In the hold of the ship I joined another line. But there was less frenzy here. The passengers relaxed and the line moved forward in a civilised fashion. At last, at the bottom of the steps, I presented my ticket for Bari. In the lounge I joined another line to hand in my passport at the purser’s office for ‘reasons of security’.
Out on the deck I found a seat in the sun. The ship was still tied to the wharf, but everyone aboard had slipped into a different gear. They paused at entranceways to allow others through. They closed their eyes and basked in the sun. Further along the rail I saw the prostitute from the Dajti. She was in the same fur coat, but she had new company. A large fleshy-faced Dane was eating a sandwich, while his older companion cut up an orange. The woman wore sunglasses and she crossed her legs, and when offered a segment of orange she put it in her mouth but did not chew; she took the orange like a pill.
The ship was still tied up at the wharf but to all intents and purposes we had left Albania, and for some reason I felt compelled to write down the date in my notebook.
I had reached the point where Swire, fifty years ago, ends his book—standing on the stern of the Lussino and watching its wake trail back toward Durrës. He closes his account in a most wonderful way: ‘I went to the saloon to write the last page of my Albanian diary. When I had laid down my pen the fresh breeze caught and turned the written page. My Albania days were done.’ But I still had unfinished business to attend to. I picked up Nick’s mother’s cake and my bag and found a table next to a window in the lounge.
There was a parting jolt from the wharf. The grille on the bar went up. Stainless-steel lids were noisily lifted off pans of paprika chicken, fresh lasagne, pasta, salads and golden chips. The next time I looked up, away to the port side, the Albanian coastline had melted into the mountains.
I tried to imagine the same moment aboard the freighters, during the ‘boat exodus’. Albania sinking into the distance, and up on deck, in hot, cramped conditions, the Albanians with their crazy notions as to what lay ahead, pieced together from hearsay and wild speculation.
I thought of Nick’s map of the North Yorkshire moors, his poaching another’s journey, the way he’d boned up on Sherlock Holmes for additional information on the moors, until eventually he had been able to imagine the landscape the dotted line passed through.
Performing a similar role, Cliff ’s shortwave radio had helped to rein in the outside world.
My imaginative reach had been given an additional boost by Martinborough’s founder, John Martin, who had named the streets after all his favourite places visited around the world. Kansas Street was the outer street on a grid designed after the British Union Jack, with streets named after New York, Rio, Genoa, Durban, Dublin, Strasbourg and Ohio.
For a time it had been a New Year’s tradition to hold street parties, and Genoa’s was always the most popular. The few people in Kansas who could be bothered dressing up in cowboy or hayseed outfits invariably ended way over in Genoa for pizza and beer before the night was done. There was accordion music and what people in those days described as ‘gaiety’.
For some reason people stayed up later in Genoa and were still dancing and falling into each other’s arms long after the blinds had been drawn in Durban and Cardiff. Genoa had a reputation of being the ‘colourful side of town’.
My uncle’s wife, Louise, was an angry woman. She liked to dress in black—stockings, skirt and blouse—and apply lashings of red lipstick.
‘You’re looking luscious tonight, Louise,’ my uncle would say admiringly. From the couch he’d add, ‘I’ll wait up for you.’
‘Don’t,’ she always said.
Louise and Frank Latta one New Year’s sang love duets and danced up one side of Genoa and down the other.
Around dawn a farmer five kilometres outside town saw Frank and Louise walking back home past the paddocks and the cows and sheep. Louise had mistaken Frank for somebody else. Dawn broke pale and emptily over the southern Wairarapa and suddenly she had realised that she was running off with a plasterer. It was Frank. Frank Latta. And Frank had also come to his senses. He had a cricket match on for that afternoon. The annual town-and-country fixture.
Louise had turned up Kansas carrying her black shoes and picking her way home across the front lawns as the sun hit the corrugated iron roofs.
She was gone inside a year. Louise could take Kansas no longer. She wanted to rejoin the world, she said. My uncle, under the impression Louise was staying with friends further up the line in Dannevirke, received a letter from Melbourne, Australia.
He continued to keep the photograph of Louise pruning the roses in the front garden on his bedside table. He felt Louise just needed to get something out of her system and she’d be back soon enough.
I kept coming over the hill for another two summers, although the New Year’s Eve street-party tradition ended after Louise’s departure. People saw the unhappy face of my uncle about town and you could see their thoughts shift back to the previous New Year’s Eve and the imaginative risk Frank, the plasterer, and Louise had brought to Genoa.
52
ON THE MIDNIGHT train to Rome I fell asleep with the taste of a fresh ham sandwich in my mouth. In the morning I strode lightly from a station platform. Outside the Termini the commuters dispersed. There was an appealing order, and the surfaces of the city were clean. In the bistros beneath glass counters the pastries and éclairs were displayed like jewellery. For the next few days, however, I was to come across pockets of Albania.
The Franciscan monastery was colder than I remembered, and Nick more sallow and creepy.
He rang the number Leila had written down and spoke with the manager of a restaurant in Carsoli. The manager said to ring back in twenty minutes—it was the lunch hour and Fatmir was behind with the dishes.
For the time being we sat in the Franciscan telephone room, a cold cell on the ground floor. The telephone was one of Nick’s responsibilities. He was expected to keep tabs on toll calls. A tatty old exercise book hung by a string from a nail.
I remembered his mother’s cake and reached into my bag. Nick grinned, nodded. He looked at it for all of five seconds and threw it on a shelf with a pile of ecclesiastical magazines.
He was more interested to find out who I had met in Shkodër. Professor Pepa and Gjyzepina drew no reaction. But his face coloured at the mention of Mimi and Illir.
He glanced away with embarrassment.
‘Illir is nothing,’ he said.
He wanted to know why I hadn’t contacted the priests—those ones who could really speak of suffering.
I mentioned Nexhmije and Nick’s eyes blazed with indignation. ‘You did not speak to the right people. These are terrible, terrible people.’
He couldn’t contain himself. He got up and walked about shaking his head.
The next time he tried the restaurant, he got through to Fatmir and a time and rendezvous were agreed to.
The brigadier hadn’t given me a telephone number for his son, Eloni, just an address. Caprarola was a good hour-and-a-half drive from Rome; getting there would take the best part of a morning on a bus. Nick said he couldn’t spare the time. It was impossible. He had to be back by midday to feed the friars. There were other problems besides. I think my knowledge of Nick’s background had altered everything. Nick seemed less heroic, and perhaps in his eyes I had become less trustworthy. Anyway, his excuses veered off into unintelligibility, and when we shook hands it was with the knowledge that we were parting company for the final time.
The solution was left as to where I was renting a room. The landlady’s son put me in touch with his former girlfriend, Emanuella, and one fine Sunday morning we followed via Cassia out of the city into the countryside.
Greenpeace stickers plastered Emanuella’s car, inside and out. Stickers demanding animal rights; stickers of endangered species, pandas, whales, elephants and a weird shovel-beaked bird which I had thought to be already extinct. An anti-vivisectionist organisation had
the dashboard.
I had warned her that this trip out to Caprarola was a long shot. The person we were driving to meet didn’t know we were coming.
‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t doing anything.’
It was a brilliantly fine day and shortly before Viterbo we turned off the motorway onto a country road. Emanuella slowed and we wound down the windows.
‘New Zealand,’ she suddenly said. ‘I would like to go there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is so far away.’
Emanuella’s was a sad story. Her mother had leapt from an apartment building when Emanuella was two. When she was old enough she had learned of her mother’s severe postnatal depression, and she had never quite cured herself of the idea that she had had some responsibility for her mother’s death.
At the age of twelve, Emanuella, her brother and her father had moved to a bigger house. The last room to be packed was her father’s study. He told her not to touch the desk, that he would clear out his drawers.
The telephone rang and her father was called out on an errand. While he was gone Emanuella went through his desk and found a warrant for her father’s arrest, a charge sheet, and other papers exonerating him for any part in her mother’s death.
She left everything the way she had found it, and rather than challenge her father, who was a strict and domineering figure, Emanuella had lived with her secret. She was twelve years old and completely dependent on the man she now believed had driven, if not pushed, her mother to her death.
She had spent her teenage years dreaming and thinking ahead to when she would leave school and escape the house. But she had gone on to university and her dependency had continued— even after she had graduated, since she couldn’t find a job. She had recently moved into her own apartment, paid for by her father.
‘How much to fly to New Zealand?’ she asked.
Caprarola sprang up on both sides of the road—a long, unbroken line of small, clannish buildings, and via Filipo Nikolai climbed to a huge cathedral at the top of the rise.
We parked by a sweets stall and found Eloni’s address, a build ing undergoing renovation. We ducked under scaffolding and climbed five flights of stairs cut from stone. Plasterer’s dust hung in the air.
On the top floor an old woman came to the door. I heard Emanuella ask after the Albanos and the woman showed us out to a balcony off the landing. The back side of via Filipo Nikolai fell away to a deep green valley; the drop was sheer and breathtaking.
Eloni’s door was partially open. We pushed through and two men looked up from watching soccer on television.
‘Eloni?’
A slim man dressed like a waiter in dark slacks and a white 256 shirt smiled pleasantly.
Emanuella explained whom we were after, and the man in a white singlet pointed to each of the five beds pressed together in the small room, and said, ‘Albano, Albano, Albano, Albano, Albano.’
‘Eloni Idrizllari?’
The man in the dark slacks smiled to indicate that we had arrived in the right place. He came to the door and we shook hands; then he picked up his jacket and closed the door after him.
On the stairs Emanuella explained that our waiter was not Eloni.
‘However,’ she said, ‘he knows where Eloni is and he’ll take us there now.’
Besnik called Eloni from a café to tell him he had a visitor from Savra.
It was a further ten minutes’ drive winding down through the valley we had seen from the balcony outside the Albanians’ room, to Lake Bella Venere, a weekend resort. We drew up to a small grey lake, and Eloni, with the same nimble build as the brigadier, walked out of his father’s shadow in blue jeans and a denim jacket with Bruce Springsteen blaring from the bar over his shoulder.
He had been expecting me, he said. Paitim had sent a telegram.
Eloni was one of half a dozen Albanians employed to look after the maintenance of the resort. It was the off-season and the Albanians were plainly enjoying having the place to themselves. We walked over to the bar and sat outside at a table without an umbrella. There was a lovely view of the lake. It was raked with shadows from trees that had lost their leaves.
In the absence of raki Eloni shouted for coffee and beer, and one of his compatriots leapt behind the bar.
Eloni was eager for news from Savra. He leaned over his beer and asked after the brigadier’s current state of mind.
‘Is he angry? What did he say about me?’
Eloni spoke ‘TV Italian’ and he had to concentrate to understand Emanuella’s quick explanation that his father was very pleased that he was in Italy. He slowly computed that and threw back his arms.
‘Ah! That is because I have work. That’s all he ever speaks of. Work. Work. Work.’
The brigadier had always been onto him to work harder. Eloni had been kicked out of school for smoking. He worked in the fields for a few months but had hated it, and had given it up to help the brigadier at home, until the police had threatened him with jail unless he worked.
In Italy he worked at two jobs, here at the resort and during the week helping to restore the building the Albanians were living in.
At the time of the news coming out of Durrës he was planning to walk to Greece. Instead, within half an hour of hearing about the rush on the boats, he joined the mobs walking into Lushnje to catch the train. They had jumped together, 90 percent of the passengers, he said, hanging from the bars and leaping for the tracks where the train slowed down to make the hairpin run inland, towards Tirana. They had run in a group, keeping their heads low. Police fired off shots overhead. A better reception awaited him at the wharves. Soldiers were protecting certain ships and pointing to others, waving them on and wishing them well. ‘Have a good trip,’ they said.
The Panama was the only ship left and six thousand had scrambled aboard the cement freighter. They sat in the hold; through the night they huddled there and didn’t set sail until dawn. As they entered open water there had been no cheering. Everyone was afraid of having been tricked. The sigourimi were rumoured aboard, and as the homeland dropped below the horizon, rumours had started up that Italy was no longer the destination. The ship was headed to India or Africa. The hours had ticked by without sight of the coastline.
At five o’clock Eloni said he saw a seagull. Then it grew dark and Italy rose out of the sea in a long line of lights. At midnight the cement freighter had dropped anchor at Brindisi. The Italians had given them the choice of staying on board or coming ashore.
‘I was afraid we would be sent back,’ Eloni said. ‘So I came ashore, and for three nights we slept by fires on the wharf.’
He had just turned twenty and I couldn’t help but think he was lucky that things had happened for him when they did; lucky that he had come of age when things were starting to fall apart. He’d acted on impulse without ever having dreamed of it first, and I admired him for having taken his opportunity so well.
He dropped his mouth over the top of the beer bottle, and I watched his face redden as Emanuella asked if he had run across the Ago brothers.
He came up for air with troubled eyes. ‘Who are the Ago brothers?’
‘You don’t know the Agos?’
He shook his head. So I explained about their coming from Savra. ‘They were also aboard the Panama.’
He shook his head again and looked around for his compatriots, but they had all floated off with buckets and mops.
I described to him Leila’s building, but he pretended not to recognise the place.
I wrote out the names of the Ago brothers on a piece of paper. Eloni took it and stared at it, shaking his head.
‘But they are from Savra, yes. Here in Rome?’
He asked me to write down the telephone number of the Ago brothers and I did so, feeling sure that he would crumple the piece of paper as soon as we left.
53
THE AGO BROTHERS were waiting on the platform at Carsoli, a small alpine town framed by snow-capped pea
ks and dark green pines forty minutes’ train ride from the Termini. With them was a large Italian, Giuseppe, and friends of his, two women in rather ugly fur coats who had driven up from Rome to practise their English.
The brothers had sorted it out amongst themselves in advance that Eduart would do the talking. We moved to the station café, where it was established that no one wanted a drink, then on to the waiting room, where we pulled two long benches together and sat down to talk.
It was a warm day, but their faces had the unhealthy, blemished colouring that often comes with prolonged exposure to raw cold. The eyes of the Ago brothers spoke of disappointment.
There had been nowhere to sit on the Panama, Eduart said. Apart from a cup of milk, they hadn’t eaten since four o’clock the previous afternoon. Because they lacked the confidence to take a train they had walked from Savra across farmland and through the olive groves on the hills to avoid police checkpoints, all the way to Durrës, where they arrived at two in the morning and quietly boarded the cement freighter and lowered themselves into the hold. They were too excited to worry about food. They couldn’t believe it was happening: all around them, tears of happiness and talk of what awaited them on the other side of the sea—the material goodies, the things they had seen on TV, the cars, a house, a job. They had talked amongst themselves about their favourite TV programs. Their first view of Italy had seemed nothing less than miraculous.
But what had changed since then? There had been a string of refugee camps. And where previously they had watched Italian TV in Albania, now they watched it in Italy. America had replaced Italy as their El Dorado. In America, where their grandfather had gone, surely everything would come right.
They remembered Eloni on the wharves. Markelian especially. Leila’s youngest son was angry that the Communists had received equal treatment from the Italians. He had expected the Communists to be thrown into jail. He was angry and disappointed to find that here in Italy biografi counted for nothing.