By Bajram Karabolli

I was a student and I was in the village during the long summer vacation. In this case, the word "vacation" is useless, because in the village, since it was created, they don't know what vacations are. My father sent me to the city (Vlora) for some work and gave me permission to stay for two or three days at the beach. I left home and, after an hour's walk, I arrived at the center of the locality.

Sitting on a curb, between the road and the only club there, I wait for the car. Suddenly, a middle-aged man accompanied by two younger men, with a very military and fierce demeanor, comes and stands over my head.

He was the secretary of the united cooperative bureau, a discharged officer whom the party had brought from Tirana to revolutionize and develop the village. For this, it had given him unlimited power.

– What are you doing here? Where are you from? Where are you going?… – and, full of arrogance, he just asks me, without waiting for me to answer.

And he asked me again:

– How old are you, you lazy bastard?

– Twenty, – I manage to answer.

– We, you idiot, were younger, when we fought tooth and nail with Hitler and the traitors…! Why are you here? What are you doing here?

I found time to tell him that I was waiting for a car to go to the city.

– Why are you going to the city? Do you know where your friends are? They are harvesting the wheat, they are threshing the corn…! They are in action, where the party and comrade Enver call them, while you wander! Do you know that your friends in Vietnam (he said Vietnam and not Vietnam) are giving their lives in the war against savage American imperialism? You look like a lazy bum. But, you probably also have cabbage in your head. You have bourgeois thoughts. And what about this book? – and he snatches the book from my hand.

It was a novel by Dymas, in French, which I had taken with me to read during the two or three days I would be on the beach. While I was overcome with fear and weakness, he looked at the book over and over again and, since he could not read it, asked me, full of anger:

– Isn't it Albanian?! What the hell is this language?

– French, – he barely gets out the single word.

– You don't like Albanian? You like the language of the bourgeoisie. You'll be arrested on the spot. Without your pants down?

At that time, in the cities there were a few headstrong young men, who followed the fashion of the time, whose trousers were torn and torn when they were caught by groups of revolutionary youth. To one of the companions, God says in his ear that my trousers were not fashionable (indeed they were not).

– Comrade R., they are not bourgeois potteries, – he reports.

And I, quite by chance, escaped physical violence, right there, in the middle of the street. However, the psychological and spiritual violence had already been fully committed.

– Whose are you? – asks the secretary, perplexed.

When I tell him my father's name, he breaks down in anger and says:

– Well, your father was rich. Thanks to the generosity of the party, he escaped becoming a kulak. But we know very well that he is unhappy. He has spots on his biography. You will follow in his footsteps. But if you move your tail, the party will cut off your head, like all enemies.

“Kulak”, “dissatisfied”, “with spots on his biography”, “reactionary”, “class enemy”, “bourgeois”, “enemy contingent”, “liberal”… Oh my God, what scary terms! They were calling the date.

While I was trying to gather myself, I saw the secretary, with a nervous and furious gait, walking away. Besides, I had been injured.

It hadn't been long since I had read Chekhov's "Pavilion No. 6." I hadn't understood Gromov. But in those moments I felt completely Gromov.

So, when I was twenty years old, my life began to be cursed. Since then, the most precious thing to me, my homeland, began to be gloom. It was ruled by a handful of ignorant, but all-powerful people. They surrounded my homeland with barbed wire and made its inhabitants miserable and put them in bunkers.

I felt homeless.

And then I decided to escape, to get as far away as possible from my country that had become a prison. Or I would kill myself. But what would happen to my relatives after I fled (it didn't matter if I escaped, was captured, or was killed at the border)? An endless ordeal of suffering and persecution awaited them. And I didn't run away. But I didn't kill myself either. Of course, I wasn't that brave.

And, for decades, I remained in the midst of violence, persecution and spiritual desolation. I had the ignorant, the crippled, the tyrants, the cruel everywhere: above my head, in front of my eyes, behind my back, on my left and right sides. They controlled everything about me: my movements, my clothing, my haircut, my food, my speech, my thoughts and my dreams. The savage dictatorship had my entire being and life under absolute control.

She bled and mutilated me: my youth, my energy, my talent…! She killed my loves…! She imprisoned my thoughts, feelings and soul. To save what was left of me, I decided to escape that suffocating and murderous reality and hide in the world of books. It was the only escape I had left.

Thus, I found refuge in the airy and light-filled reality of Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, Esenin, Migjen, Kadare, Jacob Xoxo, Hugo, Maupassant, Stendhal, London, Gollsworth, Sholokhov, etc. Memorie.al