16 saturday review Saturday December 18 2021 | the times
W
hen Lea Ypi was a child in
communist Albania, she
understood from the con-
versation in her home
that her social circle was
highly educated. The many degrees
that her extended family and its friends
had taken at different universities were
much discussed. Not everybody had
prospered in their studies — some were
expelled, some dropped out — but most
had graduated.
Various aspects of these conversations
puzzled Ypi. The universities were, for
instance, known only by initials. Some
degrees seemed to take a very long time to
complete. And there was much talk of an
occasion when her grandfather, who
became a bureaucrat after graduating, had
received an application for a permit from a
particularly strict tutor. He had issued the
permit, refused the normal fee and shaken
hands with him. Ypi could not understand
why this was such a big deal — why
shouldn’t a strict tutor get a permit? — but
then adult life is often puzzling to children.
In 1990, when Ypi was 11, the collapse of
the Albanian regime solved this and many
other puzzles. University had been the
family’s code for prison camp. Different
subjects indicated the offences for which a
friend or relation had been imprisoned:
literature was agitation and propaganda,
international relations was treason, eco-
nomics was a financial crime, such as
hoarding gold. Expulsion was execution;
A child’s-eye memoir
gives a remarkable
insight into the death
throes of the peculiar
Albanian regime,
says Emma Duncan
Fre e
Coming of Age at
the End of History
by Lea YpiAllen Lane,
313pp; £20F C t b A 3
Life under
the weirdest
communism
in the world
dropping out was suicide. The tutor had
been a particularly brutal prison guard
over whom the grandfather, as bureaucrat,
suddenly found that he had power.
The moment of revelation, for readers as
well as for Ypi, comes halfway through the
book. The first half is an account of child-
hood under Albania’s peculiar form of
communism, isolated not just from the
West, but also from Russia and China. The
second half follows the family’s fortunes
as the country descends from hope to
anarchy. It is a remarkable story, stunning-
ly told.
The point of view of a child, for whom
weirdness is normal and small things loom
large, is a good one for examining how the
death throes of a failing despotism seep in-
to the tiniest corners of its subjects’ lives.
One chapter, for instance, is about a Coke
can. In this dirt-poor autarky, empty Coke
cans have acquired a mystical value.
Nobody quite knows what they are for,
but they lend colour to otherwise bleak
interior decor. Ypi’s mother saves up to buy
one, which disappears at the same time as
one appears in the next door neighbours’
house. A feud ensues. Ypi hides, to bring
the families together in the search for her.
The ploy works. At the reconciliation din-
ner, the mothers agree that fighting over a
Coke can was silly. Coke, after all, is a bit
passé: the vogue is now for Fanta cans.
Queueing, a big part of life, is gov-
erned by complex rules. There are two
sorts of queues: those in which nothing
happens, sometimes for several days and
nights, and those in which something
happens. In the first kind, stones or bags
may be left as placeholders. But once an
inactive queue becomes an active one,
the items lose their representative func-
tion. Correctly calling the moment of
transition from one state to another
is crucial.
The only information about the
outside world comes from “Dajti” —
weak broadcasting signals named
after the mountain north of Tirana
that lies between the Albanian capi-
tal and the rest of the Balkans. Ypi’s
father is often to be found on the
roof, battling with a recalcitrant
antenna. If it does not perform,
Albanian programming offers Gym-
nastics Under Home Conditions or
Foreign Languages at Home.
An episode of the latter includes a
scene of shopping in England, in which
the absence of queues sparks an in-
tense playground discussion. Foreignbooks
Book of the week
in the red An Albanian
woman at the grave of
communist ruler Enver
Hoxha. Below: Lea Ypitourists visit in small numbers and — as
Ypi discovers later — in two varieties:
the Scandinavian Marxist-Leninists who
regard Albania as the last redoubt of ideo-
logical purity, and novelty junkies who
have seen everything else weird that the
world has to offer.
Political discussion rumbles in the
house. “In my family, everyone had a
favourite revolution, just as everyone had
a favourite summer fruit.” Ypi likes the
Russian revolution and figs; her grand-
mother, the French revolution and dates.
But adults often fall silent when Ypi enters
the room. That’s because, as she discovers
when the regime falls, her parents’
views were unorthodox and the
family are tainted by pre-revolu-
tionary wealth on her mother’s
side and political prominence
on her father’s.
In the early, hopeful years
after 1990, a thing called “civil
society”, largely funded by
foreigners, flourishes. Activi-
ties with civil society groups
replace Communist Party
jollies. Ypi debates with the
Open Society Institute,
drinks Coke and eats peanuts
at Aids information events
and gets free rice as she hands
out food for the Red Cross.
Tirana is flooded with for-
eigners who have come to
teach Albanians the benefitsof liberal democracy. The mutual incom-
prehension is sometimes hilarious, as
when Ypi’s mother, who runs an Albanian
women’s group, has a meeting with a dele-
gation of French women. Ypi’s mother
wears a lacy nightdress from a second-
hand stall in the market in the visitors’
honour, on the grounds that it looks like
the sort of thing women wear in the soap
ads that she associates with emancipation.
The French women turn up in severe
black suits. They ask Ypi’s mother whether
sexual harassment was a problem in com-
munist Albania. It wasn’t, she says, becauseshe always carried a knife. “Just a kitchen
knife,” she says, when she sees the French
women’s discomfort. “Nothing fancy.” Of
course, she points out, people would be
able to defend themselves better if they
could carry guns, as “in the land of free-
dom” — America.
For Albania, though, freedom mostly
brings suffering. Friends disappear to Italy,
where they are never heard from again.
Ypi’s best friend may have become a prosti-
tute there; nobody quite knows. The eco-
nomy collapses, everybody gets fired and
gangsters flourish. The family lose all theirThe mothers agree
fighting over a Coke
can was silly. The
vogue is for Fanta