The Cows of Freedom

The funeral went well. Everyone was cheerful as they gathered in Baba's house for the snacks, raki and whiskey. The proper ones didn't drink the whiskey or raki of course. The idea was to show your disdain for it and sip the surface of the liquid only in the tiny glasses. That was the custom. It showed not only respect for tradition but morality. The real drinking would come later after the gathering and it would not be here.

Baba, the dead woman's brother, walked around the room shaking hands. Everyone smiled tiredly at him, even the children. Dressed in the old trousers he wore most days with a jacket that must date from before his retirement, he shuffled around the small room of the apartment bleary-eyed and distracted. Most eyes were on his wife Bebe to see how she was coping with the crowd in the little apartment. Energetic and grim-faced she watched each move of her husband confirming or changing every indication he gave to the guests about where they should stand or sit.

Everyone in the room knew something of who everyone else was. Some knew everything. This was the family. Baba's younger brother would do the talking. There would not be much if any at all through the coughing and wheezing silence and above the muffled whispering of the TV.

Everyone in the room knew what would happen. Bebe, Baba's wife, would buzz about making sure the plates of snacks and fruits were in a frenzy of replenishment and questioned everyone so suddenly, loudly and closely about what they wanted next and how much they liked it that no-one could eat more than a token. The topics of the government, the condition of the roads and what is wrong with country people would be briefly revisited from where they had been left at the last funeral but only by one or two comments made by a senior into the quiet between the long pauses. Each comment would probably be followed by Bebe interrogating someone again, maybe the speaker, about whether they had had enough or wanted more whiskey or had liked her cookies. After an hour everyone would go.

How many of them was that dead now in that part of the family? She was nearly the last. There had been five brothers and two sisters. A brother and a sister were left seated there on the couch. Sister's deaf husband and brother's dying wife were on the two comfortable chairs. Someone or other from most of the children of that group, the dead woman's nieces and nephews, poor thing she had been childless, were there. In fact a child or two from all the branches of each generation since the terrible old man, the dead woman's father, were there. Among nephews and nieces were two doctors and a cabinet minister with some kind of public relations person too and a few now unfamiliar faces back from doing god knows what abroad, some of the ex-patriot husbands and wives or god knows who. All of the nephews and nieces were now swaying quietly in their black clothes, arrayed in a standing circle of munching faces against the walls behind the comfortable chairs of the dead woman's brothers and sister. Some of their children were on the floors.

There were less comfortable chairs. Each of the adult generations but not the children had brought some specially connected friend of the family who, with well-placed more peripheral relatives, cousins of various degrees, was displayed on the dining room chairs that had been borrowed for that purpose from neighbours and arranged as the honoured first circle nearest the snacks table. When the ordering of all was completed, the few words spoken, snacks nibbled and liquids sipped and moreover everyone had seen who was there and who wasn't, then the friends and cousins would be the first to leave from those chairs.

As Baba ended his hand shaking and moved to the central table Bebe surveyed the room and saw everything was going very well.

Then one of the children, that damned fat boy of the minister, said loudly, "What is in the box Baba?"

There it was. It was under the snacks table. The sea chest of the dead aunt. Baba had gotten it from her flat on his way here after the funeral and put it under there before the snacks had been served. He had once slid it further under, bending painfully and sighing because of his condition while the late arrivals were bunched up apologising at the door before being shown to their places, this time by Bebe.

The child had seen that. Everyone there had seen that. The child had also been in the car behind Baba's nephew's little car with Baba and Bebe in it and Bebe's friend from girlhood, the schoolteacher Lira, the car that had held up irritated and honking traffic while Baba went up the stairs weeping and holding what was in fact, unknown to the child but known to others, the duplicate key Baba's sister had given him when she had faced up to the facts of how ill she was.

It was now Baba's turn to keep the chest. And after him, who?

The minister whispered a hush to the boy. The boy looked up at him and shook his head defiantly in that way fat boys have. Of course the people in the comfortable chairs and on the couch knew what the chest was, some a little, some more. The children, outer relatives and friends didn't.

But nevertheless they all knew an impropriety when they witnessed one. Shame on that child. Even the other children knew one, or should. They sat guiltily still. The minister was awful with his children. He spoilt them. That was because he was never home and we all know why that is.

The aunt's sea chest was the sea chest of her father. He was the man the eldest in the family knew as Baba long before his son. The keeper of the chest now became Baba. The Baba now had not always been the new Baba either. His older brother, now dead, had once been the new Baba, son of the old Baba. The sister of that new Baba, the maiden aunt just buried, had been the new Bebe once. Bebe had been the name of that old terror's wife. She had been a wonderful woman. All her children loved her especially the new Baba just new. And so it had been, Babas and Bebes.

But this was a moment unprecedented. New Baba was the first New Baba to get the chest since the old regime had gone. He was the first since the internet. He was the first to get the chest at a time when the newspapers wrote of private scandals of public officials, the first since genealogical searches, the first since people lived together openly without marriage, the first since modern immigration, the first since kids came home, the first since fundamentalism wasn't official, the first since he had begun writing poems and memoirs and the first since they all had left the party.

"Let's open the chest," said the new Baba to the minister's fat boy.

Baba pulled the chest from under the table. He motioned to his surviving sister and brother to help him. Bebe saw what was happening and cleared away the snacks. The chest was placed by the elderly trio among the whiskey bottles. There it sat as brother and sister sat down, sister smiling, held shut by a wide headed brass nail thrust through the two parts of a broken clasp.

"This is the sea chest of my father," said Baba. "As some of you know he was an Imam. Some of you may have heard also that he sold charms in the countryside and relics of the saints to the Christians travelling as a priest.

"This is the chest he brought back from America. It is made of Canadian wood." From the chairs of the special friends and the peripheral relatives radiated a frozen silence as normal movement ceased. A cousin from the mountains coughed.

New Baba had spoken in an elder's voice. It was in a soft cadence but almost angry with a hint of weariness. Everyone recognized it. The minister used it in parliament. The fat boy used it on his smaller friends. The doctor used it on her patients and also her husband. The public relations person heard it from the boss. It was the voice an elder used when he was entering into a narrative, a story an instruction to which people would listen and in which they must, for a moment, believe.

"Baba was in America for twelve years."

The mountain cousin shook his head. He said, "America!" New Baba paused. New Bebe turned off the TV. The room darkened. The minister took a whiskey bottle from the table and began to replenish some of the glasses that had been hastily emptied. New Baba's younger sister did the same with the Raki, hobbling around the circle with her cane. The public relations man smiled at her and thanked her, calling her auntie.

"While he was there in America he was a member of the Society of the Sons of Freedom and wrote for their newspaper."

"Surely not the Sons of Freedom!" whispered the mountain cousin who most there knew had just gotten a post with his municipality, it was thought only through a bribe to the republican democrats. The son-in-law giggled derisively.

"Yes, the Sons of Freedom. And when he came back home he married again. Well not quite again, it was a second wife, one in the city. That was normal .My mother was the village wife. When Baba died he told his eldest son, my half brother, you don't know him as that, he is Janus, the police chief, to give this chest to my mother. When she died it went to her eldest child and down through dear sister to me."

"What is in it then?" said the husband of new Baba's pretty daughter in a casual, diffident voice. He worked at the airport as a baggage handler and often brought lovely things as presents for Bebe. This time some thought he had spoken a little out of turn. The daughter reddened as one does when anything in the realm of inheritable objects are mentioned.

Baba took the nail from the clasp and opened the lid. A smell of dry paper wrinkled a few noses in the room. One child began to play on the floor with a toy truck she had brought, humming in a bored fashion. The novelty of the chest and authority of the voice had passed for her. Above the child a woman standing kicked at the truck quickly with her toe and shushed. The child looked up at Baba, this time a little fearfully.

The minister said, "Baba, perhaps now is not the time for this."

Baba's son-in-law said, "Go ahead old man."

"Horseshit," said Baba to the minister and pulled a sheaf of photographs from the chest.

"On the top I find, dear friends and relatives, photographs of me that my dear departed sister has herself put on top of Baba's things. Here is one of me with Nadje, the old dictator's wife. That was taken last year in the ancient bat's confinement just after, what, her seventy-fifth birthday. Here is another taken the year I married Bebe. I was thirty something. Sister took that to show with me with the Danish cows.

"Here is one with me in the background of a group around the dictator. I am in it. See where the faces of the Chinese delegates are rubbed out. We were up all night doing that, my sister and me. Rubbing them out of pictures and ripping pages out of books. Bebe wouldn't go near any of that. Too frightened. Under that is a notebook of draft poems I gave to sister when she was alive for her birthday and under that is the first of my Father's journals.

"Yes, there is some jewellery here and coins. There is clothing too. It looks like the cloth for a turban. There is a suit. It has a vest. There is a watch on a chain. God! Here is a photo of Bebe as a teenager with the dictator and, why it's Bebe's father too! What's that doing in here?" Baba turned swiftly as his wife dropped a plate of cookies. A cluster of female relatives leapt at once from their positions to surround her offering to be the one to clean it up and where the cloths were.

"Can I ask a question Baba?" The voice entering into the tumult was again that of the most irritating son-in-law. A property developer, the son of a famous city family well connected in the minister's party, he was the least popular of the crew the daughters had picked up. When he came for Sunday dinner he always seemed to delight in provoking Baba about his past connections with the communists, his peasant background and his lack of understanding of modern things.

He liked to make fun of Baba's present customs, sitting all day in cafés with decrepit friends, rotating around the open markets all day looking for the sausages of his youth, getting embroiled in complicated bureaucracies for hours of wrangling sarcasm about the simplest matters, leaving his flies open.

"Baba, I am confused by this," said the son-in-law. "You were a party secretary and member of the central committee. You were known as the son of the soil. You were a boy from the mountains, a peasant from the village who overcame an ignorant religious background to become a scientific socialist. You were the brother of martyrs. That was how you got your position."

Baba ignored him. He spoke instead to Bebe softly as if no one else was in the room. She was before him brushing the cookie crumbs into a pan. The family women had all been waved to their positions. "What is this picture here with you and your father with the dictator? How can that be? You were all bourgeois reactionaries. Your father was a royalist!"

"Baba, I gave your sister that picture in secret for the chest in case the affair of the Danish cows went badly. It was a life insurance. You know how things were then. But Baba I am astonished with you. What were you doing at Nadje's house last year?" She stood up. Hand with the brush on hip. Pan held towards Baba with the other.

"Yes, what of that!" said Baba's younger sister.

Bebe's friend, Lira the schoolteacher, clicked her teeth and said, "Tuuch."

"What was the affair of the Danish cows?" asked the minister. He was minister of Agriculture. Baba looked nervously around and then at Bebe with what she knew as his "have I been naughty?" look. He thought of it as his brave face.

"I will not bore you too much. It was an old thing. But first let me read something written on the back of the photo of me and the cows that sister took. It is one of old Baba's quotations. He used to write them on pieces of lamb skin and sell them to the faithful as charms based on proverbs and apocryphal books. He would say they were from a saint. He would never do that with his own lodge people though. He was Bektashi as you know. I see you smiling, son-in-law. You think they were mainly homosexuals because that is what you have read in the American journals. No they weren't. They were mystics and ecumenical promoters of revelations. They taught Byron how to write poetry.

"Here are the two proverbs. There are more in the journals. They are full of them. The first is "Every lie becomes a fact" The second is "Every life is to the honourable man a failure but to the envious a triumph."

"Now the story. I was the party secretary for the capital district of the suburbs. Above me then was only the regional secretary for the district and the dictator himself. My brother, the eldest now dead, was the secretary in the mountains where he had led the partisan column against the invaders, the one the dictator is said to have commanded. My other brother was a general. I hadn't fought in the war, I was too young but because I was a peasant and my family contained martyrs I was given a university place. I studied agriculture. I rose through the party.

"Then came the time just after the Chinese. You see at first we loved the Russians. We had their tractors and textbooks and the Bulgarian vegetables. I even had Bulgarian pen pals. I wrote to them in fraternal joy every week about their tomatoes. Ours were better though but were discouraged.

"We got those Russians because we wanted to frighten the Yugoslavs, our comrades in arms from the war, who afterward wanted to absorb the whole country. They put a big army on the border so we got the Russians who gladly put a big army on theirs as the Yugoslavs were insulting and screwing around their dictator. But then the Russians started charging a lot for their fucking junk. They wanted to put their submarines on our islands and not only that they started insulting dictators, even their own themselves. So we got the Chinese. You know that one. Plastic lanterns and cheap paper books, silly raincoats and flowery calendars everywhere. Then their dictator hops it and they start to help the bloody Yugoslavs so we spent weeks erasing their pictures and burning calendars, the ones with the secret pictures of the Great Whoever hidden in them, or so we thought.

"So we go it alone. David surrounded by Goliaths. In the circumstances our Leader decides that he needs to pick some successor who won't insult him when he dies like happened to the others. He can't pick his wife as she's always fighting with people. A very feisty and proud woman that. Very attractive too in a blackbird kind of way. The Leader can't pick his comrade-in-arms who fought the war with him but at the front, some say won it, because he was disrespectful to the Leader's wife. He was rumoured to have insulted her at a party. He even accused her of disloyalty. She thinks he is too ferocious and picky. Others say he knows dark secrets which once everyone knew but had now loyally forgotten. Besides, our leader's comrades-in-arms' wife, the very clever woman who headed my party training school, and the rest of his family, were said to be taking over the government. She had been a school friend of the comrade-in-arms' wife as you know but had known the Leader well. They were in the police, in the defence ministry, everywhere. The Leader is told that when he dies they will try to kill his wife and then insult his memory.

"So our leader picks a younger guy. One he travels with a lot and spends time with. It is a guy who dresses like him and enjoys the sorts of things he does. He is also good friends with the dictator's wife. There is a problem with this guy. He was leading our youth wing at a time when the slogan was "Think for yourselves as we are surrounded by enemies!". So a bunch of kids started having rock concerts and writing love poetry with sex in it. The successor was actually one of them. The dictator, his wife really, he was a little dotty by then, went ballistic like a Russian rocket because he had written the slogan and he meant it to mean "Hate the Chinese and Russians, the Americans too and maybe the Greeks and Yugoslavs too.

"They got the successor to denounce his friends and put them in jail. Some were there for twenty years. You can see them sitting in the cafes on the square now. They just got out last year. Two have become fundamentalists. After this the successor's picture was everywhere. The comrade-in-arms' picture was not so frequent. His wife's picture, an attractive scholarly woman, disappeared. You saw the Leader with her and swarms of Chinese especially at the time of opening that huge industrial complex that we later learned sabotaged and ruined the economy of the country, especially the agriculture.

"The affair of rock concerts and love poetry started a big purge of collaborators with foreigners. The secretary in the district next to mine was denounced by his superior, the regional secretary for sabotaging the state and collaborating with foreign powers and spying. We knew what that meant.

"The first time I had heard of a case like that was when the Yugoslavs were on the border. The Politburo met and voted to join with their Yugoslavian brothers with only one dissenting vote. The country was finished. The dissenter went to the soviet embassy and informed them. They told the Russian dictator and he shat birds. He told the Politburo to reverse their vote or he would have them thrown in the boiler of an aircraft carrier. The country was still full of their advisors and spies but there were Yugoslav ones too. The embassies were riddled with them.

The Russian Dictator said to change the Politburo completely, to let people on it like our Leader's comrade-in-arms.

"At the time I thought the dissenting vote had been my teacher at the agricultural college who had become a minister and Politburo member. He was a famous Partisan and ideologue. He was calling for an independent agricultural revolution. But how could that be? Our leader was on the Politburo. He was the head of it. It must have been him.

"We heard the shocking news that my teacher had been the one plotting with the Yugoslav pretending not to and that our Leader had drawn him into a trap and the Yugoslavs too by pretending to support them. My teacher shot himself in depressive despair on being exposed after confessing to the comrade-in-arms. He shot himself with his own pistol. All of the party members of a certain rank were issued with a pistol. I think I was the only one who refused mine. I said that if a class enemy wanted to get me, a little pistol wouldn't stop him. I came from a family of martyrs. And of heroes too. My sister, bless her soul, gave her life to the party. It is why she never married. She never thought of anything else from the time she met a comrade giving out leaflets in our village when she was a girl until the day she died. She lived with the Partisans in the woods. She had no romance no love. It was forbidden.

"Anyway in the purge of the rock and love poetry the secretary of the next district was accused of sabotaging agriculture. He was said to be a follower in hiding of the old teacher. He was said to have undermined the anti-Chinese self-reliance plan by sabotaging the production of peaches. In fact all of the production targets in our area were way below the plan. The propaganda ministry was having a hard time convincing people we were overproducing in vegetable and bread. The regional secretary had discovered that the underproduction was due to a nest of spies and saboteurs and reported that to the Politburo. My neighbour secretary, who was also a friend, was apparently put on trial and confessed. Then he shot himself in despair with his party gun. During the investigation the security police talked to me. I said I knew nothing."

During Baba's story the family and friends had kept still except for the minister and the living sister who circulated to fill glasses. Bebe had given the children plates of Baklava and forks. They were eating quietly and not spilling a crumb. New Baba had emptied his glass twice. Once he had lifted it to the annoying son-in-law. His younger brother and his wife had nodded vigorously several times. The mountain cousin remained still. The annoying son-in-law had neither drunk nor eaten. He kept blinking and swallowing.

"Then I was called before a party court headed by the provincial secretary. He read the charges to me. The first was that I had sabotaged the production of milk so that the country would become demoralised. The second was that I had married Bebe. Bebe as you know is from the Tanzania family. They had been aristocrats and supporters of the puppet king before the great patriotic anti-fascist war. Her branch of the family is made up of bourgeois urban moneylenders and landlords. Very unusually she had gone to the higher schools, not meant for class enemies, where I had met her and we had fallen in love. She was the top student in engineering and mathematics but wasn't given a prize. She wanted to work in her profession but on our wedding day I was transferred to a post in the mountains. It was a hard place with little water or food but the party wanted trusted comrades away from the degenerating city life of drink parties, soft living and intrigue. We married and took the train; she changed from her wedding dress in the train toilet. We had a tough life there. It was cold and dirty. Our daughters were born while I worked eighteen hours a day to build socialism. Bebe raised them alone. Then after the Russians I was transferred back to the city.

"Bebe's sister married a minor party man who was a cousin of our leader. My elder brother married a peasant woman who became the membership secretary of the party. That woman's sister had married a member of the Politburo who had seen her in a cotton dress picking turnips in the rain during a tour of inspection to choose hero workers for the propaganda ministry films. A lovely woman. She was in "War Against the Weevil Saboteurs". Do you remember the scene of the wind storm and her little pistols?

"None of these people helped me. The sister who married the Leader's cousin said she had hardly known her sister as she was sent to work in a factory. My ferocious peasant sister-in-law actually wrote the indictment. She wanted no taint of me on the hero name of my brother. The peasant woman sent over some sausages with a son but nothing else. She ignored my wife on the street.

"The third charge was that I was in the love poetry and rock faction which was a revival of my teacher's pro-Yugoslavian conspiracy which my friend had been a modern leader of and which may even go higher up to those close to the Leader.

"It was a critical situation. If I denied the charges it was certain that it would be taken as proof as I was anti-party as they were being brought by a superior. It would be a breach of discipline as the party line was that these were the charges and the party was never wrong nor was a leader. If I broke discipline at a time when the party was fighting an encirclement of decadent and predatory war mongering imperialism who wanted nothing more but to steal or even destroy our beautiful valleys and mountains and god knows what else, probably our traditions, revolutionary souls and virginity with bombs and rock and dope and sex drugged love poetry and motor cars.

"It was a time when bitter and rejected egotistical class enemies hidden in a thousand disguises were formulating wild and seductive stories to seduce and blind the heroic people and deliver them into the blood-soaked maws of the oppressors taking shit-covered gold from the murderers' smelly hands to deliver our state secrets to the vile assassins and lying propagandists of their intelligence agencies and to spread filthy lies about our dear Leader, the sanctity of his comrade wife and the manhood of the successor.

"I had not to deny the charges. I took first the one of being a member of that group and second the one about marrying Bebe. I said that I had been an unknowing dupe of the group and had been fooled by the things I had heard about my teacher's heroism and my friend's party dedication. I said that because of this I resigned my post and wanted to return to private life. I said I had disgraced the martyr relatives I had, my brothers and my other relatives in the party. I apologised for my marriage. I wished now to live a quiet and contemplative life in the city. That is how we got this nice apartment so close to the shops. Soon after I left the party Bebe was given a job in her profession."

"But the other charge," said the minister.

"The charge of milk sabotage was harder to deal with. The plan had set a quota based on the assumption that we would import a herd of Danish cows, who had higher yields than the ones we bred from Russian semen, and a Danish bull. Half the cows had come and a youngish bull but the bull had been butchered for the Politburo shop and some cows had been re-exported illegally to Yugoslavia to get hard currency for ministerial trips which had brought back whiskey for the same shop or on the black market or given to the Leader's wife for use at her parties. Only two cows had come to my district. They were in the state farm at night but during the day were with a moonlight independent farmer who knew how to take care of them.

"On this charge I had a risky plan which had been inspired from some proverbs of my father. I said in the party court to the provincial secretary that as a last act of being a party member I wished to defend the integrity of the always correct part and denounce the source of sabotage. I would do this because his vigilance had found out my errors which I hadn't even seen myself but now did do to the correct line of the party under its unshakeable, unified leadership.

"I pointed out that the party was led by ideology and politics and so armed the heroic people, the people's liberation army, the state organs of security, the progressive peasantry in the state farms, the workers rebuilding the factories to fight the material battles against the bourgeois encirclement and treason scientifically.

"I said the party was right to identify incorrect ideas such as the problem with the milk quota. It had done its duty. Now I as my last act armed with new vision would call for the proper managing of the cows. I denounce them! They must be punished! Let them face the wrath of the masses. The party has done the politics. The cows have neither bred nor given a patriotic level of milk. They must be judged and punished. I pointed out that since party courts are only for the party members from which sacrifices and high political discipline were expected to preserve the infallibility of the party the cows could not be judged here. They must be judged in their own commune by their own perhaps with guidance from a party member. As for me, I felt they should be executed and eaten by the people.

"I did not become suicidal and depressed. I did not commit suicide. I was retired to a teaching post. From there I wrote on improving peach production, export level cucumbers and then retired. I went to the cremation of the comrade-in-arms. We were only three there. One was a woman who watched from a party car. His relatives had all been arrested on the night he committed suicide from depression and despair and left his confession of being an imperialist spy his whole life. His body was found by the Successor. Some people who were walking outside the politburo compound had heard a sustained gun battle on the same night which may have been a practice session of the security forces as occasionally happened. This is probably what was being an initial announcement some remember that he was killed in a coup attempt. But that may have been put out by state enemies. The Leader died shortly after. The successor came briefly to power. I know his doctor has said that the leader was demented for some time but that man was not one of our doctors. He was a foreigner brought in. He was also a friend of the Leader's own local doctor, that traitor who led the American-financed overthrow of the party and set up a bourgeois republic in which our dear relative is a government minister.

"The leader's wife is now in confinement. The Successor lives with a close friend in Paris near a hospital. He has a degenerative disease.

"And you Baba are doing very well with your apartment and pension; also there is Bebe's salary," said the annoying son in law. Baba smiled at him. The boy's taunts were well-known as were Baba's passive reactions. The boy needed to show his distance from old times and modernity.

"Things were better when the leader was alive," said new Baba, looking at the boy.

"The party was something then, not like these parasites of weasels, sell-outs, car thieves and puppies now," He looked at the minister. "It was muscular and ruthless. On edge. Life or death. Not a bloated bunch of gibberers. You always knew where everyone stood. Clear lines. Clear slogans. Clear ideas! History! Glory! There was nothing to touch it. The only thing that comes close is the new religious party of those old poets and rockers and their sons. That has balls anyway."

"Why did you see Nadje?" asked Bebe.

"What is in that picture?" asked Baba.

"I know what it is," said the minister, Bebe's nephew, the son of the sister who had disowned her and son of the cousin of the leader.

"The leader's family owned a bookstore next to my grandfather's dry goods shop. Bebe worked there as a teenager. The leader and his friends would meet next door in a back room to have coffee and discuss politics and life. It was a gathering place for fashionable intellectuals who came to buy books. The comrade-in-arms went there, the woman he married, Nadje and some others. After the meetings and at other times the leader would sit in front of the shop and smoke. Bebe was a few years younger and she would talk to him when there were no customers in hers. She was fascinated. He spoke of Paris where he was going to go to school; of the fashions there and of symbolist poetry, novels, new inventions, motor cars. Of real life, not like in this stupid peasant backwater. He also spoke of history. How it was made and written. He wanted to be a professor at the Sorbonne. You know later he became a history teacher far out in the provinces in what they call the Paris of the Mountains. But before that he went to the real Paris.

"After he came back from the real Paris and had started teaching and agitating at home he came one day to grandfather's shop to tell Bebe about his travels. He showed her photographs of Paris including one of a handsome French boy, a communist student he said, his best friend while there in Paris. They had changed a room. He was also a poet. Bebe was quite taken with that student and with the leader too pictured sitting in cafés, dressed in spats and long tight coats. In some the leader and friend were with Orientals or Africans, people Bebe had never seen. Everyone looked so rich and sophisticated. Then he asked Bebe if she wanted to meet his local friends. She was thrilled. They went into the bookshop to the back room. Nadje was there and the comrade-at-arms. They were rowing. She took a ring from her finger and flung at the leader's friend. The Leader tried to calm them. Bebe said she was frightened but fascinated."

"How do you know this?" said Baba, softly looking at Bebe who stared back defiantly.

"We don't own each other," said Bebe. "We don't own each others' histories."

"I have it from my father," said the minister. "The story has been in my family forever. Bebe's father tells it every family gathering. He was in his father's shop next door that day. He was there for the rest.

"At that moment the group in the back room heard Bebe's father just outside the door say "Run! It's the Police!" He had seen them enter the street and guessed their intention. A big sweep was going on after some patriotic disturbances.

"Bebe led the group out of the bookshop back door into the alleyway. From there she took them into the back door of the family house next to the dry goods store. It is the house I live in now although the bookstore and grandfather's are gone. The group hid in a bedroom. Bebe held a shaking leader and Nadje was crying when Bebe's father came in. The comrade-in-arms was by the window with a revolver. The police had left him alone as he was a respectable businessman. They had seemed disappointed that no one was in the back room. They said they had a tip-off that a radical was there.

"Why have you never told me this?" asked Baba of Bebe. "Why is this not known?"

"It is known," the minister said. "The party history is full of clandestine meetings and escapes from the police. It just doesn't say who did what. Why the party was founded in a secret cellar in one of my cousin's houses. The family were asked to keep it quiet. But it was known. Why do you think Bebe got a place in school? Why do you think you weren't convicted?"

"What were you doing at Nadje's?" said Bebe.

"I was feeling sorry for her. I was curious too. Yes, I have visited her from time to time. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to worry you Bebe. You know how you get. She is after all in detention. It's really just a small house in the old military barracks. She spends all day watching Portuguese soap operas. She writes poems. I have a few. There is a lot of the ancient politburo there. Some of them are completely mad. I felt sorry for her, once a queen now so low. On her own. She is living in a reality even the memory of is mostly gone. She has only a girl to care for her once a week. Her family only visit once in a while and the police and journalists used to of course ask about hidden treasure and crimes but they have given up. There are a few cult communists from other countries.

"Why does she see you? You didn't know her. You were too junior."

"I knew her as a girl and I visited her a few times after her marriage."

"What!" The cry came both from Bebe's friend and Baba's sister.

"Father took me to the city one time to meet his second wife and all my half-brothers and -sisters. I went down the mountain with him from town to town to the city as he was selling his charms. At one place he sold a charm for pleasing a man to Nadje's mother. They talked a long time. I spoke to Nadje in the yard. I was carrying some charms too and I gave one to her. She saw me years later among the delegates me from the platform of a congress and sent a message to me to meet her where she was staying. It was just after the Yugoslavian affair when both she and the comrade-in-arms were put on the leader's politburo. She said she was happy to see me and would follow my career but that I must tell no one I knew her. There were too many rumours already spread by reactionaries about her and the leader. There were even rumours that the leader shot a close comrade who people said had been his lover but others said that it was really because was going to reveal his failings. But Nadje said we were both used to working underground and taking risks, used to fooling and deceiving our enemies so we should be alright if we knew each other and looked out after each other." Bebe seemed angry.

"Go on about your father," said the minister.

At this two cousins and a friend of Baba's younger brother, a priest, got up to leave. They thanked Baba for a lovely story and Bebe for the snacks. They expressed condolences again, nodded to the minister, buttoned coats and left. Bebe had not yet closed the door behind them before a second echelon of distant relatives and friends got up to leave. When they had departed glasses were replenished. The wife of the minister who had been silent offered to take two of the youngest children outside to the park for ice cream. The other children had plates replenished with baklava and cookies but were moved to the hallway with their cars, dolls and picture books. They were told not to fight by Bebe.

Glasses were filled again. "Tell us about your father," repeated the minister. Baba had not moved. His eyes had followed Bebe as she did her tasks with the desks. Bebe returned to a position on the other side of the table.

"So that is how you did it!" she said and laughed dryly. Only the son-in-law laughed with her.

"We have had hard times in this country," Baba went on, his voice now quivering. He looked like someone on a playground slide. "I do not know whether ours were worse or those of the old Baba. But we have had to be clever and artful. Baba knew that to get money was impossible in those mountains. He borrowed from relatives and friends. He was friends with both Christians and Moslems in his village. He had charmed them all, especially the elders. But I found him frightening.

"He took passage to America. At Ellis Island, the immigration place, he claimed to be an Italian. He gave a name but they changed it anyway to make it sound more English. It is the same name as a recent president's. He worked in the mines and as a salesman. He travelled into Canada. He learned good English and once wrote for an English newspaper. He was an officer in the patriotic organisation of exiles against our government then. The society also did social welfare work with exiles. He started a Bektashi lodge. He sent money back home with a brother who had gone to America with him but got homesick. The brother stole the money. When he heard in a letter from my mother that took a year to reach him he took the money he had and went home. He worked at the selling of charms. He had brought chains and metal things back with him in this trunk. He travelled all over the countryside here staying in the lodges. As was the custom he took a second wife, the daughter of a lodge brother, and supported her too. After the Geeks attacked our village and stole children and raped the women he became increasingly depressed. We saw him infrequently because of work and the situation. The country was in turmoil. My mother raised us telling us to be tolerant and quoting his proverbs. From her they made sense. They were beautiful. My brothers joined the partisans. Father came home from America in a suit and as the success he had been there with this trunk.

"But before the suit and the selling and writing he joined the army and fought in France. I believe his army papers, passport and citizenship papers are in this box. There may also be birth certificates of children and letters. There is a novel."

The annoying son-in-law began to laugh. It was a strange laugh, almost a choke. "Are you saying, Baba, that you are not the son of an ignorant superstitious peasant who served the party and country but rather the son of an American soldier who was a secret anti-patriotic terrorist?"

"He was that there. He was something else here."

"He was a bigamist there and here." too.

"He was a poet and saint in those days, son-in-law. You should respect him."

"Then you are now, with respect, a bastard ex-communist, Baba."

"He was a prince among princes then and he is still now," said Bebe angrily. She had tears in her eyes.

The minister laughed at that. He gestured to his wife, shook hands all around and left. This was followed by a general departure. Startled children were scooped up from the hall. Final greetings and well wishes were exchanged among all and condolences. Bebe refused all offers of help to clean up. The son-in-law gave Baba an extra strong embrace on departure.