On the Shores of the Mediterranean (15 page)

‘Well, where are all the men?’ she asked. There were few men to be seen, and most of those were driving tractors, hauling produce or workers behind them in trailers.

‘The men are in industry.’

It was the same further south, where the workers in the rice and cotton fields in what had been, before the war, the malaria-ridden, poverty-stricken coastal plain, were almost all women.

‘But what do you want all these extra people for? In a few years you’ll have so much machinery you won’t know what to do with them.’

‘We shall need them to fight the forces of Capitalist Imperialism and Revisionism,’ he replied.

I would have liked to have asked him what about the forces of Communist Imperialism, which also seemed currently to be having a good run for its money, but didn’t have the energy.

Great changes had taken place on the road to Shkodër since my last visit in 1968. Then the road had been a rough metalled track full of pot-holes and the bridges over the then dry torrent beds were the trunks of trees laid one beside the other. Now it was asphalted and the tree trunks had been replaced by concrete bridges. On the forty-mile journey to Shkodër we only saw one car, a brand new yellow Polski, a Polish-made Fiat, which had been in collision with a lorry loaded with workers and was no longer looking so good – neither was the driver of this government-owned vehicle, who, although unscathed, was probably for the high jump. There are no privately owned cars in Albania and we saw only about two or three dozen cars during our entire stay in the country. Petrol was only one lek a litre (there were fourteen point something leks to the pound at that time or about twenty to the dollar) but there was nothing for the man-in-the-street to put it in, even if he could buy it.

We saw in the back of an open lorry a bride dressed in white on her way to be married; bullock-carts, perhaps the only vehicles apart from tractors that would be capable of negotiating, as they are in India, the deeply rutted earth tracks that led off the main
road to distant hamlets when the winter rains would turn them into what would be a morass; and we saw Russian and Chinese jeeps, some of the Russian ones in a state of near-collapse, which was not surprising as the last shipments probably took place around 1960, although there was still a factory making spare parts. Otherwise the most common vehicle was what looked like a covered motor delivery van of the 1920s, except that it was motor-less and was horse-drawn.

Also on the road, often all over it, there were cattle, flocks of sheep, goats, foals, independent-minded pigs and, keeping to the verges, the morning shift of black-smocked school-children on their way home – there are two shifts a day, from six o’clock to midday, and from one o’clock to seven – all uttering loud ‘Oorays!’ and waving. The grown-ups were not so wavy. In the course of these forty miles I saw one dog and no cats. Altogether I saw six dogs and no cats in ten days, although other members of the group claimed to have seen one or two rather mangy cats. Was this dearth a legacy of the Chinese, to whom both cats and dogs are still delicacies? Through these crowds of animals and humans the driver wove his way at high speed with the indifference to lesser breeds which is generally a sign of membership of the Party anywhere, horn blaring, bucketing the passengers in the back seats over the axle who were trying to take surreptitious photographs through the side windows at 1/1000 second and ending up with reflections of the inside of an Albturist coach. The rear window was deliberately left covered with dust throughout the tour to make photography from it impossible. We passed collective farms with long, single-storey barns and the small town of Kopliku, which looked as dejected as it had done on my last visit, except that then it had been market day and the place had been full of people from the mountains dressed in picturesque costumes. To the right, the trees near the lake shivered like jellies in the mirage. The heat was immense.

We arrived in Shkodër at the southern end of the lake.

The earthquake of 1979 had also done terrible damage in Albania, rendering a hundred thousand Albanians homeless. In Shkodër, it had killed about eighty people and injured another three hundred. Now, rebuilt, Shkodër was a city rather than a town. Apartment blocks, many of them built of rough, unrendered brick which made it difficult to know whether they had been completed or were still waiting to be rendered, now dwarfed the old red-tiled houses and shops that survived. Broad boulevards had been built, one of which led to a Palace of Culture, and a lot of buildings that hadn’t fallen down had been torn down to make a triumphal square, as they had in other places in Albania, and what had been clocks with Chinese numerals on their faces had been taken down but not always replaced by European ones, as a clockless clock tower testified.

Like all other places in Albania at this time Shkodër appeared to be
en fête
. Hoardings in the principal squares announced the opening of the Eightieth Party Congress, which coincided with the Fortieth Anniversary of the foundation of the Albanian Communist Party, and the streets were spanned by innumerable red banners bearing such slogans as RROFTE PARTIA YNE POPYLLON – Long Live the Party and the People. Big colour blow-ups of photographs of the bosses, which must have been taken anything up to thirty years back, testified to their capacity for survival.

We were put up in a newish, tall hotel, overlooking the principal square, which was more or less typical of all the hotels we were to stay in in Albania. Some had lifts that worked, or didn’t work, or had none at all, which could mean humping one’s luggage up five floors or so, unless some kindly member of the staff, and many were kind, offered to help you or you could get a transfer to a lower level. All were insanely honest, rushing out
from the foyer on departure mornings brandishing disposable razors, moulting old toothbrushes and items of a more intimate nature that their owners had left in the waste bins, hoping never to see again.

Most hotels had long, long corridors carpeted with hand-woven runners. These runners were never quite straight and walking on them gave one the impression that one was slightly tight. As everywhere in the Balkans, there was a profusion of potted plants. In one hotel they proliferated to such an extent that they hung down the well of the staircase twenty feet or more from an upper floor, making contact with the staff behind the reception desk difficult. The rooms were very clean. Everything worked, except in one hotel where nothing worked above the ground floor and some madman had pinched all the lavatory seats in the communal bathrooms, and all the door locks. As in Russia there was not a wash plug to be seen anywhere.

In the hotel shops the same goods were on sale, presided over by what looked like the same po-faced girls I remembered from thirteen years before – hand-woven mats in rather crude colours, embroidered blouses, cigarette and pipe tobacco, both made in Shkodër, the lethal Albanian cognac, felt slippers and round mud-coloured felt skull caps.

At Shkodër we ate, as we would from now on, in the Tourist Restaurant, cheek by jowl with French, Italian, German and Austrian groups attended by waitresses in old-fashioned waitress uniforms and little lace caps, and a head waiter wearing a black tie. Albanians were excluded. They had their own, more animated eating places. More important foreign guests – including some North Vietnamese who were making the rounds – dined in private suites.

These first two meals at Shkodër, lunch and dinner, were more or less prototypes of all the meals we were to eat, good and bad,
everywhere. Lunch was the good prototype; rice soup, calves’ tongues, stuffed aubergines, a tomato salad made with olive oil of a quality difficult to come by even in Mediterranean lands, cream caramel and a bottle of a local red wine called Kallmet, which only cost six leks and, in a shop round the corner, even less, only four leks.

After this meal, ignoring the interpreter’s order, given in the form of a mandatory suggestion, that we should rest for an hour or so in our rooms, the two of us rushed out of the hotel before he could stop us to see what we could of the town, unaccompanied.

At the entrance there was a band of rather dirty, furtive-looking little boys, one or two of them with untreated impetigo, nothing like the well-scrubbed school-children, all of them members of the Young Pioneers, membership of which was obligatory from the age of seven, who were later displayed to us, or even those more rural but equally wholesome ones who had hailed us with loud ‘Oorays’ from the roadside. One had the impression that these children were minor delinquents, playing truant from school and the Young Pioneers. They asked us for chewing gum and ball-point pens, but we had none to offer. They were afraid of no one. Cuffed or even frog-marched by Albturist coach drivers or the chauffeurs of the heavily-curtained Mercedes and Volvos of visiting VIPs, they always came back. Most hotels in Albania had a similar band waiting outside them.

Out in the square, where five roads and boulevards met, an unbelievable quiet reigned. Apart from one or two jeeps whining past, an occasional Czechoslovakian bus with a trailer loaded to the gunwales and some people sedately pedalling old Chinese bicycles, there was scarcely any traffic in what was now the centre of the city. In the midst of this expanse a policeman who looked worn out by the responsibilities of office – he should have taken
a trip to the Place de la Concorde to realize how lucky he was to be here – was blowing his whistle at careless pedestrians. He blew it at us, too, when we tried to cross a segment of it, and it was a good thing he did, otherwise we would have been mown down by a cyclist, which would have been pretty silly on our first afternoon in Albania.

Then we went ‘round the corner’, which for us – there was of course no hope of evading the dreaded Sigurimi, the secret police, who had eyes and ears everywhere – came to mean putting as much distance as possible, even for a few minutes, between ourselves and interpreters, trusted, upper echelon members of the Party masquerading as coach drivers, the Tour Leader and any members of the group who might be expected to shop us. In this case ‘round the corner’ took us to a street of pre-1914 shops, dark and cavernous, in many of which the floors had been freshly watered, as had the streets outside.

One of these shops was a bookshop and, as in almost all Albanian bookshops, the customer was separated from the merchandise by a wooden barrier, which meant that every time I wanted to look at a book I had to ask the assistant, who was the sort who purses her lips when asked anything. Fed up, I leapt the barrier and got a severe ticking-off. There were lots of children’s books, some of them showing the little darlings brandishing rifles with bayonets just like Mummy on the hoardings in the country.

Apart from the assistant in the bookshop, we were well received by shopkeepers and shoppers alike, especially by those who spoke Italian. But only inside the shop, and then only if they thought the other shoppers could be trusted. Some even allowed us to take their photographs. Outside in the street it was as if we had ceased to exist. Basic commodities, including food, were relatively cheap, but salaries were low in relation to them, if what the driver told us later was to be believed. In this way it was exactly like any other
communist country in which the miracle is that, given what most people earn, they can afford to buy anything at all. Judging by the forests of television aerials, large numbers of people in the towns seemed to have television, but a set cost 4500 leks (£325 or $455), nine months’ salary at the lower end of the wage scale, and there appeared to be no facilities for hiring, or hire purchase.

According to the driver, whose home was in Tirana, whom it was difficult to believe even when discussing the most mundane matters but subsequently proved to be right, wages ranged from a minimum 500 leks (about £36 or $50) a month to 900–1000 leks, the price of a radio, which might, he said, be a junior minister’s portion, although as such he would have massive perquisites – 600 leks being about the average (£50 or $70). In 1977 the maximum/minimum ratio was reduced from 2 to 1 to 1.8 to 1 to discourage undue ambition. He himself, so he said, got 650 leks.

Food was relatively cheap. The good dark bread was very cheap. Butter was 20 leks a kilo, the excellent olive oil 13 leks a litre, a pot of jam 6 leks, a bottle of beer 4 leks, the same price as a bottle of decent wine, a melon, relatively expensive, 2 leks. Fresh vegetables – it was summer – were abundant. Butchers’ shops were nearly always shut when we turned up, but what one could see through the windows seemed to be of rather poor quality. Certainly there were no calves’ tongues of the sort we had been served in the hotel in Shkodër. There was no rationing, but there were shortages of some commodities. The fat people we saw in Albania either had something wrong with them or were members of foreign groups.

Good cigarettes – there were lots of brands to choose from, the Albanians smoke like chimneys (no warnings about it being dangerous to health) – were 2.5 leks for twenty. The worst, which were called Partisani, burned like a slow fuse.

A pair of quite elegant women’s leather sandals cost 126 leks, a baby’s soft leather boots only 7 leks. Nylon stockings – there were no tights on display – were 23 leks and huge bunches of suspenders were exhibited to keep them up. A poor quality plastic handbag was 215 leks. A full-sized pram 950 leks. A new, Albanian-built bicycle 1000 leks. A small fridge, made at the ‘Obod’ factory in Cetinje, was 4000 leks.

There was no litter in Albania, partly because the Albanians had not yet learned to package merchandise for home consumption, other than screw it up in a bit of brown paper, and because chucking it about was a serious, anti-social offence. There was no dogs’ mess, either, because there were no dogs; and no graffiti, only partly because of a lack of suitable writing instruments. On the other hand pollution was a terrible problem, the sort of smog that hung over Elbasan, south-east of Tirana, resembling that over the Black Country between the wars – the Chinese-built steel works at Elbasan looked as if it was undergoing a gas attack and the waters of the Shkumbin River, on the banks of which the city stands, resembled black treacle.