The Fracture Zone

by Simon Winchester

  Father Luke of Cetinje proved to be a walking encyclopedia of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and a man as keenly confident of his own Serbian religious rights as Mihailo seemed to be of his Montenegrin claims. “The difference is—we have history on our side. We are the oldest Serbian church—we are older than the church at Pec, which you will know as the holiest of all places in Kosovo.

  “The first saint, the founder of the Serbian church, was Saint Sava—and he was born in Montenegro, though he died in Bulgaria and people think of him as perhaps Bulgarian. But he was not: He was one of us. It is through connections like this that we know we are the rightful religious establishment here, and for an old fool like Mihailo to try and claim to be a founder of a new Montenegrin movement is just silly. Just politics. Besides,” he said darkly, “look at Mihailo’s record. He was in Rome, you know, head of the Greek Orthodox movement there—and he was defrocked.”

  I asked him what he meant, and he grinned and whispered something about unpriestly behavior. His remark, certainly rude, underlined what Father Sbutega had suggested: that battle royal was raging among the Eastern churches in Montenegro, providing an ecclesiastical parallel to what was still going on, raging like distant thunder, in the surrounding skies.

  The thunder was growing louder now, the war was gathering pace. In Podgorica the journalists were getting excited, the fixers being asked to make ever-more-daring excursions as the demands of the editors outside became ever more extreme. Get over the border deep into Kosovo. Find the Kosovo Liberation Army headquarters. Interview disaffected Serb soldiers on the frontier. Only one radio reporter seemed bored by the whole affair, a middle-aged man who declared that he had had enough of fighting and proposed to sit out this particular war. He stayed in the hotel bar all day and sent his team of fixers off to ferret out any developments: Not surprisingly they found very little, for everything that was happening—and that meant a great deal—was doing so in Albania, in Macedonia, or in Kosovo itself.

  Montenegro itself may well be poised for its own grisly little war: That much was abundantly clear, so deep and growing is the loathing now between the Montenegrins and the Serb forces among them. As I was preparing to leave there was talk about how Serbia might try to take control of the little republic’s frontiers, something the Montenegrins would not tolerate and against which they would undoubtedly fight; and I had met heavily armed young men back in Cetinje who were training, preparing to do real battle with the ten thousand Serb soldiers who were in their midst. A mood of fatalism and fear was all of a sudden gripping this exquisite little corner of the world: All, I felt, would soon end in tears.

  Yet however worrying in the long term, the short-term fate of Montenegro seemed in early June to be but a sideshow to the main event—Podgorica suddenly seemed like a backwater, and I was running out of time. So Rose and I found a car, asked Dali and Vesna for the best tactics for avoiding the Yugoslav army checkpoints on the way out, and headed promptly south for Lake Scutari, and the one non-Slavic country of this corner of the Balkans, the Republika e Shqiperise: Albania.

  7

  The Lifting of the Gate

  WHY SHOULD WE turn our country into an inn,” Enver Hoxha once asked, “with her doors flung open to pigs and sows, to people with pants on or no pants at all, and to the hirsuit [sic], longhaired hippies who would come here to supplant with their wild orgies the graceful dances of our people?”

  That was in 1970, when Albania was an impoverished and lonely workers’ paradise, when the ghost of Joseph Stalin was the only foreign hero the nation was allowed, and when Enver Hoxha, whose madness had created all this misery, was still fifteen years away from the grave. But eventually he did die, Albania did find another and more tolerant government, and the country did begin reach out for the world from which it had been so self-estranged for so long. And though Albania is still an anarchic and fractious place today, many matters—a sense of freedom and a refurbished economy in particular—are slowly improving. The legacy of Hoxha’s four decades of unmitigated harshness, however, and his frowardly and unyielding hatred for all things foreign, clings like summer mildew.

  True, no frontier barber with a blunt and bloodied razor stands ready, as once he did, to hack off any unauthorized ponytail or goatee. No “compromised” border guard is there, freed briefly from his labor camp, to pore through your every book and private letter, searching for the vaguest hint of written disrespect to Comrades Stalin or Hoxha, or to any others whom Albania chose to regard as like only unto God.

  One can get into Albania with perfect ease these days, on payment at the frontier of what some officials insist is fifty-seven dollars in cash for a one-time visa (but only fifteen dollars if you are Irish). It doesn’t seem to matter these days whether you are pig or sow, long-bearded or hairless, whether you wear pants or miniskirts or even neither, or even if you are habitually inclined to the practice of indolence and the consumption of dope. But though things have improved since the times of Hoxha, there can be no feelings of relief at the Albanian frontiers of today either—none of relief, and certainly none of joy.

  A flimsy and half-broken plywood pole with blue and gray markings, a pool of muddy water that was alleged once to have been disinfectant, a shredded blood-red flag with Skanderbeg’s black double-headed eagle, and a warped and flaking sign saying, barely legibly, Miresevni ne Shqiperi—“Welcome to the Land of the Eagle”: With such devices and delights alone does the Republic of Albania greet today’s visitors who enter the country by road, and as we did, from the north.

  As the two unshaven policemen thumbed clumsily through our passports, in a room that stank of urine, its only furniture a ripped sofa whose innards were teeming with blowflies, I gazed back north, almost with yearning, to the far frontier. It looked so civilized, just a few hundred yards away. There was the red-and-white steel pole that had been lifted for us; there, nearly out of sight on the far side of the little stream, was the newly built steel-and-concrete shed for customs examinations; and there above was the red-white-and-blue flag of Yugoslavia, fluttering next to the Montenegrin two-headed eagle, in white. The car that had brought us south, a brand-new air-conditioned Toyota, had turned around, was leaving, the driver going back to Podgorica. Two Montenegrin border policemen were cheerfully showing off to him the salmon they had caught in Lake Scutari—with only two or three travelers crossing this frontier each day, life for the guards was pretty easy.

  Someone else, I could see, was using a cell phone. A tall Montenegrin policewoman was tapping her feet to the rhythms—barely audible from here—that sounded from a radio she had placed on a chair. In spite of the strange, nervous situation that had been triggered by the war, Montenegro looked from this modest distance like a bastion of European normality: What lay ahead of us by contrast seemed stranger, more foreign, and poorer, than any place I had been for a long while.

  I suddenly felt a delicate, feathery touch on my arm, and started. It was a nut-brown Gypsy boy, dressed in a wildly bright cowboy shirt, begging for spare change. He had broken away from a group of the urchins just beside the frontier line: They were hoping for foot passengers, like us, who had to leave our Montenegrin car behind and walk across no-man’s land to the waiting Albanian taxi. A tiny girl rushed up and planted a dry kiss on my arm and smiled up at me beseechingly: I gave her and her impish friends all the remaining dinars I had, and a few American quarters, and they scuttled away in a flash of color, giggling.

  I liked Gypsies, and had ever since my childhood days when my father would me take fishing in Norfolk, along with a policeman friend of his who had been a bit of a didicoi himself. I liked the Gypsies’ magnificent insolence, their devil-may-care look at a life that, considering that they lacked everything the rest of us had—like a state, a permanent home, a capital, a single language, heroes, myths—must have been fairly bitter, but from which they always seemed to come up grubby-faced but grinning. They were persecuted everywhere: In Albania in the days of Hoxha’s bizarre Stal
inist regime they had been herded en masse into unlovely apartment houses, which was better at least than what had happened to them in Nazi Germany, or in Poland or Bulgaria, where they were gassed or just ignored and made to change their names.

  Names were important in Hoxha’s Albania. Whether you were a Gypsy or not, you could call your child only by a name selected from an officially approved list, and the list changed each year. The names were often Illyrian, or pagan, and sometimes just made up: Many Albanian adults these days bear the first name Maren-glen, which comes from the first letters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

  Such madness was only the more trivial side of a tyranny that has left ineradicable scars on almost all of Albania’s three and a half million people, who remain as a result one of the most backward and ruined peoples of Europe. The Sigurimi, the dreaded security police, had a network of no fewer than forty-eight prison camps inside the republic—and this a country hardly bigger than Vermont, about the same size as Kuwait or Djibouti, and which had as many people as Chicago.

  Hundreds of thousands of people, turned in by huge numbers of informers and spies, vanished into the camps and were either murdered or worked to death. Whole families were punished for the “crimes” of one—if a young man dared listen to a foreign broadcast, or tell a faintly amusing but disrespectful story about Enver Hoxha, his entire family, parents and grandparents included, would be sent to a Sigurimi camp, either to be brutally tortured or allowed to starve. Children were taught to spy on parents: The entire country was caught up in a web of mutual distrust, the only constant being the genially cruel presence of Friend Enver, Comrade Enver, the man whose statue was on every street corner, for whom almost every street was named, and the man who made magic, could make flowers blossom in his footsteps or the rains come at a single word.

  No one was allowed to own a car: A visitor to Tirana in 1971 noted the presence in Skanderbeg Square of just one sleepy traffic policeman who jumped up at the appearance of anything with an engine, and if he saw the same car twice in one day greeted it like a long-lost friend. Most of the people traveled in ancient buses, on trains that belched smoke and sparks, or by pony or oxcart. The senior bureaucrats had cars, as did those few foreign diplomats unlucky enough to be posted to the grim fastness of a Tirana they could barely ever leave: Otherwise the city was a capital where 150,000 people lived in squalor and misery, amids a welter of free-ranging livestock and the ever-present spies from the Sigurimi.

  There was, officially, no religion—Albania under Hoxha had announced with pride that it was the world’s first truly atheist nation. Mosques had been turned into sports halls and swimming pools, and one majestic Catholic structure in Scutari had become a tire warehouse. But in fact, in spite of the strictures and the spies, people did manage to worship, as they seem to in all those countries that try to ban religion: Services were held in private houses, and foreign religious broadcasts, mainly from Italy, were listened to avidly, late at night, and quietly.

  Then came December 1990 and the return to Albania of the nation’s favorite daughter, Mother Teresa, arguably the world’s most famous nun. Her return (she was actually born in Macedonia, though her family was of Albanian stock) triggered an eruption of repressed religious zeal that was as impressive in its scale as in its ecumenical breadth. The result was that today Albania, albeit still poor and corrupt and lawless and sometimes frightening, is at least a country that worships, and its churches and mosques are filled.

  It is, moreover, the only European nation that sports a majority of Muslims: Seven out of ten Albanians visit the mosque—the Turks had evidently done their work well, and Hoxha had hardly outdone it during his forty years. Friday prayers held these days at the Mosque of Mahmud Dashi in Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square are as impressive for their rituals and the numbers of the faithful as are any services in Lahore, Dacca, Dubai, or Istanbul: This country that was godless in the eighties had become more than amply full of gods at the century’s end, with more, in all likelihood, on the way.*

  The driver had been arranged by telephone from Podgorica. He was an elderly man with a lopsided and toothless grin and three days’ worth of gray stubble on his chin. He drove a twenty-year-old Mercedes—there are said to be some twenty thousand Mercedes-Benzes in Albania, all stolen in Germany and licensed in such a way as to ensure they can never leave the country again. He attempted to speak to us—but his Albanian was far too strange and difficult, even for Rose, who could normally pick up foreign tongues with unusual dispatch. She spoke excellent Italian and French and was competent in a host of lesser tongues, but Albanian quite foxed her.

  She was not alone. Edward Lear, who traveled in Albania in 1848, was infuriated by the one European language he could not fathom: Among the “clatter of strange monosyllables,” he wrote, he could discern only strange near-Anglicisms, “dort beer, dort bloo, dort hitch, hitch beer, blue beer, beer chak, dort gatch.” Although there are just two properly official languages today—that of the Gheg people in the north,* and that of the Tosk in the south, with the occasional addition of a third known as Arberesh, which is spoken mainly by Albanians now living in Italy—there are also said to be five main alphabets, one of which has more than fifty letters.

  The road, once we had left the frontier zone, was a ravaged and torn-up thing, much like a cart track—and the only vehicles we saw during the first few miles, as we bumped along the low plain on the eastern shore of Lake Scutari, were in fact drawn by mules, and were little more than immense haystacks on wheels. The scenery was dull, except for one curious phenomenon that became so commonplace that it almost seemed worthless to remark on it—the presence of hundreds upon thousands of mushroom-shaped pillboxes.

  Enver Hoxha had ordered them to be built. He panicked one summer day in 1968 when the Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia: He withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in protest, and then suddenly realized that his friendship agreement with faraway China did not make any provision for defense. His country, alone in its Stalinist isolation anyway, was ripe for picking should any neighbor—Greece, most probably, or some vile American agent, or maybe the Russians with whom he had so spectacularly fallen out—choose to invade. And so he built pillboxes—eight hundred thousand of them by most accounts, smooth-topped gray cement mushrooms, with a gun slit at one side and a stairway down the back, and dotted them all across his country, defying anyone who might enter the nation illegally to get more than a few hundred yards before being cut down in a hail of gunfire. Albanians today find them a grotesque embarrassment, and they have no real idea why they were built and who they were to defend Albania against. “Everyone,” one man in Tirana was quoted as saying.

  Scores of thousands of these igloolike bunkers remain—they line every main road, they cluster at the approaches to all cities, they appear every few yards along the much-used highway between Tirana and the port city of Durres,* where any invasion was thought likely to begin. Their gun slits point in all directions: Rose pointed out many that were built on hillsides but with the slit directed not out from the hill, but uselessly backwards, so that any fire would hit the grassy slope that can’t have been more than five feet away.

  Some are large, some miniature; they appear sometimes singly, or in twos and threes, or as forests of two dozen and more. None are used, nor do they ever appear to have been—though one assumes that on occasion they bristled with guns and men waiting silently through bitter nights for some of Hoxha’s imagined invaders to land. Nowadays a few of them, made no doubt of substandard cement, have crumbled like sugar in the rain. Others have been dug up from their foundations and lie upside down in the fields like stranded tortoises, monuments all to a terrible and costly folly of a sadly paranoid mind.

  The rutted road and the trainless railway beside it hugged the shore of the lake. Far to the west rose the Montenegrin mountains, violet in the late-morning sun. Behind them, I knew, lay the sea, and Ulcinj and its community of Slavic Africans. Once in a while an Italian military vehicle—a jeep
, the odd armored car, an ambulance—hurried past, the machine-gunner on top looking nervously around. The troops had the acronym AFOR stenciled on the sides—we had seen SFOR and IFOR in Bosnia, and knew that if soldiers ever did go into Kosovo, a development that was looking likelier by the hour, they would be designated as KFOR.*

  These men, mostly newcomers, were under the command of a British general based down at the port of Durres. They, together with Americans and Germans and Spaniards, were posted to Albania both to help keep the country stable, as well as to secure its borders, help organize the refugee of all, to be on hand should the NATO troops be ordered to invade. They had, I thought, the uneasy look of readiness about them, and as we pressed on south their convoys became more numerous, and there were tank transporters and helicopters, too. The balloon, it seemed, might soon be about to go up.

  We passed through a dozen dusty, forlorn-looking villages, with names that were every bit as expectedly odd as the Albanian language itself. On the way to what outsiders call Scutari, but which the Shqiperian people call Shkoder, we passed either through or close by Hani i Hoti (where we had crossed the frontier) Goraj-Bidisht, Kopliku i Sipermi, Mec, Drisht, and Renc. The names of the people were odd as well: I had only just learned that one pronounces Enver Hoxha to rhyme with lodger, when we stopped for lunch and Italian coffee at a town called Grude e Re, and I picked up a local paper only to be confronted with stories of a Communist party leader and former tinsmith who was named Koci Xoxe. The driver, happily, did not wish to make conversation about him—and indeed, he kept his own counsel for most of the journey, until we reached the outskirts of Tirana when he made it unmistakably clear, mainly by signs, that he wanted twice as much money as we had agreed to give him.