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 Democratsâ 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. Heâs 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 jailedâone for ten years. But neither will talk about his experiences.
âGod forgives,â the older one says. âWe must look to the future.â
Another fifteen minutesâ 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 hadnât believed at first what she heard about people bringing the church bell out of hiding and turning up with paint and brushes.
âWe 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.
âAfter all these years,â she says. âI think the rebuilding of the church was the peopleâs way of telling the Party that we could do anything without first asking them.â
Alongside the photographs of the slain priests in the Church of San Antonio had been others of Shkodërâs first public Mass, coming nearly twenty-five years after the regime declared the country to be the worldâs first atheist state.
Before a terrif ied congregation the priest that dayâthe previous Novemberâobserved, âI see it written in your eyes. You are ready to die.â
We wander about the graves under the trees. Some carry photographs of the dead. Where a portrait hasnât 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 someoneâs 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 Zogâs era, defending family honour offered grounds for taking anotherâs life. Shkodër had been notorious for its blood feuds. An imagined slight, âhigh wordsâ 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 neighbourâs house for days, a rifle laid across his knee, in order to exact the blood âowedâ him.
Joseph Swire tells of sharing a room at the old Hotel International with Avni Rustem, the man who assassinated Zogâs 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 âlittle pale-faced man in threadbare tweedsâ¦â He liked him. Rustem cheerfully told