Edi Rama's summer Delirium

Alfred Lela

Dressed in his oversized pants — those signature baggy trousers — and black clothes [to slim his silhouette], Edi Rama has been roaming across Albania for a week now in a bizarre, misplaced delirium, as if he’s burdened with some ancient mission that must finally be fulfilled.

Trailing behind him are weary women worn down by hardship and the peak summer heat; bodyguards trying to hold them back — though it’s unclear whether these women want to hug the Leader or curse him. Alongside, a procession of MPs and local officials follows — ever ready to throw their bodies into the path as human shields, lest anything untoward, God forbid, should happen to the Commander.

Grave and theatrical — like a decision of the Warsaw Pact echoing up the canyons of the Vlora River — he wanders through the First Operational Zone: that newly paved road and from there, he hands down decisions like Enver Hoxha — about the cottages in Theth, the tents in Himara, the condoms on Lungomare, and the sidewalks of Tirana.

The first to follow him in this "campaign against foreign manifestations" — namely, the phenomenon of sidewalks being blocked by bar chairs — is a northern Albanian, epic like all Nordics, but who, unlike them, has acquired both wisdom and fish, and has now entered the lyricism of capitalism: Gjergj, son of Ndrekë Luca.

In proper chieftain style, he issues an order: that his property Rozafa — must clear the chairs from the blocked walkway, even though they have paid the state over those chairs for 25 years — just like in the Epics.

Meanwhile, Edi retreats to the government villa in Dhërmi. Barefoot, like the olive trees in Xhevahir Spahiu’s verses, he “wanders alone along the shores.” His forehead flashes — like Zeus’s thunderbolt above the Acroceraunian peaks, high above Dhërmi — with his aching love for Albania. Nearly naked, like all wannabe-saints, he boards a boat with no captain and drifts into the bay of Saint Andrew.

“These are my shores,” he reflects. “To whom shall I grant this jewel of the Ionian, with a Prime Minister’s seal?” He tries, for a moment, to imagine pairing some businessmen with this intimate cove — a place where, say, Thetis might have dipped baby Achilles to cloak him in immortality — but he shudders.

He begins to envision Green Coast, stretching from Palasa to Saint Andrew — a monstrous ochre beast whose eyes look out at Corfu and are clouded by the greenery.

“How was it that no one stopped us — not the laws, not the foreigners and their ‘democratic standards’ — from turning Albania into what we dreamed?” he wonders to himself.

He turns toward the boat again. Trouble has erupted in Theth. God, it seems, shaped that valley like an arena — made for battle and disobedience. “Just look at my Tosks — not a peep! But these disobedient ‘Alpins’ have pitched pop-up shacks in the middle of my dream for the North.” I’ll send a Turk to bring them to heel, he thinks. Benet Beci comes to mind — but he’d look comically out of place standing next to the highlanders.

The northern businessmen of the Prime Ministerial Court never built on their lands. “We gain nothing there, bac,” one of them had told him. They cut down the forests of their birthplace, sold the timber at Zogu i Zi in Tirana, and now they’re digging the Llogara tunnel for me…

With Sali, they became well off. With me, they became millionaires.

I used to weep over these parables when I had nothing but rags and spirit — pretending to care about Albania’s fate in Koha Jonë, under Nikolla and Soros…

Hey, whatever happened to Nikolla anyway? As for little Soros — he married that lady, Abedini?