Biografi (27 page)

He has been gone some months on one of his trips to the Middle East when Geraldine is visited by an ambassador bearing a message from the Saudi King voicing disapproval of King Leka's training for the Yemen war. Leka has been making a nuisance of himself, disturbing other hotel guests and running around the hotel at four o'clock in the morning in full military kit.

The ambassador tactfully explains the impracticalities of the King involving himself in guerrilla warfare. He is too tall for a start—‘and there is no way we could protect your giant son'.

Leka returns to Spain where he continues his hand-grenade practice and small-arms training.

Geraldine would appear to be comparatively well adjusted. She manages to cut a royal figure on the embassy cocktail circuit in Madrid, but obviously the Queen has given some thought to vocational guidance. She speaks of eventually returning to Albania ‘newly trained' as a professional in modern health administration.

Meanwhile, the lives of King Zog's sisters, the princesses, fade away in the curtained gloom of a Cannes apartment. Only occasionally do they get to see the light of day, and only then during trips to the casino in Monte Carlo.

Two of the princesses die on the same night—a third goes less than a week later. Perhaps this is their finest hour as they are driven in a hearse to Paris, followed all the way by a car draped in flowers ‘tied with scarlet and black ribbons'. At Thiais, buses have ferried in grieving Albanians from exile communities all over Europe—‘The only sound in the heavy cemetery air was their calling the names of Queen Geraldine and King Leka, over and over again.'

It is during the seventies that King Leka manages to recover some of the royal family's former prosperity after an offer from the Shah of Iran to set up his ‘young cousin' in business. For the next few years Leka supplies mobile cranes for the Ports and Shipping Authority of Iran. With these spoils he is able to replace the pawned court jewellery. He presents his mother with a new crown and a set of tiaras in sapphires and diamonds.

In exile other traditions are upheld. Consent from various leaders of exile communities scattered worldwide is sought by the King to marry Susan of Sydney. In the absence of a traditional wedding gown, Susan's Sydney dressmaker copies one from an old encyclopaedia photograph. On the day, the King disports himself in the uniform of colonel of the Royal Albanian Guards with the Order of Skanderbeg, a military decoration first introduced by his father. In attendance at the wedding are other royal exiles: Queen Farida of Egypt. King Simeon and Queen Margarita of Bulgaria, a clutch of princesses. Cables from around the world are read out to the wedding guests, among them a message from Queen Elizabeth II. Guests recall the tall King slicing the wedding cake with his sword.

For the rest of the seventies, through to the early eighties, it is business as usual. Leka pops up in Thai border camps to cadge operational and communications equipment for his Free Albania units.

Queen Geraldine visits the exile communities in New York and Peterborough, in Canada. She goes to Washington and is received at the Capitol by senators who whisk her off for lunch. The Queen remembers them as being ‘charming, cultivated men, but they did not know one thing about Albania'.

Queen Geraldine and her giant son have become relics whom no one knows what to do with. The matters of sentimental attachment, the fight for shelf space, have to be juggled with a changing order of things. It is left to Leka's former playmate, Prince Juan Carlos, to prevail on the royal family to leave Spain. Leka's combat training has become intolerable, and besides, there are new political sensitivities. Franco is ill, and Spain teeters on the threshold of entering the new Europe.

Geraldine goes off to live with her sister, the Princess Apponyi, and whiles away her time reading romantic novels. Barbara Cartland is a favourite.

King Leka and Queen Susan are shunted about various African countries before a haven is found in South Africa. And here, too, royalty seeks out its own. King Leka and Queen Susan are guests of the King of Zululand.

It is in South Africa that the King accomplishes his finest political act in his and Susan's conceiving a son named Anwar (after President Sadat) Zog Baudouin (after the King of Belgium) Reza (after the Shah).

It is left to a proud granny to remind us that ‘Albania had a crown prince and the Zogu dynasty was assured.'

47

BACK IN TIRANA, Munz rang from the hotel. Kadris said he would meet Shapallo off the train. He seemed to think that Mister Gina would make the Democrats' car available for the run out to Savra. And so we said goodbye to Shapallo. He showed no disappointment to be heading back to Savra. His memories of Topojani remained intact. In that sense he hadn't risked losing that final thing he could believe in—a home.

In the morning we saw him off. Then we walked back to the Dajti, where Diani was waiting to ring Nexhmije.

She rang the telephone number which Illir had scribbled down, and Nexhmije answered—which was to be expected, of course. But for Diani, Nexhmije belonged to the old pantheon of saints. Nexhmije had shared the royal podium. It was scarcely believable that she should answer her own telephone and ask that we avoid the back entrance.

‘She did stress the “front entrance”,' said Diani.

Five o'clock, and although it was dark I could see no sign of security.

Nexhmije came to the door herself, a woman with long grey hair tied back in a schoolmistress bun. We shook hands and followed her up the stairs to the first-floor apartment.

Inside the door we were shown into an austere living room. On one wall, a large colour portrait of Enver and herself standing outside their holiday home in Vlorë, one year before the Emperor's death. Two bowls of plastic flowers stood on a coffee table. One wall was taken up with bookshelves, but few books.

I had thought to ask after Enver's real library, but any possibility of this becoming a question-and-answer session was quickly dispelled by Nexhmije. She wanted to talk about old times, and to this end she had prepared a speech.

We hear about Albania's isolation, and how the country's drift toward China had come about after its abandonment by the West.

‘Abandonment by the West?'

In a strong, disapproving voice, she says, ‘Please let me conclude.'

Nexhmije continues—she continued, uninterrupted, for two hours.

It is a lengthy dissertation scrambled by Diani's increasingly panicked translation to the point of incoherence. On she goes— out of control, and meeting my glances with petrified eyes that beg me not to ask what it is Nexhmije has just said.

And Nexhmije, none the wiser, presses on with her ‘howevers' and ‘buts' and ‘wherefores', and in this way the entire post-war history of Albania is bridged.

I am scribbling down nonsense when the monologue suddenly terminates, and when I look up there is Nexhmije, composed and happy as a cat.

‘Did I talk too long?' she asks. ‘I hope not.'

‘Noooo,' replies Diani, her hands pressed to her knees, like a child wanting to please.

‘Good.' The cat smiles.

She excuses herself then, and returns with a tray of coffee and raki.

She is pleased, very pleased, to have had the opportunity to speak with friends. It occurs to me that she is, of course, referring to Cliff 's letter.

‘These days,' she says. ‘I find myself in need of friends.'

We talk about television, her favourite programs. She doesn't care for Yugoslav television. It contains too many American programs. She prefers RAI for its sober political discussions.

Nexhmije is in the middle of explaining an invitation she received to appear on a French show when a power cut pitches the room into darkness. Nexhmije, however, is ready for this. We both are, and Nexhmije reaches for a pen light the moment I flick on Bill's torch. Our beams cross over the top of the coffee table and we laugh about that.

Nexhmije finds a candle from the sideboard. I hold the torch while she gets the candle lit, then she takes care to move the candle closer to where I have been sitting so that I can see my notes better.

This is not going the way I had wished. I note her frail ankles, the tidy composition of her hands. Nexhmije looks like somebody's grandmother.

Does she have nightmares? Did she see the way the Ceausescus died—the unceremonious way Nicolae and Elena were backed up to a wall, the way they sagged to their knees like two sacks? These are the questions the victims of bad biografi had asked in Rruga Ndre Mjeda.

In October from a window in the Dajti Bill had watched a crowd of fifty thousand swarm up the Boulevard of Martyrs intent on violence, chanting, ‘Death to the widow!'

I quietly let Diani know that I would like to hear about Nexhmije's dreams at night. What enters her head at four o'clock in the morning these days?

A look of terror comes into Diani's eyes, and a slightly different question is asked.

Nexhmije, she says, is concerned for the young people. She worries about them. They have been a little spoilt, she feels.

‘As far as the economic and psychological changes are concerned, I am a little pessimistic,' she says.

The young people have not realised how hard people in the West work. She doubts whether the youth are equipped with the right attitude to cope.

‘Perhaps we are to blame, like parents who keep their children indoors. Now the children want to go out and away from the family.'

She manages, somehow with a straight face, to explain why Albania had locked up its borders for so long.

‘We had not the possibility to allow people to go abroad because they did not have the funds.'

Of Albania's isolationist path: this is the fault of the West. Where was the support from the West after her husband's criticism of Khrushchev and the country's split with the Soviet Union in the early sixties?

‘Not even Italy came to our aid.'

Long before Dubcek, before Lech Walesa, Comrade Enver had attacked Soviet imperialism. And what happened, she asked. China had been the only one to hold out a hand. Then had come the split with China, and ever since, Albania had been left to live off its reserves.

We leave, with Nexhmije waving us goodbye from her door. On the street, though, we glance back to a curious sight. The power is on in the apartments above and below Nexhmije's. I am left with the rueful thought that perhaps halfway up that dim stairwell Nexhmije is thinking how well the interview went for her. She even agreed to a second visit.

Diani is ecstatic. ‘Did you see? She kissed me at the door!'

She makes a thing of flicking the kiss from her cheek. She agrees that her father will be very pleased.

Her father is an old partisan who spends his days in striped pyjamas prostrate before a television set. I had met him earlier in the day, and he had rolled off the bed and walked timorously over to a chest of drawers to get his old French pistol.

In her high piping voice Diani said, ‘My father wishes to tell you that this is the pistol he used in the War of Liberation.'

I turned the pistol round with elaborate care, and the old partisan received my compliments with an impatient nod of his head. He took the pistol back and plodded off to the drawers where he wrapped it in cloth; the party trick over, he fell back on his bed and grinned up at the Albanian folk music playing on the television. He would be very proud that his daughter had had an audience with Nexhmije.

48

TWO DAYS LATER, Nexhmije was arrested. The newspapers reported with some glee that she had been taken by surprise.

She had been about to enter the car which, each day, took her to the hearing into the alleged abuses of the former block men, when instead she was shown to another car.

‘Her wrists were embellished with bracelets she had never dreamed of…' cheered the
Sindikalist
newspaper.

Several days passed before we caught up with Illir. This time around he was more talkative.

We bumped in to him outside his gate. He invited us up for coffee. Inside the door of Nexhmije's apartment he tossed off his coat and pulled off his gloves like a man home from the office. He was spirited and worked up by what had happened.

Animated in that way of bush lawyers sure of their points, Illir began to cite the Helsinki Agreement in his mother's defence. This was the same agreement to which his father's regime had refused to be a signatory. Nexhmije, he argued, posed neither a threat to society nor an obstruction to the gathering of evidence. By the terms of the Helsinki Agreement she should not be in prison.

There were other problems. Nexhmije was having difficulties in obtaining the services of a lawyer—another delicious irony. One lawyer who had represented Nexhmije in seven hearings had suddenly abandoned her without a word. Another lawyer had taken up Nexhmije's case only to inexplicably drop it. Nexhmije had tried to reach him, but he refused to take her calls. Still another lawyer had withdrawn because of threats.

In one of the hearings it had come down to Illir to represent his mother. That particular battle had been small beer. In May the previous year, Nexhmije had left the grand residence in the block for these six rooms above the customs house. But this apartment as well, the prosecutor had claimed, was unjustifiably spacious for just one person. So wily Illir had moved in with his wife and children.

At that stage the scoreboard read: Nexhmije 1, the prosecutor's office 0.

Now Nexhmije was in a small cell in the prison near the railway station. The cell was without a glass pane in its window, and without heat. Illir had visited with her only once, and that was to bring his mother fresh clothing and some French novels.

We sat in the same living room with Illir as we had with Nexhmije, and this time Diani's translations were more collected.

‘Illir's mother,' she said, ‘had anticipated anything—even worse than prison.'