Free Biografi by Lloyd Jones

cladding had been clawed off, picked clean, the windows smashed. On each floor itinerants had left behind piles of human shit and graffiti: Enver mounting his wife, Nexhmije. Or Nexhmije, legs apart, playing with herself alongside an angel with a harp.
    It is National Independence Day and back in the Rozala the lobby fills up with old soldiers and cigarette smoke, the sense of special occasion bolstered by the smell of hair oil and shoe polish. Someone hands me a flier drawing attention to a public meeting to be hosted this evening by an American representative of King Leka.
    Later in the morning I follow after the old soldiers pouring out of the Rozala with their Fedoras, their stylish cigarette holders, their frayed suits.
    A substantial crowd has already gathered between the ‘Heroes of Vigut’ and a theatre balcony, where the microphones are being set up.
    On the edge of the crowd a young man, turning over sausage meat on a hot coal range, wraps my kebab in a page torn from the works of Enver Hoxha. The page in which my kebab comes wrapped is headed, ‘Failed Strategies’ and it reads: ‘We knew he was bound to come to a bad end…Several times we appealed to him to join the National Liberation Movement, but he didn’t want to, and…he was shot like a stray dog.’
    Some of the ‘stray dogs’ from the Hoxha era are gathered on the balcony.
    First up is Victor Martini, leader of the political prisoners from the Shkodër area. He spent fifteen years in prison. His proposal to rededicate the ‘Heroes of Vigut’ memorial to those thousands killed by the Communists draws the biggest roar of approval.
    Pjeter Arbori, after thirty years in prison and recently emerged as the leader of the Democrats in Shkodër, reminds the crowd of the dangers of returning the Socialists to power. This morning’s Shkodra had ridiculed the Socialists’ first conference of five days earlier with the headline: HOXHA ELECTED FIRST SECRETARY OF SOCIALIST PARTY. Six years had elapsed since the Great Leader’s death, but disciples were still thick on the ground, and many suspected the Socialists’ leader, Ramiz Alia, of being a puppet in Nexhmije’s control.
    When Arbori reminds the crowd of the Socialists’ true allegiances, the crowd begins to chant, ‘Hitler/Hoxha, Hitler/Hoxha…’
    A poet takes the microphone. His voice is soft and uncertain. He addresses the microphone rather than the crowd: ‘We are about to remove the bandages. But what is it that we will find? New skin or a scab?’ The crowd takes a moment to digest this. There is some shuffling. In the brief silence the poet apparently suffers a crisis of confidence, because next thing he tears the microphone off the stand and like a demagogue, begins to shout, ‘Democracy! Democracy!’
    Now he has the crowd with him.
    But it was time to find Nick’s parents’ house. Nick had written down his address, but in the hotel all I get from the staff are varying expressions of hopelessness. ‘Tetori’ is a mystery. I ask for a street map, but no such thing exists. One of the waiters stares at the address an inordinate length of time until he is satisfied that he has never heard of it. Another takes me by the wrist and leads me outside. We walk over to the ‘Heroes of Vigut’, where he shades his eyes from the sun and points vaguely in the direction of Greece.
    I stop a car travelling at barely faster than idling speed. A cigarette butt dangles from the driver’s lips. I regret it as soon as I hand over the notebook with Nick’s address. The driver has a wild-eyed look about him. ‘Tetori.’ He nods. His eyes do a sideways shift to the passenger door.
    Shkodër is a maze of tight streets and narrow lanes, some with names, some without. We enter spaces never intended for cars, lanes with high walls of rounded stones, full of promise because of their confined