Dom Lazër Shantoja
Memorie.al / It were the night of the New Year’s Eve. Sylvester!
Vienna was in a fever. Twenty-three theatres, one hundred and seventy cinemas, five variety shows, sixteen cabarets, forty-three bars, forty-one all-night café-concerts had announced their special programmes in advance.
Sensations, premieres, jazz band at the Opera… plays, balls, exotic girls, various specialities. A sea of champagne above all! One thousand one hundred and three venues, besides the usual ones, invited the Viennese public to amuse themselves that night, for tomorrow the world would change from seven to eight…
A new year, a new calendar! At midnight, almost all the lights would go out. That darkness symbolised the death of the old year. In those few minutes of darkness, all of Vienna would be a single kiss. With the most beautiful gesture of love, this world begins the New Year.
That night, I felt myself like a larva. In the agony of the year that was dying, I felt my own death. The thoughts that I have arranged in this letter occupied me all at once. Before me appeared, as in a clear vision, the skeletons of my comrades who rest beneath the earth: beneath foreign earth… and of the comrades killed by the hand of executioners, of the comrades who died in hospital wards, of the comrades robbed by hand and fate.
Before me also appeared the skeletons of tomorrow… I saw before me the downcast faces of the deserters and the apostates, of those who laid down their arms and returned to their homeland like postal parcels “senza valore” (without value).
The noise of automobile engines that night was even more deafening than other times, the light of the advertisements brighter, the movement greater, and the luxury more provocative. That night I… went to sleep. I did not want to poison the orgy of the living with the breath of the dead. For me, for three years now, the calendar has lost its meaning. Three years earlier I was in prison.
I welcomed the new year while sleeping… that is, by sleeping, I also put a lid on the old one. The most logical way for the dead like us to celebrate these dates. What will the New Year be for us? It is customary, especially among journalists, to define years just as historians define centuries.
1925 was the year of Locarno, 1926 the year of Germany’s entry into the League of Nations, 1927 the year of averted catastrophes. They will also give a name to the New Year, but today a year… (Years are baptised after they die.) We can baptise it as of now.
The New Year, like the past three years, is for us nothing other than one more year of leave…
I will not close this letter without also giving you my wishes. These will perhaps be the only note of humour in this whole hypochondriac letter.
Heine, in his time, offered these wishes on the occasion of the turn of the year: “I wish the madmen a little sense and the fools a little poetry. To women, I wish beautiful clothes, and to men, much patience. To the rich, I wish a heart, and to the poor, a crust of bread. But more than anything, I wish that in this New Year we slander each other as little as possible.”
Perhaps you think that as a journalist I have chosen this last wish for you.
You are mistaken. Today the world does not tolerate slander… it tolerates the truth!
Published in the newspaper ‘Ora e Shqipnisë’ (The Hour of Albania), Vienna, 10 February 1928 / Memorie.al
