Biografi by Lloyd Jones Page A

into the jet stream, and it is some time before I understand that he is trying to tell me about the sigourimi .
    â€˜You are interested in such things. Gjyzepina told me.’
    We slow down for another cart piled high with hay, and in the brief stillness his words and sentences are delivered in a comprehensible form.
    Some years ago, he says, an off icer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs had approached him with a request for information. The question of refusal had to be balanced against consideration of his family’s prospects, and Marcello had tried to hedge.
    Each day the same man had come to him with the same request. ‘Please, Marcello, what can you tell me? About anything, anyone. Tell me about your neighbour.’
    Each day Marcello shrugged and said, ‘We’ll see.’ Time passes, and he begins to wonder if he has won this battle. The sigourimi stops visiting. The pestering ends. But shortly after this, Marcello learns that he is being tailed, that his conversations are being noted.
    The lorry has started to move off again and Marcello is a torrent of words. The hay bales pass at eye level as the truck overtakes the cart. The breeze picks up, the passengers press together, words fly through the air.
    This is the last bit that I catch: the final revelation. His neighbour had placed a listening device in the ceiling of his family’s living room.
    â€˜My neighbour!’ he says.
    The wind grew stronger and we herded closer together. Marcello stood tall with his shirt collar open to the bruising cold, and I crept away to thoughts of Cliff.
    I had looked him up with the sincerest of motives. I had wanted information of the most obvious kind—where to go, some useful phrases: ‘Milk, no sugar, please.’ What to eat, what not to eat, whom to meet, whom to avoid. And as expected, Cliff had graciously come through for me.
    There were the surprises that come with establishing contact with anyone after a number of years. I mean Cliff ’s behaviour, which, when all was said and done, I had thought no more than mildly eccentric. For example, his forceful invitation to exchange my shoes for his range of rubber jandals at the door. The jandals and the living conditions in the basement were curiosities, peculiar to Cliff. There had been no means, or even the thought, of tracing them to another place.
    The ritualised hospitality, the boiling of water over Bunsen burners, the insistent invitations to eat more, more and more. The same worrying over details, the placement of cups and the order in which the coffee followed the raki, the cake coming after the sour pickles, the piles of rubber jandals behind every doorway—all the things I had thought peculiar to Cliff had popped up at Simon Pepa’s house, then again at the Markus’ and Gjyzepina’s.
    And then there was Cliff ’s appearance. His period look. The wild mane of hair and the sideburns he’d grown to reconstruct himself in the image of Balkan Man. But none of this had seemed particularly obvious to me at the time. Bess had more than hinted: ‘How Cliff has changed.’ But nothing had quite the impact of those first glimpses at Durrës, those bedraggled locks of hair, the triangular sideburns and frayed bell-bottoms. Until then I had had no idea of the extent to which Cliff had entered into the spirit of his adopted homeland. But certainly after Durrës, and perhaps even before then, I had sneakily known that I wouldn’t be able to leave Cliff out of this.
    Cliff had been helpful with contacts, one of them Illir Ikonomi, whom Cliff had described as responsible for writing replies to Radio Tirana’s worldwide correspondents.
    I had found Radio Tirana a short distance from the Hoxha Memorial, in a residential street. Building had commenced on the new Italian embassy opposite, where a plainclothes man with an AK-47 patrolled that side of the street.
    For an acquaintance of Cliff ’s, Illir