by Lloyd Jones
‘About what?’
Mustaph said the leader had reminisced about his childhood. Soon after that, work had started on the playground.
9
THIS IS HOW the day had started out, with Bill’s hand drawing an imaginary line. ‘Now, Anila, tell him to drive smoothly between fifty and sixty. A good driver makes it smooth…
‘Anila, tell him when I was learning to drive my father used to say, “Always assume there is an idiot around the next bend…”’
Several hours later it is pitch black. We’re about to enter Shkodër, but no one is talking much because of a strongly shared sense that Teti’s short driving career is drawing to a close.
For the last hour we have driven through the night with Teti switching his lights off and on. As another vehicle approaches he switches his lights off and we vanish into the night. Then, just as inexplicably, the lights come back on and startled faces show up on the roadside.
Bullock drivers raise a hand to their faces. Horses rear up. Then it is pitch black again, terrifyingly so. The moment passes with all of us screaming at Teti before he locates the switch.
It is impossible to wean him off it. First Bill, then me—we try to tell Teti that in the West we drive with our lights on all the time. ‘Anila,’ says Bill. ‘For the grace of God, will you tell him he’s driving a car not a friggin’ lighthouse. We are not a lighthouse. Understand?’
But the worst of it comes as Teti rambunctiously sits on his horn at a police roadblock. There is only one other vehicle in front of us, and Teti is giving the local police the hurry-up. This is when Bill’s patience finally runs dry.
‘Teti! I’m begging you!’
Teti says, ‘No problem.’ He jumps out the driver’s side into the night and returns holding hands with a policeman.
‘Everything okay,’ Teti says, getting in behind the wheel.
We set off again and Bill says to Anila, ‘Tell him that’s it. It’s over. Tell him only a friggin’ idiot would sit on his horn at a roadblock. That’s it…Understand?’
‘I know. I know. I keep telling him,’ says Anila.
Bill is still furious as we enter Shkodër. He twists around in his seat. He says, ‘Listen to this. Teti’s father was a fighter pilot, right. He crashed his plane into a hillside and died when he was forty. It’s on Teti’s résumé. It’s some kind of idiocy thing running in the family.’
In a mercifully short time we pull up at the hotel. The Rozala. Bill thinks it’ll be okay. He says, ‘Now listen, ask for the jam tart thing. If they still have it don’t eat the cream.
‘Anila,’ he says, ‘why don’t you go in and make sure there’s a room.’
At first it does not look promising. Anila is discussing something with the man on the desk, who seems very reluctant.
In the end a set of keys is produced. Anila says I am lucky. Tomorrow is National Independence Day, followed by National Liberation Day, and the hotel clerk, to begin with, had tried to make out that the hotel was fully booked.
I look at the keys in my hand and then at Anila.
‘Why would he say that?’
‘Because,’ she says, in heavily accented English, ‘he is a friggin’ idiot.’
The hotel clerk offers a friendly wave and points me up the stairs. He wills me on—the way a swimmer urges another into cold water.
The foyer is large and in a bygone life it might even have had pretensions toward grandeur. But indifference has taken toll and a shabbiness touches everything.
The clerk shouts something to a woman in a blue coat. She had been half-heartedly dragging a rag over the floor. Now she hurries after me, up the stairs. On the third floor she squeezes past me through the door to the hall and jams a light bulb in a socket hanging from the ceiling. She waits until I have worked the key in the door and then removes the light bulb.
I’m pleased to find light bulbs in my room—and running water. Everything is clean and tidy. The windows give on to an empty piazza. After Kukës the air is almost balmy. I can feel the nearness of the coast. In Shkodër, Europe does not feel so far off.
The Rozala has two dining rooms. The one for the Albanians is noisy and smoky, with white tablecloths covered in beer bottles and cigarette ash. From this dining room an unshaven man in a filthy waiter’s jacket guides me by the elbow to the other dining room, which is resplendently empty but for two Greek women silently eating their supper of yoghurt and bread.
The waiter brings me a bowl of yoghurt. He asks me if I would like anything else. I ask him what else is on the menu. He says there is nothing left—but nevertheless awaits my response with a waiterly elegance, a white towel draped over his forearm.
A few minutes later the dining-room doors swing open. A man in corduroys and a blue woven jersey rubs his hands. He looks like he has cottage pie on his mind. The other, a shorter man with thinning red hair, and generous enough to smile delightedly at the sight of me dining alone, rushes over to introduce himself.
Terry and Don both start to speak at once before catching themselves. I get the impression that this is something they do often. They laugh and exchange smiles. The one called Don says, ‘Don’t mind, do you, old man?’ And he helps himself to a chair at my table. He turns it round and leans his chest against the backrest and asks, ‘Been long in the country?’
‘No. Not long,’ I say, and immediately regret it.
Because, suddenly, everything changes with that admission. A kind of forfeiting of seniority takes place whereby they talk and I listen.
British Telecom had given Don a vehicle stocked full with British Telecom jerseys to drive across Europe, down through Yugoslavia to Albania. Across the border a mountain man in just bare feet and a blue singlet had been the first Albanian recipient of a British Telecom pullover.
Don says, ‘It was pitiful. Just pitiful.’
‘Have you heard? ’ they chorused—and this time Don graciously gives Terry the go-ahead.
‘Well, the thing is, we’ve heard rumours the Socialists are deliberately delaying distribution of grain until the election.’
Leaning forward, Don rests his chin on the chair top.
‘These are just rumours of course,’ he says, and he proceeds to pass on pickings from the rumour mill. The sigourimi has run an aid truck off the road. An Albanian-American journalist has received threats and also survived a near thing with another car on a mountain road. Don is pretty sure this is the work of the sigourimi.
‘Well it’s typical isn’t it?’
Terry tells me he is with Feed the Children. ‘Perhaps you saw the BBC clip on us? No…Well,’ he says, ‘we’re taking over the institution for the mentally handicapped children. Roger Hamilton is coming over from the Sunday Times. He’s going to do a piece. He really cares about it.’
‘Oh yeah, Roger does,’ says Don.
‘I mean it’s not just copy. He really does care,’ vouches Terry. ‘We were going to put in windows and fix it up—but in the end we decided the mobs would only ruin it. So we’re going to take the kids out and relocate them.’
‘Relocate them is the answer,’ Don says. ‘You have to just move in and take over.’
It’s such a tragedy,’ says Terry. ‘Listen. Eat your yoghurt. Don’t let us hold you up. God, I would kill for sausages.’ ‘Give me a pint of Guinness,’ says Don, a little later. ‘Have you tasted the grog here? Pure horse piss. Still, food would be nice too, wouldn’t it? In one village I saw a family of seven living in a single hut with two pigs and a cow. Seven! And they had only one bed and two aluminium pots between them.’
Any moment one of them is going to ask, ‘So, what brings you here, mate?’ Any moment now and I’ll have to explain away my various jigsaw pieces—Cliff, Kansas Street, Shapallo, and the exiles.
I stand up to leave and Terry moves his chair back. ‘Well, it’s been lovely,’ he says. I get to the door just ahead of Don’s discovery: ‘Oi, what about your supper? You’ve left your yoghurt.’
I hurry across t
he foyer and bound up the stairs. Then, for godsakes, I hear footsteps hurrying after me—but it is the woman with the light bulb. She waits until my light goes on; then the hallway is plunged back into darkness.
I shut the window and slip into bed with Queen Geraldine’s account of her marriage to Zog.
10
IN 1938 GERALDINE appeared on the balcony of a villa in Tirana, the Albanian flag fluttering behind her. When a sudden breeze wrapped the red and black colours around her shoulders, the crowd gathered below took this as a promising omen and roared its approval. On the day of the wedding, King Zog declared a three-day celebration. Tribesmen from all over the country—the Ghegs from the north and the Tosks from the south—gathered in Tirana to witness the event. Fifty other couples who had chosen this day for their marriage gathered in Skanderbeg Square. They were all given a Queen’s dowry consisting of a bed, blankets and two pillows.
Among the wedding gifts received by Zog and his new queen were four prancing white Lipizzaner horses from the Regent of Hungary—a handsome phaeton to transport the bride on her wedding day. Hitler sent a ‘long scarlet supercharged Mercedes with a removable roof and white leather upholstery’. Mussolini gave four copper vases.
Zog was suff iciently moved to declare an amnesty for hundreds of his political enemies, many of whom had sworn to kill him after the Albanian tradition of blood feud.
Queen Geraldine cut the three-metre-wide wedding cake with the King’s sabre—and later they drove to Durrës for the honeymoon. In Durrës the King gently ushered his young bride over the threshold of a marble pavilion he had built especially for her.
The King showed his bride the large reception room furnished in Louis XIV style. They ‘discovered’ the bedroom. The King cleared his throat and left the room briefly. A maid handed Geraldine a white silk nightgown. She disappeared, and Geraldine slipped between the sheets and waited.
‘Quickly and passionately Zog possessed her. Not as a King but as a proud son of the Eagles…His bride was no different from other virgins. No one can explain the deep personal shock and physical discomfort of a woman when she is made love to for the first time…[Geraldine] lay softly whimpering into her pillow as the King left her side and retired to a chaise longue at the other end of the room.’
There was a moment’s embarrassment in the morning. The maid was terribly upset because she had lost the Queen’s nightgown. And when Geraldine put the matter to the King, Zog blushed. He said he had required the nightgown as proof of her virginity. Parliament required such proof. It was a matter of protocol and accordingly Zog had sent Geraldine’s silk nightgown along to the President.
The birth of Leka I was celebrated by a military parade, the largest Albania had ever staged. As the people cheered ‘Our life for the King and the Crown Prince’, a squadron of Italian planes swooped low over the city and white leaflets carrying a slanderous attack on King Zog fluttered down into the streets.
It was a difficult time for Zog. Mussolini’s Fascists had presented him with a list of demands—military bases to be established on the coast and inland, the harbours and roads were to come under control of the Italian army, and Italian interests were to be observed by revising all civil service appointments. In return, Zog could keep the throne and receive a new loan.
Two hours after rejecting the Italian demands, the Albanian Parliament decided that Zog and his ministers must leave the country at once.
At 3 a.m. the Italians started their invasion on the coast south of Tirana, in Vlorë. Geraldine, who was still recuperating from the difficult birth of Prince Leka, had to be carried down the palace stairs on a mattress and bundled into a waiting car. So hasty was the departure that Geraldine left Tirana in only the nightgown she wore—the maid had packed her furs but overlooked the need for dresses and underwear. Geraldine and Leka sat in the back of a Chrysler. In the door the King bowed and kissed the baby on the head. To Geraldine he said, ‘Oh God…It was so short.’
The next day Mussolini’s son-in-law, Ciano, who had attended the wedding of Zog and Geraldine, arrived in Tirana on a new errand. He rushed from the airport to the palace where he made his way to the Queen’s suite. When he saw the bed linen stained by afterbirth, which still lay uncollected, ‘Ciano kicked it across the room, and with the anger of a wild animal, howled, “The cub has escaped!”’
In 1960, in the Bristol Hotel in Paris, Prince Leka was consecrated King before seventy representatives of Albanian groups throughout the world.
Although Leka had spent only three days on Albanian soil, he had been brought up in an Albanian household, attended to by Albanian instructors and nurtured on the idea that he was of nobility, a prince who one day would ascend to the throne. Among the cast of ‘father figures’ Leka’s mother had enlisted General Franco, the Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner, and Pinochet.
In Spain, to which the royal family eventually moved, Leka trains his Albanian exiles for the coming guerilla war—an idea that owes much to a morphine-induced dream of his father’s. In 1961, while Leka sat by his dying father in a hospital bed in Paris, Zog’s last words described the dream from which he had just awoken. He had seen Queen Geraldine, now ‘very old but still beautiful’, standing at the prow of a ship headed for the quay at Durrës. In the same dream, Leka appeared in battle fatigues, leading a column of troops to win back the Kingdom.
11
IN ROME I had hoped to find an émigrés’ quarter. I thought there might be a bar or a café used as a local hangout, a place where old soldiers in an alcoholic haze might create heroic home comings. I imagined a café with a memento like the Skanderbeg flag pinned to the wall behind the bar—in the spirit of Queen Geraldine’s handful of soil scooped up to remember Albania with—and riotous, drunken evenings every year Independence Day wound round.
Instead, in via Asmaria I had met Nick, an earnest student of divinity and philosophy.
Across the crowded foyer in the consulate on via Asmaria I had caught his eye, and in the clamour that broke out with the sudden emergence of a consulate official leaving his office, Nick surfaced at my side.
In a whisper he asked, ‘Are you English?’
He was pale and thin. A quality of a life lived indoors had rubbed off, setting him apart from his ground-grubbing compatriots.
Later, after the consulate officials had declared an end to the day’s business, we had wandered out to the entrance steps.
I was full of questions. About him. The refugees. I described to him the café with the flag of Skanderbeg pinned to the wall. Did he know of such a place?
He glanced back to the shabby foyer and touched a finger to his lips.
‘Not here,’ he said.
We hurried off in light rain to find a trattoria.
Nick was my ‘first Albanian’ and everything he had to say I took down. It was all new to me, and Nick’s stories, which were full of intrigue, were exactly what I wanted to hear. The only disappointment was that the picturesque quarter I had hoped for did not exist. Nick gave me instead an address of a monastery belonging to an order of Franciscans.
I met him there the next day, and in a small room on the ground floor Nick explained that he had been in Rome only a few months.
The first thing he had done on his arrival was to discard his name, Ardian. A generation of youth had been named after the tribes of Illyria in a bid by the regime to trample out every shred of religious identity. Once in Rome Nick had got himself christened after Saint Nicholas.
The Franciscans were putting him up, and in exchange for board he cooked for the small order of friars. In between classes he busied himself with other menial tasks around the monastery.
Through Nick I met Friar Daniel Gjecaj, who had lived in Vatican City since fleeing the Communists in 1948. He was well into his seventies now, and the recent changes in his homeland hadn’t done much to excite him.
He said, ‘You are going to Albania, but you won’t find Albania. Only the family has survived.’
‘Who are these people who call themselves Democrats? Where have they come from?’
He shook his head. There was nothing he had heard that gave him confidence for his country’s future.
For a number of years the friar had broadcast from the ‘Albanie office’ of Radio Vaticana. Some of these broadcasts Nick had listened to at the house of his cousin Kolec. For years Radio Vaticana had been a sworn enemy of the regime. Two or three times a week it broadcast the Pope’s message, sometimes a mass, sometimes religious instruction. Other times the friar, who was a classics scholar, spoke of the country’s arts and literature, all the while grinding away to undermine the regime’s creation of ‘the new man’.
At Radio Vaticana I met Gjon Gjomarkaj, who as a small ‘silent, lithe’ boy had waited on Joseph Swire in his father’s house. The Englishman had climbed 2,000 feet above the Fani i vogel River to meet Gjon Marka Gjoni, the hereditary Chieftain of Mirditë and permanent chief of all the Catholic clans in northern Albania. Swire describes a sturdy figure in ‘a dark red sash holding a tobacco box and a silver mounted pistol’. The pistol was a gift from Zog, who had wanted badly to get the chieftain on his government’s side.
Inside the stone cottage Swire had noticed a gramophone, of all things, a gift from the Italians, who at the time considered the passes of Mirditë to be of great strategic value.
Although the boy was now a white-haired man, Swire’s description still applied. The once ‘silent, lithe’ boy had developed into a quiet, haunted man, obsessed by what he had left behind.
