning, and the people that walked with us looked frozen. When we got in the car, I sighed with relief. On our way back, I kept thinking, “They are controlling my every move. I have to tell Mira and Petrit to be careful.”

Two weeks following our trip, Petrit told me about something strange that he had encountered. He was coming back from school when he stopped to see two young men fighting. An old man approached him and asked: “Are you from Berat?”

“Yes.”

“I could tell by the way you speak. What’s your father’s name?”

Petrit told him my father’s name. “Oh, he is my friend,” the man said. They walked for a while, and the man asked Petrit to meet in the evening. “He is one of the Sigurimi” I said. “What do you think?”

“I think so too,” Petrit answered, “I wasn’t even talking, and he said that he recognized where I was from, from the way I spoke.”

“Did he tell you his name?” I asked.

“Yes, he said his name is Piro, and he worked as a teacher in a night school. He had a mark on one of his cheeks” Petrit said. There were no doubts that this was an agent. The three of us talked it over, and we decided to let Petrit meet the old man. “Ok,” I said, “You can meet him, but make sure to meet him in a public place and to never be alone with him.”

They met at Liria Restaurant⁴⁰ on Barrikada Street.The place was always filled with smoke, and they served the best beer, pork chops and raki. Petrit, unlike Shpëtim who never drank, always enjoyed raki ever since he was young. No one believed that he drank a lot, but he did always held his liquor well. After they had finished a double shot, the man that Petrit had met in the street, asked him about Shpëtim’s death.

“How is it possible that he died in such shallow water?” he asked Petrit. Petrit told him that Shpëtim tripped and fell in. “Why, was he that stupid?” the man continued to provoke my brother.

“Well, there have been occasions like that,” Petrit told him.

When they went their own separate ways, the man told him to watch out for me because I was smoking too many cigarettes.

As I anxiously awaited Petrit to come home, I cursed myself for letting him meet the agent. I was afraid for him. Petrit came home and told us in detail about his meeting with the man. He had passed the test. We laughed at my father’s supposed friend, the teacher, who offered Petrit, a sixteen-year-old, cigarettes and raki. “It seems he is not such a great teacher after all.” I said relieved.

Years later, when we moved to a new apartment, and father came to live in Tirana, Petrit coincidentally met this man again, and invited him over our house. The agent promised that he would come, but we never saw him again. My father said that he had never known him. Petrit never met the man with the mark. Every time we speak about the deleterious affects of drinking, Petrit says: “If I hadn’t drank the double shot that night, what would have happened? You need to learn not to let the liquor get to you.”

It was a strange death. A month after it had happened, my father also attempted to find out what really happened that day by the river. With the help of some of his friends, he made his way to the attorneys general’s home. He welcomed him and heard my father’s complaint. My father told him what had happened, the way he was told it by people. It had happened August 15, around 12:30 in the afternoon. Around 1:00 P.M. he was taken out of the water. They had covered him with an undershirt and left him lying on the grass until the doctor had arrived. This place was located in Kruja. They had a hard time finding the doctor; that’s why they left him lying down for that long. Then, they had taken the body to a civilian hospital where the autopsy was done.

My father’s argument was three-fold. The first was the carelessness of Kruja’s investigation team because Mani brought pieces of soap two days after Shpëtim’s death. The site should have been thoroughly cleaned up by the team. Secondly, the body was left outside until late at night and because of this the investigator could not perform an autopsy. Dhori Hanxhari, moreover, the only witness to the death was not only not questioned, but allowed to go back home for two weeks, under the pretense of being in a state of shock.

The attorney general considered my father’s complaints legitimate; he asked him to write them down and when my father went to hand them in at his office, he asked him for permission to open the grave so that they could investigate some more. My father accepted. A month passed, and my father did not hear back from them. He went to the attorney general’s office. They told him that attorney general was transferred in Vlora and that the case was now in the hands of his deputy. He only went so far as to scold the investigation team from Kruja for being negligent, but the reopening of the grave was not allowed. Thus the case was closed once again. “Something should be done so that the case can be reopened,” my father said. “I believe that the transfer of the attorney general has to do with the case.”

My father then concocted a letter, which he sent to the investigation team in Kruja, which stated: “Maybe it was a murder that was love related. Maybe Dhori loved Ana and decided to drown Shpëtim.” A little after he sent the letter, they called us. Some time after, we went to meet the investigator; however as soon as we got there, we noticed Ana arriving in a red car. My father went to the Bureau of the Investigations, while I waited in the car. Ana came towards the car and got in. We smoked a cigarette. I was feeling very uncomfortable because I feared that she would ask me something and then she would learn that we were using her as an excuse to reopen the case.

A young man wearing nice and clean clothes passed by the car; Ana opened the car door and rushed towards him. He smiled. She left with him. She forgot her bag in the car.

There was only me and Ramiz in the car; Ramiz was the driver from the newspaper. I don’t know what pushed me, but I opened her bag. I could not believe my eyes what I found: a typed paper from one of Shpëtim’s plays. The page spoke about suicide and how tired he was of life. froze. Where did she find this page? Why did she take it with her? The writing belonged to Shpëtim alright; it was his concise style. When I was putting the paper back inside my bag, I met Ramiz’s eyes. He acted as if he didn’t notice anything; I don’t know what he thought about it, but he must have seen in my face an expression that showed him that what I did was the good thing to do.

Ana came back a little later to take her bag back. “Who is that young man?” I asked her. “He is the director for the Bureau of Investigations. He used to be my friend,” she said and left.

I stayed in the car and waited for my father. An hour passed. A young man maybe the age of twenty-five, paced back and forth near the car. He seemed worried. He came near the car; we looked each other in the eye, and he went back. He walked around the building and then went in. Three hours after, my father came back, accompanied by two men. He came in the car, looking very angry: “Let’s go!” he said. We did not speak on the way back. He told us at home what happened at the Bureau of Investigations.

“The whole time they offered me cigarettes and treated me with respect. I met the chief and another young investigator. I asked to read the case in the folder. It was the same story, how Dhori could not take him out of the water and how he found a shepherd in the way back whose name was not even there. Because they couldn’t find a doctor, they left his body lying down outside until 9:00 P.M. They took him to a civilian hospital and did the autopsy. I asked them why Dhori, the main witness, wasn’t questioned, but instead was allowed to leave on vacation for two weeks.

“Second, I mentioned that they went there at 9:00 P.M. and missed to see the pieces of soap that Mani brought us.

“At this time, the chief investigator said: ‘Tell Mani to keep quiet or he’ll be going in jail. We heard that he has said that he has seen some injuries on Shpetim.’ I protested against it, saying it was a lie. Mani only came the day after Shpëtim was already buried; he could not have seen something like that.

“Third, I asked them the results of the autopsy. They called the doctor in. He said that all of the organs were in place, and that only a small amount of water was found inside the body. ‘Listen,’ I told the doctor, ‘according to physics’ laws, when alveoli open up, you either get a lot of water in or no water gets in at all.’

“‘Well, it wasn’t that much water,’ the doctor continued, ‘maybe it was the food.’ Question after question, the doctor started feeling bad; he even asked for permission from the investigator to take a break and leave the room because he was getting a headache. Oh look, he is even more worried than me, the father, when the doctor left the room, the chief investigator said: “The autopsy is his responsibility. If he did not do it right then we will put him in jail.’

“The doctor was the young man who I saw pacing back and forth near the car. ‘This is what I think,’ my father continued, ‘the doctor did not even do the autopsy, he only signed it. The name of the shepherd is nowhere to be found; it’s made up. They told me that when they found him, Shpëtim was wearing only his white underwear and they had covered him with his white undershirt. You told me that his underwear were yellow. They tried telling me that maybe he was epileptic and fell in the water. This I denied.

Then, they said that maybe he had killed himself. ‘No, - my father had told them, - my son loved life. He loved writing plays; he wasn’t easy to put down.’ At this moment I remembered the note I found in Ana’s bag, but I did not mention it. I never told Ana what I found in her bag and where she might have obtained such a piece of paper, but she never told me anything about it either. We both let it go in silence.

* * *

Reality was no longer enough, so I began to look for answers in psychic readings. In Berat there was a family that we had an old friendship with. I was a childhood friend of Zana, the oldest girl. She had a beautiful face, with small lips like ripe cherries. We loved each other.

I went to see her in Berat. Although our lives took different paths long ago, that day, when we met again, it seemed as if we had never been apart. Her mother and father were both teachers and they welcomed me with love. Zana was really happy, like a child, and we did not fall asleep until late at night. I didn’t know how to begin to tell her about my problem.

“Zana,” I said in a voice that sounded scary even to me, “Do you know why I am here? I have a big problem and I need some help.” Everything got quiet. “Your cousin, Emireja,” I continued, “She is a famous psychic reader. want to go see her.”

“Okay,” Zana said, “We can go see her tomorrow. Now go to sleep.” She didn’t ask what was bothering me. I felt bad about asking her; this was something dangerous and I didn’t want to involve friends. I got up and went to sit by her bed.

“Zana,” I said, “they fired me from the newspaper. I have no job, and right now I work wherever the Board of Education sends me. I wrote a letter and sent it to Enver Hoxha and I am waiting for a reply, but I don’t know what will happen. That’s why I want to meet the psychic.”

What I told her was true. I sent a letter to the head of the party explaining that the reasons the newspaper gave for firing me had nothing to do with my leaving. In Albania, this was a time when everyone spied on one another. Enver urged them to do so. Everyone spoke against everyone else, and people accused each other of sabotaging the party, mostly in an anonymous way. Not only did I mention other names in my letter, but I also signed my name. I was thinking that the Sigurimi agents couldn’t have been stronger than whoever created them. Zana took my hands in hers, and with teary eyes said: “It’s over. Tomorrow we will go see her.”

It was a sunny day, and we walked side by side like old times. Underneath the road, Osumi⁴⁴ reflected the sunrays and on the other side, Mangalemi⁴⁵ stood on a rock. I was always surprised at how the Church of Saint Mëhill was built on the rocks. Every time I saw it, it looked like a person with ten eyes. The houses of Mangalemi have an interesting architecture and are built on top of one another. By the main hotel, Tourism Hotel (that was the name, Tourist Hotel) some women and a couple of men were preparing the soil to plant some flowers. Berat has some very beautiful roses as well as other flowers. Zana went to meet one of the men that were there. She waved at me and I approached them.

“This is a friend of ours,” she said to him. “No harm can come of her. Do you trust me?” I shook his hand. He was a tall man with red freckles on his face.

“Zana, my mother is afraid,” he said, “you know that because of things like this she spent time in prison?”⁴⁶

“Pretend that she is me,” Zana continued angry, “do you doubt me?” He took out a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote something in it. He was the psychic’s son. Zana took the paper. I thanked him and we said goodbye.

We left the center of the town, and went into a little street paved with cobblestone. The houses looked like they were glued to one another. Zana stopped walking.

“Here is the paper,” she said. “You need to give it to Ms. Emire. Now, listen, do you see the green door?” She pointed to a wooden door painted in a soft green color.

“Yes,” I nodded.

“That’s her house,” she said. “I cannot come in because there are a lot of people I work with that live on this street. They might say that she is working as a psychic and you know what can happen to her.” At that time, Zana was working as a technology engineer at the food factory. thanked her and went up the street.

The green door was slightly open. Like a person who knows they are being followed, I quickly turned around to see if anyone was behind me, opened the door and went in. I saw a yard paved with pieces of stone and a flat house with a ravishing balcony, unlike its neighboring houses, which made it look like it was built recently. A young woman carrying a child in her arms came out. Behind her a man came

out as well, maybe her husband. I gave him the letter. He read it and motioned for me to go inside the house. I went in a medium sized room. A fire place stood in front of the room, near a window facing the yard. A woman in black, with a handkerchief around her head, sat on a low couch. The room looked poor. On a sitting cushion there was an old woman who looked upset. The man handed her the paper. Reading it, she said: “Stupid, he left the house and now he is sending letters.” I don’t know why she said that; I knew what the letter said. It said: “Mother, the woman that is bringing you this letter is friends of Zana N.”

“Sit, sit,” said the woman in black, while she pointed at the sitting cushion on the floor, near where she was sitting. I was wearing pants, so it was easy for me to squat down next to her. The woman that read the letter stood in front of me. I learned from the young woman that the psychic came from Tropoja⁴⁷ after her son was charged with twenty years in prison because he had attempted to escape the country. I didn’t understand why the young woman would want to live with someone that was blacklisted by the government. The young woman started making the coffee on the fireplace fire. Spring was almost there but it was still cold. I wondered if the people in the house were going to be present as the woman in black read my coffee cup.

“Drink!” The woman in black said coldly and handed me the coffee. I started to drink it slowly. “Now, don’t drink all of it,” I heard her say as she took my cup away from me. She placed it upside down on top of a big plate and picked it up again after a few seconds. Then she started talking in a mysterious way: “How are you related to a woman named Adelina?”

“I am her….”

“You are a good girl,” she continued. “Who is a woman called Fotini?”

“That’s my mother.”

“Poor woman is dead,” she said. I was shocked to hear this from her. She didn’t ask if I was related to a woman whose name starts with an “A” or an “F”; she gave me full names. The woman in black mentioned many names from both sides of my family. And then, she asked: “How are you related to someone called Shpëtim?” I held my breath.

“He is my brother….”

“Who do you want me to speak about specifically?” she asked.

“About Shpëtim.”

“He is a nice man,” she said. “It seems he has said goodbye to his family and a woman. I feel bad for him, because he has been lied to. The government has taken him to do its work. Now he is with someone called Abdyl and someone called Abdulla.”

“Is he coming back?” I asked.

“I see an eleven, but I don’t know if it is years or months.” And then she asked: “Where do you live, why have you come to see me?”

I told her that I was from Tirana and that I used to work for the newspaper, which I had been dismissed from, and that I was waiting to get my job back.

“Where are you recently working?” she asked.

“In education,” I replied.

“Don’t even try to be relocated because that is where you will be working from now on,” she said and added, “and now enough, you’ve made me tired.” She stopped looking at the cup.

As I turned around the woman with the child and the other young woman were not there.

“Don’t worry,” the psychic said, “it has been a while since they’ve been gone. Listen; don’t come here again to see me. The Sigurimi is following me.” I gave her a coffee bag as a payment for the services and left. She called her son. It seemed that he had gone out to guard the house. He came in a little after.

“Now, you can leave,” the woman in black said to me.

I opened the green door and found myself out on the street. There was no one there, but nonetheless, I felt scared. If they had found me inside, they would have arrested me. I didn’t go back to see Zana. I thought I might be followed by the Sigurimi and I didn’t want her to get involved.

I took the train and left for Tirana. The whole time I though about what the psychic said.

I remembered one particular night at Café Flora⁴⁸. It was a nice place where a lot of young people and the Sigurimi went out for coffee. On Saturdays, we went there to wait for Mani, who came back from Laci, where he worked at the Fabric of Superphosphates. He came almost every weekend, since he had a place to stay at – his sister’s house who was married in Tirana and had two children.

Mani believed that he could read coffee cups. Shpëtim and I liked his interpretations of the different figures that the coffee remains made; he used to speak in a mysterious supernatural way. He asked us to pay for his shots of cognac in return for his psychic readings. He was very determined. “Very well,” he would say, “no money, no cup reading.” The current system and I do not get along; I am capitalistic. I have had it with the poverty.”

We used to laugh and would try to make him do it for free, but he wouldn’t accept. Then, Shpëtim took some money from his pocket, paid for his cognac and say: “Okay, here, read Adelina’s cup.”

Mani took the money and told me: “I’m doing it for the sake of my beliefs.”

For such a small thing they threw you in jail. We were young so we wouldn’t pay much attention to it.

Only, Kudret, an officer, and a friend of ours, one day told us: “Hey, what is the matter with you? This is where they all come. This man has truly lost his mind.” He was referring to Mani. Then he would make us leave the café.

On another occasion that this happened, it was Kudret’s turn to pay for dinner since the previous night Mani had paid.

Shpëtim said: “Try to eat as much as you can.”

Near the texile factories, adjacent to a bus station used to be a restaurant, where we often went for dinner. We ordered meat balls, salad, soup, and byrek.

Shpëtim kept asking: “Do you want something else? What about you Mani?” “Yes, yes,” Mani would say, “I have only just begun.”

“Why are you acting like you haven’t eaten the whole week? Out of all nights, tonight you want to eat all this?” Kudret asked. We all laughed.

Afterwards, we went to his house. Kudret’s mother was-n’t home. Mani found a pan and fried four eggs. Kudret started laughing and the eggs just stayed untouched on the pan.

Those were good times; I was with Shpëtim.

The train was approaching Tirana. Mira and Petrit waited for me at the station. What would my father say about all this? He didn’t believe in these things.

* * *

It was August 15, the two-year anniversary of Shpëtim’s death. I decided to go myself to the location where he supposedly died. I knew how to get there; I went there to visit him before the tragedy occurred.

The soldier that was at the door accompanied me to the officer who was on guard. I introduced myself and asked him to see the place where my brother died. Both of them took me there.

The three of us went the same way that Shpëtim and Dhori walked that day two years ago. The road was not paved and many military cars were driving by. It was terribly hot.

“Where are all of these cars going?” I asked.

“To Kruja,”⁴⁹ said the officer. “Only military cars are allowed to go this way because it is a closed zone.” Underneath the road river Ndroi ran through.

“Is the water always this shallow?” I broke the silence.

“No, but in the summer this is how much water is left.” On both sides of the river, there was a strip of gravel with gray and white stones. The officer pointed at a rock to sit on.

“Thanks,” I said, “But I am not tired.” I was worried that we weren’t going to have enough time. We had walked for a half an hour.

“Do you know where the place is?” I asked them for no real reason.

“The soldiers call it now the Cliff of the Student,” the officer said. Neither the river nor the walk shocked me as much as those words. Shpëtim’s place, I thought to myself: neither buried nor alive.

We walked for a while longer. “This is where it is,” the officer said slowly. Under there I saw where a thin line of water ran. There was a pond of water. It was hard to get down there from the road. The side of the road was filled with bushes, and it was slippery. It looked like a place where goats passed by. The officer and the soldier helped me get down by holding my hands. The pond was the size of a room. On the side we were on, stood was a flat rock, and on the opposed side a high rock. This is the place that Shpëtim had chosen to shoot a movie? Impossible! Besides, Dhori was a doctor, what kind of opinion could Dhori give him regarding his movie? The officer and the soldier walked a little further away.

Silence filled the hot air. The thin line of water where Mani found the soap pieces met with the pond. I put my feet in; it wasn’t deeper than 25-30 centimeters. I went near the pond that had clear water and it looked deep. In this place anything could have happened; it was well hidden. I walked for about forty minutes. If you were to count how long it took Shpëtim to get there that day, it would have been around one hour. It was a long trip under hot weather just to wash some underwear. According to Dhori, he asked Shpëtim to go back to the base, but my brother insisted that this was a must-see place. Then the scream was heard: “What have you done with him?”

Did Shpëtim bring Dhori, or did Dhori bring Shpëtim here? How could they find an ambulance in a place like this? According to Dhori, Shpëtim was the first to get in the ambulance because he had said: “When I saw his belt, I was shocked.” In the investigative report, there is no mention of any ambulance.

They say that his death happened around 12:30 P.M., maybe even before, but one thing was clear, and that was that during this time, there was a fire back in the cadet headquarters and the students went to put the fire out. “It was when we came back,” his friends said, “that we learned about what happened to Shpëtim.” What was this fire? Was it done on purpose to draw attention away from what was happening miles further? I believe that it was all planned, that they had set a couple of haystacks on fire. In the beginning, I thought this place was going to shock me, but instead it was helping me solve the mystery. They did something to him. But what – it still was not clear to me.

I thought about all of the circumstances, remembered every detail, conversation, even the words of the woman in black, the psychic. Maybe she hypnotized me and repeated everything I had told her afterwards. Right there and then I was more worried with saving my brother and his secret than myself. I was afraid that if he was not already dead, once these secrets came out, they were surely going to kill him.

When I saw the water, the place, I could never get used to the idea that Shpëtim was not alive. What else could be done, something that could be done carefully?

“Sister,” the soldier said, “it’s best if we go, don’t you think?”

I only heard: “Sister….” and I came to my senses. My brother used to call me sister jokingly. I hugged the soldier, placed my head on his shoulder, and cried.

“You will be okay,” he managed to say.

Those words, under any other circumstance, would have made me laugh because they didn’t really go with the occasion, but the soldier was in shock and saying those words made him feel better. He said it as if I had endured a sickness, and not a loss of life. I smiled at them between my tears, gave them my hand and we climbed up to the road. Climbing up was even harder than coming down; the soil was very slippery and the bushes were itchy.

* * *

There was a black notebook that Shpëtim always carried around with him. It was his journal, with dates and summarized events. After he died, Ana asked for it because most of the entries were about her, but I didn’t give it to her. Before he started military duty, when Shpëtim went to meet my family back in the little town where our house was, he wrote about Ana in his diary. He wrote that she would frequently go to the post office. His words were: “as usual, the correspondence with the mother.”

That one, dated July fourth, was written in a different handwriting from the rest: “Night. A car follows me. I hid in a canal. People are looking for me. Dogs bark at me.” It upsets you greatly. This was while he was on military duty. Did something like this happen to him or was this a part from his new play? I have read it many times since then and I still don’t know how to explain it.

This notebook, together with the play that he was writing while he was on military duty, was kept by his friend Madu Marko. When he gave the notebook to Petrit, he had said: “When I leave this place, I will speak to you about it.” During that time, I worked at the newspaper, I was standing next to the window, and I saw Madu by Durresi Street. I went downstairs to see him.

He smelled like he had just drunk a couple of shots of raki.

“You’re drunk,” I said feeling sorry for him.

“What else can I do?” He said and looked at me with his depressing black eyes.

“Go home,” I told him.

“They have sent me to work in Vlora. I am not going to work in Tirana anymore. I have to work there.”

“Do you want me to walk with you?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said, “I can go on my own. We will talk soon. I will come see you at the newspaper.”

I shook my head agreeing with him. Madu never came to see me. After a while, when I decided to go see him myself, they told me he had been arrested. I never learned what he wanted to tell me outside of the barbed wire of the military camp. That day, when I saw him, I couldn’t talk to him about anything of that sort. I felt for him as if he was my own brother. He seemed depressed. Maybe he was being followed during that time. He finished his studies in Journalism, with my brother, and he was a poet. It was a time when artists were especially being arrested, more than ever before. They had already arrested Visar - a poet; Maks; Edison; Ali - all painters; Minush - a play writer; Mihallaq

– producer, Sherif – a singer. This is during the time that Shpëtim died.

Those were hard times. You did not know who to acquaint yourself with, if people who would appear to you as friends were really friends. They continued to write about enemies and wars and the hallucinating plenums of the Party ensued. Albanians had to hang portraits of the Party’s leaders in every gathering, and the portraits were so big, it took four people to carry one. All the faces in the portraits looked like they belonged to manipulators and murderers.

The capital was especially full of buildings, which displayed billboard portraits of them, as if they were great movie stars. This was sort of their own personal advertisement space. Sometimes from the place where the portrait was placed you could tell how a leader was thought of by the Party. My husband and I went out often in the evenings and guessed at the billboard men’s destinies.

“Do you see where they have placed K. Hazbiu?”⁵² he asked me one night. It had rained a little and the portrait was damp. His portrait was surrounded by fewer lights than the rest.

With his long nose and fox’s eyes, in that half-dark evening, it looked as if they were getting ready to replace him.

Not long after, he was proclaimed to have worked against the Party.

When they built a wall around the M.I.A., Çezar said: “That is it. They are all going down. That wall is a bad omen.”

They said that they were constructing something. Who knew what was really happening? One thing was known, though: anything that they were a part of had dark consequences.

Every time I would pass by the building, I spit at its iron gates. “May you die in hell?” The Sigurimi had terrorized a whole country; even the Party’s members were scared of them. Çezar chose not to go along with them. During the 70s, he was called to see the deputy director of the Sigurimi, Servet Backa⁵³, who was behind all of the false accusations, which condemned hundreds of innocent people to prison during those years. Backa, whom we would call “cologne,” because he would always put heavy cologne on – wanted to recruit Çezar.

“We can teach you how to provoke people,” he said.
“A spy?” Çezar said, “Never!”
Backa’s eyes grew red, as if they were on fire.
“Why, do you think that you are better than us?”
Backa told him that he was going to denounce Çezar if he ever spoke about this proposal, and so he thought the case was closed.

However, a couple of years later Backa took his revenge. Çezar was demoted from being the chair for foreign languages at the University of Tirana to a day laborer in the mines of Kurbneshi.⁵⁴

His rights to publish books were taken away for ten years. They truly knew how to take revenge and make your life miserable.

Often, Çezar would tell me: “You married me because you wanted to declare a war on the Sigurimi.”

After we were married, we moved near to where the dictator, Enver Hoxha, and his cronies lived. The streets were clean, and were surrounded by beautiful villas, three-story Italian buildings.

This was our block. This was where those who called themselves the people’s servants lived.

We, the ordinary people, who were the supposed bosses of these servants, lacked many things including our freedom, but, nonetheless, we were supposed to be happy.

Why not?

We had our means of protection. We were surrounded by the civilians, the Sigurimi’s secret agents, whom you could recognize from far away.

I remember a man with an eye patch who pretended to walk his dog around day and night. I always looked at him in the eye covered by the patch and this made him nervous.

One day, they decided to place a bench by the corner of the street and planted some trees around it so they could all hide there and eavesdrop.

The children, who thought this was a game, would not leave them alone. They played hide and seek behind the trees that the agents had planted for the sole purpose of spying. This ruined their plans.

* * *

When ‘democracy’ arrived, I was able to publish Shpëtim’s play, Enemies. At the same time, I also started to look for means to produce it. I thought that we were finally living in a different time. At the theater they welcomed me, I was known there, but that was not enough. At the time, a pundit wrote: “Will we ever be able to find a producer who will direct this innovatory play?” Everyone wanted to find any excuse to bad-mouth the past regime. It reminded you of a farmers’ market, where everyone hustled for the best prize, and this time that prize was not being considered a communist. Shpëtim’s play was far from banal. Those who would have been honored just to read Shpëtim’s play, not even produce it, now completely ignored it. It was still not the right time for the play to be produced. What happened in Albania was not a complete overthrow of the old regime, but just a reformatory stage. If you think about it, who was going to transform the state? Those who were persecuted? Those, who had been in jail or those who had been doing hard work as a result of persecution, who were tools at the hands of the Sigurimi. Who was going to really harm the dictatorship? There were people who had remained honest, but those were only a few. Until yesterday, those, the five centers (that’s how people would call the spies), were making little money. Now, in ‘democracy,’ they were given stores, restaurants, even land. So, they took what belong to people as a reward for their past jobs of imprisoning the people.

I remember those cold days, when we, the teachers, went on strikes, participated in protests. The people that were talking on the tribunals against communism looked suspicious, as if someone had found them all one by one. Those who back then used to be devoted members of the Communist Party now became devoted members of the Democratic Party. I remember someone in particular, a teacher in our school, named Sonya. One day, Fredi, also a teacher, seeing her trying very hard to accomplish her duties as a new member of her new Party, the Democrats, told her in front of everyone: “Isn’t it true that you used to work for the Sigurimi? Why are you working here?” She stayed quiet. He did all that for no reason because later on she became the principal of the school. This was her reward for her old merits. K. Grillo, who did not allow me work at the newspaper because he didn’t trust my political beliefs, became the director of the Institute for Pedagogical Studies.

The ordinary citizens of Albanian were lied to again. The Sigurimi had its hands in everything. It seemed that the old people had merely switched masks, ones that were recognized by the public as democrats. A new strategy began. The black hand of the regime was hard to cut; maybe it was going to take longer.

* * *

The three of us - Mira, Petrit and I - already have children. I have a daughter and a son. Mira and Petrit have two boys each. Mira works as a pharmacist, and Petrit as a mechanical engineer. My father grew old. We always kept in touch with one another and always spoke about Shpëtim. When my children were younger, I used to tell them stories based on my brother’s life, of a boy who came back from the dead; back to the people he loved the most. Every time I told them this story they laughed and recited it to me because they knew it by heart. My daughter has Shpëtim’s eyes and is a good writer. Petrit’s son has his name but we call him Timi, for short. Mira’s son, Elis, is very smart, just like his uncle Shpëtim. During these hard times of waiting and desperation, my family leaned on me, while Mira healed our wounds with her love and kindness. It’s surprising how some people are made to have such a big heart, always willing to sacrifice for others; meanwhile they are the ones that need the most support. She never gets upset and truly knows how to forgive. I don’t know what to say but basically, my father, Petrit, and I felt very good being around her. Our children express their feelings towards her by saying: “Out aunt is so nice. There is no one else like her!” My father would say, “I have Mira, no need to worry” which would make Petrit and me feel bad, but what could we do? My father was right.

In November of 1994, my father underwent surgery; he lost one of his kidneys which was not functioning properly. He stayed in the hospital for about two months. The three of us were with him all of the time. Mira went in the morning until 2:00 in the afternoon; I was there from 3:00 until

7:00 in the evening, and Petrit stayed with him during thenight until morning. Mira completed the most arduous tasks. She cooked, cleaned, and ironed for him. When my father needed something while I was there, he would say: “It’s Ok, leave it for Mira. She will take care of it.” One day, before going to work, I passed by the house. The venetian blinds were closed; my father was sleeping. I looked at the bed next to him and saw that Mira was sleeping as well. I closed the door and left. I didn’t want to break the silence.

* * *

In Albania the situation did not change the way we wanted it to. Çezar wrote some articles. They published a few of them and said it was not the right time for the rest. Publishing was still controlled by them. Çezar at this time had the opportunity to go to Italy where he would translate Inferno by Dante Alighieri. Afterwards, he went to America.

Meanwhile, for the three years he was gone, I worked as a teacher in high school, as well as took care of the children. During the dictatorship they gave me many problems in the schools where I worked. Whenever they needed to get rid of a teacher, or when a new principal was assigned who was a literature teacher like myself, the person who was first fired was always me. They fired me about three times, but with a lot of effort, I always managed to get back to work. The reason behind these firings was my husband’s political stand. Back then I was fired because of Shpëtim and now because of Çezar. Nonetheless, there were a lot of nice people that helped my husband and me.

My students loved me. Once, I ran into one of them walking in the streets of Tirana; he was going to Spain.

“Professor, we are all very astonished that now that we live in democracy, we do not hear your voice anymore. remember when you used to speak in class; we used to say to one another: ‘Guys, what happens in this class stays here.’ were afraid for you and wanted to protect you. You were always politically active. We can’t forget how you told Arben, R. Alias’s⁵⁵ son to get out of the classroom. He was so scared in your class. We weren’t scared, but he was.”

We both laughed. He reminded me of that time. I asked Arben to comment on the lesson we had just learned in front of the class. He was a hard-working student. He began talking about a writer who was slightly successful despite the fact that the dictator did not like him. In critique of the writer, Arben said, “But he isn’t all that great of a writer.”

“Who told you that?” I asked. “Is this your own opinion or your father’s? I teach you all about whomever your

⁵⁴ R. Alia was the main collaborator of Enver Hoxha, and after the dictator’s death, became president of Albania.

father supports, but if he has a different opinion, then tell us what it is so I can teach that to the class.” The rest of the class held its breath.

I don’t know what Arben told his father about what was said that day in class. My student and I reminsced on a couple of other events, and then said goodbye.

One day the principal asked me: “Why don’t you fill out the forms so you can retire with sixty percent and live in peace?” Sixty percent at the time was a premature retirement so that jobs could become available to new teachers. When ‘democracy’ came, I decided to retire that way. I remember how I used to take a colleague of mine with me to protests even though he really didn’t want to go. “You have to come,” I would tell him, “teachers have always been at the forefront of all revolutionary movements.” After that, I decided to retire with sixty percent, and he started working at the new president’s office. Strange times!

* * *

I told my father that I was going to the American Embassy to get a visa in order to leave to the U.S. with my children. “You’re doing the right thing,” my father told me. At the end of January, I received a visa. Mira did all she could to help me get ready. “Do not wait any longer,” she said. She could not stand the situation either, so, on February 5, we bought the tickets for the United States. We did not tell my father the day we left.

On a Saturday, I went to my father’s house with my children. We met him outside.

“It’s as if God told him to come out,” Mira said. We all went to sit at a nearby café.

“Order whatever you want,” I said. Mira started crying. I tried to stay strong. I looked at her, as if saying, don’t cry.

“What is wrong?” my father asked. “Why is she crying?”

“She had an argument with a friend at work,” I said.

“But she doesn’t fight with anyone.”

“They argue with her,” I added. We sat there for a little while longer and when we left I kept kissing him.

“Why are you kissing me like this, as if I am a woman?” he said. My children kissed his hand. I didn’t know then, but it was the last time we would see each other.

On Monday, I left for the airport. It was early in the morning, and the taxi cab rushed alongside the other cars. The day grew brighter; the darkness broke little by little. The sun was about to rise, and it looked as if the plains and the hills were waking up and becoming more colorful. I wanted to take all the air with me.

I will never forget that day until the day I die. Mira had tears in her eyes; the children were confused because they hadn’t slept all night from the excitement. “Take care of Mira.” I whispered to her. Thanas, Mira’s husband, walked me up to the airplane’s steps and that’s when tears formed in his eyes. “We will reunite one day.” Mira gave me courage, “I will take care of Dad!”

“When the plane left, I felt like someone took my heart away.” Mira told me later. Thanas took her to a couple of bars afterwards, and when she arrived home, she went straight to bed because she was drunk. The next day, Mira and my aunt’s daughter went to see my father.

“May Adelina have good luck,” she told him, “she is now in America.” My father was astonished.

“You mean that she left?” he asked. He stood there for a while until he felt better. “That’s why you were crying. Oh, she left,” he said, “Petrit, Adelina left.” Petrit had just come in the house. “Good for her,” said Petrit. “Yes,” my father added. “It’s better that she didn’t tell me. It would have been harder.”

My father never stopped us from living our lives; on the contrary, he hoped that we would become successful in all of our endeavours. I know how he must have hurt, but I know that he thought that leaving for the United States would open better opportunities for me and my children.

You cannot leave your country without leaving a big piece of yourself back. There is no one who has left their country without regretting something. Nine months after I left, my father died. He died in Mira’s and Petrit’s arms.

* * *

Almost six have passed since I came to America. In my living room, I keep Shpëtim’s play and an instrument, which he loved to play. I have some pictures of him as well. Most of his writings are back in Albania, with Mira. Petrit has come to the United States as well.

One morning, as usual, Çezar went to drink an espresso. I was preparing something at home. He came back home faster than usual.

“You know something?” he said. “There is a new bartender at Café Esposito.” This was a café whose owner was Italian, but since they allowed people to smoke, a lot of Albanians went there. You cannot smoke in an American café.

“The bartender’s name is Gjergj and he used to be a doctor at the National Guard back in Albania,” he continued, “maybe he was Shpëtim’s doctor?” I shrugged.

I did not get a chance to give him any advice because I had been waiting for so long for this moment. Çezar left. The cafés are all near to where we lived and still live. I became very nervous. I tried to keep myself busy by cleaning some things in the house. I would touch something, leave it, and then start something else. By the time he came back, I drank three coffees to feel better. As soon as he opened the door, he said: “It was him, Gjergj Ndreka, the doctor from military duty.” He told me what had happened in a few words.

When Gjergj was preparing the coffee by the counter, Çezar had asked him: “Did you know someone named Shpëtim Gina? I am his brother in-law; I am married to his sister.” In the beginning, Gjergj acted as if he didn’t know what Çezar was talking about, but then later, as if he had just remembered, he said: “Yes, yes, a very nice boy.”

“What happened to him? Weren’t you the doctor on duty when he died,” Çezar asked.

Gjergj told him that on that fateful day, he had seen an ambulance, and two unknown men had told him then that Shpëtim Gina had drowned. “I went in their car. It was a big military car, and we went to where the event took place. At the time, they were taking him out of the water. I checked his heart, it had stopped beating.”

The next day, I went to meet Gjergj myself. He and I did not look young anymore; it had been twenty years since we had last seen each other. He awaited me with kindness and made me a coffee. I sat in a chair.

It was morning. There were only a few people in the café. Two men were having their coffee by the window and an older Italian woman was reading a newspaper.

“I came to meet you once with my father. Twenty years ago,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “How is your father?”

“It’s been five years since he passed away,” I said, trying to keep my tears from forming. I had to appear strong. That moment went by fast.

“I need to know what happened because back then you couldn’t stay with us, you were busy,” I lied. He told me the same story that he had told Çezar.

“Who were those two people,” I asked, “those two people that took you to the pond.”

“I don’t know them; their hats would not let me see their faces,” he said, gesturing with his hands how their faces were covered as if those hats were helmets, or better yet, masks.

“Is he lying now, or did he lie twenty years ago?” I asked myself. I let him talk.

“You hospitalized him.” I interrupted him. “But why?”

“Ah, I allowed a singer, a friend of my brother in law, so I allowed Shpëtim to stay too.”

“He answered well,” I thought to myself and then said out loud: “We came to look for you, but you were not in military duty anymore.”

“I was there, but they took me away from the emergency room, and I started working in the kitchen, deep in the other rooms of the military units.” He spoke about it as if the kitchen was a mine.

“So, then, you did finish military duty?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” he said. We separated.

“He is lying,” I told my husband.

Destiny introduced me to Gjergj’s wife.

She invited me over their house. I helped her to see a doctor in the hospital. History had repeated itself. Gjergj did not want us to have a friendship together.

I didn’t really care; I had looked for him for about twen-ty-six years, and nothing was going to stop me.

I asked them about the incident every time I visited them, until one day, righteously, she told me: “You have come here to investigate us.”

She defended her husband saying he did not know anything.

What did I get out of the conversations with them? Apparently, they were married the same month that Shpëtim died. They left military duty and Gjergj started to work at the jail of Spaçi.

One day, I told him: “You are not telling me the truth, because twenty years ago, you told me: “I wasn’t there that day because they had sent me to work at Spaç.”

Now you are saying that you were present and even checked if Shpëtim’s heart was beating.

Why these changes?

You have to know that when I went to see Shpëtim when

he was on military duty, he told me: “They sent the doctor to Tirana in order to get some medicines for me.” “That is what happened,” he had said, “I went to get medicine for him.” “But Shpëtim said that he wasn’t sick, that he was in the hospital in order not to be on military duty,” I said. “That is what I said,” He said, “that I was going to take medicine for him when I really went to meet my fiancé.” He would say one thing, and then change it around. In the end, he said: “I don’t remember if I went to see

Shpëtim’s body or not.” Then, he had crossed the line. We stopped talking after that.

One day, he told Çezar that he didn’t go to see Shpëtim’s body.

As they continued talking, he also said: “When these things happen, everyone knows a little, only the one in charge, the one who started everything, knows everything.”

* * *

The blue, yellow and red lights have just started to turn on. There is a small group of musicians singing in the street, surrounded by listeners who are clapping their hands.

The restaurants by the street are surrounded by the sea-son’s flowers. It’s autumn, but there are still tables placed outside. There are advertisements everywhere; near the theaters they advertise theater shows.

There is a woman walking by with a small fluffy dog with a lot of hair. There are many other people walking with their dogs, but I like that small one.

When I was in Albania, I imagined New York to be full of skyscrapers made of concrete and glass. I was wrong. There are a lot of flowers and trees, all well maintained. Not one tree is crooked, every flower is in bloom.

I love the streets by Broadway, the theaters and shows. By now, Shpëtim would have been fifty years old; he would have had a whole life of his own. Oh, brother, I cried for you as if you were dead; I waited for you as if you were alive. People are all going some place.

Those two girls are waiting by the theater.
There, at that restaurant, they have placed candles on the

tables sparking a romantic atmosphere. I am meeting my children. It’s now dark. The lights are shining. Everyone is going

somewhere. What have you done with him?

New York, December 2001.

¹² Burek is a type of beef patty, made with fillo dough and stuffed with meat and rice, cheese, or spinach.

¹³ Illyrians were the first people, who have inhabited Albania. Albanians descend from them.

they all look.”

¹⁵ Lana - a tiny river which runs through city of Tirana.

¹⁴ Saranda is a town in Southern Albania and it is one of the greates tourist attractions of the country.

¹⁶ Korca is a town in Southerna Albania.

¹⁷ Kuçova is a town in Central Albania, known for its petroleum industries.

¹⁸ Gjirokastra - a town in Southern Albania.

¹⁹ Enver Hoxha, the dictator , who was the head of the Albanian Communist Party until 1985.

²⁰ Laprake – a neighborhood in Tirana.

³⁵ Naim Frasheri Publishing House - was the main publishing house in Albania.

³⁶ Vlora – city in South Albania.

³⁷ Rrëshen – a small town 50 miles north of Tirana.

³⁸ Houses in Northern Albania, erected like towers with loop-
holes instead of windows.
³⁹ Region in Northern Albania

⁴⁰ Restaurant in Tirana.

⁴⁴ Osumi - a river in Southern Albania.

⁴⁵ Neighborhood in the city of Berat.

⁴⁷ Tropoja - a small town in Northern Albania.

⁴⁸ Café in center of Tirana.

⁴⁶ Any form of beliefs, spells, religious beliefs were forbidden by the party and were punishable crimes.

⁴⁹ A small town in Central Albania.

⁵² K. Hazbiu - Secretary of the Internal Affairs at this time.

⁵² Servet Backa – Deputy director of Albanian secret services during totaliaran regime. Later acussed for serving Jugoslav secret services. He now resides in USA.
⁵³ Kurbnesh - a mine center in Northern Albania and a place of
deportation and confinement.

WHERE IS MY BROTHER?
A TRUE STORY

BOOKSURGE, LLC

Copyright © 2006 Adelina Gina All rights reserved.

ADELINA GINA
WHERE IS MY BROTHER?
A TRUE STORY
ISBN 1-4196-5194-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006909453

Publisher: BookSurge, LLC North Charleston , South Carolina

The title of the original:

Adelina Gina
KU E ÇUAT SHPETIMIN?
Kurti Publishing, New York 2002
ISBN 0-9717938-0-8

Translated by OLTA BUKA

Edited by ZHANDARKA KURTI