Biografi (7 page)

Any moment one of them is going to ask, ‘So, what brings you here, mate?' Any moment now and I'll have to explain away my various jigsaw pieces—Cliff, Kansas Street, Shapallo, and the exiles.

I stand up to leave and Terry moves his chair back. ‘Well, it's been lovely,' he says. I get to the door just ahead of Don's discovery: ‘Oi, what about your supper? You've left your yoghurt.'

I hurry across the foyer and bound up the stairs. Then, for godsakes, I hear footsteps hurrying after me—but it is the woman with the light bulb. She waits until my light goes on; then the hallway is plunged back into darkness.

I shut the window and slip into bed with Queen Geraldine's account of her marriage to Zog.

10

IN 1938 GERALDINE appeared on the balcony of a villa in Tirana, the Albanian flag fluttering behind her. When a sudden breeze wrapped the red and black colours around her shoulders, the crowd gathered below took this as a promising omen and roared its approval. On the day of the wedding, King Zog declared a three-day celebration. Tribesmen from all over the country—the Ghegs from the north and the Tosks from the south—gathered in Tirana to witness the event. Fifty other couples who had chosen this day for their marriage gathered in Skanderbeg Square. They were all given a Queen's dowry consisting of a bed, blankets and two pillows.

Among the wedding gifts received by Zog and his new queen were four prancing white Lipizzaner horses from the Regent of Hungary—a handsome phaeton to transport the bride on her wedding day. Hitler sent a ‘long scarlet supercharged Mercedes with a removable roof and white leather upholstery'. Mussolini gave four copper vases.

Zog was suff iciently moved to declare an amnesty for hundreds of his political enemies, many of whom had sworn to kill him after the Albanian tradition of blood feud.

Queen Geraldine cut the three-metre-wide wedding cake with the King's sabre—and later they drove to Durrës for the honeymoon. In Durrës the King gently ushered his young bride over the threshold of a marble pavilion he had built especially for her.

The King showed his bride the large reception room furnished in Louis XIV style. They ‘discovered' the bedroom. The King cleared his throat and left the room briefly. A maid handed Geraldine a white silk nightgown. She disappeared, and Geraldine slipped between the sheets and waited.

‘Quickly and passionately Zog possessed her. Not as a King but as a proud son of the Eagles…His bride was no different from other virgins. No one can explain the deep personal shock and physical discomfort of a woman when she is made love to for the first time…[Geraldine] lay softly whimpering into her pillow as the King left her side and retired to a chaise longue at the other end of the room.'

There was a moment's embarrassment in the morning. The maid was terribly upset because she had lost the Queen's nightgown. And when Geraldine put the matter to the King, Zog blushed. He said he had required the nightgown as proof of her virginity. Parliament required such proof. It was a matter of protocol and accordingly Zog had sent Geraldine's silk nightgown along to the President.

The birth of Leka I was celebrated by a military parade, the largest Albania had ever staged. As the people cheered ‘Our life for the King and the Crown Prince', a squadron of Italian planes swooped low over the city and white leaflets carrying a slanderous attack on King Zog fluttered down into the streets.

It was a difficult time for Zog. Mussolini's Fascists had presented him with a list of demands—military bases to be established on the coast and inland, the harbours and roads were to come under control of the Italian army, and Italian interests were to be observed by revising all civil service appointments. In return, Zog could keep the throne and receive a new loan.

Two hours after rejecting the Italian demands, the Albanian Parliament decided that Zog and his ministers must leave the country at once.

At 3 a.m. the Italians started their invasion on the coast south of Tirana, in Vlorë. Geraldine, who was still recuperating from the difficult birth of Prince Leka, had to be carried down the palace stairs on a mattress and bundled into a waiting car. So hasty was the departure that Geraldine left Tirana in only the nightgown she wore—the maid had packed her furs but overlooked the need for dresses and underwear. Geraldine and Leka sat in the back of a Chrysler. In the door the King bowed and kissed the baby on the head. To Geraldine he said, ‘Oh God…It was so short.'

The next day Mussolini's son-in-law, Ciano, who had attended the wedding of Zog and Geraldine, arrived in Tirana on a new errand. He rushed from the airport to the palace where he made his way to the Queen's suite. When he saw the bed linen stained by afterbirth, which still lay uncollected, ‘Ciano kicked it across the room, and with the anger of a wild animal, howled, “The cub has escaped!”'

In 1960, in the Bristol Hotel in Paris, Prince Leka was consecrated King before seventy representatives of Albanian groups throughout the world.

Although Leka had spent only three days on Albanian soil, he had been brought up in an Albanian household, attended to by Albanian instructors and nurtured on the idea that he was of nobility, a prince who one day would ascend to the throne. Among the cast of ‘father figures' Leka's mother had enlisted General Franco, the Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner, and Pinochet.

In Spain, to which the royal family eventually moved, Leka trains his Albanian exiles for the coming guerilla war—an idea that owes much to a morphine-induced dream of his father's. In 1961, while Leka sat by his dying father in a hospital bed in Paris, Zog's last words described the dream from which he had just awoken. He had seen Queen Geraldine, now ‘very old but still beautiful', standing at the prow of a ship headed for the quay at Durrës. In the same dream, Leka appeared in battle fatigues, leading a column of troops to win back the Kingdom.

11

IN ROME I had hoped to find an émigrés' quarter. I thought there might be a bar or a café used as a local hangout, a place where old soldiers in an alcoholic haze might create heroic home comings. I imagined a café with a memento like the Skanderbeg flag pinned to the wall behind the bar—in the spirit of Queen Geraldine's handful of soil scooped up to remember Albania with—and riotous, drunken evenings every year Independence Day wound round.

Instead, in via Asmaria I had met Nick, an earnest student of divinity and philosophy.

Across the crowded foyer in the consulate on via Asmaria I had caught his eye, and in the clamour that broke out with the sudden emergence of a consulate official leaving his office, Nick surfaced at my side.

In a whisper he asked, ‘Are you English?'

He was pale and thin. A quality of a life lived indoors had rubbed off, setting him apart from his ground-grubbing compatriots.

Later, after the consulate officials had declared an end to the day's business, we had wandered out to the entrance steps.

I was full of questions. About him. The refugees. I described to him the café with the flag of Skanderbeg pinned to the wall. Did he know of such a place?

He glanced back to the shabby foyer and touched a finger to his lips.

‘Not here,' he said.

We hurried off in light rain to find a trattoria.

Nick was my ‘first Albanian' and everything he had to say I took down. It was all new to me, and Nick's stories, which were full of intrigue, were exactly what I wanted to hear. The only disappointment was that the picturesque quarter I had hoped for did not exist. Nick gave me instead an address of a monastery belonging to an order of Franciscans.

I met him there the next day, and in a small room on the ground floor Nick explained that he had been in Rome only a few months.

The first thing he had done on his arrival was to discard his name, Ardian. A generation of youth had been named after the tribes of Illyria in a bid by the regime to trample out every shred of religious identity. Once in Rome Nick had got himself christened after Saint Nicholas.

The Franciscans were putting him up, and in exchange for board he cooked for the small order of friars. In between classes he busied himself with other menial tasks around the monastery.

Through Nick I met Friar Daniel Gjecaj, who had lived in Vatican City since fleeing the Communists in 1948. He was well into his seventies now, and the recent changes in his homeland hadn't done much to excite him.

He said, ‘You are going to Albania, but you won't find Albania. Only the family has survived.'

He had no wish to return. Nor was he convinced by the political changes.

‘Who are these people who call themselves Democrats? Where have they come from?'

He shook his head. There was nothing he had heard that gave him confidence for his country's future.

For a number of years the friar had broadcast from the ‘Albanie office' of Radio Vaticana. Some of these broadcasts Nick had listened to at the house of his cousin Kolec. For years Radio Vaticana had been a sworn enemy of the regime. Two or three times a week it broadcast the Pope's message, sometimes a mass, sometimes religious instruction. Other times the friar, who was a classics scholar, spoke of the country's arts and literature, all the while grinding away to undermine the regime's creation of ‘the new man'.

At Radio Vaticana I met Gjon Gjomarkaj, who as a small ‘silent, lithe' boy had waited on Joseph Swire in his father's house. The Englishman had climbed 2,000 feet above the Fani i vogel River to meet Gjon Marka Gjoni, the hereditary Chieftain of Mirditë and permanent chief of all the Catholic clans in northern Albania. Swire describes a sturdy figure in ‘a dark red sash holding a tobacco box and a silver mounted pistol'. The pistol was a gift from Zog, who had wanted badly to get the chieftain on his government's side.

Inside the stone cottage Swire had noticed a gramophone, of all things, a gift from the Italians, who at the time considered the passes of Mirditë to be of great strategic value.

Although the boy was now a white-haired man, Swire's description still applied. The once ‘silent, lithe' boy had developed into a quiet, haunted man, obsessed by what he had left behind.

In 1949, as a twenty-two-year-old, he had slipped into Greece over the Dardha Mountains near Korçë. Three times Gjomarkaj and his companions were ambushed. Gjomarkaj took bullets in his body—one bullet smashed his right leg leaving him helpless and immobile. Fortunately for him his companions had refused his invitation to shoot him.

Gjomarkaj met me in the lobby. His prim, dark trousers and tan sports coat suggested restraint and minimal fuss. He held out a hand.

‘This way, please.'

On the first floor we paused admiringly before a huge colour photograph, even larger than the one of the Pope downstairs, of Radio Vaticana's transmitter towers located about twenty kilometres outside Rome.

Then Gjomarkaj held open a door into a long corridor. As far as the eye could see, signposted above each office door were the various languages of Radio Vaticana's broadcasts—Croat, Polish, Czech, Slovaccio, Ukrainian and so on, the length of the corridor and resuming up on the next floor. Next to Lithuanie was Gjomarkaj's patch, Albanie.

‘Here,' he said, standing aside for me to enter his office, ‘here you see the free Albanie.'

Gjomarkaj's scarlet flag—like the one I had imagined in the expatriates' bar—sported the black-and-gold-braided eagle. The top of his filing cabinet was dotted with smaller Albanian flags from the pre-Communist era. On the wall behind his desk was a photo of Gjomarkaj's predecessor, ‘an extremely provocative broadcaster' killed by Albanian agents on via del Tratone near
il Messagero
in 1976.

In this way and others, Gjomarkaj took heart that the broadcasts were getting through. And then there had been the death threats, of course. Always a good sign. But even more encouraging were the letters sent by balloon. Listeners to Radio Vaticana's Albanie Service released balloons whenever the wind blew east to west. Some, he said, had even reached Switzerland.

I could imagine Gjomarkaj's grudge quietly festering away and never letting up. Whereas, by comparison, the strength of Nick's convictions could be alarmingly volatile.

One afternoon at the monastery he told me how a chance meeting with a Dutch evangelist in the park across from the Rozala Hotel had led him to embark on a kind of blood feud against Stalin. With the friar passively looking on, Nick listed the ingredients for his home recipe for dynamite to blow up the statue of Stalin in the Square of Shkodër. The Dutch evangelist had had some shattering news for Nick. He had not been baptised, and therefore, whispered the Dutchman, there could be no possibility of Nick making it to heaven.

As he told me this, Nick's face grew more grieved. His face turned whiter than usual and his lips quivered.

‘Do you not see? Hoxha tried to deny me eternal life!' he shouted. I felt him waiting for me to agree and offer solace. It was a similar uneasiness to the one I had felt when Gjomarkaj had suddenly opened the door to the Radio Vaticana chapel and watched me to see if I would cross myself.

Still, Nick had been more than helpful with names and contacts. He had fitted me out with a useful working knowledge of whom to seek out and whom to avoid. The former tended to be old priests with twenty, thirty years of prison under their belt. A sure sign in Nick's estimation of both their innocence and the strength of their conviction. He had written his family to expect me. I could hardly refuse, therefore, his request that I deliver a carton of cigarettes for his father, a radio for his younger brother, and for his mother, some Franciscan literature.

The reason I had come to Shkodër was Nick.

12

IN THE MORNING I stepped into a stinking toilet to avoid Terry and Don in the hall. I waited for their noisy departure in the lobby before coming down the stairs. It was a glorious day. Blue skies. Not quite warm. White splashes of sunlight caught patches on Taraboshi and Cukali, the mountains fringing Shkodër.