Biografi (5 page)

Bill is headed north in the morning. He says I'm welcome to make the trip. Everyone has been saying Shkodër's the place. Politically, Shkodër is ‘hot'. I actually have other reasons for visiting Shkodër.

There will be a small detour to the northeast—if I can handle that, he says. There are some warehouses to inspect. But from Kukës, Shkodër is a five- or six-hour run.

We leave early the next morning. There's five of us: Teti, the driver; Anila, Bill's interpreter; and a pretty, soft-faced girl whose name I fail to catch. Bill introduces her as the ‘economist'.

‘Doesn't mean shit though. Half the population is a director of something, and when you look them up they're working in a tin shed with a hole in the roof.

‘It's okay,' he says. ‘She can't speak English.'

The economist rides in the back with me. Bill rides shotgun. He's virtually nailed himself to the side of Teti, who's there because every relief vehicle is required to employ a local driver.

Children with small grimy faces rush fearlessly out to the middle of the road. Until a year ago they had to worry only about the horse-drawn carts, bicycles, and the occasional bus or truck. But now the kids spot the aid insignia on the side of the Landcruiser and try to touch its sides.

We pass through a bleak landscape of malnourishment, listening to Teti's pirated tapes of Steely Dan, Sting and New Kids on the Block. Through the windshield Albania shifts to plain vista. We pass through it in our capsule of warm air conditioning and nice upholstery. We are sufficiently removed from what we see. Those small kids out there rushing out to the road, that wide mouth yelling for gum, is something I might have seen in the pages of
National Geographic.
Bill says the Yugoslav truck drivers started this thing of throwing gum from their window and now in every town we pass through kids sit on the road like birds after a downpour.

I'm happy to be getting outside Tirana at last, just to escape the rain. I thank Bill for this lift and he waves his pipe. ‘Hey,' he says. He can use the company.

Two days ago he had taken a couple of London
Daily Mirror
reporters out to a food drop. After a while, it had become obvious to Bill that Harry, the photographer, was doing a ‘Girls of Albania thing'.

‘Every halfway decent gal we stopped for so Harry could do his thing. One place there was this very pretty gal washing clothes in a ditch. I said to Harry, you know, half-joking, “Harry, do you want me to go and splash a little water on her shirt…You know, for a wet T-shirt shot?”'

We laugh—and Anila pulls her cheap fur coat around her shoulders a little more. She speaks only when spoken to—but the soft-faced economist doesn't speak at all. Bill offered her a barley sugar and back came the most beautiful smile. Bill says it's just ‘a language thing'. But later I do hear him ask Anila whether the economist is okay.

We are in the countryside now. Circles of men squat at the roadside. Others hack away at stumps for firewood. A blackened smokestack rises in the distance and a few minutes later we pass a chemical and metallurgy plant. Even from the car window it appears eccentric and ungainly, as if the regime had followed the advice of a young child using Meccano for the very first time.

The rust-coloured King Zog bridge takes us across the vast shingle flats of the Mat River. Here, the road starts to climb inland until we are high above the river valley. A convoy of Italian trucks piled high with grain passes us coming the other way. As each truck goes by, Teti takes his hand off the wheel to give the Democrat salute. The Italians show no interest—they stare through Teti to the road ahead, an imaginary road paved all the way home to Italy. The same stony indifference had sat with the Italian drivers in Durrës as they lined their trucks up beneath a grain chute. The Italians wore red, white and blue neckerchiefs. In their khaki uniforms and high-laced boots they could have stepped out of an L.A. nightclub. I think it was in the bar of the Dajti that somebody told me the Italian army uniform was designed by Armani.

We continue to climb this narrow road. Either side of the ravine the slopes of loose rock rise to blue sky, the first I have seen since arriving in the country. On the ridge tops the trees are changing colour and there is a lovely suffusion of oranges and yellows. I ask Bill if he knows the names of the trees. He asks Anila. Her shoulders rise and fall. She asks the economist. She doesn't know. No one knows.

On a visit to Burgeget, King Zog's village in the Mati Valley, Swire describes soft hills well grown with mulberry, walnut, cherry and chestnut trees.

We enter a loop in the road, and as we draw around the last bend, melted into a pinnacle of rock up ahead is an old Greek Orthodox church. Its roof suddenly catches sunlight, and as the road travels underneath this splash of gold we enter Rubik.

In the space of a bend the road dissolves to a marketplace and Teti snarls at everything in our path. Oxen, gum-worshipping kids, horse-drawn carts. He leans on the horn, and people stop their conversations to stare at us.

‘Teti! Anila, will you tell him to stop that bullshit…' And again: ‘Don't piss these people off, Teti. Leave the friggin' horn.'

A rock bounces off the side of the Landcruiser and that does it. We lurch to a halt. Teti is out the door and running back up the road.

Bill just refuses to look. He says to Anila, ‘He's a friggin' idiot. I want you to tell him that, okay.'

In the back window I see Teti catch up with a kid and start to smack him about the head.

Bill says, ‘What's he's doing? Tell me what the hell he is doing? I'm not going to look, but I need to know.'

The economist continues to sit with her arms folded and an imperturbable gaze aimed at her side window. Anila turns around in her seat. She reports to Bill: ‘Teti is coming back. He's let the boy go.'

Flushed and stiff with dignity, Teti settles in behind the wheel. Bill doesn't budge a whisker. He takes a deep breath; then he says quietly to Anila, ‘Go ahead. Tell him.'

So Anila says something to Teti, who ignores it. He starts up the Landcruiser and we are on our way.

‘Tell him Anila…One month ago with Kemal…' Bill turns around to explain with his pipe. ‘Kemal, you know…the same make as Teti, as all this macho bullshit. The same thing happened in a little town north of here. Rock hits the side of the van. Kemal stops. Marches back to deal with some farm boys and gets his ass kicked.

‘Hey!' he says to Anila. ‘Remind Teti about Kemal…His arm was all mangled…half his friggin' teeth left on the roadside!'

Bill meditates for a few more kilometres. Then he says to Anila, ‘Tell him if he ever does that again I'm throwing him out.'

Anila says something and Teti's ears turn red.

We cross the Mat River again and catch sight on the far hillside above the railway line of a huge painted slogan: ‘July is the month of working hard.'

Near Rrëshen we check out a food warehouse guarded by a man with an old hunting rifle. He and Bill embrace warmly. Bill gives the man some tobacco. He takes a quick peep in the windows of the warehouse, and then we continue on into Rrëshen.

The road into the town climbs a hill, and on the side overlooking the valley is a striking bronze sculpture of four women—one woman shoulders a rifle, another carries a book, the third a pick. Anila says the sculpture represents the ‘struggle against obscurantism'.

‘The women have returned from working on the railway construction. In other words,' she says, ‘they show the correct path.'

The other reason for visiting Rrëshen is that Anila married a pharmacist from here. We stop by the pharmacy. It is open but has no drugs. Anila's husband has gone to Italy to work as a labourer for a few months and a letter is waiting for her at the pharmacy. She goes off to read it alone at the foot of the bronze women. Bill tells Teti to stay with the vehicle. He's not to drive it—nor is he to leave it.

He stays parked outside the Town Hall with an Albanian version of
Jesus Christ Superstar
cranked up while Bill and I go to look for some food. The one café has its chairs stacked up on the tables. It quickly transpires that there is nothing left to eat in Rrëshen, and as we come out of the café a small crowd greets us with looks of amusement. It is all good-natured. Bill seems to think they are apologising for the state of things. One of the elders steps forward, but before he can explain anything Teti guns the Landcruiser across the square and suddenly the crowd are scattered like pigeons.

‘Teti!' For a moment I think Bill is going to throw his pipe at the grinning face in the windscreen. Instead he says to me, ‘This is supposed to be a favour. We employ the local people. But I get a madman.'

Teti hangs out the window waiting for Bill's instructions, the motor drumming.

‘Jesus. Just go and get Anila.'

‘Anila…Okay!'

And Teti's foot falls upon the accelerator with renewed purpose as Bill finishes: ‘We've gotta apologise to these people.'

We drive on for another hour, climbing and twisting through high hill country. We have gone back far enough now that the leaves of the chestnut trees lie on the ground leaving the branches looking lonely and stark. One time we stop so Teti can relieve himself and in the silence we hear the bells of a goatherd ring down from the hillsides.

A few months earlier Bill had visited a village so remote that he was the first foreigner the inhabitants had seen since the war. On that occasion the villagers had seen a British parachutist float down from the sky. He was taken in by a local priest and a month later smuggled out of Albania. Fifty years later Bill drove into the village and had a wonderful lunch there.

‘Great bread, yoghurt, raki, and this wonderful antipasto kind of thing, you know? A bit of red pepper and onion…' He smiles over the stem of his pipe at the memory and we all fall silent with hunger.

‘It was a blast, a couple of hundred people sitting around staring at us for a couple of hours.'

Bill says he knows of a ‘trucker's stop' near here. It is in a place called ‘the neck of the mountain', an accurate enough description for where the road doubles back on itself. Bill's ‘trucker's stop' turns out to be a small grotto of roofing iron and rocks stacked on one another. We arrive at the same time as a truckload of young soldiers but manage to scramble in ahead.

The proprietor, a small wizened man, ladles the runny white yoghurt into greasy plastic bowls and slaps them down on a crude wooden bench. Then the soldiers start to pour in and soon we are standing shoulder to shoulder in crowded silence— jammed inside this smoky grotto with these poor half-starved boys in green tunics.

We grind on to Kukës in low gear for another hour. Bill has given up directing Teti—and despite the driver's assurances, ‘I'm okay, I'm okay,' Bill just grabs the wheel whenever the moment requires intervention to pull us onto the shoulder again. Teti feeds in a tape of The Who's rock opera
Tommy
. Bill turns it down. Teti sneaks the dials up. And on it goes.

We stop one more time after Anila feels carsick. It is deadly quiet. The road trickles invitingly up to a rise.

When I asked Cliff how he had got around he said, ‘Train. Bus. Foot.' And in my more fanciful moments I imagined myself doing as Joseph Swire had done, walking between villages with a burro and usually with armed escorts.

Bill says, ‘Go ahead. Stretch out your ligaments. We'll be by in twenty minutes.'

At one point I hear Anila violently heave, and when I look back there is Bill sitting on a rock, knees crossed, lighting his pipe.

Another ten minutes and I'm at the pass gazing across the tops of gold and black hills which roll on to Macedonia in the east and, to the north, Montenegro. Small boys minding goats above the roadside whistle out from the scrub.

8

POPULI PARTI ENVER, just as it appears on the postage stamps, is emblazoned on the hillside above Kukës.

Twenty years ago the workers at the copper smelter plant had collected small stones on the hillside and carefully arranged the stones to spell the slogan.

I learned this from Mustaph, an unemployed journalist, who looks after the food distribution in Kukës.

Mustaph had been waiting on the hotel steps for our arrival. A man of about fifty, round-headed, with greying temples and quick, intelligent eyes, and formidably sober. His overcoat was the one he had bought in Leningrad after being sent there to study literature and languages in the fifties.

I think he found my questions about POPULI PARTI ENVER a little tiresome. The slogan bore down on the town in such a way as to suggest a major landmark; but as Mustaph's uncooperative silence seemed to suggest, a landmark not inquired of but accepted as readily as the clouds or the hilltops and other natural phenomena. POPULI PARTI ENVER could be seen from anywhere in Kukës—a ‘new city' of bleak housing blocks. The old town lay beneath the new lake in a valley which had been flooded for hydroelectric purposes. The hydroelectric plant was a happier subject for Mustaph.

Work on the modern city had started in the sixties. People living down in the old town on the valley floor could gaze up to the cloud line and watch their future homes going up. They were promised playgrounds and hospitals, and in the evenings, Mustaph said, the old people would sit in their gardens and watch the last of the summer evening depart the concrete shells up there on the rise.

One day in the seventies the people had all trooped up to the new town and where the new hospital was sited a park bench had been built for the elderly to sit and watch the water level rise below. It had taken months, years. First the streets turned a muddy colour, then the water rushed inside the small stone houses and rose up the walls until there were just rooftops to gaze upon like floating islands or garden stepping-stones across a lake. Finally the ‘stepping-stones' had disappeared altogether, and now, looking upon the lake, I found it hard to believe that another city, with its quarrels, blood feuds and arranged marriages, lay beneath this calm blue surface.