The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  ‘What would you know about that?’

  ‘I sleep with him all the time, wherever there are people following his commandments, as they’re doing right now in this sorely abused corner of Europe. I know him. I see him every day. I clean up after him. And I don’t have the time to clean up after you.’

  ‘You won’t need to.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, and I hope you’ve brought enough cash with you,’ Poulsen said, then he got out of the driver’s seat and walked over to Teddy, who stood hunched over a cigarette, his feet solidly planted between two puddles as he contemplated the tumbledown houses with their strangely incongruous satellite dishes, two boys playing football in the mud, the washing lines and a small kiosk from which a toothless old man was grinning inanely and beckoning to Teddy to come closer and see his wares. Teddy looked tired. As if it had suddenly dawned on him that by being here he might be helping to condemn his own sister. Maybe he was simply travel-weary, or shocked to find that Europe could also look like this. Or maybe it was just that his back hurt.

  Teddy looked up, tossed his cigarette butt into a dingy grey puddle which was covered by a thin film of oil shot with rainbows. The sky darkened and big, heavy drops began to fall. They could hear the thunder rumbling out across the Adriatic.

  ‘Don’t you just adore Albania,’ said Teddy, treading on the cigarette butt.

  ‘It’s the love of my life,’ Poulsen said.

  25

  A COUPLE OF DAYS WENT BY before they received a message to say that a gentleman respectfully referred to as Don Alberto wished to speak to them, as he had new information regarding a certain woman. This message was delivered to them by a small boy who approached Toftlund down on the promenade in Dürres. Like so many other little ragamuffins he was hustling contraband cigarettes, but there was something in his eyes that stopped Toftlund from shooing him away. The lad looked him straight in the face, handed him a pack of cigarettes and in halting English announced that Don Alberto would like to meet the Danish gentlemen this evening; in the pack, which Toftlund exchanged for a ten-dollar bill, along with a dozen or so cigarettes was a note giving the name of a restaurant and a number, twenty, which Toftlund took to stand for the hour set for this rendezvous. Per knew the restaurant, he had eaten lunch there once. It lay down on the harbourfront, only a few hundred metres from their hotel.

  It was about time. The waiting had been driving Toftlund and Teddy crazy. They bickered like an old married couple, snapping and snarling at one another or lapsing into sullen silence in the shoebox of a room they shared. In it were two narrow beds, a small wooden chest-of-drawers and two high-backed chairs which had once been upholstered. Teddy was no longer feeling quite so cooperative. It almost seemed as if he was regretting the whole thing and now felt guilty for helping the police, so Toftlund had had to turn the screws and inform him that he had the choice between cooperating or discovering how it felt to help the police with their inquiries in a rather different way. Teddy spat back that he was stuck here in the arsehole of the world, with no sister, no wife, no money and soon, for all he knew, no job. His back was sore, his gums ached and he fucking well wanted to go home.

  ‘Who the hell’s interested in a one-time spy from a long-forgotten cold war,’ Pedersen snarled. ‘Half the newspaper editors in Denmark – even the director-general of Danmarks Radio, for God’s sake – attended party schools in the GDR! So what. It doesn’t mean a thing today. You’re chasing ghosts, Toftlund. And nobody gives a shit. You’re digging up skeletons that no one wants you to find. Let bygones by bygones. Go home, see your baby born. At least there’s some meaning to that.’

  Toftlund had had no answer to that. He was just as tired of this place as Teddy and missed Lise more than he could have thought possible. It had been a bloody awful spring, as unreal as NATO’s unreal war, with all the politicians’ Newspeak about it being a humanitarian exercise, despite the fact that people were being killed every day and the stream of refugees was swelling and swelling, while the sleek, grey NATO fighters and lumbering bombers with their cargo of cluster bombs, uranium-tipped warheads and laser-guided missiles circled lazily up above, waiting to dump their loads on dummy Serb military positions or bridges packed with fleeing civilians. And yes. He was chasing a ghost, and he would have to continue the chase. Because those were his orders. Because, against all the odds, Vuldom had succeeded in having Irma’s remand warrant extended by another eight days – this she had told him over the Refugee Agency’s crackling satellite phone link, but the judge had made it quite clear that this was absolutely the last time – unless, that is, the burden of evidence altered radically in favour of the prosecution.

  That call had come yesterday. Afterwards they had repaired to the hotel’s bar-cum-restaurant for a large glass of cheap beer. Or at least, Per had stuck to one. Teddy had been on his fourth and growing drunk and argumentative when Toftlund decided to leave him to it and go for another walk. He had strolled down to the harbour and the dirty-grey Adriatic where an oily fringe of scum laced with human excrement, old plastic bottles and all sorts of other imperishable waste was washed up onto the big rocks by the waves rolling in from the civilisation of Italy. From there too came a steady stream of large roll-on, roll-off ferries disgorging men and equipment, including military hardware with the attendant NATO personnel and masses of aid supplies, from blankets to sanitary pads and food, all of which piled up in the port’s filthy, dilapidated warehouses. The Serbs had stripped the refugees of all they had: from their homes and their personal papers to the women’s right to keep themselves clean.

  Torsten Poulsen had to fight harder and harder to keep his weary eyes open as he endeavoured to have the aid supplies moved out of the warehouses and into the country, to the masses of refugees living in makeshift tent cities, disused factories and abandoned schools. He had plenty of drivers and trucks, but getting the inefficient, multicultural UN system to work was a nightmare. Everybody had an opinion on everything. Negotiating the miles of red tape was like trudging through the Albanian mud. The roads were clogged with military traffic and convoys of trucks from private relief organisations, who were also anxious to help, but often ended up delivering the wrong stuff to the wrong places. And around it all, like a swarm of bees, buzzed the press and TV people, getting in the way, elbowing their way to the fore wherever you went, hiring intepreters and expensive fixers who pushed up the prices of everything from petrol to a proficiency in English.

  On the other hand, they were a necessary evil. Without their shots of cold, hungry children with beseeching eyes on the evening news, the relief organisations’ funds would soon have run out. Torsten knew that the media circus would stay in Albania for only a short time, until the news desks at home tired of their tales of slaughter, rape, murder, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and suffering refugees and turned instead to some other story which would hold their attention for a short while.

  ‘When the journalists and the interest have moved on, I’ll still be here,’ he had said on the day after Toftlund’s arrival, when the latter drove over to the Albanian capital, Tirana, with him to meet C. While Torsten, armed with all of his saintly patience, battled with and against UN bureaucracy, in an effort to get supplies out to his drivers, Toftlund had a brief meeting with Major Carsten Sørensen. They sat down at a pavement café on Tirana’s main street. The weather was glorious, the sun shining and the thermometer nudging twenty degrees. Tirana was a bizarre city full of broad, socialist-style avenues, run-down buildings, half-finished glass-and-concrete temples, garish advertisements, market stalls at every turn and cows grazing on the banks of the canal which flowed like an open sewer through the middle of the town. From where they sat they had a view of the Opera House and the imposing Hotel International. Tirana reminded Toftlund of Istanbul, only poorer, with its beggars and cigarette-hustling boys peddling their merchandise from battered old cardboard boxes. Everywhere you looked there were adverts for Marlboro, or for something called Tele-Bingo, in which
some lucky contestant could win sixty million Albanian lek. As in Dürres there were also an incredibly large number of stylish young people clad in the latest Italian fashions. The traffic was a peculiar mix of horse-drawn carts and ancient, mud-spattered Mercedes saloons – God only knew how they had found their way into the country. The war appeared to have engendered a sudden wave of affluence for the chosen few. Or maybe the more prosperous citizens were simply survivors of Albanian capitalism’s big boom? Either that or representatives of the ubiquitous and highly active mafia.

  Sørensen and Toftlund ordered coffee and juice. Like everyone else in Albania, C., as he had always been known in the army, had weary eyes. He handed Per a small, cheap sports holdall.

  ‘It’s a Beretta 927, standard issue with both the French and the Italian troops. Three spare clips. Shoulder holster. I’d like it back, if possible,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks C.,’ Toftlund said, placing the holdall between his feet.

  ‘You can’t walk around unarmed in this country,’ Sørensen went on. ‘Tirana is dead after ten o’clock at night. Even we don’t go out. There are guns going off all over the shop – mafia showdowns, family feuds. There are shoot-outs and car bombs or bombs in bags. This land is awash with weapons. They all have the same guns and they’re not afraid to use them. This restaurant was blown up a year ago during a clash between rival gangs.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d been here before.’

  ‘Weapons inspection for the UN. There are weapons and ammunition in holes and corners all over this country, stored under conditions you just wouldn’t believe. The whole idea was that every Albanian had to be able to arm himself if the Italians, or the Russians, or – eventually – the Chinese should come knocking.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think anything is possible here. From the greatest hospitality to the greatest brutality.’

  C. lit a cigarette, blew the smoke away from Toftlund.

  ‘That’s it in a nutshell. People here are as warm and friendly as they are everywhere else in the Balkans, and as brutal as everywhere else in the Balkans. Their history has made them that way. The worst thing about communism was not really the stupidity of it all, but the fact that it brutalised millions of people, because it had no respect for the individual. The individual was a cog in the great factory of the revolution, I think Stalin said that. Let me give you an example: I was speaking to a woman this morning. She left Kosovo a week ago. Together with seven other women and children. The rest of their village is gone. The Serbian militia came. They separated the men from the women, the old from the children and said to the men: Dig a ditch. So they dug a ditch. Then they said: those of you who have money may go, those who have none must stay, then they took the money, shot those who had given as well as those who had nothing to give and threw them all into the ditch; after that they raped the women and chased them and the children up into the mountains before setting fire to the village. Now all of that is bad enough. But do you know what the worst of it is?’

  Toftlund shook his head:

  ‘It’s not that there are thousands of similar stories. The worst part is that once we’ve taken care of Milosevic, the Albanians will return home and pay the Serbs back in their own coin, while we stand by and watch.’

  On the drive back to Dürres, Toftlund related this story to Torsten Poulsen. The port was only forty kilometres away, but it took over two hours to get there on the rutted, muddy, busy roads, with the Toyota rocking and rolling like a ship in distress.

  ‘I hear stories like that every day,’ Poulsen said. ‘I’ve got another one for you, which might serve to illustrate why we could have our work cut out for us here for many years to come. Enver Hoxha was, of course, a dictator. Everybody knows that. But he was also a raving lunatic, swanning about in that grand palace of his, insisting that everybody around him spoke French – this in a country that could barely afford to feed itself. One day he decided to create a double of himself. His secret police found a little dentist from up north who bore some resemblance to Enver – a man who, at that time, was regarded by some groups in Denmark as a great revolutionary hero. Then Hoxha gathered together the ten or twelve plastic surgeons in Albania and they set about turning the dentist into a perfect double of their glorious leader. With great success. Now the doppelgänger could play the dictator whenever Enver himself feared an assassination attempt, or simply could not be bothered shaking hands or opening a new bunker. With the operation successfully completed, Hoxha summoned all the surgeons and nurses and told them that as a token of his gratitude for their revolutionary efforts he was treating them to a holiday at one of Albania’s top luxury hotels. Although I don’t even know if they actually had any such thing. Be that as it may, they were all led out to a bus – the swishest, most up-to-date coach in the country. Then they were driven straight into the Adriatic, bus and all, and there they lie to this day, at the bottom of the sea.’

  Sitting there with the little holdall on his lap, Toftlund glanced over at Torsten, who was manoeuvering the four-wheel drive round a donkey. It was sitting in the middle of the road, refusing to budge, regardless of the elderly, bearded man laying into its back with a long stick.

  ‘That’s a very good story,’ Per said. ‘But is it true?’

  ‘It’s as true as anything else in the Balkans.’

  ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘Some guy who was writing a biography of Hoxha.’

  ‘It sounds pretty far out.’

  ‘Albania, the past, the Balkans, this war, Toftlund – it’s all so real, with very real problems, and at the same time totally unreal, a nightmare almost, a distorted reflection of the evil we all carry inside us. The only difference is that in our part of the world, thanks to a mixture of luck and skill, we’ve managed to suppress the beast within for the past fifty years.’

  ‘My, aren’t we philosophical,’ Toftlund remarked and immediately regretted it. He could tell that he had offended Torsten by making fun of his grave words, but as Lise said, Per always ran for cover the minute there was any talk of emotions or serious ideas.

  ‘I read books, Per. You ought to try it. It’s better than what you have in that bag. That solves nothing,’ Torsten had said as they trundled into the suburbs of Dürres.

  But Toftlund was grateful for the sense of security which the pistol in its shoulder holster gave him as he strolled along the harbourside. At night when he stood at his window looking out at the darkness, he would hear gunfire down here. The shots were always followed by the barking of the dogs, a canine chorus that would strike up in one corner of the district and spread right across the city. One night he had woken up thinking that the war had reached Dürres, but it was only thunder, rolling across the sea, with the lightning illuminating the night sky and the city like an enormous flashbulb. Shortly afterwards the rain had come pouring down and, in his plain, but clean hotel room, he thought of the thousands of refugees still sleeping in the open air, possibly with no more than a blanket or a bit of plastic sheeting for cover. The rain drummed on the roof and sent little rivers rushing down the unpaved streets. Another nightmarish bolt of lightning had ripped through the darkness, throwing the minarets of the nearby mosque into relief, as if etched against the sky for eternity.

  That evening when he got back to his hotel room Per checked his gun before going to fetch Teddy, who was shooting crap with three drivers who were moving on the next day. Toftlund admired Teddy’s knack of being able to talk to just about anybody. There was no doubt that most of the drivers found this charming little man both easygoing and entertaining. Not at all snobbish, even if he was a university lecturer and all that – this was the general opinion of the taciturn long-distance lorry drivers with eyes which had seen way too much in recent weeks.

  ‘Coming, Teddy?’ Toftlund asked.

  They walked along the lane in silence, coming out onto Dürres’s main street, with the harbour at one end and the mosque at the other. Toftlund had done a bit of reconnaissanc
e, so he was familiar with the area around the little restaurant. Teddy, who had the most amazing fund of knowledge tucked away behind that high brow of his, had also filled him in on the town’s history. Dürres was an ancient city, now the second largest in Albania, with a population of eighty-five thousand. It lay in a bay on the Adriatic coast and everywhere one looked one saw signs of Italian influence, from Roman ruins to the present prevailing military presence. In April 1939, Mussolini’s troops had been the last in a long succession of armies to invade Dürres, known to the Italians as Durazzo. They had met with fierce opposition. Toftlund and Teddy walked past the memorial to those first martyrs in the national war of liberation. Albania was a country which honoured its dead. Possibly because there had been so many of them. And in 1991 the tide had gone the other way. Thousands of desperate people who had lost all they had in the world attempted to escape across the sea to Italy and the promised land of the EU in just about anything that would float. There had been nothing for it but to send them back and, now, make sure they stayed where they were.

  Darkness fell. The air was surprisingly mild, with a hint of rain in it by the time they reached the promenade. There were still people around, but soon they would all retreat indoors and leave the night to the gangsters. Two Italian infantrymen were eating hamburgers and drinking Löwenbräu beer at an open-air restaurant, their storm rifles propped up against the new wooden table. The aroma of barbecued meat drifted up from the open grill. Two French legionnaires walked past with their automatics slung across their chests and waved to their Italian allies.

  Toftlund and Teddy walked along the waterside. They saw a ferry leave the harbour and head out to sea. Only every second street lamp was lit, but there were still people to be seen behind the windows of the restaurants. The place where they had arranged to meet lay a little further along the promenade, set back slightly from the road. It was a new Italian restaurant built out of massive logs, as if the owner had wanted it to look like a settler’s cabin from the pioneering days of the Old West. The neon had been switched off, but Toftlund could see a faint light burning behind the polka-dot curtains. He turned away from the beach, drew his pistol, cocked it and did not refasten the flap on his shoulder holster. He left his leather jacket hanging open.