The False Apocalypse. Fatos Lubonja

like fashionable clothes. With extraordinary speed every square inch of the park, once the pride of the city with its tall trees and variegated greenery, was crammed with bars and kiosks. The trees and grass withered and died. Plate glass and aluminium predominated, while other bars imitated caves or grottoes. There were also arcades with fruit machines, Ping-Pong halls and discotheques. The dark alleys between them became hangouts for drug dealers and for use as outdoor urinals.

      Bar West was on the northern edge of the park, opposite the Defence Ministry. It was the same street on which Noel’s was situated, after it crossed the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation. The bar was sheathed in plate glass that extended to the pavement and enabled prospective clients to see who was inside before entering, and also allowed customers to keep an eye on passers-by. You could leave your bicycle outside without fear of it being stolen. Inside there was central heating in winter and air conditioning in summer, both novelties in Albania.

      The proprietor was a trim young lad with vertical gel-stiffened hair. He had been a wrestler in the time of communism and then the bodyguard of PD Prime Minister Meksi. But he had kept up his friendship with several deputies of the Alliance who frequented the bar. Some people said these deputies were only customers because of the many opponents of Berisha who went there. These premises gained a reputation, and their regulars gave each bar its soul and defined its political allegiance. The cafés became the nodes of a news network that spread throughout the capital city; the most powerful news medium in the country, more so than the newspapers or the sole State television channel. The network had already been established under the communist regime, and now that the cafés were more numerous, they had increased in strength and influence.

      Bar West was the hub of the opposition media network. This was where journalists, intellectuals and the most media-savvy opposition politicians met. Here anti-government news was commented on and disseminated. Almost all the journalists of Koha Jonë, university teachers, unemployed writers and poets, and those who had turned themselves into journalists and politicians, drank their coffee there. Shvarc came here because Noel’s was empty in the morning. Foreign journalists turned up, fishing for Albanian newspapermen and opposition leaders to interview.

      ***

      On that day at the end of January, when Qorri entered Bar West, he saw an extended table from which tobacco smoke rose in even thicker wreaths than anywhere else. Around it sat a group of opposition types normally found at separate tables. Some journalists at the adjacent table had also joined the conversation.

      The table’s leading smoker was Meidani, the general secretary of the Socialist Party and former professor of physics at Tirana University. At the end of the ’80s, the Communist president Ramiz Alia had invited him to become a member of his presidential council, and after this he had become chairman of the first electoral commission for multi-party elections, until he agreed to join the Socialist Party and became its secretary. Majko had been one of the students in the anticommunist movement of December 1990 but had switched to the Socialist Party. Some said he had done this because there had been a lot of competition in the PD at the beginning and nobody had taken any notice of Majko, and others said that he had chosen the Socialists under the influence of his father, a military man strongly connected to the old Albanian Party of Labour. He was very young, and always smiling as if delighted at having become so important so soon.

      These two were both important people in the Socialist Party because they served to show the public, and especially foreigners, that the old communist Party of Labour, now called the Socialist Party, had changed its stripes and brought new people into its ranks.

      When Qorri came up to their table, Majko stood up, smiled, shook his hand, and said, ‘Congratulations.’ Qorri was taken aback.

      ‘Don’t spoil our day,’ Majko said before Qorri could utter a word. ‘We’ve elected you to represent the Left.’

      Qorri remembered the conversation in Noel’s a few days before.

      ‘Take a seat,’ they said to him, drawing up a chair.

      Qorri sat down to find out more. They told him of their plan to create an alliance of all the parties and associations against Berisha. It was to be led by three former political prisoners. Kurt Kola, the chairman of the Association of Former Victims of Persecution, had agreed to be one of them. The other two would be Daut Gumeni, to represent the right-wing parties, and Qorri for the left-wing Further decisions would be made at their inaugural meeting.

      ‘I can’t give an answer now. I’ll think about it,’ Qorri said to them.

      ‘Don’t spoil our day,’ Majko said again, speaking for them all. ‘Say yes.’

      Qorri looked around and his eyes involuntarily fell on a table where ‘the cook’, was sitting as always with ‘the spook’. No doubt these two knew something about this conversation, he thought. The eyes of Berisha’s security service, the SHIK, were ever present at Bar West. The powerful SHIK had inherited the aura of the omnipresent Sigurimi secret police.

      The short, thickset ‘cook’ earned his nickname because he was said to have worked at one time in a students’ canteen. The ‘spook’ was tall and bald, always making impassioned remarks to journalists about their articles. The two sat there almost all day. Both were said also to have been Sigurimi informers. Qorri knew the ‘spook’ because his brother had been in prison too. Somebody had told Qorri that the ‘spook’ had been forced to become an informer after his brother’s arrest, but someone else claimed that he had been recruited earlier, and was partly to blame for his brother’s fate. With all the rumour and speculation, it was impossible to know the truth. Everything to do with the Sigurimi and the people who worked for it was shrouded in secrecy. The ‘spook’ was the most fervent of anti-communists, like many whom the regime had both oppressed and humiliated by turning them into spies. ‘You were in prison with my brother,’ he had said to Qorri one day at a table in Bar West. ‘And so I must tell you that I’ve started working for the SHIK. I was out of work. But please keep this to yourself.’ At the West, everybody knew that the truth was not as he had told Qorri, because he did indeed have a day job. But this job was a cover, and every day he sat in the bar on duty. It was hard to understand just why people who had suffered under the rule of dictatorship looked for employment with the very agency that inherited the mantle of the Sigurimi: was it revenge, or simply because they could not escape its clutches? Rumour had it that the networks of the old Sigurimi and Berisha’s secret services to a large extent overlapped. Some swore that only the controllers had changed, and that former subordinates had been promoted to controllers. It was an impenetrable underground world.

      Qorri did not wait for the spook to greet him with his habitual cordiality, so perfectly simulated that anybody not in the know would think this was the last person to be suspected of being a spy. Instead, he looked across to a table at which sat Delina, Edi Rama’s wife, with Rama’s old friend Dash Peza and Blendi Gonxhja, his former student at the Academy. Qorri stood up from the politicians’ table and went over to them. Without sitting down, he told them of the proposal put to him.

      Delina almost shrieked, ‘Fatos, something has to be done. They beat up Edi Rama. They could beat up any of us!’

      ‘But Edi’s run off to Paris,’ Qorri said.

      ‘He’s gone for treatment until the situation calms down. He’ll be back.’

      Dash Peza and Blendi Gonxhja said the same. Dash was a boyhood friend of Rama. He had recently returned from America where he had tried without success to build a new life. He said he had become a born-again Christian there but this had evidently been a survival strategy, because in Albania he showed no symptoms of piety. Gonxhja was much more famous because he had taken part in the first students’ strike and later had become one of the most active members of the Democratic Alliance. He was now caught between his need to make a living, his love of art, his passion for politics, and his plans to leave Albania forever. Dash and Gonxhja both insisted they were ready to help the cause.

      The lack of opposition from Bar West was beginning to persuade Qorri that he might agree to represent the left in this new organisation that was to be created. But he felt no enthusiasm.