Biografi (6 page)

We booked into the hotel with a view of the lake. Anila went to bed. Teti was given the rest of the afternoon off. And with the economist and Mustaph giving directions we set off for the warehouse.

Somewhere on our way through a housing estate a rock bounces off the side of the Landcruiser. Bill hardly raises a hair.

‘Kids. Same the world over,' he says, and Mustaph is relieved to hear this.

The ‘industrial zone' is on the other side of town and we are there in another five minutes. A woman in a blue cotton smock unchains the gates, and as we drive to the end of a yard we are chased by a crowd of thin gaunt figures in cotton and flapping canvas shoes. The moment we park, their faces press up to the window.

‘Looking for gum, betcha,' says Bill, and quickly forgets them. He's busy fiddling with a tape. ‘What the hell has Teti done here…' But then the deck receives the tape, and Bill sits back with relief. ‘Sharon put me on to this,' he says.

Bill removes his pipe. His eyelids close, to Patsy Cline. A pane of glass separates him from an old man whose toothless gums are barking something at the side of Bill's deaf ear. When I check with Mustaph what the man is saying, his face creases into a smile. ‘He is saying, “Show me where the war is, I want to fight.”'

I head off with Mustaph to find the person with the keys to the warehouse.

Inside a loading bay we push through a door to a smoke-filled chamber. Four women who have been crouching around an open fire and warming their hands spring to their feet and cover their faces in giggling shame. Two of the younger ones run past us for the door. Mustaph smiles tolerantly.

Across the yard the crowd is still pressed around the Land-cruiser and in the window I can make out Bill smoking his pipe, his head marking time, ever so.

We have a wait on our hands until the person with the keys to the warehouse shows. Despite the cold, Mustaph refuses to wait inside the vehicle, but stands in the yard with his hands in his coat pockets, determined to deny the cold—as if one thing has to do with admitting to the ruin surrounding us.

There's nothing to do but walk to keep warm. I head off back along the road that brought us here. Old Russian trucks and mutant vehicles with Chinese and North Korean markings— the chattels of Albania's failed marriages—splash through the puddles. Barrier gates with gaping holes wear heavy padlocks. Men huddle around in small groups.

No one has anything to do. People have turned up to work out of habit. They watch me approach. They eye me, as watchful as sheepdogs, and as I pass, in unison they call out, ‘May your life be long.' The smokestacks look like some wasted experiment. There is no noise other than the wind off the stony walls of the valley. Opposite the ‘official mechanical plant of Kukës' I wander through a field full of concrete pillboxes. Their gunholes stare accusingly at the mountains. I suppose if you gaze at such things long enough you just might begin to sense the enemy on his way, if not today, then just around the next bend, in the next valley, beyond that peak. Tomorrow he will come through the mountains to learn the secret of Albania's success. ‘Above our homeland,' the inscription reads, ‘we have everything…and that is freedom and independence.'

I soon find the playground promised the inhabitants of old Kukës. It had started out as a reasonably bold idea before foundering along the way—for lack of either materials or will to take it any further. The playground bomb shelter has made it through to completion, likewise a white cement sculpture of a mother cradling a child.

The sculptured mother cradles her child a short distance from a rusted Ferris wheel that has seized up. Surrounding it is a mangle of steel, from which small children in cotton clothing and bare feet swing from the makeshift bars. The children barely make a sound. I wonder if they know they are just seven hours' ferry ride from Italy.

A hand suddenly rests on my shoulder and there is Mustaph, with his clever smile.

That night in the hotel bar Bill and I got a little drunk on raki and Bill talked about Sharon. They had met while out jogging. This was in Washington. They jogged the same route, although in opposite directions. ‘Oh, she was real cute. She'd smile and I'd say “Hi.” Then we'd run off with both of us kinda looking back over our shoulder.' One morning Bill just turned around and ran with her, and moved into her house soon after. He felt around in his jacket.

‘Goddamn,' he said. The photo was back in Tirana. So I showed Bill my postage stamp of Enver Hoxha—it being the only likeness I had of Shapallo. Then I told Bill about the playground, where Mustaph had surprised me. On the way back to the warehouse Mustaph had chatted away amiably. He said he had met the Great Leader three times, here in Kukës.

The first time, Enver had been visiting the copper plant. It was the second time, however, while out on a walk that Enver suddenly paused to stare at a bare hillside. Seeing his famous smiling lines tighten with disapproval, the local Party people duly took note, and the next day, when the Great Leader's eye fell upon the same spot a tree was found growing there. Such was the warmth of Comrade Enver's smile that it appeared to enrich the earth around the sapling—an observation which Mustaph had been obliged to report in his newspaper. These magical powers set him apart, of course. Otherwise, he had seemed a nice man. They had even talked, recalled Mustaph.

‘About what?'

Mustaph said the leader had reminisced about his childhood. Soon after that, work had started on the playground.

9

THIS IS HOW the day had started out, with Bill's hand drawing an imaginary line. ‘Now, Anila, tell him to drive smoothly between fifty and sixty. A good driver makes it smooth…

‘Anila, tell him when I was learning to drive my father used to say, “Always assume there is an idiot around the next bend…”'

Several hours later it is pitch black. We're about to enter Shkodër, but no one is talking much because of a strongly shared sense that Teti's short driving career is drawing to a close.

For the last hour we have driven through the night with Teti switching his lights off and on. As another vehicle approaches he switches his lights off and we vanish into the night. Then, just as inexplicably, the lights come back on and startled faces show up on the roadside.

Bullock drivers raise a hand to their faces. Horses rear up. Then it is pitch black again, terrifyingly so. The moment passes with all of us screaming at Teti before he locates the switch.

It is impossible to wean him off it. First Bill, then me—we try to tell Teti that in the West we drive with our lights on all the time. ‘Anila,' says Bill. ‘For the grace of God, will you tell him he's driving a car not a friggin' lighthouse. We are not a lighthouse. Understand?'

But the worst of it comes as Teti rambunctiously sits on his horn at a police roadblock. There is only one other vehicle in front of us, and Teti is giving the local police the hurry-up. This is when Bill's patience finally runs dry.

‘Teti! I'm begging you!'

Teti says, ‘No problem.' He jumps out the driver's side into the night and returns holding hands with a policeman.

‘Everything okay,' Teti says, getting in behind the wheel.

We set off again and Bill says to Anila, ‘Tell him that's it. It's over. Tell him only a friggin' idiot would sit on his horn at a roadblock. That's it…Understand?'

‘I know. I know. I keep telling him,' says Anila.

Bill is still furious as we enter Shkodër. He twists around in his seat. He says, ‘Listen to this. Teti's father was a fighter pilot, right. He crashed his plane into a hillside and died when he was forty. It's on Teti's résumé. It's some kind of idiocy thing running in the family.'

In a mercifully short time we pull up at the hotel. The Rozala. Bill thinks it'll be okay. He says, ‘Now listen, ask for the jam tart thing. If they still have it don't eat the cream.

‘Anila,' he says, ‘why don't you go in and make sure there's a room.'

At first it does not look promising. Anila is discussing something with the man on the desk, who seems very reluctant.

In the end a set of keys is produced. Anila says I am lucky. Tomorrow is National Independence Day, followed by National Liberation Day, and the hotel clerk, to begin with, had tried to make out that the hotel was fully booked.

I look at the keys in my hand and then at Anila.

‘Why would he say that?'

‘Because,' she says, in heavily accented English, ‘he is a friggin' idiot.'

The hotel clerk offers a friendly wave and points me up the stairs. He wills me on—the way a swimmer urges another into cold water.

The foyer is large and in a bygone life it might even have had pretensions toward grandeur. But indifference has taken toll and a shabbiness touches everything.

The clerk shouts something to a woman in a blue coat. She had been half-heartedly dragging a rag over the floor. Now she hurries after me, up the stairs. On the third floor she squeezes past me through the door to the hall and jams a light bulb in a socket hanging from the ceiling. She waits until I have worked the key in the door and then removes the light bulb.

I'm pleased to find light bulbs in my room—and running water. Everything is clean and tidy. The windows give on to an empty piazza. After Kukës the air is almost balmy. I can feel the nearness of the coast. In Shkodër, Europe does not feel so far off.

The Rozala has two dining rooms. The one for the Albanians is noisy and smoky, with white tablecloths covered in beer bottles and cigarette ash. From this dining room an unshaven man in a filthy waiter's jacket guides me by the elbow to the other dining room, which is resplendently empty but for two Greek women silently eating their supper of yoghurt and bread.

The waiter brings me a bowl of yoghurt. He asks me if I would like anything else. I ask him what else is on the menu. He says there is nothing left—but nevertheless awaits my response with a waiterly elegance, a white towel draped over his forearm.

A few minutes later the dining-room doors swing open. A man in corduroys and a blue woven jersey rubs his hands. He looks like he has cottage pie on his mind. The other, a shorter man with thinning red hair, and generous enough to smile delightedly at the sight of me dining alone, rushes over to introduce himself.

Terry and Don both start to speak at once before catching themselves. I get the impression that this is something they do often. They laugh and exchange smiles. The one called Don says, ‘Don't mind, do you, old man?' And he helps himself to a chair at my table. He turns it round and leans his chest against the backrest and asks, ‘Been long in the country?'

‘No. Not long,' I say, and immediately regret it.

Because, suddenly, everything changes with that admission. A kind of forfeiting of seniority takes place whereby they talk and I listen.

British Telecom had given Don a vehicle stocked full with British Telecom jerseys to drive across Europe, down through Yugoslavia to Albania. Across the border a mountain man in just bare feet and a blue singlet had been the first Albanian recipient of a British Telecom pullover.

Don says, ‘It was pitiful. Just pitiful.'

‘Have you heard? ' they chorused—and this time Don graciously gives Terry the go-ahead.

‘Well, the thing is, we've heard rumours the Socialists are deliberately delaying distribution of grain until the election.'

Leaning forward, Don rests his chin on the chair top.

‘These are just rumours of course,' he says, and he proceeds to pass on pickings from the rumour mill. The
sigourimi
has run an aid truck off the road. An Albanian-American journalist has received threats and also survived a near thing with another car on a mountain road. Don is pretty sure this is the work of the
sigourimi
.

‘Well it's typical isn't it?'

Terry tells me he is with Feed the Children. ‘Perhaps you saw the BBC clip on us? No…Well,' he says, ‘we're taking over the institution for the mentally handicapped children. Roger Hamilton is coming over from the
Sunday Times.
He's going to do a piece. He really cares about it.'

‘Oh yeah, Roger does,' says Don.

‘I mean it's not just copy. He really does care,' vouches Terry. ‘We were going to put in windows and fix it up—but in the end we decided the mobs would only ruin it. So we're going to take the kids out and relocate them.'

‘Relocate them is the answer,' Don says. ‘You have to just move in and take over.'

It's such a tragedy,' says Terry. ‘Listen. Eat your yoghurt. Don't let us hold you up. God, I would kill for sausages.' ‘Give me a pint of Guinness,' says Don, a little later. ‘Have you tasted the grog here? Pure horse piss. Still, food would be nice too, wouldn't it? In one village I saw a family of seven living in a single hut with two pigs and a cow. Seven! And they had only one bed and two aluminium pots between them.'