NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  I kept on walking, into a ruined park, past a stagnant reservoir where people were sunning themselves in their underwear. Their underwear had the same cast-off look as their clothes, just as ill-fitting and ragged and dated. Most of what Albanians wore these days had been supplied by Italian charitable agencies, and so it had come out of attics and closets in pious households up and down the Adriatic.

  There were signs of vandalism even here—plaques torn off, signs defaced, dates obliterated, plinths cracked where they had held statues. About a mile beyond the reservoir there was a terrible smell, borne by a hot breeze. No sign indicated it, but it was clear that just ahead was the Tirana Zoo.

  I hate zoos generally but never have I felt more like opening cage doors and setting the animals free. If they ate a few Albanians then it was poetic justice for the torments these animals had endured, though I had yet to see an Albanian fit to eat.

  The cages were very small—about the size that they would be for a wicked criminal in the prison of a brutish country. This was how the animals were seen—as savage beasts; and because they were beasts they were treated like convicted murderers. An example of this was the magnificent tiger, his fur gone grotty in his foul cage; he was fatigued and desperate in this eight-by-twelve-foot cage, which hardly contained him. An Albanian watering some plants tormented the tiger by squirting the hose into his face.

  A wolf gnawed a bone in a small cell. Three eagles flopped in another cage, so small that it was impossible for them to spread their wings—one of them hobbled. A filthy crane, four sweating bear cubs, and worst of all a lioness, demented by captivity, pacing beside the bars, with still enough wit to flinch when an Albanian worker tossed twigs at her. Her mate, cowed by the twig-throwing, retreated to the back wall of the cage.

  “Why are you doing that, you shithead?” I said to the Albanian, and made gestures.

  He grinned at me and muttered in his own language. Throwing things at the animals was apparently one of the pastimes here. Among old bones and lion droppings and slime there was the other stuff that Albanians had flung through the bars—more twigs, balled-up paper, stones, a black cap.

  But seeing this zoo was a way of understanding how the Albanians lived, in tiny apartments, eating bad food and not enough of it, putting up with water shortages and power cuts, tormenting each other, ignoring the filth in the streets. It was almost certainly the way their prisoners were treated, and these zoo animals were just another species of prisoner.

  • • •

  If I had abused that bullying man at the zoo in Italian he might have understood me. It was true that Italian was the second language here. I found an Italian-speaking taxi driver, Ali, bargained a little and went back to Durrës in his fairly new Lancia.

  “Where did you buy this car?”

  “Down the coast. The place has no name.”

  “So was this car stolen?”

  “Probably. But not here. Italy maybe.”

  The bunkers by the roadside and on every hill did not look less strange, even days later. Ali said one of them was his—he had forgotten which one.

  Past the ruined trees, the broken road, the cracked tenements, the locked railway station: I had fled from these on the old bus. The beach at Durrës was the nastiest I had seen in the Mediterranean. It was bouldery and black, littered with oily flotsam, broken glass and greasy plastic. This was the sort of beach that needed a great overwhelming tide to sweep it and scour its sand. Such a tide did not exist in this sea.

  Its filth did not deter Albanians from swimming and sunning themselves there. Pale, in their underwear, they had the look of people who had been forced to strip and undergo a cruel initiation.

  Ancient Roman columns stood on the beach—in ancient times this was where the Via Egnatia picked up after it left Bari, one of the great spokes of the Roman road system. It was the remains of a temple, left to decay. Farther on, a war memorial to the Albanian dead—a twenty-foot-high bronze soldier charging off his plinth and underneath it, spray-painted in red on the marble, Nirvana and Guns n Roses and Fuck You.

  The construction of the memorial—the way the slabs were set up, the marble blocks a certain height and spaced just so—made it serve a dual function as war memorial and toilet. It had been fouled; it stank. This whole shore under the headland of the former palace of King Zog was a horror.

  Ali said, “Want to see the amphitheater?”

  We drove into a dead end, and there among the houses of the slum was a Roman ruin. The slum was part of it, though the houses looked much frailer than the Roman arches.

  An Albanian watchman, angling for a tip, began chattering in Italian.

  “This is where the rich people came in on their horses,” he said, showing me a cavernous entry way. “The poor people came in through that little door up there.”

  The slum dwellers had simply encroached upon it in a distinctly Mediterranean manner, creeping up to it and snatching the marble slabs and the old Roman bricks and using these ancient building materials for their hovels.

  “This was big enough for fifteen thousand people,” the watchman said. “They had shows—animals, lions, tigers and gladiators. Look, the original stone, these steps, this passageway went all the way around the perimeter, where you see these houses.”

  “The people used the stone for their houses,” I said.

  “But they didn’t break it. An earthquake did that,” he said. “There were two earthquakes. In the first one it was destroyed. People took the stone to put in their houses. Come, I will show you the chapels.”

  There were two Byzantine chapels in the lower passageway. There had been catacombs, there were mosaics of broken but still-recognizable portraits of saints. The watchman knew them: St. Sofia, St. Irene, St. Stephen, some angels. “This was used for baptisms and funerals.”

  “It’s too bad so much of it is buried,” I said.

  “We only found it a little while ago.”

  “This Roman amphitheater? You didn’t know it was here?”

  “No. Like I said, it was buried in an earthquake. Then one day in 1966 a man’s fig tree died. He dug it up, to plant another, and in the hole he found this wall—these stairs.” He showed me the marble staircase. “He dug further and when he found more stairs he reported it to the archaeological department. And they saw that this whole slope was an amphitheater.”

  At that point it began to be excavated, and bits of it started to vanish, only to appear as elements in the nearby houses. The Roman amphitheater was a mess, like everything else, and the underground passages that had been dug out were flooded.

  “Pump’s broken!” the watchman said. Nevertheless, he had earned his five leks.

  We went, Ali and I, to King Zog’s palace. Ali said that it was now a government guest house, like Hoxha’s mansion in Tirana. “Sometimes visitors stay here.” It was a squarish villa at the top of the hill, less impressive up close than it had seemed from the deck of the ferry Venezia.

  Zog had a son, Ali said. He had been born in this palace, and the next day the infant had been spirited into exile with his father and mother.

  “Do you want him to be your king?”

  Ali laughed at the suggestion, and said, “He spent one day here. Then a few years ago he came back. Also for a day. So he’s—what?—fifty-five or fifty-six, and in his whole life he’s spent two days in Albania!”

  I asked him whether it was true, as the youths in Tirana had told me, that all the borders of Albania had been closed, and that people were forbidden to leave.

  Yes, Ali said, it was against the law—no one could leave.

  “Why?”

  “Why! Why!” He slapped his head to ridicule my pestering question. “You think it’s strange that we couldn’t leave this country. Look, when I was a little boy I couldn’t leave the house! Everyone stayed in. My parents kept the door locked. I couldn’t go out. You understand? No one went out of the house during Hoxha’s time.”

  “They went to work, though
?”

  “Yes. Then straight home.”

  On our way back to Tirana we passed the decrepit factories. The biggest was a rubber factory. “Is it working?”

  “Destroyed,” Ali said. “All the factories are destroyed. Rubber factory. Plastics factory. Machinery. All broken.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Who! Who!” He smacked the side of his head again. “Who do you think did it?” He laughed but it was a shameful laugh. “I did it! In 1990 and again last year! We were excited. We broke everything!”

  However poor Tirana seemed, life was harder in the countryside. About thirty miles south of Tirana many people had taken up residence in the larger bunkers and bomb shelters. They had extended them at the entrance with a framework of poles, covered with plastic or canvas sheets. It was bound to happen, with so many bunkers and such a serious housing shortage.

  I had come here with Adrian Bebeti, a native of Tirana, in his late twenties, who also owned a stolen car, a BMW with a tape deck and leather seats. I had met him near the Dajti and he agreed to take me on a slow trip to southern Albania for a hundred dollars, stopping at Vlorë and anywhere else I wished, and dropping me at Sarandë, where (“Perhaps,” he said in Italian) I might find a boat to take me to Greek Corfu.

  Himself, he hated Greeks, he said. They were scum who did little but persecute Albanians and lord over them the fact that they were members of the European Community. And look at them, the average Greek was just as pathetic as the average Albanian.

  Adrian spoke Italian fluently. He had visited Italy twice. His brother worked there. He watched Italian television—he liked the game shows, the football, the music programs.

  Driving south, we passed a burned-out factory.

  “Did you do that?” I asked him.

  “Not that one,” he said. “I burned another one!”

  Traveling down the coast, about twenty miles south of Durrës, Adrian pulled off the road near a huge parking lot. But it was not a parking lot.

  “All stolen,” Adrian said. Tutto rubato.

  It was the thieves’ car market, all the cars lined up in an orderly way beside the shoreline. The Mediterranean had some odd beaches, but this one was by far the oddest. There were about five hundred cars and Albanians swarmed around them, kicking the tires, flashing money, making deals. Mr. Lombardi, are you looking for your Fiat that was stolen in Rome a few months ago? It was here. Mr. Schmidt, your Mercedes that was pinched in Munich, and Mr. Wilson’s Jeep Cherokee that was last seen in a hotel parking lot in Lausanne—these and many others were here under the scrubby pines by the Albanian shore. They were in good order, with new papers, and there were so many it was impossible for me to look at all of them. The prices were reasonable because, having been stolen, they had no book value, only what the market would bear. They were much cheaper, Adrian said, than what they would have cost in Italy or Germany. The number of them, and their excellent condition, and the remote spot on another grubby beach, nowhere near a town, all impressed me. It struck me that some of them might have come with me the week before on the ferry Venezia from Bari.

  “Crooked lawyers in Italy fix them up with new papers, and off they go,” Adrian said.

  “Ask them how much this Mercedes is.”

  But he wouldn’t. He said, “It is not a good idea to ask questions here if you are not intending to buy a car. They will wonder why you ask so many questions.”

  “I suppose that’s my problem—asking questions,” I said.

  “In Albania we have learned not to talk too much,” Adrian said. And he suggested we get back on the road.

  It was a poor road, lined with rows of tree stumps. The trees, Adrian explained, had been cut and used for fuel. There were few other cars on the road—some carts, some horses and dogs and chickens, and people had the habit of walking in the road. The houses were much poorer than ones I had seen in Durrës and Tirana. But they had the same doomsday look, as though at a certain point in the growth of these villages they had been stricken. The people were not ragged—no beggars here—but there was a definite look of deprivation: women carrying water in tin containers, families hoeing, groups of people selling small piles of vegetables or fruit by the side of the road. At the town of Fier we stopped and walked to the market, where Adrian bought a pound of cherries. They were in season. We sat and ate them, and then set off again.

  Remembering what the American diplomat had said to me about the besa and the blood feud, I asked Adrian.

  “You’re confusing two things,” he said. “First of all, besa means a promise that has to be kept, no matter what.”

  “Give me an example,” I said.

  “All right. Suppose you give me your telephone number in New York and I go there, because you invited me and you gave me your besa. In that case, you meet me, you take me to your house, you feed me—because your besa was given with your invitation. You would never leave me on the street. You would look after me no matter what. You cannot abandon me!”

  He was driving in a swerving fast-slow sort of way. If private cars had been banned in Albania until 1990 that meant no Albanian had been driving for more than three years, and most of them much less, or not at all. The inexperience certainly showed.

  “Revenge is another matter,” Adrian was saying—gabbling in Italian and swerving to avoid potholes in the rutted road. “We call it hakmari or jakmari. Hak means blood, mari means take.”

  “Does it always involve killing?”

  Adrian took both hands off the steering wheel and cupped them, a gesture that meant, “The answer to that question is so obvious I do not believe it is worthy of a verbal reply.”

  I said, “Please give me an example of Albanian hakmari.”

  “All right. Someone does something to your brother. So you do something to him. Or, you just killed someone in my family, you miserable Pig—”

  Adrian became shrill and definite when he personalized these examples. I was uncomfortable again, as I had been when illustrating besa he had said, You cannot abandon me!

  “In that case, I kill you,” he said, his jaw set. “Never mind how much time passes. It could be twenty years later. By then you are happy. You have forgotten what you did. But I have not forgotten. It is there, the pain in my heart. One day you leave your house—happy! It is a nice day! I go to you and”—he whipped his fingers against his throat—“I kill you.”

  “Is it better if some time passes?” I said. “In English there is a proverb that goes, ‘Revenge is a dish that is best served cold.’ ”

  Adrian smiled. He liked that. But he said, “Anytime is the right time for hakmari.”

  I saw from the map that we were approaching Vlorë, where I had been intending to stop. I mentioned this to Adrian. He did not react. His mind was on other things.

  “My grandfather was a victim of hakmari,” he said. “He had an enemy. One day the man killed him. It was my mother’s father, about 1952 or so.”

  “Was his death avenged?”

  “What could be done? Nothing. Because there were no men in the family. My grandfather had three sisters and his wife and only daughters. Women don’t kill.” He kept driving. He said, “That was in Scutari.”

  “Why weren’t you told to kill the man?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t kill him. I wasn’t born until 1966. By then it was too late. I was the wrong generation. The matter had been forgotten.”

  “I see. So vengeance has to be carried out by someone in the same generation as the victim.”

  “Exactly,” Adrian said.

  “Was hakmari practiced during the Hoxha times?”

  “No, not in the Hoxha communist times. But in the past few years I have heard stories. Not a lot but definitely there are families ‘taking blood.’ ”

  We stopped for the night at Vlorë. We had gone more than half the distance to Sarandë, and it was now late in the day. It was not a good idea to be on the road after dark in a country so inadequately provided for. Anyway, Adrian h
ad a friend here, he said. Remembering my liking for the cherries he had bought at Fier, Adrian asked several people in Vlorë where we could buy some. Thirty cents got us a pound of ripe cherries.

  The hotel at Vlorë had no name, and many empty rooms. The only guests were two Albanian families. They had spent the day on the stony beach. Adrian said he would stay with his friend and pick me up at seven the next morning. He left me the cherries and a stern warning to be very careful. “Lock your door at night.” I took his advice.

  At Vlorë there was a large villa on a headland which had belonged to Enver Hoxha. Before darkness fell I walked towards it, but saw that it was guarded by soldiers and thought better of rousing their suspicions. Though people stared; no one in Vlorë followed me; there was dire poverty here, but no beggars. The people on the beach, baring their bodies to the gray sky, risking death by poison in the water of Vlorë Bay, were bony and pale. It was so odd to see these skinny white people crouched on the sand, frail little families at play—and these were the well-off Albanians, at this seaside town.

  Probably because Hoxha had come here often, there were slogans painted on the sides of buildings. They resembled the so-called “big character” Cultural Revolution slogans I had seen in China, and in some cases the words were identical. Glory to Marxism and Leninism had been painted carefully in red letters on a wall in Vlorë, and other walls extolled Hoxha—Glory to Enver Hoxha (Lavde Enver Hoxha) and ditto with revolution, work, and Albania. No one had bothered to paint over the now out-of-date slogans, but in some cases whole walls had been smashed. On a mountainside outside of Vlorë in stone letters forty feet high were the words PARTI ENVER.

  I drank a beer, I ate bread and stew, and in my room I listened to an update from the BBC about the trial in Tirana of Ramiz Alia, who was being tried on charges of “abuse of power” and “misappropriation of state funds.”

  There was no sound at night in Vlorë. No wind, no passing cars, no music, not even a voice. The sea was silent: not even the mushburger waves that slopped on the shore of other Mediterranean places.