NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “So what did you call him?” I asked Adrian the next morning, as we drove out of Vlorë past the slogans to Hoxha. “‘Great leader’? ‘Teacher’? ‘Father’? Something like that?”

  “Shokut,” Adrian said. “Shokut Enver.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Friend.” Amico.

  That was wonderful. The man who had put a wall around the country and starved them and turned off the lights and terrified them and imprisoned them and wouldn’t let them grow beards and lived in lovely villas while they stayed inside their huts eating sour bread or cleaning their personal weapon (“in the event of an attack by the imperialists”), this man was “Friend Enver.”

  “These days we don’t use the word shokut at all,” Adrian said. “It is not a good word, because of the way we used it before.”

  “Then if you don’t use the word friend, how do you say ‘Friend Adrian’?”

  “We use the word zoti. Zoti Paul, I might say to you if I greet you,” he said. “It means ‘god.’ No more friends, we are now gods.”

  Until Vlorë we had been traveling on a shore road that was fairly flat, but the next day I saw that the southern part of the Albanian coast was mountainous. The steep cliffs dropped straight into the sea, and the road climbed behind them, becoming corrugated and unsafe, as it shook our car sideways to the edge. Rising to over two and a half thousand feet, the road was also bleak and windy, in places precipitous, at the edge of rocky goat-haunted ravines, where the only settlements were clusters of stone huts, many of them ancient.

  Above Vlorë there were only tree stumps—the trees had been recently cut down. In the desperate and anarchic days of the previous year, when there was no fuel, people had cleared the woods and cut even the cedars that had been planted beside the road.

  “Perfume!” Adrian shouted as he bumped along the side of a ravine, and the heavy scent of rosemary from the mountainside entered the car.

  Almost four hours of this narrow mountain road; Adrian had a tape machine in his car but only one tape, The Greatest Hits of Queen, a rock group. Adrian liked the group. “Freddie Mercury,” he said. “He died of AIDS.” Towards noon, passing a remote spot, we saw a policeman hitchhiking. At first I thought he was at a roadblock, and my heart sank. But Adrian explained that the man was hitching a ride and that we were under no obligation to pick him up. Thinking that it might be useful to have a policeman on board, I said, “Let’s take him.”

  The policeman had two containers of olive oil. They were so heavy he could scarcely lift them. Adrian helped him hoist them into the trunk.

  “Ramiz Alia!” the policeman said. “He’s on trial!”

  Adrian said nothing. The policeman abandoned his attempt at conversation. Clearly, Adrian hated him. We drove about twenty miles. When the policeman got out at a crossroads Adrian discovered that some of the olive oil had leaked onto the carpet of his trunk, and he cursed and swore. It was obvious that the Albanians had few personal possessions, but they were maniacally fastidious about keeping them in good order.

  The villages on the southern Albania coast looked Greek—blocky stucco huts in hillsides. We passed a ruined church.

  “What religion are you?”

  “None,” Adrian said.

  “What about God?” I asked, sensing that I sounded like a character in a Graham Greene novel.

  “I really don’t know—the whole thing confuses me,” Adrian said.

  We soon were back above the coast again—great bluey-green bays and steep sluices of whitish rock. There was no one in the coves. No boats, no people, no villages. There was no litter. These were the emptiest and most beautiful beaches I had seen so far. Most of them were only accessible by sea, the cliff walls were too steep for any path. I was never to see such a coastline again in the Mediterranean. Nothing had happened here. Farther on there was a submarine base, with a large man-made cave cut into the mountainside at the shoreline for the sub to slide into. That was guarded, but that was the only man-made thing on this whole superb shore that still had the look of Illyria.

  The Greek island of Ithaca, home to Ulysses, was only a hundred miles due south of here. Sailing back to Penelope, Ulysses would have seen these same cliffs and bays of this unspoiled coast.

  We reached Sarandë in midafternoon. Adrian was edgy. He wanted to start back to Tirana immediately. I gave him the hundred dollars that we had agreed on and he dropped me at the Hotel Butrinti at the edge of town, just above the harbor.

  “Is there a boat to Corfu?” I asked the desk clerk.

  “Oh, yes. It will be here tomorrow at noon,” he said. “It is only one hour to Corfu Town.”

  This was delightful news. The hotel was empty. I got a room and walked around the town, which was a strangely empty place, having been deserted by Albanians who had fled to Italy or Greece in search of work. There were a shirt factory and a carpet-weaving operation in Sarandë. There was a hospital. There were schools. What Sarandë lacked were people.

  I met Fatmir, a friendly local man, whose parents had remained devoutly Muslim, he said, throughout the atheistic Hoxha years. He was fluent in English.

  “I hope you will come back in ten years,” Fatmir said. “You will find that the houses are better, the town is better, the port is better, the food is better, and I am better.”

  The strangest thing of all—stranger than the ruin of Albania, the bad roads, the skinny people, the rural poverty, the broken glass, the vandalism, the cruelty, the unexpected kindness—stranger than all of this was the sudden appearance the next day of a boatload of tourists sailing into Sarandë harbor on a day trip from Greece. I had not seen any tourists for such a long time—none in Albania, none in Croatia, none in Slovenia, not even Trieste had tourists. I felt I had been through a mild ordeal and that I had made a personal discovery. At that point I bumped into a busload of package tourists on their day out.

  I waited for them to return from their little tour of the ruins at Roman Butrinti, and then I sneaked onto the bus which was taking them back to their boat. I would simply pretend that I had been on their day trip and, just like that, would find my way to Corfu with the tourists.

  These were nicer than the sort that in Gibraltar I had had to distinguish from apes, but still the genuine sunburned beer-swigging article. They hated Albania. They were disgusted by Sarandë—after my experience of the rest of Albania, Sarandë seemed pleasant, if a bit spectral. The tourists were shocked by the Hotel Butrinti. They mocked the Roman ruins.

  Most of them were hard-up Britons who had come to Corfu because it was, they said, cheaper than a holiday at home. Kathleen and Sally, two older Irish women who worked in the same clothing factory in Dublin, had paid a little over four hundred dollars (£267) for two weeks in Corfu. This included their round-trip airfare from Dublin, as well as bed and breakfast at the hotel in Corfu. (“We couldn’t go for even a few days in Cork for that money.”)

  “I’m not impressed at all,” one woman said, glancing at the town as we lined up on the quay.

  “The food were filthy,” a man said in a strong Lancashire accent.

  “The tea, I couldn’t drink it,” his Lancastrian companion said. “They make it out of flour, you know.”

  “The Russians had something to do with this, I understand.”

  They were bored, scared, exhausted.

  One man next to me looked very depressed.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Me wife died at Christmas,” he said. Four months ago. “It was quite a blow.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Forty-two years,” he said. He was asthmatic with grief, struggling for breath, poor old guy, looking so lost here on this Albanian shore.

  “Oh, God.”

  “That lady over there is just a friend,” he said. “I went out with her long ago, before I met my wife. I don’t know what will happen now. I’ll sell my motor home soon.” He looked sadly at me. “I don’t expect you to understand. But you’re kind
to listen.”

  Fatmir had come to the quay to see the tourists leave.

  “Come back to Albania, Mister Paul,” he said. “When you come back it will be better.”

  The sad old man said, “That’s a shocking big bag you’ve got there.”

  “I’m a stowaway,” I said. I explained how I had come from Tirana and was sneaking aboard, so that I could get to Greece.

  “Good lad.”

  My passport was examined and stamped. I found a seat on the upper deck, feeling pleased with myself. Kathleen and Sally waved to me from another seat. But on board, among the tourists, I got gloomy. Spring had arrived and so had the trippers and the holiday-makers, the Germans, the cut-price package people, in their annual combat with the hectoring locals. “I geeve you good price!” “You eat here!” “The food were filthy.” “Just ignore him, Jeremy.” All that.

  As we left Sarandë on this boat to Corfu Town, fifteen or twenty boys leaped from the pier and began swimming in the roiling water of the stern, yelling, “Money!” and “Give me your hat!” and “Soldi!” as a smaller number of them had done at Durrës.

  Some of the tourists taunted them, just as the tourists had taunted the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar. Others threw bits of paper or peanuts. Some coins were flung from the rail—small-denomination leks which, although made of some sort of metal, were so worthless they could float in water. The Albanians boys began to complain. The tourists laughed. The boat gathered speed.

  “Fuck you!” one of the boys yelled. He made a finger sign. Then they all took up the cry. “Adio!” “Fuck you!” “Va fan cul’!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!”

  “The universal language,” Kathleen said in her lilting Dublin accent.

  13

  The Seabourn Spirit to Istanbul

  On our third day at sea we were all given a printed directory, a little four-page brochure, as elegant as a gourmet menu, of the passengers’ full names, and where they lived. I kept it, read it carefully, used it as a bookmark, and as it became rubbed and foxed with use I scribbled notes—question marks, quotations, warnings to myself—beside some of the names.

  From Richmond Virginia, then, came Mr. William Cabell Garbee, Jr., and Mrs. Kent Darling Garbee, and from Southold, New York, the Joe Cornacchias, whose horse “Go for Gin” had just won the Kentucky Derby; from East Rockaway, the Manny Kleins, to whom on the quay at Giardini Naxos, near Taormina, I gave instructions in the use of an Italian public telephone. Mr. Pierre Des Marais II and Ms. Ghislaine LeFrancois had come from Ile Des Soeurs, Quebec; Ambassador Bienvenido A. Tan, Jr., and Mrs. Emma Tan, from Manila, Republic of the Philippines—the ambassador, retired, now did “charitable work,” in a public manner; and the Uffners, the Tribunos and the McAllisters from New York; all these joined the Seabourn Spirit that day on the quay at Nice.

  The Mousers were from Boca Raton, and smoked heavily and invented fabulous new destinations with their malaprops, such as their cruise “to Rio J. DeNiro” and “Shiva, Fuji.” And from Honolulu there were the Bernsteins: Mark, who had once been obliged to destroy on behalf of a client twenty-two million Philippine pesos (one million U.S. dollars), a five-hour job on his office shredder; and his wife, Leah, who represented the popular Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiw’o’ole, whose current weight was over seven hundred pounds. Mrs. Sappho Drakos Petrowski from Simsbury, Connecticut (but formerly a dealer in fresh flowers in the Florida Keys), was traveling as a companion to Mrs. Mary P. Fuller, ninety-one years old, of Bloomfield, Connecticut, widow of brush tycoon Alfred Fuller, who sold brushes door-to-door and then founded the Fuller Brush Company.

  There was Harry Jipping, a developer, from Reno, Nevada, who said, “Malta—is that an island, or a country? Isn’t it part of Italy? You mean it’s got its own money and all that?” and “That black stuff—what’s it called? Right, caviar—that Cornacchia guy’s always chomping on it.” Harry was traveling with his wife, Laverne, a Frisbie from Grand Junction. The Joneses from New York, the Smiths from Toronto, the Greens from Wooton Wauwen, England, Mrs. Doris Brown from Lauderdale, Florida, the Burton Sperbers from Malibu. And Jack Greenwald from Montreal, who wore a blazer with solid gold buttons, and his regimental tie of the Household Cavalry, and who addressed the waiters in French, usually to describe his personal recipes which he insisted on their delivering to the head chef, Jörg, and seldom spoke to another passenger on board except to say, “Can you tell me what a drongo is?” or “I’m down to two desserts.” Mr. Greenwald’s wife was the former actress Miss Constance Brown.

  The Zivots from Calgary, the Alfred Nijkerks from Antwerp, Belgium, the Sonny Prices from Sylvania, Ohio, and the Rev. Deacon Albert J. Schwind from Beach Haven, New Jersey, Señor and Señora Pablo Brockmann from Mexico City, Mr. Ed and Mrs. Merrilee Turley from Tiburon, California. Mrs. Blanche Lasher from Los Angeles was on her twelfth cruise; so were the Ambushes and the Hardnetts.

  And Mrs. Betty Levy of London and the Algarve was on her thirtieth cruise and had been up the Amazon. “I love your books, I’ve read every one of them,” Mrs. Levy said to me. “Are you writing one about this cruise?”

  “No, unless anything interesting happens,” I said, so confused by her directness that I realized that I was telling her the truth.

  The Fritzes, the Norton Freedmans, the Louie Padulas—all these people, and more, boarded the Seabourn Spirit that day in Nice.

  • • •

  The summer had passed. It was low season again. I needed an antidote to Albania and the shock I had gotten in Greek Corfu, an island leaping with chattering tourists that reminded me of the rock apes on the slopes of Gibraltar. I had gone home and tended my garden, and then in late September I went to Nice. I joined this cruise. I had never been on a cruise before, or seen people like this.

  Many were limping, one had an aluminum walker, Mrs. Fuller was in a wheelchair, some of the wealthiest looked starved, a few were thunderously huge, morbidly obese. Like many moneyed Americans who travel they had a characteristic gait, a way of walking that was slow and assured. They sized up Greek ruins or colorful natives like heads of state reviewing a platoon of foreign soldiers, with a stately and skeptical squint, absolutely unhurried. That, and an entirely unembarrassed way of laughing in public that was like a goose honking ten tables away.

  “You’ve got to be a mountain climber to get up these stairs!”

  “Why don’t they turn the air conditioner on?”

  “Who’s that supposed to be?”

  It was the color portrait on B Deck of the Norwegian King and Queen—two of Scandinavia’s bicycle-riding monarchs, King Harald V and Queen Sonja. The ship was Norwegian, registered in Oslo.

  Some were rather infirm or very elderly or simply not spry, with a scattering of middle-aged people and only one child (Miss Olivia Cockburn, ten, of Washington, D.C., traveling with her grandparents). The majority were “seniors,” as they called themselves, who had the money or time to embark on such a cruise. Hard of hearing, the passengers mostly shouted. Their eyesight was poor. Eavesdropping was a cinch for me, so was note-taking.

  “This is our eighth cruise—”

  “Did you do the Amazon—?”

  “Vietnam was very unique—”

  Most of them, on this luxury cruise through the Mediterranean, were sailing from Nice to Istanbul. Some were going on to Haifa. Betty Levy was headed into the Indian Ocean with the ship. The cost for this, excluding airfare, was one thousand dollars a day, per person.

  I was a guest of the shipping company. There was no disgrace in that. It often happens that a writer is offered free hospitality, in a hotel or on a ship. Few newspapers or magazines actually pay a penny for the trips their writers make, and so travel journalism is the simple art of being slurpingly grateful. It posed no moral problem for me, but because my writing made me seem as though I was continually biting the hand that had fed me, my ironizing was nailed as “grumpy” and I was seldom invited back a second time. That was fine with me. In
travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.

  In 1928, Evelyn Waugh was offered a free cruise of a similar sort, through the Mediterranean on a Norwegian ship, the Stella Polaris. Waugh’s agent got free tickets for Waugh and his wife on the understanding that Waugh “would write it up in a travel book.” The account of his cruise, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal, published in 1930, was one of the most celebrated travel books of the thirties, regarded by many people—though not by me—as the heyday of the travel narrative. (I think that travel books have had many heydays.)

  Waugh “had no interest in foreign travel,” Humphrey Carpenter wrote in The Brideshead Generation. “He would have agreed with John Betjeman’s remark to Edward James: ‘Isn’t abroad awful?’ ” Yet Waugh gave the Mediterranean mixed reviews, and admitted to a frank infatuation with Corfu. Labels, the result of the free tickets, was full of snap judgments and obnoxious opinions that helped make his reputation, and because of its hearty snobberies the narrative became the model for a certain kind of travel book that was much boosted recently by a crowd of pedants who believed that there was a time in the past when the going was good. It is actually a strange book.

  But then a travel book is a very strange thing, there are few good excuses for writing one—all of them personal—and, these days, there are as many different travel books as there are travelers. The fairest way of judging travel books is by their truth and their wit. You can have quite a good time reading a harrowing book like The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, without any further thought of traveling to Antarctica. It is less a matter of geography than of your own taste. And some of the best and most enjoyable travel books are studies in snap judgments. In the end, all that matters is that the facts are generally true, so that a historian, some Fernand Braudel of the future, will be able to use your book as a source for, say, the condition of Albania in 1994 (“… stolen cars … bad roads … poor diets … lived in bunkers … Hoxha graffiti still legible on some walls …”). Historians are on firm ground with primary sources, diaries and travelers’ tales.