(From the notebook “Notes…”)
During the time of communism…!
Memorie.al / During the time of communism, next to every enterprise there was the Cadre Office. Often closed with iron grilles. With rusty locks that creaked.
Behind them… the door. Further on were the shelves… the files. With brown cardboard… dread… string… with secrets.
Every enterprise employee, besides their work booklet, had their “characteristic” there. This was more political than professional. For some, it was written right on the cover: enemy, kulak, suspect, prison veteran…!
And the officials behind those rusty doors themselves came across as gloomy, moldy.
When they sent me as a soldier to a labor brigade, in Kongrazhd, Burrel, a soldier with soft, girlish eyes appears before me.
“Teacher,” he says, “you here?” That was enough… all the soldiers in the unit called me teacher. I was five years older than each of them. A late soldier.
“Teacher,” the former student addresses me. “This is a unit for the punished, for those like me with a certain ‘biography.’ You’re educated, you write in newspapers. This is no place for you. That one over there is a shoot from the blood of Mustafa Kruja. That likable one is the son of the executed Teme Sejko. The other one, of the enemy Bedri Spahiu.”
We swing the pickaxe… this isn’t real army duty here!
In the evening, at night… one of those sons of enemies took me next to a fire. He took the wooden end of a shovel and stuck it into the flame.
“Professor… welcome among us.
Tomorrow you’ll swing the pickaxe. Those pen-holding hands need to get calloused.”
He kept sticking the shovel handle into the fire, and I would touch it and squeeze it hard until it burned me. My palms thickened, the skin became like a turtle’s shell, hard.
“Tomorrow, when you take the pickaxe, no blood will burst from these hands,” the “enemy” told me.
I went to the Cadre Office at the Burrel Corps Command and “demanded an explanation”: why am I a soldier in the Labor Brigade? You know I have higher education… after the Two-Year Higher Institute I passed exams… I’m almost getting my diploma from the University of Tirana. I’ve been a school director. I write in newspapers. What have I done to be here?
He showed patience. I was a soldier, he an officer… he wasn’t obliged to answer me. But… I had all that education, maybe more than him. And beyond that cupboard with the iron grille, a drawer opened.
His glasses fumbled in his hands. He leafed through the papers. He told me: “It’s nothing from your family… it’s from your friendly circle.”
I studied on a state scholarship.
“My friendly circle hasn’t hindered me. Until now. Now here beside me I have soldiers who, what can I tell you… people called enemies with…!”
“You, do your duty. You have nothing to do with them.”
“I don’t do my duty alone.
I eat in the same mess, sleep in the same barracks; pickaxe me, pickaxe them…!”
“The Party knows who you are, and it knows who they are. Do your duty.”
Fine words, fine answers…!
He closed the iron cupboard. He was just a cadre clerk, a guardian of the herd of files.
In 1967, in Burrel I started with a pickaxe, as a farm laborer and… then came the autumn of 1968. Withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. State alarm. In Tirana, in Sauk, they pulled some beds out of the ground… that were said to be rockets ready to fire. Readiness Level 1.
From Fushë-Studeni in Librazhd, from planting and uprooting potatoes (the potato, according to the slogans of those years, was “both bread and stew”), I am transferred to Porto Romano, in Durrës. There, a field gun was supposed to protect the sea space in front of it from the enemy.
As the most educated one, they made me the gun calculator…!
Every morning we would take the gun out to the seashore. We’d do half an hour of drill, how we would shoot the enemy (who never came), and then we’d put the gun in a bunker nearby. Then… cards… handball matches… kill time however you can. Vulgarities… soldiers!
In my military booklet it was written: Sadik Bejko, artilleryman, gun number. So I got promoted. I carried a carbine. Not a pickaxe. In shooting drills I became a sniper. I’d hit two… or three targets…! Long live the withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Looong live!
I became a teacher again. How, why… I don’t know what the hell I scribbled in that file of mine.
But were there one file or more than one?
When even that big chief of the Cadre Office of the big Military Corps of Burrel didn’t know how to answer me, and for the third time he wiped and re-wiped his black-framed glasses, what can I say?
I had forgotten about the “business” of the file. And about how I had been a soldier… a labor slave.
They call me to the cadre office of the Berat district. This cadre man was tall and careful, as if born to carry and transport eggs. Soft eyes, but attentive, like a lawyer who knows where the sentence ends and where the period should be placed. The office was just as gloomy, just as rusty, as in the Burrel Corps.
The clerk was a refined professional and, in this case, well-disposed.
He tells me I need to make some additions to my Cadre file.
“Why?”
“There’s news that you might get a better job. A transfer…!”
I was a teacher at a high school in the city of Berat. I knew something about this… up there…! Oh? What more did I need?
I started to think of the bad things in my biography… (the shadow… of that Burrel officer). “You have to write it in your own handwriting.” A letter, I told him…! And I sharpened; I thickened the colors for the worse regarding that “friendly circle,” those outside the house. As if I foresaw it. “Climbing” uphill… it might not turn out well. (…the innocent phantom, as if asking for forgiveness, of that cadre officer in the Burrel Military Corps).
Meanwhile, this man with the lawyerly appearance from Berat told me… “Don’t, better not… don’t make the bad stuff thicker. Just as it is. Now tell me, in writing, the good things about your family… and do you have communists in your friendly circle… no matter how distant… write them all down.”
He was truly a golden cadre chief. I never saw another like him.
The file story continues…!
The year 1974. I am at the door of the Cadre Office of the Tepelenë District.
I ask: “Where is my file?”
“You are not a cadre. You don’t have a file.”
In my booklet it is written: “You are transferred to Tepelenë.” “You cannot be transferred from Radio-Tirana as an underground worker in Tepelenë. From the central radio, you could be transferred to a local radio like in Gjirokastër or any other radio. There is no accompanying document for your file here. Even if it is here with us, as blocked, it does not exist.”
“Please, why so…?!”
“…because you have no legal punishment, no administrative punishment, no decision upon which documents move…!”
Where should I ask for an explanation? He shrugged. But when he turned his back to me, he gestured with his hand toward the Party Committee.
“The Party Committee?”
My punishment was neither legal, nor administrative… but… blind… political…!
When in Berat they told me “you’re going as a soldier,” without telling me where I was going, they had tricked me. I didn’t go as a soldier, but as a manual laborer in agriculture.
And now they transfer me… to the end of the earth. And they don’t tell me the reason. But…! In any case, the fault was on my own shoulders.
August 1979
At the door of the Tepelenë Cadre Office. “You came for the file? Your file is dead. We could even turn it to ash.”
I showed my booklet… I had left the mine. “I wish you well,” he said. “But as much as a dead man can rise from the grave, so much cans a dead file rise.”
The Resurrection of the File…!
My big friends who got me out of the underground took care to appoint me to education.
It was the good will of some people at the head of institutions in Gjirokastër that, in an Albanian-style way, appointed me to that job. Here, the given word came into play. These people from Gjirokastër gave their word to my friends in Tirana and, on their own responsibility, got me into work as a teacher, as a cadre without a file.
Tepelenë had taken the file hostage and wouldn’t let it go. Because that file had been thrown into the abyss, like a stone into a well… and once a man throws a stone into a well, forty wise men can’t get it out.
The First Secretary of Tepelenë would not release the file without a decision, without a document.
I didn’t know what was being played out behind my back. That I was working like a ghost… not officially appointed. A living corpse, as Tolstoy would say.
After the First Secretary of Tepelenë, comrade A.P., was driven out, the path for the file’s resurrection opened. According to the code of the given word. Since a dead file wouldn’t move by paperwork, someone alive could tuck it under his arm and, from a cadre office in Tepelenë where it had slept; it could wake up and breathe in the Cadre Office in Gjirokastër.
And so it was done. In 1980, a clerk from Gjirokastër secretly took it from Tepelenë and brought it to Gjirokastër. THEN I was officially registered as a cadre.
Until then, I had been like in that ballad: A dead man rides on a horse… who is dead and who is alive…!
Without that file, officially, I could not be alive.
I learned about this resurrection after the 1990s.
But did I have only that one file? Memorie.al
