The Song of a Mother’s Pain…!
By Jozef Radi
Memorie.al / This old writing can be read with or without this note…! It’s been more than six years since I wrote it, and like many of my writings, after I write them and free myself from what I think, I leave them somewhere in my archive, convinced that one day: “Do your work and cast it into the sea; if man doesn’t find it, the fish will…” This very heartfelt piece is one of the few about my Mother, as she never wanted to be written or spoken about… “I haven’t done anything important in this world except you…! All other mothers have done the same as me…!” Fearing that I only had a father, today I also testify about my Mother…!
Vitore Vushmaqi – Radi, was born in Pejë (Kosovo) on June 12, 1926. She was the eldest of 6 children of Frano Llesh Vushmaqi, originally from Vermosh and a distant relative of Prek Cali. Her father, Frano, and her uncle, Pjetër, studied in Austria. The former in sausage processing and the latter in military education…! In 1932, the two Vushmaqi brothers, Pjetër and Frano, settled in Tirana, where her father opened the first sausage workshop in the capital, while her uncle, Pjetri, served as an officer in the Royal Gendarmerie.
She received her initial education at the College of Nuns and later studied at the “Queen Mother” Institute. She mastered two foreign languages, Italian and Serbo-Croatian, and worked as a secretary for a year. The fact that her parents were educated in Austria instilled in her a spirit of discipline, order, and respect. In 1943, she married Lazër Radi, and a year later, their first child – a daughter, Veronika – was born. After Lazri’s arrest on November 23, 1944, she was left on the streets without support and lived with her brother-in-law.
Her daughter died before reaching the age of one (March 1945)… and she herself was later arrested in 1952. She was sentenced to ten years in prison as an “agent,” in a group where she did not know any of the accused…! She was released in 1956 and returned to the Kuç i Kurveleshit internment camp, where her husband was interned, as the only possibility for survival. She lived there for three years as the only woman among a hundred men!! Their first child was born there. The odyssey of the internment camps then continued: Gradishtë, Çermë, and Savër, where, alongside endless suffering, two more children were born…! She returned to Tirana in February 1991… and died, also in Tirana, on March 21, 1997…!
Requiem for Everything that Leaves this World…
Ten Years Ago… March 19, 1997
Ten years ago, the world seemed to have found a perfect balance with itself, so everything in this story begins like a fairy tale…! There were two genuinely elderly people who were living the last days of their once so terrifying lives in complete peace…! They had two sons nearby and a daughter across the ocean, which was spiritually with them every day. They had three grandsons and three granddaughters, bright as light. They lived in a new house (after half a century on the roads… a house of their own!!! It was unbelievable good fortune!!) With an untroubled economic well-being, and with all three children settled down…! So, they had managed to realize a part of what could be called their “unacceptable dream”… after so many long and endless years of horror and terror. Thus, everything had returned to that peaceful plateau of calm and harmony…! No more than a hundred meters away from that former house near the Lana River, where their irreversible calvary had begun on November 23, ’44…!
Ten years ago, on a March night like this one in 1997, they all gathered together to celebrate the name day of their eldest son, which was also the Fathers’ Day…! But at the same time, we had to sorrowfully bid farewell, with tears held back in our Mother’s eyes, to that shared misfortune into which all of Albania was quickly sinking at such a dizzying speed. Outside, the gray sky was full of gunshot marks, and the ground underfoot was full of empty shell casings.
Never had death stalked the Albanian streets and squares so fiercely…! I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, we all became part of that collective madness that was burning, stealing, killing, raping, and destroying everything! We were all powerless to do anything (even in self-defense), because the state that state of dreamed-of freedoms was suddenly made of paper, like a nestling newly hatched from the egg…! I had thought of everything, but I had never thought of this, I hadn’t even entertained the idea in my mind.
Nor could my father, with all his grey hairs and endless experiences, grasp this collective madness in which we were all sinking… as individuals and as a people… nor did he believe in that abyss into which we were all sinking together, and he could no longer find either the word or the consoling reason for what he was seeing with his own eyes…! That lady timidly and tremblingly raised the toast glass on my name day (St. Joseph’s), but found no words of blessing… none! Her eyes became deep and moist from the carnage that was surrounding and urgently darkening our daily and nightly lives.
“Run away, son, run away!! Run away, because nobody but scoundrels can prosper in this country!! You suffered enough for half a century because of us…! Don’t let your children suffer because of you…!” The words that poured from her lips had been dominating her being and her deeply religious soul for days…! “We are not accustomed to doing harm to anyone, but we must not constantly suffer from this evil…! It is not right! We spent our whole lives in the greatest test of suffering…! Enough now! Run away, son, and keep close to each other!” And never had those words of hers been deeper than at that moment…!
I had never heard my mother philosophize like a goddess as I did on the evening of March 19, 1997! I knew my father as a born Socratic, and I couldn’t see him differently… I couldn’t find anyone to compare my mother to! “Don’t look at us! We’ve had our share of hardship. One day more, one day less, doesn’t matter… Look after your lives and your children’s lives… This is what Mother tells you, and she doesn’t know more!!”
I still couldn’t believe my ears that those words, coming from the depths of her soul… were hers…?! Outside, the sky continued to thunder from the crisscrossing bursts of Kalashnikovs. Quite close to the window, a screaming light of bullets was unleashed through the darkness from a nearby balcony…! She shrank and became smaller…! “Fortunately, your paths are open…! It’s easier for you…! Even being made king in this country is not worth it…! I’m not telling you anything to dishearten you, I’m telling you what my eyes see and what my ears hear…”!
My father was frozen like a statue. He looked directly into the eyes of that terrorized woman and didn’t know whether he should oppose her, support her, or agree with her words. To support her, never, because he had thought and acted differently all his life… Because he had believed in the future of his own country…! He couldn’t oppose her, because it was a mother’s instinct, thus the essence of her being – the protection of her creations – had been violated.
To agree with her, on what, why… wasn’t the whole meaning of her sayings complete…?! That March evening (oh Mars: God of Strife and War), that Woman had exceeded all her own limits, which he, as a Great Patriarch, had not even considered! “Do not rejoice in the jobs you have, neither one nor the other. An even harder job, as long as it’s honest, it doesn’t matter where…! If you listen to me, don’t delay twenty-four hours…! Run away… Don’t worry about us, we’ll manage somehow…”!
“Enough, enough, you’re exhausting me with philosophy! They’ll sleep under bridges…! Don’t think anyone is waiting for them with flowers wherever they go…” – my father retorted, now nervous, simultaneously emptying his glass of wine…!
Silence reigned for a few moments…! A silence that gnawed everywhere. I felt a deep sob within myself. But there was no point in letting it out…! I went outside. That night I felt I was at the most difficult crossroads of my life. And I was not the only one! It was an entire nation amidst that frightening crossroads. As a people, we were left between Scylla and Charybdis… and no one dared to speak about tomorrow, since the present was endless… and meaningless!
The news was getting harsher and harsher. Murders, burnings, gangs, threats, beheadings, (Central!!) Committees… were everywhere…! Our great evil, fueled from outside and supported from within, was taking on the dimensions of a civil war…! South against North, North against south… filling the screens everywhere.
“Again with the lost cause we are…” – I thought to myself, as I saw my parents off through the darkness of the night…! There in the yard, I noticed that age was weighing even more heavily on both of their backs, but that night of endless bullets and bursts was weighing even more heavily…! One was 71 and the other 81…! They carried the weight of endless prisons and internments on their shoulders – they carried a lifetime…!
As we were parting, a burst of “Kalashnikov” roared from the palace next door, and another one sawed the sky a little further away! None of us spoke. And what was the point of words on a night like that. The muzzles of the rifles spoke, and man now only had the dimension of those weapons that those people held in their hands…!
Mother wrapped herself even tighter in her coat, kissed the two grandsons who had come out to see her off, and kissed the rest of us who were standing frozen in the yard: “If you have ever listened to me, do not neglect what I told you!” she whispered through gritted teeth, wishing me the last: “Good night…!”
Her steps moved away shuffling through the darkness, while the “Kalashnikov” muzzles sawed the capital’s sky on all sides.
What more could that Mother say…? She had said everything as she moved toward eternity…! After that night, all the balances of the world took a downward spiral inside and outside of me. What she had told me at the feast table, she would not be able to repeat again. But I had to repeat it to myself endlessly until it hurt…!
Two nights later, like a flower that is plucked, she left this world of suffering with an unprecedented serenity. She spoke with her daughter in America, leaned on the couch… and leaning thus, she slept forever…! She abandoned this world steeped in chaos and terror like an angel in search of the heavens of peace. Life had been a real terror for her, and for many other women like her, the afterlife would surely make some room for her in Paradise… for her noble soul…!
…I could not tear my eyes away from that face where peace itself slept. All the hidden sufferings, all the exhaustion, all her silences were written there… but also those words said as a testament, which she had torn from her exhausted soul with such pain…!
Since that night, life continues its course, but nothing is the same as it was before that night. All the balances of that magical moment are gone now. Life struggles, following the traces of her last words, spoken through that bullet-pierced darkness on a March night, while the world plunged deeper and deeper into that still unexplained terror, which only a perverse human being can inflict upon themselves…! Memorie.al
