By Denisa Kona
Second part
Memorie.al / The history of the Bakalli family are that of one of the oldest Tirana families, with traditions. In one of the five houses left by the father (moved a little further from the 2000-year-old one – where the “Beer House” is located today), in the heart of Tirana, lived the last of 6 brothers, from a mother and a grandmother and one of the 24 children of the Kadi of Tirana – as the city’s judge, Hasan Bakalli, was then called. Qazim Bakalli, in 2009, was 88 years old, after having suffered 5 heart attacks and a cerebral hemorrhage; he hoped to live for a long time, thanks to his faith in God…! His story is one of the rarest, as you might expect to hear from a man in deep old age and with a very rich life of all kinds. Although his speech was a little hindered by the paralysis he had suffered some time ago, he called it a miracle that he has returned that ability. And this is what he showed us laid out in his house, filled with books, decorations and religious symbols.
Continues from last issue
And yet, Doctor Qazim Bakalli says that he would not have wanted a divorce. 50 years ago (at that time Qazimi must have been 55 years old and his wife 43), the letter from the court arrived made the decision without discussing it with me first. While I was signing the summons to the court, it seemed to me that I was signing my death”.
“I have shown ignorance and I have put my hand on it”!
I feel guilty, Dr. Qazimi repeated. “Married life comes to mind with anxiety, because I destroyed it, because I destroyed the children’s lives. We were arguing in the middle of the night, 1:00 a.m., she started crying, she cried day and night, winter and summer, she ran away from the house with her socks on. She was very jealous”! He didn’t say he was jealous for nothing, he didn’t even say he was right. Instead, he said that the drivers and the doctors have gotten used to going with women, because they have a lot of contact with them.
“A doctor’s wife can’t help but be jealous,” he says. She was a very good woman, very hardworking, clean, and intelligent. She was a teacher, but she had a nerve problem that made life impossible. I never beat the children, but she beat them all the time. She was also jealous of my love for children.”
“A doctor’s wife always has reason to be jealous”!
“The woman was also jealous of my name as a doctor,” he said.- When I returned after 10 years from Burreli to Tirana, it was full of very good doctors. But I had come out with nami, and when nami comes out, there is no family left without calling you. I roamed all over Tirana by bicycle. The woman did not take well to compliments or complaints from patients. When he happened to see them laughing. As I came from the province, I was kind to all the people and she called this my weakness”.
He adds that – her jealousy and mistrust is so great that she suspected every chance. “If she found out that you were here, or looked at you from the window, she will tell her daughter, not me: Qazim continues to be a whore as a young man, as an old man.”
70 years have passed since their marriage. Even when she was over 70 years old and they were separated, she still ranted around the house against him. Qazim told us that it is their house, which his father left him; the first floor is his, while his wife lived on the two floors above. He did not earn them from the division of wealth, but from the sale of his father’s properties, which he had at Liceu. With their money, he built two floors above it. (How did we forget to ask Dr. Qazim why she decided to raise the floors right there, after being divorced and not elsewhere, or maybe she had raised them before they separated?).
At that time, when he was 88 years old, he said: “I’m surprised how we, an intellectual family, I’m a doctor, she’s a teacher, both from families with traditions, could get to the point of fighting over a hat. She suffered from neuroses, but even I could not contain myself after her outbursts. We have been hot-tempered”!
When we asked Doctor Qazim if he ever knocked on his ex-wife’s door and if he sent her any gifts, he replied: “Gifts? Poo, poo, poo! She hits him in the face. Even the trash when I find it in the yard, I secretly pour it out. It’s her type to do everything.” He repeats that if he had not neglected his wife’s nervous troubles and she had been cured, there would have been no divorce.
Doctor Bakalli: “I need love.” Dad did that job until he was 114 years old.”
The woman was in his head after the heart attack, but a sexual adventure of the 88-year-old angered him again. At that time, Dr. Qazimi had gone to France for prostate surgery. But he had a cerebral hemorrhage after that. He had lost his speech. In those moments, his ex-wife (he constantly calls her “wife”) overcomes the anger accumulated over the years and comes to visit him. He descends the stairs of the house like the stairs of anger and stands on his head. It feeds him. For months she cooked them every day. “He even bathed me as a child”, says Qazimi. But this old love would not last long. “We messed up again”, he said, – without giving any details.
Sometime later, he would have a heart attack. The fifth heart attack. The friend once again made her heart big and again offered her care. But sometime after overcoming the condition, Dr. Qazimi apparently made one of those youthful mistakes. “I went for a walk, after I had improved, and by chance I met a woman at the market whose mother and father I had treated. I had entered her house many years ago, but I didn’t remember it, but she did. He meets me by chance on the street, after telling me that he was divorced, he tells me that he had health problems. I told him I had to visit him. Came here to the house. I had no preconceived notions, – says Qazimi, – because a doctor, who does not do his work without other goals, is not a doctor. After I visited him, we started talking. We liked and confused…! – says Qazimi – Sometimes the devil confuses you”.
My friend had heard about this episode, maybe eavesdropped. From that day, when she saw her old ex-husband on the street, she would say: “Where were you? You went to meet that whore, …?! From today, don’t expect any more service from me. There is no more good morning or good evening”. Doctor Qazimi said that he never loved this woman who had a very confused life.
However, she occasionally comes to keep him company. We ask him how it is possible that he got involved with this woman at this advanced age, again giving cause for jealousy to the woman who forgave him?! The answer may seem from those praises of the elders, but by carefully following the entire family chronology, you may come to believe things differently.
In the old man’s confession, there were doses, even excessive sincerity. “I need it,” he said. “I’m a man…! My father lived to be 116 years old and he made love with his last wife until he was 114 years old. We are a strong race. If you were a boy, I would speak differently, but I’m telling you that I feel like a young man…(he also expresses himself with a kind of surprise, while he claims that he has never used any stimulants). But now it’s been 3 months since I gave up. I am afraid of the heart; I have had 5 heart attacks. For this reason, for several months I have also given up the cold water baths that I used to take every morning. Even the doctors have stopped me…”! Said Doctor Qazimi. All this, it seems so strange! Or not?
88-year-old man: “Cook for a week, wash the house 3 times a day”
For 24 years, Dr. Qazimi lived alone between the damp walls of his house. The color of the plaster, knocked down several times in the wet part, showed all the layers of the years. But the 88-year-old man was not complaining. “It was very bad before. Now it is good. The children constructed it again when they came from abroad, because here, what fell outside entered inside”, he said. But humidity is not his only friend. Loneliness is what torments him the most. We found him eating pasta with meat in a large pan.
“I make them for a week and eat them for the whole week”, he said, while telling us how he cooked them. As a doctor, Qazim had a rare passion for order and cleanliness. With these hands I wipe, wash and pick up powders three times a day. Books in particular should be protected from dust, because it spoils them”, he told us.
“My wife never tore the photo of my Bulgarian girlfriend…”!
Qazim offered us another photo: An old woman, the same age as him, sent him a photo of her years ago. He went out there with his grandson. She is Bulgarian; she was his girlfriend before getting married. “We were the same age,” Qazimi recalls, “both 27 years old.” I loved him, love that lasted about 1 year, until I came here, but the woman never became jealous of him. Even when he saw a photo of her when she was young, where she was very beautiful, he told me: Here you know how to choose”.
This woman, now an elderly woman herself, is called Margarita. But Margarita never disturbed his family life; it remained a memory of youth. After that, we create a better idea about the nature of the wife’s jealousy. She must not have been sick with jealousy. Even Qazim himself affirms: “My wife liked the look of this woman and never tore up her picture. That woman did not make him feel jealous, as it had been a story before our acquaintance and marriage.”
One of the first 5 post-war doctors
At that time, Albania had a total of 5 doctors: Doctor Rusin, Doctor Sula, Doctor Selenica (officer), Doctor Cimbi and Doctor Qazim. Two of them had studied in Romania and three others in Italy; they were almost the same generation. The civil and military institutions argued among themselves about who should take the doctors. “We were like scarce water,” recalls Dr. Qazimi. – The military institutions, in order to have us for themselves, took us as soldiers, even though we had completed our higher studies. They mobilized us and after two months we were promoted to “captain”. But we haven’t done any army hours. Today, 3 of these great doctors are alive, while Dr. Maksut Dërrasa (great surgeon) and Hysni Rusi (talented cardiologist) are not. The doctor of free and imprisoned people in 70 years, Qazim Bakalli, says: “The holy blessing of the father made me forgive the the encounter”!
“How did my father fan me with a jacket, when I was going to make the decision about the diagnosis of the spy”?!
It was 1939. Hasan Bakalli, the Kadi of Tirana, calls his son, Qazim, and says: “Can I see the diploma?” I gave it to him and after that, he said to me: “Take a gold napoleon because you deserve it.” “No,” I told him, “I don’t want it.” “You will get it”, he told me. He gave it to me forcefully. After that he asked me: “What’s wrong with me?” “What you want, I told him.” “Be a imam”, my father told me. I sat down. It was not an imposition, because there had never been any form of violence in our family.
But it was respect. Among the 81 members of the family who had gathered, the second brother was taken and said: ‘Mor dad. There is nothing to be done like you. There will be a village boss and they will shoot him with potatoes! Then he asked me: What will you get dad? “Doctor”, I said. The father was very happy. “Be kind, be kind!” He told me. He called this profession holy because whoever saves people’s lives saves humanity. After that, the father had repeated to him several times: “If you visit anyone as often as you need, just like me, does it well!” If you visit my enemy by trickery, be damned!
“All my life, I have visited every person as if they were my own,” says Dr. Qazimi. This is where a special story of his work begins. He was at that time in Burrel, and in addition to the free people, he had to visit the prisoners as well. They had called him to visit them on one occasion, to determine who was and who was not fit for work. The prisoners were admitted to the prison ambulance, designed as a hospital. They were “enemies of the people”. “When the door opened, I saw my brother there too, but I didn’t speak to him. It was not allowed. As I started the treatment, among them I recognized one, who I had found out, had been spying on my brother.
According to the order of the prison directorate, I started to visit them. I looked this man in the eye, without saying a word, and in the eye I said that; I know you are the one who killed my brother. Visiting the spy, who complained that he was suffering from a heart attack, two minds were fighting in me: One told me: I put it in your hand, the other told me otherwise. Oscillating in this conflict of thoughts, between revenge and the feeling of forgiveness, my father was there, standing next to the prisoner, with a stick in his hand. He noticed me and did not speak. My father’s spirit came to me without speaking to me, – says doctor Qazimi with tears in his eyes. – Then I took the letter and wrote: Suffering from the heart, even though I was convinced that that man was not suffering. I tolerated exactly him, my enemy, and put my father’s words in place”. Years later, Dr. Qazimi remembers that this man would kiss his feet.
“In the Burrell prison, the director was a good man who came out of the war, but was illiterate. It was Volonia. I asked the director of the prison what the prisoners have to eat, – said doctor Qazimi, – but he answered me: The command knows. I made it clear to him that I needed to know what the food treatment was like, what kind of work awaited the prisoners, how many hours a day and whether the road to get there was by car or on foot. Later I found out that he had lied to me. He told me by car, when there they went on foot, and the food was not what they showed me!
Then another story begins: A prisoner named Harri Panariti, sentenced to death, was staying in the prison hospital because according to the law, he had to be treated first, and then executed. He showed me a spot on his leg. I found it was gangrene. I didn’t go to jail for a week, because the whole city was waiting for me. I waited for the births in the maternity ward. When I returned, I was told that Harry was in the dungeon. I told the director that he had to leave for Tirana urgently that day, for surgery. He chuckled and said: Oh and you. We will have a meeting once, and after a week or two, we can take him to Tirana.
I insisted that he had to leave today, but he did not listen to me. Then I went to the post office and wrote a letter to the Minister of the Interior, Mehmet Shehu. The one who received the letters, the postmaster, was from Sigurimi, but she was a lady. I wrote down the time, paid and received the coupon. Meanwhile, after I left, she called the director of the Ministry of the Interior, Gjoleka Aliu, and told him. This one gets in the car and comes as if by chance. He says to me: ‘Doctor’, (he never called me by name), how are things going?
I told him about the letter and he replied: Why didn’t you tell me?! After that, he called the director of the prison to his office. This one comes breathing as much from haste, as from great body weight, as well as from worry. And he says: The doctor is right or not, his order is irrefutable. Because he is responsible for the health of the prisoners?! With a minister’s car, they took the convict to the emergency hospital, an operation was performed, but it was too late. He did not escape”! Doctor Bakalli, claims that; the regime operated on two sides: on the one hand, class war, on the other hand, responsibility for human life. The prisoner was hoping until the last minute for a reduction in his sentence, even when he was sentenced to death, and for this reason, he wanted to be treated. “Life is very expensive, – says the doctor – and as long as he has it, one hopes until the end”!
“My brother died in the emergency room, when the doctor and the nurse were making love…”!
After walking all over Albania, wherever there was a medical emergency, Doctor Bakalli finally stopped in Tirana. In the civil hospital, today the “Mother Teresa” University Hospital Center, he was chief of staff, also a dietitian who determined the way of feeding patients in all hospitals, including the Sanatorium and the Military Hospital.
“In addition, I was in charge of following the health of 25 patients every day, – he says, – while other doctors, party members, spies of the Sigurimi, were in charge of 1 to 5 patients”! Here he recalls a bitter incident. One of his brothers, a shoemaker, was affected by jaundice (jaundice). He presented to the emergency room. “It was Sunday and we were preparing the third brother’s wedding. My brother died that day. He died carelessly, due to not receiving medical help in time. The doctor on duty, H.P., together with a head nurse, were making love and had left the patients at the mercy of fate, – said doctor Bakalli. – And this man from the Security did not suffer anything. The event was covered up and called an accident”!
Doctor Qazimi says that, years later, with the death of this man, i.e. his brother, the Tufina Cemetery would be inaugurated. “He was the first to be buried there,” said Qazimi. He was sorry, because; although he himself was a physician, he had not attended to the health of his people. He had taken care of all the sick, while they had neglected his own. His brother’s death and his wife’s illness were still killing him.
“If it had been cured, we would not have been divorced”, he said.
The father-in-law, student of Einstein, was shot, the brother of the “Group of Deputies”, was imprisoned!
The class war affected the Bakalli family from all sides, like a wave that attacks the boat from all directions. His brother had been sentenced to death twice by the regime (but had been jailed). He had participated in the Anti-Fascist Movement, knew five languages, and had been a student of Harry Fultz. But starting after the War, he had not been for communism and had become part of the “Group of Deputies”. His fault was the translation from English of the nationalist government’s memorandum. “They sentenced him to death, then to 20 years,” says Qazimi. “The second time, he was transferred to Burrel prison, where I was the only doctor in the entire district of Mat. I was also a prison doctor”.
While his wife, on her part, had another heavy weight. Her father, Asim Abduraman Shpuza, was shot as a nationalist. He had refused to participate in the then communist government. Asimi had been an excellent chemical engineer, had graduated in Germany, Einstein’s student in the auditorium and was decorated with the “Gold Medal”. Qazim’s wife was only 10 years old when her father was shot. Their family was left without any support, they didn’t give them bread, and they didn’t give them food. Her mother was poor and they lived by selling some handicrafts.
His family was tainted. When one brother is sent to prison, the other soon has his place there. But the dictatorship, with Dr. Qazim, was spared. “Maybe because I was a doctor and they needed me, maybe because I had been with the Anti-Fascist Movement from the first hour and because my family had been a storehouse for food and medicine for Dajti’s squad”, he said. /Memorie.al
