Biografi by Lloyd Jones Page B

Swire over his newspaper that he was waiting for his death, for Essad’s blood had to be avenged. Six weeks later he was shot down in Tirana by a hireling of Essad’s family, ‘a thick man with a red face’ whom Swire says he met several times in 1930 near his house ‘with an innocent umbrella in his hand’.
    The priests and the teenage girls were gone when we wandered back past the cathedral. Not a soul was about, even at the residential end of Rruga Ndre Mjeda. Shkodër’s population turns indoors between the hours of one and three.
    A mangy cat lying in a doorway raised its head as we passed. A single vendor had chosen to stay with his five or six copies of Albert Camus’ The Outsider , which was enjoying the runaway success of a newly released hot title.
    It was at the bottom end of the rruga that we came upon a small crowd lined up outside an open door.
    The building seemed to be some kind of shrine. A new enterprise, something like Bill would imagine, a highly popular café even crossed my mind.
    â€˜It is not these things,’ says Gjyzepina. ‘It is…How do you say…?’
    She thought for the moment, concentrating with the effort.
    â€˜It is the house of biografi.’
    â€˜A house?’
    â€˜No. Not a house exactly. An office.’
    We chewed around some more, before nailing it down to the office for political prisoners.
    I preferred Gjyzepina’s original choice.
    â€˜House of biografi did you say?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she says. ‘This is the place.’

14
    IN A BACK room of the house of biografi there is a desk and two chairs. The registrar sits before a huge open ledger, into which he enters the details of the person sitting opposite.
    The room is filled with surviving relatives. Adult children with stories of parents carried off in the night. Wives who have lost touch with their husbands. Or solitary men and women, former prisoners and exiles whose lives were confiscated under the old regime, have been lining up in Rruga Ndre Mjeda to tell their story.
    Two lines form in this small cool room of alabaster. One behind the registrar’s desk, and another line before me and Gjyzepina.
    It just happened this way, a story for the ledger and another for me. They present their lives as though they are little more than damaged houseware, bits of crockery; as if to say, Here, do with it what you may.
    In Albania when lives disappeared it was more often than not through a trapdoor called ‘Article 55’, shorthand for ‘agitation, betrayal and propaganda’. The first time I ask a man who had been jailed for ten years for the evidence, some details please of his ‘betraying the people’, he doesn’t quite understand.
    â€˜The evidence? The evidence is they said I betrayed the people.’
    Then he says, ‘When they said “Ten years”, it felt to me that they had kissed me on both cheeks.’
    One woman refuses to come further than the doorway. She is halfway through giving her details when she loses her nerve. The registrar assures her that she is amongst friends. She mustn’t feel afraid.
    â€˜It is not for myself that I feel afraid,’ she says. ‘I am afraid for my children.’
    The sigourimi recently dynamited some houses in her street. She does not want her house to be next. She says she is sorry; she cannot go through with her story. It is still much too dangerous.
    Luchia Cole steps forward. She had worked in a bakery. In the late seventies, during one of the country’s periodic convulsions, the biografis were pored over for likely victims and it was discovered that Luchia’s father had escaped the country in 1951. After eleven months of interrogation, Luchia ‘confessed’ to her crime and was jailed for eight years under Article 55.
    Gjenovefa Vilaku is here on her husband’s behalf. Before their marriage, before they had even met, her husband was studying in