Biografi by Lloyd Jones Page A

Antonio is a pile of rubble. Sparrows hop nervously between lumps of plaster and concrete, an area of waste stretching up to the doorway of the old kindergarten, now the Democrats’ office.
    Rruga Ndre Mjeda comes out at the old Cathedral of Shkodër. We arrive in time to see a donkey carrying rubble out of the cathedral doors. With the help of Italian money, the cathedral is in the process of reverting from a volleyball court. There, above the altar, the time clock is still attached. Back outside the cathedral a mob of teenage girls surrounds an Italian priest. He’s wearing designer sunglasses and his tanned cheeks bulge with pleasure at all this attention.
    Two old Albanian priests stand off at a short distance, basking in the sunshine. We learn that both had been jailed—one for ten years. But neither will talk about his experiences.
    â€˜God forgives,’ the older one says. ‘We must look to the future.’
    Another fifteen minutes’ amble and we come onto kisha e Volreve Katolike, the Catholic cemetery, in the Skanderbeg district, a poor, run-down area on the edge of town. Newly painted white crosses hide under the shade of trees. Work in the chapel had started the previous November, two months before the first demonstrations against the regime.
    Gjyzepina hadn’t believed at first what she heard about people bringing the church bell out of hiding and turning up with paint and brushes.
    â€˜We were afraid to see who was building the church. Even me! To tell the truth, I put a handkerchief over my head and came here in the night with my brother to see for myself.
    â€˜After all these years,’ she says. ‘I think the rebuilding of the church was the people’s way of telling the Party that we could do anything without first asking them.’
    Alongside the photographs of the slain priests in the Church of San Antonio had been others of Shkodër’s first public Mass, coming nearly twenty-five years after the regime declared the country to be the world’s first atheist state.
    Before a terrif ied congregation the priest that day—the previous November—observed, ‘I see it written in your eyes. You are ready to die.’
    We wander about the graves under the trees. Some carry photographs of the dead. Where a portrait hasn’t been available, a drawn arrow indicates the deceased, a smiling face at the back of a family gathering; with those who had been older, or gravely ill, it sometimes seemed that they were already posing for their headstones. The other graves, the ones without headstones and for a long time lost in overgrown grass, have re-emerged, their grave markings defined by carefully placed whitewashed pebbles.
    Another country was emerging through grainy, poorly reproduced photographs appearing daily in newspapers, testifying to some wrongdoing, or defending after forty years some slander by the Party on someone’s parent, grandparent, sister, brother, aunt or uncle. Family pride, as much as it had always done in Albania, was seeking to put right old wrongs.
    Right up until King Zog’s era, defending family honour offered grounds for taking another’s life. Shkodër had been notorious for its blood feuds. An imagined slight, ‘high words’ at a card game, was often enough for a man to shoot his neighbour dead. Vengeance was routinely expected and a man might stand vigil near his neighbour’s house for days, a rifle laid across his knee, in order to exact the blood ‘owed’ him.
    Joseph Swire tells of sharing a room at the old Hotel International with Avni Rustem, the man who assassinated Zog’s Turkophile uncle, Essad Pasha, in Paris in 1920. The French convicted Rustem of political murder and fined him one franc. Rustem returned to Albania, where his countrymen rewarded him with a pension. Swire described a ‘little pale-faced man in threadbare tweeds…’ He liked him. Rustem cheerfully told