By Shkëlqim Abazi
Part Twelve
Memorie.al / I were born on 23.12.1951, in a black month, of a time of sorrow, under the blackest communist regime. On September 23, 1968, the sadistic chief investigator, Llambi Gegeni, the ignorant investigator Shyqyri Çoku, and the cruel prosecutor, Thoma Tutulani, mutilated me at the Internal Affairs Branch in Shkodër. They split my head, blinded one of my eyes, and deafened one of my ears, after breaking several of my ribs, half of my molars, and the thumb of my left hand. On October 23, 1968, they took me to court, where the wretch Faik Minarolli gave me a ten-year political prison sentence. After having half of my sentence cut because I was still a minor, sixteen years old, on November 23, 1968, they took me to the political camp of Reps and from there, on September 23, 1970, to the Spaç camp, where on May 23, 1973, during the revolt of political prisoners, four martyrs were sentenced to death and executed by firing squad: Pal Zefi, Skënder Daja, Hajri Pashaj and Dervish Bejko.
On June 23, 2013, the Democratic Party lost the elections, a perfectly normal process in the democracy we pretend to have. But on October 23, 2013, the General Director of the “Renaissance” government sent Order No. 2203, dated 23.10.2013, for the release of a police employee from duty. So Divine Providence intertwined with the neo-communist Renaissance Providence and, precisely on the 23rd, I was replaced by none other than the former Sigurimi operative of the Burrel Prison. Could anything be more significant than that?! The former political prisoner is replaced by the former persecutor!
Author
SHKËLQIM ABAZI
Continued from the last issue
R E P S I
(Forced Labor Camp)
Memoir
Six Hundred Grams
(The routine of a day at the dormitory camp)
A little later, he returned; now accompanied by two others, one of whom was a fellow villager of mine.
“How are you, Avzi Nela!?” my fellow villager extended his hand to me, then turned to the others present. “Friends, Avzi are not a bad man, but in our parts, we are bound by our word. Whoever breaks it is considered a traitor to their word. And so, this is the reason that Avzi remains silent! Isn’t that right, Avzi?” he turned to me.
Without giving me time to answer, he continued:
“But here we are before the Party, times have changed, believe me, now there are no reservations about that…!”
“Listen, sir, you and the whole village know very well what I’ve done and how things have gone!” I didn’t let him continue his Marxist sermon, because in the momentum he had picked up, there was no telling where it would end. “I have said what I had to say; now I have nothing more to add. What I wanted to do, I did openly; now you do what you have in mind to do!”
“Don’t, Avzi!” he bowed, with his hands joined, as if praying. “May you have yourself on your conscience, man!” and left without saying goodbye.
Later, when I returned to this meeting in my memory, I couldn’t conclude whether it was staged or sincere, because in the village he was considered a good man. But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that he too was part of the game, even without knowing it.
This was the last peaceful meeting in that environment, if it can be called that! The confrontation between the executioner and the victim, even when the executioner kills you with cotton. After this, they changed my cell. They put me in a narrow and long stall at the end of the corridor. It was a kind of manger, lower than my height, with some rings on the wall, to tie horses. It looked like it had once been a stable.
They put an electrician’s belt around my waist, with suspenders, like the ones they use to tie themselves to poles when working at heights. They passed the screw under my thighs on both sides and fastened it to my back, where they attached a thick chain, so thick that a tank could be pulled with it. They locked it with a padlock, while the last ring, where a chain link hung, they fixed to the wall above the manger.
They turned me into a kind of parachutist, or a horse pulling a cart, but instead of a parachute, I had the manger, while instead of a dragging weight, I had the walls of the building with all its foundations and several floors above it. Of course, this was a figment of my imagination, completely incompatible with the state I was in, because in fact, in the state they had left me, a skeleton of bones and skin, I was capable of nothing. I had never been healthy anyway, but in the cell, I wasted away pitifully.
The first two days, they opened the cell door twice for my personal needs, in the morning and in the evening. They would untie my hands and the belt, and then two police officers would push me from behind, to the bathroom door, next to the cell. As soon as I finished my needs, they would return me to the cell, fasten the belt and the handcuffs again, and the daily ritual would begin again, that is: rolling around in my space, from one end to the other of the stall, as far as the length of the chain allowed.
Soon, the weight of the chain tired me; I would sit down as if it had caught me, sometimes on my side and sometimes on my stomach. The smell of the old urine of the animal, which had been the master of this stable, mixed with the stench of the adjacent bathroom, so as soon as I touched the cement, it stung my nose and caused me to feel nauseous and vomit. I let out some sour burps, but my empty stomach, from not eating, was straining, it contracted, but it had nothing to expel.
On the morning of the third day, they untied me as usual. After doing my usual routine in the bathroom, even though I didn’t feel the need for a biological bowel movement, since I had nothing to expel, I took advantage of those few minutes of freedom to stretch my limbs. When they returned me to the cell and tied me up, they left the door ajar.
“They forgot to lock it,” I thought at that moment, but after an hour or so passed and no one came to close it, I got up to take a look in the corridor. Curious to see what was happening outside that filthy stable, I forgot that I was in chains. Before I reached the door, I found myself tangled. The momentum was cut short by the waist belt, which pulled me back, and at the same time, caused a sharp cut in my lower abdomen and pelvis.
I got up again, desperate, and I understood the game; they had shortened the chain by a few more links. The mournful creaking of the links attracted the attention of the guard; he approached me mockingly:
“There, baldy, there!” I heard him yell at me from behind the door. “Bark, oh bark, but you have no teeth! Oh you filthy mutt, we will turn you into slag! Shut up, you’re ruining the mood, oh may I eat your halva!” a lump of filth flew towards me and landed on my face.
I fell silent…! I didn’t want to answer that miserable hired hand. A few hours passed. In front of the door appeared a dirty table, full of bread and some uncovered aluminum bowls that were steaming. I got the message; they aimed to arouse my greed. I hadn’t eaten anything for three days, my intestines were rumbling, my mouth was dry and no longer producing any secretions. The feeling of hunger had become dominant. “How much more could I resist?!” I didn’t know!
I felt powerless. An unfamiliar weakness was taking over every vital organ. In that difficult mental state, I tried to test my memory’s ability, I recalled verses I had learned long ago, I recited them by heart. I tried to weave some of my own that would fit the circumstances. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I didn’t. In any case, my brain was functioning normally. But as soon as my gaze hit the table with the food, all my attention was diverted; the protest of my intestines began.
I struggled to escape that reality and turn my mind elsewhere, but my eyes didn’t obey me, I wasn’t able to defeat my animal instincts. My conditioned reflexes were overcoming my logic. Only then did I understand the cruel method that the Roma people used to force bears to dance.
A few more days passed. But how many? Only God knows! I had long lost the notion of time; I was totally disoriented. My days and nights were indistinguishable from each other. Sometimes I would get up, rush to the door, like those crazed beasts, but I never reached the table. The plates seemed to fly in reverse, towards a horizon, ungraspable by the human eye.
However, an invisible hand replaced the spicy-smelling dishes every day. The spices that they released would scratch the nostrils of my nose at that moment, my brain would descend into my stomach, and the hunger would turn into an unbearable nightmare. I tried to reason, but reason had been obscured; maybe my gray matter was reddened. Instincts had defeated logic; I was ready to do anything, just to be able to eat. At that time, the animal commanded the human. Right at that moment, I understood what drives an animal to devour its own cubs!
Hunger, hunger, hunger…! To break it, a person becomes like that too! The day arrived when they escorted me to the bathroom, without unlocking my chain, but only taking it off the link above the manger and pulling me towards the latrine, just like a rabid animal.
Maybe they were afraid I would tear them apart, because I felt I had turned into a beast. The day when a hideous snout suddenly appeared to me in the bathroom, with tangled hairs, with two crystal eyes crossed through by reddened veins, truly the eyes of a savage beast, I froze:
“What does this beast want here? Why is it looking at me with such hatred?” I backed away. Instinctively, I raised my hands to protect myself, but the animal opposite me made the same gesture. “Was it scared?” The fear the beast showed gave me courage. I snarled at it, but the image in front of me just bared its teeth, but that was all. At that moment, I reflected. I was in front of a mirror. A smirk escaped me unintentionally, which the image opposite me returned. “What? Was I the beast myself?! Oh God, what a fundamental change!”
With superhuman effort, I focused on the mirror; I no longer recognized my own features. I saw a deformed face, some protruding cheekbones, and some clearly contoured bones, covered with earth-colored skin. The hairs of my beard, like the mane of a wild animal, terrified me; my feverish eyes, like crazed glass, with some purple streaks, deeply sunken in some bruised cavities, made my flesh crawl. In front of me, a frightening skeleton stood a grotesque figure with protruding cheekbones and jawbones, with gray, bristling hairs like the thorns of a hedgehog.
“Could it be me?! Maybe! Anyway, if this caricature is really me, I’ve gone gray! I’m finished! Oh Almighty God, keep me in my right mind!” I prayed. While I was looking at the image in the mirror, I became clear about the hopeless situation. It came to my mind why they kept me chained up. The mirror, which they had placed in front of me for another purpose, brought me back to the real world. In fact, this terrifying reality did the opposite of the fate that the architects of this fabrication had predicted. The “tamers” had not thought that I could overcome this moment.
I reflected in a few seconds; the state I had been reduced to could not be endured indefinitely. Without a doubt, at some point, my resistance would weaken and my brain would lose its logical function. A terrible end awaited me. I had to invent something to escape this trap. After all, I had nothing to lose. At that moment, I put my life at stake. And I loved life, with all my soul!
I gathered momentum and lunged with my head at the mirror’s surface. The glass cracked with a rumble, the pieces shattered on the cement and in the toilet. Someone remembered to pull me back by the edge of the chain, but it was too late; the mirror was broken. They returned me to my cell, where they tied me to the ring on the wall again.
I felt a warm liquid dripping down my neck. It seems the pieces of glass had caused some tears on my skin. I started to scream with all my might. I gathered what little strength I had left, and the screams came out even more intense. The guards quickly gathered in front of my door. I knew they had nothing to do, other than to report the incident to the superiors. So I ignored their presence, I increased my screams.
In my mind, I devised a plan of my own, which I thought of carrying out to the end.
“Come on, I’m taking a risk, I have nothing more to lose! If this situation continues for a long time, I could end up truly insane! Life is a gift that the Great God has given me! Let’s try it!” I encouraged myself.
I no longer paid attention to the guards, but continued with my own thing; with screams and screams.
Maybe, accustomed to the symptoms of this torture, the investigators were expecting a different reaction. Maybe they hadn’t foreseen this end.
As the prisoners who had been put to the test of “softening” would tell me later: after the first days, hunger became the master of feelings, the person lost their logic and surrendered exhausted, agreed to sign, without seeing what was written on the paper, whatever document was put in front of them, because even their eyes went out of function. These useless formalities, even though they had no legal value because they were taken under violence and pressure, the investigators used as authentic evidence.
But it happened that the signer became aware of the action he had taken and denied what he had accepted. But by then it was too late, the investigators had gotten what they wanted and for the subsequent continuation of the process, the denial was not taken into account. In fact, it was not at all necessary that the depositions were necessarily true or whether they had been taken outside of free will or through violence. For them, only the fact was enough; the guilt was confessed, and no one thought about the consequences.
It had happened that these miserable depositors, when they realized the dead end they had gotten into, would hit the wall with their heads, jump from heights when the opportunity arose, that is, they would attempt any form of self-annihilation. But on the other hand, the criminal specialists, who had long experience in intensive interrogations, to prevent suicides, increased the level of security. They undertook special measures, with special means; that is, they put helmets on their heads. They equipped death row prisoners with such helmets, but also the insane.
They put one on me too. So, since I was still conscious, I would play the madman. This idea was born to me the moment I, with the helmet on, left nothing to be desired from the madman. For this, my experience served me. I remembered the gestures of a madman I had known, in the village where I had taught. They called him Mevlut, but for short, they called him Luti.
He was a harmless madman, but when the young people teased him with the expression: “Luti, Luti, who put it in you?!” then he would completely change; his eyes would widen, his hair would bristle, he would take on the features of a rabid beast. Then he would start hitting with any object his hands could grab, on anything and anyone who came in front of him; at those moments, he was uncontrollable. The only one who could take him was the village nurse.
I had seen Luti in an excited state several times and the nurse following him with a syringe in his hand. As soon as Luti saw him, he would throw the object he had grabbed to the ground and, like a tame lamb, would approach him and wait for him to give him the injection. For this, they said in the village: “The goat went to the butcher.”
Today, I am not able to say exactly how long my screams continued, because I became dazed. The guards, it seems, fell for my trick, because I saw them walk away from the door and they whispered something on the phone. Even though I didn’t stop shouting, in fragments of a second, I would eavesdrop on them when they were talking.
When I stopped screaming, I lay down on the cement as long as I was, with my eyes fixed on the void, on the ceiling of the cell. The guards approached me, but now they were not alone; with them came two others, one in civilian clothes and the other a military man. The military man went straight into the cell and bent over me, looked at me carefully, and then went outside. I still stayed in the first position, without moving, I didn’t even close my eyelids.
With extraordinary effort, I had to carry the game to the end. But this time, as rarely in my life, luck was on my side. The civilian who talked to the military man came into the cell. He also bent over me, but unlike the military man, he touched my unshaven cheeks, and then asked the guards to take me out into the light.
They unfastened the waist belt and the chain, put the handcuffs on my hands, only not behind my back. They threw me on a filthy blanket, gathered me into a ball like a bundle, and where they tied the ends of the blanket, they put a pole in the middle, lifted me into the air, and transported me somewhere. But where? I was unable to determine, because my vision was blocked.
When they untied the bundle, I saw myself in a lit room, on a table or bed, I couldn’t make it out. The strong light above my eyes had the effect of a projector at night on butterflies; it attracts them, but it burns them. That’s how I felt too; initially, I opened them, but in a fraction of a second, I closed them, but even closed, the light penetrated. It seems the weakness had thinned my eyelids like an onion skin and turned them into transparent lenses.
I was unable to distinguish what was happening around me, but I could clearly hear the people bustling and talking in low voices. Someone stood over my head; I heard them more than I saw them, because a shadow dimmed the powerful light that passed through my thin eyelids.
I tried to open my eyes but it was useless. I don’t know if I managed to open them, but one thing I can say for sure is that since that day a curtain has been in front of my eyes that sometimes blinds me. The person who was standing over my head shook my shoulder:
“What’s your name?” The voice sounded like one I had heard somewhere. But where? I couldn’t remember. If I was not mistaken, this was the voice of a person I had undoubtedly encountered somewhere in life!
“What’s your name?” the familiar voice repeated, and a hand shook my shoulder. “Speak, man!” the tone was now commanding. I tried to gather my memories, to bring to mind different people I had met on the paths of life, to connect the fragments of past years. My memory was not working. I made one final effort, but it was useless again. I was exhausted, my brain had suffered a schism; I couldn’t organize the old films.
I felt a kind of sting in my forearm. Immediately after this sting, a wave of heat took over my chest, first on the side of my heart, then my lungs, and a wave of steam burst from my mouth. I went into a delirium; I felt like I was flying on clouds. I was immersed in an illusory world. I was lost in nothingness.
“Man, what happened to him?!” I heard someone’s muffled voice that came very weakly, as if from the depths of a bottomless well. They refreshed my face with something, and then some slaps landed on my cheeks. Someone must have thrown water on me and was hitting me with slaps. I pulled myself together, but I still couldn’t perceive where I was and who was near me. For a few moments, silence reined, then again movement and the familiar voice that said:
“Open your eyes, hey man! Speak, what’s your name?”
“A-av-zi… Ne-la!” I pronounced in syllables, with my thickened tongue that burned as if my mouth were full of glass shards.
“What?! What did you say? Repeat it again!” the voice insisted, and some fingers lifted my leaden eyelids. “Speak, man!” he ordered, in a louder tone.
“Avzi Nela!” I repeated, with great multiple efforts.
“Hey, kid, open your eyes!”
Like a lightning strike, the thought shifted many years back. Only one person had baptized me with this epithet, my friend from the distant years of high school, the Bear of the Mountains. Immediately, the happy days of my youth and my coarse friend from Tropoja came to mind. I gathered my strength, and with extraordinary effort, I pulled open my eyelids, and fixed my gaze on that broad face. Yes. The doubt was gone; it was him, the Bear of the Mountains! Memorie.al
Continued in the next issue
