By Shkëlqim ABAZI
Part forty-two
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
I could distinguish the dialects even though I couldn’t make out the faces.
“Near Rrëshen!”
“Did they put you in for politics?”
“I’m worse off, truly!”
A prolonged groan pierced the darkness:
“Woe, oh mother!”
“What’s wrong, Fran?” – I couldn’t hold myself back. Silence.
“You’re not feeling well, are you?” – Luigji asked the misplaced question.
“Can a man feel well in a sack?!”
“Did they put you in a sack, huh?”
“Yes, by God!”
“Come on; let’s get him out, men!” – We extended our hands like a blind man with a stick and got tangled up more than we helped. The desire to free someone even more unfortunate made us forget the handcuffs. With our ten-fingered hands, we grabbed rough burlap, but we couldn’t find the opening. The fabric tangled in our thorny fingers, while the handcuffs bruised our wrists, and a metallic scratching noise scraped the sheet metal and hurt our ears.
“Look, they even handcuffed the sack!” – Someone expressed surprise.
“Are you tied up, huh?” – asked the other.
“Yes, truly, hands and feet!”
“Where is your head, Fran?” – Luigji’s voice.
“Here, man!”
“Where, inside?”
“Here where the voice comes from, then!”
“The voice is heard, but you can’t see it!” – interjected Ladi, who hadn’t been heard until then.
“I don’t know what to say, men, when you can’t see with your open eyes, how can I see me, from inside the sack?!”
He was right, but in the grave, everyone is a Homer, who knows neither where they come from nor where they are going.
“Leave it alone; they secured him well enough before putting him in here!” – said a northerner.
“Why did they convict you, Frana?”
“They haven’t convicted me yet!”
“How long have you been inside, man?”
“A week now!”
“Where are they taking you, inside?”
“To Rrëshen, I suppose!”
We learned the destination; we would end up in Spaç. After all, the policeman had spoken clearly: “Slam him into the Branch and continue further!”
“They are taking us to Spaç!” – Someone said.
“Are we still far?” – I asked.
“The devil knows! – Someone answered me. – Tell me where we are, and I’ll tell you how much road we have?”
“I know where we are!” – Ladi jumped in.
“Where, inside?”
“In the auto-grave!”
Someone guffawed, but I didn’t understand why, because laughter knows no dialect.
“Devil’s work, how this man has adapted; he even laughs in the grave!” I philosophized, but the name Spaç itself scattered my brains and terrified me.
“Go ahead and push five years in the mine! But Ladi, ten? And these others, whom only God knows how long they have been sentenced for?!”
I knew Luigji was sentenced to four years, but he was a wretch, without family, without home, without work, without property, and it wasn’t the end of the world; at least he would find shelter and a bowl of soup where they would take him.
“You swallowed Spaç, son!”
“What did you say, friend?”
“Nothing!” – in fact, I involuntarily expressed what I was churning in my mind. I bit my tongue and kept silent.
Meanwhile, the auto-grave continued its rattling through the potholes…!
“Why did they put you in, Fran?” – Someone continued the series of questions.
“I killed two people!”
“For real, huh?”
“Yes, truly!”
“I thought they put you in for politics, like us?”
“I wish it were so, but I killed! Oh mother, my soul is leaving me!” – groaned the sack, or the man in it.
“You feel weak, huh?”
“I’ve never felt worse!”
“Hold on, man! – Luigji tried to encourage the dead man – We are all in for politics!” – Perhaps he hoped to ease the pain of the one confined in the sack by emphasizing this fact.
“Lucky you! Politics is for the smart ones, fools kill!” – the one plunged in the sack continued his groans. “What did you tell us, smart ones?!”
“Who are the ‘smart ones,’ O man in the sack? Luigji! What does he know about politics, poor guy! Give him a dish of cow bones, and he’ll fly to the seventh heaven! And what black politics do the rest of us know? Nothing, absolutely nothing! They put us in because the Party’s work demanded it! O man, we are utterly useless, but we haven’t killed, and we haven’t stained our hands with blood!”
I thought I had spoken out loud, but the monologue unfolded in the scattered chambers of my brain. It’s strange how reason weakens when darkness strikes; misery penetrates the brain, enters the soul, and confounds judgment! It was then I understood why they used darkness as a form of torture. Lord, O Lord! The engine gasped. The auto-grave pulled and swayed, heavily dragging its own weight up the slope of some mountain pass.
The smell of unburnt gasoline turned my stomach, which churned as if filled with vinegar. A gulp of fluid burst from my mouth. I tried to swallow it, but sourness scorched the bottom of my esophagus, and a heavy stench stung my nostrils. Meanwhile, next to me, a prolonged hiccup pierced the darkness, and a viscous fluid flowed along my forearm to the tips of my fingers, while a gulp with a toilet smell was emptied onto my face. The disgusting belch reminded me of a similar one that I had smelled somewhere, but I couldn’t recall where.
“Oh God, I’m dying!” – complained Ladi and emptied what he had in his stomach.
“What’s wrong, Ladi?”
“I burst; I was holding it in with difficulty.”
“Spit it out, man! I spat it out an hour ago and I feel quite good!”
I suddenly realized: the smell of our auto-prison resembled the smell of stable manure, mixed with the ammonia of urine.
“Eureka, eureka! How did I not remember the stench of Xhike’s carriage-prison dung sooner?” The same buzzing, the same burning, the same pungent taste, only more disgusting.
Suddenly my esophagus erupted; a new gush blew out with pressure. I crouched to hold it in, but the key of will failed, and the pressure almost burst my lungs.
“Oh God!” – I groaned subconsciously.
“Spit it out, man!” – They urged me from the darkness.
I was foolish to impose on myself the need to restrain the vomit, to overcome the stomach cramps and spasms, when the others had already emptied it out! As soon as I opened my mouth, a fountain of heavy belch erupted. I avoided spraying my fellow travelers and turned towards where I thought the side rail was, but two or three sudden gulps rushed out, just like the piss of Xhike’s horse.
“May you be gone, Xhike, with your horse and araba, you just wouldn’t leave me, you just wouldn’t leave me!”
My stomach muscles went slack, and my throat dried up; meanwhile, the deep exhale was followed by a wave of acridity, and I slumped over, almost falling asleep. As the auto-prison continued its swaying through the potholes, the groans and wriggling of the sack increased, reminding me of where I was; I stretched my limbs and regained my balance.
“Can I ask you something?” – I heard Luigji, who didn’t care about the auto-grave’s shaking. It was strange; this incredibly grown man had the body of a chameleon; he adapted to any environment!
“You want to ask me, huh?” – the sound pierced the burlap.
“Yes, man!” – And he added without waiting for the other’s approval: – “Who did you kill, friend?”
“My fiancée, with her lover!”
“You did very wrong!” – a mountaineer’s dialect. – “You gave them their just deserts!” – Again the same dialect. “How many years were you engaged?”
“Eighteen now!”
“That’s a lot, truly!”
“How old was she?” – asked Ladi.
“Who, inside?”
“The fiancée, then?”
“Ah-ah! Eighteen!”
“How much did you say?!”
“That much, then!”
“How so, they were engaged before birth?!”
“Yes, man!”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five!”
“Did your fiancée know you?”
“No. But she knew for a long time!”
“A pity!” – Ladi fell silent. The others also fell silent.
In the darkness, I was unable to fathom what my fellow travelers were grinding over. But I couldn’t find any motive to justify that monstrous crime.
“How can a person be killed so easily? Because she loves a boy and refuses to prolong her life with a stranger! May God lend a hand! How can you take the lives of two people, as if crushing two potato bugs?”
“But the motive!” – escaped me inadvertently.
“It’s not a motive, but a custom, Kanun (Code of Law)!” O God, what ignorance!
“Custom! Kanun!”
“It is neither custom nor Kanun. But crime, O man of God! Unprecedented crime and Lek Dukagjini would not have killed his daughter because she refused to marry a stranger! I am even inclined to believe that Lek would never have given her to a stranger!”
The few lines I had fixed from the ‘Code of Lek…’ came into my mind!
“Calm down, no Kanun mentions these crimes…” – I spoke the last part out loud; the others I just dreamed.
“Did she betray you, huh?”
“No!”
“How so, man?”
“On the railroad!”
“When did it happen?”
“Some time ago!”
“With whom, man?”
“With the company commander!”
“No, man! You killed both, huh?”
“Yes, truly!”
“Bless your gun, hey brave man of the earth!”
In that moment, I would have wanted to be a bird, an ant, a reptile, to get out of the box contaminated with worms and run away, not to escape prison, but not to hear that calamity.
“Swallow me, O earth! May God have deafened me before I heard these horrors! Thank God I am in darkness, where I cannot see the braggart!”
Amid the heavy stench of that accursed auto-grave, I envied Homer:
“It was better that he was blind, because if he had been sighted and had seen his heroes, perhaps he would not have adorned them with the superlatives of gods, and we would have been deprived of the Iliad and the Odyssey!”
I imagined the deaf Beethoven and the fate of his mesmerizing scores:
If he had had ears, would he have left us that harmony of notes, which he composed with imagination? Where does shortsightedness lead you, to take the life of your fellow man and boast as if killing a snake! And why?
‘Besa’ (pledge of honor), the Kanun, it says!
Oh coward, you are a hostage to an unkept promise, which, after all, you have no proof of, because you never gave it! When the ‘besa’ was given, you had not come to life, and even those who swore in your name, eighteen years ago, surely regret it!
‘I restored my honor,’ you can defend yourself, ‘I followed the code of the highlands exactly!’
No, O sack, no one touched your honor! Nor does the Kanun ever say to sacrifice without motive, to kill without motive, to boast without motive!
But where do you find a motive that justifies murder, O fool!
Death is the anti-motive of life, a challenge to humanity, sacrilege against the Creator. Motives are the refuge of cowards! Whoever has a rabbit in their belly seeks to restore their emasculated manhood with supposedly heroic gestures.
“May God protect us from the hot heads that incite primitive revenge?”
My brains were scorching, as if they had been grazed with brambles; they stung and drove me mad!
“The civilized world attempts to eliminate wars, soften blood feuds, reconcile hearts, bring races closer, democratize ideas, explore the cosmos and beyond, while we huddle behind the curtains of self-isolation and strive to hide behind doctrines that are disregarded even where they originated; on the contrary, they are hated. We set ambushes for the present and incite hatred in the darkest corners of the soul!”
Communism spurred divisions and stimulated class separation; it fed hatred for one’s neighbor, translated social belonging into the opposite of ‘besa’ (pledge of honor):
“The Party works diligently to educate the new generation, the class man, the instrument that will advance the enlightened ideals of the time, the devoted communist, the man of ‘sh-besa’ or (homo denunciatorus),” dictator Enver Hoxha would proudly declare from every congress podium.
“We will not allow anyone to infect the minds of the youth with the decadent isms of the West, rotten in vices. We will cleanse with the iron broom every carrier of superstitions and backward customs, we will banish all political scoundrels and ordinary criminals to hell, we will give the deserved punishment to the ruffians, and we will throw them into the trash bin of history! Our heroic youth will march confidently on the enlightened path sketched out by the eagle-eyed Party…,” the Great One continued his preaching and threats.
And the truth is, they severely punished crimes, but the punished were sacrificed in two antagonistic categories: ordinary criminals who, “nonetheless remain our offspring,” and political opponents, “dangerous enemies to the order and the socialist society!” Thus, in a way, they stimulated them. Instead of turning prisons into a punitive hell for criminals and bandits, they transformed them into hell for political opponents.
This is so true that the ordinary criminals anathematized us political prisoners:
“May you die on the rope, vile enemies, who wanted to overthrow the Party and Comrade Enver!” While they justified themselves and their crimes with Party slogans:
“We have indeed committed crimes, but we haven’t betrayed! The Party and Comrade Enver have a big belly and a wide heart! Long live the Party and Comrade Enver Hoxha! Hurrah-h!”
As crime was justified and criminals multiplied, the Party applauded them. Unfortunately, this pathetic penal policy “bombarded” public opinion from morning till evening, so much so that it convinced the brainwashed, rotten-minded to defend crime.
Woe, one of them had ended up among us. “Bless your gun, hey brave man of the earth!” encouraged the murderer.
“Tell me, I beg you, what bravery did he perform?” I felt like screaming. “Did he do some inter-planetary heroism that we didn’t know about? Did he save the globe from the apocalypse?! Did he cut the seven heads of the hydra that had left the village without water? Did he defeat the devil who was confusing the minds of the youth? Did he bear the cross on his back and place the crown of thorns of Jesus Christ on his head, preaching peace among men?
Or did he put on the habit, gird the rope of St. Francis, and wander the world barefoot, without bread or water, to plant the missing love? No, he committed a crime! A great crime! He entered into God’s domain! He separated two lambs from His flock! He took two innocent lives! He extinguished two sparks that wanted to light a torch! He plucked two flowers in the Garden of Eden! And why? Because a never-given promise has remained suspended somewhere on a rusty hook!”
“Shame, shame, shame!” – the exclamations turned into shrieks.
“What did you say?”
I fell silent. But now the engine also fell silent.
Behind the door, the bolt squeaked, some hands ripped open the sack, and the door closed.
The auto-grave gasped, snorted, shook, and moved forward, relieved; the foul stench of crime no longer weighed on it…!
“It’s started!”
“Where to?”
“To the boonies, to the kingdom of the horned devil!”
“Maybe it will banish us to some black abyss, worse than the belly of the monster where they confined us!”
“Praise is to the Great God who separated us from the crime…”
“Amen!”
The Auto-Prison Sophism
The day the auto-prison crossed the barbed wires and entered the camp was an event of value, not only for the one just unloaded, who began the backward counting of days, weeks, months, years, and decades until the end of the sentence – if he was lucky enough not to be re-sentenced a second or third time, or if God willed him to reach the hour – but also for the others who had started the count long ago and never managed to close it.
The story began when the auto-prison stopped, the bolts were removed, the door was opened, and the screams were heard: “Come on, get down, you over there?”
When no one moved, they added: “Or do you want to be taken to the grave?” And truly, many unfortunate souls were taken from the auto-grave to the grave, and then, to the annals of oblivion.
“Move it, inside! You’ve spread out as if you were in the middle of the square at the Grand Café!” – the policeman snapped at us when the auto-prison stopped in Reps.
But we were numb and couldn’t react. Then they climbed up and flung us like cattle at the butcher’s door, without considering the fatigue from the road, over five or six hours, the churning and unsettling of the stomach, nor the blood dripping from our wrists from the shackles and the cold of the Fan Gorge. They slammed us in a heap on top of each other, kicked us with the heel and struck us with the stick on the back, thundered at us, cursed us, hastily drew up the handover report, and rushed off.
This was the ritual of the auto-prison: it stopped, collected the new cargo, and crammed it on top of the vomit of those just flung out, only to return on schedule. The date of the auto-prison’s arrival or departure remained a reference for the unfortunates it left behind or the others it took, just like a clothes hanger where tight clothes are hung. The fate of a certain person, or the date of a certain event, was linked to the arrival or return of the auto-prison: “Do you remember the transfer, release, or death of so-and-so over the barbed wires?” Memorie.al
To be continued in the next issue
