The False Apocalypse. Fatos Lubonja

the bar.

      The same doubts assailed him just as they had done before, at Noel’s. He was unsure if they arose from trepidation at this dangerous enterprise or his lack of political zeal. Nor did he feel at home in this company. Could he court this kind of danger alongside people he didn’t know? He believed that these were the people intellectually best equipped to bring about democracy, because they were the best educated, but what had happened to them morally during those two decades while he himself had been in prison? Edi Rama, among the instigators of this group, had fled immediately to Paris. Even at the start of the anti-communist movement he had run away to Greece in fright straight after making a speech against Enver Hoxha. This entire generation of intellectuals with their double lives, opposing the regime and yet collaborating with it, seemed to have a tendency to bolt. Their way of life had taught them never to put complete faith in what they were doing but to always leave an escape route open, and ultimately never to trust one another. In one of his articles, he had used the phrase ‘grey area’ which in other countries of the East denoted the region between the ‘black’ of the regime and the ‘white’ of the dissidents. Could these people be ‘light grey’? In Albania, he believed, there had never been any white, but only black and grey. He did not think of the prisoners, including himself, as dissidents but victims. They served the regime by scaring the rest of the population. Hoxha’s regime had been a totally black hole, unillumined by the rays of courage and hope that Sakharov, Michnik or Havel had spread elsewhere in post-Stalinist Eastern Europe. Only now, after the fall of communism, was the ‘grey’ divisible into the ‘dark grey’ of those who had risen to power with Berisha and the ‘light grey’ of the opponents of the authoritarian regime. But this colour chart did not cover all the shades that distinguished these people from one another. What Qorri called ‘light grey’ had its dark patches, too. He remembered the rumours that the so-called democratic movement had been entirely a contrivance of the former Sigurimi and that most of its leaders had been its former agents and informers.

      No enterprise of this kind could expect to rely entirely on well-known, tried and tested people. Certainly these members of this opposition were united by a need to free themselves from a regime that had violated their liberty, although each of them perhaps had their particular expectations and ambitions. Qorri could not tell where this adventure would lead: to the pinnacles of power in a future government, or somewhere very far from them.

      Yet he felt he would accept their offer. He was tempted by the prospect of a leading role, and also driven by his old desire to overcome his fear of any task fraught with danger. Whenever faced with important decisions, since the clashes with the authority of his father in adolescence and his conflicts with the dictatorship and the prison authorities, it seemed to Qorri that he had always been trying to overcome fear and repress the weaker part of his nature that did not allow him to become his stronger, fuller self. That was what the dictatorship had done to people. It had made them fear to live and left them diminished. But did not these diminished selves ultimately become real selves? Fear had to be fought against, if you were not to be diminished. Qorri’s relationship with fear had been decisive in his life and in the lives of people among whom he had lived, because in their society fear was the main instrument of control. It created relationships. But it was also the main obstacle to being free. Since prison, he had established a different, less confrontational rapport with fear and with authority. He was no longer so ashamed of his fear. He was more willing to accept it as a part of himself. Sometimes he even thought of fear as a mark of dignity and respect for life. Experience had taught him that the problem was not of feeling fear, but of not allowing oneself to be mastered by it. It was less a question of not falling than of picking yourself up again. This meant that he had to nurture within himself the figure of a hero that challenged fear, but without feeling heroic. More coolly considered, this hero figure was perhaps the obverse of a repressive culture based on fear.

       Chapter VI

       First Meeting

      Qorri entered the premises of the Association of Former Victims of Political Persecution, studying the building with interest.

      The architecture of the villa housing the association was like nothing else in Tirana. The eclectic 1920s style of the façade included a round protruding balcony with a conical roof above it, which added a distinctive charm. The building also occupied a special site on a small but important square where the flag of independence had first been raised in Tirana.

      The villa had been built by a former Ottoman military officer who later sold it to the Italians for their consulate. During the Fascist occupation it became the seat of the Luogotenente. On his visit after the invasion, Ciano had looked out from its balcony on the crowds of Albanians at an organized rally in the square. In his famous diary, he mentioned ‘silent students’ among the throng.

      Most of these students later became communists, went underground and took to the mountains as partisans. In 1944, they seized power and turned the headquarters of the Luogotenente into the offices of the Albanian-Soviet Friendship Association, until the beginning of the ‘60s, when the Albanian communists broke with the Soviets and remained loyal to Stalin. The building subsequently became the headquarters of the Veterans of the National Liberation War until the fall of communism.

      The Democrats, as soon as they gained power in 1992, decided to give this villa to the recently formed Association of Former Victims of Political Persecution. But the desire to break the moulds of the past soon yielded to a tendency to emulate them. The PD was very successful in enlisting the support of former political prisoners and their families as a way of reinforcing its own anti-communist credentials. These former prisoners were required to take the places of the communist martyrs and war veterans. The ex-communist Berisha believed that they were more interested in recognition and compensation for their past than their future careers. The gift of this building was intended to mark the start of a new epoch, and invited the former victims of communist persecution to accept the symbolic role of veterans.

      In addition, the only monument to communist persecution in Tirana at that time had been erected in a corner of the square in front of this very building. This sculpture was intended to represent a victim of torture, but it gave the impression of a body whose neck, at the moment of beheading, had been stopped with a cork so that its blood had spread through its body, turning its limbs into swollen lumps like inflated balloons.

      The former prisoners, especially the group who from the start had rejected the PD and called them ‘tools of the communists’, did not like the absence of a head. Most of the former prisoners were not old men content to be honoured as veterans and pillars of moral support, but were active people of ambition. Many of them indeed subtracted their years in prison from their age, thus presenting themselves as even younger and more purposeful. But most importantly a deep gulf, created by their different histories, yawned between the former victims of persecution and the elite anti-communist leaders. When the anticommunist movement erupted, most of the victims of persecution were either in prison or internal exile, or were living quietly in obscure corners out of the way of the dictatorship. They had minimal contact with the elite, which consisted almost entirely of members of communist families, if not party members. Qorri quoted Machiavelli to describe their position: ‘Stay neither too close, nor too far from the Prince... If you are too close, you may be buried in the rubble when he falls, but if you are too far you have no time to move in to take his place.’ The prisoners had been too far away to play a major part in the overthrow of communism, but they felt morally superior because they had not collaborated with the regime. So the elite envied the prisoners their moral stature, and the prisoners envied the elite their opportunities for education and entry into the country’s higher intellectual strata.

      Quite a few former prisoners nevertheless joined the Democratic Party. Some were ambitious people who saw in it a launch pad for their careers and hoped that they could soon get rid of the communists in the leadership. Others, with lesser pretensions, joined this big party in the hope of landing a job.

      But the Association, led by Kurt Kola, had broken with Berisha’s party after a hunger strike started by former prisoners when the government refused their claim for compensation. The strike took place in the Association’s premises and became the focus of media attention. One by one, former prisoners