On the Road to Babadag (12 page)

Around Patos the land began to flatten. The mountains were now at our back. To the Adriatic it was a dozen kilometers, and the horizon to the left took on a gray-blue color. It was hot and stuffy in the bus. People tossed cans of cola and beer out the windows.

On the outskirts of Fier, on either side of the road were abandoned cars, mostly Mercedes and Audis, in various stages of decay. The cars were ten, fifteen, twenty years old, and there were hundreds of them, in smaller or larger groups. Near Durrës, the hundreds became thousands in the beating heat, on the bare ground, among clumps of burned grass. Some were nude, stripped, their metal pulled off, revealing the whole pornography of axle, undercarriage, transmission, brake drum, rusted remains; others still had parts of their chassis, baked dull, and stood staunchly on bald, wrinkled tires. Through this endless field of bodies wandered blackened men with blowtorches, there to cut off sheets of metal still in good health. White streams of sparks brighter than the sun. A butchering of the unalive. Other men waited to receive the needed parts. The rest of the cars, lying about, had taken root in the ground: the broken bones of connecting rods, crooked pistons, blind headlights, crushed radiators, fenders eaten through, gas cans full of holes, gutted oil filters, gearboxes with their insides strewn. Gangrene in hoses, cancer in floorboards, syphilis in gaskets, and the cataracts of shattered windows. The suburb of Durrës was a great field hospital for automotive Germany, a hospital in which only amputation was performed.

Durrës is a port, so these thousands of bodies must have come here by ship. I remember photographs of the famous Albanian exodus of 1992: people hanging over the sides like desperate bunches of grapes, from the quarterdeck, from the rigging, and fishing boats, ferries, and barges all covered with living human tape, as if the whole nation wished to flee from itself, to go as far as possible, beyond the sea, to the other side of the Adriatic, Italy, the wide world, which seemed salvation, being an unimaginable, fairy-tale opposite of their cursed land. Now from that wide world came flotillas laden with scrap, junk, internal combustion corpses.

When the highway turned toward Tirana, the bunkers began. Gray concrete skulls, jutting a meter above the ground, gazed with eyes that were black vertical slits. They looked like corpses buried standing. Each with room to accommodate a machine-gun crew. Scattered across low, flat hills, they overlooked the lifeless automobile junkyards. Junkyard and bunker both indestructible. Astrit said that in the whole country, most likely, there was not one mill in operation in order to melt down all this German metal. Nor enough dynamite to level these 600,000 bunkers built to hold off an invasion by the entire world.

An hour and a half by boat from Corfu. Half an hour by hydrofoil. The building at the Greek port is long and squat. Italian, English, and German tourists sit on piled luggage or drag day packs on wheels. The crowd pushes at the edge, divides into separate streams, forms lines at the gangplanks leading to the ferries, some of which look like seven-story department stores. Tour buses bring all of Europe. Heaps of carry-ons with keypad locks await baggage handlers. Five guys in black leather tend their burdened Hondas and Kawasakis. At the quay stands the three-mast
Von Humboldt,
the color of dark vegetation. Also a mahogany yacht with a British flag. On board, young men in white trousers hurrying. Glittering snakes of automobiles slowly slide into the deep holds. In the sky, you can see the white bodies of Boeings and DCs descending to land. Couples take their last snapshots in the Greek light.

We didn't have to ask where the ship to Saranda was. The crowd of people waiting there was still, pressed at the gangplank. They had boxes, cartons, circles of green garden hoses, those plastic bags in red-and-blue checks familiar in Europe and throughout the world, packages wrapped in foil, ordinary duffels, plastic bags with store names long since rubbed off, and they all seemed weary, but their weariness was not yesterday's or last month's. It was significantly older.

A Greek border guard in a white shirt and dark glasses took passports from a wooden box and called out names: Illyet ... Freng ... Myslim ... Hajji ... Bedri ... The people grabbed their things and ran onto the feeble ship. The border guard handed the passports to a stocky civilian. It was as if a shadow had fallen on them, as if they stood under an unseen cloud, while the rest of the port—the vacationing crowd, the tanned arms of the women, the gold rings, sandals, and backpacks—was bathed in a light straight out of Kodak.

A small Amstel onboard cost two euros. We sailed along the strait, the land remaining in sight. The mountain shore on our right was treeless. The burned ridge looked as if the sun had always stood at the zenith above it: eternal south, rock as old as the world, flaking from the heat.

Then I saw Saranda. It began suddenly, without warning. On the bare slopes, the skeletons of houses appeared. From a distance you'd think there had been a fire, but these buildings were unfinished. Darker than the mountains but as mineral, as if baked in a great oven and stripped by fire of everything that might suggest a home. Deep in the bay, the city thickened a little, gleamed with glass, turned green, but we sailed on, to reach the shore. A rusted crane stood in a cement square. Over a gray barrack fluttered the two-headed Albanian eagle and the blue flag of the EU. Inside were a desk and two chairs. A woman in a uniform told us to pay twenty-five euros, took thirty, gave us a receipt, and said with a smile that she had no change. On the hill above the port stood apartment blocks of rust-red concrete. But for the clothes drying on lines and the satellite dishes, they looked abandoned.

Yes, everyone should come here. At least those who make use of the name
Europe.
It should be an initiation ceremony, because Albania is the unconscious of the continent. Yes, the European id, the fear that at night haunts slumbering Paris, London, and Frankfurt am Main. Albania is the dark well into which those who believe that everything has been settled once and for all should peer.

"Welcome in bloody country," Fatos said, in English, when we met at the Café Opera in Skanderbeg Square in Tirana. I was drinking beer and wondering if something as cosmopolitan as a blessing honored national boundaries. If the Greek border guards sent it back at the road to Kakavilë, if the Italians did not permit it to be taken on board the ferries to Bari and Brindisi. In the square, in the shade beneath trees, dozens of men were exchanging money: 136 leks for a dollar. In the crowd of these black marketers I saw several radio cars. The cops as well as the money changers and the rest of Albania smoked thin Karelias that summer, at a hundred leks a pack. In the square, an air of indifferent symbiosis. Everyone was connected by a time that had to be waited through. Seconds and minutes grew, swelled, and burst open, but there was nothing inside.

I asked Fatos if the exchange was legal. "Of course not," he said.

"And the police?"

"They're just here to keep the peace," was his reply.

It was still dark at five thirty in Korçë. Men sat in the bar near the bus station, drinking their morning coffee and their raki in small tumblers. They boil the coffee with a handheld coil right in the cup. The raki is drunk at dawn, because it dispels sleep even better than coffee. But you have only one: raki isn't a drink, it's a custom. Then an old Mercedes bus pulled up. It slowly filled with people. The driver handed out plastic bags. The first horse-drawn carts of produce began gathering for the market. When the sky had turned an unquestionable gray, we set off, south. Two cops, standing at the front, wore antique Soviet TT-33 pistols with worn stars on the butts. It was only ten kilometers to the Greek border, but the names of the places we passed sounded Slavic: Kamenice, Vidice, Selenice, Borove ... When we got on the first switchback road, I understood the reason for the plastic bags. A fat woman wearing a lot of gold and holding a battery-run fan began to groan, and her family got up to help. They took the pocket fan from her hand, and she began vomiting into the bag. Another woman did the same, and another. Then it was the children's turn. This sickness, Astrit told us later, afflicted only women and children. The men traveled without the side effect, but they took part in the general excitement of the misfortune—the whole bus did, offering words of comfort, making comments, and throwing the used bags, passed from hand to hand, out the window. The driver immediately distributed new ones.

At Ersekë the mountains grew more powerful. We climbed to 1,700 meters: second gear, first, and the constant corkscrew at cliff's edge without a barrier. I saw no houses, paths, or animals. Yellow burned grass covering the domed peaks, white scree, and for an hour and a half not a sign of human habitation. I counted the bunkers. I stopped counting at the fifty-seventh. They were everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Skulls of cement stuck on slopes in places no vehicle had a chance of reaching. Maybe the cement and steel had been transported by mule and donkey, or maybe it had all been carried in on shoulders, I don't know. Gray concrete toads, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos and threes, guarded the imagined passes and gorges; they intersected lines of anticipated attack, awaited the offensive, the invasion, and their black, empty stares took in the whole horizon. They gave the impression of something that would endure to the end of time. Older than the mountains, indifferent to geology and erosion. I kept reminding myself of their number: 600,000. In each, let's say, you had two soldiers manning a machine gun or holding submachine guns—that is, 1,200,000 people, which meant about half the population of the country. During the artillery tests, goats were locked in them. The holes for shooting resembled oversize sunglasses. In this empty landscape, where a car might appear once in an hour, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being watched.

A stop in Leskovik, near a small bar, where coffee, raki, and hard-boiled eggs were served. A man approached our table but didn't sit. He only needed the tabletop. He rolled the egg on it to crack the shell under his palm. It took him a long time, because he would lose track, watching us—maybe seeing and listening to foreigners for the first time in his life. The shell had cracked, the white was visible, but he kept watching, without a word.

There were bunkers too in Leskovik, but much larger. They resembled concrete yurts with double doors of steel. Among them, donkeys grazed. The animals were the same color as the shelters, and the stony field was the same color, too, and so were the mountain slopes framing the scene. After the town, we entered the shade of the Nemerçke range. I had never seen such mountains. They seemed molded out of ash. The timberline stopped as if cut, and then there was only a barren, vertical massif, which from this distance appeared to be floating, detached, impermanent. There was nothing there but nakedness. The truncated summit of Papingut looked like a pile of dust, a dump that reached the sky. This dust, this dirt, must have sifted from somewhere above, from space, from the farthest corners of the universe.

Albania, see, is ancient. Its beauty brings to mind species and epochs that are long extinct and have left behind no likenesses. The landscape endures yet is constantly disintegrating, as if the sky and air were tearing at it with their fingers. Hence the cracks, ravines, fissures, and the persistent weight of matter that wishes to be left alone, to be rid of its shapes, to rest, and to return to the time when there were no forms.

Gjirokastër is a town of white stone. The roofs of the houses are covered with black tiles that once were white too. The windows of the pension Hajji Kotoni directly face the minaret. Several times a day from the high tower, the loudspeakers come on, and the metal voice of the muezzin fills the streets, the alleyways, and the whole valley of the Drinos River. Next to the mosque is the Greek consulate. A crowd has been standing there since morning: dozens of women and men waiting for a visa. On television is a kilometer-long line of Albanian cars at the border in Kakavilë. For a few days now the Greeks have been letting no one in. They say that the computer system is down. The Albanians say it's intentional: Let the Albanians learn their place, let them stand and ask for Greek work and the Greek euro, let them know it's the Greeks who grant it. But, the Albanians say, without us their vineyards will grow wild, their olive groves too, as ours have, because we must leave them and go to Greece, because that's where the work is and the money. Greeks don't know how to work, say the Albanians. They despise us, but without us they couldn't drink wine, because they have grown fat and lazy.

I sip a black Albanian Fernet and look down on the hometown of Enver Hoxha. In the early afternoon the streets empty, and the crowd before the consulate disappears. The sun, directly overhead, sweeps the shadows from the narrowest alleys. It becomes so still, it's as if everyone has left, abandoning the town to its fate, to the predation of time and the heat. From the mountains, wolves will come down and breed with the dogs; the vineyards will pry apart the stone walls; the hundred-year-old Mercedes will pine for their chauffeurs and die; the Turkish fortress on the hill will fall into itself; the wind will fill the rooms of the Sopoti Hotel with sand; rust will eat into the Muslim loudspeakers; the raki will burn through the screw tops of the bottles in the Festivali Bar; the discarded packs of hundred-lek notes with Fanem Noli on them will all turn into oxygen; and finally the gray carapace of the mountains will cover everything.

So I drank black Fernet and tried to imagine a country that one day everyone would leave. They would abandon their land to the mercy of time, which would break open the envelope of the hours and months and in pure form enter what remained of cities, to dissolve them, turn them into primal air and minerals. For time, here, was the most important element. As persistent and heavy as a giant ox, it filled the river valleys, crushing the mountain peaks from Shkoder to Saranda, from Korçë to Durrës. It was in time's gut that these men lived who appeared on street corners and squares. Possibly they saw its coming death and knew fear, because the final throes of the beast in whose belly they waded would mean, for them, isolation: if the beast died, they could never meet again. They would be carried away by the separate little streams of minutes and days, streams that were only a pathetic human imitation of the original current, whose power brought to mind the power of no motion. They would have to live off the carrion of eternity, whose taste is precisely that of freedom.