Paul Alkazraji's Blog - Posts Tagged "tirana"
Those dangerous mountain roads
Driving over the mountain roads in Albania recently, the tops dusted with fresh snow, reminds me of warmer days depicted in Chapter 1 of The Silencer, and evoked here in photographer Peter Wilson’s beautiful photo.
Chapter 1
South of Tirana, Albania.
Pic. P.Wilson.
Away to the west the view opened out before him. The ridgelines of mountains, light brown and then deep brown into shadow, rose beyond each other for over fifty kilometres fading into the blue haze. The sun was falling lower over them tingeing the dust with an orange-pink. Jude leant forwards to see and felt pleasure well up. There was an eruption of birdsong from beneath the old man’s jacket. He reached inside it methodically and Jude watched half-expecting him to draw out a canary in a protective caress. He lifted a mobile phone to his ear.
“Alo. I’m on the Krrabë road! What? Wait, I said. I’m coming!” he shouted. All eyes turned to glower at him. He sniffed and seemed oblivious to it.
Jude turned around to drink in the view through the rear window. A dark blue ‘90s Mercedes with a broken headlight was drawing up behind them. The van driver now began to accelerate as the road levelled out along the top of the ridge. He tapped out a cigarette from a pack on the dashboard and slipped it into the corner of his mouth, glanced in his side mirror, and squared himself at the wheel. The Mercedes pulled out to the left and began to draw alongside. A sign with white arrows on black indicating a sharp turn left was coming closer. An old, Chinese truck came rasping around the bend with its horn on. Jude tightened his grip a little on the seat in front. The Mercedes braked and swung back sharply in behind them. He could see a faint grin of pleasure on the van driver’s face in the rear-view mirror as he touched the lighter to his cigarette. He manoeuvred the gears upwards.
A line of pylons marched up the mountain’s flank and across the road ahead of them. In seconds, the wires few over their heads. A white stony riverbed snaked away on the valley floor, perhaps five kilometres away, the water catching the sun and flashing its message. The driver’s mobile phone rang with the Nokia tone and with one hand on the wheel he put it to his ear.
“E, mo!” he shouted. ”What’s up?” As they took the bend the van tires began to sing on the road surface. He dropped the phone and the cigarette into his lap and gripped the wheel. Jude ran his hand through his hair and felt his heart beat quicken. The driver began beating the burning tobacco off his lap.
“O, zoti Schumacher? Take it easy there!” Jude called to him. The youth turned around and grinned. The Mercedes pulled out to the left for another attempt to pass and began to pull up level. Jude looked down at the two men sitting in the front. Both wore clean, blue shirts and sunglasses. The passenger looked up at Jude, and then seemed to nod to his driver. The road swung to the left over a narrow bridge and the Mercedes was forced back again in behind the van beating on its horn.
Whitewashed, stone walls, holding back the mountain dirt behind them, streamed past stencilled with logos and sprayed with graffiti: ‘Albanian Exhausts’, ‘Geri’, ‘LSI’… Then came a café plastered with Nescafe posters, a man selling ice cream from a scratched refrigerator, and an old man bobbing sidesaddle on a mule laden with white sacks, flicking its rump with a stick. The old man in the cloth cap called something to the driver but he didn’t respond. Jude could feel touches of cold sweat on his palms. He took his glasses off and cleaned the condensation with his T-shirt.
“Lord, keep us on the road!” he prayed under his breath. He glanced backwards. The Mercedes was right up to the van’s bumper. It swung back to the left and pulled parallel, the driver hammering his horn. Then it touched the side with a metallic grate.
“Zot i madh! God!” shouted the driver, jerking his head to the left and back to the road ahead. The youth pressed his face to the glass angrily waving the car to pass. The road forced the Mercedes back.
Old concrete telegraph poles flashed past, tilted, fallen and then gaps, some with scraps of wire hanging down. Below them were short white posts topped with a red tip that looked to Jude like cigarette sweets. A policeman standing in a dirt lay-by vainly lifted his traffic lollipop and then stood back, hands on his hips and cap pushed back. Jude leant forward to see if he could catch the driver’s eye in the rear-view mirror. The speedometer was past 120 km/h…
From Chapter 11
With his cheek pressed deeply into the pillow Jude lay on his front. He could not get into a comfortable position. He reached for his mobile phone on the bedside cabinet and checked the time. It was 4.08am. He held its lit face over Alex and saw she was sleeping deeply. He slid it under the pillow and dropped his head. He thought about how the culture had worn her down as she tried to help the women economically as well as spiritually. His mind moved to Spiro: would Mehmed’s book be ready for the biennial conference? It drifted to Valon’s daughter, Kela, in Shënvogël and if the local doctors would really help her. He spun over and lay on his back. He heard a man singing drunkenly down in the stairwell, and somewhere the raised voices of a couple rowing. A taxi van rumbled down May 5th Street, hunting for passengers for its early morning Tirana run.
On the dressing table was a photo in a clip frame that Alex had taken of light shafts on the grey sea off the cliffs of Bournemouth, where her parents had run a bed and breakfast establishment. Streetlight came through a gap in the curtains and reflected off its glass surface giving a point for the eye to fix on. In that moment, the noises around seemed to fade down. The curtain fluttered by the open window. The particles of air seemed almost charged with something. Alex turned over and sat upright.
“Jude… I just had a dream,” she said breathily. “It was very vivid. Can you get me a glass of water?” Jude kicked off the sheet on his side and felt the floor with his feet for his slippers. He switched on the side lamp and watched Alex push herself back against the wall. She wiped her face with her hands, her magnified shadow moving against the orange glow on the wall. He felt his way through to the kitchen in the darkness and fumbled for a glass in the cupboard. He filled it from the tap and returned. He handed it to her and sat down on the edge of the bed. “So what was it?” he said.
“Wait,” she said. She was breathing heavily. She drank several gulps and then caught her breath. “There was a man trying to wrap himself in a flag… as the breeze seemed to lift it off him. It was a red one… but not the Albanian flag. It had a white crescent and a star on it.”
“It’s the Turkish flag,” said Jude.
“I also saw one of those blue glass ‘evil eye’ charms they sell in the market here. Only it was big, like a moon… and it was riding through the night as it passed over the lights of towns below it… Alexandroupoli, Xanthi…” She seemed to pause mid-sentence.
“Those are Greek towns,” he said.
“There was a man looking at a name on a computer screen… It was your name Jude.”
“The same man with the flag?”
“They had no clear form. I don’t know.” Jude ran his hand back through his hair. “And what do you make of it?” he said as he looked at her. She held her gaze forwards as if looking beyond their bedroom. She cast him an anxious glance sideways.
“Let me pray. That’s all I can recall of it,” she said. She lowered herself under the sheet and closed her eyes. Jude lay down on the bed beside her. He felt her reach for his hand and he slid it to her. He turned off the side lamp and looked up at the ceiling. He knew that God had used dreams to speak to Alex in the past. He remembered her ‘Clapham Junction’ dream when she came to faith, but what did this one mean? Did it mean anything at all? How on earth was he to know? When he fell asleep, before Alex, sometime around 5am, the dawn light had crept into the room.
From Chapter 27
Shpetim fastened the buttons of his white shirt, took his mobile phone and a slate grey suit jacket, and left the house immediately after Jude’s phone call. It was now urgent, he felt, to find and confront this Sheref Dushman. In a town of 30,000 people, he knew he could locate him given time, maybe not too much, unless he chanced upon him quickly. He decided he would check out the three main hotels, though he knew there were dozens more and some that didn’t even sign in their guests. He made some calls to local contacts. Then he walked repeatedly between Shënomadh County Police Directorate and the high street watching.
At 10.55am he took a phone call from his SHISH director ordering him to return to operations monitoring the civil disturbances. He rubbed his temples lightly with his thumb and middle finger. The consequences for him if he delayed would be very serious. He walked out into the centre of the high street and looked both ways searching. His phone vibrated in his hand. He took the call.
“Alo,” a man shouted. “Bledi Shehu jam. You came yesterday? My grandmother just told me. She’s not as she was… her legs, her ears, her head… you know.”
“Bledi… police. You brought a man up from the border on Tuesday morning. Where did you drop him?”
“Po. By the hotels on Rruga e Gështenjave… what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. I’ll be in touch.” Shpetim hung up. He looked down the high street to the top of the avenue of horse chestnut trees around 200 metres away. He began to jog towards it.
He turned the corner and ran on until he came to the side street. A woman in a white cleaner’s jacket sat on a chair outside the first hotel. He took out the folded print out with an enlarged, grainy passport photo of Sheref on it and showed it to her.
“I’m looking for this man. Have you seen him?” he said authoritatively.
“Yes… he checked out about two hours ago.”
“How did he seem to you?”
“He paid his bill… what can I say?” she shrugged. She smoothed back her tight, purple-black hair considering something. “He had strange eyes, though… when he took his sunglasses off… cold, cloudy… huh, like a fish left too long out of the water.” Shpetim stood thinking as he stared at her. She began to shuffle uneasily. Maybe he had just moved on to another town, he thought. Or maybe this is his final day?
He spun on the ball of his foot and walked back onto the avenue. He began to walk quickly past the trees as a wind started to churn their leaves. A shower of chestnuts drummed down onto the tarmac scattering as he crossed over. He jogged past the sliding doors of Banka Alpha where an LCD clock read 11.30 am. He lifted his phone to his ear and pressed a speed-dial option.
“Luan, can you get over to May 5th Street, Jude’s block,” he said. “Yes… I know Burim’s got the Mercedes!” He slung his jacket over his shoulder and the holstered pistol wrapped inside it thudded into his back as he moved. He jogged along the pavement of the main road clipping a café chair with his hip knocking it over. He stopped and ran back to pick it up apologising to an angry waiter. He jogged quicker now breaking into a run along the edge of the road.
Copyright Paul Alkazraji. Highland Books Ltd. 2012. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Silencer-...
Taken from:
Chapter 1
South of Tirana, Albania.
Pic. P.Wilson.
Away to the west the view opened out before him. The ridgelines of mountains, light brown and then deep brown into shadow, rose beyond each other for over fifty kilometres fading into the blue haze. The sun was falling lower over them tingeing the dust with an orange-pink. Jude leant forwards to see and felt pleasure well up. There was an eruption of birdsong from beneath the old man’s jacket. He reached inside it methodically and Jude watched half-expecting him to draw out a canary in a protective caress. He lifted a mobile phone to his ear.
“Alo. I’m on the Krrabë road! What? Wait, I said. I’m coming!” he shouted. All eyes turned to glower at him. He sniffed and seemed oblivious to it.
Jude turned around to drink in the view through the rear window. A dark blue ‘90s Mercedes with a broken headlight was drawing up behind them. The van driver now began to accelerate as the road levelled out along the top of the ridge. He tapped out a cigarette from a pack on the dashboard and slipped it into the corner of his mouth, glanced in his side mirror, and squared himself at the wheel. The Mercedes pulled out to the left and began to draw alongside. A sign with white arrows on black indicating a sharp turn left was coming closer. An old, Chinese truck came rasping around the bend with its horn on. Jude tightened his grip a little on the seat in front. The Mercedes braked and swung back sharply in behind them. He could see a faint grin of pleasure on the van driver’s face in the rear-view mirror as he touched the lighter to his cigarette. He manoeuvred the gears upwards.
A line of pylons marched up the mountain’s flank and across the road ahead of them. In seconds, the wires few over their heads. A white stony riverbed snaked away on the valley floor, perhaps five kilometres away, the water catching the sun and flashing its message. The driver’s mobile phone rang with the Nokia tone and with one hand on the wheel he put it to his ear.
“E, mo!” he shouted. ”What’s up?” As they took the bend the van tires began to sing on the road surface. He dropped the phone and the cigarette into his lap and gripped the wheel. Jude ran his hand through his hair and felt his heart beat quicken. The driver began beating the burning tobacco off his lap.
“O, zoti Schumacher? Take it easy there!” Jude called to him. The youth turned around and grinned. The Mercedes pulled out to the left for another attempt to pass and began to pull up level. Jude looked down at the two men sitting in the front. Both wore clean, blue shirts and sunglasses. The passenger looked up at Jude, and then seemed to nod to his driver. The road swung to the left over a narrow bridge and the Mercedes was forced back again in behind the van beating on its horn.
Whitewashed, stone walls, holding back the mountain dirt behind them, streamed past stencilled with logos and sprayed with graffiti: ‘Albanian Exhausts’, ‘Geri’, ‘LSI’… Then came a café plastered with Nescafe posters, a man selling ice cream from a scratched refrigerator, and an old man bobbing sidesaddle on a mule laden with white sacks, flicking its rump with a stick. The old man in the cloth cap called something to the driver but he didn’t respond. Jude could feel touches of cold sweat on his palms. He took his glasses off and cleaned the condensation with his T-shirt.
“Lord, keep us on the road!” he prayed under his breath. He glanced backwards. The Mercedes was right up to the van’s bumper. It swung back to the left and pulled parallel, the driver hammering his horn. Then it touched the side with a metallic grate.
“Zot i madh! God!” shouted the driver, jerking his head to the left and back to the road ahead. The youth pressed his face to the glass angrily waving the car to pass. The road forced the Mercedes back.
Old concrete telegraph poles flashed past, tilted, fallen and then gaps, some with scraps of wire hanging down. Below them were short white posts topped with a red tip that looked to Jude like cigarette sweets. A policeman standing in a dirt lay-by vainly lifted his traffic lollipop and then stood back, hands on his hips and cap pushed back. Jude leant forward to see if he could catch the driver’s eye in the rear-view mirror. The speedometer was past 120 km/h…
From Chapter 11
With his cheek pressed deeply into the pillow Jude lay on his front. He could not get into a comfortable position. He reached for his mobile phone on the bedside cabinet and checked the time. It was 4.08am. He held its lit face over Alex and saw she was sleeping deeply. He slid it under the pillow and dropped his head. He thought about how the culture had worn her down as she tried to help the women economically as well as spiritually. His mind moved to Spiro: would Mehmed’s book be ready for the biennial conference? It drifted to Valon’s daughter, Kela, in Shënvogël and if the local doctors would really help her. He spun over and lay on his back. He heard a man singing drunkenly down in the stairwell, and somewhere the raised voices of a couple rowing. A taxi van rumbled down May 5th Street, hunting for passengers for its early morning Tirana run.
On the dressing table was a photo in a clip frame that Alex had taken of light shafts on the grey sea off the cliffs of Bournemouth, where her parents had run a bed and breakfast establishment. Streetlight came through a gap in the curtains and reflected off its glass surface giving a point for the eye to fix on. In that moment, the noises around seemed to fade down. The curtain fluttered by the open window. The particles of air seemed almost charged with something. Alex turned over and sat upright.
“Jude… I just had a dream,” she said breathily. “It was very vivid. Can you get me a glass of water?” Jude kicked off the sheet on his side and felt the floor with his feet for his slippers. He switched on the side lamp and watched Alex push herself back against the wall. She wiped her face with her hands, her magnified shadow moving against the orange glow on the wall. He felt his way through to the kitchen in the darkness and fumbled for a glass in the cupboard. He filled it from the tap and returned. He handed it to her and sat down on the edge of the bed. “So what was it?” he said.
“Wait,” she said. She was breathing heavily. She drank several gulps and then caught her breath. “There was a man trying to wrap himself in a flag… as the breeze seemed to lift it off him. It was a red one… but not the Albanian flag. It had a white crescent and a star on it.”
“It’s the Turkish flag,” said Jude.
“I also saw one of those blue glass ‘evil eye’ charms they sell in the market here. Only it was big, like a moon… and it was riding through the night as it passed over the lights of towns below it… Alexandroupoli, Xanthi…” She seemed to pause mid-sentence.
“Those are Greek towns,” he said.
“There was a man looking at a name on a computer screen… It was your name Jude.”
“The same man with the flag?”
“They had no clear form. I don’t know.” Jude ran his hand back through his hair. “And what do you make of it?” he said as he looked at her. She held her gaze forwards as if looking beyond their bedroom. She cast him an anxious glance sideways.
“Let me pray. That’s all I can recall of it,” she said. She lowered herself under the sheet and closed her eyes. Jude lay down on the bed beside her. He felt her reach for his hand and he slid it to her. He turned off the side lamp and looked up at the ceiling. He knew that God had used dreams to speak to Alex in the past. He remembered her ‘Clapham Junction’ dream when she came to faith, but what did this one mean? Did it mean anything at all? How on earth was he to know? When he fell asleep, before Alex, sometime around 5am, the dawn light had crept into the room.
From Chapter 27
Shpetim fastened the buttons of his white shirt, took his mobile phone and a slate grey suit jacket, and left the house immediately after Jude’s phone call. It was now urgent, he felt, to find and confront this Sheref Dushman. In a town of 30,000 people, he knew he could locate him given time, maybe not too much, unless he chanced upon him quickly. He decided he would check out the three main hotels, though he knew there were dozens more and some that didn’t even sign in their guests. He made some calls to local contacts. Then he walked repeatedly between Shënomadh County Police Directorate and the high street watching.
At 10.55am he took a phone call from his SHISH director ordering him to return to operations monitoring the civil disturbances. He rubbed his temples lightly with his thumb and middle finger. The consequences for him if he delayed would be very serious. He walked out into the centre of the high street and looked both ways searching. His phone vibrated in his hand. He took the call.
“Alo,” a man shouted. “Bledi Shehu jam. You came yesterday? My grandmother just told me. She’s not as she was… her legs, her ears, her head… you know.”
“Bledi… police. You brought a man up from the border on Tuesday morning. Where did you drop him?”
“Po. By the hotels on Rruga e Gështenjave… what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. I’ll be in touch.” Shpetim hung up. He looked down the high street to the top of the avenue of horse chestnut trees around 200 metres away. He began to jog towards it.
He turned the corner and ran on until he came to the side street. A woman in a white cleaner’s jacket sat on a chair outside the first hotel. He took out the folded print out with an enlarged, grainy passport photo of Sheref on it and showed it to her.
“I’m looking for this man. Have you seen him?” he said authoritatively.
“Yes… he checked out about two hours ago.”
“How did he seem to you?”
“He paid his bill… what can I say?” she shrugged. She smoothed back her tight, purple-black hair considering something. “He had strange eyes, though… when he took his sunglasses off… cold, cloudy… huh, like a fish left too long out of the water.” Shpetim stood thinking as he stared at her. She began to shuffle uneasily. Maybe he had just moved on to another town, he thought. Or maybe this is his final day?
He spun on the ball of his foot and walked back onto the avenue. He began to walk quickly past the trees as a wind started to churn their leaves. A shower of chestnuts drummed down onto the tarmac scattering as he crossed over. He jogged past the sliding doors of Banka Alpha where an LCD clock read 11.30 am. He lifted his phone to his ear and pressed a speed-dial option.
“Luan, can you get over to May 5th Street, Jude’s block,” he said. “Yes… I know Burim’s got the Mercedes!” He slung his jacket over his shoulder and the holstered pistol wrapped inside it thudded into his back as he moved. He jogged along the pavement of the main road clipping a café chair with his hip knocking it over. He stopped and ran back to pick it up apologising to an angry waiter. He jogged quicker now breaking into a run along the edge of the road.
Copyright Paul Alkazraji. Highland Books Ltd. 2012. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Silencer-...
Taken from:
'The Silencer' Reviewed
The Silencer by Paul AlkazrajiMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
They said...
‘Paul Alkazraji's novel conveys a vivid and atmospheric impression of life in the Balkans. His characters are believable and real, some of them loveable and slightly eccentric. This is a thriller in the old style, building up a picture with skill and dexterity, and as the plot becomes tense towards the end of the book, it is a real page-turner. Highly recommended!!’
Grace Turner. Author of ‘The Kings Gold’, Monarch Books.
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Great holiday read
‘I enjoyed this read while taking time out; it was easy to recognize the Balkan attitudes, the dangers in that area of the world, and the fundamentalist mindset. A great read for a journey or the beach, with a tea or a Raki.’
Ian Loring, subject of ‘Christ and the Kalashnikov’, Zondervan. Amazon.co.uk
---
Great story by a master creator of images
‘The Silencer does a wonderful job of bringing to life the culture, climate and topography of the Balkans, especially Turkey, Greece and Albania. I've been living in the Balkans myself for 24 years and I instantly recognized the place descriptions in Paul's book. And it's not a bad tale, either. Paul gives an excellent portrayal of Albanian culture, both its positive and negative aspects. He tells an inspiring story of selflessness, sacrifice, and love overcoming evil. Highly recommended.’
Dan Truitt. Amazon.co.uk
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A gripping read from start to finish
‘The Silencer is a gripping, edge-of-your-seat thriller set in Albania and Turkey. It captures the atmosphere and characters of Albania very well, and the plot carries you along at a great pace. Full of suspense, I found it hard to put the book down. I rarely read books more than once but am about to read The Silencer again!’
Andrew Avramenko. Amazon.co.uk
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‘Portraying faith in fiction is a major challenge. Believers tend to do it badly, and unbelievers find it hard to believe in! But faith is a huge part of life for millions of people... why shouldn't it surface in good-quality fiction? Paul Alkazraji's 'The silencer' is an excellent example of a whole new genre: stories that take faith seriously without seeking overtly to 'convert'. Faith-based without being faith-biased, The Silencer is a fast-moving tale that beautifully captures the landscapes and cultures of Albania. This is an author who has found a new home; has fallen in love with it, and is not afraid to let that love shape his writing. The book offers particular insight into the small but growing Albanian evangelical community: a faith-group that was officially non-existent until the Iron Curtain came down. The attempt to grow church in the nation once declared as the world's first fully atheist state; the pressures of corruption and opposition; the raw beauty of the place and its people - these are the threads that weave together to form this intriguing tale.’ This review also appears on my blog, lovethewords.com
Gerard Kelly, author.
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A very Albanian murder
A Christian novel to be enjoyed at your leisure! This is a ‘who-dun-it’ set in Albania, and while the characters and the intrigue are completely fictional it is not difficult to understand how they could be so real in the political climate of the area. The blurb states that ‘mission is no Christian monopoly’ and as the story unfolds we see the ‘political’ and fanatical groups that endanger the work of the gospel today. A good, easy read for the lengthening evenings or a good stocking filler if this is the genre of books that you enjoy!
Val Maidstone, pastor’s wife from Dorking. Evangelicals Now, UK. November 2013.
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‘The book is a fitting tribute to Berti (Dosti)... and thousands of other brave Albanian Christians whose testimonies helped the Church survive a difficult rebirth...” “...keeps the reader on a knife-edge until the final page.’
John Butterworth. Author of ‘God's Secret Listener’ reviewing for ‘Inspire’ UK.
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A clear picture of the struggles, joys, and areas for prayer facing all missionaries…
‘First of all, let me say that if I was a missionary in Albania, I would want every one of my friends, family and supporters to read this book. It gives a clear picture of the struggles, joys, and areas for prayer facing all missionaries living and working with Albanians. It's done in an honest, but not sappy or overly-spiritualizing way, and I was so pleased to see such an excellent treatment of the realities of life there. It's given me new avenues for prayer. Well done.
We worked and lived in Eastern Europe and Russia for some years, so I'm familiar with a lot of the issues presented in the book. I love that it's fiction, so no one is 'implicated'. Yet, it gives the picture very clearly and without bias.’
Name withheld.
All photos. Peter Wilson.
View all my reviews
New by Paul Alkazraji.
Q and A with author Paul Alkazraji
‘The Silencer’ – Turmoil in Turkey and a ‘lone wolf’ who sets out across the Balkans for a strike on a foreign target…
What inspired you to write this story?
I’d had the idea of writing a thriller with a ‘slowly approaching danger’ for some years, but when I read into recent incidents of the persecution of the church in the nearby country of Turkey, it anchored the story in that context more. I began to feel in a new way that there were people not dissimilar to myself close by facing grave dangers. The book gives some account of events there, but I think it is a story that could have come similarly from numerous other countries too. Then I set about looking at how the main character and others around him might deal with facing such frightening realities emotionally and spiritually.
Where does the story begin?
The opening scene on a taxi van (a ‘furgon’) coming over the spectacular Qafë Krrabë road, which climbs into the mountains south of Tirana, Albania, was the first piece of the story I had in place in my head. It is a thrilling route to travel, but preferably in safe driving hands. The manner of driving in the scene is not exaggerated for effect and I’m not alone in having been through some of those white-knuckle experiences written for the protagonist Jude. Though, to be fair I think the general physical condition of many ‘furgons’ has improved in recent years... if not the driving.
What are its themes?
Justice is a main theme of the story, and how when people prosecute their own notions of it, how wide of the mark that frequently falls. In one scene before Jude leads a discussion in class about justice in the French Revolution, two neighbours argue in a nearby apartment block, and one throws dirty water down, but it falls on passers-by, and this is how it is. In the story the Leeds United FC fans’ vengeance catches Sheref, who is not even Galatasaray, he’s Fenerbace... and Sheref’s vengeance falls... well, you’ll need to read it to find out.
Did you make the antagonist’s journey?
Yes, but during the field research I discovered that the ‘Friendship Express’ service between Istanbul and Thessaloniki had stopped altogether just a month before I wanted to get on it. So I had to work out an alternative way of experiencing the journey Sheref makes. My wife and I found a coach trip for Istanbul from Albania on Women’s Day 2011, and travelled roughly along the same route through the night, at times parallel to the railway lines. The excursion degenerated into chaos in Istanbul as the passengers complained and demanded their own personal itineraries be met, and the organisers, who had had enough of them, dumped them all in fatigue. Caught in the middle of it, we ended up locked inside the coach for over two hours. But that said, I was still able to do what I had set out to. I would have loved to have taken the train. As an aside, it is the first section of the route James Bond travels with Tatiana Romanova and the ‘Spectre’ machine in Fleming’s ‘From Russia with Love’.
Are some of characters based on real people?
There are shades of people that I have met and known, but no real people wholesale: they are imaginary concoctions. Though, that said, Jack and Flori Moshohori, the Albanian border guard, come close. The back-story of hard-man Mehmed Krasnichi is loosely-based on the life of someone I have met in Albania, though it is not a true telling of it. It has fictional additions and elaborations, a different physical description, and shouldn’t be taken as accurate at all. In common with other writers, many of the characters are given names that fit them. To mention a few, the goatherd boy in Jude’s class, ‘Liridon’ means, ‘longing for freedom’, and the Turks ‘Gazi’ which means ‘wounded veteran’, and centrally, ‘Sheref Dushman’, which means ‘honour/pride’: ‘the enemy’. There was an Albanian tribe by the name of ‘Dushman’ too.
Have you a favourite minor character?
The minor player of Defrim, a driver with an excess of gizmos on his dashboard, typifies those surprising connections you can find with people when you are travelling. In the back of beyond, you chance upon someone with whom you share absurd things in common. In this instance Defrim is an improbable enthusiast for the 80’s synth-pop act ‘The Human League’. He is also someone for whom Providence has a role in a greater story unfolding all around him.
Where did you learn about the pistol in the epilogue?
Among the many tiles that were brainstormed for the book was ‘The Tokarev Falls’, the reason for which I think is apparent in the epilogue. The operation of the Tokarev TT pistol, standard Albanian Police issue, is correctly described there, and was shown to me by a relative who is licensed to hold one. He dismantled his quickly and set the oily pieces out on my desk inviting me to reassemble it, and I stared blankly at it. He then quickly clipped it all back together, waved it under my nose, and offered it to me to handle. He left me three copper-coloured bullets in my pencil holder as souvenirs.
Can we guess the ending?
I hope that as the plot unfolds there is a sense of events not being pre-determined, and of how in the midst them outcomes can turn on prayer.
Video trailer on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/51611355
Amazon UK reviews: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Silencer-...
‘Albania ‘96: sweet, sad, surreal...’ Book review by Paul Alkazraji.
Lake Pogradec by the ‘not quite so accursed mountains’ of south east Albania, scene of the now famous ‘fish restaurant stitch-up' incident. Pic. A. LaSavio.
In the pocket of his increasingly tatty travel trousers Robert Carver carried an impressive business card during his 1996 passage through Albania: it said ‘Freelance BBC Broadcaster - author - film-maker’ (in 7 languages) to establish his credentials where necessary. ‘The Accursed Mountains’ is his fabulous account of the country post-communism and pre-anarchy of 1997. It is a personal travelogue with rich seams of the land’s history running through it.
Having lived in Albania myself for a decade, it is with some self-reproach that I took so long to arrive at reading it. Carver’s observations are highly insightful about the culture, funny and at times painfully déjà vu to read, like how, as a foreigner, he got financially skinned at a fish restaurant on Lake Pogradec... poor man. He writes poignantly of one refugee being evicted off a bus near Leskovik and left at the roadside ‘staring at us as if at a passing lifeboat in mid-Atlantic’. He records a Greek taxi-driver’s description of Albania as: “...just like Greece used to be after the civil war. No cars, much poverty, broken houses, donkeys and mules, no work, but... but...”
“...a sweetness?” suggests Carver.
“Yes, a sweetness,” the driver replies. He writes of the whole place resembling the post-war Italy of Vittorio De Sica’s film ‘Bicycle Thieves’, and of the surreal aspects of ‘90s Albania: a brown bear chained up outside a gynaecological clinic in Tirana, and the broken neon lights of ‘Ali Pasha’s Disco-Boogie Club’.
Though at times what he records strikes a relentlessly bleak, even brutal tone, it is nevertheless not unfair: the cruelty in the country’s past; the tragedy in its present; the ruined, shabbiness of everything then were so. Albanians, though, are given occasional voices for a reverse assessment. One woman says of Britain after she had just holidayed there: “Very clean, very rich. But there is no family life and everyone works so much, all the time. And the women are hard, like men, and the men are soft, like women. In England the women are beating the men, I think,” she says. His respect for the missionaries who helped him around the remoter north comes through, despite the insinuation that two of them in Bajram Curri, ‘the Dodge City’ of northern Albania, were probably CIA agents.
The postscript ‘where are they now’ raises an ache to know that the cast of characters Carver met were okay, that they made it out of the ensuing chaos of ’97 alive. Some of them didn’t. His mountain guide, Major-Doctor Bajraktar, was ambushed and murdered whilst gun-running for the KLA. And what really happened to ‘Natasha of the nomenclature’ in the UK? It was with some delight that one central character was discretely pointed out to me, alive and well in August 2013, just a few feet away in a crowd. “No... it can’t be him... is it really?” I said. “Yes,” my confidant assured me, “That’s him.”
This is a vivid and perceptive travel narrative from an erudite writer who wowed me with his capacity to repeatedly nail things so well. It holds its own with the works he refers to, Edith Durham’s ‘High Albania’ and Julian Amery’s ‘Sons of the Eagle’, on the top shelf of British sojourners in the country.
The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania
A book by the reviewer set in Albania:
New excerpts from 'The Silencer' (2).
Chapter 19
(Thessaloniki to Kastoria).
The coach’s hydraulic brakes let out stuttering hisses
to accompany the high beeps of its reversing alarm.
Sheref watched the silver dome of the Macedonia
Coach Terminal glint in the sun and slip away on
his right behind him. The ‘KTEL’ ticket office there
had informed him that the journey to Kastoria in
northwest Greece would take around four hours.
He knew that it would then be only a short taxi
ride to the nearby Albanian border. He reflected
momentarily on the morning. He had woken just
after 7.00am, paid cash and collected his passport
from the Hotel Persephone receptionist: she with
the cherry lipstick, who had again maddeningly
avoided eye contact with him. He had then waved
down a dark blue Mercedes taxi on Monastiriou
Street for the short drive to the terminal. He checked
his watch: it read 9.06am, Sunday, August 24th. The
coach was half full with passengers, all Greeks he
thought, and he had taken a seat over the rear left
wheel arch with no one immediately to his front or
right for removal from close contact with them. The
sun was already burning the left side of his head. He
drew the pleated orange curtain halfway across the
window for shade, and to psychologically fortify his
private enclosure.
Sheref took out the road map and guidebook
from his backpack and tossed them on the empty
seat beside him. The coach began to accelerate past
tall cranes angled in the city’s port before the hazy
blue Gulf of Thermi, and billboards for concerts with
silver-moustached musicians, before filtering onto
the Via Egnatia Motorway. He slunk a little lower in
the seat and watched the oncoming flow of traffic to
his left.
A stretch of water flashed by below the roadside
fence and he checked his map. It was probably the
River Axios Vardaris, he thought. The coach shortly
began to slow and he sat up to peer forwards. Lanes
of traffic were queuing ahead into a wide row of
booths. Above them was a line of blue signs, each
with a white outline of a man wearing a flat-topped,
peaked cap like a French gendarme. He felt his
backpack pockets hastily to locate his passport. He
hunched his shoulders around himself a little and
pressed his fingers into the palms of his hands. As
the traffic edged closer to the row of rising and
falling barriers, he reassured himself that it was just
a road toll station. As they passed through, on the
right side there were parked lorries, and Kantina
vans smoking from griddle meat with chairs set
out on decks for customers. A Greek policeman
slouched on the front wing of his white car drinking
from a polystyrene cup. He rose and lifted his
mobile phone to his ear closely watching the coach
pass. When Sheref released his clench, rows of white
dimples were imprinted on his palms.
He took a gulp of mineral water from a small,
plastic bottle and splashed some over his face to
ease the heat. He ran his finger and thumb around
the edges of his top lip to clear off the sweat. He
watched the bushes blooming with pink flowers in
the lay-bys pass, and soon he was looking out across
orchards of peach trees dotted with the pulsing
sprays of water sprinklers. Away to the south, above
lower slopes darkened by forest, a high ridge of
jagged peaks rose up still tipped with snow. That,
I think, must be Mount Olympus, he observed
flicking through his guidebook: Greece’s highest
mountain, chosen by the ancients as the abode of
their gods, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades. A pang of
yearning seemed to escape from some cavern deep
within him. His thoughts moved to Hanife and her
submission to the religion of his land, but he? Who
did he follow? Well, he had his path now with its
own motion and trajectory. Where was that coffee
shop hag’s guide: remote with Zeus, or with him?
“Haydi!” he whispered. She’d cheated him of two
good lira and laughed at his back! He took out his
camera, pointed it roughly at Olympus, and pressed
the shutter button a few times. He circled it with a
pen in the book. He glanced over the nearby entry
for the Royal Tombs of Vergina, the first capital of
Macedon, thought to house the remains of Alexander
the Great’s son, and where King Philip II was
assassinated. He circled that too for good measure.
He noticed a road sign for the town of Veria pass
on his right, and then the motorway began to climb.
The coach’s engine growled against the incline and
they passed into the shade of a road tunnel and then
another one. When they entered the third one he
began keeping count. His eyes passed over the green
lights and arrows above the lanes, the signs to turn
on headlights, and those with the tunnels’ length.
Still they kept coming and he saw that the tenth one
was 2.2km long. Here in the extended darkness he
watched the wall lights, white on his left and red
on his right, streaming past. Fans, like jet turbines,
fastened to the roof, seemed to him to be propelling
him forwards like a bullet down a barrel. Before the
thirteenth tunnel, he saw a sign saying ‘Call 1077 in
an emergency’.
The coach rocked along past a row of unmanned
tollbooths and the motorway began to descend
gradually into a wide, flat valley. They passed
under a line of pylons crossing the plain, their heads
horned and arms hanging at the elbows clutching
cables as they filed towards a distant power station.
He stared ahead. There detachments of them converged
to fetch and carry electricity. High red and
white striped chimneys rose among them, and from
a cooling tower a cloud of steam arched into the sky
like a giant question mark.
A rocky outcrop with a pinnacle like some
straying child below it passed by close to the motorway’s
edge, and soon it swept through a pass in a
range of hills running left to right. As the driver drew
off the slip road at Siatista, a squat factory chimney
made of bricks caught his eye. He checked the time: it
was just before mid-day. They now took a main road
that wound through woods and open country with
mountains, dry, brown and bare, to his right, and
hills lower and undulating to his left. He thought
he felt something like the brushing of silk pass over
the skin of his right arm. He touched it. Road works
and yellow earthmoving vehicles parked by a wide,
empty stretch of pristine tarmac came into view. A
strange new lightness of heart had come over him.
It was a feeling of wellbeing, an inner warmth not
sensed since childhood. He became aware that he
had been feeling like this for perhaps ten minutes.
He turned to see a man sitting in the aisle seat
on his right. His arms flinched slightly into his chest
with the shock. How long had he been sitting there?
How could it be that he had not seen nor heard him
come? The man was staring straight ahead and did
not look back at him. He wore a plain white T-shirt
and light fawn trousers. His black hair flowed onto
his shoulders thick and fragrant with a sweet aroma
that Sheref now breathed in. He found himself
staring at the man’s face: a strong and shapely nose
and eyes with a beauty that was almost feminine.
His nationality was not apparent: Greek, Turk or
Albanian, nor his age. Then he thought he heard the
words: “Go back to your father.” A feeling of cool
air being blown onto his cheek made him touch it.
He lifted his head to check the air-con valve but it
was off. As he did so it was as if he rose outside of
himself. Questions about what he was undertaking
seemed suddenly to touch him. Where am I going?
What is this I’m doing? Light, like the reflection of
the sun flashing off a mirror or window, caught his
eyes and dazzled him momentarily. He covered
them with his hand and then removed it. He turned
his head again to the man. He was no longer there.
He yanked himself up by the seat in front to see if
he was moving down the coach. There was no one
in the aisle.
He saw a sign with ‘Kastoria’ written on it, and
soon the road was skirting the shore of a lake on his
right-hand side. A couple of smart hotels passed by
and a warehouse with an illuminated sign above it
where a model pressed a thick fur coat to her neck.
Through gaps in the buildings he caught glimpses
across greeny-blue water to a peninsular of land with
white houses stacked up its steep sides. He scanned
the guidebook entry for the town. Kastori was Greek
for beaver, once central to the local fur trade. He
took out a pen but somehow did not follow through
in circling it.
The coach pulled up in a car park by a taxi
rank and a row of quiet shops and cafes. He looked
keenly for the man with the feminine eyes as he
disembarked, but he did not see him. He bought some
pastries from a baker’s and ate them as he stared
across a children’s playground to the lake. A couple
of swans skimmed over the water’s surface as they
landed by a patch of reeds. Wooden rowing boats
bobbed at their moorings there, one striped with the
blue and white colours of the Greek flag, with green
fishing nets draped across them.
Sheref walked to a cafe and sat in the shade of its
canopy on a low, leather sofa. The waiter set down a
bottle of mineral water, cool with condensation, on
the glass coffee table before him and he ordered an
iced latte. His mind kept returning to the man on
the bus. An odd, yet pleasant, bemusement lingered
from the incident that he was trying to process. He
took out his mobile phone and turned it on. He then
fiddled with it a little; the back light was now flickering
and the 7 button was functioning only intermittently.
He shook it and tapped it. Why had he not
fixed it? The latte was brought and he sipped it a
little and drank a glass of water. His phone began
to vibrate, rattling loudly on the coffee table glass.
It was Hanife! He looked at it for a few seconds and
then picked it up.
“Sheref! Where are you?” he heard her say anxiously.
“Why was your phone off? I’ve been trying to call you!”
“I’m in Greece…” An answer came to him: “You
know what roaming rates are like!”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m just drinking a coffee. There’s a… nice lake
here.”
“Don’t be angry with me… I told baba that you
were going to Albania.”
“Why did you do that?” he shouted curtly.
“He’s here.”
“What? No I don’t want to...”
“Sheref?” The sound of his father’s voice made
him screw up his eyes tightly. He’d said his name
softly, without accusation or reproach, for the first
time in so long. Sheref lowered the phone to his
chest for a moment. He swallowed. A tear welled
up and it fell with a ‘pat’ onto his thigh. He could
hear his father saying his name repeatedly, anxious
they’d been cut off.
“Yes?”
“I have… this fine new samovar… at the Bazaar.
It makes good tea… that is to say… when you have
seen those Arnavutlar.” Sheref understood what he
was trying to say.
“Yes baba,” he said. A few moments of silence
passed and Sheref pressed the red button to end the
call. He lowered his head and his shoulders shook as
he sobbed. He brushed his cheeks quickly with his
fingers, checked the receipt, and left his unfinished
latte and three euros on the table.
He walked over a patch of dry grassy ground and
then across a road to a pavement along the water’s
edge. He followed it thinking. The trees by the shore
had been painted with skirts of whitewash. There
were more cafes here with their tables arranged
under the shade of canopies, mobiles tingling above
them in the mild breeze. He passed a small boy with
a face smeared with pink ice cream rocking happily
on a child’s ride. White, timbered mansions rose
up the hillside on his left, and conifer trees clung to
the rocky hillsides around. He sat down on a bench
affected by the peace of the place. There he watched
a man casting his rod and line out across the water
and he thought of the Galata Bridge and the waters
of the Golden Horn. The high, afternoon sun blazed
off the surface, and a white sail turned slowly in
the shimmering glare and moved back towards
land. He had made a decision. He would stay here
tonight. Tomorrow, yes, let it be so, he would return
to Istanbul.
Paul Alkazraji.
Copyright Paul Alkazraji. Highland Books Ltd. 2012. All Rights Reserved.
Find ‘The Silencer’ on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...
Also by this author.
(Thessaloniki to Kastoria).
The coach’s hydraulic brakes let out stuttering hisses
to accompany the high beeps of its reversing alarm.
Sheref watched the silver dome of the Macedonia
Coach Terminal glint in the sun and slip away on
his right behind him. The ‘KTEL’ ticket office there
had informed him that the journey to Kastoria in
northwest Greece would take around four hours.
He knew that it would then be only a short taxi
ride to the nearby Albanian border. He reflected
momentarily on the morning. He had woken just
after 7.00am, paid cash and collected his passport
from the Hotel Persephone receptionist: she with
the cherry lipstick, who had again maddeningly
avoided eye contact with him. He had then waved
down a dark blue Mercedes taxi on Monastiriou
Street for the short drive to the terminal. He checked
his watch: it read 9.06am, Sunday, August 24th. The
coach was half full with passengers, all Greeks he
thought, and he had taken a seat over the rear left
wheel arch with no one immediately to his front or
right for removal from close contact with them. The
sun was already burning the left side of his head. He
drew the pleated orange curtain halfway across the
window for shade, and to psychologically fortify his
private enclosure.
Sheref took out the road map and guidebook
from his backpack and tossed them on the empty
seat beside him. The coach began to accelerate past
tall cranes angled in the city’s port before the hazy
blue Gulf of Thermi, and billboards for concerts with
silver-moustached musicians, before filtering onto
the Via Egnatia Motorway. He slunk a little lower in
the seat and watched the oncoming flow of traffic to
his left.
A stretch of water flashed by below the roadside
fence and he checked his map. It was probably the
River Axios Vardaris, he thought. The coach shortly
began to slow and he sat up to peer forwards. Lanes
of traffic were queuing ahead into a wide row of
booths. Above them was a line of blue signs, each
with a white outline of a man wearing a flat-topped,
peaked cap like a French gendarme. He felt his
backpack pockets hastily to locate his passport. He
hunched his shoulders around himself a little and
pressed his fingers into the palms of his hands. As
the traffic edged closer to the row of rising and
falling barriers, he reassured himself that it was just
a road toll station. As they passed through, on the
right side there were parked lorries, and Kantina
vans smoking from griddle meat with chairs set
out on decks for customers. A Greek policeman
slouched on the front wing of his white car drinking
from a polystyrene cup. He rose and lifted his
mobile phone to his ear closely watching the coach
pass. When Sheref released his clench, rows of white
dimples were imprinted on his palms.
He took a gulp of mineral water from a small,
plastic bottle and splashed some over his face to
ease the heat. He ran his finger and thumb around
the edges of his top lip to clear off the sweat. He
watched the bushes blooming with pink flowers in
the lay-bys pass, and soon he was looking out across
orchards of peach trees dotted with the pulsing
sprays of water sprinklers. Away to the south, above
lower slopes darkened by forest, a high ridge of
jagged peaks rose up still tipped with snow. That,
I think, must be Mount Olympus, he observed
flicking through his guidebook: Greece’s highest
mountain, chosen by the ancients as the abode of
their gods, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades. A pang of
yearning seemed to escape from some cavern deep
within him. His thoughts moved to Hanife and her
submission to the religion of his land, but he? Who
did he follow? Well, he had his path now with its
own motion and trajectory. Where was that coffee
shop hag’s guide: remote with Zeus, or with him?
“Haydi!” he whispered. She’d cheated him of two
good lira and laughed at his back! He took out his
camera, pointed it roughly at Olympus, and pressed
the shutter button a few times. He circled it with a
pen in the book. He glanced over the nearby entry
for the Royal Tombs of Vergina, the first capital of
Macedon, thought to house the remains of Alexander
the Great’s son, and where King Philip II was
assassinated. He circled that too for good measure.
He noticed a road sign for the town of Veria pass
on his right, and then the motorway began to climb.
The coach’s engine growled against the incline and
they passed into the shade of a road tunnel and then
another one. When they entered the third one he
began keeping count. His eyes passed over the green
lights and arrows above the lanes, the signs to turn
on headlights, and those with the tunnels’ length.
Still they kept coming and he saw that the tenth one
was 2.2km long. Here in the extended darkness he
watched the wall lights, white on his left and red
on his right, streaming past. Fans, like jet turbines,
fastened to the roof, seemed to him to be propelling
him forwards like a bullet down a barrel. Before the
thirteenth tunnel, he saw a sign saying ‘Call 1077 in
an emergency’.
The coach rocked along past a row of unmanned
tollbooths and the motorway began to descend
gradually into a wide, flat valley. They passed
under a line of pylons crossing the plain, their heads
horned and arms hanging at the elbows clutching
cables as they filed towards a distant power station.
He stared ahead. There detachments of them converged
to fetch and carry electricity. High red and
white striped chimneys rose among them, and from
a cooling tower a cloud of steam arched into the sky
like a giant question mark.
A rocky outcrop with a pinnacle like some
straying child below it passed by close to the motorway’s
edge, and soon it swept through a pass in a
range of hills running left to right. As the driver drew
off the slip road at Siatista, a squat factory chimney
made of bricks caught his eye. He checked the time: it
was just before mid-day. They now took a main road
that wound through woods and open country with
mountains, dry, brown and bare, to his right, and
hills lower and undulating to his left. He thought
he felt something like the brushing of silk pass over
the skin of his right arm. He touched it. Road works
and yellow earthmoving vehicles parked by a wide,
empty stretch of pristine tarmac came into view. A
strange new lightness of heart had come over him.
It was a feeling of wellbeing, an inner warmth not
sensed since childhood. He became aware that he
had been feeling like this for perhaps ten minutes.
He turned to see a man sitting in the aisle seat
on his right. His arms flinched slightly into his chest
with the shock. How long had he been sitting there?
How could it be that he had not seen nor heard him
come? The man was staring straight ahead and did
not look back at him. He wore a plain white T-shirt
and light fawn trousers. His black hair flowed onto
his shoulders thick and fragrant with a sweet aroma
that Sheref now breathed in. He found himself
staring at the man’s face: a strong and shapely nose
and eyes with a beauty that was almost feminine.
His nationality was not apparent: Greek, Turk or
Albanian, nor his age. Then he thought he heard the
words: “Go back to your father.” A feeling of cool
air being blown onto his cheek made him touch it.
He lifted his head to check the air-con valve but it
was off. As he did so it was as if he rose outside of
himself. Questions about what he was undertaking
seemed suddenly to touch him. Where am I going?
What is this I’m doing? Light, like the reflection of
the sun flashing off a mirror or window, caught his
eyes and dazzled him momentarily. He covered
them with his hand and then removed it. He turned
his head again to the man. He was no longer there.
He yanked himself up by the seat in front to see if
he was moving down the coach. There was no one
in the aisle.
He saw a sign with ‘Kastoria’ written on it, and
soon the road was skirting the shore of a lake on his
right-hand side. A couple of smart hotels passed by
and a warehouse with an illuminated sign above it
where a model pressed a thick fur coat to her neck.
Through gaps in the buildings he caught glimpses
across greeny-blue water to a peninsular of land with
white houses stacked up its steep sides. He scanned
the guidebook entry for the town. Kastori was Greek
for beaver, once central to the local fur trade. He
took out a pen but somehow did not follow through
in circling it.
The coach pulled up in a car park by a taxi
rank and a row of quiet shops and cafes. He looked
keenly for the man with the feminine eyes as he
disembarked, but he did not see him. He bought some
pastries from a baker’s and ate them as he stared
across a children’s playground to the lake. A couple
of swans skimmed over the water’s surface as they
landed by a patch of reeds. Wooden rowing boats
bobbed at their moorings there, one striped with the
blue and white colours of the Greek flag, with green
fishing nets draped across them.
Sheref walked to a cafe and sat in the shade of its
canopy on a low, leather sofa. The waiter set down a
bottle of mineral water, cool with condensation, on
the glass coffee table before him and he ordered an
iced latte. His mind kept returning to the man on
the bus. An odd, yet pleasant, bemusement lingered
from the incident that he was trying to process. He
took out his mobile phone and turned it on. He then
fiddled with it a little; the back light was now flickering
and the 7 button was functioning only intermittently.
He shook it and tapped it. Why had he not
fixed it? The latte was brought and he sipped it a
little and drank a glass of water. His phone began
to vibrate, rattling loudly on the coffee table glass.
It was Hanife! He looked at it for a few seconds and
then picked it up.
“Sheref! Where are you?” he heard her say anxiously.
“Why was your phone off? I’ve been trying to call you!”
“I’m in Greece…” An answer came to him: “You
know what roaming rates are like!”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m just drinking a coffee. There’s a… nice lake
here.”
“Don’t be angry with me… I told baba that you
were going to Albania.”
“Why did you do that?” he shouted curtly.
“He’s here.”
“What? No I don’t want to...”
“Sheref?” The sound of his father’s voice made
him screw up his eyes tightly. He’d said his name
softly, without accusation or reproach, for the first
time in so long. Sheref lowered the phone to his
chest for a moment. He swallowed. A tear welled
up and it fell with a ‘pat’ onto his thigh. He could
hear his father saying his name repeatedly, anxious
they’d been cut off.
“Yes?”
“I have… this fine new samovar… at the Bazaar.
It makes good tea… that is to say… when you have
seen those Arnavutlar.” Sheref understood what he
was trying to say.
“Yes baba,” he said. A few moments of silence
passed and Sheref pressed the red button to end the
call. He lowered his head and his shoulders shook as
he sobbed. He brushed his cheeks quickly with his
fingers, checked the receipt, and left his unfinished
latte and three euros on the table.
He walked over a patch of dry grassy ground and
then across a road to a pavement along the water’s
edge. He followed it thinking. The trees by the shore
had been painted with skirts of whitewash. There
were more cafes here with their tables arranged
under the shade of canopies, mobiles tingling above
them in the mild breeze. He passed a small boy with
a face smeared with pink ice cream rocking happily
on a child’s ride. White, timbered mansions rose
up the hillside on his left, and conifer trees clung to
the rocky hillsides around. He sat down on a bench
affected by the peace of the place. There he watched
a man casting his rod and line out across the water
and he thought of the Galata Bridge and the waters
of the Golden Horn. The high, afternoon sun blazed
off the surface, and a white sail turned slowly in
the shimmering glare and moved back towards
land. He had made a decision. He would stay here
tonight. Tomorrow, yes, let it be so, he would return
to Istanbul.
Paul Alkazraji.
Copyright Paul Alkazraji. Highland Books Ltd. 2012. All Rights Reserved.
Find ‘The Silencer’ on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...
Also by this author.
New excerpts from 'The Silencer'.
Chapter 10
Photos. Peter Wilson.
Outside the Blue Café under the shade of a silver
birch tree Jude sat with Shpetim Gurbardhi watching
the passers by on the high street. A horse cantered
past pulling a cart piled high with rattling plastic
kitchenware, buckets and brushes, and two gypsy
girls sitting with their legs dangling off the back. A
white car with four young men slunk low drove by,
the windows wound down to protect them surely,
he thought, from the Greek bouzouki music they’d
amplified to a glass-shattering level. At a nearby
table was a man with a grey bandit’s moustache and
a dark beret. He looks like he’s walked out of the
pages of history to join his comrades for a coffee,
before hitching on his bullet belt and heading back
to some Partisan mountain base, he thought.
Shpetim balanced his slim, chromed mobile
phone on the marble table and slid his fingers down
the edges before flipping it over. He held it like it was
a thing of wondrous value, which he kept checking
he still actually possessed.
“How much did your sunglasses cost you?” said
Shpetim as they waited for their coffees.
“I don’t remember… maybe £10,” said Jude.
“I can get you a pair the next time I go back to
England.” Shpetim grinned. “Did you try the Earl
Grey tea I gave you?”
“To be truthful, I liked the box,” he said with an
apologetic look. “But the tea tasted of… cologne.”
He reached behind him to his suit jacket hung on the
chair back and took out a sprig of dried, green plants
wrapped in a blue plastic bag. “My mother sent you
this. It’s çaj mali, mountain tea.”
“It looks like something you’ve confiscated,”
said Jude.
“Jude!” he said smiling through a look of reproof.
He then leant closer. “There is a village near here
which produces cannabis… it’s like a plantation.
Most of the residents are involved. So, we had to
put a stop to it. Last year, the police approached it.
The problem was the villagers had posted a sentry…
a ninety-year-old woman with a semi-automatic
weapon. What could we do? Send in the Special
Forces? There would have been an outcry!”
“You should have sent in your grandad, Petrit.
She might have been an old Partisan flame of his.
That would have disarmed her,” said Jude. Shpetim
laughed. His phone rang. It was still set on Lionel
Richie. He stood up and walked a couple of paces
away from the table, then spun around on the ball
of his right foot. Jude watched him as Shpetim fixed
his eyes on a detail of mottling in the table’s white
marble surface. His eyes were clear and set as it
seemed information and calculations sped through
his mind as he listened. He then quietly issued a
series of terse instructions. At one point, when it
appeared he was being countermanded, he drew
his hand towards his chest with fingers and thumb
pinched tightly together, and then splayed them out
in emphasis. He sat down with a dour face.
“Ah, Shqipëria!” he said dropping his head.
“Albania will never become Albania with Albanians
in it!” He glanced at Jude. “Don’t ask.” Fredi the
waiter brought two macchiatos in their blue cups
and set them down on the table.
“Pizza,” Shpetim said to him. Jude nodded
quickly to Fredi so as not to draw him in. “I couldn’t
have borne this work without God Jude… the things
we deal with. I thank Him that people like you came
here.”
“Was it through the children’s group… that you
came in to the church?”
“My parents sent me for the free gifts, what can
I say?” he grinned. “As I stayed, though, the Bible
studies just kind of sank in, until they took root and
meant something.” The lines on his forehead became
less angular. His thick eyebrows straightened. It
seemed to Jude that the light of the world flickered
through his eyes. “And you, was it because of what
happened with your mother?” Jude put a spoon of
sugar in his coffee and stirred.
“Well, things seemed very bleak and broken
after mum died, for sure,” he said. “Then when I got
to university… some of the literature I was reading
didn’t help. I went to the student parties… I liked
them for a while. There was someone special too
that I liked. I thought I could believe in her… but
one night I stumbled upon her at a party with a
university lecturer. There was a whole group of them
sprawled on the floor drunk. It just intensified my
sense of the sham, the corruption of life… in contrast
to the high academic ideals. Do you know what I
mean?”
“Jude. I’m an Albanian and you ask me if I
understand corruption!” said Shpetim with a look
of amusement. Jude smiled.
“I was thinking… What is there to admire or
look up to? What is there that is good or true in this
world? I felt whatever it was they were all suffering
from, I was infected with it too… I was no saint.”
Jude spooned up the remaining sugar grains from
the bottom of his cup and stirred again. “I was
traipsing around the streets of York after a party in the
early hours of the morning one time… and I came to
the Low Ousegate Bridge.”
“The one on the playing card?” said Shpetim.
“Yes… the one we will make the match with,”
said Jude staring into his macchiato. “I looked down
at the River Ouse… black and sweeping under the
bridge. I felt dead inside… so I might as well be
dead in body. Thankfully, I’d read one good book at
that time, A Tale of Two Cities. There’s a character in
there, Sydney Carton, who stands by the River Seine
in Paris at dawn and hears the words of Christ. Well,
I remembered them, and they just seemed to penetrate
me in that moment… ‘He who believes in me, though he
were dead, yet shall he live!’
“So you left the bridge?”
“I walked towards the Minster… it’s a big church
there that dominates the skyline… and waited hours
until it opened. Inside, I got down in the aisle and
prayed. I had a wonderful experience there… a touch
of something that welled up warm and enfolding on
all sides… and through me… like a rain shower. I
lay there until a verger told me to get up because I
was disturbing the tourists.” Shpetim was looking at
him curiously, smiling. “Well, that was the moment
my rudder moved, and I began to inch away from
the busy shipping lane where most of the traffic is.
And here I am… twelve years later, at a café table in
your country.” Fredi arrived and put down Shpetim’s
pizza on the table with cutlery and a ketchup
bottle. Shpetim began to cover it with criss-crossing
lines of the red sauce. He looked up and caught Jude
staring.
“Ç’ ke? What?” said Shpetim. Jude tried to feign
an expression of nonchalance. “It is good you are
here, doing what you are,” he said.
“Not everyone sees it that way,” said Jude.
“So, are you worried about the phone call?” said
Shpetim. “Don’t be. People make a lot of threats
here.”
Chapter 18
Jude was alone, lying on the living room sofa with
his sandals off, easing his way into a late Sunday
afternoon nap, when a knock came on the apartment
door. It had a character he did not recognise, but not
only for this reason, some sense beyond hearing
caused the hairs on his forearms to ruffle like a wheat
field in a mild breeze. He looked towards the door.
He rose and trod barefoot, through the room into
the entrance hall. He listened. It seemed unnaturally
quiet. He hesitated. Then he turned the latch and
drew in the door. The lights in the stairwell were
off and it took his eyes some seconds to penetrate
the darkness split by the bar of light he’d let out.
He then made out the form of a tall man’s arm and
shoulder standing in close against the wall to the
side. Jude’s senses came alive. Danger was edging
out of the shadow. He knew it. It’s come, he thought
in the splitting of a second.
The man took two quick steps towards him.
Jude stumbled backwards away from his approach
into his entrance hall. The man strode in after him.
Jude backed into the living room stubbing his bare
heel on a raised edge of floor mat. He thought to
turn and run, but he was trapped. He felt his pocket
for his mobile phone. He’d left it on the coffee table.
The man swiftly closed the door behind him. He
advanced over Jude with his eyes kept closely on
him. They then swept around, to the kitchen, and
through doors left ajar.
“You are alone in the house?” he said tersely,
with, Jude noted instantly, a Kosovar accent.
“My wife will be here any moment… I have
friends who will call me,” said Jude staring back
levelly, but breathing heavily.
“Sit down,” he ordered. Jude complied observing
the man cautiously as he too was being observed.
He had a sallow, clean-shaven face. He was physically
lean and coiled with alertness. He was wearing
a pressed, grey shirt, black trousers and polished,
black slip-on shoes. His eyes were firm, but not
cruel, Jude thought.
“I would like your assistance,” he said briskly.
“There are two ways we can do this. You can give
your co-operation willingly… or there are other
ways.” He placed a hand purposefully by his trouser
waist. Jude could see clearly the L-shaped bulge of
a pistol below the cloth. “I think that we understand
each other.” Jude nodded. The man now stood at
ease like a soldier used to standing to attention.
“The manuscript… I would like to see it,” he said.
“You want… to read it here, or to take a copy?”
“You have a computer, I presume, so open it.”
Jude indicated with his eyes towards the side desk,
stood up slowly, and walked to his laptop. He keyed
in the password, slotted in the USB stick Spiro had
given him after church, and clicked open the file.
“You can relax now,” said the man. “Make some
coffee for yourself if it eases you. If your wife comes,
you will tell her I am a friend of Mehmed’s. Act
wisely now…” He positioned the chair and laptop
so that he could see over the rim of the screen to
observe Jude with ease.
Jude walked cautiously to the kitchen and took
down his Mr Rochester’s Mug from a shelf. He went
through the motions of making a pint of tea to give
himself something to focus on. Where was Alex, he
thought? She’d been out for hours! Maybe it was
better she didn’t return now to disturb this man. He
prayed in the quiet anxiety of his mind that it would
be so, and thought. His heartbeat felt quicker, but
not racing. This man is controlled, not wild, professional,
he reasoned: first the pressure, then the
courtesy. He looked to be scrolling quickly though
the pages, stopping periodically. He seems to know
what he is looking for, thought Jude. If I do as he
says, he will do nothing unreasonable. I’ll be okay
now.
Jude’s mobile phone suddenly made a loud rattle
as it vibrated on the coffee table surface. He looked
at the man. He was watching him. Jude walked over
and glanced at the phone’s screen for the caller’s
ID. It was Spiro. Oh Lord, thought Jude. He lifted it
slowly and pressed the green button to accept.
“Jude. Je mirë? Is everything okay with you?” he
heard Spiro say.
“Yes. Of course it is! I’m relaxing with a cup of
tea, like a true Englishman… Mos ki merak,” he said
trying to add a light-hearted touch.
“Okay then…” said Spiro pausing. “I’ll see you
in the morning then.” Spiro hung up and Jude put
the phone back down on the coffee table.
He now waited silently holding his mug of tea,
though he did not drink any, whilst the man looked
at the computer screen for another thirty minutes.
The man then folded the laptop closed.
“This is the version you propose to publish?” he said.
“Yes. It is finished now.”
“You will take out this name on page 45… and
insert a pseudonym. You will then have no difficulties
with us.” He produced a scrap of paper from his
shirt pocket, wrote down something and placed it on
the desk. He stood up briskly and walked towards
the entrance hall.
“Who are you?” asked Jude gently. The man
sauntered a step, turned and looked at him.
“Tell Mehmed… friends in Prishtina send their
regards.” Jude felt a little emboldened by the man’s
change of body language. He’d got what he’d come for.
“Were you at Edona’s apartment… near the
Bajram Curri Boulevard in Tirana?” He did not say
anything. You were, thought Jude. “Were you…
your people… on the Qafë Krrabë ridge road? Did
you telephone me?”
“I know nothing of these things,” he said. He
then hesitated as if considering something. “The
book… it is… interesting. Others may not take that
view however.”
“What others?” asked Jude. He looked at Jude
with an expression of worldly knowing.
“Mehmed is a man with a long past.”
“He also has a new future,” said Jude.
“In this world?” he said with a cynical glazing
passing over his eyes. “If others permit it…” Jude
then heard men’s voices rising up the stairwell. An
officious knock was hammered on the door.
“Jude? Ke ndonjë hall? Is everything alright?”
shouted Spiro. Jude stared into the entrance hall.
His heart groaned, and his mind flashed through
outcomes of this man’s hand being forced. The man
gave him a look of gunmetal coldness. It said: ‘Don’t
move. Don’t even swallow…’
Paul Alkazraji.
Copyright Paul Alkazraji. Highland Books Ltd. 2012. All Rights Reserved.
Find ‘The Silencer’ on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...
Also by this author.
Photos. Peter Wilson.
Outside the Blue Café under the shade of a silver
birch tree Jude sat with Shpetim Gurbardhi watching
the passers by on the high street. A horse cantered
past pulling a cart piled high with rattling plastic
kitchenware, buckets and brushes, and two gypsy
girls sitting with their legs dangling off the back. A
white car with four young men slunk low drove by,
the windows wound down to protect them surely,
he thought, from the Greek bouzouki music they’d
amplified to a glass-shattering level. At a nearby
table was a man with a grey bandit’s moustache and
a dark beret. He looks like he’s walked out of the
pages of history to join his comrades for a coffee,
before hitching on his bullet belt and heading back
to some Partisan mountain base, he thought.
Shpetim balanced his slim, chromed mobile
phone on the marble table and slid his fingers down
the edges before flipping it over. He held it like it was
a thing of wondrous value, which he kept checking
he still actually possessed.
“How much did your sunglasses cost you?” said
Shpetim as they waited for their coffees.
“I don’t remember… maybe £10,” said Jude.
“I can get you a pair the next time I go back to
England.” Shpetim grinned. “Did you try the Earl
Grey tea I gave you?”
“To be truthful, I liked the box,” he said with an
apologetic look. “But the tea tasted of… cologne.”
He reached behind him to his suit jacket hung on the
chair back and took out a sprig of dried, green plants
wrapped in a blue plastic bag. “My mother sent you
this. It’s çaj mali, mountain tea.”
“It looks like something you’ve confiscated,”
said Jude.
“Jude!” he said smiling through a look of reproof.
He then leant closer. “There is a village near here
which produces cannabis… it’s like a plantation.
Most of the residents are involved. So, we had to
put a stop to it. Last year, the police approached it.
The problem was the villagers had posted a sentry…
a ninety-year-old woman with a semi-automatic
weapon. What could we do? Send in the Special
Forces? There would have been an outcry!”
“You should have sent in your grandad, Petrit.
She might have been an old Partisan flame of his.
That would have disarmed her,” said Jude. Shpetim
laughed. His phone rang. It was still set on Lionel
Richie. He stood up and walked a couple of paces
away from the table, then spun around on the ball
of his right foot. Jude watched him as Shpetim fixed
his eyes on a detail of mottling in the table’s white
marble surface. His eyes were clear and set as it
seemed information and calculations sped through
his mind as he listened. He then quietly issued a
series of terse instructions. At one point, when it
appeared he was being countermanded, he drew
his hand towards his chest with fingers and thumb
pinched tightly together, and then splayed them out
in emphasis. He sat down with a dour face.
“Ah, Shqipëria!” he said dropping his head.
“Albania will never become Albania with Albanians
in it!” He glanced at Jude. “Don’t ask.” Fredi the
waiter brought two macchiatos in their blue cups
and set them down on the table.
“Pizza,” Shpetim said to him. Jude nodded
quickly to Fredi so as not to draw him in. “I couldn’t
have borne this work without God Jude… the things
we deal with. I thank Him that people like you came
here.”
“Was it through the children’s group… that you
came in to the church?”
“My parents sent me for the free gifts, what can
I say?” he grinned. “As I stayed, though, the Bible
studies just kind of sank in, until they took root and
meant something.” The lines on his forehead became
less angular. His thick eyebrows straightened. It
seemed to Jude that the light of the world flickered
through his eyes. “And you, was it because of what
happened with your mother?” Jude put a spoon of
sugar in his coffee and stirred.
“Well, things seemed very bleak and broken
after mum died, for sure,” he said. “Then when I got
to university… some of the literature I was reading
didn’t help. I went to the student parties… I liked
them for a while. There was someone special too
that I liked. I thought I could believe in her… but
one night I stumbled upon her at a party with a
university lecturer. There was a whole group of them
sprawled on the floor drunk. It just intensified my
sense of the sham, the corruption of life… in contrast
to the high academic ideals. Do you know what I
mean?”
“Jude. I’m an Albanian and you ask me if I
understand corruption!” said Shpetim with a look
of amusement. Jude smiled.
“I was thinking… What is there to admire or
look up to? What is there that is good or true in this
world? I felt whatever it was they were all suffering
from, I was infected with it too… I was no saint.”
Jude spooned up the remaining sugar grains from
the bottom of his cup and stirred again. “I was
traipsing around the streets of York after a party in the
early hours of the morning one time… and I came to
the Low Ousegate Bridge.”
“The one on the playing card?” said Shpetim.
“Yes… the one we will make the match with,”
said Jude staring into his macchiato. “I looked down
at the River Ouse… black and sweeping under the
bridge. I felt dead inside… so I might as well be
dead in body. Thankfully, I’d read one good book at
that time, A Tale of Two Cities. There’s a character in
there, Sydney Carton, who stands by the River Seine
in Paris at dawn and hears the words of Christ. Well,
I remembered them, and they just seemed to penetrate
me in that moment… ‘He who believes in me, though he
were dead, yet shall he live!’
“So you left the bridge?”
“I walked towards the Minster… it’s a big church
there that dominates the skyline… and waited hours
until it opened. Inside, I got down in the aisle and
prayed. I had a wonderful experience there… a touch
of something that welled up warm and enfolding on
all sides… and through me… like a rain shower. I
lay there until a verger told me to get up because I
was disturbing the tourists.” Shpetim was looking at
him curiously, smiling. “Well, that was the moment
my rudder moved, and I began to inch away from
the busy shipping lane where most of the traffic is.
And here I am… twelve years later, at a café table in
your country.” Fredi arrived and put down Shpetim’s
pizza on the table with cutlery and a ketchup
bottle. Shpetim began to cover it with criss-crossing
lines of the red sauce. He looked up and caught Jude
staring.
“Ç’ ke? What?” said Shpetim. Jude tried to feign
an expression of nonchalance. “It is good you are
here, doing what you are,” he said.
“Not everyone sees it that way,” said Jude.
“So, are you worried about the phone call?” said
Shpetim. “Don’t be. People make a lot of threats
here.”
Chapter 18
Jude was alone, lying on the living room sofa with
his sandals off, easing his way into a late Sunday
afternoon nap, when a knock came on the apartment
door. It had a character he did not recognise, but not
only for this reason, some sense beyond hearing
caused the hairs on his forearms to ruffle like a wheat
field in a mild breeze. He looked towards the door.
He rose and trod barefoot, through the room into
the entrance hall. He listened. It seemed unnaturally
quiet. He hesitated. Then he turned the latch and
drew in the door. The lights in the stairwell were
off and it took his eyes some seconds to penetrate
the darkness split by the bar of light he’d let out.
He then made out the form of a tall man’s arm and
shoulder standing in close against the wall to the
side. Jude’s senses came alive. Danger was edging
out of the shadow. He knew it. It’s come, he thought
in the splitting of a second.
The man took two quick steps towards him.
Jude stumbled backwards away from his approach
into his entrance hall. The man strode in after him.
Jude backed into the living room stubbing his bare
heel on a raised edge of floor mat. He thought to
turn and run, but he was trapped. He felt his pocket
for his mobile phone. He’d left it on the coffee table.
The man swiftly closed the door behind him. He
advanced over Jude with his eyes kept closely on
him. They then swept around, to the kitchen, and
through doors left ajar.
“You are alone in the house?” he said tersely,
with, Jude noted instantly, a Kosovar accent.
“My wife will be here any moment… I have
friends who will call me,” said Jude staring back
levelly, but breathing heavily.
“Sit down,” he ordered. Jude complied observing
the man cautiously as he too was being observed.
He had a sallow, clean-shaven face. He was physically
lean and coiled with alertness. He was wearing
a pressed, grey shirt, black trousers and polished,
black slip-on shoes. His eyes were firm, but not
cruel, Jude thought.
“I would like your assistance,” he said briskly.
“There are two ways we can do this. You can give
your co-operation willingly… or there are other
ways.” He placed a hand purposefully by his trouser
waist. Jude could see clearly the L-shaped bulge of
a pistol below the cloth. “I think that we understand
each other.” Jude nodded. The man now stood at
ease like a soldier used to standing to attention.
“The manuscript… I would like to see it,” he said.
“You want… to read it here, or to take a copy?”
“You have a computer, I presume, so open it.”
Jude indicated with his eyes towards the side desk,
stood up slowly, and walked to his laptop. He keyed
in the password, slotted in the USB stick Spiro had
given him after church, and clicked open the file.
“You can relax now,” said the man. “Make some
coffee for yourself if it eases you. If your wife comes,
you will tell her I am a friend of Mehmed’s. Act
wisely now…” He positioned the chair and laptop
so that he could see over the rim of the screen to
observe Jude with ease.
Jude walked cautiously to the kitchen and took
down his Mr Rochester’s Mug from a shelf. He went
through the motions of making a pint of tea to give
himself something to focus on. Where was Alex, he
thought? She’d been out for hours! Maybe it was
better she didn’t return now to disturb this man. He
prayed in the quiet anxiety of his mind that it would
be so, and thought. His heartbeat felt quicker, but
not racing. This man is controlled, not wild, professional,
he reasoned: first the pressure, then the
courtesy. He looked to be scrolling quickly though
the pages, stopping periodically. He seems to know
what he is looking for, thought Jude. If I do as he
says, he will do nothing unreasonable. I’ll be okay
now.
Jude’s mobile phone suddenly made a loud rattle
as it vibrated on the coffee table surface. He looked
at the man. He was watching him. Jude walked over
and glanced at the phone’s screen for the caller’s
ID. It was Spiro. Oh Lord, thought Jude. He lifted it
slowly and pressed the green button to accept.
“Jude. Je mirë? Is everything okay with you?” he
heard Spiro say.
“Yes. Of course it is! I’m relaxing with a cup of
tea, like a true Englishman… Mos ki merak,” he said
trying to add a light-hearted touch.
“Okay then…” said Spiro pausing. “I’ll see you
in the morning then.” Spiro hung up and Jude put
the phone back down on the coffee table.
He now waited silently holding his mug of tea,
though he did not drink any, whilst the man looked
at the computer screen for another thirty minutes.
The man then folded the laptop closed.
“This is the version you propose to publish?” he said.
“Yes. It is finished now.”
“You will take out this name on page 45… and
insert a pseudonym. You will then have no difficulties
with us.” He produced a scrap of paper from his
shirt pocket, wrote down something and placed it on
the desk. He stood up briskly and walked towards
the entrance hall.
“Who are you?” asked Jude gently. The man
sauntered a step, turned and looked at him.
“Tell Mehmed… friends in Prishtina send their
regards.” Jude felt a little emboldened by the man’s
change of body language. He’d got what he’d come for.
“Were you at Edona’s apartment… near the
Bajram Curri Boulevard in Tirana?” He did not say
anything. You were, thought Jude. “Were you…
your people… on the Qafë Krrabë ridge road? Did
you telephone me?”
“I know nothing of these things,” he said. He
then hesitated as if considering something. “The
book… it is… interesting. Others may not take that
view however.”
“What others?” asked Jude. He looked at Jude
with an expression of worldly knowing.
“Mehmed is a man with a long past.”
“He also has a new future,” said Jude.
“In this world?” he said with a cynical glazing
passing over his eyes. “If others permit it…” Jude
then heard men’s voices rising up the stairwell. An
officious knock was hammered on the door.
“Jude? Ke ndonjë hall? Is everything alright?”
shouted Spiro. Jude stared into the entrance hall.
His heart groaned, and his mind flashed through
outcomes of this man’s hand being forced. The man
gave him a look of gunmetal coldness. It said: ‘Don’t
move. Don’t even swallow…’
Paul Alkazraji.
Copyright Paul Alkazraji. Highland Books Ltd. 2012. All Rights Reserved.
Find ‘The Silencer’ on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...
Also by this author.
My book @ bedtime ‘The Silencer’
Watch out for bed-time tweets from this story beginning Sunday for a week. Travel from Albania to Istanbul and back across northern Greece as a deadly danger approaches on the ‘Friendship Express’…
https://twitter.com/paul_alkazraji
Love Books tour comments on ‘The Silencer’
Readers’ comments for ‘The Silencer’ from the Love Books tour.
‘I love the cover for this book. It definitely drew me in.’ Lozzieloves.
‘A gripping read from the first page. Paul has a way of describing things so vividly, you can almost see it as if it was on TV.’ Redhead_reviews1.
‘A really enjoyable thriller that was well-written with a compelling storyline and well-developed characters that all brought something to the plot. I loved the formatting of the book and how we get the perspective of multiple characters, as that always makes me feel like I really know them.‘ Fiction Vixon18.
‘The author manages to place you amongst the pages… I love being transported between the pages of a book.’ Donna.
‘I loved this book. As it's so detailed, you can really imagine it all. Jude and his wife Alex are lovely characters, not too good to be true... ‘ Maressa.
‘The story is a journey of Jude and Alex, their struggles, challenges in order to publish a book (about) how a man turned Christian. That was the main reason I wanted to read the book, as religions and spirituality is kind of an interesting topic for me…’ Edyta.
On Goodreads:
'Beni’s Game'. A new short story by Paul Alkazraji.
Three Albanian words:
shiko – well, look
budalla – stupid
mirë – good
Luan rammed the gears of the Mercedes from second to fourth, and surged down the wrong side of the airport road past a line of cars, flashing his headlights. Jude was thrust back deep into the leather seat with the acceleration. The sky ahead of them had streaks of lilac and molten iron below the black heights as a lone aircraft banked down with white lights pulsing on its wing tips.
‘What time does he land?’ said Luan, tilting his head towards the clock by the speedometer. The illuminated red dial was touching 130kmph as it hovered close to the time – ‘19:45’.
‘In ten minutes,’ said Jude. He slid his fingers through his fringe as he shoved it off his forehead and blew out his breath.
‘Shiko... I’m doing my best!’ Luan’s voice was dour as he glanced at his friend. ‘You took your time with your pilaf rice. There’s some on your T-shirt.’
‘The waiter went AWOL... bringing it,’ replied Jude. He pressed the switch for the electric window and it dropped half way in an instant. The warm August night air rushed in, smelling of dry grass and field smoke. He flicked the rice grains out. ‘Thanks for coming with me, Luan. It’s Beni’s grandfather I’m here for, really – Gëzim. He keeps goats in the village and comes to the church. He came to meet us in the border forest…’
‘Yes, Jude. I remember Gëzim,’ said Luan, as he rubbed a finger up the side of his Liam Neeson-like nose. ‘So… fill me in a little more.’
‘Well, Beni left for England about a year ago, but I don’t remember seeing him since he was...’ Jude considered. ‘Maybe fourteen? Tousled, brown hair then. Shy, but a cunning little fella. He used to hide “Chance” cards under the Monopoly board at the youth club.’
‘So, it’s not worked out for him, then,’ said Luan.
Jude slid his glasses back into position up the ridge of his nose as he thought to himself, A deportation flight, eh, Beni? Do not even pass ‘Go’ or ‘collect £200’ before…
‘I wonder what he’s been doing there?’ Luan scowled. ‘And who might be waiting for him here? I hope he’s not foolish enough to be carrying something… budalla.’ Ahead of them on the road, a cluster of white and neon lights like a small town grew closer, and soon Luan was braking hard into a roundabout. He flung the steering wheel to the right, past a row of floodlit palm trees, and through a barrier to where the terminal building of Tirana International Airport glowed green from the interior like a great, tilting cube of glass.
--o0o--
The lights across the Tirana horizon line rolled up the aircraft window on Beni’s right and settled level at the midpoint. There was an uneasy hush along the cabin’s interior as the passengers sat apart on different rows. Only an occasional cough interrupted the muted roar of the jet-turbines and the air rushing over the plane’s fuselage outside. He swallowed and the roar increased.
As the lights were dimmed for the descent, he glanced around him; there were so many British officials on board. He felt the pocket of his rucksack and the flat, oblong form inside to check it was still there. No one’s found it, he thought. He wiped the moisture on his palms along his thighs. He turned his hands upwards and stared at them. They were shaking, and he shivered. He remembered how cold they had been that evening – freezing – so surprising for last August. The sea spray had stung his cheeks. A great, grey wall of foaming water had risen above them, and their dinghy had seemed no bigger than an inner tube. Down they’d swirled, into a valley. He’d cried out, ‘Oh, God! Oh, good God, save us!’ When they’d risen out of it to the crest, he’d seen the glint of the sun on the spinning blades of a distant windfarm and a chalky wall of cliffs. Then they’d all tumbled overboard, and the dinghy was like the manhole cover of a drain above his head, and there was no way back up to the light…
He now watched the mauve and orange light above the Albanian hills. He ran the heel of his palm over the corner of one eye. He straightened his back and sniffed. He had held on to an Iranian man. It had seemed like twenty minutes, but maybe it was only five. The man had slipped away from him, sinking under, with a glug from his mouth. He’d heard the motor of the Border Force boat droning through the water in his eardrums before he’d actually seen it.
Later, he’d sat on the shore, shivering, the gulls shrieking hostilities at them as they’d swooped around their heads. His clothes had smelt of sewage.
In a big tent at some old military airfield, he’d been given a mug of hot chocolate and a warm blanket, and he’d sobbed; it was the kindness of it.
Grandad Gëzim had said on the phone that Jude would be there to meet him. He breathed out a little and smiled to himself. He remembered Jude and the sausages he’d cooked in tinfoil on a wood fire in his garden for the village boys. He is a good man, he thought. What would he tell him? Maybe some things were too dark for his ears. Yet, what if one of them was waiting there too?
A line of blue ground lights flashed past his window and, with a jolting bounce, they were down. There was an eruption of clapping behind him. What could those other men like him have to celebrate?
As he shuffled down the aircraft steps inside a Perspex tunnel, the warm air seemed to revive him. He raised his hands to feel its familiarity once more as he smelt the runway dust and aviation fuel in this Tirana night. He stared around him and noticed the pool of light under a parked Lufthansa plane as a man shone a torch under its belly. There was something like a golf cart caterpillar with a frantic neon light on top, and other vehicles like severed insects still moving along the ground with the rear of their torsos missing. It’s strange to return this way, he thought. The line of uniformed men eyed him indifferently as they led them towards the waiting Policia van.
--o0o--
Jude snatched a chair at a café table and turned it so he could watch his friend. Luan was jogging across the inside of the terminal building; his chest seemed raised and thrust forward, a little ridiculously, as a corrective for his bulging midriff. He is displaying his rank, Jude thought, smiling to himself. Luan unhooked a black partition cord on a chrome stand, and a man in a lime security vest jumped forward to challenge him. Luan produced a card from inside his suit jacket, his Albanian Secret Service card, no doubt, and they disappeared together through a sliding glass door.
Jude shook a sachet of sugar and tipped it into the tiny white cup of Segafredo espresso. He took a hasty bite out of his pistachio doughnut, and cast his eyes around the exit doors to see if anyone waiting caught his attention by acting suspiciously. He could not tell: this was Luan’s kind of work. He could sense things in his spirit sometimes, though, and this evening, like the rising whine of a jet-turbine, there was an alarm there. The tube lights reflecting on the glass windows looked like the dots and dashes of a Morse code message, but he couldn’t decipher it. He flicked open the copy of The Times newspaper he’d bought, and eyed a headline: ‘Bodies of 18 Asylum Seekers Uncovered in Greek Forest Ravaged by Wildfire’. Well, Beni, he reflected, whatever happened to you, it could have been much worse.
Luan jogged back towards him, spinning his car keys around his index finger with a sharp, flicking sound.
‘Shiko... he’ll be through in a few minutes, but not here,’ he said. ‘The charter flight deportees are processed at a police station. Come on… it’s about a five-minute walk.’
Jude looked wistfully at his doughnut as he rose in the rush. It seemed a shame to waste it at these prices. Luan grabbed it and stuffed it in his mouth with a grin.
They strode along the footpath past an old, red biplane until they came to a grey building with a small car park. Next to it was a wire mesh fence with a huge sliding gate. Jude saw several others loitering there around the dark edges.
‘Let’s keep a little distance... and watch,’ whispered Luan. A line of white lights high on their poles stretched down the runway perimeter like beacons towards the last traces of dusk’s tangerine aura. There was a metallic screech as the gate was slid open. Jude felt the hairs rise on his forearms. The first passengers shambled through. He studied each one – young men, all of them. It had been many years since he’d seen Arben Driloni: Beni.
One man stopped and glanced around him. He was wearing a crumpled shell suit, and with his untidy curls and goatee tuft, he looked to Jude like a seedy Mr Tumnus from the Narnia books. A P&O Ferries carrier bag dangled forlornly from his fist.
‘Hey... did you get a first-class cabin?’ shouted a policeman by the gate. There was a cackle of infantile laughter. Jude touched Luan’s arm. He felt Luan give a sharp tug backwards on his T-shirt sleeve. A man in a black, quilted nylon jacket with the hood up slid an arm through Mr Tumnus’ and began to lead him away. Luan was just a few paces behind them.
‘Beni... is that you?’ Jude called out to him. The hooded man spun around and raised the long, thin blade of a knife. From the holster under his jacket, Luan drew out his pistol. The man turned to flee, but suddenly, Beni stuck his foot out. The man tumbled and Luan leapt on him like a big cat, and pinned him down.
--o0o--
Beni slumped into the rear seat of the Mercedes, pressed the heels of his palms into both eyes, then sat back and drew a deep breath. He gazed out, smiling at Luan, but averted his eyes as the man got in and slammed the driver’s door. Some kind of off-duty policeman, Jude had said. I wouldn’t like to cross him when he’s on duty, he thought. He pushed his rucksack down, out of sight, between his legs.
Pastor Jude turned around in the front passenger seat and smiled at him with a warmth he suddenly remembered. He still had that chipped front tooth, but his sideburns had greyed and his face was fuller. He watched him push his uneven fringe to one side.
‘So,’ said Jude. ‘How was your time in England?’
‘Well… good, pastor. Mirë,’ he said.
‘Sure it was!’ snapped Luan. ‘So great you had a plane-full of British officials to escort you home personally.’
Beni glanced at Luan and back at Jude. He felt the lid of his right eye begin to twitch.
‘It’s OK,’ said Jude. ‘He’s on other cases – not yours. He’s a friend. You can tell us about it, if you want to?’
‘Those officials accompanied the others… and me,’ Beni conceded to Luan. ‘Some Brits will now work at the airport, we heard...’ Sweat was beading on his chest and he wiped his T-shirt over it. It’s so hot after England, he thought. He lowered a rear passenger window with the switch. A guard dog by the car park entry hut rattled its chain as it rose and barked once before it settled again. Beni flinched and rubbed his ear lobe. He sat forward. ‘I saw these adverts on TikTok last year in the spring… so I took the chance and crossed the Channel with their help. It was a nightmare. Later, I found out the British police were calling them the Dragon gang. I ended up in a hotel in Ramsgate with some other asylum seekers. I called my friend, Bledi. He came in his car late one night... and I slipped out. I stayed with him on this north London road with lorries passing at every hour.’ He remembered their spray dribbling down his window on wet winter nights, the odour of mould, and the walls of his room vibrating as the lorries hit the low drain cover outside. ‘I worked in restaurant kitchens, dirty ones and shiny aluminium ones, for some months… but it was for less than the minimum wage, and another Albanian – Blackbeard, they called him – invited me to work with him in the West Country. One of his businesses was a grass house in this small-town suburb. He had a hundred cannabis plants growing under UV lamps in a blacked-out attic. I moved into the agricultural sector… so to speak.’
Luan had been scrolling on his mobile phone and jiggling his leg on his toes as he listened. The car was rocking from it now.
‘Was the pay a bit better there, then?’ he asked, with heavy irony.
‘Yeah, but… well, Blackbeard let me out occasionally for some fresh air, to work at a car wash he owned on the A37 in Somerset,’ continued Beni. ‘I was picked up there last month in an undercover police raid. I’d just sponged their windscreen really well, too!’ Luan huffed from his nostrils. ‘I went there to work, Pastor Jude, not to get into crime… honestly. You do believe me, don’t you? I’m not a bad person.’ He watched Jude lift off his glasses and fold the arms together before resting them on his lips.
‘I’m sure you set out with good intentions, Beni,’ said Jude, as he turned away. He reached back a moment later, handing him a packet of sunflower seeds. ‘Do you still chew these?’
‘Oh… I haven’t since…’ Beni tore open the packet, put one in his mouth, and split it with his front teeth. As he drew out the kernel and spat the salty shell into his hand, he was thinking. Yes, he would do it.
--o0o--
As Luan eased the car towards the airport entrance roundabout, Jude leaned out of the passenger window a little, with his elbow surfing the night air. A high whistle of cicadas wafted in and out like a weak radio signal. The distant blues and reds of the airport lights were mingling with the low stars. He shuffled around to look at Beni.
‘Will you try again… for England?’ said Jude.
‘For that life? I don’t think so,’ said Beni. ‘Anyway, they stamped my passport with an entry stop to the Schengen Area for three years.’
‘You could have been sent to Rwanda,’ said Luan, with his face fixed towards the road’s unbroken white line ahead. ‘Anyway, you’ve a bright future waiting on café tables in Tirana to look forward to.’
Jude saw Beni sniff and shrug as he lowered his eyes. He then reached down further and rustled by his feet. He handed something over, and Jude felt the weight of it settle on his hand. It was a burgundy hardback Gideon’s Bible.
‘It’s for you, Jude. I want you to have it,’ said Beni. Jude felt his right eyebrow rise even as his forehead furrowed. ‘Open it at the end – near the book of Revelation.’ Jude pressed the nightlight switch above their heads and, under the yellowish glow, the pages fell open in his palm. The last centimetre was stuck together as one. ‘Tear off that top page…’ In a hollowed-out section, Jude saw a red £50 note on top of others. He tilted it for Luan to see. ‘For the poor and orphans... Jude... take it.’ Beni’s eyes widened with a look of appeal. Jude noticed his eyebrow had just a single chevron like a corporal’s razored through it.
‘Beni... this is grass house money, isn’t it? I can’t,’ said Jude. ‘You made a hole in the New Testament for this? Treasure in heaven was one part you cut out.’
Luan ran a finger up the side of his prominent nose, and then around the back of his ear. With one hand gripping the wheel, he reached over and let the note corners flutter over his thumb. He then flipped the wad out onto Jude’s lap.
‘Sprinkle it with holy water… It’s just two or three thousand,’ Luan scoffed, with a wry grin. ‘That’s what our friend by the airport gate had come to collect – wasn’t it, Beni? Or… shiko, you can have it put in a police filing cabinet until it disappears, or post it back to Blackbeard, if you like?’
Jude stared at it. No... he couldn’t.
On 23 August 2022, 1,295 migrants made the crossing over the English Channel in twenty-seven boats. ‘Beni’ was one of them.
Editor. Sheila Jacobs.
© Paul Alkazraji 2024. All rights reserved.
'Beni's Game' is based on characters in two novels by Paul Alkazraji 'The Silencer' and 'The Migrant'.
Download a free larger-print pdf version here:
https://mega.nz/file/cjVAHJQQ#e6A5Kvj...
Read Chapter 1 of ‘The Migrant’ here:
https://instantapostle.com/2019/02/22...
Find copies of the novels here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/autho...
'Beni’s Game'. A new short story by Paul Alkazraji. Coming next week.
A short story set at Tirana International Airport entitled ‘Beni’s Game’ will be published next week. Details to follow here.
‘Well, Beni left for England about a year ago, but I don’t remember seeing him since he was...’ Jude considered. ‘Maybe fourteen? Tousled, brown hair then. Shy, but a cunning little fella. He used to hide “Chance” cards under the Monopoly board at the youth club.’
'Beni's Game' is based on characters in two novels by Paul Alkazraji 'The Silencer' and 'The Migrant'.
Read Chapter 1 of ‘The Migrant’ here:
https://instantapostle.com/2019/02/22...
