The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  Tirana looked like a city of the Wild West on the day the carnival comes to town. We arrived at dusk on a Saturday evening, and tens of thousands of Albanians—perhaps the whole city, it looked so chaotic and busy—were on hand for their evening passeggiata, milling around, wandering idly in front of speeding cars, tussling with one another, shouting at children, playing in the fountains, gazing into shop windows. There were impromptu amusement parks, bicycles for rent, street stalls, kebab sellers, open-air hairdressers, peasants hawking fresh fish, cobblers and shoeshine boys, farmers selling hunting birds, mullahs on their way to prayer. I half expected to see fire eaters and tumblers, jesters and harlequins. It was like Rome’s beautiful and madcap Piazza Navona on a Saturday night—thronging, exuberant, a scene from a Fellini movie, from a summer night’s dream, and if the players were ragged and poor—well, what of it!

  The women were vividly dressed, the men by contrast dull and dusty—though it was possible to tell in the crowds the northern Gheg people, who if they wore hats at all wore domed white skullcaps. Their Tosk rivals, on the other hand, wore the fez, also white but with a flattened top. Gypsy children were everywhere, darting in and out of the crowds, pestering the strollers, brushing dust from the car windscreens, begging for change. And money changers were at every street corner, offering huge bundles of leks without a care in the world for the police who, ten years before, would have rounded them up and sent them off for torture and hard labor.

  Albania’s capital was like a city with the safety cap taken off. It positively bubbled and bustled with the newfound enthusiasms of freedom, more than any of the other great cities—Berlin, Prague, Budapest—that had lately been released from the burdens of Marx. It was chaotic, it was poor, it was grubby. But everyone seemed to be smiling, carefree, optimistic, there was an infectious effervescence about the place, as if everyone knew that a great awakening was under way. I knew that I would like it from the moment that our car lurched into Skanderbeg Square, and there was the hero Skanderbeg himself, iron dark and nobly bearded astride his horse, reminding all Albanians that he, not the appalling Hoxha, was the true national hero.

  It was five hundred years ago that he, then plain Gjerg Kastrioti, managed the awesome feat of welding into one all the disparate Illyrian tribes of the day, and fighting for twenty-five years—in vain, as it turned out—against the invading Turks. Like Prince Lazar up in Kosovo, the great Alexander Bey, Skanderbeg, is best remembered as a force for unifying and ennobling his people’s cause. That both men lost to the superior numbers and the superior military skills of the Turks has never managed to quench, even five and six centuries later, the popular fondness for them.

  Skanderbeg left the double-headed black eagle as his legacy, and both it and his image and his statue, around which scores of small children were playing, serve as reminders of pride in unity and the glories of an Albania whose identity has never been crushed by the foreign dominations they have had to bear all too often. By comparison Enver Hoxha has left no legacy at all, nothing of which one single Albanian can be proud—certainly not the hundreds of thousands of grim cement igloos, dotted pathetically across the land.

  We stayed at an empty and echoing mausoleum of a hotel, the Dajti. The rooms were small and dusty; I had read once that the Albanian fleas were the biggest and fattest in the world, and so shook the sheets to make sure they were clean. Downstairs a feisty receptionist got rid of the driver and cut his anticipated bill in half. “A northerner,” she said. “A cheat. Be careful. There are a lot of cheats here this days.”

  I thanked the woman, once the driver had scowled his way back to his car and swerved out of the gates. I told her she was kind, and by the way, very pretty too. She grinned and blushed—and suddenly a man standing at the counter who had been chatting with her earlier took a step toward me. I shrank away. The girl raised her hand, waved off the man.

  I had been more foolish than I realized. Later that evening I was told that the possessive pride of many Albanian men is such as to keep all foreigners perpetually on guard. Pay no compliments, I was warned. Never flirt. Be sure never to smile too hard or to wink at anyone. Be scrupulously careful of any too-friendly remark that might perhaps, if understood, being fatally misinterpreted.

  The old customs and blood feuds between families remained a powerful force in Albanian tradition. I was told of a young man from a southern village, a university-educated, English-speaking engineer named Tony who worked in a factory in Tirana, who had met a young woman at a carnival earlier in the year and had playfully pinched her backside. She had thought little of the incident, had laughed it off—indeed, had been rather flattered. But a few days later she made the mistake of mentioning what had happened, in passing, to her brother. The brother in turn told their father, and then a sudden thundercloud descended.

  The family patriarch decided that, in line with the ancient customs of his clan, the girl’s honor had been besmirched. Vengeance should now be wrought. An example should now be made.

  “And so, despite the protests from the girl,” I was told, “her brother and another boy from the family took the bus down from Kukes, where they lived up north, and they went down to the village where the young man lived. They rounded up all the young men in the family—not just the bottom pincher, but all of his brothers and his cousins in his village—and they took knives to them and sliced off their noses. Just cut them off, there and then. No questions, no arguments. They told the men why it had happened, that it had been ordered by the clan leader to make their position known, and that the mutilated fellows should never dare set foot in Kukes again. And they took off and went back home.

  “Everyone understood. There was no question of a crime having been committed, except for the bottom pinching that started it all. There was no question of an investigation or of any further punishment. That, so far as everyone was concerned, was an end to the matter.”

  Except it wasn’t quite. The young engineer, who would then come to the Tirana office wearing a small handkerchief taped to his forehead, which hung down and obscured the gaping and cartilaginous hole in his face, saved up money to have plastic surgery in Italy. His employer begged him not to: The sum he had saved, a thousand dollars, may have been difficult to come by, and a third of the Albanian average annual income, but it would not buy a satisfactory replacement. But the boy went anyway, and had something grafted onto his face that looked much like a big toe, only lopsided. He had since gone back to his village, ashamed ever to show himself again, taking comfort only in the knowledge that his brothers and cousins looked at least as ugly as he did.

  I was told the story of Tony by the one friend I had in Albania—an Irish-Canadian engineer from Calgary, whom I had encountered many years before on Sakhalin Island, in the Russian Far East. He name was Shaun Going, and he ran a company called DRC, Inc., which specialized in “construction and disaster services.” What that meant, basically, was that wherever in the world was in need of urgent repair, for whatever reason—war, earthquake, hurricane—he and his men would swarm in and make good and mend. He had been in Sakhalin trying to put up houses for the oilmen who were beginning work in a place ruined by years of Communist neglect. Now he was here in Tirana, building encampments for the refugees. And he was readying himself for Kosovo because, he knew, “just as soon as the war is over, people will need to have new houses, new offices, new everything. I have the men and the equipment, and I can go in like a small task force. It’s exciting stuff!”

  Shaun Going was an eternally amusing, energetic man, the kind of perpetually upbeat figure for whom nothing seemed ever to be a problem—though I knew from Sakhalin Island that his business had been run fairly close to the wind, and that he had never amassed the kind of fortune that one suspected could be made out of the world’s endless supply of disasters. Here he had a worthwhile contract with NATO, and he had already, “through contacts,” acquired a plot of land in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.

  “The moment the soldie
rs get there,” he said excitedly, “they’re going to need showers, latrines, offices. I’ll send in a team within hours of the invasion. I’ll build them all they need in double-quick time. Then I’ll hang around, bring in more people—rebuild the housing. I guess it’s pretty bad over there, huh?” And he gave me a slew of telephone numbers, and asked me whether, if I managed to get into Kosovo, I might call him with an assessment of the damage that had been done. “I need to know how much to bring in, in the way of material, men, you know. A call from you, from someone on the spot, would be very helpful.”

  Mr. Going was a hustler, all right. But on the other hand he seemed to be having so much fun doing what he did, he seemed to take so positive and optimistic an attitude to it and was clearly so well liked by so many of the Albanians I met—“Mr. Going is the King of Albania” I was told, unprompted, by a total stranger who had heard of him—that it would seem churlish to suggest that he was a man who exploited human misery. And besides, who was I, or who was any writer who came to these parts to see and write about wars and disasters, to pass any judgment at all? Wars and disasters throw up all kinds of humanity, and Shaun Going was one of those you meet on the periphery, not as noble as the fighters perhaps, but yet with his own kind of nobility, for sure.

  He took us to a restaurant called the Black Rooster, which has a courtyard with a thatched roof that was kept wet and dripped sheets of water into old stone runnels, and we ate trout from Lake Ohrid—a fish so rare, and from a lake so clear and deep that Enver Hoxha banned anyone but himself from fishing it, on penalty of thirty years’ hard labor. The fish was interesting, but rather more so was the man Shaun brought as his guest—an American named Greg, who came from North Carolina, said he was a journalist working for George magazine in New York, and by his own admission paced the streets of Tirana at all hours of the night gathering, as he put it, “financial intelligence.”

  I never quite knew what to make of him. He was tall, languid, educated, he spoke with an elaborately courteous southern drawl and he dressed impeccably. He had a strange accent, an odd manner: He kept referring to “the province,” which he claimed to visit regularly, when he was speaking of Kosovo, and on those few occasions he used the word he called it Koss-oh-vo, with a long second o. He referred to his present home as being in a nation called Alb-ah-nia.

  He gave the impression, as I am sure he half-intended, that he was some kind of American spy—which, when I compared him with the handful of real spies I knew, he almost certainly was not—or else was an extremely inept one. His journalistic contacts were far fewer than he suggested at first, and when I pressed him he could cite only having done an occasional piece on local casinos for a Texas-based journal devoted to gambling. I was puzzled by him, and after spending half a day wandering the back streets of the city with him and getting hopelessly lost, I concluded that he was probably one of those Walter Mittyish characters who are often thrown up by the atmospheres of strange cities like Tirana—sad men who attach themselves, limpetlike, to the journalists and other temporary figures who briefly settle during the crisis, who eke out an existence in a more drab and banal way than they pretend, and who then, and before they are discovered, pack up and move on somewhere else. I had seen such people before, in Kabul, in Beirut, in Buenos Aires, and he seemed to fit the modus operandi. But then again, maybe Greg was indeed a senior spymaster for the Albanian desk back at the circus, and I had been royally duped.

  Tirana was, in any case, infested by a veritable army of ‘“internationals,” as they had been snippishly called back in Sarajevo. They gathered each evening beside the caricaturably Hockney-blue pool at the EuropaPark Hotel, which was managed by Viennese and had been created for the sole use, it seemed, of foreigners willing to pay hundreds of dollars a night to stay and help Albania get back on its feet. I had lunch there once: A courtly Italian aid official with highly polished shoes and a suit of the coolest linen spent a good fifteen minutes choosing the perfect Montepulciano to have with his osso buco, in the process puzzling the tall Albanian waiter, whose badge suggested that his name was Elvis. What relevance any of this had to do with the poor, corrupt, lunatic nation beyond the clipped privet hedges and the security guards, I do not know: but I was happy to settle the bill and leave, and get into the car bound for the frontier with Macedonia.

  Shaun had arranged that a huge Gheg villager named Monday*, once a heavyweight boxing champion, would drive us across to Skopje. Shaun also supplied us with one of his fleet of cars, which unlike most Albanian cars did have the right permission and insurance certificates that were needed to leave the country. And so we headed off out of Tirana, which fell away in no more than five minutes, once we had maneuvered our way around the massive fortifications at the American embassy. This, it seems, is a city without suburbs: Just like Pyongyang, with which it had few other similarities except for the screwball nature of its former regime, you are at one moment in the city—and then you were not. As with North Korea, so here with Albania. A row of mean houses comes to a sudden end—and then the countryside begins. One moment there is noise and confusion and fumes and traffic jams—and the next the sweet smell of new-mown hay, the sound of sheep bells, the patient plod of cowherds, and, in this case of this Albanian journey, the crags of the mountains of Kerrabe, which stand between the capital and the valley of Elbasan.

  It was a dangerous, white-knuckle forty miles—for despite this being the Via Egnatia, the most direct Roman-built route between Durres and Byzantium, Monday and the equally huge friend he had brought along for company had no choice but to swing the car through a score of hairpin turns to hoist us over the mountain range. The summit was less than three thousand feet, but the view was stupendous: On the western side of the escarpment we could see all the way across the Durres and Tirana Plain, clear to the Adriatic and the island of Corfu. To the east we were confronted by range upon range of more distant blue hills, and just below the immense steel mill that the Chinese had built in more comradely times. It was quiet now, with no billowing clouds from its smokestacks: It rusted quietly in the sun, like Albania a victim of years of ruin and neglect.

  Beyond the steel mill the countryside became wilder and ever more remote, and Monday urged us to watch out for bandits, gangs of men with guns who would swarm out of nowhere in an ambush, and take everything in a paroxysm of thievery. I had friends who had made this journey before, one of whom was left beside the road in only his underwear—his car, money, passport, clothes all gone with just a war whoop of delight, all lost in some isolated mountain lair. The region is lawless, dangerous—and I only felt confident that this journey would succeed because of two realities: First, Monday was a very large man indeed, and was known to thousands of Albanian boxing fans and respected by all of them; and second, there was a major war presently in the making, and the road and the fields ahead were swarming with eastbound soldiers and equipment, most of them American.

  We came across the first of them while we sped down the valley of the Shkumbinit River, between the towns of Librazhd and Perrenjas: A pair of American Humvees was parked under the trees beside the stream, the soldiers gazing in rapture at a group of young Albanian girls in bathing suits. Then suddenly the air was filled with thunder and a pair of U.S. Army helicopters zoomed low above us, their rotors setting the trees thrashing in their wake. They were bound for the shores of Lake Ohrid, to a rendezvous point for the battle to come.

  And then we saw more, many more, as we breasted a rise above the western side of the lake itself. The road forks just beyond Perrenjas, and one can go either to a border crossing south of the lake or another at the northern side. Since we were due to take the road north up to Skopje, this latter northern frontier post seemed the better choice, and so we turned to the left—and climbed up onto a treeless moorland country of tussock grass and stunted bushes that could have been in Scotland, and needed only a sporraned piper to look the part. We rounded a bend—and then saw ahead of a huge concentration of American armed force
s, parked in a great circle in a field beside the road.

  It was a landing strip and a refueling base for the Macedonia-bound squadron of Apache helicopters. Twenty of the sleek and menacing looking machines, known as AH-64s, and said by the Pentagon to be among the finest tank-killing, infantry-disrupting slow-speed attack aircraft ever designed, had been in Albania for the previous ten weeks. They had proved perfectly useless: One of them had crashed; two men had been killed; the rest of the crews turned out to be poorly trained and quite unsuited for the kind of duties the Joint Chiefs of Staff had assumed they could carry out. So now, as a soft option, they were going to Macedonia, and if not to prosecute a war, then at least to help secure a kind of peace.

  And whether they were going proudly or in some kind of disgrace, their simple presence here, the sight of such a muscular part of the American military machine in so backward and bucolic a corner of the world, was hugely impressive. Giant fuel pumps, scores of armored cars, dozens of jeeps and Humvees and radio vans and sentries were posted over ten acres of clifftop. And one by one, the needle-nosed machines thundered in from the west, were refueled with speed and efficiency, and then spiraled up into the sky once more before heading east, across the frontier. We could have watched for hours, and a few Albanian children, held back by the men with guns, were evidently doing so. The sight of so much hardware, the roaring of engines, the smell of jet fuel, the impression of power and money and might—it all had a mesmerizing effect.