Just over the rise, small hunting lodges in a cluster of reds and bright yellows are tucked away in a copse of pine.
Here the road is in shadow and Mentor takes it carefully, like a skater his first time upon ice. He is not liking it. The conditions have at last borne out his worst expectations. This morning he tried to persuade me with his visions of ice and snow to take the inland route. The thinner ice is cracking under the weight of the car and we have all fallen rather quiet.
But then we leave the trees and shadows behind, and the tyres begin to grip the road. Around the next bend we come face-on with the breathtaking surprise of the Ionian Sea. After the muddy Adriatic, it is vast and blue, and above all, civilising. The car slows to a halt; even Mentor is moved to gaze, for there is this wonderful sense of threshold, of our moving on to better things.
After punching into dark, icy hollows on the way up the other side, the downward journey takes us through wide-open space and sunshine. The road gleefully races out to the bend, and here the sea glances up at a surprising angle and lists away, back and forth, as we loop the stony mountainside.
Shapallo recalls that when he made this same journey several years back, the air had grown warmer at every bend, until halfway down the mountain the bride complained of the smell of horse dung on her father’s hands.
On one of the bends is a military post—all window and lens trained on the horizon; we squirrel by unnoticed, zigzagging all the way down to the bottom of the mountain.
The road briefly sinks beneath some trees, then we cross a small stream into Dhermi.
Virtually without warning the road disappears out from under us. What remains is barely wide enough for the Volvo. We push along a track which twists around the back of weathered stone dwellings and underneath patios dripping yellow, withered vines. Some of the windows have been shuttered up. The windows of a café are boarded over; its doors plastered with Democrat slogans. The only sign of life is an elderly man with a thick white moustache and wearing a Muslim skullcap.
We draw alongside so Kadris can ask where everyone has disappeared to.
‘Greece!’
The man waves his hand in the direction of the coast. Then he repeats himself: ‘Greece!’ He has a cross look as if he has lost a bad-tempered argument.
We pick a lane down to the beach, where we find the second inhabitant, a middle-aged man neatly turned out in an officer’s uniform, his shiny black boots crunching along the beach. In lovely white sunbather’s sand a line of concrete bunkers sits about twenty metres above the high-tide mark.
The only other signs of trespass are a military installation and a block of workers’ holiday flats at the far end of the beach. The military installation stares blankly out to sea, whereas, as if to curb any longing for foreign places, the view from the workers’ flats has been turned away from the horizon to behold the coastline further south. The view is thus contorted, like a man perpetually twisted in order to stare into his own armpit.
Although Sarandë is no more than eighty kilometres further down the coast, we spend the rest of the day getting there. It all starts coming back to Shapallo, his various encampments and shelters. We stop by some other deserted workers’ holiday flats. The windows have been smashed, the walls blackened from campfires. Itinerants, gypsies, migrants destined for Greece have all passed through here.
Shapallo says he once spent a year living in another abandoned block of flats with a family of hickory workers, highlanders, he said, who had travelled to the coast to make a living out of crafting pipes. Sometime later we pass a family combing the roadside brush and Shapallo points out the load of hickory on their backs. One very old woman who has been spared a load is bent over nearly double from a lifetime of mule work. As late as Zog’s reign women along with livestock were fair game among cattle thieves.
PARTI ENVER has been scratched on a hillside a little north of Borsh, and in the near deserted town itself, LIRI (freedom) has been painted over the door to a café.
We pass through the abandoned orange and olive groves. In one place we stop and help Mentor load his boot with oranges.
‘Everyone has gone to Greece,’ says Kadris. ‘No time to pick or eat.’
One village after another, we enter the peculiarly still air and crawl past the locked-up houses. The remains of a goat, a thin carcass, its eyes pecked out, is still chained to a feeding post.
Between Borsh and Lukove, Kadris tells the story of his thirty-four-year-old brother-in-law joining this southward flight. By Kadris’s account Romano had a miserable time.
He had almost frozen to death while crossing the Pindus pass in ice and snow. The Albanian border guards had turned their backs by this stage. But on the Greek side, the guards there fired at the refugees, and in a panic Romano ran off the track and lost his way. Many hours later, a Greek shepherd picked him up and took care of him. Romano was fed goat milk and cheese. He spent the night with the shepherd, in the lee of a tall stone cairn, listening to the wind lift and whistle off the peaks.
At first light Romano was taken to a village; from there he was handed on down a line of villages, until at the last one, he was shown onto a road.
He walked all the next day and arrived in a village, worn out and scared, and from there spent all his savings on a taxi fare to Athens.
He found the centre of Athens crawling with his half-starved countrymen. They roamed the markets scavenging for scraps and fighting one another. It had been a terrible time.
Romano had been on the brink of starting back home when he landed a part in a film. An Australian crew filming a documentary on the origins of the marathon, in time for the Barcelona Olympics, needed extras—runners. Romano signed on with thirty or forty half-starved Albanians. They were driven in covered army trucks to various places on the outskirts of Athens. Silent with hunger they lined up for singlets and shorts designed after the 1896 Athens Olympics.
For hours at a time, Romano and the other refugees jogged behind a vehicle with a camera mounted on specially built struts. They ran through the suburbs around Athens. One morning they drove far out into the countryside and spent the day running along a hill road. At the end of the day’s shoot they changed out of the running gear into their rags and were driven back into the centre of Athens. At night they slept around Omonia Square, one hand clenched around their earnings—ten dollars a day—and in their other hand a knife. In the morning the truck rounded them up again.
After ten days Romano had earned one hundred dollars—and while it was more than he could earn in a year back home, he had had enough.
‘Homesick,’ said Kadris, and he mentioned a wife and daughter.
Romano arrived home with fifty dollars in his pocket, pushing ahead of himself a small fridge on wheels specially fitted for the journey.
38
IT IS ALREADY dark by the time we wind down off the hilltops into Sarandë, on the coast. But even in the dark it is possible to see that Sarandë is deserving of its umbrella logo on Cliff ’s map. A horseshoe bay begins at one end with a swept-up hotel and stretches round to the port-lit end. On the beach, below the line of pine trees, is a lifeguard tower; no concrete bunkers, none that I can see, anyway.
The lights of Corfu can be seen across the channel. Back in Savra, where I had whiled away the time studying Cliff ’s map, Sarandë’s proximity to Corfu had suggested other possibilities. Food. Drink. ‘Dollar shops’. Coming down from the Llogara Pass I had briefly entertained thoughts of outdoor tables and chairs, somewhere with a menu and plenty of red wine shipped across the border.
Unfortunately, the one hotel open is a dollar one wanting sixty US dollars a night per person, as opposed to the forty cents I had paid in Lushnje.
The woman behind the desk won’t entertain leks. She snaps, ‘Dollars! Dollars!’
It is during the search for an alternative hotel that Sarandë reveals its other, more familiar side. Windows are boarded up. Hotel signs hang broken from a nail. We swoop upon one hotel, boarded up but nonetheles
s with a light on in its lobby, but no one answers our hammering on the door.
We head back to the dollar hotel and discover that it has a lek restaurant. The menu features just the one item, a sweet cake oozing honey which has been trucked in from over the border.
Fortunately, we had managed to eat something earlier, in Lukove, a village sitting high above the beach and with a two-storey restaurant set back from the road. The windows had been blasted out and a very cold wind blew in off the sea. We had the dining room to ourselves. We ate the last of the soup and were watched through a doorway by a room crammed with men lingering over empty coffee cups.
We eat what we can of the cake and I buy the rest for Shapallo, who hadn’t wanted to leave the car.
Hoxha’s birthplace, Gjirokastër, is another two hours’ drive. There is no choice but to push on there and hope for a lek hotel.
As we climb up to the main road, Sarandë drops from view and the back window fills with the lights from Corfu. Soon the last of the lights are well behind us, and it is pitch black. Sometime later we start to lose speed, and begin a long climb that reduces us to a crawl. On one corner a wheel catches a patch of ice; it spins furiously and then we lurch off again.
We probably should have waited until morning. We could have slept in the car. Our headlights have started to pick up snowdrifts, and as we grind it out around steep bends, the lights disconcertingly vanish into a black chasm.
I ask Kadris if he has any idea of how high the mountain is.
‘Very, very high.’
He leans forward to confer, but Mentor has no idea either.
‘Tell him to change down.’
‘I have told him this, already. Many, many times. Mentor does not enjoy the sound of those gears.’
Then he checks with Shapallo, who is none the wiser either. But as Shapallo tilted his head back, in the dash lights I’d caught that side profile of the Emperor—‘like Orson Welles’, one British Special Operations agent had written in his report. Hoxha reminded another of a ‘seedy student’.
In the dash light it is Shapallo’s doggy grin, that expression of knowingness that he has had to carry around with him ever since Tef shoved him out into a world where at the mere sight of him farm workers had dropped their picks and hay rakes.
The other night, relating these difficulties, Shapallo had compared the Sun King’s experiences to his own. He had read that first-time visitors to Louis’s court were often advised to get used to seeing the King before raising the courage to address him, since first contact with his personality often struck them dumb. In the early days before he grew a beard and disfigured himself, farm workers, woodcutters, agronomists, children, muleteers—all had stopped in their tracks at the sight of Shapallo shambling towards them. Old men rubbed at their eyes. Children looked around and ran for it.
Once, in the fields outside Seman, I think it was, in Apollonia, Shapallo tried to convince a farm worker that he was not a ghost. But the man stuck out his hands to prevent Shapallo from venturing any closer.
I imagine a smiling beneficence had seen Shapallo through. The sea of bewildered faces parting, the landscape opening up, and Shapallo, both amused and regretful, like the condemned actor forever remembered for just one role, taking his resigned grin off in the direction of the darkening range of hills.
One night earlier this year he had entered a village to look for food and found Enver’s statue toppled in the square. His first thoughts were to hold an act of God responsible. He looked closer. Enver’s arms were tied behind his back, and painted over the raised cheek was the word mut, or shit.
A week later, near Elbasan, he had picked up a newspaper used by a truck driver to wipe his hands after changing a tyre, and there, beneath oily thumbprints, was a photograph of ‘hooligans’ swarming into Embassy Row.
I seem to recall back in Tirana virtually every black market commodity carried a Greek label. People spoke of the ‘highway’ up from Greece and I had imagined lanes of traffic and convoys of trucks travelling through the night.
But the highway I had expected is a country road. Down the other side of the mountain we arrive at a junction: another five kilometres south lies the Greek border; eighteen kilometres in the opposite direction is Gjirokastër.
We’re the only traffic, and the only change from the jack-knifing road which brought us over the mountain is that it now has fewer bends. A moment ago, the headlights picked up the black skin of a river and we’ve stuck beside it since.
We pass under small villages stapled to the hillside above the road. Sometimes we catch a solitary light. But most of the way is covered in darkness before the start of the concrete housing blocks announces ‘new Gjirokastër’. The whereabouts of ‘old Gjirokastër’ are a mystery.
We have to wind down the windows to listen for sounds of habitation, more like woodsmen than motorists with a map. A light snow is falling and we can hear the dull sounds of an axe biting into damp wood. Then Kadris sights a tiny cluster of glow-worm lights high, high above the road.
We climb to a grand-looking hotel that sits at the foot of the old fortress walls; then the road closes up to a cobbled lane full of sharp bends and exquisite wood and lead-light boutiques. Here is the imprimatur of private ownership. A pipe shop. A bar. A bakery. None open at this hour, but a heartening sight nonetheless.
We have zigzagged our way to an area above the fortress walls to find the house of the local Democrat leader, an old university buddy of Kadris’s. The snow is falling heavily and the prospect of a night sitting upright in the Volvo is a daunting one.
Kadris’s friend, like all the other Democrats I have met, is an economics teacher. A dark, slim man in his early thirties. In the hotel the Democrat takes the hand of a rather formidable woman behind the desk and coaxes from her an acceptable deal—Kadris, Mentor and Shapallo will pay in leks, but I must pay in dollars, in advance.
There are signs pointing to the dining room; another promises a bar. But the only voices we hear are our own. The Democrat apologises for everything having closed down so early. But the hotel staff fear for their security.
Gjirokastër, Brikena had told me, was ‘an intellectual town’.
‘There is also the possibility of vandalism and windows getting smashed,’ continues the Democrat.
‘But why?’
‘Debate. Argument,’ he says. ‘It is the biggest problem for our party to explain that after fifty years of unified Party stand on everything, healthy debate is not the same thing as anarchy.’
We have two rooms at the end of a long, carpeted corridor. We are the only guests on the second floor. Miraculously the rooms are heated. The shower works. There is hot water! And a fluffy eiderdown on each bed. I drift off, watching the snow fall on an owl sitting on a bare branch in the window.
39
LAST NIGHT’S HOPES of finding food have come to nothing. This morning we were late getting downstairs and the restaurant had run out of bread.
On a more pleasant note Gjirokastër is beautiful. I think Enver must have drawn the line here, since the grubby housing blocks, like an invading army, have got no further than the bottom of the hill.
Outside, it is pure mountain air. Shapallo has his coat collar pushed up around his ears—not sure as to what he would value more at this moment, a cup of coffee or total invisibility. On the way to Enver’s house we stop at a shop filled with Greek merchandise and sightseers. I buy some brandy and chocolate, and a scarf for Shapallo.
The mountain behind Gjirokastër is buried in a grey mist. Underfoot are pink and grey bricks. The houses are the colour of old snow. The slate on their roofs is a dark, wet grey. Outside each house people have lit small fires under their frozen water pipes.
We find Enver’s old house easily enough. For years it was a shrine; now, we discover, it is an archive.
This morning a boy of sixteen or seventeen guards the door. In his hands he has a rifle dating back to the partisans’ campaigns. His tousled brown hair is fille
d with snowflakes, which have been falling all morning. His eyes and nose are running. His hands are numb with cold.
Kadris gives him a piece of chocolate, and for the moment the rifle dangles like a shoulder bag while he licks his fingers.
We slip in the door and immediately come up against a second line of defence, a well-dressed woman who has managed to escape the usual drab custodian’s uniform. The conversation runs a predictable course. First the official line—it is quite impossible for anyone to visit, since the archive is closed.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ says Kadris; then he asks me for a dollar.
The woman quickly pockets it. But she is not particularly pleased to have done so. She has some harsh words for the boy soldier, who, covered with shame, returns to his post with his chocolate fingers.
The invitation is to look. We must not touch the cartons. A few minutes is all she will allow. Time, she says, ‘to soak up the atmosphere’. The woman’s mutterings chase us up the stairs.
One wall has been devoted to a photographic display, and Shapallo is most interested in this. There is Enver, the studious youth. Enver at the beach, where the future leader with ‘the film-star looks’ already seems inordinately aware of the camera, more so than he is of the sun on his shoulders and back.
There is the famous smile which at a glance was said to have ripened fruit; this same thing for which women forgave his occasional rudeness.
The photograph that has interested Shapallo so much is one of Enver standing with a group of comrades. Enver is the only one not listening to the photographer’s instructions. The rest of the comrades smile into the lens, whereas Enver, arms folded, is uncharacteristically glancing off to somewhere in the wings.
Something has caught his attention, and fifty years later in a different time and place he and Shapallo appear to be exchanging glances: youth contemplating old age or, just as likely, old age glancing back down the same road.
We move along to the oil paintings—most of them studies of Lenin kindly listening to the problems of peasants; or at his writing desk, in a pensive mood, smiling at the brilliant thought still to be completed on the sheet of paper.