Translated by Tatiana Rudyak

$\hspace{50 pt}$Persons of Homeless Nationality (reading Arian Leka, “Secret Side Of Albanian Socialist Garden”)

$\hspace{65 pt}$(Excerpt from an essay)

Author’s Note: My essay is not so much about the war in Ukraine, but about the situation in Belarus—which every Belarusian to some extent also considers a war, internal and terrible. All of these seem to be the elements  of the same, big horror, in which we all now find ourselves, one way or another. In 2022, shortly after the war in Ukraine began, I was forced to flee Belarus. Now I live in Albania. This text began as a book review or just a letter of gratitude to a modern Albanian author whose book I was reading. But gradually it took on a life of its own and turned into something else - a half essay, half howl. I found many parallels between  today's Belarus and the dictatorial Albania of the communist period of  isolation—as well as between Albania of the subsequent period and the collective tragedy of totalitarianism, emigration, war, and lack of voice.

According to the human rights center "Viasna", there are currently one thousand two hundred and seventy-two political prisoners in Belarusian prisons. On the resource politzek.me — a project created in August, 2020 to count, remember, and help political prisoners, this figure is slightly lower — one thousand one hundred and fifty-two. Both of these are inaccurate; it is almost impossible to count everyone. In addition, many of those arrested (themselves or their relatives) ask not to recognize them as political prisoners and not to mention them on the lists; the label "political prisoner" automatically makes the life of prisoners and their families many times harder and more dangerous. At the bottom of the main page of politzek.me, there is a map of Belarusian prisons with sky-blue circle marks and numbers in them; the inscription at the top offers "to find yours on the map". Almost every resident of Belarus has had someone of their own go through arrests and detentions. All these real and ghostly numbers are terrifying.

In Belarus of recent decades, there have always been political prisoners; those opposing the dictator have disappeared without a trace or have been killed. There has been a gang of security forces with a very literary, metaphorical, and therefore especially terrifying name, "death squad". Protests also occurred periodically. They were brutally put down, with hundreds of people beaten and arrested. But such huge numbers — of both protesters and the imprisoned — have not been seen in the country since the great Soviet terror. Both Internet resources, like many other media projects that are one way or another related to politics, repression, and Belarusian hell — are recognized as "extremist", and their creators are either in prison or in exile. Belarusian human rights activist, chairman of the center "Viasna", Ales Bialiatski was sentenced to ten years in a maximum security penal colony. He became a Nobel Peace Prize laureate while serving his sentence in the colony.

Ales, Masha, Viktor Dmitrievich, Edik, Stepan, Igor, Katya, Marfa, Marina, Maksim, Zmitser, Nasta, Sergey, Pavel, Mikhail, Roman, Mikalai, Tatyana, Antonina, Ilya, Vladimir, Ruslan, Volga, Rostislav…

After the fall of the communist regime in 1991, about 40% of the population emigrated from Albania. Of the surviving population. During the time of Hoxha, people were expelled from the country, many tried to cross the border on their own, almost always unsuccessfully. They were seized, arrested, some were shot on the spot. During the Ottoman Empire, which lasted for almost five centuries, Albanians also left their land in more or less intense waves. The Albanian diaspora is one of the largest in the world. In his book, Ariane Leka calls this "exodus", a biblical word totally apt  for such numbers. The author recounts how in 1990, when the first protests in the history of the communist country began in Albania, residents of Tirana rammed a huge truck into the wall of the German embassy, trying to escape from the security forces and ask for asylum.

Ten days later, about three thousand Albanians were asking for protection there. The authorities then decided to cut off the electricity and water supplies to the embassy building and stop food deliveries, too. The same thing happened in the Italian and French embassies. After a series of negotiations, the German ambassador Werner Daum obtained permission to send the refugees to European countries. On July 12, 1990, people begging for protection and legal status were transported to the port of Durres, where a huge ferry was waiting for them*—*the first of many that transported Albanians to countries they couldn’t go to for almost half a century.

What exactly were Belarusians fleeing from? I can only speak for myself. From the daily morning panic attacks of “they’re coming for me,” from the news of those who had already been taken, from the war that had begun nearby. From the endless prison, total violence, disgust at the system that had given birth to it, and the humiliating fear that began to ooze from the pores of our own skin, corroding our internal organs, the skin itself, and our thoughts. From helplessness, despair, and unwillingness to be another victim. We jumped out of closing windows and creaking doors, pushed through the holes of not yet cancelled flights, ran through forests and swamps in sneakers and with keychain toy compasses, flew away on homemade gliders. Some left on buses and trains, and some in the trunks of cars.

We were afraid that we wouldn’t have time to at least crawl into the crack of the closing iron curtain — the memories of which had not yet been erased, pulsating in each of us like a black strobe. No, stop, we weren’t exactly running. The system was kicking us in the ass and batoning us in the back, and as we ran, we cried from the teargas air of our homeland, the unbearable weight of saying goodbye, and the inescapable feeling of guilt. We were saving ourselves, we were abandoning them all…

…Denis, Yura, Egor, David, Stanislav, Ilya, Daria, Pavel, Elena, Olga, Alexandra, Rygor, Alena, Mykita, Andrey, Irina, Vitaly, Kim, Artyom, Timur, Oleg, Daniil, Anastasia, Roman, Mark, Artur, Ivan, Vika…

Ariane Leka writes about his two sons, who became “cultural immigrants” in Vienna. Like many young Albanians of the more or less herbivorous, post-communist era, they went to Europe to study. In Austria, they were “Albanian-Austrians”; back in Albania, “Austro-Albanians”. A jumping, switching identity. In both countries, you are both a refugee and an immigrant, not yet at home, no longer at home, never at home. Franco-Albanians, Italian-Albanians, Anglo-Albanians, Swiss-Albanians… I often see large, noisy families in the cafés here — the older generation speaks Albanian, the grown-up children communicate with each other in English, immediately switch to Albanian with their parents, and address their children in French or Italian.

All this can be perceived as a very nice phenomenon, if you do not think about the historical tragedy that preceded the multilingual mix of voices. Right now, I (Belarusian-Albanian, Albanian-Belarusian?) am sitting in my favorite cafe near my house with a book by Arian Lek in my hand, with a view of the sea and the outlines of Durres in the distance. At the next table, a young Albanian is endlessly calling someone, speaking sometimes in Albanian, sometimes in German, sometimes in beautiful musical Italian, as if supplementing the text of the book with a precise and realistic acoustic illustration.

Emigrants, migrants, relocates, settlers, refugees, exiles — the words are different, the outcome is the same; "migration is for birds, exile is for men". Reading about this, I try to define myself: a refugee, an emigrant, a relocate, a nomad, a tourist, a vacationer, a business traveler, a disappeared one, hanging in limbo? Identities change as time passes and distances increase. For many years, we lived in Belarus and declared our precarious existence, calling it "internal emigration" sometimes with a bravura and almost proud intonation, sometimes with a tired doom, and sometimes simply with "whatever". And now, which is quite logical — because if you constantly play hide and seek with external problems, ultimately choosing the position of “I’m hidden”, sticking your head in the swamp mud, occasionally going out to the square to have at least some audible (or visible) voice, dividing yourself into “us” and ” them” and sometimes simply reveling in your pained learned helplessness — this internal emigration has predictably turned from a figure of speech into an act of emigration, completely external and hyperrealistic. So now, eat this!

A couple of days ago, I accidentally noticed the word “home” printed in a very small, almost imperceptible, as if apologizing in advance, font in the weather app of my iPhone, above the location “Durres”. How is it doing without me, the home where I cannot return? In the first weeks after my escap from Belarus (how easily I suddenly wrote the word “escape”), it seemed that it would only be for a couple of months. Later, it became clear that it would be years. Now, “perhaps forever” sometimes creeps up on me like a night tremor. It is still unthinkable to accommodate “forever”, and as soon as this chimera pulls its snake tail out from under the bed, I put my dangling leg back under the blanket, covering myself with it. I am a child and I am scared, so I hide. A year ago, a law was passed in Belarus — Belarusians abroad will not be able to extend the validity of their passports at embassies or consulates. An unprecedented case, forcing Belarusians to either become illegals in the countries that have sheltered them, or return to the tyrant, risking being caught right at the border and losing their freedom. A couple of days ago, news broke that a decree was developed in the US, which proposes to recognize expired passports of Belarusians as valid and put American visas in them. It was also proposed to recognize Belarusians as "persons of homeless nationality"...

In the first year of emigration (how easily I wrote this word), I read a novel by the world-famous Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, “The Palace of Dreams”, which was banned from publication in Albania at the time. It is a complete allegory of totalitarian power, both the imperial Ottoman and the communist Hoxha. A ministry endlessly studying the dreams of all the subjects of the empire in search of conspiracies and political crimes. The sorrows and epics of a small nation. Fragile nostalgia for a lost home. And in all this, there is a striking echo of the present time. With our reality, dreams and longing — both in the theme of war, which is again nearby, and in the themes of repression, migration, and wounds, which are again inside*—*a constant and, apparently, inevitable historical refrain. “But Albania… Like a distant cold star,  dimmed again, slipping away from him, and he wondered if he even knew what was happening there. And if he understood it, did he have the right to talk about it… So he sat, immersed in doubt, while his pen became heavier and heavier in his hand, until finally it touched the paper, and on it, instead of the word “Albania”, he wrote “there”. He looked at this word, which replaced the name of his homeland, and suddenly felt the full weight of what he immediately christened Albanian melancholy, an expression that does not exist in any language in the world. There is probably snow there now.”

It is winter in Belarus now. There is snow. I see it in the photographs of those who remained “there”… Snow on the sour cherry trees in my small dacha garden, on the roof of the abandoned house and small bathhouse, by the gate and by the road where my dog used to run. Snow on the streets of my city, always sleepy anyway, and now, probably, lethargic. Snow on the road leading to the entrance of my house, on the bench under the hawthorn bush*—there is also snow on the branches. Snow by the door, the code to which I have already forgotten. The door, behind which are the stairs, the elevator, the seventh floor, and my apartment. There, on the walls, paintings and photographs have fallen asleep, things are hunched in the closet, and on the shelves, favorite books and various little things are yearning — simple and sacred decorations of most of my life. It is quite possible that they will not find their next incarnation any time soon — but maybe when the children or grandchildren of Belarusian emigrants who have returned to visit the country of their ancestors, will leisurely walk along the ruins of a flea market somewhere in Zhdanovichi and tenderly exclaim: "Look, what a funny portrait in a frame. Drawn, it seems, with a pencil? Or crayons? She has one happy eye, and the other sad, as if with one she sees the present, and with the other — the future. Shall we take it?" They will think and buy it, bring it carefully together with other trinkets, brush the dust off  the frame, wipe the glass and find a suitable place for the drawing—*hanging it on the wall or placing it on a shelf with books. And then I will return home...