Take grocery shopping. There was always a queue. It always formed before the distribution lorry arrived. You were always expected to join, unless you had befriended the shopkeeper. That was the general rule. But there were also loopholes. Anyone was allowed to leave the queue so long as they found an appropriate object to replace them during their absence. It could be an old shopping bag, a can, a brick, or a stone. Then there was another rule, eagerly endorsed and promptly enforced: namely, that once the supplies arrived, the object left to act as your representative immediately lost its representative function. It did not matter if you had left a bag, can, brick, or stone in your place. The bag was just a bag; it could no longer be you.

My grandmother was not nostalgic for her past. She had no desire to return to a world in which her aristocratic family spoke French and visited the opera while the servants who prepared her meals and cleaned her clothes could not read or write. She had never been a Communist, she said, but nor did she long for the ancien régime. She was aware of the privilege in which she had grown up and suspicious of the rhetoric that had justified it. She did not think class consciousness and class belonging were the same thing. She insisted that we do not inherit our political views but freely choose them, and we choose the ones that sound right, not those that are most convenient or best serve our interest. “We lost everything,” she said. “But we did not lose ourselves. We did not lose our dignity, because dignity has nothing to do with money, honours, or titles. I am the same person I always was,” she insisted. “And I still like whisky.”

I thought about her words on the morning of the election. Why did my parents hesitate to vote? Why did they not simply go out to savour the freedom they’d been longing for? The staged yawning, the theatrical sleep, and the faux indecision all gave the impression that what they had wanted all these years was not for concrete things to happen but for abstract possibilities to remain available. Now that something specific was within reach, my family feared losing control. Instead of exercising the freedom of choice that elections were assumed to bring, they tried to keep that choice free from contamination. Perhaps they wanted to avoid committing to a specific individual or policy that might turn out to disappoint. Or perhaps they worried that if the same results were brought about through the actions of millions of other voters, who had different principles and motives, their hopes would turn into illusion.

Everyone agreed that privacy was important. “Not just important—it’s your right. It’s a right,” Donika explained, her voice charged with all the wisdom and authority she had accumulated during the many years spent opening envelopes.

It never occurred to my mother that things could have been different for her. When she saw a problem, she thought only about how she could solve it herself, not whether she could appeal to others. The charisma she possessed, and the authority she commanded, made her independent from other people, sometimes too much. The only weapon she could offer to other women was her own strength. The only defence she passed on to me was her example. I grew up seeing how people were deferential to her, as if intimidated by her—not just the pupils in her class, the children in our neighbourhood, and us, her own children, but also quite a few adults, including men. I wondered where her power came from, and thought that perhaps she instilled fear in others because she was never scared of anything herself. But when I tried to be like her, and sought to control my fears, even dominate them, I struggled. I realized that she was an impossible model to follow. My mother did not fight and conquer her fears. She never knew fear in the first place.

It was not until many years later that something new occurred to me: how lonely she must have been. What also occurred to me around the same time was that perhaps she didn’t stand out after all; perhaps there were hundreds, even thousands of other women like her. They would have conducted their lives unaware of one another’s existence, content with their self-sufficiency, resentful of one another’s lack of courage, or aspiration, or resolve to fight. It was from either a failure of the relevant institutions or a lack of imagination that my mother lived all her life in a Socialist state convinced that one can only ever fight against others, never alongside them. I would have offered my sympathy, if I hadn’t thought she would feel insulted.

When those working in the port heard that they were about to lose their jobs, they began to visit our house in the early hours of the morning, waiting patiently outside until my father left. At first, there were only four or five, but as news of the structural reforms spread, the crowds grew bigger. They stood in the courtyard until my father appeared at the door, then shouted at him, begging him to think twice: “Good morning, boss. You’re a good man, boss, don’t do it, don’t listen to them thieves.” “Is it about drinking, boss? Is it that? I can quit drinking tomorrow, if that’s the problem. Tomorrow I can quit drinking, and I can quit smoking too, if you want. Who has money for raki these days? I’ve cut so much, boss, really cut down, you know.” “I only have a couple of years until retirement, boss. Just two more years. I’ve worked in the port since I was thirteen.” “Boss, I never stole anything. You know, they say Gypsies steal everything. Maybe someone told you I stole from the warehouse. I’ve never stolen a penny, boss. I swear on my children’s heads, I’ve never stolen anything.” “Let me do my job. I like my job. It’s a hard job, but I like it. I know everyone in the port. The port is like my house. I sleep there, I eat there, I do everything at the port. When I go home, my children are sleeping.”

When confronted with the same decisions about structural reforms, his colleagues became cynical. “Oh, well,” they would say. “We survived the Turks. We survived the Fascists and the Nazis. We survived the Soviets and the Chinese. We’ll survive the World Bank.” He was terrified of forgetting what that survival had cost. Now that he was safe, now that our family was no longer at risk of being killed, imprisoned, or deported, he was anxious that he might soon no longer remember what it was like to wake up in the morning and worry about what the day would bring. He tried to recall the names of all the people who worked in the port, even though there were hundreds of them. “If I forget their names, I will forget about their lives,” he said. “They will no longer be people; they’ll become numbers. Their aspirations, their fears will no longer matter. We will only remember the rules, not those to whom they apply. Only think about orders, not about the purpose they serve. That’s probably what the Mule thought as she informed on her pupils’ families. What Haki repeated to himself when reaching out for his torture instruments.”

EACH YEAR, I BEGIN my Marx courses at the London School of Economics by telling my students that many people think of socialism as a theory of material relations, class struggle, or economic justice but that, in reality, something more fundamental animates it. Socialism, I tell them, is above all a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realize their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing is also oppressive. And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.

MY STORIES ABOUT SOCIALISM in Albania and references to all the other Socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba—there was nothing Socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends’ socialism was clear, bright, and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody, and of the past.

And yet, the future they sought, one that Socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But, to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by the failure of these ideas to be realized. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it.