By Shkëlqim ABAZI
Part forty-five
S P A Ç
The Grave of the Living
Tirana, 2018
(My memories and those of others)
Memorie.al /Now in my old age, I feel obliged to tell my truth, just as I lived it. To speak of the modest men, who never boasted of their deeds and of others whose mouths the regime sealed, burying them in nameless pits? In no case do I presume to usurp the monopoly on truth or claim the laurels for an event where I was accidentally present, even though I desperately tried to help my friends, who tactfully and kindly deterred me: “Brother, open your eyes… don’t get involved… you only have two months and a little more left!” A worry that clung to me like an amulet, from the morning of May 21, 22, and 23, 1974, and even followed me in the months after, until I was released. Nevertheless, everything I saw and heard during those three days; I would not want to take to the grave.
Continued from the previous issue
A chilling panorama!
(The Time of the Serpent!)
Meditations
- We were destined for the black holes of the pitch-dark time, in whose circle they marked the field and hammered the pivot! The darkness encompassed the galaxy that rotated along the elliptical orbit where they imprisoned us, without a chance of breaking away from the parabola, with the pivot or the extreme end of the rope as the forefront, and the gravitational umbilical cord being the Branch of Internal Affairs, starting and ending in the so-called People’s Courts.
- From the sheepfold to the pen-gate, we passed two by two and lined up on the tuff stairs on the path of Calvary, to be banished to the kingdom of Hades, where the current of Lethe swallowed us and immersed us in Daedalus’ labyrinth, from which we did not hope to find the way back again. We crawled in the zigzag galleries, following the corrosion-eaten rails, like the broken thread of Ariadne, we floundered on the rusted platforms, right and left, crossing the tunnels with ascents and descents, until we reached the eastern face, where the parabola plunged into the darkness.
We loaded the wagon with troubles and woes and traversed the itinerary, now in the opposite direction, stepping on the same tunnels, rails, platforms, until we came out and emptied it into the ore dump, only to restart the cycle again and again, until exhaustion. Through the darkness, we pushed the wagons, and we pushed our blackened bodies. We awaited in the lap of Hades the twilights, the dawns, the rotation of shifts, weeks, months, seasons, years; we awaited the vernal, summer, autumn, and winter equinoxes, and we waited…, and we waited for freedom…! The horizon darkened and it did not stir anywhere, but we caught the signals in the political sinusoidal intersections and felt it was coming. Yes, it was coming!
We rejoiced in it, hoped for it, and desired it passionately…! Immersed in nocturnal dreams and dissolved within the dark orbit, just like mourning clothes, we tried to glimpse beyond the barbed wire that surrounded us, to discern the change, to notice the transformation of matter, and we nourished the hope of a different expectation, we aspired for better, more prosperous days. We perceived the perspective of tomorrow through the gloom of today, catching the change of time moving beyond the opaque convolution… just like the infallible meteorologists, we foresaw freedom approaching and waited patiently, despite the darkness, despite the terror!
Despite the fact that consciousness erred deep underground, with a sense unknown to human science, which perhaps was useless to the free, we confronted it and managed to sniff it in the perfume of spring flowers; to breathe it in the air currents brought by the western winds; to feel it in the chirping of birds returning from intercontinental migrations; to perceive it in the celestial transparency, amidst the redness of the sun, when it hid behind the tramont (north wind/mountain) and sent us messages of resistance with ray-torpedoes; to touch it on the bones broken by the beating and the handcuffs that renewed themselves after every session of violence; in the lungs eroded by the cold and heat of the cells that found the strength to recuperate and supplied us with air; in the blood that was shed and regenerated, to reawaken the exhausted cells.
We, the modern Sisyphuses, turned into a phoenix, resurrected from nothing, every time they thought us dead, and gained clarity in the darkness of the galleys, sharpened our reason in the pool of misery where the regime confined us, acquired perception, and trained our imagination to escape the ideological noose, when the “free” lost their bearings.
III. Erosion transforms matter.
Not even the globe can escape dialectical change, which suffers irreparable fissures in the course of centuries, nor the forms that acquire certain phantasmagoric shapes, as a result of continuous schism, nor the relief that breaks somewhere, is eaten away somewhere, disappears somewhere; the geography with seas, islands, mountains, plains is distorted; great forces have extinguished continents, states, regions, cities; volcanic magma swallowed Atlantis and plunged Pompeii, under the aqueous kingdom, etc., etc.
Matter and living things cannot evade the universal law, much less the human species, especially political convicts, who were treated so brutally that after a year their faces were grim, after two they were blackened, after three or more, grief deepened the furrows and multiplied the wrinkles, freshness faded, heads were shaved, hair turned gray, eyes sank into sockets until they lost the light, flesh withered, the skin peeled off in flakes until the bones gleamed. While time stood still, dates changed, weeks passed, months, seasons, years rolled by, decades stripped away like amorphous skeletons that Kronos layered like dinosaur fossils, in the tumult of monotony.
- Change stimulates life, but spontaneity was lacking in prison; uniformity turned into a prolonged calamity, calamity into monotony, and life emptied, existence lost its meaning and took on ominous forms, causing hopes to wither.
Perhaps elsewhere nature amazes you with sudden surprises and variations, but the prison slid into an imperceptible, indistinguishable viscosity by the human eye; the tableau froze and the world petrified. You woke up in darkness and ended the day under violence. You plunged from a night of gloom into an even gloomier day, because there were no white mornings, bright noons, red sunsets, but only lightning and thunder and an eternally cursed weather, where the pendulum stopped amidst the dark evil and time climbed over the thorns, was torn by the wind and settled on the fences, like a discarded rag.
Meanwhile, misery, like a dark emissary, absorbed you into the kingdom of Hades and glued you to the faces of the galleries, where you couldn’t distinguish days, weeks, months, seasons, years, decades, because the concepts mixed up, God forbid! There was no spring, because the flowers withered while still buds; no summer, because the sun rusted at dawn and at noon was sewn behind the celestial dome; autumn lacked the multicolored vividness; while in winter, the snow flared black and time identified with the mark of damnation.
In the Spaçian continent, the seasons were terrifying; the heat and the frost were refracted in reverse – it was either cold and cold, or hot and hot. Outside the galleries in winter, the shivers penetrated your bone; inside them in summer, the frost chilled you so much that neither the fur coat, which stuck to our backs like a turtle shell, nor the oilcloth, which became parchment for every season, could appease it. Amidst the fog of Kronos, misery emptied our brains and souls, while fantasy took wing, reason sharpened to the point of craving, and logic cleared to perfection. The annals were missing there. History did not stir anywhere.
Rites and events repeated and followed each other with a funereal uniformity, epochs dissolved into the ether, time turned into nothing and stretched into the empty space with the tempo of a snail, distributing the monochrome darkness, like an eclipse of light and shadows. While day-nights, seasons, complete and fragile years, adhered to the magma that burns and scorches the greenery. Over the Albania-prison tableau, the veil of agony settled, painfully gripping the barbed wires. Whoever tried to tear that net remained in the rags and reddened the tops of the pyramids, of the twenty-eight thousand kilometres, forgotten by the world. Above and below the Arbëror land, patches reflected, which with terrifying red determined: “The Era of Blood, or the Time of Enver!”
- A murderous epoch and time!
Stitched with threads of blood, like a symbol of the animal world. Perhaps in the historical annals, the man-eating Era will be registered as the Time of Vampires, which for five decades crawled upon our soil and left a trail of blood, like the slug’s slime. A time of cruelties, without dates, without history, without memory! A time of torn emblems, of communist inquisitors! A time of Cains, which began with betrayal and ended that way? A time of Oedipuses, who extinguished their lusts with their mothers! An incestuous time, conceived in a flock and giving birth to groups! A time of brainwashed people! A time of identical scoundrels! A time of collective whores! A time without identity…!
VI.
The ancient profane divided the epochs, compiled the lunar and solar, stellar and earthly calendars, and although naive, they succeeded. “The Era of Blood or the Time of Enver!” erased them all. Homo-sapiens returned to the origin. He plunged into total chaos. He overturned the phases, brought back the apocalypse, and selected the species by the method of political selection, as in the time of Noah. He transformed the slave into a numerical identity, where the digit erred and was lost in the gloom of millennia, like the Mayan calendar, which shook even the most capable scholars in its complicated labyrinths.
The counting began backwards. They deprived us of human experience and locked us deep inside mammoth caves. They reduced the intellect, so much so that messages had to be conveyed by primordial methods, with drawings in caves, on soil, on sand, on trunks, on rock. They returned to the proto-homo to determine the chronological order, they referred to memory and comparability with cyclic phenomena. They marked us as sacrifices, in the dithyrambs dedicated to X or Y communist deity.
They confined us in the holes of Hades (although they called them mines), from where our predecessors barely escaped with titanic efforts. They erased countless millennia-centuries, revived the paleologue, the neologue, brought us back to the stone and clay tablet, to the skin, to the papyrus, to the parchment, to the bone; they served the tools that ancestors had invented once before. They dispossessed us of the right to natural heritage, provided us with primitive tools made of stone, wood, bone; denatured the appearance and propagated nakedness, pushed us to consume roots, insects, reptiles, wild fruits, grass!
They leveled history like the Achaeans leveled Priam’s Troy, zeroed the epochs, and imposed nothingness upon us. The titanic efforts, up to the present day, were in vain. Over the millennial annals, they stretched the curtain of darkness and extinguished human sacrifices, denied the struggles of generations; they changed the spiral of orders, dissolved the epochs, and spread oblivion, making the centuries a mash, so that you couldn’t distinguish where one ended and the other began; you couldn’t tell the prehistoric man from the Neanderthal, the animal just raised on its hind legs from the cured civilian. They erased discoveries from memory; now the Marco Polos, Magellans, Amerigo Vespuccis, Christopher Columbuses would have to be reborn to re-explore the globe.
VII
The communist theoreticians and practitioners discovered a new land in the heart of the old one, the “CONTINENT OF OBLIVION,” and strived to persuade the world that the “Era of Blood or the Time of Enver” was opening a unique page in world history, a system that would bring about the missing dynamism, would spur people toward progress, in a word, would be the promoter that would lead the community out of the capitalist-revisionist “cave,” would eliminate the exploitation of man by man, would re-establish equality over property, and culture, art, and letters would flourish. Thus, they propagated paradise and smeared it with filth, plunging the populace into the abyss of illusion, desecrated the intelligence of homo-sapiens, and produced a hybrid type, devoid of faith or conscience, a washed-out and repulsive Shiva who would recognize the Party and Enver as mother and father; they concocted the unscrupulous recidivist, homo-socialistus.
Thus, order and chronology lost their balance, technological progress was shattered, and the instincts of proto-homo were revived, which kindled war within the species, like animals at the beginning of time, stimulating cannibalistic survival where the strongest resisted the storm. They overthrew historical stratifications, mixed up the times terribly; one couldn’t distinguish matriarchy from patriarchy, slavery from feudalism, capitalism from socialism, all the way to the atomic age. They ignored the birth of Christ. They started the era with Marx and the epoch with the triumph of Marxism-Leninism, embodied in the murders, fratricides, and infanticides of the Bolshevik Revolution.
They sanctified deception on the “CONTINENT OF OBLIVION,” spread universal amnesia, and rendered all references meaningless, confusing events, epochs, orders, organizations; prehistory, which gave birth to history and should have served as a model for identifying the sequential classification, they turned into chaos. They kindled controversial thoughts that produced controversial ideas, consequently fabricating a controversial history. They superimposed epochs and began the de-classification of orders amidst controversy and confused the millennia. The collective vortex incited collective bewilderment where even the most stoic lost their bearings and wandered aimlessly amidst the Hamletian dilemma: “To be, or not to be…”?!
The bewilderment reached its peak when, on top of everything else, they superimposed the “Era of Blood or the Time of Enver” and began the global, mad dance. The international flock of devils preached the triumph of worldwide communism, which according to them was a matter of “time.” Our own ghouls joined the dance, erasing the past and starting the Albanian era on the day “WHEN THE PARTY WAS BORN.” According to the panderers, November 8, 1941, signified the date one, of the year one, of the century one. Thus, they converted dates, years, centuries, and even human brains with the animal product, and initiated the headlong rush with the slogan: “The alley of the madmen,” spurred the flight of the wise, with the threshold: “The lawn of tears,” and the Stalinist gulag as the destination. While the delirious howled: “Party-Enver, we are ready anytime,” the wise were silenced and silently marked their graves.
VIII
Communism projected the “new man,” incest of diabolical minds that desecrated the human being. Intelligence died, knowledge, culture, heritage, and the experience of generations migrated; the slave was turned into an aimless zero, without a compass or a map. This very incestuous creature (lejfen) converted into a Bedouin who wandered without reference in the wasteland and ran and ran towards the unattainable and elusive mirage. He burned and died under the scorching heat of the dunes of the dream, without reaching the oasis he aimed for. And the Pindaric headlong rush continued. As one fell, others snatched the poor wretch’s baton and ran, until they suffered the fate of the first.
If the marathon runner died a few steps away from the place where the Athenians waited for him but carried the message of victory, our communist marathon runners faded away chasing an illusion, reaching nowhere, conveying no value, without even managing to understand the purpose of the fatal striving. The game of the mirage lasted throughout the “Era of Blood or the Time of Enver.” Although a minority sensed that the sacrifice was not worth the effort, they lacked the courage to speak and froze like the wedding guests in the legend. Meanwhile, for those who sought to survive on the “CONTINENT OF OBLIVION,” dumbness became the norm and silences the golden cover.
Whoever wanted to save their head, well-being, and family comfort remained silent; whoever spoke and tried to show others the swamp where the socialist wreck was stuck was subjected to the program, denigrated, anathematized, cursed, killed, pinned with all sorts of nicknames: Cain, Pontius Pilate, Iago, Naiad, Dryad, anachronism, sorcerer, magician, deceiver, hinderer; they unleashed storms upon him and cast him into Tartarus. The “blabbermouths” were confined to the Stalinist gulag, while panic, fear, and terror reigned on the modern “Golgotha,” which transformed the “CONTINENT OF OBLIVION” into a collective graveyard.
IX
Humanity became mute; misery and mediocrity occupied the corner! The poor slaves with amorphous minds and uniform brains turned into walking corpses! They courted methods long forgotten: they were born in a flock, raised in a flock, lived in a flock, died in a flock; in a flock, they were also put under the noose, first by force, then voluntarily. Under the claws of defiance against the universe, with the slogan: “all against all,” no one cared about the horror that awaited them, beyond the socialist abyss, but they rotated in the void, like the sheep of Panurge. The ideologues spread the field with ideological thorns, under the dictate of the One, and forced the people to run barefoot, until the verge of exhaustion.
“One for all, all for one,” the One thundered, and the line of brainwashed puppets hurried toward the sublime sacrifice, each eager to offer their readiness and self-sacrifice in the name of nothingness, inciting even their peers to commit acts of self-immolation. The line stretched with the head in the abyss and the tail in emptiness, accelerating the moral of Rabelais’ famous fable with actions. They concocted the perverse education: “To think and act like revolutionaries!” Zeus yelled from the peak of Olympus, and the subordinates instigated collective brainwashing, or self-detachment from tradition, from the family, friendly, and social circle, in a word; flocking again, according to the moral of the aforementioned fable.
With exhausting movements: “To work, to live, to vigilantly stand guard as in a siege!” they completed the brainwashing and brutalized the populace, to give up their soul in fruitless labor. The collective masquerade limited free time to the extreme; no one thought about other problems besides the woes of daily life. They invented idiotic decorations and medals for nothing! “The Hero’s Star” was won even by the dead behind the bushes, by those who hadn’t fired a single shot, by those who fell from a mulberry tree and ended up on the fence posts, and even by the unfortunate kids who were caught in danger of losing their lives in “war” games. Decorations like the “Hero of the People” were turned into a cross!
After they cast off the cross, they used the crescent moon as a medallion and hung it on the foreheads of the coffins of the unfortunates who lost their lives in banal accidents, like the case of the poor Dukagjin woman, whom the earth swallowed on the Rrogozhina-Lushnje railway, and her comrades, in an attempt to save her, killed her with the pickaxe; also for Dino Qose and Ismet Bruçi, who lost their lives in natural disasters, or for Agron Elezi, whose pyramid collapsed on his head, etc.
Meanwhile, parents had to rejoice in the decorations, even when their children were brought to them in a coffin: “My son, your mother’s milk is blessed, long live the Party!” they cheered and sang like raving lunatics. With the “Communist Party Card,” the madness reached its peak; they even made members of the dead who were not given the “Front Card” while alive!
They debased the “Hero of Socialist Labor”; they left no milkmaid, cowherd, shepherd, woodcutter, tractor driver, textile worker, miner, or lathe operator without hanging a piece of tin around their neck, supposedly stimulating them to work for the next millennium, when people weren’t filling their stomachs with bread.
On the “CONTINENT OF OBLIVION,” they invented the communist Saturdays, a perverse imitation of the October Revolution, where the people had to toil without compensation, they invented the Stakhanovite Sundays, where again through forced labor, everyone had to contribute to the actions of the neighborhood, city, village, region, and the missing reward for the unpaid work now translated into: bullets in the enemy’s heart!
“We are two million Albanians, each one kills one hundred soldiers in war, with a rifle slung over the shoulder…” etc., etc., the Primo-tenor raised his voice. The scream captured the twenty-eight thousand square kilometres and was followed by the chorus of brainwashed sycophants, thus completing the socialist sham (butaforada). They were crossed with a Kalashnikov with training bullets over their chests, they had joyful carnival masks attached to their faces, their instinct of hatred for the neighbour was fueled, and they were hurled in attack against the scarecrows-enemies, in bunkers and trenches. They locked the populace in barracks for the seventeen-day training drill, where with flintlock rifles, they defied the world’s military, while with forced labor, and they challenged the global economy.
The militaristic megalomania and the failing productivity stimulated indifference, while routine fed apathy and became a nightmare for the masses. On the “CONTINENT OF OBLIVION,” collective brainwashing turned into a mania. Until the “REPUBLIC OF THE PUPPETS/IMPOSTORS” was born! Whoever attempted to escape persecution was camouflaged behind forgotten means, starting scribbles in ancient caves. He adapted to the time, became primitive (laturis) but saved his head; whoever lacked the ability ended up in hell. Memorie.al
Continued in the next issue
