Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant Enver Hoxha, in his uncle’s attic. While he was in prison he was re-sentenced to a further 25 years for involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation. The dictator didn’t last as long as that. Fatos served 17 years, partly in Spaç, partly in other camps.
It wasn’t difficult to get on the wrong side of the paranoid Hoxha. One man, Zef, was incarcerated because he made the mistake of wearing a derby hat in Tirana at a time when the dictator favoured this article; when Hoxha saw him, he decided that the hat wearer thought he was losing power. The prison had a number of political bigwigs who had fallen from grace through some deviation in ideology. Other inmates had been caught trying to leave Albania by swimming towards a foreign ship or across Lake Ohrid, or escaping over the Greek border. Spaç was a prison within a far bigger one.
Chapter by chapter we meet a selection of Lubonja’s comrades. The author himself is rarely centre stage, except at the beginning, when he arrived in February 1975 and saw ‘that repellent human whirlpool’ of prisoners assembled in an open space:
I found myself staring at a strange mass of human creatures, of a kind I had never seen in my life. I had seen larger crowds… but it was the way these people moved that made this swarm of humanity so unusual… the prisoners anxiously paced to and fro, back and forth, within that confined space.
It reminded him of a documentary about caged wolves. When he was in his cell, he too found himself pacing back and forth.
One of the inmates was a pretty cat, owned by a prisoner from the Greek minority who had tried to escape from Albania three times. The cat would squeeze through the observation window in the cell door every night and land with a thump on the floor. She would make up to the others in the cell too:
We hadn’t felt anything like her soft touch for so long. It wasn’t the touch of a woman, but only an animal, yet we felt warmed by another creature, with the intimacy this brings. The pleasure was very strong in this society of men, where contact with any other body, in other words the body of a man, was taboo.
Alas, the cat hunted the guards’ rabbits and she was shot. Her owner went berserk and shrieked at the guards; he ended strung up in chains in the punishment cells, and they cut him down on the sixth day.
Another prisoner also kept a cat, but her owner’s enemies killed it. Prison, as ever, elicited the extreme of man’s inhumanity to man (and cat) except when it exposed man’s humanity to man – of which there was much too. The same applied to the guards. One liked thrashing the men, and might cover the victim in a piece of sheet metal and beat as hard as he could. Another enjoyed ‘spying through the grille and catching prisoners doing something forbidden, such as playing cards, climbing up to the window, practising gymnastics, quarrelling…’ Then there were the provocateurs, placed in cells to elicit reckless comments. Sex and sexual deprivation were constant obsessions. Yet, bizarrely, one prisoner managed to earn a conjugal visit from his wife, a weirdly Swedish concession.
There were other outlets:
The need to pass the time, which weighed on prisoners like an invisible mountain of nothingness, led them to scratch a few lines in the planks of the floor with a sharpened spoon handle or a smuggled nail. The black squares were distinguished from the white by a few oblique lines scratched inside them… the new inmates made their own [chess] pieces squeezed from breadcrumbs, with one player mixing his with cigarette ash.
Mid-game in one cell, when the players were away, another inmate ate the pieces.
There’s a fascinating cast here: the Don, who every year raised people’s hopes by insisting there was an amnesty coming; a political prisoner, once so committed to the cause that he and his companions had beaten a Romanian peasant to death for criticising the Soviet Union; a Catholic priest and a Protestant Manichean, each with his own take on the meaning of suffering. Why, Lubonja wonders, does he write about these men? Maybe they best illustrate the acceptance or refusal of the life in ‘this cauldron created by devils to destroy souls’. But in the end, he and they have been formed by their life in prison, and he now realises that ‘this wide open space where we will walk with body and soul at ease… can only be found by taking stock of the shackles we have left behind’.
The spare prose of the translator John Hodgson is very fine too.
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