A LATE FEELING

2024-12-08 13:32:00, Opinione Agim Xhafka

A LATE FEELING

And here, without realizing it, retirement age arrives. Once upon a time, when we were young, people who enjoyed this status seemed to us candidates for the Holy Trinity, with one foot in the grave, that is. We felt sorry for them, so we forgave them for every mistake they made. They have it from the years they carry on their backs, we justified them. But now, that I have equalized, I say that I fell for them in vain.

This age can still be called "boyish" age. As long as I walk over 20,000 steps a day, as long as I drive to Korça and back and I don't get tired, as long as I swim 1 km every day in the summer, as long as I still have a lot of friends at work, do I have the right to say; do i feel like riosh? Or the most important one; every time my eye sees a beautiful girl my brain commands me, turn, turn your head and be amazed! Oh man!

Well, I took a resume of my years of work to Insurance and I was waiting for an SMS from them. It was not late. It came.

- Everything is fine, but for the 9 years you worked at the "Bashkimi" newspaper, no documents are found in the archive. Your name does not appear anywhere!

That's it. I urgently asked the colleagues we worked with.

- We have proven with trials the years we worked there, - they told me.

A word of mouth this. The trials in Albania are starting today, you're lucky if they end when your nephew or niece retires.

-Go to the library, watch, search the newspaper collection and photocopy your writings over the years! I believe they serve as a document, they have value as evidence that you have been a journalist for 9 years, - the woman told me.

It seemed like a solution. At the National Library one morning I started slowly with my mobile phone in hand. I saw my name in the newspaper, I used to take pictures of the writing. After a couple of hours I got tired, I left it. I'm printing these once and come back tomorrow, I decided. Curiosity prompted me to read the writing on the first photo. From March 1983 with the title "Lakteshi seeks friends". It occurred to me in detail. Like it happened to me today. I was on duty in Pogradec.

From the hotel, after having a snack, I went to the committee. The boss, as soon as I left Tirana the other day, told me that they were interested in an article on herds. Today this name makes you laugh, but in those days it made all the peasants of the homeland cry. That the government collected all the cattle they had at home. Starting from cows, goats, sheep, lambs, pigs. Then he went crazy, he loved the chickens, the turkeys, and the birds singing in the trees. We will unite the herds in the cooperative so that the children and women are freed from their care for grazing and milking. Women would have free time, while children would learn more.

This was trumpeted as a goal and no one said that the peasant would not have a drop of milk for the toads. He would take it to the village shops, the radio and television would blare. Experience soon showed that both the name and the color of the milk were forgotten. When this plight of the village was felt, I wrote the opposite. Here is this letter that I would submit as a pension document. In black on white, with my name, I wrote those years, the villagers were happy and glad that they were saved from the fatigue with the cattle.

Now they had no time left for entertainment and artistic activities. Fun, fun, I meant. While the children were so excited that they expressed on their healthy faces the effect of swarming. Now they no longer grazed goats and cows, but "grazed" on books and knowledge all day long. I wrote that there was plenty of milk not only in the store, but also in the kindergartens and nurseries. That…

I was so ashamed of the writing, but also of myself. In those years, I touched the misery of the country every day, I went by myself at 1 in the morning to stand in line for a bottle of milk in the middle of Tirana. As a family, I only got one kg of Argentinian meat a week, more than half of which was fat. While eggs up to ten grains... But my pencil wrote completely upside down, upside down. It was normal that those times led to the guillotine if you told the truth, but I could lie less. That's all I had in hand. I might not put a lot of white paint on a black background. I mixed it with some gray e.g. I then read the other posts. I hated it, especially since my name was at the end of them. How I would like to delete it, to disappear the name and surname, to leave it anonymous, but the newspaper was printed, it was not online like today.

I found myself fixated like today's government lickers who appear every night on television. Even I have painted better than these. What a diligent, pious and unscrupulous servant you were, I said to myself. I wanted to apologize, but I didn't know how to do it. This people deserves to go to "Skënderbej" square and with megaphone in hand to confess, to humble myself. But I know that this cannot be done, there is no way. I went home and while I told my wife that I took a lot of photos from my writings, I ended the explanation:

- I will not take the years I was in the newspaper to Insurance. I'd rather not be known for seniority.

- Why?

- That for a mountain of snow that I wrote those 9 years, this people has given me a salary. And pretty salary. Fat and even accompanied by diets and endless rewards.

-And? - she asked with surprise.

- And, this people can't even give me a pension now. Boll has spent for me.

At that moment I wanted to find a word that would blacken it, make my journalism of those years sterile, so that I could be convincing. And I found it:

-Those times were haram, woman. And a pension that arises from haram is not halal for me. Haram, haram. Do you understand?

I emphasized to convince you and myself that this action was a form of apology. I could do so much and sleep in bits and pieces from now on, that comfort was out of the question.

- Yes, you will only receive half a pension, man!

- I take as much as I deserve. That's what I deserve, - I pronounced these words loudly to end the conversation that put me in a vortex of shame and regret. "Haram years" go as an epithet to those 9 years that I want to erase but can't. That they are kept with police in libraries, share some thick cardboard covers.../ CNA