by Lloyd Jones
Children with small grimy faces rush fearlessly out to the middle of the road. Until a year ago they had to worry only about the horse-drawn carts, bicycles, and the occasional bus or truck. But now the kids spot the aid insignia on the side of the Landcruiser and try to touch its sides.
We pass through a bleak landscape of malnourishment, listening to Teti’s pirated tapes of Steely Dan, Sting and New Kids on the Block. Through the windshield Albania shifts to plain vista. We pass through it in our capsule of warm air conditioning and nice upholstery. We are sufficiently removed from what we see. Those small kids out there rushing out to the road, that wide mouth yelling for gum, is something I might have seen in the pages of National Geographic. Bill says the Yugoslav truck drivers started this thing of throwing gum from their window and now in every town we pass through kids sit on the road like birds after a downpour.
I’m happy to be getting outside Tirana at last, just to escape the rain. I thank Bill for this lift and he waves his pipe. ‘Hey,’ he says. He can use the company.
Two days ago he had taken a couple of London Daily Mirror reporters out to a food drop. After a while, it had become obvious to Bill that Harry, the photographer, was doing a ‘Girls of Albania thing’.
‘Every halfway decent gal we stopped for so Harry could do his thing. One place there was this very pretty gal washing clothes in a ditch. I said to Harry, you know, half-joking, “Harry, do you want me to go and splash a little water on her shirt…You know, for a wet T-shirt shot?”’
We laugh—and Anila pulls her cheap fur coat around her shoulders a little more. She speaks only when spoken to—but the soft-faced economist doesn’t speak at all. Bill offered her a barley sugar and back came the most beautiful smile. Bill says it’s just ‘a language thing’. But later I do hear him ask Anila whether the economist is okay.
We are in the countryside now. Circles of men squat at the roadside. Others hack away at stumps for firewood. A blackened smokestack rises in the distance and a few minutes later we pass a chemical and metallurgy plant. Even from the car window it appears eccentric and ungainly, as if the regime had followed the advice of a young child using Meccano for the very first time.
The rust-coloured King Zog bridge takes us across the vast shingle flats of the Mat River. Here, the road starts to climb inland until we are high above the river valley. A convoy of Italian trucks piled high with grain passes us coming the other way. As each truck goes by, Teti takes his hand off the wheel to give the Democrat salute. The Italians show no interest—they stare through Teti to the road ahead, an imaginary road paved all the way home to Italy. The same stony indifference had sat with the Italian drivers in Durrës as they lined their trucks up beneath a grain chute. The Italians wore red, white and blue neckerchiefs. In their khaki uniforms and high-laced boots they could have stepped out of an L.A. nightclub. I think it was in the bar of the Dajti that somebody told me the Italian army uniform was designed by Armani.
We continue to climb this narrow road. Either side of the ravine the slopes of loose rock rise to blue sky, the first I have seen since arriving in the country. On the ridge tops the trees are changing colour and there is a lovely suffusion of oranges and yellows. I ask Bill if he knows the names of the trees. He asks Anila. Her shoulders rise and fall. She asks the economist. She doesn’t know. No one knows.
On a visit to Burgeget, King Zog’s village in the Mati Valley, Swire describes soft hills well grown with mulberry, walnut, cherry and chestnut trees.
We enter a loop in the road, and as we draw around the last bend, melted into a pinnacle of rock up ahead is an old Greek Orthodox church. Its roof suddenly catches sunlight, and as the road travels underneath this splash of gold we enter Rubik.
In the space of a bend the road dissolves to a marketplace and Teti snarls at everything in our path. Oxen, gum-worshipping kids, horse-drawn carts. He leans on the horn, and people stop their conversations to stare at us.
‘Teti! Anila, will you tell him to stop that bullshit…’ And again: ‘Don’t piss these people off, Teti. Leave the friggin’ horn.’
A rock bounces off the side of the Landcruiser and that does it. We lurch to a halt. Teti is out the door and running back up the road.
Bill just refuses to look. He says to Anila, ‘He’s a friggin’ idiot. I want you to tell him that, okay.’
In the back window I see Teti catch up with a kid and start to smack him about the head.
Bill says, ‘What’s he’s doing? Tell me what the hell he is doing? I’m not going to look, but I need to know.’
The economist continues to sit with her arms folded and an imperturbable gaze aimed at her side window. Anila turns around in her seat. She reports to Bill: ‘Teti is coming back. He’s let the boy go.’
Flushed and stiff with dignity, Teti settles in behind the wheel. Bill doesn’t budge a whisker. He takes a deep breath; then he says quietly to Anila, ‘Go ahead. Tell him.’
So Anila says something to Teti, who ignores it. He starts up the Landcruiser and we are on our way.
‘Tell him Anila…One month ago with Kemal…’ Bill turns around to explain with his pipe. ‘Kemal, you know…the same make as Teti, as all this macho bullshit. The same thing happened in a little town north of here. Rock hits the side of the van. Kemal stops. Marches back to deal with some farm boys and gets his ass kicked.
‘Hey!’ he says to Anila. ‘Remind Teti about Kemal…His arm was all mangled…half his friggin’ teeth left on the roadside!’
Bill meditates for a few more kilometres. Then he says to Anila, ‘Tell him if he ever does that again I’m throwing him out.’
Anila says something and Teti’s ears turn red.
We cross the Mat River again and catch sight on the far hillside above the railway line of a huge painted slogan: ‘July is the month of working hard.’
Near Rrëshen we check out a food warehouse guarded by a man with an old hunting rifle. He and Bill embrace warmly. Bill gives the man some tobacco. He takes a quick peep in the windows of the warehouse, and then we continue on into Rrëshen.
The road into the town climbs a hill, and on the side overlooking the valley is a striking bronze sculpture of four women—one woman shoulders a rifle, another carries a book, the third a pick. Anila says the sculpture represents the ‘struggle against obscurantism’.
‘The women have returned from working on the railway construction. In other words,’ she says, ‘they show the correct path.’
The other reason for visiting Rrëshen is that Anila married a pharmacist from here. We stop by the pharmacy. It is open but has no drugs. Anila’s husband has gone to Italy to work as a labourer for a few months and a letter is waiting for her at the pharmacy. She goes off to read it alone at the foot of the bronze women. Bill tells Teti to stay with the vehicle. He’s not to drive it—nor is he to leave it.
He stays parked outside the Town Hall with an Albanian version of Jesus Christ Superstar cranked up while Bill and I go to look for some food. The one café has its chairs stacked up on the tables. It quickly transpires that there is nothing left to eat in Rrëshen, and as we come out of the café a small crowd greets us with looks of amusement. It is all good-natured. Bill seems to think they are apologising for the state of things. One of the elders steps forward, but before he can explain anything Teti guns the Landcruiser across the square and suddenly the crowd are scattered like pigeons.
‘Teti!’ For a moment I think Bill is going to throw his pipe at the grinning face in the windscreen. Instead he says to me, ‘This is supposed to be a favour. We employ the local people. But I get a madman.’
Teti hangs out the window waiting for Bill’s instructions, the motor drumming.
‘Jesus. Just go and get Anila.’
‘Anila…Okay!’
And Teti’s foot falls upon the accelerator with renewed purpose as Bill finishes: ‘We’ve gotta apologise to these people.’
We drive on for another hour, climbing and twisting through hig
h hill country. We have gone back far enough now that the leaves of the chestnut trees lie on the ground leaving the branches looking lonely and stark. One time we stop so Teti can relieve himself and in the silence we hear the bells of a goatherd ring down from the hillsides.
A few months earlier Bill had visited a village so remote that he was the first foreigner the inhabitants had seen since the war. On that occasion the villagers had seen a British parachutist float down from the sky. He was taken in by a local priest and a month later smuggled out of Albania. Fifty years later Bill drove into the village and had a wonderful lunch there.
‘Great bread, yoghurt, raki, and this wonderful antipasto kind of thing, you know? A bit of red pepper and onion…’ He smiles over the stem of his pipe at the memory and we all fall silent with hunger.
‘It was a blast, a couple of hundred people sitting around staring at us for a couple of hours.’
Bill says he knows of a ‘trucker’s stop’ near here. It is in a place called ‘the neck of the mountain’, an accurate enough description for where the road doubles back on itself. Bill’s ‘trucker’s stop’ turns out to be a small grotto of roofing iron and rocks stacked on one another. We arrive at the same time as a truckload of young soldiers but manage to scramble in ahead.
The proprietor, a small wizened man, ladles the runny white yoghurt into greasy plastic bowls and slaps them down on a crude wooden bench. Then the soldiers start to pour in and soon we are standing shoulder to shoulder in crowded silence— jammed inside this smoky grotto with these poor half-starved boys in green tunics.
We grind on to Kukës in low gear for another hour. Bill has given up directing Teti—and despite the driver’s assurances, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ Bill just grabs the wheel whenever the moment requires intervention to pull us onto the shoulder again. Teti feeds in a tape of The Who’s rock opera Tommy. Bill turns it down. Teti sneaks the dials up. And on it goes.
We stop one more time after Anila feels carsick. It is deadly quiet. The road trickles invitingly up to a rise.
When I asked Cliff how he had got around he said, ‘Train. Bus. Foot.’ And in my more fanciful moments I imagined myself doing as Joseph Swire had done, walking between villages with a burro and usually with armed escorts.
Bill says, ‘Go ahead. Stretch out your ligaments. We’ll be by in twenty minutes.’
At one point I hear Anila violently heave, and when I look back there is Bill sitting on a rock, knees crossed, lighting his pipe.
Another ten minutes and I’m at the pass gazing across the tops of gold and black hills which roll on to Macedonia in the east and, to the north, Montenegro. Small boys minding goats above the roadside whistle out from the scrub.
8
POPULI PARTI ENVER, just as it appears on the postage stamps, is emblazoned on the hillside above Kukës.
Twenty years ago the workers at the copper smelter plant had collected small stones on the hillside and carefully arranged the stones to spell the slogan.
I learned this from Mustaph, an unemployed journalist, who looks after the food distribution in Kukës.
Mustaph had been waiting on the hotel steps for our arrival. A man of about fifty, round-headed, with greying temples and quick, intelligent eyes, and formidably sober. His overcoat was the one he had bought in Leningrad after being sent there to study literature and languages in the fifties.
I think he found my questions about POPULI PARTI ENVER a little tiresome. The slogan bore down on the town in such a way as to suggest a major landmark; but as Mustaph’s uncooperative silence seemed to suggest, a landmark not inquired of but accepted as readily as the clouds or the hilltops and other natural phenomena. POPULI PARTI ENVER could be seen from anywhere in Kukës—a ‘new city’ of bleak housing blocks. The old town lay beneath the new lake in a valley which had been flooded for hydroelectric purposes. The hydroelectric plant was a happier subject for Mustaph.
Work on the modern city had started in the sixties. People living down in the old town on the valley floor could gaze up to the cloud line and watch their future homes going up. They were promised playgrounds and hospitals, and in the evenings, Mustaph said, the old people would sit in their gardens and watch the last of the summer evening depart the concrete shells up there on the rise.
One day in the seventies the people had all trooped up to the new town and where the new hospital was sited a park bench had been built for the elderly to sit and watch the water level rise below. It had taken months, years. First the streets turned a muddy colour, then the water rushed inside the small stone houses and rose up the walls until there were just rooftops to gaze upon like floating islands or garden stepping-stones across a lake. Finally the ‘stepping-stones’ had disappeared altogether, and now, looking upon the lake, I found it hard to believe that another city, with its quarrels, blood feuds and arranged marriages, lay beneath this calm blue surface.
We booked into the hotel with a view of the lake. Anila went to bed. Teti was given the rest of the afternoon off. And with the economist and Mustaph giving directions we set off for the warehouse.
Somewhere on our way through a housing estate a rock bounces off the side of the Landcruiser. Bill hardly raises a hair.
‘Kids. Same the world over,’ he says, and Mustaph is relieved to hear this.
The ‘industrial zone’ is on the other side of town and we are there in another five minutes. A woman in a blue cotton smock unchains the gates, and as we drive to the end of a yard we are chased by a crowd of thin gaunt figures in cotton and flapping canvas shoes. The moment we park, their faces press up to the window.
‘Looking for gum, betcha,’ says Bill, and quickly forgets them. He’s busy fiddling with a tape. ‘What the hell has Teti done here…’ But then the deck receives the tape, and Bill sits back with relief. ‘Sharon put me on to this,’ he says.
Bill removes his pipe. His eyelids close, to Patsy Cline. A pane of glass separates him from an old man whose toothless gums are barking something at the side of Bill’s deaf ear. When I check with Mustaph what the man is saying, his face creases into a smile. ‘He is saying, “Show me where the war is, I want to fight.”’
I head off with Mustaph to find the person with the keys to the warehouse.
Inside a loading bay we push through a door to a smoke-filled chamber. Four women who have been crouching around an open fire and warming their hands spring to their feet and cover their faces in giggling shame. Two of the younger ones run past us for the door. Mustaph smiles tolerantly.
Across the yard the crowd is still pressed around the Land-cruiser and in the window I can make out Bill smoking his pipe, his head marking time, ever so.
We have a wait on our hands until the person with the keys to the warehouse shows. Despite the cold, Mustaph refuses to wait inside the vehicle, but stands in the yard with his hands in his coat pockets, determined to deny the cold—as if one thing has to do with admitting to the ruin surrounding us.
There’s nothing to do but walk to keep warm. I head off back along the road that brought us here. Old Russian trucks and mutant vehicles with Chinese and North Korean markings— the chattels of Albania’s failed marriages—splash through the puddles. Barrier gates with gaping holes wear heavy padlocks. Men huddle around in small groups.
No one has anything to do. People have turned up to work out of habit. They watch me approach. They eye me, as watchful as sheepdogs, and as I pass, in unison they call out, ‘May your life be long.’ The smokestacks look like some wasted experiment. There is no noise other than the wind off the stony walls of the valley. Opposite the ‘official mechanical plant of Kukës’ I wander through a field full of concrete pillboxes. Their gunholes stare accusingly at the mountains. I suppose if you gaze at such things long enough you just might begin to sense the enemy on his way, if not today, then just around the next bend, in the next valley, beyond that peak. Tomorrow he will come through the mountains to learn the secret of Albania’s success. ‘Above our homeland,�
�� the inscription reads, ‘we have everything…and that is freedom and independence.’
I soon find the playground promised the inhabitants of old Kukës. It had started out as a reasonably bold idea before foundering along the way—for lack of either materials or will to take it any further. The playground bomb shelter has made it through to completion, likewise a white cement sculpture of a mother cradling a child.
The sculptured mother cradles her child a short distance from a rusted Ferris wheel that has seized up. Surrounding it is a mangle of steel, from which small children in cotton clothing and bare feet swing from the makeshift bars. The children barely make a sound. I wonder if they know they are just seven hours’ ferry ride from Italy.
A hand suddenly rests on my shoulder and there is Mustaph, with his clever smile.
That night in the hotel bar Bill and I got a little drunk on raki and Bill talked about Sharon. They had met while out jogging. This was in Washington. They jogged the same route, although in opposite directions. ‘Oh, she was real cute. She’d smile and I’d say “Hi.” Then we’d run off with both of us kinda looking back over our shoulder.’ One morning Bill just turned around and ran with her, and moved into her house soon after. He felt around in his jacket.
‘Goddamn,’ he said. The photo was back in Tirana. So I showed Bill my postage stamp of Enver Hoxha—it being the only likeness I had of Shapallo. Then I told Bill about the playground, where Mustaph had surprised me. On the way back to the warehouse Mustaph had chatted away amiably. He said he had met the Great Leader three times, here in Kukës.
The first time, Enver had been visiting the copper plant. It was the second time, however, while out on a walk that Enver suddenly paused to stare at a bare hillside. Seeing his famous smiling lines tighten with disapproval, the local Party people duly took note, and the next day, when the Great Leader’s eye fell upon the same spot a tree was found growing there. Such was the warmth of Comrade Enver’s smile that it appeared to enrich the earth around the sapling—an observation which Mustaph had been obliged to report in his newspaper. These magical powers set him apart, of course. Otherwise, he had seemed a nice man. They had even talked, recalled Mustaph.
