By Zija Çela
Part Two
(And events that intertwine)
Memorie.al / One afternoon, I was passing along the side of “Shallvareve” with my wife and the writer Luljeta Dano, when I see Mr. Xhelil Gjoni in front of me. It was as if I felt that, after many, many years, he had something to tell me and the two of us talked on foot. I remember he mentioned an interview that was to be published the next day. And he made known to me a detail, he said he had stated that; “a friend of mine asked for my resignation.” The next day I don’t know how it slipped my mind and I didn’t get the newspaper or magazine. However, the formulation that a friend had asked for his resignation, I did not forget. Xhelil Gjoni had been one of the high-ranking party members during the communist regime, but had made a career for a few years also in pluralism, being elected a deputy of the Socialist Party.
Continues from the previous issue
On the road to the printing press I was remembering many troubles, like everyone in my country. I was brooding over the fact that, if I had entered prison, what would happen to my family, what would be the fate of the children, would they intern them together with my wife?! At that time my son was twelve years old, my daughter ten. I was thirty-six, exactly at the age when Dritan would close his eyes from a serious illness.
But if some illnesses are sent to us by God, as if it were a bit of totalitarian despotism, many of the destructive wickednesses we sent (and still send) to each other ourselves! I kept remembering the accusations, the possibility of their source, from where and how they had been collected. As much as Xhelil Gjoni had told me, they had been accurate. This I could not deny.
Even the manuscripts of the novella and the novel existed, I still had them, I have them even today together with the response of the editorial board and four reviews, five raw materials, which in the file were perhaps included as “documentation.” “People Who Live with the Dead” I had written in 1973, it was 56 typewritten pages. I had circulated it in several hands in Kukës, writers and non-writers. I don’t remember well if I also took it to Lezhë.
The late Agim Spahiu, Visari and I were connected with the talented boys of Lezhë and, when we could, we gave and received original manuscripts or translations. Some of these translations with false names, probably translations by Rudolf Marku, which I typewritten in three-four copies with my “Olivetti,” I still keep.
Naturally, with those loads it had, “People Who Live with the Dead” I had not dared to submit for publication. But it is true that I reused it in 1974, when I wrote the first novel “Men Do Not Come Out of War,” which I submitted at once both for the competition of the year and to the Publishing House “Naim Frashëri.” It did not take long and in Kukës the news arrived that the novel was being seen as a scandal by the jury of the competition and someone advised me that the best thing I could do was to withdraw it as soon as possible. I was not allowed to withdraw it.
While the response that came from “Naim Frashëri,” together with the reviews, was devastating. There I was accused even for what I had not even had in mind when writing. Because only a madman could self-denounce himself openly with the text like that. Among other things, here is what was said in the response of the prose editorial board: “The novel has no positive hero and this derives from the fact that the writer’s attention is not focused on those phenomena that are typical for our life, because it is focused more on the ‘shadows’ than on the ‘lights.’
In many scenes and episodes pacifist and defeatist ideas are embodied. The idea of pacifism is linked to that of supra-class humanism, which is reflected in Christian pity and mercy…! The four former partisans, who have come to the brigade’s celebration (…), are described mainly as people who have lost their minds, sometimes unbalanced and who live with the anxiety of death.
Their spiritual physiognomy is not that of communist fighters, the ‘men’ remind you of the heroes of Remarque and Aldington; they are heroes tired of ‘war.’ The predominance of negative characters in this line and generally in the entire novel creates the wrong impression that our life, our socialist country, is filled through and through with psychopaths, with mediocrities, misers and bureaucrats. Urgua, who is the only positive character, is presented in-active, in the role of an observer.
Where is the influence of the working environment on him, and even more so on the negative characters?!.. This contrived solution leads to the idea that class struggle in the bosom of the people should not be waged, that the revolutionization of people’s consciousness is a spontaneous process. You have arbitrarily reconciled two things that cannot be reconciled, two enemy ideologies. As a conclusion, we must say that you have created a work on a wrong ideo-artistic platform, very harmful.
Your novel ‘Men Do Not Come out of War’ is not worthy of publication and there is no possibility of reworking.” Add here also the verve of the reviewing writer, the late Fatmir Gjata that for understandable reasons of high sensitivity, sounded like a ready-made claim: “It can be thought, for example, that the central idea is the title itself, ‘Men Do Not Come out of War.’
But whoever reads the book comes out with the opposite conclusion…! The reflection of the (partisan) brigade’s celebration more through the eyes of Derman and Mrs. Bektash, who slander as enemies for the veterans, gives the celebration without emotions, without enthusiasm, as an amorphous thing and blackens it, while in the mind remains the reactionary thought of Derman Derman that “one of them they shoved inside,” while for the others he seeks to know how many of the former partisans have violated or deviated from the political line that the PPSH has determined.
The author does not deal with their psychological deepening (of the characters), but brings to the foreground the phobias, even the delusions that are characteristic of the mentally ill and at the same time characteristic of bourgeois decadent literature. All these are unacceptable for our method of socialist realism.”
Now imagine the trial for a moment. As the experiences of that time have testified with the article of agitation and propaganda, what more would the prosecutor need for the indictment?! When Ramiz Alia was elected President of the country, Xhelil Gjoni became the Number One of the party. If judged by the long career, as well as by the circumstances when the veterans of the Bureau and generally the rusty nomenklatura showed themselves null before the new political reality, this rise of Gjoni seemed expected.
However in my viewpoint, and not only mine, I saw two irreconcilabilities. First, with the leaders of monism the processes of democratic installations and the very renewal of the left would be delayed. I thought that the country should go to the right and that the newly formed right could do this faster, but also more convincingly.
Regardless of the fact that it had won the first elections, the left had to prepare to quickly pass into opposition and the rotation (through early elections) should not bring either the crushing shattering of the left, so much so as to end up a completely rocket-like parliamentary opposition, nor non-acceptance for the handover of power, thus conflict and violence. How prepared was he for this, at the head of the party, Xhelil Gjoni?
Second, Mr. Gjoni enjoyed the reputation that he represented the hard wing, the more conservative one in the party. This opinion was widely spread, indeed already (it seemed the thorn was taking the bridge and that government did not have long) it was trumpeted also by a part of those, who previously had boasted about a coffee with comrade Xhelil.
The speech he had held at the so-called Tirana meeting against the emigrants, who left through foreign embassies, had been so categorical and dogmatic, that the conviction was created that this leader was incorrigible and belonged definitively to the past.
I had a lot of distance with Mr. Gjoni, in the sense that we had no relationship, nor any meeting even by chance; indeed I was not sure what he thought about me, how much weight my word as a writer and public person would have with him. As far as it concerned me privately, I kept the memory that with his will or some recommendation from higher instances, I had escaped from the door of the prison.
And yet, I reasoned that Mr. Gjoni should withdraw from politics, especially from the political leadership. Of course there were people, who thought the same way also in his camp. But why didn’t those around him tell him?!
Because some held with their nails the posts they had inherited or had seized, because some others were younger, more ambitious and, in silence, were making calculations to attack and advance in career at the right time and place. However all this stopping, sprinkled also with Machiavellianism, went to the detriment of general developments?
In short, I had the impression that no one had opened their mouth before their big chief to suggest resignation to him. A left-wing party member, whom I asked to do it, shrugged his shoulders and looked at me scared, as if he had before his eyes some madman.
Then I decided to take that step myself. But how, when I didn’t even have a phone number?! I secured it through Halil Lalaj, who later also became a deputy of the SP. When I called on the phone in Halil’s presence, I told him that I was so-and-so and that I wanted a meeting for the next day, Xhelil Gjoni surprised me with his readiness. Without any hesitation, without any fuss of the powerful man, he said: Of course. We set a time for the morning.
At the headquarters of the Central Committee I presented myself from the gate beside the big boulevard and I had my identity card ready for the counter, where I would get the entry slip. But apparently they had been notified, they told me it was not necessary and, if I am not mistaken, one of the civilian guards accompanied me up the stairs. Comrade Xhelil was waiting for me, I found him pacing in the corridor and he immediately led me to his office.
We were seeing each other after so many years. I wonder what had he thought beforehand? I have the impression that with intuition he had sensed something. He gave no sign of nervousness; he maintained an outwardly visibly generous calm, except that I could detect an inner tissue of sadness, perhaps from the premonition when a person waits for something close, something that you may have guessed; now it will happen.
We sat down almost as before, he at the head table, while I at the side of the other, the one that formed the extension of the T, a fashion rooted with time. If you looked at it with the urge to give some symbolism to that form, it resembled the tail and head of a hammer.
After exchanging the first words, which are usually parasitic, I began:
– Comrade Xhelil, I have come to tell you to resign…!
He listened to me without interrupting, while I enumerated the arguments. I remember he had raised his elbows on the table and, on his intertwined palms, had rested his heavy head of a posing man. As I spoke, that inner sadness little by little was becoming more visible to him, passing even to human sorrow. When he spoke, I suspect his eyes were a little moistened, but it was not this that surprised me. His words surprised me, when he said:
“In fact, three days ago I submitted my resignation to comrade Ramiz, but he has not accepted it. I…”! Were we alone or was someone else, in another office, listening to our conversation through hidden microphones? Excesses with the tendency of suspicion, although it was time itself that prompted them, do not always hold.
We continued the conversation for a while, indeed I am returning the “favor” to the former boasters, at that meeting I even drank coffee with comrade Xhelil. I don’t know how right I was in the step I took. Perhaps I respected my conscience, my conviction, but also that of a civil majority that, at all times, in a somewhat mysterious way seems to delegate its request to someone. No one comes to tell you, but by yourself you feel charged with that task.
In any case, time proved that when Xhelil Gjoni went to parliament as a deputy of the left, the esteem for dialogue and compromise sometimes appeared in him to such an extent, that many claimants of that camp, although younger in age, in mentality seemed older.
As can be seen, many years have passed since the first meeting, but quite a few also since the second. I had never spoken either about the second, or about the first. After the 1990s I did not publish the manuscripts of that time, neither the novella “People Who Live with the Dead,” nor the novel “Men Do Not Come out of War.”
Usually I do not turn back, because compared to what I wrote yesterday, what I will write today captivates me more. But I published books of those who had suffered prison, books of Maks Velo, Visar Zhiti, Kasëm Trebeshina, etc. But also from the typology of forbidden books, for example Kadare’s “The Monster,” which the author had entrusted to me shortly before his escape.
In any case, perhaps also out of curiosity, the reader has the right to ask whether, during the free conversation at the second meeting, Xhelil Gjoni and I returned somewhat to what had happened at the first. Yes, we returned. I learned that the order for my arrest was signed by Nusret Dautaj, director of the Directorate of Internal Affairs.
I learned some other things too, but further I did not ask…! Since the beginnings of pluralism I have written and spoken publicly: In the opening of the files of the collaborators of the Sigurimi, writers should also be included. Indeed they should be included voluntarily, starting from me. Except that I have never forgotten to make an emphasis.
After all, I have no insistence on knowing if someone did harm to me, but I want others to definitely know if I have done harm to anyone. As for that mysterious withdrawal…! Yes, even in today’s reality it has remained so to me.
Sometimes, I feel like putting on new underwear, putting on a black tie and, with a wax candle in hand, knocking on the door of some party members and high-ranking functionaries: “Knock-knock!” “Who are you?” “A servant of spirits.” “And with what message do you come?” “I come to ask for your resignation…”! Only for one thing I have not yet made up my mind, when and which will be the first door, where I will knock./ Memorie.al
5 May 2018
