By Ilir Kadia
Memorie.al / Do you have a friend whom you haven’t met even once for 35 years?! I do, Astrit Lulushi, whom I nevertheless met today! It truly seems like a paradox! But he, whom I made a friend the moment I heard his voice on “Voice of America” and for 35 years straight, until he retired in Washington! He never came to Albania during that entire time! But here we met today in the middle of Tirana, at the “Pedonale” (Pedestrian Street) and had a drink together with Bislim Ahmetaj! He had published his seventh book in Tirana, “Pa kufizim” (Without Limit).
– “No one better than you can make an assessment of Tirana in 1985 compared to today! How does it look to you, how do we look to you?” – I asked him.
– “Tirana and the people are completely different! Beautiful!”
– “How did you escape?!”
And Astrit Lulushi told us:
“I was working at the Auto-Tractor Combine. I was married, with two children. We couldn’t make ends meet. I told my wife that I was going to Sarandë for a beach cabin. ‘If I don’t come back tomorrow, I will come back one day.’ I bought a Chinese bicycle inner tube and a pump. I got on the train to Ballsh and the bus to Sarandë. In my hand, I held a magazine ‘Rruga e Partisë’ (The Path of the Party)!
I studied the location when I arrived in Sarandë near an old villa on the shore and, when night fell, I inflated the inner tube and wrapped it around my body like the serpents of Laocoön, while I put my passport in a plastic bag and tightened it around my waist. When the border searchlight shone its light towards me, I would dive into the sea! It didn’t spot me.
Then, when I had gone a good distance, a speedboat stopped five hundred meters away, but it didn’t spot me either. As it left, I let myself loose in the sea, swimming until dawn when a tourist ship saw me as I was screaming and signaling with my hands! They lowered a boat with two people who took me onto the deck! I was completely naked! The bag with the passport and the clothes had fallen off my body somewhere in the sea!
The captain of the ship told me they were heading to Brindisi and that if I wanted to go to Greece, he would turn the ship around! But I told him that I was headed for America! That’s how I ended up in Brindisi and from there to the refugee camp in Latina, near Rome! I stayed there for 9 months, until the American embassy sent me to America.
I first went to Boston until ‘Voice of America’ accepted me into their studios in Washington! Until ’90 I was alone, but when the embassies opened, the boys and my wife, along with her brother, came! One son died three years ago! He had a stomach operation. It didn’t go well! Now my wife and I are retired! That’s how it was!”
35 years of a man’s life recounted in a few minutes during today’s lunch, but they have gripped my mind like a vice!
Astrit Lulushi was 32 years old when he left Albania! At the peak of a man’s life! He swam across the sea through the night towards the destiny of his life, his family, and today…!
“We have grown old, Liri (a short form of Ilir)!” – He told me with a laugh before we parted. But it sounded to me like he said: “Our freedom has grown old!” Memorie.al
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