The first banner of Albanian independence is raised in Valona back in 1912. When the Tedeschi family move to Valona in 1939, there are about 600 Jews living there, but she, Haya, remembers only Fanny Malli, because Fanny led a rabbit on a leash, and Ruben Ketz, because he had pockets full of black pebbles and spoke Albanian better than she did. In retrospect, she knows there was once a synagogue in Valona, which the Italians turned into a weapons armoury during the Great War, and there had been a Jewish cemetery, because before the bombs began to fall, while walking with Ludovik across a ploughed building site, she noticed a little tablet with a Star of David on it and oddly carved letters. Those are our enemies, Florian and Ada say, the Greeks and the Albanians, the partisan bandits. Haya believes there are enemies everywhere around them, although she is no longer a child. Italian boats sink in the Albanian port. The Italian confectioners shut down.
We are losing the war, Florian says.
The Germans don’t like us, Ada says.
In Tirana, Enver Hoxha closes his shop, called Flora, where he sells alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, sandwiches and tobacco, for the opening of which he had submitted the necessary paperwork to the (Italian) municipal administration, signed Envero Hoxha. In a rash of demonstrations, Albanian anti-fascists clash with the carabinieri and the local police. The newly sworn-in Albanian prime minister, Mussolini’s favourite Mustafa Merlika-Kruja, persecutes, arrests, tortures and kills all those who are against the regime. The Italians capture Koçi Xoxe and condemn him to death by hanging. The youth leader Qemal Stafa is killed. In Korçë, anti-fascists set fire to the barracks of the Italian Army, and on 24 July, 1942, they blow up an armoury with the weapons inside; the Tedeschi family run into the textile shop on the ground floor of their building and hide among the bolts of floral cotton; they themselves becoming a decoration, a pattern, in the growing maelstrom. At Tirana airport the spotlights are smashed; the Communists sabotage the central telephone switchboard and cut all telephone lines, and the organized uprising begins. Florian Tedeschi continues making the rounds of the interior branch offices of the bank where he is a loyal employee. Ada packs the basics. Orestes declares, I want to go for a swim. Paula skips rope in the living room. Nora says, I got my period. Down in the cellar Haya presses Ludovik’s icy fingers between her legs, then twists like the stem of a yellow gerbera and says ah. Her whisper and Ludovik’s whisper light up the woodshed, from which cats scamper, prowling for rats
syçkë pëllumb
lamtumirë
im verdhë ëndërr
të dua
të dashuroj
Ada’s breath smells of cheap perfume. The bus is full of women, children, farm animals. They rumble through the Albanian wilderness and remote mountains. The roads are ghastly. It takes them a week to reach Tirana. Florian locks up his desk as if he will soon be back to his bills, extracts, copies, calculations, interest rates, but he will not. He jumps into a car in Valona, sits next to an Italian general, who is also on the run, and before his family arrive he reaches the Dajti Hotel, only recently opened, orders sausages, un rocchio di salsiccia, a mixed salad of all sorts of vegetables, and blackberry and vanilla ice cream: Genuine Italian, nothing finer, winks the waiter. At dusk he strolls along Viale Savoia, A beautiful avenue, he says, and is breathless at the sight of the elegant villas nestled in Mediterranean vegetation. A new old chapter is being written, one of political intrigue, murders on demand, secret services, of people disappeared, families disappeared, stories never to be untangled, whose rotten threads like ratty street brooms poke along the ground and do nothing but smear the shit. Enver Hoxha is photographed more often, his two gold teeth flashing. Ada and the children abruptly forget their pidgin Albanian, and all they repeat is faleminderit shumë, faleminderit shumë, after which they fall suddenly silent. The Tedeschi family spend several nights on straw mattresses in the foyer of the Dajti Hotel, while around their heads stomp polished Italian boots. Later, in 1944, in chorus with Ada and Florian, Haya will tell their relatives in Gorizia, Those were terrible times for us Italians there.
It is already 1943. How time flies. In early September, when Italy is no longer any factor in Albania, when the director of the Banca di Napoli informs Florian, while they are still in Valona, that he is absolutely free to travel immediately to wherever he would like to go, the Tedeschi family secretly accept the help of a small Jewish anti-fascist group, which finds them accommodation near the airport, where, since the war is raging, planes keep landing and taking off and bombs drop like falling stars. Ah, our happy days are forever gone, hums Ada, swinging her hips and taking a long swig from a flask of brandy. Terrible, Ada says to her sister Letizia and brother Carlo after they return to Gorizia in late 1943.
There is not enough food or bread to go around. They use coupons to purchase coffee and sugar. The Albanians are speaking less Italian and more Albanian; some are even speaking German. These are a wild people, Ada and Florian say after they return to Gorizia, but a brave people, yes, indeed. The German troops attack. German bombs destroy. The Nazis count, catalogue, purify the population, filter it. Every day there are people hanging on the squares, swaying to the rhythm of the palm fronds. Ada believes all this to be a brief and cruel diversion, the work of unruly young men, so one day, after she has had a good swig from the flask that she now hides in the linen cupboard, under the bedding, she goes off to the German Military Command with Haya, convinced she can help free Florian’s colleague Sandro Koffler, the banker. Listen, Ada says, Sandro is an honest man. I am telling you. My last name is Tedeschi. The S.S. officer only glances up at Hitler hanging there on the wall, and waits. Tedesco in Italian means German, Ada says, I am someone you can trust.