by Joseph Roth
Albania is en route from the vendetta to the League of Nations.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 15 June 1927
* Vendetta: a preoccupation presumably more of Roth’s readership or editors than Roth himself, a blood-feud between two families or clans.
36. The Albanian Army
The Albanian army exercises from five to twelve in the morning and from three to seven in the afternoon. It exercises during its lunch-break. It exercises before bedtime; and at night, when the soldiers are asleep, many hundreds of trumpets may be heard blowing in the mosques (in which the army likes to camp). From this I conclude that the Albanian army surely exercises in its sleep. I am forced to wonder, is there any time when the Albanian army is not exercising?
Nor do I know why it exercises. There seems to be an irresistible compulsion to exercise in the human male—I am the only exception I know of. The Albanian people are born fighters, and they like to shoot from infancy—why in the world would they still exercise? If the rest of us exercise, that’s on account of some legal obligation or other. Our names appear on a roll, we are enlisted, we have to exercise or we are shot. We exercise, therefore, for dear life. In Albania there are no such legal obligations. Recruits are—so they are told—summoned for six months at a time, and are then free to go home. They are supposed to be paid, too. But the fact is that in Albania recruits are kept for two years, and they are not paid a penny—even the officers only manage to get three months of back-pay by extorting it (staff officers are permanently owed two months), and senior policemen live from the sale of confiscated goods—so why do they exercise in Albania? Moreover, deserters are not punished. Recruits, who, without a word to a soul go back to their villages, are handed over by the police to a passing motorist who happens to be stationed in the deserter’s own garrison. The prospect of a ride in a Ford is enough to persuade the deserter to return to his unit, which is to say to return to his exercises. Discipline leaves nothing to be desired. Those soldiers who happen not to have deserted, stiffly and with evident enjoyment salute every passing officer—because who could force them to stiffness? They march, perform knee bends, turns, stand to attention, run, drop to their knees, run in “loose order” and don’t get paid a penny, and their officers don’t either. Why don’t they desert? Why do they exercise?
Further, to what end do Albanian soldiers exercise? They know the mountains like the backs of their hands, they know all the hiding places, they can climb like mountain goats. Surely no one proposes to use them in a world war? A knee bend is unavailing against poison gas. Is Albania contemplating an invasion of Italy by any chance? Even if it were, it can’t be done by exercises. Surely they would need to shoot? Now the Albanian army has Austrian rifles and Italian ammunition, bullets that jam, magazines that can’t be clicked in, British knapsacks that can’t be secured with Italian straps, covers for field-shovels and no field-shovels with which to dig trenches, Italian officers who don’t know commands in Albanian, Austrian officers who are blackballed by their Italian comrades, White Russian officers who don’t exercise at all, but have only come so as to be able to stay in uniform while they wait for Soviet Russia to collapse, British officers who know neither Albanian nor Italian nor German nor Russian, and like to walk around with their swizzle sticks just so that Britain is represented too. It’s the oddest army in the world. It has no coherent rule book or command structure, all it has is martial music, trumpet signals, drums, and a devotion to drill. Men used to scampering in soft slippers over rocks have been shod in heavy, hobnailed boots that make it impossible for them to pick their feet up. They don’t need heavy packs, because they can live on bread and cheese and water for months on end. But they are given heavy knapsacks with pointless contents on useless straps. They were forced to leave their own, Austrian ammunition at home, and were issued with Italian ammunition, because the contracts have gone to Milanese suppliers, so now they can’t even shoot—as they could quite happily in civvy street. But they exercise.
For whom do they exercise? Surely not for their country? Because half the country is unhappy with their government—for reasons of idealism. Half the rest has been bought by the Serbs, and the remainder is on the payroll of the Italians. And in the middle of it, the soldiers are exercising. Perhaps they are exercising for Ahmed Zogu, their president? He has his personal bodyguard, which, if required to, will shoot at the regular soldiers, who, for all their exercising, are thought not to be reliable, and who are deliberately issued with bad ammunition and heavy boots, to keep them from undertaking anything against the president. Only the bodyguard has matching ammunition, no rucksacks, lightweight boots, a unified command structure and personal friends of the president to lead them.
So I repeat my questions: why, for whom, and to what end does the Albanian army exercise? All I am able to say is why:
Because they are stupid. Because they enjoy sweating, being yelled at, tormented and oppressed. I suspect that this is not confined to Albanians. The Europeans are no different. Did I say the Albanians had the oddest army in the world? It’s not true. All armies in the world are odd; very odd.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 June 1927
37. Western Visitors in Barbaria
One can infer the exotic character of Albania straightaway from the peculiar carry-on of the civilized Europeans there. The members of this curious race, whose baffling customs and practices have still not sufficiently been researched, and who make a point of hating each other in their comfortable homelands, seem in wild terrain to have taken on a different heart, a different point of view and a different character. Immediately after setting foot in a country without flushing toilets they unpack from their travelling bags a never-used, gleaming friendliness, to exchange it like for like with their equally civilized fellows. In particularly inhospitable areas, it seems real ladies have been seen dancing with commercial representatives in the European club—merely to break through the ranks of natives.
In Albania I am able to establish that all Europeans and Americans are one heart and one soul. Racial memories of liftboys and bundles of stocks and shares form an indissoluble bond that is finally cemented when a gramophone sounds and couples contort themselves to dance. Rival diplomats fight shoulder to shoulder against mosquitoes, malaria and the least attempt on the part of a native to approach the culture they are bringing him. All the rivals who have clustered round this tough but—until now—unspoken-for morsel, march together and take their profits separately. Even journalists generously pass on to one another their snippets of false news from real sources. Early in the morning you can see military attachés greeting a barber who happens to be in their sector, and hence at the mercy of their protection. Veritable excellencies leave calling cards at unimportant addresses. Outside the embassies are no dismissive guards but a humble policeman or kavass. Where in Europe an unmannerly secretary remains seated, here a friendly dragoman rises to his feet. Gentlemen are on occasion capable of sharing a bed together just to confuse the local bugs. The brotherliness of the masters is as great as it would be in the last hour before the end of the world. They tremble before the volcano on which they dance their Charlestons. A couple of distinguished locals have been adopted in the circle of the foreign gods. Tirana has a tennis club where anyone who swings a racket and uses toothpaste is admitted. An Albanian colonel and national hero of Austrian ancestry and Western character offers a welcome subject of conversation. A couple of Albanian officials venture on a round of cards with the wives of English officers. A German company director plays poker with the Vice Consul of a Balkan state. Americans are friendly to Bulgarians, because they have a deal to sell sponges to Sofia, and Tirana is not yet in the bag. The odd minister may be seen helping an au pair as she takes her little European charges on a walk.
On some evenings there are parties. The English, who would be instantly recognizable even in their lounge suits, come in tails. On one such evening it transpired that a feudal yachtsman who hat
es the press and indeed any piece of paper not bearing a coat of arms, sat down and talked to me for fully half an hour—which I did not reciprocate. We drank whisky and soda, mixed by the White Russian who is running the bar here till such time as the czar is resurrected. People told each other stories. Because Tirana has gossip—the foreign gods don’t even notice how humane they are being.
We hear that the attractive girlfriend of the Albanian president is a Viennese girl from Ottakring by the name of Franzi. She was seen driving a Fiat. When? This afternoon! What time? Twenty past four! What was she wearing? A new hat! Describe the hat! It was red!—Major X, adjutant of the President’s sister, refused permission to a young Albanian official to dance with her. When the young man did anyway, the Major had him arrested. He spent three days in Tirana gaol. The barbarousness of it! splutter the foreign gods. Even though in Bavaria writers often spent years behind bars, without ever seeing an adjutant. In America Charlie Chaplin is boycotted because he kissed his wife on the mouth and elsewhere. In France, remember, there was a certain Dreyfus. In Italy individuals with sound digestion are made to guzzle castor oil. But Albania—Albania is unspeakable.
Diplomats have to prove they are representing their national interests. They hover—extraterritorial as they are—like flies on a cheese cloche, buzzing back and forth in large automobiles, pay calls on one another, snoop on one another, take counsel together, make mountains out of molehills, encode them, and wire them home. Then the situation becomes tense. There is a rush to arms. Then a journalist trots along to the telegraph office. He hears a toot. It was the horn of an ambassador. In the newspaper it was the fire brigade of our special correspondent. The newspaper eavesdrops on the diplomat. The diplomat believes what he reads. What have you heard? Armed bands in Scutari? Have you spoken to the military attaché? Haven’t you heard? Salonica? Sazan? Gunboats? Hydroplanes?
In the meantime the Albanian peasants work their fields, the traders sell traditional opanci shoes, the blacksmiths hammer out saucepans, the saddlers stitch saddles. But every morning brings march-past, drums, reveille, knee-bends. Sooner or later, you’re going to get shot. By the Italians? By the South Slavs?—Who cares? War is war.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 7 July 1927
38. Article about Albania (Written on a Hot Day)
Albania is beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring. Its mountains are sometimes of an uncertain clear substance, so that you might take them for shards of glass painted green. It’s only on dull days, when the sky isn’t clouded over so much as swaddled in a thin overcoat of cloudy stuff, that you feel they might be rock after all. They have become more massive, implacable, and the whole country feels like a locked courtyard, ringed by the walls of a natural prison. Freedom is a relative concept, you sense that there are no railways at hand to lead us into our century, that ships two hours, four hours, twelve hours from here, only put in once a week at an Albanian port, and the exoticism of it is twice as hard to bear as a self-chosen torment. Viewed from the distance of Berlin, the phenomenon of the vendetta may well appear worth investigating. On its native terrain, though, it rather blurs into the background of filth, cockroaches, dark nights, broken oil lamps, fat spiders, malaria attacks and murky seaweed tea.
Under such circumstances, I am less receptive to the beauties of nature than those born optimists called tourists. At most, I might register: quiet blue days of simple sublimity; a hot sun that bakes even your shadow, and that is palpable in every cool recess; a few birds (a rarity here, because the shooters are so assiduous) in the air and of course also on the branches; forests of an unfathomable stillness, depth and darkness. A few houses, windowless, fortress-like, deaf and blind cubes of stone, coarse, enigmatic and tragic, redolent of destiny and secret curses. On each of these buildings that are so arranged as to offer rest to a murderer, refuge to a pursued man, security to a whole clan, lies the so-called charm of eeriness, which I would sooner not get too close to. Without the permission of the master of the house, one may not set foot in the meanest hut. But with his permission, the hospitality is life-threatening. Hospitality is a fine custom, among the noblest proofs of humanity. But there is every justification for it too in the selfish thought that among people who have instituted blood revenge for justice, a man needs to rest up somewhere, because sooner or later everyone will end up as a fugitive. If you are resolute in your sceptical thinking, then you will come to the conclusion that a good police force is actually preferable to hospitality. May Albanians and others forgive me that I am not sufficiently gifted to admire unproductive conservatism in the way it should be admired. Unfortunately, alongside other habits that I revere, the Albanians have one that I merely understand: they are utterly intent on preserving old habits, not only stressing their Albanianism at the expense of their humanity, but also cultivating their tribalism at the expense of their nation. Albanians who live outside Albania like to shut themselves away, marry only one another, and remain suspicious of their new settings. Even in America, they remain Albanians, talk to each other in Albanian, and at the end of a few decades away, return, why?—in order to go around in a cartridge belt in Albania. Like other small peoples, they have that kind of national feeling that causes the nation to die and keeps the national culture impoverished. Hence the fact that the Albanian language still has no word for “love”, no fixed terms for the colours of the rainbow, no particular word for “God”; that Albanian literature could be a richer or at the very least a more accurate representation of Albanian life today, but remains as simple as the first songs of European humanity and lags behind the development of even this laggardly country. The materials of the literature are bucolic family sagas. Alongside the patriotic conservatism, tribal rivalries exist at the expense of the nation, and religious fanaticism at the expense of religion. It’s not as though the Albanians are particularly devout. But their membership of a faith in and of itself leads them to look askance at members of others.
I understand that most “national traits” are the consequence of an unhappy history, in this case centuries of bitter struggle against the Turks. But there were also thousands of Albanians who went voluntarily to serve the Turks, were Turkish favourites, generals, officials, helped oppress their country and—and yet remained Albanians. Such are the whims of national culture. An Albanian major said to me: “It’s as well that the Turks oppressed us, and kept us away from their civilization. But for that, the Albanian language might have disappeared without trace.” This was, as I say, an Albanian major speaking. Therefore I didn’t say what I was sorely tempted to say: But what good did that do you? Try telling your beautiful wife: I love you in Albanian. Wouldn’t it be better to say it wholly in Turkish than half-say it in Albanian? It’s a crime to oppress a nation, we both agree about that. But to praise the negative outcome of this oppression, the chance survival of a technically interesting language is false and childish national pride. But as I say, I bit my tongue.
I passed through towns of an exquisite ghostliness, and others that were simply heart-breaking. I saw Elbasan, one of the oldest towns in the country. Its stone buildings in stone courtyards in stone grounds have the monumentality of death and at the same time its idyllic grief. There is nothing so moving as the green between stones, cracks and crannies sprouting soft, damp moss, the flower of mould and nothingness. It makes the stone somehow still stonier. With its winding lanes and its hunchbacked bazaar the town is reminiscent of a sort of huge and whimsically, defiantly irregular snail shell, whose original inhabitant has died and has left its place to a clutch of casual, brown, picturesquely clad, also soiled and broken traders. It appears that most of Elbasan belongs to one Shefgiet Verlaci, the father-in-law to be of Ahmed Zogu. Elbasan boasts one of the loveliest, widest, greenest prayer sites of the whole country, where on hot afternoons priests and acolytes like to recline and give themselves over to metaphysics. In the east are the great Mohammedan cemeteries with gravestones like outsize mushrooms
; in the south is the dynamited bridge at Skumli, and further an extensive deep-green olive wood, a fairy-tale wood for a stage production.
I will mention Kruja. It is a dream of primitivism. It reminds me of the story of Rebecca going to the well. A naïve early Biblical fuzz overlies the overgrown village. Pots are baked in large fiery open ovens, Old Testament forms, handled jars of innocent clay, brownish-girlish, with youthfully slim necks and hips, and slightly clumsy thin spouts. Turkish coffee is boiled on open fires. The café consists of a patron and an immovable set of scales, in whose pans sit a couple of cups filled with black, viscous, syrupy stuff. The town is ruled with a heavy hand by the gendarmerie commander, who in another life was a warlord (or, some might say, robber baron). He has a fine uniform with gold stars.
Walking around, you encounter Biblical scenes: shepherds scarved against sunburn, leaf huts, tents of woven willow, men on mule-back, veiled women, knitting as they walk. The land is so peaceful that you refuse to credit its reputation for murder. Even so, I met a man who wanted to avenge a friend, and shot an innocent party by mistake. He was unlucky: the innocent party had seven brothers, who are now all on the tail of my acquaintance. He tried sending out various emissaries, but it takes a while to settle on a price. For three months now he has lived in imminent expectation of death. He is no sort of primitive Albanian either, but a man who has lived in Paris as a munitions worker and returned, expressly to carry out his vendetta. Even though he is himself pursued, he is still looking for the man who murdered his friend.
