Asllan sifted through the papers on his desk — university notes, the first few issues of Bota e Re, some newspaper cuttings — and felt his head spinning. He was struck by the clarity of mind of the twenty-something-year-old that had penned the lines he was now reading. Education, intellectuals, masses, democracy, participation, enlightenment, enlightenment, enlightenment.

All shadows now, banished forever to the underworld, after following him innocently to an imaginary place of escape. . . When had it all started to go wrong? he thought. When the fascists invaded the country? When Zog came to power? When Albania became independent? No, Albania was irrelevant. Even in times of peace, its problems had always been the problems of the world, just not very well concealed. When Hitler invaded Austria? When the Spanish Republic was lost? When Wall Street crumbled?

Bota e Re. The New World! There was a time when he’d been proud of the theories he espoused. They could be slipped over reality like a satin nightgown: so simple and elegant. And they predicted everything so confidently. He stumbled on the title of the last article he had published, “The Development of Machinery and the Economic Crisis,” and reread the first page:

Technological development should have helped ease the burden of work. Instead, in our contemporary capitalist system, it triggers unemployment, the main cause of the contemporary crisis. How can we resolve it? The sophistication of machinery must be accompanied by a reduction in working hours that protects salaries. The age for starting work must be increased. The pension age must be lowered. Workers’ representatives must be given control.

Labor and capital, prices and profit, money and commodities: these were the forces that shaped the world. Every value could be converted to a number, every number to a function. Of course, most people behaved irrationally, he knew that. But merely out of inertia. Evil was always the result of error, not ill will. All that needed to be done was to help people disrupt the pattern, encourage them to think differently.

Asllan put down the journal, then felt a strange compulsion to open it again:

Liberal economists, whose theories belong in the museums, say that the economy always goes through booms and busts. They neglect an important detail. While previous crises were crises of scarcity, this one is a crisis of abundance and therefore. . .

He stopped reading. He felt unusually affected by the confidence of his writing. There was something strange about the contrast between the effortless fluency of his written words and the hesitancy that usually crept into his speech. It surprised him that he’d never noticed this before. The article wasn’t bad; certainly he did not regret what he had written. In many places, he still agreed with it. Nevertheless, there was something irksome about it. The lines exuded such irritating optimism, even when they made dire predictions. Technological development would provoke competition between business owners; the push to minimize labor costs would lead to an economic crisis; protectionism would stoke nationalist fervor; the resulting arms race would escalate into an outright conflict between rival economic blocs. In short: war.

It was especially the mention of that final word, war, that had seemed to justify the optimism. He had been confident it would never happen again. One had to keep repeating it, but only as a warning, in the way an ambulance must keep its flashing lights on when driving on a busy road. People would step away from it. The world had already been through such horror.

Everyone knew that patriotism was the fatal bite of an innocent-looking insect. Those solemn speeches about honor, glory, the defense of the nation. And then what? The dirt, the blood, the cold, the degradation at the front. Millions had already fought, most had never returned. Hundreds of thousands of cripples from Tannenberg, from Gallipoli, from Verdun, haunted European cities. What mother would send her son to fight again? What father would not rather stay at home, and see his children grow?

He picked up the battered copy of The Social Contract that lay on the table and cleared the dust off the cover. For the first time, he noticed the volume had a foul smell, a mixture of sweat and mold. He remembered the bouquiniste along the Seine who had sold it to him many moons ago, a bubbly chap called Pascal, only a few years older than him. Pascal had once been a blacksmith but lost both legs on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. “Si je suis tombé par terre, / C’est la faute à Voltaire, / Le nez dans le ruisseau, / C’est la faute à Rousseau” (“If I fell to the ground, / It’s the fault of Voltaire, / My nose in the gutter, / It’s the fault of Rousseau”), he sang merrily, as he handed him the book. “I was the only one in my regiment to have survived,” he said, in an apologetic tone. Every evening, when he recited his prayers, he wondered what had made his fate different from that of all his dead comrades now in heaven. Or hell. Or nowhere.

Pascal was not religious, he said; he recited his prayers just in case. He thought about his life, and how it had been so close to ending. And all the faces of his regimental comrades, minutes before the explosion, ran before him frame by frame like a scene from a silent movie. The following morning, he felt as if he’d been granted early release from a life sentence.

There were millions like Pascal, Asllan thought. People had been fooled the first time. Now everything would be different. The workers would settle accounts with their masters, rather than slaughter each other. He was a student in Paris when Léon Blum, only a few months before becoming prime minister, was dragged out of his car and almost beaten to death by the royalist antisemites of the Camelots du Roi. He remembered the anger that followed, the marches in the Fifth Arrondissement, the red banners, the revolutionary songs, the slogans: “Dignity to Work,” “Insurrection, not War,” “Socialism or Barbarism.” Was it really anger? Or more like a performance of anger? They seemed so childish, those protesters. Socialism or barbarism? What a joke. Back then, there was still a choice. I guess it’s barbarism, he said to himself.

For a few months now, he had felt paralyzed. His cousin Ahmet visited the shop every now and then to persuade him to join the Communist Party. “Comrade Miladin and Comrade Dushan have heard your name. Comrade Enver, you know yourself of course. Others are keen too. Why don’t you join us?”

He had been unwavering in his support of the Spanish Republicans. But it was easy to decide in that case: they had won an election; they represented the will of the people. What was the will of the Albanian people? Now that the German armed forces had moved into both Greece and Yugoslavia, and the Italian authorities in Albania were in disarray, there were at least five different resistance movements, each supported by a different coalition of states, each claiming to represent the people’s will. An “Albanian Communist Party” with Trotskyist leanings had already been founded by expats in Greece shortly before being supplanted by the new Yugoslav-influenced one.

Asllan was confident that the name of the Bolshevik leader meant very little to the average Albanian worker, but they had still absorbed the central committee’s message to “beware of Trots.” As to the partisan movement itself, even the label was controversial for those who were hostile to Yugoslav influence. Parts of Kosovo had been absorbed into Albania after the Italian occupation. Asllan was suspicious of the two Yugoslavs who had helped found the Communist Party and gave instructions to the Albanians, coordinating with Belgrade, but mainly following directives from Moscow.

“I am a Marxist not a Leninist,” he kept repeating to Ahmet.

“I support a broad democratic front, not a vanguard sect.”

“So does comrade Stalin,” Ahmet countered.

Asllan paused and thought a little. “For now,” he replied.

Sometimes he was embarrassed by his own passivity. At other times, he hated the sense of urgency imposed by the war. What was this Albanian resistance? Was it a glorious national struggle? Or just a banal civil war like so many others he had seen? First the communists made a deal with the liberal nationalists, then they fought each other. At one stage, both groups swore loyalty to the anti-fascist cause, at another they traded accusations of betrayal.

Even Asllan’s British friend, Vandeleur Robinson, usually a reliable guide on politics, was utterly confused. He’d told Asllan about the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, a British intelligence unit formed when the War Office, Foreign Office, and Secret Intelligence Office combined efforts to encourage undercover activities in areas occupied by Axis forces. Various members of the SOE, whose Balkan unit was based in Cairo and was tasked by Churchill with supporting guerrilla groups in the Balkans, were soon to be parachuted into Albania, though not one of them, Robinson had said, had the faintest idea about what was happening on the ground.

They were briefed and taught a few Albanian greetings by a former ethnographer called Margaret Hasluck, the widow of a Cambridge archaeologist known to Robinson, who spoke fluent Albanian and had spent more than a decade living in the country in the 1920s, researching folk tales, indigenous plants, and blood feuds. She was later recruited by British intelligence services and sent to neutral Turkey with the task of collecting destitute Albanian expats to encourage them to become freedom fighters, but progress was very slow and erratic.

As a result of these difficulties, British intervention in Albania had become increasingly schizophrenic. One day they thought they supported the partisans in the mountains, the next they had hedged their bets on King Zog, who had in the meantime moved to London and ran his own resistance movement from a suite at the Ritz Hotel.

“We have to be pragmatic,” Robinson advised. “I suspect Mr Hoxha is the best of a very bad lot.”

Asllan wished he could grab his former self, give him a vigorous shake and shout: “It’s not as straightforward as you thought, OK?” But sometimes he envied the courage and conviction of the young rebel he had once been. He secretly hoped that this part of him was still there, and would one day slowly rise like Lazarus and whisper in his ear: “It’s not that hard, OK? And it’s not too late. Just pick your side.”