By Ardian Vehbiu
When the news about the loss of the beloved Tan Minarolli just came in that morning, I had to immediately find and cling, at all cost, to a word, a phrase or a thought that would encompass him entirely, exactly as I knew and remembered him. And I felt as though I heard his deep baritone voice say to me in Whitman’s words: I am large. I contain multitudes. That’s how I knew him, and that’s how I will remember him – as the man who carried within himself all of Tirana; as the Man, with a capital letter.
He published a volume of short stories, Kufoma e njà« telefoni (The corpse of a telephone) a long time ago, which isn’t usually mentioned next to his films; but which I would recommend to all those who would like to experience Tani’s humanity. His interest in the homeless, the worried, the violated, the tired; the person who could not make a name for him- or herself, the strange godforsaken loner in a city that seemed to be turning its back to its people.
Everyone loved Tani, – they used to stop him in the street, hug him and trust him with their pain and secrets. As uncle Dhimitri, a carpenter we had called to fix a ping-pong table, once said to me: He’s a man “sweet as sugar.” They loved Tani, but he loved them even more. He helped the ones rejected by life. I remember one night, when suddenly he came to my home to tell me that the tailor I usually went to for sewing my pants, and at the same time his close friend, had an urgent need for money and asked if it was possible for me to pay him immediately. People like him are naturally popular; they swim in the sea of friendship, fondness, and admiration by an entire uninterested city. I’ve seen some of the most ferocious “tough guys” in Tirana eat food out of Tani’s hands: who knows how he had tamed them, how he had won their hearts, and made them accept him as one of their own.
He lived in another world, unknown to me; maybe an underground world, the world of all those who didn’t want to have anything to do with the regime – outcasts, ex-convicts, suspects, families freshly returned from confinement; families with an imprisoned head of household, families left behind by a son or a brother who had escaped abroad; families tainted simply because they dared to not give up living.
He was like the saint of the downtrodden; of those who had their dignity denied; of those whom the regime wanted to assail. They all believed in Tani; perhaps they could immediately read his pure heart, with that type of intuition that is usually kept alive by the pain of old betrayals. There was no one in the streets of Tirana, – and I do not mean only the privileged ones and the children of ‘Blloku’ – who didn’t meet and hug him. It was as if he belonged to a semi-invisible reality, where age was measured by millennia, not with the 25th- anniversaries of the regime.
We spent a lifetime together – since fifth grade at “Avni Rustemi” middle school and later at “Sami Frashà«ri” high school. We were neighbors and we used to spend the holidays together, get drunk together, get food-poisoning together, smoke crappy cigarettes together and injure our fingers with the same guitar chords. And yet, I had discovered something very rare and remarkable about Tani, that I now think must have been some kind of early maturity, which came as a consequence of his remarkable empathy. He had early on noticed certain things that weren’t right for him and especially for others, starting from the chains that kept all of us bound to our shared prison. He had noticed them before any of us did.
I remember the time when we started to take an interest in the world outside Albania – and Tani was introducing names, that otherwise, would have remained unknown to us. In the early 70s he had learned to play a guitar riff from Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” – at a time when the rest of us still listened to Adriano Celentano’s “Chi Non Lavora” and the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” . Furthermore: Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner – a rich constellation of musicians from another music galaxy; who in my mind remain connected with Cassius Clay’s triumph in heavy-weight boxing and Brazil’s winning the World Cup (which was then called Jules Rimet), in the summer of 1970.
Tani was the only one among us that cheered for Brazil, attracted not only by the strength of the team, but also and especially by the beautiful Brazilian game, their technique, and aesthetics. It was like he was the only one among us with an artistic soul, who cared for weird and absurd things. He would create a scene after every accident and incident, with props and wise directing to present to his fictional audience in a theatrical form.
For that, we should thank his maternal uncle, the super-talented and unfortunate Kujtim Spahivogli, a great actor and director, from whom Tani had the opportunity to learn about theatre ever since he was a child. Kujtim – I’m allowing myself to refer to him by his first name because I was lucky enough to meet him through Tani – had fed his nephew with the sophisticated culture of the Soviet school of theater and acting.
I remember seeing a lot of Russian books at the Minarollis, books impenetrable to all of us, in a language we couldn’t read, but with superb illustrations, modern, elegant, drawings of stage settings, interiors, phantasmagoria and what not. Kujtim had studied theater in Russia and was a rising star in the Albanian stage, but then the 1973fight against Western influences came and Enver Hoxha’s muzhiks cut his career short. In my mind, he will always remain associated with Brecht, Stanislavski, Meyerhold, and Pasolini, a unique figure even though he was not allowed to fulfill his artistic destiny.
In a way, Kujtim continued living vicariously, through Tani. Many years later, after 2000, Tani told me he would have liked to make a film about his uncle, a Beckettian drama about Kujtim’s trial, before they revoked his right to be a stage director and sent him to exile. A trial directed by the demonic commissars from the Party Committee District. Tani combed the archives, but didn’t find anything of use. Human memory fades, memories get distorted, the history of the National Theatre lacks continuity – it is more like a collage kept together with saliva; sometimes with the same saliva used for spitting against the victims of political violence.
Kujtim’s tomb remains the only certainty and truth – for Tani and a few others who refuse to forget the cultural misery of Tirana after the 1973 purges, but also of what Kujtim could have become. Maybe Tani had inherited from his uncle an eye for the theatrical gesture, or the gift for reproducing anything that would be worth showing to the public. We would often talk about possible films, and even more often about impossible ones. Because my approach to the cinema was and is from the outside, I wanted to know more about how Tani saw it, the actors and directors he praised, the secrets of camerawork.
In the late 1980s, I had just returned to Tirana from a year of studies in Rome and had brought some fresh music to share with friends. Tani was then looking for a soundtrack for his documentary film about a record-breaking athlete. We listened to my collection for hours, until he decided to go with a long instrumental part of “Telegraph Road” by Dire Straits. He said that the song’s crescendo was exactly what he was looking for, to showcase the athlete’s progress towards her goal. As far as I remember, that part made it to the final sound track. Since then, even Dire Straits– a group very dear to me – was included into the world-film directed by Tani.
As an artist of the image and the written word, but also as an authentic rare and genuine humanist, Tani had an unerring sensitivity to detail. In the films that impressed him, he would always identify some directorial “device” and express his fascination with it, although he was no formalist and his imagination as a natural artist of the theater was always concrete, bound to reality.
I remember, in particular, a screenplay that he had written, which would later become a short film called “Shkallà«t” (The Stairs) directed by Ilir Harxhi. I have not seen the film, but I remember the screenplay, in which a very ill businessman gets discharged from the hospital, is taken home on an ambulance and then carried, still on a stretcher, up the narrow stairs to the penthouse apartment on the top floor of the new building he owns; which has so shabbily been built that the elevator is almost always broken. A few days later, the businessman passes away – and now his corpse has to be brought down the same narrow stairwell by the pallbearers, where a hearse awaits him.
The whole concept was captivating, with the ambulance and the hearse as its bookends; and a stretcher that goes up, to then come back down as a coffin. I then asked Tani why he gave the screenplay away to his colleague, instead of making the film himself. This image of a human body that barely makes it up to then be immediately brought down, in the same staircase built for Albania’s rat racers in the early nineties seemed totally captivating to me, as it stood for a time when even dying was difficult, if not impossible to achieve…
The news of his death reached me as I was working on the translation of his latest screenplay, “The Delegation” . He had fallen in love with it and felt that he had a precious story in his hands, simple but thrilling. I have often helped with the translation of his screenplays; and sometimes I have told him he had to get rid of this obsessive habit of getting distraught by side characters. Only later did I realize that Tani, as an author, fell in love with his characters; after creating them, he wanted to go further, find out what motivated them and possibly befriend them.
This empathy for his own creations made him rare, unique, unrepeatable. Now that he is no longer among us, I almost feel, as well, like a character in an unfinished film of his. With his passing away, the rest of us have become a bit like single images, or photograms left behind, from a film that the director suddenly withdraws from the theaters.
Rest in peace, dear Tani.
