Читать книгу The False Apocalypse - Fatos Lubonja - Страница 9

Chapter III

Knuckledusters

The next morning, still in bed, Qorri heard Ben Kumbaro calling him from below in an ominous voice. He went to the window and saw Ben with one leg over the crossbar of his bicycle, his expression more sombre than usual.

‘What’s happened?’

‘They beat up Edi Rama and Lad Myrtezaj, knocked them round the head with knuckledusters.’

‘When?’

‘Late yesterday evening as they were going home from Noel’s.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘They’re out of danger, but it’s serious. Especially Edi.’

‘Where are they?’

‘The hospital stitched them and sent them home.’

‘So their lives aren’t in danger.’

‘No.’

Qorri put on his overcoat, rammed his beret crookedly on his head, pulling it more firmly than usual from behind, and hurried downstairs. He unlocked his bicycle from the banister and set off with Ben for the house of Edi Rama’s parents, where Edi had gone after they discharged him from the hospital. Some unknown men, hooded and masked, had been waiting for him in a dark place near Edi’s apartment, just past the place where Artan Imami, had dropped him in his car. They let Delina go and attacked the other two with knuckledusters. Lad had escaped lightly with a cut on his head but they gave Edi a much rougher time, and he arrived in the hospital with deep gashes in his scalp and a broken nose. He was now improving, but was in deep shock, and his head was swathed in bandages.

Qorri listened to this story from Ben, perched on his bicycle, and racked his brains for the reason behind this attack. He was also fearful for himself. He recalled the faces of the police chiefs at a dinner he had recently attended, and the drunken expression of Deputy Prime Minster Shehi as he left Noel’s. These were the people that must have given the signal for the attack, yet Qorri did not want to believe it. Did they know about their conversations with the Alliance and their plans to create a united front? Did they want to crush this front before it was even born? He would rather believe that they had been attacked because of their quarrel with a neighbour in the apartment block opposite, who had complained after seeing two artists dancing naked in their house, on the grounds that that this outrage to family values had obliged him to keep his curtains drawn. But that had been a long time ago, last summer. No, it was naive to think that this attack was not linked to what was happening all over the country. It was a sign and a threat to them all.

For the past three or four years, Berisha’s media had been stirring up hatred against intellectuals who protested against the PD’s behaviour since coming to power, calling them anti-Albanian, traitors, spies and homosexuals. They had even dreamed up new labels such as ‘Greco-Slavic-Orthodox’, which summed up the vulgarity that had taken root in the first anti-communist political party. Edi Rama had been among the first to be attacked for his writing. Now that the government felt threatened, it was translating hate speech into direct action. But who had selected Edi Rama, and who had carried out the attack? Was this the impulsive act of some fanatic emboldened by the climate of hatred, or had it been done under orders? Unfortunately, the second possibility seemed more likely.

***

The home of Edi Rama’s parents, an apartment on the third floor of a communist-era block, was open to visitors as if to receive condolences. Visitors came and went in the living room and kitchen, while Edi himself lay in one of the bedrooms.

Qorri went in to see him. As he approached the bed, he was afraid he would be unable to bear the sight of Edi’s disfigured face. And so it turned out. Edi’s face was horribly blackened and swollen, half covered by two bloodstained bandages in the form of a cross over his broken nose. His black eyes were barely visible on either side. Even his lips were grotesquely swollen. He struggled to speak but in vain, but only a kind of stutter came from his mouth. A wave of mixed emotions swept over Qorri, of a kind he had rarely experienced, like a failure of the nerves under the assault of all those contradictory feelings of horror mixed with despair, pity, and powerlessness to respond.

He did not stay long but returned to the adjacent room where he found many friends and acquaintances.

‘We’ve got to do something. Something has to be done,’ he heard Delina say, to him and to everyone there.

Qorri stood doubtfully, as if waiting for someone else to take a decision.

‘All I can do is write an article in Koha Jonë,’ he replied, seeing that no better suggestion was forthcoming.

Edi Rama, after being attacked, had done something that impressed Qorri greatly, and was a gift to the press. In the disfigured state that he was, his face smeared with blood, he had not waited for the ambulance but had knocked at the door of a neighbour, a photographer, and asked him to take his picture. Qorri picked up the shots that the photographer had developed that same night. Blood trickled down Edi’s brow and from his nose, where the knuckleduster’s blows had fallen, and spread over his face, staining his white open-necked shirt, and dripping onto his trousers. Yet the man who had suffered these bloody blows was still on his feet, reminding Qorri of the legend of a murdered man who walks away carrying his severed head in his hands.

Qorri took the photo with him and asked Delina to give him a floppy disc with the article Edi had mentioned at Noel’s. He mounted the bicycle he had left at the bottom of the stairs, and set off again, thinking about what he would write. He was so distracted that more than once he failed to avoid the ubiquitous potholes in the Tirana streets. The heavy traffic at that hour made them hard to avoid and several times the bicycle threw him into the air.