would use all possible means to maintain order.
***
The winter cold did nothing to cool these passions, and these increasing acts of violence were a dangerous omen.
Several days after the attack on Rama and Myrtezaj, Qorri sat down to draft a memorandum for which he hoped to gather as many well-known signatures as possible.
It was time for Albania’s intellectuals to state some blunt truths. The great financial deception was only part of an even greater political deception. Within a few years, the Democratic Party had transformed itself from a hope to a threat. Abandoned by its intellectual supporters, it was now a rump of ex-communists who had now turned into anti-communists, with a contingent of former victims of persecution who allowed themselves to be manipulated by a state that was crushing the first green shoots of democracy.
The stone throwing and fires were not just because people were furious at losing their money but also because their patience had been abused. They had seen the government first behave like a bandit and then set itself up as a judge. Any people who were not allowed to demonstrate peacefully would one day resort to using stones and fire. The country needed an authority based on trust not fear, and this could only come from a parliament elected by a free vote. The traditional destructive cycle of ‘crime breeding crime’ had to be broken.
Qorri’s memorandum in this spirit was addressed to President Berisha and his party but also to the opposition, calling on them to rise above power struggles and to construct an alternative. It called on the army and the police not to allow themselves to become instruments of one political group against another, and it appealed to the whole of public opinion. Copies were sent to the embassies in Tirana. In conclusion, he appealed to people to continue their peaceful protests, avoiding outbreaks of violence and ignoring the provocations of the secret police.
The number of signatures was not large. What Qorri in one of his articles had called the ‘pilot fish’ (a large category of the former communist intelligentsia) were frightened. Fish of this kind have no fins to steer themselves, so in compensation nature has given them very strong lips. They clamp these lips onto sharks that carry them along until they find a pocket of warm water where they can float. These fish had now torn their lips away from Berisha, because he had left the warm waters. But he was still strong enough to punish them. So they had not attached their lips to a new host. They were biding their time.
And so there were barely sixteen signatories. Besides Qorri, they included four former political prisoners and Kurt Kola, the chairman of the Association of Former Political prisoners, and Daut Gumeni, Qorri’s neighbour in Kindergarten Nr. 19. There was also the theatre producer Ben Kumbaro, as well as Edi Rama, and Artan Imami, who had been at the table that dramatic evening at Noel’s.
The memorandum was published in Koha Jonë.
Chapter V
Proposal (In Grey and White)
Nobody knew why Berisha’s opponents made the Bar West their headquarters. It was perhaps mere chance that this bar, located in the Park of Youth, now entered its heyday.
In the early ‘90s the opening of any private bar or restaurant in Tirana was an event. These cafés and bars, that suddenly sprouted up one after another in huts erected in public parks, were halfway houses in the transition to private property. Every proprietor tried a new gimmick, and their owners were entrepreneurs who usually had links to central or local government or paid a bribe for a permit. The most varied selection of bars and restaurants was in the Park of Youth in the city centre. The population hurried to sample every new venue, each more modern than the last, and changed their favourites from one month to the next like fashionable clothes. With extraordinary speed every square inch of the park, once the pride of the city with its tall trees and variegated greenery, was crammed with bars and kiosks. The trees and grass withered and died. Plate glass and aluminium predominated, while other bars imitated caves or grottoes. There were also arcades with fruit machines, Ping-Pong halls and discotheques. The dark alleys between them became hangouts for drug dealers and for use as outdoor urinals.
Bar West was on the northern edge of the park, opposite the Defence Ministry. It was the same street on which Noel’s was situated, after it crossed the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation. The bar was sheathed in plate glass that extended to the pavement and enabled prospective clients to see who was inside before entering, and also allowed customers to keep an eye on passers-by. You could leave your bicycle outside without fear of it being stolen. Inside there was central heating in winter and air conditioning in summer, both novelties in Albania.
The proprietor was a trim young lad with vertical gel-stiffened hair. He had been a wrestler in the time of communism and then the bodyguard of PD Prime Minister Meksi. But he had kept up his friendship with several deputies of the Alliance who frequented the bar. Some people said these deputies were only customers because of the many opponents of Berisha who went there. These premises gained a reputation, and their regulars gave each bar its soul and defined its political allegiance. The cafés became the nodes of a news network that spread throughout the capital city; the most powerful news medium in the country, more so than the newspapers or the sole State television channel. The network had already been established under the communist regime, and now that the cafés were more numerous, they had increased in strength and influence.
Bar West was the hub of the opposition media network. This was where journalists, intellectuals and the most media-savvy opposition politicians met. Here anti-government news was commented on and disseminated. Almost all the journalists of Koha Jonë, university teachers, unemployed writers and poets, and those who had turned themselves into journalists and politicians, drank their coffee there. Shvarc came here because Noel’s was empty in the morning. Foreign journalists turned up, fishing for Albanian newspapermen and opposition leaders to interview.
***
On that day at the end of January, when Qorri entered Bar West, he saw an extended table from which tobacco smoke rose in even thicker wreaths than anywhere else. Around it sat a group of opposition types normally found at separate tables. Some journalists at the adjacent table had also joined the conversation.
The table’s leading smoker was Meidani, the general secretary of the Socialist Party and former professor of physics at Tirana University. At the end of the ’80s, the Communist president Ramiz Alia had invited him to become a member of his presidential council, and after this he had become chairman of the first electoral commission for multi-party elections, until he agreed to join the Socialist Party and became its secretary. Majko had been one of the students in the anticommunist movement of December 1990 but had switched to the Socialist Party. Some said he had done this because there had been a lot of competition in the PD at the beginning and nobody had taken any notice of Majko, and others said that he had chosen the Socialists under the influence of his father, a military man strongly connected to the old Albanian Party of Labour. He was very young, and always smiling as if delighted at having become so important so soon.
These two were both important people in the Socialist Party because they served to show the public, and especially foreigners, that the old communist Party of Labour, now called the Socialist Party, had changed its stripes and brought new people into its ranks.
When Qorri came up to their table, Majko stood up, smiled, shook his hand, and said, ‘Congratulations.’ Qorri was taken aback.
‘Don’t spoil our day,’ Majko said before Qorri could utter a word. ‘We’ve elected you to represent the Left.’
Qorri remembered the conversation in Noel’s a few days before.
‘Take a
