Thursday, May 23, 2019

"Lora" of Leonard Veizi - novel


Title: Lora 

Place of Publication: Tirana

Publication date: 2014

Publisher: Omsca-1

Genre: Novel

ISBN: 978-9928-132-57-4




© all rights reserved to the author:  leonardveizi@yahoo.it


Subject:  This novel handles a social topic. Although the novel plays in many places of the world, they show the Albanian way of life with its ups and downs, with its loves and disappointments, with its brutality and humanity. The novel can be interpreted in many plans and play on earth, in the air, in different cities, states and institutions. In center of the novel is Rron Grabova, who leaves Albania after the massacre of Lora Emerson, and moves to different places of Europe to investigate for the crime. Through this novel we get an image of prostitution, corruption, crime and the different relations between the individual and the society: between police and prosecution, Interpol and foreign informative service, as well as an image of the tragic fate of the two main characters.

Characters: In this novel there are at least 42 characters. The main characters are Rron Grabova and Lora Emerson, who are shown as complex, special and they have a dual personality. They commit some bad deeds, being obligated from the wild reality and from the need to survive to act so.


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Leonard Veizi was born on 29th of August 1968 in Tirana. He finished his studies as agrarian engineer. He worked as a journalist in the written and electronic media since 1991. Among his works are the short stories Grahma e shpirtit të mjegullt (Gasp of the Foggy Soul), Treni  i fundit i metrosë (The Last Train of the Metro), I dënuar me vdekjen (Sentenced to death) and the novels Surpriza e natës së fundit (Last Night’s Surprise), Rrëfimi (Confession), I çmenduri i pavionit 3 (The Mentally Disordered of Pavilion 3), Orgji në famullinë e at Ludovikut (Orgy in the Parish of Fr.Ludovic), Lora and Rrënimi (Demolition).





Extract

Above the white sheet of the big bed, a woman laid all naked, while her body and everything else around her were splashed with blood. Her wide open eyes, which seemed as out of orbit, showed off clearly all the terror that she had experienced during her last breathes of life. A huge commando –style dagger, with ditches in each side, a very sharp blade in one side and cogs on the other, and stained all over with blood, was still stabbing the mattress, precisely between her opened legs.
The whole room was soaking in a kind of purblind light, as if it was a film negative, and everything could be espied only thanks to the light of a lamp-shade which stood near the big bed. In that moment, that tiny space had become an infinite cosmic space, dark and cold, where fear ruled. Maybe somewhere out there, where no one understood what was hiding beyond visions and perceptions, a mystery that could be far more enigmatic from what it appeared at first sight, was being hidden.
In front of the bed where the breathless body laid in a puddle of blood, the hotel receptionist, a man with thick gray hair and a pair of thick myopic glasses, kept on staying there as if he was totally frozen. It seemed as if he had lost his mind and his whole being had been plunged somewhere very deep in that shapeless poorly lightened room. After a little while, he shook his head, as if he was trying to come out of that passive and utterly amorphous and passive state of mind, and beginning to believe that everything he had seen was real.
-My God – he murmured with a trembling voice. The redness of the blood, its thickness and the fact that it had congealed throughout that woman’s body, while still falling drop by drop on the floor, made him fill sick. He almost vomited and didn’t quite understand how he succeeded to resist to that interior welter he was feeling. His reasoning, that till that moment had been like deformed and frozen as if it had been stiffened inside a piece of ice, begun to come back to him with dizzying speed. His eyes now were fixed on the military digger that stood between the victim’s legs, giving the impression as if it had cut her sex in two pieces. – Oh my God! – he stuttered again, while still not quite understanding what he was doing in that room, alone and so near to a bloody corpse.
He took a step forward, driven by a sudden and uncontrolled impulse that made him think that he maybe had to check her pulse, because even as she had been so rudely massacred, she could still be alive. He had no need to hurry and call the police, because first he could call the hospital and tell them to send an ambulance and a doctor. But his own shadow that followed his steps and the dim light that pulsed on the membrane of her glassy eyes, made him tremble. He felt so terrified, that his curiosity fell apart, and his being refused to want to know any further details about that macabre sight. An instant later, he rashly walked out of that room, passed through the long hallway with an erratic scurry, stroke the lateral wall with his shoulder after losing his balance for a moment, walked down the stairs grasping the board guardrails and finally, gasping he bumped at the reception. He grabbed the phone and formed a three-digit number.
-This is the police, the control room, – someone told him on the phone. The man was about to talk, but his words seemed like to have been stuck in his throat and all he could do was to crepitate. – Hello! Do you hear me? The police…
He was desperately trying to outdo his gasping, as he was more and more breathless.
-Send immediately a patrol here! A person has been killed! – he finally managed to say with a trembling voice, sobbing, with a sense of alarm that was still hanging in the air.
-Stay calm please, – a voice from the receptor told him. –Give me the address.
The man watched his fingers trembling on the counter, his yellow hand skin and eventually lost his mind again, at the point that he didn’t remember the address anymore.
-It’s the “Apolon” hotel, near the Train Station, – he said, feeling like he was saving himself from the double nightmare he was living, – You know, on the right down the road.
But the voice on the phone interrupted his explanation that was getting longer as he was struggling to justify his little loss of memory.
-I know where it is. Please do not touch anything in the crime scene! In two minutes the patrol will be there.
The man left the receptor feeling more comfortable and raised his head looking at the ceiling, right where her room should be. The puddle of blood that had already swamped her bed and the floor soon would begin to leak drop by drop from the ceiling. He squinted at the hall. There was no other sign of life, besides him. This made that silent place even more frightening. Suddenly a red stain appeared on the white ceiling. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Two or three seconds later it had spread in an unbelievable way.
-Oh my God, – he screamed with a horrified face and his sense of vomit returned to him again. He rushed towards the toilet keeping his mouth shut with both of his hands. “It’s only a daydreaming, a hallucination, it’s not real, you fucking have to believe it man”, he thought as he was having a quick rinse with the cold water coming down from the tap.
Far away he heard the howl of a siren that was beginning to be felt constantly nearer. He went quickly to the hall and while the policemen were entering hurriedly through the glass sliding door, he didn’t feel his legs anymore and fell down on his knees.
-Encircle this place! You have to control everywhere. No one should walk out of this door. – he heard a resolute voice saying, and he lost it again.

  
The extract is translated from the Albanian by  Elvi Sidheri.

Leonard Veizi



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