The False Apocalypse. Fatos Lubonja

across the Adriatic. In the north, meanwhile, Berisha had authorised the opening of weapons depots to his own loyalists. In the absence of some providential outside intervention, bloodshed beckoned on a massive scale.

      Two outsiders made the essential moves towards a resolution. The first was the former Austrian chancellor, Franz Vranitzky, who arrived as the OSCE’s special representative and convinced Berisha that he could not resolve the crisis through force alone. And the second was Italy’s prime minister, Romano Prodi, who largely sidelined his own ambassador in Tirana, Paolo Foresti, who had been Berisha’s biggest champion, and organized an ad hoc United Nations force to pacify the country. Both men then pressed Berisha to agree to new elections. The gambit worked: the violence subsided, new elections took place at the end of June with remarkable smoothness, the Socialists swept to power and Berisha, understanding that the eyes of the world were on him, stepped aside with barely a murmur.

      It’s impossible, of course, to speak of happy endings. At best the outcome was a happy middle. The Socialists were so flawed and corrupt in their own right that they opened the door for Berisha to stage a remarkable comeback - he served eight years as prime minister, starting in 2005. Berisha and Edi Rama remain locked in a furious rivalry, not least because Rama, running on the Socialist ticket, beat him at the polls in 2013 and took over the premiership. Both, in their different ways, have tested the patience of the international community. Over the past 18 years, the country has clawed its way slowly back from the brink – first through IMF-administered life support and then through a slow and painful process of political and institutional reform. Clearly, there are no shortcuts to building a new society.

      Fatos Lubonja’s continuing anger and melancholy over the events of 1997 are obvious. His book reads, even with the distance of the years, like an urgent series of dispatches from a battle that is, in some sense, still simmering. Albania carries a heavy historical legacy and has many wounds to salve. As for that boatload of money my friend dreamed about, the country is still waiting.

      Andrew Gumbel, August, 2014.

      First published in 2014 by Istros Books

      London, United Kingdom

      www.istrosbooks.com

      ©Fatos Lubonja 2014

      Translation ©John Hodgson, 2014

      Artwork & Design@Milos Miljkovich, 2014

      Graphic Designer/Web Developer - [email protected]

      The right of Fatos Lubonja to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

      ISBN: 9781908236197 (print edition)

      ISBN: 978-1-908236-87-6 (eBook)

      Printed in England by

      CMP (UK), Poole, Dorset

      This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.

       In modern tragedy, not the hero but the chorus dies.

      -- Joseph Brodsky

       PART ONE

      Chapter I

       The Sugar Boat

      Kindergarten Nr. 19, where Fatos Qorri had found a roof, had been built in the Soviet era, the 50’s. It was a neoclassical building of red brick, entered through a three-arched porch that supported the central first-floor balcony. The kindergarten, as a building and an institution, had flourished for a couple of decades and then decayed over time until, after the fall of the regime in the early nineties, it was virtually derelict. The front door was torn off and most of its rooms were empty, their children long gone. The back yard was used as a rubbish dump by the residents of the neighbouring apartment block, because by this time even the rubbish was no longer collected. Some illegal extensions to another apartment block behind the kindergarten made it impossible for any private vehicle to come in to remove the garbage, and a battle had begun between the apartment dwellers who continued to throw out their rubbish, and wild nature itself, which tried to cover it with various kinds of vegetation of which wild figs were the most rampant. The most common visitors to the yard were street dogs and cats, swarming in packs over the refuse that stank foully in hot weather.

      Like many similar public buildings, the Kindergarten had become a refuge for the homeless during the upheavals and the mass exodus that accompanied the fall of communism. Its rooms were quickly shared out among six groups of people. Half the ground floor, a classroom with toilet and annex, still functioned as a kindergarten, kept going by the teachers who wanted to hold onto their jobs. The family of Qorri’s friend Daut Gumeni, a former political prisoner who had served twenty-four years, lived in the other half. Qorri himself was on the first floor above Gumeni and opposite him lived the former owners of the land on which the Kindergarten had been built, and who had moved in to protect their property. A divorced woman had taken the head teacher’s office in-between, and opposite her lived a pensioner who had once been the caretaker.

      So here in these six living spaces, some of the most acute social problems that followed the fall of the communist regime were brought together: the need to house the former political prisoners and the families the regime had interned in remote villages, the issues of compensation for expropriated landowners and of accommodation for the elderly who had lost their old people’s homes and of divorced women who were no longer protected by the state, which had compelled their husbands to share an apartment with them. There were also the problems which arose from the employment of teachers who had lost their work places and of the pre-school education of children whose families had nobody to care for them.

      ***

      Winter was particularly hard, because the rooms were large, with many wooden windows whose frames were now rotten with age. The wind pierced their cracks like a knife. The inhabitants warmed themselves with electric heaters, whose wires hung in the air and were attached directly to the poles outside, but power cuts were frequent and their heating was never adequate.

      That night too, Qorri turned on the fan heater as soon as he returned home, noticing that the furred blades were making an increasingly loud noise.

      Every evening he wrote a little fiction in order to clear his mind of the tensions of current events he wrote about for the newspapers. These were now becoming extremely worrying, and he was less and less able to ignore them and switch to the imaginative plane of fiction. When nothing fresh came to him, he would turn back and read everything he had written so far. He was writing the summary of a novel that he intended to call ‘The Sugar Boat,’ based on the story of a small pyramid scheme that a cousin of his had started. It had collapsed some time ago, but without the commotion that the fall of the big schemes was now causing.

      The arrival of a boatload of sugar, whose sale would pay off all his debts, was the last deception used by the mastermind of the pyramid scheme to palm off the daily demands of his creditors. Qorri had made this boat the focal point of the novel, a symbol of people’s hope and trust in the victory of capitalism over the reality of socialism. The arrival of the sugar boat would solve everything.

      Notes for the novel ‘The Sugar Boat’: Description of Luli’s house and his arrival in Tirana after 44 years:

      In the time of King Zog this neighbourhood had been one of the smartest in Tirana. The new rich had built these now dilapidated villas. At the fall of communism