Biografi by Lloyd Jones

shift to something more pleasant. I had the feeling he was operating in the old climate of fear, where it was better to know nothing because information invariably meant complicity. You learned something and immediately were tainted by it. Either you became a threat because of what you knew or you were made a victim because of it.
    Mrs Marku was ready to serve dinner. Another bottle of wine was dusted off. To appease Nick’s father we discussed books.
    I brought up Kadare for discussion, Dossier H, but its mention produced only a scowl. Kadare, in Vladimir’s view, had disgraced himself by leaving the country. This was not an uncommon view. Even Gjyzepina was critical.
    Yesterday, while walking up Rruga Ndre Mjeda, I had asked for her opinion of Kadare. She said, ‘How can we say he wrote honestly? Perhaps he fought for democracy with his heart and mind, but he forgot to express it.’
    Vladimir put down his fork and with his fingers pulled a chewed hunk of meat from his mouth. Then he held up a greasy finger to make his point. Kadare, he said, was a propagandist.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Mimi. ‘My husband is referring to The Great Winter , the novel in which Enver Hoxha is the main character. The hero.’
    Vladimir patted Mimi’s shoulder. She had on the same black dress as last night. Mimi looked at where he had left a grease spot; Vladimir dove back into his food.
    I wondered who Vladimir thought was behind the gunfire at night.
    â€˜Bandits,’ he said, with his mouth full, and went on eating. This time Arben did not contest it.
    After Mimi and Vladimir left, Nick’s mother wrapped a cake in a towel and placed it in my hands.
    â€˜My mother would like you to take the cake to Nick in Rome,’ Arben explained.
    It was a special cake which the Catholics in the north of the country baked to celebrate Easter. In the past, Arben explained, they had had to bake the cake secretly, even going to the extent of burying the eggshells in the backyard so the neighbours wouldn’t see them in the rubbish and tell the sigourimi .
    â€˜Vladimir?’ I asked.
    Arben nodded.
    â€˜Vladimir,’ his mother said.

16
    THE NEXT MORNING the entire delegation is there to see me off—Gjyzepina, Clement, Arben, Nick’s parents.
    True to her word, Gjyzepina has gone off to search the neighbourhood for someone to accompany me to Tirana. She turns up with Marcello, a greying twenty-nine-year-old student returning to university in Tirana.
    The bus, in fact, is an old lorry which draws up to the meat market at great speed, splashing ditch water over the bloody carcasses displayed on the pavement.
    Fifteen or twenty passengers are already standing on the tray, and because I am the inexperienced foreigner and because I am surrounded by fifteen to twenty willing hosts, I’m pushed with Marcello to the front of the tray to lean up against the cab. Marcello tells me this is the most sought-after place—here it is warm and secure.
    Within a short time, out in the countryside, my head is a block of ice. And what was exhilarating has lost its edge. Behind us the other passengers’ eyelids are half-closed, their faces red with cold, their hair swept back off their foreheads by the breeze. They stand with their legs apart and their hands placed on the shoulders of the person in front of them.
    Arben said we would be in Tirana in a couple of hours, no more.
    Now Marcello tells me it’s likely to be ‘three, four hours, perhaps’.
    Every so often there is a respite as we slow up behind a horse and cart. Briefly, the icy breeze subsides and we thaw out in the still air. It is possible again to feel the sun and imagine the greenness either side of the road in flower or baked in midsummer. The season of postcards. Then we’re off again, lurching, the tray leaping potholes with its human cargo. The words of Marcello’s uncertain English suddenly pop up shrilly or are blown away