On the Shores of the Mediterranean (17 page)

‘What did you see behind the church?’ he said.

‘I saw some old stones lying about.’

‘What sort of old stones?’

‘I don’t know. We couldn’t see very well. We left our glasses in the coach. They looked like tombstones.’

‘What else did you see? What about the view? What did you see in the view?’

‘There were a lot of those concrete fortifications.’

‘Now, be careful how you answer. Did you take photographs?’

‘No. You can have the film if you want to. In fact you can have the whole lot if you want them.’

‘Now listen to me,’ he said. His eyes were like marbles. He was a little terror, this commissar, and he was certainly putting the wind up me. ‘I can do anything I like with you, or anyone else in this group. I know who you are. I know what the girl is who is supposed to be painting flowers. She is from the BBC. I know what the Canadian professor is. You think I am just a little lorry driver who has travelled abroad, taking frogs’ legs to France (which was one of the jobs he had admitted to doing as a long-distance lorry driver), only speaks Italian and laughs at your jokes.’

‘Well, what do you think I am?’ I said.

‘I think you are from British Intelligence.’

‘I’m not in British Intelligence or any other Intelligence,’ I said.
‘I’m not intelligent enough, or mad enough, and if I was I wouldn’t be in Albania for all the tea in China,’ not intending to make what sounded like another poor attempt at a joke. ‘Surely you can see that. As for laughing at my jokes, that’s something you never did.’

‘You just be careful, Mr and Mrs Newby,’ he said, ‘just be careful. You are in danger. You always have been in danger, ever since you crossed the frontier.’

‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘If you were all that worried by us going behind the church, why didn’t you stop us? You saw us going. And, anyway, if you don’t want anyone to go there, why not simply put up a notice telling them not to? I think you wanted us to go there, so that you could frighten us to death. Well, you’ve succeeded.’

‘All the time I wonder what you’re doing with a group like this,’ he said.

‘I wonder what you’re doing with a group like this,’ I said.

‘One of my jobs,’ he said, ‘the one I like least, is to prevent you, and people like you, being sent to prison.’
³

What was most disagreeable about Albania, apart from the prying and repressions to which the proletariat of all communist countries are subjected, was the gross inequality which one has learned to take for granted in all those so-called revisionist communist states which flirt with capitalism but which seemed here, in a country where a purer, more primitive, communism was still ostensibly being practised, doubly grotesque, the leaders, in spite of this, living a life of luxury hidden in their seaside villas at Durrës and in the official enclave in the capital, Tirana.

At Sarandë and Butrint, resorts on the Adriatic coast, across
the channel from Corfu, wives or girl friends of Party officials described to us by the interpreter as being ‘workers on a day’s holiday’ wore beautifully cut, simple dresses that looked as if they had emanated from couture workrooms, pearl necklaces, gold-rimmed sunglasses, elegant shoes and carried handbags of soft leather, none of which were available in the shops in Tirana, or anywhere else in Albania. When they went swimming at a place called Ksamil, on the coast between Sarandë and Butrint, well out of sight of the real workers, it was in foreign-made bathing costumes, and one only had to look at their long, painted fingernails to see that not only had they not participated in a month’s obligatory agriculture within living memory, but that they had probably never worked what here in Albania is an official eight-hour day. Their swains, equally elegant, carried Japanese transistors, items also not found in Albanian shops. Under the circumstances, it was not an agreeable sight.

On our last afternoon in Albania en route for the Yugoslav frontier, between Shkodër and Han-i-Hotit, our coach was brought to a halt on the outskirts of a village by a funeral procession of men wearing suits and the brown-stockinged women we had seen working in the fields, which appeared to comprise the entire population. The coffin was carried on the back of an open lorry and was covered by a fine old carpet, which gave the impression that the dead person may have been born a Muslim. Looking at the inscrutable faces of the mourners at this atheistic comrades’ funeral, who resolutely refused to break ranks in the face of the driver’s impatience to pass them, it was difficult to imagine what they felt about the complete extirpation of their religion, or anything else of a spiritual kind. Was it imagination that led one to detect an air of profound gloom among them rather than of grief for the dead person? Not having been allowed to speak to them about such matters we shall never know. All that one could
be sure of was that the spectacle would have brought joy to the heart of the Director of the Museum of Atheism and would have ravished the member of the Franco-Albanian Friendship Society who had signed his visitors’ book.

After Albania we took the night ferry from Bar on the coast of Montenegro to Igoumenitsa in Epirus, that part of Greece that somehow seems remote from it, between the Pindus Mountains and the Ionian Sea that was Albanian under the Turkish empire, and is still in many ways more Albanian than Greek. We slept on deck in a fierce, north-west
maestrale
under a big moon, with the big mountains of Albania appearing to rise sheer out of the water to port, seeing at first light places we had visited on that same coast a week previously on our trip through Albania, all of which now looked, seen from the deck of a Yugoslav ship, as inaccessible as Tibet. Then we came into the harbour at Corfu below the citadels the Turks never succeeded in taking from the Venetians,
with the sun already up and all the coast down to Cape Aspokávos at the southern end in a mist of spindrift.

Although it was September, the end of the season of mass travel, the dusty quayside at Bar had been crowded with boys and girls, most of them from Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, with a sprinkling of French and Australians, but for some inscrutable reason hardly any English, on their way to Corfu, Delphi, the Parthenon and the Cyclades to bathe in the last, now fast weakening rays of the summer sun – some of them wearing plastic nose guards against it – before returning to do whatever boys and girls with student cards do in winter, even if they are not students, in such places as Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen. With their hair done up in bandeaux, they resembled a pow-wow of Red Indians in a dust bowl.

And by the time we reached the passenger decks of this Yugoslav ship with its uncouth purser and its equally uncouth reception staff, having paid the equivalent of £100 ($140) for the pleasure of travelling on it for one night, together with our van, these Wandervögel had already shuffled aboard, bowed under the weight of their enormous packs that towered high above their heads, and had invested not only the 300 seats, which were all that were provided to seat 600 passengers, but had taken over every foot of deck inside and outside, with the exception of those parts of the open deck which were exposed to the full force of the
maestrale
.

‘Gentleman! Lady! You want ticket for Bar, for this evening,’ were the words with which we were greeted by the touts for the rival ticket agencies whose offices line the waterfront when we came ashore at Igoumenitsa, a place which although it has obviously been there a long time has an air of transience, not surprisingly as it caters almost exclusively for those in transit. To which we answered, having had enough of the Yugoslavs, their shipping line, and their not-so-good ship
Slavija
, ‘GRR! Buzz off!’

We fled Igoumenitsa and spent the rest of the morning recovering from Albania and the MV
Slavija
on the shore of a wide bay to the south of Plataria of which we were the only occupants, swimming, sunbathing, eating grilled sardines in a little restaurant facing the sea and drinking a bottle of retsina for which the proprietress, in what must have been a moment of insanity, charged us a monstrous 220 drachmas (the drachma being currently 121 to the pound, 170 to the dollar), then rapidly reduced it to the going rate, 25 drachmas. Later, we drove on to Parga, once a small Venetian seaport, on a dangerous, precipitous coast, reminiscent of Amalfi, with a citadel embellished with the lion of St Mark set on top of a conical hill, above a labyrinth of narrow streets. In one of these, under an arch which led from the harbour into the town, we bought thick, green olive oil from an old man in a dark room, the best we had yet discovered in the Mediterranean outside Albania, pressed from olives harvested the previous winter in the great groves of ancient trees which surrounded the town. And from another old man we bought a strange, sweet, orange-coloured liqueur that was not made from oranges, in a pretty, old-fashioned shop lined with bottles of various other liqueurs, all of which he had concocted himself.

Late in the afternoon we arrived at Préveza, a small port at the entrance to the Gulf of Arta, an inlet from the Ionian Sea about twenty-five miles long and ten miles wide, in winter the abode of wildfowl. Although the waterfront was a bit arid, Préveza was not as unprepossessing as our guide book said it was. In fact, some of its back streets were both picturesque and interesting and were full of useful shops. In one which sold religious articles we bought a couple of church candles to illuminate our dinner, which we were unable to eat in the open air owing to the enormous numbers of mosquitoes which infest the region. As late as 1956, the Admiralty
Pilot Guide to the Mediterranean
said that the
inhabitants suffered from what it quaintly described as ‘ague’, presumably meaning malaria.

In another, a knife grinder’s establishment, we had a terrific edge put on our carving knife and also on one of those lethal French knives called la Main Couronnée, made by the firm of Chopinel, which Wanda always carries with her, ostensibly to peel potatoes. In a wine shop full of barrels, presided over by two bearded, white-moustached gentlemen, we drank a glass of the rare but somewhat sickly red wine of Andípaxoi, a little island which lies south of Paxoi. Then, after we had brought some hot, freshly baked bread from an old-fashioned baker’s shop and had a couple of glasses of excellent retsina from an equally old-fashioned café to take away the taste of the wine of Andípaxoi, we felt that Préveza was not as bad as it was made out to be.

In addition it exported, if the Admiralty
Pilot Guide
was to be believed, olive oil – there were certainly large olive groves everywhere – wool, butter, cheese and
valonia
(which are the acorn cups and unripe acorns of the Eurasian oak,
Quercus aegilops
, used in tanning, dyeing and making ink), receiving by way of imports cotton and woollen goods, petroleum, and wine, which apparently does not flourish to any great extent here on the shores of the Gulf of Arta.

We crossed the Strait, Stenón Prévezis, here only a quarter of a mile wide, by a car ferry, for this is the way to Levkás, and to another road which runs along the southern shores of the Gulf to join the main road to Missolonghi, and climbed on to the top of the fort on the southern side, built by the Venetians who occupied Préveza from 1499 to 1699, when they were forced to cede it to the Turks by the Treaty of Carlowitz. They got it back by force of arms in 1717, then in 1797 lost it, this time for ever, to the French, who themselves had it taken from them in 1798 by Ali Pasha. The Turks then kept it until it fell to the Greek army
in 1912. From 1881 to 1912 the frontier between Turkey and Greece ran through the middle of the Strait. This was the scene not only of the battle of Actium but of another even more shameful action in which a Christian fleet, led by the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, failed to join battle with the Turkish fleet commanded by Barbarossa (Hayrettin Paşa), allowing one Venetian ship, the Galleon of Venice, to take the brunt of a series of attacks by dozens of Turkish ships.

It was a delightful situation. Behind the fort a grove of black poplars sighed in the south-westerly breeze which was bringing a German yacht in under sail over the bar in a glittering sea to spend the night at Préveza.

Apart from this view of the sea and of the wooded promontory on the north side of the Strait, the immediate environs of what had been the Actium of the ancient world were not all that inspiring.

Down by the ferry landing there was a kiosk selling cigarettes and a rather revolting-looking café. Beyond them was the road to the south, running through a treeless plain in which, bounded by a desolate shore, there was a military aerodrome.

‘With the whole of Greece to choose from you certainly made a wonderful choice,’ Wanda said, with that logic which even after nearly four decades of marriage never fails to infuriate me. Still infuriated with one another, we walked along the shore – I myself saying, ‘You would spoil it all. You always do!’, implying that this was the chance to write the mood-piece of a lifetime about Actium and the great sea battle which in 31 BC decided the future of the Roman world, walking along a foreshore loaded with plastic bottles and black oil, backed by a grove of eucalyptus, out towards a curving, whiteish sand spit with a beacon on the end of it and a large inlet on the far side which I, rightly or wrongly, identified as Actium.

It was beyond this spit, in an inlet of the Gulf of Arta, that all through the winter of 32–31 BC, and throughout the following spring and summer, Mark Antony kept his fleet at safe anchor, or drawn up on the shore, in what was to be the last of the civil wars following upon the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. There, in the late summer of 31 BC, Antony, governor-general of the territories east of the Adriatic, found himself bottled up by the fleet of Octavian, ruler of the west. And on the morning of 2 September, after five days on which the wind had blown strongly and steadily from the south-west, making it impossible for his ships to clear the Straits, short of food and deciding that some decisive action was imperative, he ordered his fleet to break out of the Gulf and engage the enemy. It now emerged, under a cloudless sky, consisting of 500 ships, led by what were some of the biggest vessels in the Roman world, quinquiremes, galleys with five banks of oars on either side, triremes, and merchant vessels converted to be ships of war. The largest of these ships were fitted with high superstructures or turrets manned by Eastern archers and equipped with
ballistae
which hurled stones and with machines for discharging darts. The sides of these huge ships were reinforced with balks of timber to prevent them being rammed, and this made them slow and unwieldy to manoeuvre. These giants were followed by the ships of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians, which had gaily-painted upper-works, gilded bows, and streamed with flags and pennants. Extraordinarily conspicuous among all these was the floating palace of Cleopatra, a galley furnished with silken sails dyed with Tyrian purple, propelled by oars sheathed in silver.

Awaiting them in the open sea were the 250 vessels of Octavian’s fleet, under the command of Agrippa, assembled in two divisions. Much lighter vessels, much more manoeuvrable than those of Mark Antony, and crewed by some of the finest sailors of the ancient world, they were more than a match for Mark Antony’s
crews, who were demoralized by inactivity and so depleted that men who had never been to sea, mule drivers and labourers, had had to be conscripted to bring the ships’ companies up to strength.

The action began about noon with Agrippa’s triremes running in close, shearing off the oars of Mark Antony’s quinquiremes, which were so enormously heavy that it was impossible for the rowers to ship them, in doing so suffering surprisingly little damage from the archers and the
ballistae
in their towering turrets. And almost before it had begun, although no one either in the ships or watching from the land realized it, the battle was lost. Quite suddenly, what had been up to this moment a calm sea became an agitated one when a north-east breeze off the land sprang up. As it did so, the crews of the Egyptian squadron of 60 ships could be seen making sail, the first ship to do so being Cleopatra’s galley, which was already setting course for Alexandria.

It is said that this was part of a pre-arranged plan; that Cleopatra, on board whose galley a large amount of treasure had been loaded just before the fleet sailed, was on her way to Egypt, there to rally those of Mark Antony’s legions that still remained there, and with the means to pay them. Certainly, she was not the sort of woman whom anyone would accuse of cowardice. Ruthless, scheming, evil she might be, but certainly not frightened of anyone.

What was ignoble was the behaviour of Mark Antony, who abandoned his flagship for a swifter vessel and had himself conveyed aboard Cleopatra’s galley, narrowly escaping capture on the way to it, there to be welcomed by his mistress and, surrounded by every sort of luxury, to sit in the bows with his back to the ship’s company, contemplating his utter disgrace as the galley sailed southwards. This was the end of him as a ruler and commander.

When Antony and Cleopatra were seen to be fleeing the scene
of action, some of their captains drove their ships ashore and became anonymous spectators, joining those hundreds of thousands who were already watching the battle. Others continued the struggle, gallantly lashing their huge vessels together, turning them into huge, oarless fortresses, better to resist Agrippa’s men, who by this time were setting them on fire with burning arrows and jamming rafts loaded with inflammable substances against their sides. By four o’clock the battle was over. Twelve thousand of Antony’s men had perished and those ships that were not either destroyed or taken that afternoon were later burned at their anchorages inside the point.

The spectators of this battle, one of the decisive battles of the ancient world, were the 200,000 men of the opposing armies who were stationed on either side of the Gulf, inside the Straits, but who could do nothing to influence it; Octavian’s 80,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, whom he had ferried across the Adriatic from Brundisium and marched through Albania to this remote spot in order to frustrate Mark Antony’s plan to invade Italy and bring the horrors of civil war to the peninsula; and Mark Antony’s army of 100,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalrymen which included Egyptians and barbarians supplied by those eastern Asian rulers who had been forced to recognize his authority (many of whom had already deserted to Octavian). So perished Antony’s nearly realized dream of becoming Emperor of the East and West, with the capital of the Empire not at Rome but at Alexandria, which would have had consequences difficult, if not impossible, to envisage.

On this day, 2 September 31 BC, the civil wars that had plagued the Roman world finally ended, as did the Republic. Octavian became Caesar, appropriating to himself the name of his great-uncle, and also called himself Augustus, as such becoming the first Emperor of Rome. By the autumn of the following year he was master of Egypt and of its treasure, and Antony and Cleopatra,
who found herself unable to work her will on this new ruler of the world, were both dead.