A Band of Terrorists

By Visar Zhiti

(Excerpt from the book “Trails of Hell” pg. 221,222)

“I have already heard of you from Bajo. My prison sentence was burdened by some poems, yet they weren’t even mine.”
            I felt my heart sink.

 “Moreover, I was denounced by my wife.” He said, while we, like two Sisyphus, struggled to push something immense, rattling in front of us.

            “Were you married?”

            “No.”

            “It’s for the better. The Communists would have destroyed your family, your honor… Is your mother still alive?”

            “I have both of my parents.”

             “You don’t suffer much in prison when you have your mother.”

            “ Why was your wife like that?” I muttered under my breath, as we went deeper into the rocky nothingness, that mine, after another turn, where darkness drifted away and the other soul closed in on you.”  

            “Eh, we did not get along well,” he continued. “When we were on trial for divorce court proceedings, she denounced me for listening to foreign radio stations: ‘The Voice of America,’ and ‘The Vatican’ and …”

            “I, too, was convicted for listening to ‘Radio-Prishtina,’” I said.

            “Yes, yes, I know.  The Communists wrote in their newspaper ‘The Voice of the People’ or rather, Against the People, that some friends from Kosova and their Chinese brothers had come to visit Albania. For the Communists, blood has no potency - it is not sacred; it is but a red fluid that might easily be shed for the ideal. Always, someone else’s blood. Their ideal… Yes, it is very clear: they do not even have an ideal. They are a band of terrorists.”

Translated from The Albanian by Kelly Mema