FLASH
Shkruar nga Frrok Çupi
Requiem or 'rest in peace', i.e., 'rest in peace!'...
Is he dead or not!, no one says he is dead, but he is not alive. The apartment continues to cast a shadow where it has been since the communist era; sometimes it gets wet in the rain and sometimes it blows in the wind. Now it is not known who lives there; it is not known whether it has been inhabited or not since 1996.
Next to the old building with red bricks like protruding bones, a new building has been built and a tunnel on the first floor. The space where hundreds of people pass a day under a scary concrete crown, has been named 'Sala Tunnel'. If this dull toponym had not been created, it would not even have been discovered by tomorrow's archaeologists that Sali Ramë Berisha lived in the old apartment.
The apartment itself is a mysterious being; for a while it shone with glory and then sank into oblivion. Glory came to him from his owner, but also oblivion - from that same owner. When the owner was a 'glorious doctor', the apartment was also glorious. The doctor had never cured a single patient in his life, but he was called 'famous' because he worked in the Politburo Block of the Communist Party. While the mystery of the apartment was connected to a phone Saliu had at home. The whole of Tirana had no more than three or four telephones like that; maybe Enver Hoxha had one, Mehmet Shehu and Kadri Hazbiu - two others. Sali Berisha had the fourth. You could call any other phone number with that phone, but no one outside of it could call. The mystery was two-fold: Both because the doctor had a mysterious phone 'like those up there', and because of the profession of 'the doctor's humanism'.
"What if someone was giving his soul from the heart, how would he call the doctor?!".
A true mystery.
While the glory of that apartment, which is being forgotten, is related to the day when Dr. Berisha abandoned it. There was a moment when every member of the palace began to wail out of grief because 'our lord betrayed us!' If those sun-baked bones had mouths, these words would surely speak. Berisha had initially cheated him and in the end he 'spoiled' his apartment donated by Enver Hoxha. As soon as he took the reins of the angry crowds that created human rivers everywhere, Sali Berisha promised in front of them that 'I will never leave the popular apartment'. The apartment felt cozy and pampered. Saliu ascended to the throne of the president and from there he promised that 'I will live like the people'.
One day, in 1996, when he had just prepared the bloodshed of his own people and the opposition in Tirana's square, he abandoned his 'virginity' apartment and settled in the Brigade Palace. Then, in 1997, he holed up, Kalashnikov in hand, in the president's office; had said that 'Vlora is coming to kill me'.
The old apartment felt abandoned and betrayed. The Albanian people felt terrified by Berisha's terror, betrayal would be the smallest thing. The people put to work their miracle, memory. The people, when they do it for debt, make you 'hasha', forget your name and your grave. Just like in ancient Athens where arsonists received the most severe punishment:
'Decision: Not to mention the name!'.
This 'Sala' road that leads you to Brrakë, a neighborhood historically inhabited by Roma, seems to have carried great curses on its shoulders, up to the 'Sala Tunnel' which seems to be a curse that sneaks into the neighborhood as in time of illegals or as with the 'Trojan Horse'. The neighborhood is called 'Brrakë', but the main street was named after Tirana 'Fortuzi'. For some time, the neighborhood kept both names. When the communists named him 'Asim Vokshi', until today, the citizens of the neighborhood rejected that name and pretended they 'didn't know'. "What about this name, they say that Vokshi was a fighter in Spain and not here, he came from Kosovo!".
Nothing suited the neighborhood.
The neighborhood never took hold, until it felt threatened when Saliu from Malësia e Gjakova became the "biggest of the Brrakka neighborhood". Then he became the richest man in Albania.
The neighborhood applied oblivion to the 'arsonist', and created only the eerie toponymy of the tunnel. The more palaces Berisha's family built, the deeper the oblivion Brraka made. The more land thefts, sea thefts, bank violence, fear of war, conflicts between Albanians, coup d'états, murders in the courtyard of government offices, murders and humane burnings in Gërdec..., the deeper Brraka buried the memory of The Berishes.
Until yesterday, the apartment in the Roma neighborhood had remained 'without an area'. Now the day has come when Sali Berisha himself does not have "a house where he can be arrested". The New Justice has found some roots of Berisha's terrible crimes and thefts, and has decided to arrest him. Now Berisha is a prisoner at home. But the declared house has been seized by the state. The houses, the mansions, and the finances of the sons and sons-in-law. The Court's order for 'house arrest' does not make sense now; because there is no home.
Perhaps this is the curse of the apartment on the old 'Fortuzi' street. He is dead. 'Rest in peace!', requiem for that apartment that has no fault for housing the arsonist.
The arsonist is now no longer remembered by his neighborhood. / Pamphlet
Lini një Përgjigje