Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

I could tell she was agitated. She had a tendency to channel her frustration by finding new domestic chores; the greater the frustration, the more ambitious the scale of her projects. When she was angry with other people, she would say nothing but would bang pots and pans, curse the cutlery that slipped to the floor, fling trays into cupboards. When she was angry with herself, she would rearrange the furniture, drag tables across the room, pile up chairs, and roll up the heavy carpet in our living room so she could scrub the floor.

Albania and Yugoslavia were the only countries to have won the war without the help of Allied forces.

I could never explain to my friends what it was like to live in a family where the past seemed irrelevant and all that mattered was debating the present and planning for the future.

My father’s story was the more confusing of the two. He was gifted in the sciences and while still in secondary school had won Olympiads in maths, physics, chemistry, and biology. He wanted to continue studying maths but was told by the Party that he had to join the real working class because of his “biography.”

“The country mourns the loss of its most eminent son,” the reporter went on, “the founding father of the modern Albanian nation, the clever strategist who organized the resistance against Italian fascism, the brilliant general who defeated the Nazis, the revolutionary thinker who steered clear of both opportunism and sectarianism, the proud statesman who resisted Yugoslav revisionist attempts to annex our beloved nation, the politician who never fell for Anglo-American imperialist plots, and who never surrendered to Soviet and Chinese revisionist pressure.”

I was fascinated by the story of a Nazi soldier he had killed, a blond man called Hans, to whom Mihal had offered water to wash the blood from his mouth while he was on his last breath. Hans had refused, continuing to mutter, “Heil Hitler” instead. I asked Mihal to describe how he had killed Hans, but he preferred to talk about the last thing he remembered of him: his thin moustache, a moustache that had not fully grown yet, he said. “My own moustache had not grown either,” he added, and I was puzzled by how he described Hans almost with affection, as if he were recalling a long-lost friend with whom he’d shared fond memories, rather than a mortal foe whose life he had taken.

Coca-Cola can. At the time, these were an extremely rare sight. Even rarer was the knowledge of their function. They were markers of social status: if people happened to own a can, they would show it off by exhibiting it in their living room, usually on an embroidered tablecloth over the television or the radio, often right next to the photo of Enver Hoxha. Without the Coca-Cola can, our houses looked the same.

A tourist never came alone; instead, they always appeared as part of a group. Years later, I discovered that the groups were of two kinds: the realists and the dreamers. The dreamers belonged to fringe Marxist-Leninist groups. They mostly came from Scandinavia and were furious with the social wreckage that was called social democracy. They brought sweets to offer locals, who rarely accepted. They worshipped our country as the only one in the world that had managed to build a principled, uncompromising Socialist society. They admired everything about us: the clarity of our slogans, the order in our factories, the purity of our children, the discipline of the horses who pulled our carriages, and the conviction of the peasants who travelled in them.

Then there was the second group, the restless Westerners, bored of the beaches on Lake Balaton and in Bali, moaning about how Mexico and Moscow had been invaded by tourists. They had joined niche clubs, and exclusive tour operators now sold them the ultimate exotic adventure: a place in the heart of Europe, just over one hour by plane from Rome and two hours from Paris. A place nevertheless so remote, with its hostile mountains, its dreamy beaches, its inaccessible people, its confusing history, and its complicated politics, that only the most spirited traveller would dare to make the trip. They came to crack the code, to discover the truth. But it was a truth they had already agreed upon. They had talked about it while sipping cocktails in Bali and downing shots of vodka in Moscow. The truth was political. They had no political views but one: socialism was contrary to human nature, anywhere and in any form. They had always suspected it. Now they knew it. They waved, too, sometimes. They did not smile so often. They also carried sweets and wanted to talk. Sometimes they managed it. The next time they tried, nobody returned the wave, nobody was interested in sweets. They would never be able to guess if the locals who shared their views with them were random passers-by or secret service agents. It could have been either. They knew it would be hard to tell. But they always tried.

The more I thought about the encounter with the tourists, the less resentful I became. The part of me that had been offended at the idea that they knew far less about us than we knew about them found that same detail amusing—empowering, even. It had felt like a test, one I was now increasingly confident I had passed.

Robespierre’s speech that said that the secret of freedom is in educating people, while the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

Why had socialism come to an end? Only a few months before, in our moral education class, teacher Nora had explained that socialism was not perfect; it was not like communism would be when it arrived. Socialism was a dictatorship, she said, the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was different, and certainly better, than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that ruled in Western imperialist states. In socialism, the state was controlled by the workers, rather than by capital, and the law served the workers’ interests, not the interests of those who wanted to increase their profits. But she made it clear that socialism had problems too. Class struggle was not over. We had many external enemies, like the Soviet Union, which had long ago given up on the ideal of communism and turned into a repressive imperialist state that sent tanks to crush smaller countries. We also had many internal enemies. The people who had once been rich and had lost all their privileges and property kept plotting to undermine the rule of the workers and deserved to be punished.

in December 1990, the same human beings who had been marching to celebrate socialism and the advance towards communism took to the streets to demand its end. The representatives of the people declared that the only things they had ever known under socialism were not freedom and democracy but tyranny and coercion.

In the following days, the first opposition party was founded and my parents revealed the truth, their truth. They said that my country had been an open-air prison for almost half a century.

That the universities which had haunted my family were, yes, educational institutions, but of a peculiar kind. That when my family spoke of the graduation of relatives, what they really meant was their recent release from prison. That completing a degree was coded language for completing a sentence.

I learned that the former prime minister whom I had grown up despising, and whose name my father bore, did not have the same name and surname by coincidence. He was my great-grandfather. For his entire life, the weight of that name had crushed my father’s hopes. He could not study what he wanted. He had to explain his biography. He had to make amends for a wrong he had never committed, and to apologize for views he did not share. My grandfather, who had disagreed with his own father so much that he had wanted to join the Republicans in Spain, on the opposite side of the struggle, had paid for the blood relationship with fifteen years in prison.

I would have paid for my mother’s family too, I was told. I learned that the boats my mother had made paper models of with her uncle Hysen, and the land, factories, and flats she had drawn as a child, had really belonged to her family before she was born, before the arrival of socialism, before they were expropriated. That the building that housed the Party’s headquarters, and in front of which she and my father had first explained to me what Islam was, had once been her family’s property too. “Do you remember the time we spoke about Islam when we were standing in front of that building?” my mother asked. I nodded. She reminded me of how whenever we went past that building she looked up to the fifth-floor window, the one without the flowerpot. An alleged enemy of the people had once stood there, shouting, “Allahu akbar!” before throwing himself out. He had been trying to escape torture. The year was 1947. The man was her grandfather.

She wanted me to remember her trajectory, and to understand that she was the author of her life: that despite all the obstacles she had encountered on the way, she had remained in control of her fate. She had never ceased to be responsible. Freedom, she said, is being conscious of necessity.

We had been warned that the dictatorship of the proletariat was always under threat by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. What we did not anticipate was that the first victim of that conflict, the clearest sign of victory, would be the disappearance of those very terms: dictatorship, proletariat, bourgeoisie. They were no longer part of our vocabulary. Before the withering away of the state, the language with which to articulate that aspiration itself withered away. Socialism, the society we lived under, was gone. Communism, the society we aspired to create, where class conflict would disappear and the free abilities of each would be fully developed, was gone too. It was gone not only as an ideal, not only as a system of rule, but also as a category of thought. Only one word was left: freedom.

“Every vote of the people is a bullet to our enemy,” went the official slogan.

The counterprotests would last only a few more months. What had started as a series of reforms was increasingly labelled as revolution. In any other revolution, there would have been oppressed and oppressors, winners and losers, victims and perpetrators. Here, the chain of responsibility was so intricate that there could be only one camp. Executing leaders, imprisoning spies, or sanctioning former Party members would have fuelled the conflicts even further, sharpening the desire for revenge, spilling more blood. It seemed more sensible to erase responsibility altogether, to pretend everyone had been innocent all along. The only wrongdoers it was legitimate to name were those who had already died—those who could neither explain nor absolve themselves. All the rest turned into victims. All the survivors were winners. With no perpetrators, only ideas were left to blame. Communism was considered a vision so hopeless for some, so murderous for others, that the sole mention of the word would be met with either scorn or hatred. This revolution, the velvet one, was a revolution of people against concepts.

When my family decided the time to vote had come, the polls were about to close. We rushed outside, where many people were greeting each other by raising two fingers in the shape of a V, the new symbol of freedom and democracy. My brother and I found it surprisingly easy to replace the fist with the two fingers.

The results came the morning after. The opposition’s defeat was crushing. The Communists, the future Socialist Party, emerged triumphant, with more than sixty per cent of the vote. My mother declared that the elections had been neither free nor fair. The entire campaign, she said, had been organized by the Party. It was absurd to expect it to both regulate a competition between itself and other parties and try to win the election at the same time. The whole thing was a fraud. That turned out to be harsh, or at least harsh by the standards of the tourists who had in the meantime descended on our country, armed with notepads and television cameras, and who now went by the name of the “international community.” Their official explanation, which set a precedent for official explanations that were considered authoritative only if they came from the international community, was different. They argued that the opposition parties had had little time to prepare and had struggled to file candidates in rural areas, and that since the old dissidents had been jailed and only recently released, it had been too late for them to run for office.

Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek replaced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels almost overnight.

One afternoon, Bashkim Spahia, a local doctor and former Party member turned opposition candidate, knocked on our door, visibly agitated. He was wearing a charcoal-grey jacket cut in the style favoured by Leonid Brezhnev; under it he had on a purple T-shirt with pink writing across in the middle, above matching purple trousers. The writing was in English. It read: “Sweet dreams, my lovely friends.” Bashkim asked if my father owned any grey socks he could borrow for a few months. He had been knocking on every door, he said. He explained that for the election campaign, the U.S. State Department had distributed brochures containing important advice on what aspiring members of Parliament ought to wear. “Apparently, only dark socks are acceptable, grey or black, but better grey,” he added, visibly distressed. “I only have white socks. They also say I need a sponsour for my campaign. What sponsour are they asking about? I don’t even have socks to wear!” he exclaimed in despair. My parents invited him in for coffee. They tried to explain that the advice could not have come from the State Department; perhaps it came from the U.S. embassy. Even then, the embassy might be flexible. Bashkim shook his head. He was inconsolable. His son had translated the leaflets, he insisted, and had assured him that they bore the imprint of the Department of State. He would never be able to win his seat back from those dirty Communist bastards without the right colour socks. On the night his victory...

“It’s been opened,” she announced, looking towards the door. “They’ve opened it.” The silence in the room transformed into a collective murmur. “Bastards,” my mother finally came out with. “They haven’t just opened it once. Several times,” explained Donika. “Yes, obviously,” her husband, Mihal, retorted. “It’s not like they’ve hired new people to work in the post office. They just do what they’re used to doing.” Some neighbours nodded. Others disagreed. “Post office workers should be instructed to stop opening letters,” Donika replied. “Privacy,” my mother said. “Privacy is so important. We never had any privacy before.” Then she suggested that nothing would happen before the post office was privatized. Only privatization could respect privacy. Everyone agreed that privacy was important. “Not just important—it’s your right. It’s a right,”

I made a list of all the new things I had discovered for the first time, meticulously recording them: the first time I felt air-conditioning on the palms of my hands; the first time I tasted bananas; the first time I saw traffic lights; the first time I wore jeans; the first time I did not need to queue to enter a shop; the first time I encountered border control; the first time I saw queues made of cars instead of humans; the first time I sat down on a toilet instead of squatting; the first time I saw people following dogs on a leash instead of stray dogs following people; the first time I was given actual chewing-gum rather than just the wrapper; the first time I saw buildings made of different shops and shop windows bursting with toys; the first time I saw crosses on graves; the first time I stared at walls covered by adverts rather than anti-imperialist slogans; the first time I admired the Acropolis, but only from the outside because we could not afford the entrance ticket. I also described at length my first encounter with tourist children as a tourist child myself, when I learned with surprise that they did not recognize the names of Athena and Ulysses, and they laughed because I did not recognize the image of an apparently famous mouse called Mickey.

“Everyone wants to leave,” I wrote in my diary, commenting on the events of March and August 1991. “Everyone except us.” Most of our friends and relatives spent days, weeks, even months planning how they would leave. There was a wide range of possibilities: falsifying documents, hijacking boats, crossing the land border, applying for a visa, finding a Westerner who could invite them and guarantee their stay, borrowing money. People hardly gave thought to the purpose. Knowing how you would get somewhere was more important than knowing why.

We were a society in transition, it was said, moving from socialism to liberalism, from one-party rule to pluralism,

In the past, one would have been arrested for wanting to leave. Now that nobody was stopping us from emigrating, we were no longer welcome on the other side. The only thing that had changed was the colour of the police uniforms. We risked being arrested not in the name of our own government but in the name of other states, those same governments who used to urge us to break free. The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement, condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Our exiles used to be received as heroes. Now they were treated like criminals.

But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter? Were borders and walls reprehensible only when they served to keep people in, as opposed to keeping them out? The border guards, the patrol boats, the detention and repression of immigrants that were pioneered in southern Europe for the first time in those years would become standard practice over the coming decades. The West, initially unprepared for the arrival of thousands of people wanting a different future, would soon perfect a system for excluding the most vulnerable and attracting the more skilled, all the while defending borders to “protect our way of life.” And yet, those who sought to emigrate did so because they were attracted to that way of life. Far from posing a threat to the system, they were its most ardent supporters.

Unlike my father, who thought people were naturally good, she thought they were naturally evil. There was no point in trying to make them good; one simply had to channel that evil so as to limit the harm. That’s why she was convinced that socialism could never work, even under the best circumstances. It was against human nature. People needed to know what belonged to them and to be able to do with it what they wanted. Then they would look after their assets and it wouldn’t be fighting anymore; it would be healthy competition.

For her, finding the truth about family property was as much a matter of rectifying historic injustice as of regulating property rights. The only purpose of the state, as she saw it, was to facilitate such transactions and protect the contracts necessary to ensure that everyone could stick to what they had earned. Anything else, anything that went beyond that, encouraged the growth of parasites who wasted money and resources.

My mother interrupted him. “I’m talking about women, not black people. Did you hear what I said? These Western women, you know, they can’t multitask, they’re such losers. If they have to study and work, or work and look after children, or look after children and cook, they can’t keep up. And they assume everybody here is like them, and somehow this should be the state’s problem. So that another loser can come up with a silly list of criteria of how to give women a chance.”

In the past, all women had been expected to work. They had been expected to work everywhere. All my friends’ mothers worked. Not one stayed at home. They were up at dawn to clean their houses and prepare their children for school, and then they went on to drive trains, dig for coal, fix electric cables, teach in schools, or nurse in hospitals. Some travelled long hours to reach the offices, farms, or factories in which they were employed. They returned home late and exhausted. They still had to prepare dinner, help the children do their homework, and wash the dishes. They had to cook into the evening, preparing meals for the next day. During the night, they had to nurse their babies or make love to their husbands. Or both. At home, the men rested. They read newspapers and watched television, or they went out to see their friends. Many expected their shirts to be ironed and made sarcastic jokes if their coffee was served a little less than piping hot. If their wives left the house to see their friends too, their husbands had a right to know why.

They issued orders for their wife to remain indoors or to stop meeting this friend or that. They always did it out of love, they said. In their minds, loving women and controlling them were virtually indistinguishable.

It never occurred to my mother that things could have been different for her. When she saw a problem, she thought only about how she could solve it herself, not whether she could appeal to others. The charisma she possessed, and the authority she commanded, made her independent from other people, sometimes too much. The only weapon she could offer to other women was her own strength. The only defence she passed on to me was her example. I grew up seeing how people were deferential to her, as if intimidated by her—not just the pupils in her class, the children in our neighbourhood, and us, her own children, but also quite a few adults, including men. I wondered where her power came from, and thought that perhaps she instilled fear in others because she was never scared of anything herself. But when I tried to be like her, and sought to control my fears, even dominate them, I struggled. I realized that she was an impossible model to follow. My mother did not fight and conquer her fears. She never knew fear in the first place.

Most of all, she distrusted the state. She was allergic to abstract discussions about equality or about the role of institutions in promoting justice. Asking yourself whether something ought to be this way or that way was the wrong place to start. You should never wonder what the state could do for you, she thought, only what you could do to reduce your reliance on the state. She suspected that all the discussions around affirmative action and women’s quotas were distractions that gave more power of scrutiny to bureaucratic institutions, and more opportunities for parasitic individuals to be corrupted. She never saw the state as a vehicle of progress. She never believed in the power of collectives.

“Did you pray for me to find a job?” my father joked when I told him that I’d added the mosque to the list of my civil society activities. “It won’t help,” I replied. “You need to change the font on your CV. You need to switch from Times New Roman to Garamond.”

In fact, they were not actually called marines, my father had learned. His English comprehension was so poor, he had misheard on the bus. They were called Mormons. They said they were missionaries, but there was some controversy in my family as to the exact nature of their mission. My father thought they only wanted to teach English; Nini insisted that if they only wanted to teach English, they would call themselves not missionaries but teachers.

My father joked more than anyone else. He joked all the time, so much so that it was often difficult to infer from the tone of his questions if they were intended seriously or if he wanted to make us laugh. At one point in his life, he had figured out that irony was more than a rhetorical device; it was a mode of survival.

he came to realize that independence had its limits; that he was not as free as he had imagined. He wanted to change things but discovered there was little left for him to do. The world had acquired a definitive shape before anyone could understand what that shape was. Moral imperatives and personal convictions mattered very little.

Socialism had denied him the possibility to be who he wanted to be, to make mistakes and learn from them, and to explore the world on his own terms. Capitalism was denying it to others, the people who depended on his decisions, who worked in the port.

My teenage years were mostly ones of misery, a predicament which intensified the more my family denied that it had cause to exist. They seemed to assume that one was entitled to feel wretched only when there were objective grounds: if you were at risk of starving or freezing or had no place to sleep or lived under the threat of violence. These were absolute thresholds. If something could be done to raise yourself above the threshold, you forfeited your right to protest; otherwise, it would be an insult to those less fortunate. It was a bit like with food vouchers under socialism. Since everyone had a share of something, hunger couldn’t possibly exist. If you said you were hungry, you became an enemy of the people. I was urged to feel grateful, to show my appreciation for the bliss of freedom, which had arrived too late for my parents to enjoy and therefore required me to exercise it all the more responsibly. When I failed to sympathize with their predicament, I was scolded for my selfishness, for being insensitive to the suffering of my ancestors, for erasing the memory of their plight with the lightness of my behaviour.

To say that I was bored would risk making the condition interesting by qualifying it, by attaching a description to a mass of events in which nothing deserved to stand out. Time was the eternal return of the same. The clubs I used to attend as a child, for poetry, theatre, singing, maths, natural science, music or chess, had all come to an abrupt end in December 1990. In school, the only subjects to be taken seriously were the hard sciences: physics, chemistry, maths. For the humanities, either new classes were introduced, such as when Market Economy replaced Dialectical Materialism and we had no textbooks at all, or, as with the history and geography material, they still described our country as “the lighthouse of anti-imperialist struggles around the world.”

My grandmother had warned me that there was only one category of boys I must never, under any circumstances, fall in love with: children of former secret service agents. That summer it happened, twice. I felt so guilty that I decided to increase my visits to the mosque. I contemplated wearing a veil, but my family prohibited that too. There is a difference between religion and fanaticism, Nini said. Since more girls were turning up at the mosque wearing veils and I did not want to stand out, I switched to a new religion: Buddhism. I discovered it by reading my grandfather’s old Larousse dictionary when I ran out of books. I added meditation sessions to my daily schedule, but I never learned to meditate without crying. I was haunted by tales of the persecution my family had endured at the hands of Sigurimi agents, a thought which not only didn’t help me fall out of love with their sons but made that love more desperate.

It’s very hard to place Gypsy children. Nobody wants them. People will say, ‘Please, no Gypsies; they’re hard to control, they steal everything.’ One of the twins turned out to have some kind of handicap, a mental problem, I can’t remember exactly what. The ones with disabilities are even harder to place.

Democratic Party of Albania, the former Communists’ main opponent in elections.

party’s main slogan, whose disarming simplicity concealed decades of frustrated aspiration: “We want Albania to be like the whole of Europe.”

Positive thinking also won with regard to my father’s election as an MP. He obtained more than sixty per cent of the vote. This was the only success he recorded in his short career as an MP. The rest of the months spent in Parliament were an unmitigated failure. He soon discovered that he had neither the fearless instinct of a leader nor the calculated patience of an adviser. He lacked party discipline. He hesitated to make decisions but was unwilling to endorse those of others. He had neither the ambition to guide nor the inclination to follow.