Luli returned to Tirana in 1990 and found his house at the start of the street still standing, but its peeling stucco made it hard to imagine that this had once been the home of one of King Zog’s senior civil servants.
But this is how Luli found his father’s house, which he had left behind when he escaped from Albania in 1947. Yet he could no longer recognize it in this ugly building.
Luli was one of the first to return from abroad after communism fell. His relatives welcomed him like a god, although there were few people left in the neighbourhood who had known him as a boy.
After the war the whole family had been viewed with suspicion because Luli’s elder brother had fled the country in 1944 and settled in America. After Luli escaped, his father was interned in a remote village for several years and when he was allowed back to Tirana he sold cigarettes in a kiosk.
Now time had vindicated him and Luli’s escape was viewed in a different light. His relatives were slightly hurt by the fact that their beloved Luli had forgotten almost all their names, even the names of his uncle’s sons with whom he had grown up.
People found excuses for him. He had escaped when he was very young and the poor man had struggled hard to get where he was. Now he was a millionaire. His first successful business had been in New Zealand, they said, and now he traded throughout the world.
He himself said that he could have made no other choice. He had either to forget everybody or to pine away yearning for his relatives like his brother, a poet, who had spent his entire life writing pathetic verses of homesickness until his death from cancer in the United States a few years previously. Luli frankly admitted that his soul was not a poetic one like his elder brother’s.
Meeting the President:
Luli was even granted an audience with the last communist president, Ramiz Alia. Now that Albania was opening its doors to the capitalist world, one of the president’s principal tasks was to meet businessmen who wanted to invest in the country. The television news reported on the meeting and revealed that Luli wanted to buy the privatised handicrafts enterprise with its excellent lines in knitwear. Luli wanted to turn the entire organization into a woollen-wear manufacturer. New Zealand wool had an excellent reputation. He could ship the wool from New Zealand and the cheap workforce of Albanian women could produce knitwear for export to Europe.
He stayed a short time and then returned to New Zealand where he had his family and principal business.
Mimi and Vera:
Before Luli returned, the neighbourhood had recognized his younger brother Mimi as the owner of the house. In his career as a construction engineer Mimi had risen no higher than middle management. He married late in life after an appalling incident in which a spurned ex-girlfriend had gone to his house late one evening, called him to the door, and thrown acid in his face, blinding him in one eye. Nobody knew what had so embittered this woman, whether Mimi had done anything more than break off the relationship, but people considered her a crazy woman, and Mimi her victim.
Later he married Vera, but they had no children. There was only a cat and a dog at home.
Luli’s second visit:
On this second visit, Luli stated that he had come purely on business, but his first duty was to attend the funeral of a close cousin. At the ceremony the mourners were totally distracted by a beautiful woman whom Luli brought with him. Returning from the burial, the dead man’s family and friends did not talk at all about their memories of the deceased, but only about the charms of Luli’s companion. She was a lovely young mulatto, whose hips, breasts, and full lips drew everyone’s attention. Nobody knew if Luli was separated from his first wife or not. He said that their children were scattered all over the world, one in Japan, one in Australia, and a third in the United States.
A few days later, Luli declared he had started a business partnership with a company in Slovenia, and would import household appliances. Such an idea seemed miraculous to the Albanians, who had just emerged from the penury of communism. Electric stoves, refrigerators, and Gorenje washing machines started to arrive. But Luli’s main business remained in New Zealand, where he had built up his life, and in the United States, which was his trading base. His visit to Albania, he said, arose from a sense of duty to his long-suffering fellow-countrymen, and in giving work to his brother. Mimi became the firm’s manager in Albania.
Founding the pyramid:
Soon after Luli’s second visit, Mimi was understood to be paying interest on the dollars he had collected. For every $1,000 paid to him, he would pay out $75 per month. Mimi said that the money was given to Luli, who set it to work in his large-scale businesses throughout the world. Luli’s profits in the western world were rumoured to be colossal, and 7.5 per cent a month represented a modest return.
The myth surrounding Luli, combined with Mimi’s moral credibility, convinced all their relatives it was safe to invest their money. Some had only $500 to deposit and some had thousands. Mimi welcomed them all with a show of courtesy, and Vera carefully wrote down the clients’ names and the amounts and dates of their deposits.
At first everything went miraculously smoothly. Some depositors of small sums of $500 to $1,000 lived for the whole month on the interest they received, because $50 a month was a substantial income in the first years after communism. But it was rumoured that some people had deposited more than $20,000 with Mimi. He was trusted to such a degree that people begged him to take their money and some even asked their relatives to intervene to have themselves included on Mimi’s lists.
Mimi himself kept a low profile. He did not open grandiose offices like VEFA or Gjallica: firms calling themselves finance houses that were set up at the same time. He said that he took his friends’ and relatives’ money only as a favour to them, because Luli had no real need of it.
For a while Mimi behaved very properly, paying the monthly dividend on the capital placed with him. Very few people withdrew this dividend, except for needy people who had paid in small sums. The depositors watched in fascination as the sums grew every month. Those who had put in $1,000 calculated that the $75 interest of the first month increased the second month’s dividend, and so on, until within a short time their $1,000 had become $2,000. Investors of $10,000 were delighted to find they had $20,000. And so for a long time Mimi accumulated more than he paid out.
Mimi and the big pyramids:
When the big pyramid schemes appeared, Mimi poured scorn on them. They produce nothing, he told everyone who would listen, while continuing to praise his brother’s trading ventures.
But the strength and reputation of the big pyramid schemes grew fast. They advertised in the newspapers and on State television. The word ‘Holding’ which the largest firm VEFA added to its name, exerted a magic power. The Albanian economy was entering the great global market, and now had its very own ‘Holdings’.
But after a while, people noticed that Mimi was becoming dilatory in paying interest on request.
Mimi’s swift collapse was caused by the growth of the big pyramids. These wonder-working firms increased their interest rates. Anyone who owned a small apartment could sell it for $10,000, invest the money, and within a year buy another apartment twice the size. People flocked to them to deposit their money.
Mimi became increasingly behind in paying back the money that his depositors had invested, and now wanted to withdraw. At first he paid only the interest, but then had to suspend these payments too. A strange psychological phenomenon was apparent among the majority of people who asked for their money but were sent away empty-handed. In the beginning, they did not argue or even question the reason for this delay. They seemed scared to look beneath the surface. They were frightened of waking from their dream.
Bad news:
Soon afterwards, bad news spread through the family circle. A relative returned from a visit to Slovenia with the information that Albanians there knew Luli as a prodigious gambler who spent his days in the casinos of Ljubljana, and that the mulatto was not his wife but his current mistress.
However, the family