Excerpt from Free by Lea Ypi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Things got better when Foreign Languages at Home began to be broadcast at five p.m. The programme played daily on Albanian television and was therefore immune to the arbitrary power the antenna exercised on our lives. In addition to English, there was French, Italian, and also "Gymnastics Under Home Conditions." I never tried the latter. We had plenty of exercise every morning at the start of classes, when the whole cohort of teachers and pupils gathered in the schoolyard to practise toe touching, arm rotations, and quad stretches, followed by swearing loyalty to the Party. But I followed all the language programmes with great enthusiasm, especially the Italian one. Imagine how much more I would enjoy the cartoons on Rai Uno, I told myself, if I could figure out what they were about.

Foreign Languages at Home was the subject of intense discussion in the playground. There was always something to learn, not only about foreign languages but also about foreign cultures. I remember an intense discussion about shopping in England, as revealed in a supermarket scene where a mother read out a grocery list and her children had to identify the matching items on the shelves. Pasta, check. Bread, check. Toothpaste, check. Soft drinks, check. Beer, check.

And so we discovered that there was no need to queue. That anyone could choose any food they liked. That the shelves were overflowing with goods, but customers in the shop bought so much they could not even carry it. That people presented no food vouchers and seemed to have no limits on what they could buy, and in what quantity. We wondered why, if people could purchase food anytime they wanted, they chose to stockpile it.

Most puzzling of all was how each food item had its own label. Instead of displaying a generic name, like "toothpaste," "pasta," or "beer," it contained what looked like the name or surname of a person: Barilla pasta, Heineken beer, or Colgate toothpaste. This also seemed to apply to the supermarket itself. Why couldn't a shop simply be called Bread Shop, Meat Shop, Clothes Shop, or Coffee Shop? "Imagine," Besa said, "having a shop called Ypi's Meat or Marsida's Coffee or Besa's Bread."

"Probably the names of the people who made them," I pointed out. "You know, like we have plastic produced by the First of May brigade."

Others contested that interpretation. Teacher Nora explained that outside Albania, people never knew the names of those who made things, the names of the workers. She told us that in the West one knew only the names of the factories where they were made, the people who owned them, their children, and their children's children. Like Dombey and Son.
The next perplexing topic was the function of shopping trolleys. "The trolley was to carry children," I said.

"Food," Marsida corrected me. "Children," I insisted.

"Well, it was clearly used for both," Besa said. "Did you see what the children smuggled into the shopping trolley?" she added, with the air of someone who can distinguish the relevant from the trivial detail. "The mother only discovered it at the end, when she had to pay. I think it was a Coca-Cola can."

"Yes, it was," Marsida said. "She still went ahead and bought it for the children. They said they were thirsty. Maybe the shop didn't have any water. Maybe they don't have everything after all."

"I think it's a drink," I almost whispered, as if I were revealing a secret. "Those cans you sometimes see on top of people's shelves, they're to hold drinks."

Then Flamur, who was feeding left-over bones to his favourite dog, Pelé, interrupted us. "Blah blah blah," he mocked. "Of course Coca-Cola is a drink—everyone knows it. I've tasted it before. I once saw a tourist kid drop a can in the bin, and I collected it. It was still half full, so I tried it. It's a bit like the red aranxhata they sell on the beach, but for tourists."

Everyone looked at him with suspicion.

Excerpted from Free by Lea Ypi. Copyright © 2022 by Lea Ypi. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.