by Joseph Roth
Oh, I fear work is only a blessing because it stands in for joy.
Written in October 1926 for
the Russian series, but never printed
V
Albania
33. A Meeting with President Ahmed Zogu
On Saturday at five in the afternoon, I go to meet the president of the Republic of Albania.* His house is under military guard. The sentries salute. His aide is waiting in the ante-room. He is young, slender, a major; pleasant, briefed and ready to talk about the weather, the Albanian landscape and the perils of malaria: what you call an aide.
In the president’s room there is a portly, clever, older gentleman, who is the foreign secretary. He functions as interpreter and minder. The president wears the uniform of a general. Following some rule that insists a head of state needs a desk, Ahmed Zogu steps out from behind his. Greetings are exchanged. I am engulfed by an armchair. The president tells the minister in Albanian that he is happy to welcome the representative of a great German newspaper to his country; the great German people can be assured of the sympathies of the little Albanian people. The minister relays it to me, in French. The president permits me to travel the length and breadth of Albania free and unhindered, and with the support of the state. The minister repeats it in French. A bow. Another bow. Another. At this point, Ahmed Zogu switches to German. (He once served in Austria.) Had I been in Albania long. How long I anticipated staying. When and where I proposed to go. He desired nothing from reporters but the truth. The truth, I replied, was relative. Something that was true to one person could be a falsehood to another. Certainly, German reporters were obsessed with the need for truthfulness.
I had no particular questions for him—I could answer them all for myself. Interviews are an alibi for a journalist’s lack of ideas.
I extricate myself from the armchair. Smiles wreathe three faces. A bow. Another bow. Another. Sentries. Salutes.
As far as the ceremonial of the audience goes, the Albanian version is indistinguishable in point of ritual, custom and awkwardness from those of any other country. Ahmed Zogu is younger than most European presidents; he is a tad over thirty. He has had a richer, more dramatic life than most Europeans his age. He has dead enemies on his conscience and living ones at large in his country. This last, again, is common to statesmen the world over; the former—more the dead enemies part than the conscience—is an Oriental speciality. Ahmed Zogu looks harmless enough, tall, as representative as he needs to be, and oddly, blond. The blondness overlies the Oriental features like a mistake. The posture he adopts when giving audiences is more the result of caution than any personal confidence. The sparseness of his speech, the slowness of his tongue, the empty politeness of his questions, all are the expression of an insufficiently practised and therefore all the more rigidly adhered-to diplomacy. He strives—for no good reason—for a crown-prince-like banality.
His military abilities are said to be small. In the Great War he did not, contrary to the claims of a swiftly circulated legend, enter Durazzo at the head of a column of Albanian troops. But in this country where every tenth peasant is a military genius, and every second a dead shot with a rifle, it is difficult to shine through military gifts. He is said to be a ruthless dictator. But in Albania, where every warlord has aspirations to be a dictator, every landowner his vassal, and anyone who can read and write his secretary, there is probably no other dictatorship going than the ruthless kind. Ahmed seems if anything less dictatorial than the people around him, who are more experienced, clever, and ruthless than he is, and many of whom have undergone a thorough education in these qualities under the Turks. Of all the qualities that underpin rather than grace dictatorship, the president of the Republic of Albania has perhaps only worry for the future of his country—understandably, in a country where a man doesn’t even have to be dictator to fear a casual bullet. Further, Ahmed has enjoyed lavish hospitality from the South Slavs, having “conquered” Albania with the help of South Slav bands before shortly afterwards concluding the familiar pact with Italy. But for more than 800 years most of the influential men in the Balkans have not refused money, especially when offered by two opposing sides—and why should Ahmed be the exception here? The selfless friendship of the South Slavs has not yet been proved, in any case. But even if I (rightly) question the selfless patriotism of Ahmed, in many points the selfish ambition of the president tallies with the true needs of his country, which, faced with the choice between putting itself in the care of a more cultivated country or one still fighting with its unresolved internal difficulties, chooses the former. Further, the president is accused of plastering his image on walls, stamps and coins everywhere. But even in more developed nations, the widely circulated likeness is still seen as the best means of establishing oneself in the mostly brief and ungrateful consciousness of an electorate.
In any case, it is impossible to judge the circumstances of an Oriental state, whose history is oppression, whose ethics are corruption, and whose culture is a mixture of native bucolic and archaic-romantic naïveté and the recent importation of intrigue, by the criteria of a Western democracy. If one suddenly found oneself back in the Middle Ages, it would be similarly fatuous to be exercised about the burning of witches.
One should try to judge Ahmed with an unprejudiced eye as an expression of his surroundings. One should bear in mind that he is the scion of an Albanian noble family that was in power in the seventeenth century and before—and presumably not with democratic methods then. One should bear in mind that a parliament in Albania can only be convoked in one way, the way that it is presently convoked. It will be a “parliament in name only” for at least another twenty years. It is just as open to the influence of cliques, the will of the head of state as the South Slav Skupština, and just as powerless as the parliaments in Budapest or Ankara. One should bear in mind that the rivals and enemies of Ahmed Zogu, some of whom I know personally, are no more Western than the man himself. Of the nine hundred and twenty Western-educated men who have left the country since Ahmed’s accession, of the seven politicians who have fled to the South Slav Republic since 1925, of the twelve who since 1922 have lost their lives, I presume that none would want to exercise power in a different way than Ahmed Zogu—and I don’t condemn them. Because in Oriental politics, and Albanian politics in particular, self-defence is a very broad concept, and one that plays almost the same role as reasons of state do in Western Europe. A long and laborious process of education needs to take place to make citizens out of shepherds, chieftains, warlords and religious fanatics.
Whether or not Ahmed Zogu is able or willing to take in hand this education is anyone’s guess. Today even his ties to Italy make him nervous. He is no longer able to play off Italy and the South Slavs against each other. There is nothing he is more anxiously awaiting than an olive branch from the South Slavs. But the South Slavs are bitterly readying other men and methods. Italy is more concerned with protecting its own interests than Zogu’s life. And so this young man, who has already had to suppress three revolts, in his well-cut general’s uniform, with an immense allowance, in a by local standards palatial, by ours middle-class home, surrounded by a lifeguard whose loyalty is as relative as everything else in this country, advised by politicians whose cunning was sharpened and whose character dulled in Turkish service—this young man who might have led a carefree student existence in Paris, is stern and trembling, and awaiting a fourth revolt. Most of all, one doesn’t take exception to the loss of life he is said to have been responsible for, so much as the sums of money he has obtained. But then again—if he didn’t have them, then they would end up with others who would have deserved them even less; the small but lardy layer of alphabetical leeches, the Turkish scribes, the corrupt enablers of corruption.
Tomorrow may see Ahmed Zogu still in power, and the day after gone, and someone else in his place, who would be almost indistinguishable from him.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 M
ay 1927
* The recipient here of J. R.’s dusty cool had himself made king the following year (King Zog I), remained in power until 1938, and finally died in exile in France in 1961. He is buried in the Cimetière Parisien de Thiais, where Roth lies too. He was the object of some six hundred blood feuds—vendettas—and survived fifty-five assassination attempts.
34. Arrival in Albania
The sea is calm, the clouds hang in the sky as though nailed there, a ghostly boat skims across the placid surface towards the ship as though drawn on an invisible rope to collect me. There are only two of us disembarking here: a man hoping in this land of beards to sell Gillette razors, and myself.
Where terra firma begins there is a little wooden hut with a picture-book chimney from which the smoke goes straight up, as though drawn with a ruler. It’s seven in the morning; wooded, green, bare, steel-blue mountains frame the horizon; cryptic larks flit about the shiny blue sky; the hut, like many attractions these days, has a guest-book; sitting over the book is a man in a black uniform, rolling himself a cigarette, and this is the Albanian border police. A master of the alphabet, but unused to writing, he sits there, whiling away the time of the new arrivals by painstaking scrutiny of their passports. A stooped Levantine chauffeur is kept waiting in the Ford he proposes to drive until the policeman has got to the end. I cut short his study by offering to set down my name for him.
Then, in a dense cloud of dust, amid the thunder of continually exploding tyres, thrown up and down by authentic Ford springs, I am taken along the road to Tirana. Each time a tyre needs changing, I get out, watch the dust settle and the scenery re-establish itself, mountains of a spectral violet, meadows of a twice-done green, sky of a dependable blue, a sky of cloth, a sky without wrinkles, a taut, carefully ironed arc. Workmen are repairing the road. There are always two hunched over together. Like children in kindergarten they collect little scoops of sand on their tiny shovels or in their bare hands, pour it into scars and potholes, sprinkle a few stones on top, wet the whole thing with water from a watering can and stamp it down with their bare feet. As soon as our Ford has passed, they can start the game again.
It’s not long before we come to some soldiers. To see them march! In yellow-khaki columns, with steel helmets on their heads, rucksacks on their tired backs, burned by the sun, sweating and singing, they are marching for their new fatherland to Durazzo to exercise, escorted by an Albanian version of Mars with leather puttees, first lieutenant and spare uniform. On the juicy pastures a herd of cloudy white lambs is drifting about. Rams with ornamental curved horns, black oxen, a kind of beast of the underworld, the flocks of Hades. Either side there are telegraph wires, strung not on masts, but on crooked bare trees, which have been lopped and cropped. They once used to stand by the roadside, a home to birds, stopping places for evening winds; now they are redesignated as telegraph poles, fitted out with little white china panicles, and equipped to transmit journalistic reports—the twitterings of political sparrows—to Europe. On the left-hand side there is a set of rails, a narrow-gauge memento of the Austrians in the Great War, today given over to decay and the rusty tooth of time.
Finally a black-uniformed policeman, who can speak German, emerges from a white hut, takes our passports, and promises to have them left for us tomorrow morning in the police station at Tirana.
So here is Tirana, the capital city of Albania. On the right a mosque, on the left a rudimentary café terrace where guests bake and fezzes talk. The mosque turns out to be a barracks, soldiers with guns guard themselves. Every hotel room is taken, journalists have hurried here, and diplomats and parliamentarians, officers from England and Italy. Parliament is in session, Tirana is a burial-pit for sensation, imbroglios are on the street, the whole country is an apple of discord. Good citizens walk down the middle of the road, armed with muskets against sunstroke, heavy drum-revolvers stuck in wide, often doubled and tripled red sashes. Mules, laden with filled panniers, dawdle along the pavement, and wait outside shops like dogs while their masters make purchases. Here comes the majestic figure of the commander-in-chief of the Albanian army, Jemal Aranitas, mounted on a noble grey steed, little dark shoeshine boys fall over each other to get out of his way, a squire follows him, only a moment ago he was addressing the army, that’s why their marching was so sorry, no state without a general, no general without a grey steed. Gold sparkles on his shoulders, he greets acquaintances at cafés with a casual wave.
A man turns up by the name of Nikola, who lets me a room. The bed has all four legs in petrol to keep the cockroaches at bay, the window is cracked at the bottom, and replaced at the top by a mosquito net, my neighbour is a trumpeter. He is a member of the orchestra that plays outside the castle every afternoon.
A policeman with snow-white gloves stands in the middle of the road, in case of traffic.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 June 1927
35. Tirana, the Capital City
The inhabitants of Tirana love music and flowers. You can see the men going around with roses in their mouths. They seem to use them as an extra buttonhole.
A section of the populace has devoted itself to brass instruments. Brass players—horns for the fatherland—have been recruited into the Albanian army. The soldiers’ days begin with reveille and end with taps. Music keeps the swing in their stride.
The president has his very own personal band. The bandleader wears a pince-nez and hails from Trieste. The players are from Korça, in the melophile south, and from Czechoslovakia, which in the days when it was still the Kingdom of Bohemia used to supply the Army of the Dual Monarchy with the most sublime band sergeant majors. Every musician is paid fifteen napoleons a month. The acquisition and maintenance of the gorgeous uniforms—black with gold trimmings—is each individual’s responsibility. On his cap every musician wears the familiar emblem of martial music: a golden lyre.
At seven in the morning, just as the soldiers are tooting and parping away, the musicians get up like so many larks, and rehearse passages of marches and overtures in the middle of the high street. The local inhabitants have petitioned the courts on six separate occasions to have the practice moved to a meadow outside the city. But on six separate occasions they have forgotten to attach arguments to their petition. Nothing works without arguments.
Men who are neither in the army nor in the band are devoted to the mild plinking of the mandolin. They have for the most part been to America. There they had their teeth filled with gold, and bought themselves stringed instruments. They sing a song of bananas, to prove that they have seen the world, perhaps also as an expression of their painful longing for America, which they left on account of their painful longing for Tirana. Their hearts are still bobbing on the ocean wave, but their wares, which consist of combs, mirrors, letter paper, are in Tirana. A mandolin is a sheer inevitability.
They sit outside their shops in the sun for hours on end. It’s very quiet. Musical predilections aside, Tirana is tranquil enough. When there is a lull in the blare, you hear the cocks crow, the hammers of the blacksmiths in the bazaar, and the regular summons to worship from the muezzin. The sun scorches down on the streets. The dust is baked in the heat, seeming to disintegrate into finer, thinner dust, dissolving in the atmosphere, disappearing into thin air, without anyone washing or sweeping the pavements. People say a young man is sent out by the authorities with a watering-can every morning, in the furtherance of hygiene, but no one has ever clapped eyes on him. But barracks are erected in the interests of progress. The dynamo that is to keep the electric lights going is too weak for so many bulbs. They come on at night, but they look like dying embers. They dangle on wires, like so many hanged glow-worms.
Bazaars have been knocked through, houses split and scalped, in order to make Tirana an up-to-date capital city. The half-buildings stand there, with black guts open. The residents exotically use the stoves as toilets, without taking off their pistols and rifles. Not for an instant is one sa
fe from a vendetta.* Women in black and white veils put one in mind of funeral processions or the KKK. They have shutters in front of their eyes at all times, they are walled in gauze and cloth. I would like to know what they get up to in their own homes. I am curious about them, they look like strange, illuminated, screened windows. The women are quiet as wild beasts and unresponsive as the dead. Are they crying? I can’t see for sure. They talk to one another. But the sounds are trapped and their voices trickle thinly through the pores of the cloth like clear water through a choked and dirty sieve.
The veiled women, the hundreds of ownerless dogs led on the wind’s leash, the fezzes on fat heads and turbans on bearded faces, the colour-postcard vendetta-artists with revolvers for bellies, and rifles for umbrellas—all these money-earning, business-conducting, official-bribing exotic philistines are in the majority and beyond time. There is nothing so arid as an ethnicity that has been dissected in the mausoleums of ethnology and in books and seminar rooms for thirty years, but is still paraded, as though it were in any sense alive. There is a parliament with a presidential suite and a bell, with order papers for interventions and a press balcony; there is a bank with sluggish Italian officials, with rates of exchange pinned up on boards like so many butterflies, with a loans manager. Already the owner of my hotel has taken to using his holster for keeping small change in, and on his sideboard the first swallows of civilization are starting to roost: Giesshübler mineral water, whisky, vermouth, Fernet-Branca. Together with the gold fillings and the New York slang, the half-education and the mandolins of the returnees from the States, together with the Fords in the streets suggestive of crushed barrel-organs, they constitute the transition from so-called “national culture” to the demand for an “autonomous republic”.
