By Sokrat Shyti
Part twenty-five
Memorie.al / The writer Sokrat Shyti is the “great unknown” who, for several years, has revealed the peak of the iceberg of his literary creativity. I say this based on the limited number of his published books in recent years, primarily the voluminous novel “The Phantom Night” (Tirana 2014). The novels: “BEYOND THE MYSTERY,” “BETWEEN TEMPTATION AND WHIRLPOOL,” “THE DIGGING OF NIGHTMARES,” “THE SHADOW OF SHAME AND DEATH,” “THE CHIEF COLONEL,” “THE DAMPENED HOPES,” “THE CONFUSIONS OF DESTINY” I, II, “SURVIVAL IN THE COWSHED,” as well as other works, all novel manuscripts ranging from 350 to 550 pages, are waiting to be published. The dreams and initial fervor of the young novelist, returning from studies abroad full of energy and love for art and literature, were cut short early by the brutal edge of the communist dictatorship.
Who is Sokrat Shyti?
After returning from studies at the State University of Moscow, shortly after the interruption of Albanian-Soviet relations in 1960, Sokrat Shyti worked at Radio “Diapazon” (which at that time was located on Kavaja Street), in an editorial team with his journalist friends – Vangjel Lezho and Fadil Kokomani – both of whom were later arrested and subsequently executed by the communist regime. In addition to the radio, 21-year-old Sokrat, if we can imagine him, had passionate literary interests at that time. He wrote his first novel “Madam Doctor” and was on the brink of publication, but… alas! Right after the arrest of his friends, as if to fill the cup, one of his brothers, a painter, escaped abroad.
Sokrat was arrested in September 1963, and in November of that year, he was interned along with his family (his mother and younger sister) in a location between Ardenica and Kolonje in Lushnje. For 27 years in a row, the family lived in a cattle shed made of reeds, without windows, while Sokrat was subjected to forced labor. During those 27 years, he was legally obliged to report three times a day to the local authority. He had no right to move from the place of internment and was deprived of any kind of documentation, etc. In these conditions, amidst a cattle shed, he gave birth to and raised children. It is precisely based on this event, or more accurately, a very long history of persecution, that he was inspired to write the book “Survival in the Cowshed”!
Agron Tufa
Continues from the previous issue
EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK “SURVIVAL IN THE COWSHED”
“Regardless of the dark stain of the escaped brother-in-law, which cannot be removed from my biography, it will remain a mark, thanks to the perspective of the First Secretary. I feel grounded: because I will not be slandered or gossiped about, and perhaps I will not be attacked from behind. You must know that in the first days and weeks after the escape, a storm of punitive cyclones swirled around me and my family. In several consecutive meetings of the basic organization, the threat over my neck hung like a Turkish yatagan. The thinking and decision of the district’s bureau were awaited, especially which way the word of the great leader of the Party would weigh.
The terrible news that your family’s internment was carried out in horrific conditions did not lead you to any camp, neither in Savër nor in Gjazë, but straight to the cowshed of the forest guard, seemed as strange and frightening to us! Even though I am quite a timid person, one day I gathered my courage and asked the officer of the Internal Department, who covers the sector of the interned individuals. (I took advantage of the darkness when returning from work after eight in the evening, and there was no one on the street):
– “How do you see this special form of punishment through the eyes of a specialist?”… – “It’s the first time something like this has happened; I don’t know how to say…!” – he replied, shrugging his shoulders. “In my opinion, every punishment is harder to endure when you are alone than when you are in company with others. I have no opinion on what the members of the Government Commission had in mind when they determined this form of decision.
But I repeat: your brother-in-law, a very young man, will have a difficult time facing the oppressive opinion of the local residents, as, based on my experience; they will view him with hostile eyes. He must have the courage and bravery to give him the appropriate resistance to get through the first phase without suffering a cerebral blow!”… After this wish, which seemed sincere to me, this question spontaneously came to my mind: could they have had exactly this in mind, that they sheltered him in the cowshed? And I did not hesitate to express it to the officer.
– “Maybe, and perhaps,” he said. “The fact that this form of punishment is being imposed for the first time in our district must definitely have a special impetus. It remains a mystery whose mind it first entered and which member of the commission proposed it. But this cannot be disputed or revealed. Therefore, do not take the trouble to ask anyone, even if this is an officer with high ranks in this sector, as you will only open trouble for yourself.
Even if I were to compare this isolated punishment with that of His Grace, Irine Banushi, who is at the Monastery of Ardenica, there is still a significant difference. Because His Grace lives like a Pasha, in ideal conditions, eats like a gentleman, is served by a caretaker and a cook! He is often visited by beautiful women and high-ranking officials. He strolls freely through the forests. Reads at any time when the urge strikes him.
He does not do any forced labor. The only restriction is movement to go to Tirana or to some other city, and he must be provided with a special permit. If your brother-in-law had been interned in the monastery, given that there are ample rooms and living conditions become more secure, I would not be surprised at all. And I believe you would have been less worried, and perhaps you would have thanked the one who proposed this decision. Because here, the journalist would feel like he was in a rest camp, the stress of contempt wouldn’t weigh him down, and he would have time to read, write, and think.
While the requirement to report three times a day to the magistrate would help maintain his physical form. However, it happened that this was not the case. And this shocked me greatly! Therefore, I repeat: have the courage and bravery to get through this situation without suffering madness, as he is a young man, at the blooming age, and from what I’ve heard, he has a brilliant mind…”!
– “The conversation with the officer of the Internal Department,” continued my sister’s husband, “especially the comparison of the punishment with His Grace, taking into account the significant change in your outlook in all directions, including age and education, led me to deep thoughts, and sparked a terrifying question: have you inadvertently stepped on the callus of one of the Radio chiefs, not directly that individual, but his friend or relative? And has he been waiting to take revenge?”…
– “I don’t know of any such case, because in the youth program, we always highlighted only the positive example…” – I replied, looking surprised.
– “Could this vengeful stance be related to the fact that you sat in the same office with Vangjel Lezho?” – He added, worried.
– “It’s not excluded that there might have been a pent-up resentment against him, since he wasn’t satisfied with the 25-year prison sentence, and the remaining part was directed against me, as the opportunity arose!”… I added somewhat hesitantly.
– “But how were your relationships with the leaders of the writers, aside from Shevqet Musaraj?” – he asked curiously. – “I may be wrong, but it seems to me that this must have been the starting point of the avalanche against you…!” – He emphasized with a determined look.
– “I knew that there were occasionally heated frictions among them. Because I suffered personally from the partial publication of the story ‘Aunt Maga’ in the magazine ‘Nëntori.’ Therefore, I still do not have clarity on what fate awaits the unpublished manuscript of the novel ‘Madam Doctor’?!
– “Now it matters whose hands the manuscript is in. How do you feel after all this time, I mean before you wrote the novel: did you have any high-ranking official in mind to provoke?” – He asked, quite concerned.
– “I don’t know. Even after reading the manuscript, he didn’t make such comments. What worries me is this: it has been almost three years since he last contacted me! Who knows what troubles he has? He promised to guard the manuscript like the apple of his eye, and I believe his word. It’s possible they might have removed him from the leadership of the Union on the pretext of health. And without a vehicle, he cannot move from Tirana. But even if he is formally in his previous position, in reality, the keys to the office are with him, as the leadership of the Union is passing into the hands of the new elite…!”
– “If it’s as you say, then the impetus for the evil comes from the elite,” – the husband of my sister interrupted me. – “Because if they wanted well, they would find another less humiliating solution. In my opinion, the heaviest punishment for you should have been removal from the Radio and employment for several years in a production work center for’re-education,’ as it’s commonly referred to. For you, as a public figure, since you were a journalist and are a writer, the opinions of the primary leaders of the Radio and the Union must definitely be considered before a final decision is made.”
From the way they acted, it seems that they not only did not support you but rather took the opportunity to get rid of you so you wouldn’t return. Since the officer of the Internal Department in this sector, who surely knows the content of the decision precisely, expressed to me that all possibilities were present to designate the Monastery of Ardenica as a place of punishment and not to seek shelter in the cowshed, this casts doubt on whether someone first thought of this humiliating shelter, someone who wants to lead you to perdition, not because you had unkind intentions towards him, but he has ambitions towards you under the guidance of satanic malice.
It’s possible that the First Secretary, after reading the decision, must have sensed the deliberate evasion that left the officer of the Internal Department astonished, and he had no difficulty understanding that the alienation between content and implementation was driven by a monstrous wickedness. This was enough for him to change his harsh stance towards you with his authority, without delving into unnecessary details about what the malice had been.
The fact that you still haven’t seen and read the decision of the Government Commission three years after the day of internment proves that within this game of secrecy lies the backstage of revenge, that this vile fabrication was originally concocted by the local wrongdoers, certainly in collaboration with the lickspittles here. But this intrigue will never be uncovered.
Even our current conversation is only to calm ourselves and to reach the end of speculation, not to dig deeper since we have that opportunity. We must be grateful to the First Secretary for the stance he maintained that lifted the terrible quarantine between us. Otherwise, if it had continued, it might have caused irrevocable stress for everyone!
– “During these three years in the cowshed, the gnawing nightmares almost turned me into a work animal, a lonely wanderer with a barrel of oil on my shoulder, in poverty and disarray, asking myself; how long will the torture and humiliation last?!” – I expressed my resentment with a deep sigh. – “The humiliation’s sting had penetrated to the marrow, so deeply that I did not know if I would endure the terrible quarantine until the end!”
We, the inhabitants of planet Earth, although we touch and partially enjoy the sensations of life with awareness, still remain unable to see and foresee the gaffes; they will have a downside.
This deficiency ignites the imagination and creativity to fabricate all sorts of speculations to fill the void of mystery, directing curiosity, eyes, and attention through the endless celestial spaces. In the early stages of human life, as a consequence of this deficiency, superstitions arose, followed by beliefs, until the phenomenon that encompasses all nations of the globe was born in consciousness, the worship of God in various forms and ways, according to religious rites.
Whenever we see ourselves cornered or entangled in the darkness of mystery, human consciousness turns to God for help, when the mind cannot provide a solution, no matter how much we squeeze and ignite the flames of imagination. Enveloped in the swaddling of the broken hope of not knowing the mystery, we beseech God fervently to send us a ray of light, so we can see through the tunnel of darkness what we expect to happen…!
But in life, one may encounter a terrifying, surprising turn that has never crossed our minds, which becomes the decisive cornerstone of fate. Something like this happened to me after the interruption of my studies at the world-renowned university in Moscow and my return to Albania: just when I was expecting to reap the fruits of my labor, I was family-interned in the cowshed in the village of Ardenica in Lushnje!
(Although for many readers, this leap may resemble a fantasy, crafted solely to concoct fabricated stories, comparable to adventures rather than actual events, so my statements may seem like fabrications or imaginative inventions to make the narrative as engaging and interesting as possible. Considering the endless multitude of publications, there are indeed writings of this nature; I assure you that this way of writing does not belong to my style, as I feel a moral obligation to the reader to narrate events as they have occurred in reality, regardless of the fact that they often take on shades and tones of disbelief.
For the story you are reading, there is no place for shocking speculations or heavenly astonishments, considering that events of the time of strange paradoxes are described, when Dictator Enver Hoxha was convinced that the galaxy revolved around him, and everywhere in the world, he was seen as the Sun!
Exactly this paranoia was propagated and spread with overwhelming noise in the literature of socialist realism, through the verses of apocalyptic poems: there was an ambitious feverish race among the poets and elite writers to attract as much attention as possible from the “Sun”!… In the deep darkness of “Zeus’s” consciousness, the worm of pathological hatred crawled incessantly against intellectuals with Western democratic beliefs: their mouths were shut simply by frightening and suppressing them in their solitude. Following the example of the great Chinese brother, “the village surrounds the city,” Enver purged the Political Bureau, the Government, and the Central Committee of the Party of the “irreparable troublemakers”!
He brought onto the political stage the dregs of Albanian society: (The ones who raised sea chickens, with four classes of night school! The woodcutter! And other such scum! Moreover, roles were given to these key figures, even to the highest point of the Pyramid, aiming to exert terrifying pressure on the rest of the Political Bureau and the Government, especially the prime minister and several ministers, to make it easier to declare them “enemies and double agents!” in the future!)
(After this necessary intervention, to refresh your memory, so that you have in mind the real time when the events are unfolding, I continue the interrupted narrative):
During breaks between rehearsals, among friends, different conversations would begin, accompanied by humor. Among them, I was the quietest: I only listened and smiled. We knew each other so well that it seemed we were members of one family! Therefore, we were not angry when the limits of humor were occasionally exceeded, as in the case when Faslliu suddenly asked a member of the group: “How old is your mouth?”
(Because he spoke so quickly during the rehearsal, out of fear that he would forget the text, that he bit his words and they came out truncated!). Even though at that moment we all laughed at this surprising humor, we felt it necessary to intervene to prevent our friend from feeling insulted: we told him that “biting words” happens to seasoned actors, let alone amateurs. To continue the humor, Todi, as the Albanian language teacher, would try to determine the subject and predicate in every expression when pronounced incorrectly.
And especially, he liked to tease the director of the troupe. In fact, at times, he would provoke him so much that it drove him to the brink, forcing him to step outside. But we, accustomed to these jests, were not at all worried about the director’s departure, as we continued with the rehearsals without his presence. And for the sake of truth, during this time, everything ran smoothly, as there were no frictions or scratches.
I don’t know who among the friends suggested that, in addition to interpreting the role, I should also take on the duties of the make-up artist, when Faslliu, as an artistic high school graduate, could have easily fulfilled this role! However, I did not object, as I had once tried my hand at a children’s theater and didn’t do poorly. I mention this detail because this ability became the genesis of my closeness with my future wife, Arqilina.
In fact, we had known each other since childhood when we traveled through villages to perform together with the adult group from the Cultural House. She was younger, with a compact body: she performed various acrobatic and circus exercises. But since we lived in different neighborhoods and didn’t attend the same school, our childhood acquaintance stopped there. Who would have thought that fate would bring us together and allow us to get closer in our youth, me at 25 years old and her at 23, in the amateur theater group?!…
When I was doing Arqilina’s make-up in a separate corner (she played the role of an aristocratic mother, so her make-up took a long time), we didn’t even realize at first why the silent glances were entwined on each other’s eyelids, and began to exchange thrilling messages that words could not express. Unconsciously, the internal impulses became vigorously activated, and an extraordinary sense of energy flowed through our brains, hearts, and bodies, which unexpectedly established the first spiritual connection, fragile and unprotected, the outcome of which was uncertain!
I say fragile and unprotected, because although fate led me to join the amateur theater group, this time would end quickly after the competition, and then we would naturally part ways and not see each other again. But even if we did happen to meet by chance when I came to visit my older sister, we would only be able to exchange greetings and reminisce about some jokes from the rehearsals.
Certainly, it was my duty to show restraint, not to reveal my feelings, considering the heavy reality of the class struggle, as even a small provocation could lead to severe consequences. I put myself in her shoes. I imagined the powerful pressures on her parents, her married sister, her older brother, and the extended family.
It was clear that everyone was against this relationship, even though they had nothing against me concerning family, behavior, character, education, or appearance, considering that normal human logic prioritizes living conditions and future prospects. When these are not only unpromising but rather bring and sow insecurity, the contradictions naturally take on aggressive forms and shapes.
After analyzing all the causes and consequences, I reached the undesirable conclusion that the monster of class struggle would not allow our closeness. Therefore, to avoid further deepening our silent relationship, we first had to cultivate patience, hoping that perhaps an intermediate solution might be found (just as one hope that stones might fall from the sky!)./Memorie.al
Continues in the next issue
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