Biografi by Lloyd Jones

scrambled to put on makeup and a favourite, knee-length black dress.
    â€˜You like it?’ She was pleased. ‘Vlady bought it for me. He buys all my clothes,’ she said.
    â€˜Really?’ I said. Then I asked how she had met her husband, while pretending not to notice the nervous glance exchanged between Arben and his father.
    But Mimi was unconcerned by my curiosity. She said they had met on a bus. Vladimir was attending the special Ministry of Internal Affairs school in Tirana. Mimi was studying political philosophy in Tirana. They had met on the bus returning to Shkodër.
    She said matter-of-factly, ‘I can not tell you anything about his work, because he does not tell me anything.’
    It was later, after we had put away the last few bottles of Nick’s father’s wine, the product from his backyard vine, that Mimi started to wonder herself how she had come to marry into the sigourimi.
    She shook her head. ‘We met on the bus.’ She shrugged. Then she laughed. Nick’s mother, happy that Mimi was making the evening such a success, kissed her niece on the cheek.
    â€˜I met my husband on the bus. He asked to see my biografi. After that, we got married. Perhaps it happens differently in the West?’
    It all seemed to have been so simple. Now, she said, she no longer felt the same. ‘I have never loved him. We live as if by arrangement.’
    The Markus, none the wiser for Mimi’s sad confession, raised their glasses for a toast. Mimi smiled and met each of their glasses with her own.
    Mimi said she had grown up with a portrait of the Great Leader in her family’s living room. It was hung on the wall opposite the window where people passing by could see Enver prominently displayed.
    â€˜My father,’ she said, ‘recently took down the portrait because in Albania, as you know, we have run out of glass.’

13
    IN THE MORNING, as Mimi had promised to arrange, Nick’s old schoolteacher Gjyzepina Lulgjuzay is waiting down in the lobby. She appears matronly, in a man’s jacket, a thick plaid skirt and flat shoes.
    We are a little wary of each other at first.
    Gjyzepina begins by running through the morning newspapers. In one paper a cartoon has Albania separated from its borders with Greece, Macedonia and Montenegro, merrily sailing for Europe while a chain anchored to a sickle stretches to breaking point.
    Gjyzepina laughs—revealing just two yellowing teeth in her mouth. She suddenly remembers this, and up comes her hand and an unguarded moment sadly trails off to embarrassment.
    We wander off to the piazza. Gjyzepina talks about Nick. Of course she remembers him. Nick was one of her best students.
    It is National Liberation Day, but unlike yesterday’s National Independence Day, there is hardly a soul about.
    Cliff had sketched a quick map of the piazza and its surrounding attractions for me. The Atheists Museum should be the two-storey building opposite. But according to Gjyzepina, the museum has been abandoned. The icons have been returned to the churches. For a brief time the Atheists Museum was home to the Democrats, but the protests following the Socialists’ unexpected election victory earlier in the year had blocked the piazza and the Democrats were moved to a former church kindergarten.
    â€˜It is not far from here,’ she says.
    Rruga Ndre Mjeda is a narrow, winding lane which begins behind a café. We catch up with people trailing through the doors of San Antonio.
    Up until a year ago the church had been a gymnasium. The concrete bleachers are still in place at the rear of the church. Voices whisper in darkness. In the foyer there is just enough light to make out photographs of priests and bishops tortured and executed by the regime.
    Cliff had told me to look in the Atheists Museum for the photographs of priests armed with machine guns firing into groups of partisans.
    The priest’s house alongside the Church of San