By Shkëlqim Abazi
Part twenty-nine
Memorie.al / I were born on December 23, 1951, in the black month of a black time, under the blackest communist regime. On September 23, 1968, the sadistic chief interrogator, 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 eye, deafened one ear, and after breaking several of my ribs, half of my molars, and the thumb of my left hand, they sent me to court on October 23, 1968. There, the wretched Faik Minarolli gave me a ten-year political prison sentence. After they cut my sentence in half because I was still a minor, a sixteen-year-old, they sent me to the political camp of Reps on November 23, 1968. From there, on September 23, 1970, I was transferred to the Spaç camp, where on May 23, 1973, during the revolt of the 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 aspire to have. But on October 23, 2013, the General Director of the “Renaissance” Government issued order No. 2203, dated 23.10.2013, for the “Dismissal from duty of a police employee.” So, Divine Providence intertwined with the neo-communist “Renaissance” Providence, and precisely on the 23rd, I was replaced, no more and no less, by a former State Security operative from Burrel Prison. What could be more telling than that?! The former political prisoner is replaced by his former persecutor!
The Author
SHKËLQIM ABAZI
R E P S I
(The Forced Labor Camp)
Memoir
The day they tied me up was grueling. When I saw the guards approaching, I measured the time distance. Based on the logic I mentioned before, I had to resist about two more hours of torture, plus or minus the desire of the guards to sound the ringer (a term for the bell that signaled the end of the shift). In any case, this two-hour interval seemed endless; the rain and wind made it feel even longer. In the miserable state I was in, I couldn’t tell where I was in pain. My whole body was trembling; my heart was racing frantically, fluttering like a wounded bird. “Hold on, you wretch, don’t leave me!” I encouraged myself.
I thought I wouldn’t make it to the ringer. The thin handcuffs tightened around my wrists were burning me, and when I moved, the wires dug deeper into my flesh and hurt me. I had the sensation that they were about to break, that blood was gushing from my veins, flowing non-stop and would drain me of life. A long time passed from the moment the guards changed shifts, but I couldn’t perceive it because the notion of time had become distorted for me. I felt extreme thirst, my lips were foaming as if my mouth had been filled with salt. I wanted water. An endless amount of water!
I raised my head with difficulty, opened my eyelids, and looked around, but I couldn’t see a single soul. “Water! Water! Water!” My lips trembled, my heart weakened! I sank into an endless despair. The need for the liquid of life overshadowed my reason. I lifted my head again and instinctively opened my mouth. A few drops of rain falling at an angle penetrated it. “Oh, what a delight, water!” I tried to slurp the stream that ran down from my forehead and haggard cheeks, but it flowed sideways and ended up under my chin, trickling down the corners of my mouth. Those few drops that reached my parched cavity only increased my thirst even more. “I want water, water, water!”
My thirst grew; I wanted to drink without stopping, to gulp down a whole torrent, a spring, a river, even an entire sea. The downpour that was lashing me hard was scorching my face; it seemed the thorns of the wild rose had deeply torn my skin. They had tied me to the last pole, or the first one as you left for work, on the Golgotha road, at the exit of the work site, toward the sleeping camp. The Road of Golgotha, the road of suffering, the road of torment!
That’s what we had christened the segment that connected the two camps. Perhaps the prisoners had given it this name precisely because of the great horrors that had occurred on this short stretch. This muddy path in winter, and dusty in summer, had been transformed into a symbol of violence, into the skewer of horror. There were eight wooden poles in total; four on each side. These objects of utilitarian importance had been turned into objects of shame. They had been given dual functions: at the top, they held the insulators where the electrical conductors were attached, while below, they also attached human bodies with wire and through them, and they transmitted violence.
Rarely was there a day when I saw those poles empty! Because they punished you there for nothing! The malevolence of a single policeman was enough to find you crucified beneath a pole with barbed wire. Very often, the number of punished people was greater than eight. So when all eight poles were occupied, those who were left were tied to the poles of the camp’s fence. We called this perpendicular stretch “Calvary.” So, besides “Golgotha,” they had also marked out a “Calvary.” It was on this path that prisoners were subjected to humiliating searches, sometimes for hours on end.
Here on this segment, irony surpassed sarcasm. Any police officer could vent their anger against any prisoner whenever the whim struck them, for anything and whenever they felt like it. That’s why they had given it a second nickname, “The Road of Whims.” Some prisoners, fond of shots of raki, called it “The Road of Shots.” One of these raki enthusiasts, the joker from Tirana, Xhaferr Dema, once said to me in jest: “Ah, my friend, this little road makes me so nostalgic! Every time I walk by here, it’s like I’m having five shots of raki!”
“Why are you tormenting yourself, Xhaf, you’d be better off having a double and a half! This way you drink them faster and hopefully, you’ll enjoy them more!” I replied, also in jest. “You’re right, my friend, but what will the police do then!? If they drink them half and half, they’ll finish fast and be out of work!? By God, believe me, I enjoy it more when they turn us back again and again… for a roll call!” he laughed.
Here, in the mud of this stretch of road, I have seen men’s mustaches pulled out. I have seen old, sick men stripped naked, as their mother had made them, and shamed in front of the crowd, just to satisfy the whims of the ignorant police officers! They would snicker and make jokes at the sight of the exhausted, naked men.
On this path, beatings were handed out for no reason at all. The backs of young men were broken. Torrents of blows were poured down on them, until they were sent to the hospitals tied with wire… all just for whims! Worse still, here I have seen sons of mothers permanently crippled! On a similar path, my friend and fellow sufferer, Urim Elezi from Korça, was left a permanent cripple. The most graceful and powerful young man in the political prisons and camps was gifted with darkness! Just for sport, the police wanted to test the endurance of the human being. By striking him hard on the back of the neck, they plunged that boy, who was bright as light, into darkness! And after that, no one ever thought to treat him.
Not only back then, but even to this day, no one has been held accountable for this macabre crime and other unparalleled ones caused on the Machiavellian Golgothas. They left the symbol of Christ’s torture as a legacy to the Christians of modern times, the political prisoners of the communist system. The democracy we dreamed of tore up the pages of the criminal notebook and scattered them across the globe. For us, it only kept the meaningless covers. They blamed all those false accusations on Enver Hoxha, who was already dead… and the others continue to enjoy the fruits of democracy.
Half-faint, my disoriented mind was grinding into thin air. A procession of everything I had seen during those two months passed before me, but my imagination mostly reproduced what others had told me. Above all, the scene of a recent event that had happened shortly before my arrival in Reps stood out. It was about a young man from Lumi i Vlorës who had been tortured to the point of castration. Left a eunuch, he had decided that the remaining part of his life was no longer needed. In extreme depression, fixated on the idea of self-poisoning, he had gone to the wires at the first opportunity. But what had actually happened?
Nothing unknown. Such events, with a tragic end, had been happening periodically for almost thirty years. It must have been a hot noon at the end of September. The soldier on guard in the watchtower toward which the self-sacrificer was heading happened to be a contemporary of his, also from Vlora, and even from a neighboring village. Before he was sentenced, the unfortunate man and the soldier had herded goats together. The guard, who recognized him, when he noticed the crazed actions, called out, “Stop,” three times, according to regulations. But the lost soul did not retreat from the ominous decision he had planned and rushed toward the wires. Of course, anyone else in his place would have fired, but he didn’t want to shoot him. He had recognized him, he screamed, he called him by name: “Go back, you wretched man, don’t lose your youth on the barbed wire!”
He even reminded him that his mother was waiting for him, and that as her only son, she had placed all the hopes of her old age in him. He didn’t shoot him even when he crossed the fence. Instead, he quickly came down from the watchtower and chased after him, wanting to capture him alive. As soon as he reached the forested area where it would be easier for him to disappear into the woods, the poor man stood still, turned to his pursuer, and ordered him: “Fire! Neither my mother nor my sisters need me anymore! Now I am neither a man nor a woman!”
The soldier was panting on the uphill slope of the hill, he threw his weapon to the ground and quickened his pace even more, and he wanted to save him! At that very moment, two machine gun barrels began to “cough” from the side watchtowers of the fence and spewed out endless bullets. The unfortunate man fell into a puddle of blood. When the soldier approached him, he had not yet breathed his last. In his final gasps, he told his pursuer: “Thank you! I was as good as dead anyway, but I wanted you to kill me and get the reward! And who, more than you, my friend, deserved the fifteen-day reward?”
Two hours later, he gave up his soul, lying in the middle of the camp yard, while the soldier was no longer seen on the watchtowers. So, just the memory of these lived and narrated events was terrifying me. The unanswered dilemma: “To live or not to live?” was torturing me. My brain was functioning in reverse. It was the first time I had ended up tied with wires behind the pole. I had indeed passed the first test, in the isolation cells during the investigation, but there I knew who would deal with me. I was mentally and physically prepared to face the questions and pressures that I expected them to put on me.
In the end, practice itself taught me. It was always the same investigators and the same police officers, who over the days got to know me, and I got to know them. I could intuitively smell trouble when I had to get ready for a beating, so I gritted my teeth. When I got away without a beating, I would say: “Thank goodness, I made it through today too!” But with these people here, you never knew who your turn would be with. Today it was one person, tomorrow another. The first one with humor, the other one with malice. I hoped I wouldn’t end up as a guinea pig for the camp police. I felt terrified when I thought that I, too, could be one of the many victims of their dark humor.
Especially me, the new prisoner, about whom the old timers would tell me: “You have to be careful as hell, because the first clash could be fatal. You can break, my son, and never be put back together! Physical tortures are nothing when you compare them to psychological violence! You get beaten once, some blood will flow, some wounds and bruises will form, and after a week or two, they will heal. But when you wait with anxiety for something that hasn’t happened yet, the terror torments you. The shock from the consequences of the unknown, of the enigma you don’t know, is the most severe psychological blow. The fear of expected terror is more murderous than the terror itself! A terrorized, surrendered person!”
That’s how they would quote certain sentences that they themselves didn’t know who had used first. But what did it matter who had said it? It remained relevant. The very idea of being crippled was crippling me endlessly. I envisioned myself for a moment lying in the mud. Dozens of police officers with the studs of their boots were stepping on my whole body and disfiguring my face. My collarbone hurt terribly, its delicate bones were shaking before my eyes. “Oh God? My bones are not sticking out of my skin, they are just shaking and rattling, but they’re not falling to the ground!” I was asking myself. “We’re dancing, my dear!” my alter-ego replied.
“Dancing?!” “Yes, the dance of the bones, this is the challenge of modern times!” “Man, what are you babbling about? I had heard of the dance of Kukës, the dance of Tirana, the Pogonishte dance, the dance of death, but I had never even thought of my bones dancing before my eyes!” “That’s how much you know, my dear!” And screams and screams, and endless screams tore my throat. No one pitied me, not even my alter-ego; they were stepping on me and stepping on me, and stepping on me, without a drop of mercy. “Oh God!” The more piercing the scream from my throat, the more forcefully the studs of the soles of the boots pierced me.
I pictured my face disfigured, to the point of destruction. A huge python with its mouth agape and its fangs extended, was about to swallow me. A bottomless abyss opened beneath my feet. I had no choice but to either throw myself headfirst into this precipitous abyss, or end up between the fangs of this giant python. I chose the headfirst plunge into the abyss, as the most likely path to salvation. And I fell and fell and fell, into the endless chasm.
Somewhere at the bottom of the chasm, an executioner with knives in his hands was clanging and rubbing them against each other like butchers sharpening their cleavers before slaughtering a bull. But the executioner, dressed neatly in police clothes, leaned over me and came at me with his feet first:
“Hey, friend, you came?” “I came!” “I was waiting for you!” “Why me, butcher friend?” “Why, do you take me for a butcher?” “That’s what you look like to me!” “It doesn’t matter how you see things, I am the Devil’s chief chamberlain!” “I thought you were an executioner of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” “You’re seriously mistaken…” “Maybe! When I saw you with knives and cleavers, I thought you were one!” “I do have those, but I don’t intend to slaughter you, I’m going to castrate you like a goat!” “What have I done to you?” “What are you going to do to us anymore, you pimp, and you’re beating up our people!” “I didn’t know that the immoral were also yours?!” Just as he finished his sentence, he, with his knives outstretched, undressed. Inside, darkness, outside, a void!
What did I see? From the monster’s guts, the camp operative, Pjetër Tarazhi, appeared and, as if possessed, rushed toward my genitals. A prolonged scream came from my throat: “Oh God, protect me from the executioner!” Did I really scream? Only God knows! Maybe it was a hallucination. I can’t recall it exactly, but at that moment, a metallic sound answered my scream and tore my ears: “Dang-dung, dang-dung!” It was the ringer that signaled the end of the workday. The bronze chime brought me back to my senses.
I shivered from head to toe. The metallic sounds seemed to pierce my brain. The anxiety of waking up from this chilling experience overwhelmed me from head to foot, the pains multiplied beyond the limits of my endurance, and a groan escaped from my gritted teeth involuntarily. Perhaps it was the moment when my faith had begun its miserable descent and my heart was completely giving up. The tales of heroes and the heroics of kreshniks (epic heroes) seemed like toys from a bygone era. The feeling of horror, mixed with the nightmare of the unknown, clouded my brain and soul like never before. The complaining groans escaped on their own and followed one another:
“Oh my mother, I’m dead! Oh Great God, save me!” The return to reality cost me terrifying suffering. I was swimming in an ocean of pain like a shattered boat. Now the rain had intensified, pouring down from the sky in torrents. Around me, a red puddle had formed, like fire. “It must be the blood that has flowed from my broken veins,” I thought sadly, and I tried to take my mind off the puddle at my feet. I moved the thickened tips of my fingers, but they had turned to wood and didn’t obey me. “Don’t weaken, man!” I felt someone say to me. But who was it? I couldn’t make them out. The fog and darkness that had settled over the Fan Valley had limited my range of vision.
“Hold on, man! Don’t weaken!” the same voice repeated. “Courage! Now you’ve gotten through the worst of it!” another voice. “We’re all with you! You got that dog back!” someone else added. Was I really hearing them or was it just my imagination?! God be my witness! No, the voices were clearly audible! A feeling of pride was born in me. The encouragements from the semi-darkness awakened my inner self: “So there are people who support me! Oh God!” This moral support acted as a catalyst in chemical reactions; I felt my shaken courage revive in my soul. As if they were spreading a layer of soothing balm over the wounds on my body, the pain subsided. It seems my heart had been in great need of this encouragement to stop its thrashing. And it arrived, right when I was about to give up completely. This hopeful balm drove away the fear, and eliminated the terror.
“Resist a little longer,” I said to my heart. “Just a little longer! Just a little bit! Maybe we’ll make it! Hold on, my dear, it’s very important that we overcome this ordeal together! Give it one more push, be strong, resist! We have everyone with us!” and I gritted my teeth, which were chattering with rage. The rain turned into a downpour. Now the big drops were beating me heavily. I was soaked through, as if they had pulled me from a puddle. The police, huddled under their capes, finished counting. They passed by quickly, just to get it over with, the crowd of wet chickens, and began to leave, some heading toward the entrance of the worksite, others toward the camp.
No one was thinking about me. “Oh, Mr. Policeman, I’m here too!” I shouted, terrified by the idea that they might forget me and leave me outside, where even though I was tied up, a soldier might execute me for attempting to escape from the place of my punishment, so he could get the fifteen-day reward. As they were leaving, two policemen broke away and came back toward me. They untied the wires at my shins and on my chest, and then cut the one that was tightening my waist and my wrists with pliers, and put me in front of them.
Now, freed from the wires, my hands remained behind my back, as if the sleeves of the fur coat had been glued to me. My shoulder hurt terribly, while my clothes weighed heavily on me, as if they had thrown a river-soaked quilt over my shoulders, which spread the pain all over my body. I was dripping water. The streams flowed from my body and ended up in my mud-laden moccasins. They squelched in the mud, preventing me from moving my frozen feet, which had turned into stumps and didn’t want to support me.
They pushed me from behind to the store; there, one in front and one behind, they turned me upward toward the cells. I took the uphill road with difficulty, but the worn-out soles of my lastika (rubber sandals) slipped on the sloping ground and with every step, I fell and got up again. They got bored and started to poke me with the tip of a stick. With great effort, we arrived at the door of the isolation cells. Until then, I hadn’t heard their voices, because although they were pushing me, no one spoke to me. The rain and strong wind forced them to hide their heads under the hoods of their capes, so I couldn’t even see their faces.
As they reached the threshold of the cells and sheltered under the sheet metal roof, I heard one of them: “Hey Zef, where are the keys?” “They’re with the duty officer!” “Go get them, then, to open the door!” It was Mark “the red-mustache.” “Yes, sir, I’ll go right now!” Ndreca went down to the duty officer’s office. Under the sheet metal roof, only Mark and I were left. At that moment, the words he had spoken when they were tying me up popped into my head. My conscience prompted me to thank him. Since I didn’t know when I would have this opportunity again, I took the courage to speak:
“Mr. Mark, thank you!” “And what do you want to thank me for, friend?!” His blue eyes and yellow mustaches appeared from under the hood, an ironic smirk formed on his thin lips, which made one corner of his twisted mustaches move a little. “Now you’ll rot for a month in the cell!” “I know! But, fate got the best of me…,” I wanted to add more, but I kept quiet because I didn’t know how he would take it. Maybe it would give him the idea that I was foolishly bragging. We both fell silent.
“But you acted like a man!” he broke the silence. “I had no other way! I had to defend myself!” “Come on, you’re in prison, you can’t go anywhere worse!” This ambiguous phrase seemed to tickle my ego. “I’ll do my best! When I hear that you also think I acted rightly, I feel calmer! For this, I thank you twice!” Silence, then: “Sir, I’m not here as your friend, they’ve brought me here to give you orders! Do you understand?”
“Yes, it’s clear to me!” I replied. “However, I’m also a man, even though I’m a policeman, I don’t like pederasts! They are a kind of people who should be eliminated completely!” He fell silent, and I understood that he was afraid because he turned his head down toward the store, from where his colleague was supposed to return. “Indeed, you did what a man would do! But now you’ll pay for it for a month!” he hurried to add quickly, while the other policeman was approaching with a pair of pliers in his hand.
Mark snatched the keys and opened one of the two doors. “Come closer, friend!” I approached, and he searched me for forbidden items, then he pushed me with his hands. “Come on, move your butt! We’re soaked for your sake!” “Aren’t we going to put him in without handcuffs?” the other one interrupted, unscrewing the handcuffs. “We have to follow the regulations, friend!” “Leave it, Zef, this guy has been tied for four hours behind the pole! Come on, friend, let’s go, we’re soaked!” Mark cut him off.
“But we have to report it to the operative, right?” “We’ll report it now!” “Do you know that he gave the order…” “Oh, man, I know, of course I do, but we have to fill out the book!” and he pushed the door and locked it with the bolt. Fate was with me! I was saved from the big one! From the mistreatment that prisoners were subjected to in such cases. Mark, with his magnanimity or his carefree negligence, and God with the relentless rain, were on my side. I didn’t know how to thank them! I turned toward the door and whispered “thank you!” (of course, for Mark!)./Memorie.al
