Biografi (26 page)

We push on, Bill with his pipe clenched in his teeth and craning over the wheel. We can't see more than ten feet ahead. The road turns and twists round a coil in the mountain, and up ahead there appear four lights in the fog.

No sooner do these lights appear than we break through the cloudline and suddenly it's as though the fog below us has completely lifted. On the other side of the gorge is the kind of view which you might see from an aeroplane: the lights of a village, not so much in a tight cluster but spread out like brilliant stars in a night sky. And this, too, feels like a completely new world from the one we have just left behind in the gorge.

‘Let's see where the hell we are,' Bill says.

He switches on the radio, and the next thing we're listening to Miles Davis playing ‘Five Minutes to Midnight'.

‘That'll be Yugoslavia,' he says.

45

IN THE MORNING we return to the gorge—this time with Mustaph and Anila, but without Shapallo.

Shapallo woke complaining of chest pains and nausea. He said he hadn't slept a wink. At breakfast he ate a cold chip, took a sip of coffee and pushed his chair out.

We helped him back to his room. He was very emotional. His eyes were moist and he shook his head all the way up the stairs. He couldn't understand what had got into him.

Bill told Shapallo there would be another day.

‘Listen, we can do it another time,' he said. ‘Anila, tell him.'

But she refused to; she walked to the window and hissed at Bill, ‘Can't you see Mister Shapallo does not wish to go?'

But Bill, I think, was just offering up words to smooth over any embarrassment the old man might feel for his loss of nerve after having come this far.

We left Shapallo exactly the way we had yesterday, lying on his bed, his hand raised to signal that all was okay. He had given instructions to Anila that I was to report everything back to him.

‘Mister Shapallo wishes to compare pictures,' she said.

On the way through we pick up Mustaph; still the same proud figure in a grey coat and buttoned-up shirt. But the gorge this morning is a different place. The sun is out, and streaks of purple and green have replaced yesterday's greys and charcoals. Patches of tilled earth cling tenaciously to the tops of cliffs which, yesterday, were lost in fog.

This morning there is a stronger, more satisfying sense of the gorge leading to somewhere. Far above are large stone houses with slate roofs trailing pale blue smoke.

Yesterday, when we crossed the river, we missed the turnoff winding up the side of the gorge to some rooftops just peeping above a knoll. By Bill's reckoning Topojani was the starlit village we had looked down upon.

We follow the track for another kilometre until we are high above the river, and across the other side of the gorge we can make out ridges that flatten out to gentler areas for goats and sheep to graze upon. Bill stops to admire the view. ‘You know,' he says, ‘a smart operator could turn this into a great backpacker's kind of thing. You could make an itinerary and walk along the ridges between villages.'

‘Fine,' snaps Anila. ‘You come here for your vacation. I will go to Washington for mine.'

Anila passes this on to Mustaph and his head rocks back. Amused at first, and then dismayed after he has thought about it some more.

A few minutes on, and we all pile out of the Landcruiser. Mustaph. Me. Bill. Anila, with a cool regard for the muddy ground ahead of us.

We are near the top of the rise, and the first slate roofs blink in the hard sunlight. A short climb and Shapallo's village comes into view. Stone houses squat randomly, as in a fistful of stones flung at a hillside of mud. There are no roads, just well-worn tracks threading the cottages.

Higher again, on a knoll above the rooftops, a military post, and inside a small fenced area a soldier stares across the gorge to a widening cleft, beyond which layers of green hillside peel back to the Macedonian border.

We were discovered by children first. Then a few stooped old men. Someone ran off for the doctor, a youngish man, clean shaven, in a polo neck and an old blazer. He went off to find the chief of the village council. One man, pale and sweating from tilling the yard outside his cottage, put down a crude grubber and gazed at us with astonishment. The women, shy as forest creatures, hid in doorways.

We learned we were in an area known as ‘the black place': Gryke e Leze.

The name had stuck after the Serbs, in 1912, marched into the gorge and slaughtered 520 men and women. Pregnant women were butchered and left to die. The Serbs had got as far as a village which used to stand at the mouth of the gorge.

From the chief of the council, a small bowlegged man with a handsome grey moustache, Bill and I learned that we were the first foreigners into Topojani since the Serbs.

Thirty or forty faces were peering and grinning—all of them stunted and malnourished. Boys of twelve and thirteen stood no taller than my waist.

The doctor said they were suffering from dystrophy and malnutrition, while the adults had to contend with chronic bronchitis and rheumatism.

‘He has a clinic but no medicine,' says Anila.

The chief told Bill that the village had learned as recently as a month ago that grain supplies had arrived in Albania from abroad. But he added it would be another ten or twenty years before such aid would arrive in Topojani.

‘We believe we eat,' he said. ‘In fact, we eat potatoes because the soil cannot grow anything else. Topojani has always been poor.'

‘Always?'

‘We have a very old woman who remembers the Serbs. She will tell you, all her life she has starved.'

Topojani was out of macaroni, soap, salt. Before the regime collapsed they used to carry potatoes down the gorge to Kukës and barter for peppers and cheese and meat.

But there were other problems. Topojani had grown to an unsustainable size. The chief told Bill it had started out with just five houses.

‘Oh? When was that?'

‘Two hundred years ago,' said the man.

The Ismshj family had fled a blood feud in Shkodër and made for this bolt-hole tucked away in the gorge of the furthermost corner of the country. Now there were fifteen families with the Ismshj name and the Topojani population stood at 1150, spread over some three hundred houses.

The chief spoke of his concern about the winter. They have no bread. The few goats were without feed.

Bill listened but said nothing.

Last summer, the chief continued, many of them had walked into Kukës to sleep out in the fields under sheets of plastic. ‘If you ask a ninety-year-old woman or a child, they will say the same thing: “We don't want to live here. We have lost all hope.”'

One of the houses abandoned by a family for a plastic sheet in the fields outside Kukës has been turned into a coffee house. Eleven o'clock in the morning and it is smoky and dark. We feel our way like the blind for a table by the wall. As soon as candles are lit, the walls flare up with silhouettes of shaggy manes of hair. There are some thirty men sitting around, watchful and silent.

Bill says, ‘Go ahead. Ask after Shapallo.'

I hadn't thought to ask Shapallo for the names of relatives. But thinking about it, I remembered he had been born to a different village. I guess he had been dropped into Topojani, the same way the doctor had: an outsider, city-trained, sent to run the clinic.

Anila spoke with the doctor, who passes on the question; and the chief of the village council then took it up with the rest of the room.

Several times I hear Shapallo's name mentioned. But there are no takers.

‘Anila, perhaps if you mention Shapallo was the dentist here?'

‘Yes. I have said this already.' Then she shushes me as a chair scrapes back on the floor. A shadow standing in the corner of the room recalls that Shapallo was transferred to another village.

‘And his wife and children?'

‘They went to join him some months afterwards.'

‘He had a clinic.'

‘Yes, it is where the doctor is now.'

‘That's it?'

‘They don't remember Mister Shapallo,' concludes Anila.

In a last-ditch effort I pass on everything that Shapallo has told me about his life here, as well as the other things he had told Munz, such as his teaching the village children gymnastics; on National Independence Day he used to construct elaborate pyramids using up to a dozen children, each one supporting another. But no one in the room remembers the pyramids of children. The dentist is recalled as a quiet man who had kept to himself.

‘He must have had some friends. Surely someone remembers something?'

‘A tall man, yes?' But the council chief is just checking to reassure himself.

The shadow who remembers Shapallo's ‘transfer' says he knows where the family had lived, if that is any help.

We wander along a track that climbs to the memorial recalling the 1912 massacre. From there we slide down a bank to a small cottage all on its own.

The yard has been tilled to grow potatoes. Chicken wire covers the windows, and there are bits of feather stuck in the wire. The cottage boasts two rooms. The floors of both are covered in a white cement of chicken shit and feathers.

The chief picks up the story here. He seemed to remember now. It had been after the family's ‘transfer' that an official from Kukës had arrived with six hens and roosters to start Topojani's poultry development.

Poultry had flourished for a time, but disease had cut their numbers, and then a blizzard had wiped out all but a plucky rooster. For six months the council chief visited one village after another in search of a hen. There was talk among the younger men of slipping across the Macedonian border to steal a hen, but nothing had come of it. In the morning the hotheads walked away from this talk and returned to peeling stones off the hillside to create another potato patch.

Shapallo was remembered as a footnote to the period that had succeeded his ‘transfer', when Topojani, for a brief time, had enjoyed eggs and fowl.

46

SHAPALLO EASED HIMSELF onto his elbows. Anila rearranged the pillows behind his back. He took a sip of coffee. Then Anila took the cup from him and Shapallo lay back to await our news.

I had been dreading this; all the way back down the gorge it had occurred to me to wonder what kind of ‘good news' Professor Kupi could possibly have taken back to King Leka and the Albanian communities living abroad.

‘Mister Shapallo asks, Is Topojani still beautiful?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Good,' smiled Shapallo. ‘This is surely good. My house. Did they show it to you?'

‘A lovely cottage.'

Shapallo sighed, ‘But in spring…' In spring, he said, Topojani revealed its soul.

With an embarrassed smile he asked, coyly, ‘Did the people remember me, their old dentist?'

‘Yes,' I said, but Anila explained at much greater length and Shapallo was evidently pleased by what he heard. He smiled happily and his head nodded on against his pillow.

Anila, my second witness, trained her black eyes on me and quietly explained, ‘I was telling Mister Shapallo that everyone had fond memories of him and his family. Everyone, without exception.'

That night, in the room next to Shapallo's, I pulled the bedcovers around me and caught up with Zog in exile.

The lack of recognition caused him his greatest anxiety. Zog worked hard and spent prodigiously to bolster his image and legitimise his position as head of the Albanians. He created legations in Turkey and Egypt, a mission in Washington and four consular posts. He created a shadow government with four or five Ministers. Increasingly desperate, he offered the Anglo-Jewish Association a Jewish settlement in Albania if the Jews would consent to his regaining the throne.

During the war the royal household passes through a succession of residencies. There was the undignified scramble out of France just a few hours ahead of the Nazis marching into Paris. In London Zog installed the royal household in the Ritz off Piccadilly: of his thirty-four-strong entourage, six were listed as H. M. Ordinance Officers; these were Zog's bodyguards, Mati tribesmen whose sawn-off shotguns never left their sides. From the Ritz Zog moved the entourage to a villa in Sunningdale near Ascot. Soon after, there was another move, to Henley, where it was left to Queen Geraldine to get out the gardening tools and cultivate a large garden to feed the entourage. Zog would not permit the men in his entourage to do any work—after all, he argued, they had given up everything to be with him; so it was left to Geraldine to do the gardening and the cooking, and to clean out the chicken coop.

Following Zog's death Geraldine faced problems of a different kind: the main one what to do with a six-foot-eight princeling. He was without employable skills and a royal household is nothing without funds.

The years tick by. Geraldine quietly sells one piece of jewellery after another in order to keep up appearances. Following King Leka's coronation the Krupps in Hamburg offer to take on the new King as an apprentice arms dealer. But the pay is meagre and an acceptance of the position would require the royal household to move to Hamburg.

The problems of a job, money, expense accounts remain until Leka turns to his father's friends. Prince Faisal, for one, introduces Leka to leading Saudi businessmen.

All is well for a while. There is money coming in and Leka is generally well received in the Middle East. There are motorcades. Escorts. Guards snap to attention. Flags are raised over hotels. The curtains pulled on all the windows on the floor of whatever hotel he happens to be staying at.

But the frustrations which go with the job of royalty in exile are beginning to mount. For example, he has a uniform but no regiment. He has guns but no target. He is forever training, and training others for the beachhead landing to honour his father's deathbed hallucination. There are other times when Leka is simply the wayward son in search of war.