By Shkëlqim ABAZI
Part thirty-seven
S P A Ç
The Grave of the Living
Tirana, 2018
(My memories and those of others)
Memorie.al /Now in my old age, I feel obliged to tell my truth, just as I lived it. To speak of the modest men, who never boasted of their deeds and of others whose mouths the regime sealed, burying them in nameless pits? In no case do I presume to usurp the monopoly on truth or claim the laurels for an event where I was accidentally present, even though I desperately tried to help my friends, who tactfully and kindly deterred me: “Brother, open your eyes… don’t get involved… you only have two months and a little more left!” A worry that clung to me like an amulet, from the morning of May 21, 22, and 23, 1974, and even followed me in the months after, until I was released. Nevertheless, everything I saw and heard during those three days; I would not want to take to the grave.
Continued from the previous issue
“May you enjoy it?”
“After we blind you!”
“What did you want with me?”
“You destroyed our nests!”
“I did?”
“You and the others, you put dynamite in!”
“It’s not our fault!”
“What does it matter, don’t you drill the holes?”
“We are forced to!”
“Don’t do it!”
“They have thrown us in prison, man!”
“May we meet there? – krra-a-u, krro-krro, krra-a-u.”
“What a heavy curse!”
“May you never see the light again! – krra-u, krro-krro, krra-a-u.”
“Never again?”
“Yes, never again! – krra-u, krro-krro, krra-a-u.”
“Tell Edgar Allan Poe!”
“We told him once, now there’s no need, because we have him among us!”
“He too has become a raven with you?!”
“He was a raven while alive, you blackened one! He wasn’t speaking our language for nothing! But you too will end up like that, you raven! – krra-a-a-u, krro-krro, kra-a-a-u!” The flock hung over the pitch-dark earth with beaks and claws sharpened.
I raised my hands in horror. The cloud unfurled, the sun blackened, lightning struck, the sky was torn open and split the orbit in half. Zigzag lightning bolts snaked like black harpy tongues from the pyrite holes and discharged all the blackness of hell upon the horizon.
Roaring, thunder, rattling, booming, falling, striking set the globe ablaze with black tongues of fire, just like carbon, whipped the ether like the tails of a hydra and burst with a roar upon the hills of Spaç, occupied the black pyrite holes, huddled and rushed into them, demolished the resistance of the rock, and opened new tunnels.
“Is the second zone here?” a voice thundered.
“How may I serve you, sir?”
“I will scorch the entire mountain with lightning arrows!”
“Who are you, you thunderer?!”
“Zeus-i-i!” The thunder roared mightily.
“A-ha, I took you for Malo!”
“Who did you say?”
“Malo, our town crier!”
“Is this Malo so terrifying?!”
“You sound alike! Besides, I thought you were on Olympus, Mr. Zeus!”
“I was once, but now I changed my dwelling!”
“With Malo?”
“What poor Malo, you wretched man, the communists climbed Olympus, I descended to Spaç!”
“I am very sorry!”
“Don’t be sorry at all!”
“A person shouldn’t be bothered at this age!”
“Well, I am a God; I command the bridges of fire!”
“I learned that in mythology!”
“Exactly, so I will roast you!”
“What have we done to you?”
“Once you stole my fire, now you set off my mines!”
“It’s not our fault, they want pyrite…”
“I don’t care at all about your problems!”
“You don’t care, you say?!”
“Yes, may your eyeballs burst…!”
A sudden downpour erupted, may God protect us! The earth became one with the sky. Black torrents whipped the ground with acid rain and swollen drops. From the mouths of the tunnels, blasts rushed out with insane fury and threw out whatever they found inside.
Wagon beds with wheels spinning in the air, misshapen and torn cauldrons, corroded rails, ripped tubes, rotten bodies uprooted, worn-out shovels, fallen pickaxes, broken handles, torn cardboard caps were flung into the abyss. Rusty levers and chisels mingled like medieval spears with the naked bodies of the political prisoners, stained with pyrite blood, and the police with the star stuck on their foreheads.
Hellish torrents burst onto the opposite face and tumbled down into the worm-like collector that foamed, boiled, and steamed, corroded and swallowed, sucked in and dissolved in sulfuric acid, everything it found in its path. From the peaks with brownish snow, avalanches plunged, the streams roared with dizzying clamor, the rivers swelled, and the black sludge devoured the universe.
The globe changed shape, the river, the banks; the valley, the black sheep, and the pitch-dark shepherdess were ripped from the base; immediately the hills with black forests and the mountains with brownish snow were lost. The horizon overturned, and the panorama dissolved; the pyrite holes remained suspended in the air, pitch-dark like the torn mouth of a hydra, ready to swallow the political prisoners, along with the orbits and galaxies.
Cataclysm!
The world was shattered, the globe became a skeleton, and the mines clung to nothing!
From Dream to Waking
“Save us, oh God,” I prayed to the Almighty Power, who I don’t know if he heard me, being busy with heavenly duties…! But my friends heard me.
“We are here, we have nowhere to go!” Havzi Nela would repeat, when the ignorant police confused the number and sent us to roll call a second time.
“Stop bothering us, Smail, we know where we are!” Esat Kala would retort to him, every time the town crier repeated the records clerk’s words like a parrot, when they changed our work fronts.
While Xhelal Bey would cut it short:
“Wherever the Party wants!” when they asked him where he was coming from.
So, my friends heard my ravings because I had nowhere to go; whether I wanted to or not, I would vegetate in that seventy-centimeter space that the Party had allotted me.
“It’s evening, my friend!” Riza shook me. “This boy should be taken to the doctor, man, he’s lost his mind!”
“It’s not madness, it’s not a fart, Zake, there is no doctor, nor healer, na muti manas to komunismos (the shit of the mother of communism)!” Barba Nashua said to him, half Albanian, half Greek.
“The second zone, the brigade of…”
“Who are you talking to, son?”
“To Malo, to the mountain, to the snow, to the devil, to Hades, to Hell, to Zeus, to Cerberus, to the sky, to the sun, to the river, to the banks, to the paths, to the rain, to the south, to the north, to the lightning, to the flashes, to the ravens, to the holes, to the mice, to the police, to God, to…” I continued the delirium.
“Gather your senses, son, the poor thing is just a grain of wheat and fiu…”
“Shake him, Zake, his goats have run off!” Xhelal Bey was pacing, two beds away.
“Leave him alone, man, let him gorge himself on shadows and ghosts; we are here, we will talk when he sobers up!” suggested Ali Nelku, from across the corridor.
I heard but didn’t understand, because at that moment, I was in the air with the black ravens, wing-to-wing, with Edgar Allan Poe. In the evening, I pulled myself together, overcame the psychological and physical fatigue that the pleurisy of a few weeks ago had left me, and began to reason.
“The appointment is a fact; many sicker than I am will be struggling in that zone; one more or one less doesn’t tip the scale; they consider us work animals and send us where the burden is heaviest!”
I needed to meet the comrades I would be joining the next day. I met the brigadier, a tall, gaunt man from Korça named Mensur, who told me that in the group, I would be with Tomor (Balliu), whom we called Tomçe, to distinguish him from Allajbeu, and a man from Dibra.
“Tomçe will be your miner; he is from Çekin of Gramsh, he has a married sister in Berat, and he’s quite a patriot,” Mensur began the explanation.
“Tomçe is my friend, but the other one?”
“Osmani, the student’s cousin.”
“Does this Student have no name?!”
“Oh-u-a, you don’t know your Student?” he feigned surprise.
“No!” I replied.
As he was about to leave, he changed his mind and turned around so quickly that his bones cracked like a bundle of poles:
“Ahmeti, man!” He looked at me strangely: “Does all of Spaç not know Ahmet and Osman Avdia?!”
“Spaç might know them, but I don’t even know myself!” I teased him and walked away. I almost crashed into Myslim at the door.
“Where are you rushing off to, brother?”
“To the Chinese rice fields!” I quipped, borrowing Esat Kala’s line.
“Leave the rice fields to Esat and Xhelal, man; tell me what’s wrong with you?” he insisted seriously.
“Nothing to report!”
“Why are you so distracted?”
“Well, the second zone, brother!”
“Courage, you are not alone!”
“I don’t feel too well health-wise!”
“Who is well here? We are all sick!”
“Good night!” and I made to leave.
“Wait, who are you assigned to in the group?”
“With Tomçe and the cousin of some student!”
“Tomor is one of ours, and Osman Avdia…?”
“That’s what he’s called, I think!”
“He and his cousin are golden boys!” the painter praised them.
“Maybe, I don’t know them!”
“When you know them, you will agree with me!” He wished me good night and headed towards the washrooms.
That night I spent dreaming; I saw wagons crushing human bodies against the armature, ceilings collapsing and crushing the unfortunate, police with wire ropes in their trouser belts…!
When the snakes’ whistles announced the wake-up call, followed by Malo’s hoarse voice, I was already awake. I joined the buzz of the transferred men looking for their comrades as they walked back and forth: washrooms, faucets, kitchen, until I began the ordeal between my old friend, Tomçe, and Osmani, whom I was meeting for the first time.
Prison Quips
At the corner where you turned into the first brigade, two wretches were arguing, audible from afar: “Hey Veri, how are things going for you in Cambodia, Laos, South Vietnam, and North Korea!”
“Leave me alone, Xhelal Bey, I beg you; I’m barely getting through my days, and you are confusing me with the whole world!” the other retorted in the same tone.
“Why, did your Vekja bring you here for nothing, then?”
“Bastard!” the other shot back.
“And you, what do you say, man?” he addressed me as I was passing by.
Lost in my own troubles, I didn’t pay attention, but he prodded me again:
“Say something, man, may your mind be shut down!”
“What can I tell you, Xhelal Bey, I cannot answer you right now because I just left for Asia; when I return, I will give you a proper answer?” I replied sarcastically.
“Go where the Party needs you!” He burst out laughing heartily: “Ha-ha-ha!” just like in Reps, and turned to the one who was looking for a fight:
“Zike, your cousin values this young man too highly; he spotted him back in Reps as potential cadre and is now sending him to the second zone for experience!”
“Wow-a, what has this Xhelal become, man; he won’t leave anyone alone, the ill-mannered fellow!” the victim complained to me.
“Are you picking a fight with Njazi today, Xhelal Bey?” Osmani prodded him.
“Good work starts in the morning, boy! Why, they don’t say for nothing: the sun is visible in the dawn! Who can you trust more than a cousin’s son?”
“The son of a whore!” the other retorted instantly.
“Come on, man, you are cursing your own aunt!”
“My worst part!”
“You know what, boys, move your feet because the troubles of others are none of our concern!” Tomçe interrupted them. We broke away and continued on the road towards the black holes.
The two quarreling men were Xhelal Bey and Njazi Gorica from Gjirokastra, one an emblematic figure in the political prisons and the other, as they said, Enver Hoxha’s cousin’s son. I don’t know how accurate this story was, but that’s how he was gossiped about, even by people from Gjirokastra: Laver Minxhai and Mërkur Babameto, who he admitted he was related by blood to Enver.
Although I couldn’t form a friendship with Njazi, as he was withdrawn, on the only occasion I managed to speak calmly with him, I tactfully mentioned what I had heard, and he confirmed that it was true. When I asked him how it happened that the son of the Great One’s cousin ended up in prison, he burst out in anger:
“The son of a whore, he doesn’t resemble his father, nor his mother, neither in stature, nor in temperament, nor in manners, nor in appearance!”
Of course, I took his words with reservations at the time; I was waiting for a chance to find the right moment to bring up the subject again, but unfortunately, this chance was not given to me, because Njazi would tragically lose his life.
He worked in the maintenance brigade, perhaps the only privilege he had as the Great One’s “cousin’s son,” while the others toiled in the tunnels.
For supporting services, they assigned either the elderly, or the sick with a pile of medical reports, or spies who were sent for relaxation after their “valuable services,” or some individual with support from above.
Njazi belonged to the last category, although the old-timers considered him a man of character, uncompromised with the Security and the operative. Nevertheless, he kept to himself and was a difficult type.
One day, my compatriot, Halim Qejvani, was unloading the wagon with mineral at the storage point of the third zone. A large rock bounced out of the side and plunged down the chute so fast that near the bottom, it resembled a cannonball. The surface workers were cleaning the soil deposited by the previous day’s torrents, under the rubble. Although Halim screamed: “Watch out, watch out!” and everyone was alerted, the tragedy occurred.
The rock snatched other stones too on its insane trajectory, almost as if the river of hell was pouring out. The fury of the rocky avalanche left the poor Njazi no chance to react; a rock burst on his head and scattered his brains into the sludge of the puddles.
The son of the Number One’s “aunt” ended up in the grave with no name, while Halim was given three more years added to his sentence, and the file was closed with the footnote:
“…despite the incessant instruction and permanent advice for protection against accidents at work, the victim was not careful; as a result, he met with instantaneous death, while the cause of the accident received the deserved punishment. Etc., etc…”
The phrase so fashionable at the time could very well have been used: “One enemy less.”
The Second Zone
I was stepping for the first time in almost eight months onto the northeast face of the Gurth-Spaç hill. My work had taken me to the vertical stream, beyond the line that divided the slope into two almost symmetrical parts.
When I rounded the bend at the protruding nose that morning, a panorama unfolded before me that wasn’t much different from what I saw every day; however, it was an unknown horizon. The place was almost as bare of vegetation, with some scorched bushes scattered irregularly over the eroded surface, not enjoying the luxury of becoming trees due to the presence of pyrite extract.
A few steps below the road, the endless line of three-meter-high fence posts and the guard towers continued. The blanket of barbed wire crossed the debris and ravines up to a ridge, where it made a ninety-degree turn and climbed straight up the slope, only to disappear from sight above the last tunnel. Memorie.al
To be continued in the next issue
