On the Road to Babadag (13 page)

On the beach in Saranda, people moved the trash to make a place for themselves. They pushed aside the plastic bottles, cartons, cans, those emptied wonders of civilization, the shopping bags of Boss, Marlboro, and Tesco, to clear patches of sand on which entire families could spread out. The wind carried the transparent tatters landward and draped them on the trees. It blew from the west. Never in my life had I seen such a mess and the calm with which people lived in it and added to it constantly. The patches of cleared sand were the size only of a mattress or a little larger, allowing a group to sit. There was something elegant and contemptuous in their gestures as they discarded used things, a kind of lordliness of consumption and a theater of indifference toward whatever didn't give instant gratification. The wind blew from the west both literally and figuratively, yet it brought nothing of value. Perhaps those things of value, which no doubt were there in the west, simply couldn't be transported and lost their worth en route, spoiling, decomposing. But perhaps they would have been of no use to the people here in any case.

The first day, as we walked from the port, Genci latched on to us. He was about thirty, wore sandals (no socks) and filthy black shorts. On his back he carried a kid several years old. In fluent English he asked us where we were from and if we needed a room. We certainly needed one, after a night of no sleep. He led us among apartment blocks that were a few stories high and coming apart: stench, gutters choked with rubble and rotten trash, piles of stones, indestructible plastic, a kind of Balkan morning after. Tanned children looked at us with curiosity. We hadn't the strength to get rid of this well-wishing character. Genci gave a shout, and an old woman appeared, all in black. We followed her. She unlocked a gate that enclosed a patio on the ground floor of one of the blocks, then unlocked the front door. It was cool inside and absurdly clean. The two-room apartment gleamed. The terra-cotta floor gleamed, the refrigerator, the bathroom, the television set, the large fan. There was even a shine and smell of cleanliness on the bedding. As if no one had ever lived here, just cleaned and cleaned. "She's a widow," Genci told us, "so you have to pay her twenty-five dollars a night."

We met Genci a few more times after that. He talked nonstop and was always promising us something. He said he knew the writer Ismail Kadare, that Kadare was now in Albania and Genci could arrange a meeting. He offered us an air-conditioned apartment in downtown Tirana for ten dollars. He told us about his conversion to Protestantism; about his wife, who worked for the Soros Foundation; with pride about his father, who during the Hoxha regime was a security guard. One day, when we were discussing Europe in general, he asked if there had been communism in Poland.

From the pier promenade in Saranda you can see the misty shore of Corfu. You can sit at a coffeehouse table in the shifting shade of a palm tree and watch the passenger ferries move through the smooth water of the strait and vanish in the open sea. It's very possible that the international tourists look at the Albanian shore as they might look at the shore of, say, Liberia or Guinea. They may even hold binoculars. The seven-story floating hotels sparkle in the sun and are gone. A touch of safari in this, and mirage.

I drank Greek retsina and tried to imagine this place twenty years ago. Tried to imagine the country cut off from the rest of the world like an island in some godforsaken part of the ocean. A country that had about 160 enemies ( let's say that at the time there were that many nations on the political map). Danger lurked to the east and to the west. Capitalism lurked, communism lurked in its degenerate Soviet and Chinese forms, African monarchies lurked, and the technocratic regimes of Southeast Asia, and Greenland lurked and the island Republic of Cape Verde, and there lurked the cosmos debauched by the Americans and the Soviets. Enver Hoxha, leaving Tirana, locks the television station and takes the key with him, so no one in his absence will let in a Greek, Italian, or Yugoslav program. In Saranda today, it's late afternoon, except that there are not all these hastily assembled concrete bars and hotels. People sit on the seashore and look at passing ships that belong to the enemy. The huge semitransparent homes sail on to their destruction, because they belong to a world over which hangs a heavy curse. Dusk falls. That world has no meaning, no form, it is a kind of antiworld, or antireality ruined by a fundamental lie.

Three hundred twenty kilometers at the longest place, 140 at the widest. Which comes to about 28,000 square kilometers of absolute truth and complete isolation. In 1948, Yugoslavia was the renegade; in 1961, it was the Soviets; in 1978, China. Betrayal hems in Albania on every side. Village teachers set slogans in stone on the hilltops. "Vigilance, Vigilance, Vigilance." "The Most Dangerous Enemy Is the One You Forget." "Think, Work, and Live like a Revolutionary." Carelessness or error may bring the accusation of treason. Three hundred twenty are sentenced for carelessness, 140 for error, and there is no chance of escape, because the rest of the world does not exist.

The slogans in stone are best seen from above, from the sky. They were a challenge to the cosmos. Apparently the goal was maximum: to convert not China, not the Soviets, but the entire universe.

One day we set out from Korçë to Voskopojë. We wanted to see what was once the largest city in the European part of the Ottoman Empire, 30,000 homes built so close together "that a goat could walk from one end to the other on the rooftops," and 22 houses of worship. We wanted to see the place where the caravan trails intersected from Poland, Hungary, Saxony, ConstanŢa, Venice, Constantinople, and where 280 years ago the first printing press was established in the Balkans.

To get there, we hired a small delivery van. It was driven by Jani, and his buddy kept trying to start a conversation. He knew a few Slavic words. His "lady comrade" was Slovak. They met in an olive plantation in Greece. We went up and up a road full of potholes. For thirty kilometers there was no crossroad, only a donkey path now and then coming down the mountain. The men gave us cigarettes and showed us their signet rings in the form of a lion's head.

Voskopojë was all ground-floor. It didn't seem constructed at all, just slapped together with stones. Some of the houses sank under their own weight, and it wasn't the result of neglect or age but of the material used—simply, nothing larger or higher could be assembled with that sifting stuff. This was more geology than architecture. As if one day the earth parted and gave to the world its rendition of human building. And now the falling walls, dribbling facades, cracked clay trickling from joints, split roofs, and the wood of the gates and fences splintered by the heat, with the help of erosion and gravity, were doing their best to return to the bosom of the earth.

Jani and his buddy waited for us in the bar, which was a single small stone room with a Greek woman, over fifty, at the counter. She listed for us all the churches that once stood here. She served us cheese, paprika, bread, and raki. She didn't want money; she wanted to talk, to tell. It didn't bother her that we all had to guess at what we were saying to one another. Others came, to look at us and shake our hands. Jani and his colleague drank one Albanian brandy after another and chased them down with Tirana beer. We wanted to stay longer but were afraid for our guides, who measured time in shots of liquor. People came out of the bar to stand and watch us leave. The men talked and talked. We were in a cornfield; people tore off golden ears and stuffed them in our pockets. Now it was downhill all the way, and we coasted in neutral to save gas. Jani put on monotonous, trancelike music, some kind of Turkish techno, and he and his buddy started dancing in their seats. They pitched and twisted as if they were riding camels. Jani let go of the steering wheel and raised his arms in fluid circles. Sometimes they turned to make sure we were having fun too. Then, to the dull desert rhythm, they began to yell, "Ben Laden! Ben Laden!," and with such swaying, with open windows letting in the hot air and dust, we reached Korçë. But that wasn't the end of it, because we absolutely had to visit a shop belonging to a friend of Jani, and of course we had to drink beer. We sat on benches among herbs, tomato plants, and the buzzing of flies, and Jani explained to us that the owner was a police officer but had decided to start his own business. The black-haired man smiled shyly, gave us cigarettes and hard red apples. The fiancé of the Slovak woman slept, his head between two white round cheeses.

Of the old fortress in Krujë, all that remained was a stone tower, a few walls, and an outline of foundations. The rest was reconstructed in 1982 by Pranvera Hoxha, daughter of Enver. She was an architect and had power, and this was how she imagined medieval Albania. It was here that in 1443 Skanderbeg hung the flag with the black two-headed eagle and declared the country's independence. He challenged Turkey, before which all Christian Europe trembled in those days. Callistus III spoke of him as "Christ's athlete," though George Kastrioti in his youth had converted to Islam, hence the name Skander. He lost, of course, and Albania had to wait until 1913 for its independence. All this, the whole tale of many centuries, with the flags, likenesses of heroes, statesmen, documents, and a copy of Skanderbeg's helmet, could be found in the building of Enver's daughter. At the entrance, guarded by a soldier with a Kalashnikov, stood a line.

We walked back, down a long, narrow street of ancient homes. There were about a dozen, and in each the old times were sold, thousands of objects, tens of thousands. In chaos and dimness, put in piles, set in stacks, hung in bundles, the entire past of Albania was gathered here. Carved chests, heavy dark tables, narghiles, curved knives, necklaces of silver coins, hand-sewn dresses permeated with age and decay, dioramas of Istanbul and Mecca, pieces of harness, mountaineer shoes desiccated and flaking, oriental filigree, sabers, wood furniture, bone utensils, objects made of horn, divans, blackened iron pots—a kind of dusty supermarket of a culture, all worn smooth by the touch of generations, not the least bit fake, only recently pulled from the dark and given a wipe for sale. We stopped at each treasure den in turn, but the variety of stuff and its barbaric splendor pushed us away. At one point, the power went out. The sellers led us deep into a black maze and with flashlights showed us items. A golden circle jumped from object to object, from one fragment of the past to the next. Out of the gray murk, a gleam, the shred of an outfit, an ornament, the metallic blink of jewelry, and it was like trying to learn about a world you couldn't completely believe in. Part museum, part flea market, part archive-storehouse. The helpless beam of light, wandering lost, turned it into a metaphor for Albania. In one of the shops, on an archaic ottoman, lay the owner. His boots upright beside him as he slept.

In practically every antique store there was a corner where the latest history was piled in a heap. Paper, mainly, likenesses of Enver; tomes and albums in which the leader posed against the background of his accomplishments: Enver before the multitude, Enver before a new housing development, Enver before a tilled field or a factory. Besides paper there were medals and ribbons with the obligatory red star. Only these things were left, and were for sale. I don't know if anyone was buying them. For an album about the life of Hoxha, one merchant wanted thirty dollars. He gave the price and wasn't interested in bargaining. He repeated his "thirty" and finally, impatient, turned his back. "Albanians don't bargain," Astrit told me later. "Particularly with a foreigner. They think all foreigners have more money than they do, and if you try to pay less, it's an injustice."

There were bunkers here too. Everywhere, in every shop—dozens, hundreds of miniature bunkers in white stone. They could serve as ashtrays, paperweights, knickknacks. A souvenir of Albania when you left.

Albania is loneliness. I recall a late afternoon in Korçë. The market, a relic of Ottoman days, was empty now. All the antique Mercedes had left, as well as the horse-drawn two-wheel carts. A woman had swept the square of its litter. That day the sky was gray, and when the crowd dispersed and the colorful riot of commodities disappeared, the gray flowed down and filled the empty place. The abandoned market was inert, as if no one had ever come by. Then, in the farthest corner of the square, I saw three men. They were squatting around a tiny grated fire and roasting ears of corn. You could hardly see them against the gray wall. The gathering dusk erased their profile. You could see only the flame, a red, uncertain flicker in the wind.

One day Astrit and I were talking about emigration routes in Europe, the never-ending westward flow from east and south, the guest-working nomads from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, the indigent coming to make conquest of the land of the Germans, French, Anglo-Saxons, and all the rest, to find employment in Cape Saint Vincent, Cape Passero, and the fish-processing plants of Iceland. I told Astrit about Poles and Ukrainians at German construction sites and farms; I sang the old ballad of how hard it is for the worse off to live in a better-lit place. All to balance somehow his Albanian tale. When I finished, he said, "It's not the same. You don't know what it means to be an Albanian in Europe." We changed the subject.

"These remain from '97," Rigels said. It was in Gjirokastër, and I had asked him about the ruined ground floors of some of the buildings. No doors, no display windows, only huge holes at the base filled with rubbish, bits of furniture, stones. In the spring of 1997, the financial pyramid collapsed. The government of Salieri Berisha maintained to the end that everything was under control, and in a way it supported the activity of these fictional institutions. Tempted by the geometric rise of wealth, people sold everything they had—homes, apartments—took loans, and put the money in accounts so it would shoot up like the mercury in a thermometer when you run a fever. Tens of thousands of Albanians lost everything. "So what happened then?" I asked Rigels. "The shops, the little bars, belonged to the government?" He smiled. "No, they belonged to those who had something. The ones who robbed, who destroyed, they had nothing. It was revenge taken for the possession of anything."