Like a Prisoner by Fatos Lubonja

Author:Fatos Lubonja
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Istros Books
Published: 2023-02-20T08:15:13+00:00

Edip

It was hard to imagine anyone pointing to Edip if they were asked who the famous officer was, sentenced by the dictator with the group of putschists. With his high brow and thick-­lensed spectacles, he stood out among the prisoners whose shorn heads and prison clothes made them all look so similar. He resembled more a professor who had spent his entire life in libraries, certainly not in the army. His exceptional courtesy was far from anyone’s idea of a military man. He spoke with a soft, measured voice, and chose his words carefully. He was never heard to quarrel or trade insults with anyone in that camp where arguments and squabbles were the order of the day.

* * *

The contrast between his reputation and his appearance prompted a lot of speculation about what lay hidden behind those spectacles with their thick lenses in round frames. The first, unavoidable question was how the dictator could have included this gentle and placid man on the list of putschists and sentenced him to twenty-­five years.

The prisoners had different answers. Most believed that Edip’s courtesy was the result of a transformation that took place after his investigation and trial. It was hard not to emerge unchanged after being held in a cell for two years, in a lidless coffin with a light bulb glaring twenty-­four hours a day above your head – this, they said, was how the putschists were treated – and with the fear of death in your guts; and this, people added, was after a trial which handed out swathes of death sentences. No, he was inevitably a traumatised man whom his own family would barely recognise, they said, thanking their stars that their own charge sheets and investigations had not been so terrible.

But besides this majority, there were also two groups split into extreme camps. One was composed of former communists who had ended up in prison, who knew Edip better. No, Edip had always been courteous. Why had others who had experienced similar fates not turned to politeness? they asked, arguing against the trauma diagnosis. The no­bility that he radiated arose from the fact that he was brought up in the family of a high Ottoman aristocrat who had adopted and raised him as a little boy. He had acquired all the virtues of this class to which he had belonged in his youth, but his sensitivity towards the poor had led him to adopt communist ideals and join the antifascist resistance. For his feats in what they proudly termed ‘the Struggle’ or the ‘National Liberation’ and his good education, he had been sent immediately after the war for further study in the Soviet Union, at the Air Force Academy. His academic prowess and his exemplary service had lifted him through the ranks until he become Air Force Commander. But the dictator as he aged became increasingly scared of those former comrades of his who had earned their positions through their own merits and not his patronage.

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