Matildi made us a simple but tasty lunch with her own golden hands. We ate every bit of it. An aristocrat, she came from the heart of cultured society. Her hands embellished the clothes for clients with taste in the city of Durrës. One of the few friends she still had, the teacher Naxhie Kala, spoke with great pride of her embroidery.

“Make no mistake, Matildi is the art itself.”

She said to my mother once when I was still a teenager, so my mother gave her a sweater to embroider. She stitched the Ralph Loren, Polo player logo on it. Even to this day, I treasure it as something precious from the hands of my friend Vlash Dovana’s mother. Matildi did embroidery work as a means of making an honest living. Even though in deep poverty, the heroic mother raised two marvelous children, Vlash and Nirvana. They were prevented from higher education, but they excelled in their studies in the time they were allowed to attend school.

The Dovanas were thrown out of their house and left in the street. The Communists took everything from them and then, to slake their beastly thirst, they sent Vlash’s father, the poet Alfons Dovana, to prison. The anti-men who came as “liberators” were decimating the aristocracy in one of the most enlightened cities of Illyria. In the “New Society”, brigandry and crime were no longer being prosecuted nor punished. To the contrary, songs were being sung of such “heroic” deeds. Great Communist poets, today become self-identified dissidents, wrote verse about the thieving criminal “heroes”. Eh, and go say history doesn’t repeat itself! That’s what their progenitors, the Bolsheviks, did before them. Firing a blank shot from the cannon of the “Aurora”, they set upon the Winter Palace and plundered it.

Didn’t the “First Man”, the architect of the “New Society”, say to the highland peasant who went to visit him at the confiscated house in the “block”:

“Don’t remove your muddy moccasins! Step freely on the thick carpet, it belongs to Vërlaci.”

When the highlander returned to his home deep in the mountains of Elbasan, in a voice filled with disgust, he said to his mother:

“We gave refuge to nothing more than an ordinary thief.”

The man, who once shared his pear with Nero, never again set foot in Tirana. His story got told and retold from village to village when they robed the country folk of their animals and left them not even a single chicken per household. The man told me and Anastas Paparisto that story himself when he invited us for lunch at his home. Anastas signaled me not to show joy at hearing the story as his father had already been sentenced twice to long prison terms. We were working as teachers high up in the mountains where the “Liberators” had taken refuge once. Now they were sending us persecuted people there.

In the dungeon, inhuman methods of torture were being employed on Alfons. They wanted to rob him of the little money he had left. And, it wasn’t all his. It belonged to him and his three sisters equally. The beasts turned the interrogation into a Stalinist inquisition. They bound him and threw him into a barrel of water full of leeches. Starved, the leaches attacked his already emaciated body sucking out the little blood still left in him. When they brought his sisters to his cell, to convince him to tell where the money was, Elsa fainted on the spot. With tears streaming down their faces, the sisters begged him to surrender the money. Alfonse acquiesced, and then spent the rest of his life at hard physical labor.

We left Matildi home and took the city bus to the beach. At “Apollonia”, there were only a few people strolling at the sandy shore. The warm breeze wafting off the surface of the water was such a contrast to temperature further ashore. We sat down at the far end of the “Apollonia” pier. Italy, the land of dreams, stretched out on the horizon. So near and yet so far … The scent on the wind was intoxicating. Along with the breeze we breathed in the freedom wafting from the distance.

“That’s where free people live. We were connected for centuries. We have wealth and possessions there. A friend of the family is taking care of it all,” Vlash spoke with a voice from somewhere deep within as his gaze was drifting into the distance. After a while he added:

“Yesterday I got some bitter news. My childhood friend ended his own life. His mother and sister went to ask for the body. They won’t let us burry him …”

Deeply touched, I asked Vlash to tell me what had made the young man go as far as suicide.

“We knew each other from childhood. He was just like us,” Vlash turned pale as he started speaking.

“They suffered so much. With the death of his father, he started working in the loading docks at the train station. He was in the third year of High School, so he went to school during the day and worked during the night. His mother was working as a cleaning woman and, through great effort, a job was found for his sister at the “NISH Goma” plant,” Vlash’s eyes filled with tears.

“Lasted just a while though. The supervisor, a Party member, started sexually harassing her. He’d schedule her on the third shift … call her to his office … She refused him. He started denying her work, letting her work one week but not the next. She was beautiful, the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood, respectable. Everyone admired her. She kept her honor, the only precious thing she possessed. Humble, genuine, as pure as the driven snow, she went to work with trepidation but hid it from her brother. He was a brave man.” Vlash swallowed hard. A lump had formed in his throat.

“One day she told her mother, who advised her to leave that job. But, finding the job she had was hard enough, where could she find another?”

Vlash struggled to say the words. He … feared them.

“One shift, uncomfortable, tired, sleepy she found herself alone in the early hours of the morning. Her workmate happened to be outside attending to personal needs. The monster grabbed her from behind. He wrestled her down to the dirty floor forcing one paw over her mouth while with the other, he sought to take her honor. Gentle Ophelia resisted. She broke free of his clutches. Terrified she ran home.”

Vlash grew quiet. The waves were subsiding. The Sun slid down into the sea, bleeding into the water.

“The good brother heard his sister crying in their mother’s arms. He ran into the street and caught the beast as he was leaving work. At the same corner where he waited for his sister every morning, he grabbed the monster by the throat with one hand and by the belt with the other and lifted him high into the air. The creature screamed in terror. People watched the brave young man with admiration. He whirled the beast and threw him under the wheels of the approaching ‘NISH-Gomes’ truck as it was making the turn. The driver stepped on the gas pedal.”

Vlash took a deep breath …

“Yesterday my friend climbed onto the flat roof of the prison building and then from there he cried, LIBERTY! Bellow, armed soldiers surrounded the rest of the prisoners. When Special Forces commandos climbed up to grab him, he flew like an eagle, towards freedom.”

As the bloody sunset left the land in darkness, tears wouldn’t let Vlash say more. The sound of Don Backy’s song, “Sognando” drifted in from the shore. Our emotions and the line “There is no future, there is no past”, melted together.