NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (40 page)

“We drove down from Zenica today,” an aid worker told me. Zenica was about forty miles northwest of Sarajevo. “Last year it took us ten days to drive from Zenica to Split, because of roadblocks and fighting. Today it took eight hours. Maybe things are improving!”

He was an Australian, traveling with his American wife, who was also an aid worker. She had a neighborly manner, and he was upright, mustached, and had a military bearing—he later told me he had been a soldier in South Africa. He was in his mid-forties, with the charity World Vision. His name was David Jennings. He and Theresa were making their first-ever visit to Italy, as a break from their aid project in Bosnia.

They asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m a writer.”

“Journalists are a pain,” David said.

“They all cover the same story—four guys in four separate cars go to the same place,” Theresa said.

“They come for the big stories, when they can get their face on the camera, with shooting behind them,” David said.

“I’m not a journalist,” I said. “I don’t work for anyone. I’m just looking around.”

“I went back to Australia for about ten days last January,” David said. “I looked at the paper, flipping the pages, and there was nothing about the war—nothing. I called the editor. I said, ‘Hey, mate. I’ve just come back from Bosnia, and I’ve got some news for you—the war’s still on!’ ”

“What sort of thing do you do?”

“I’m a logistician,” he said. “But I do everything. I mean, we all do. We have heart specialists driving ambulances.”

“Isn’t logistics about making things happen?”

“Yes. I coordinate shipments of food and equipment. My military background is useful for that. It takes patience, though. I mean, like waiting for six hours at a checkpoint because some jumped little guy pretends there’s something wrong with my papers.”

The problem was that all the borders were so blurred. Serb, Croat and Bosnian lines were close and continually shifting.

“Because I’m working in Bosnia they see my work as helping the enemy,” he said. “And they’re fussy too. In my office I have a Bosnian Muslim, a Croat and a Serb. They get along fine. But my interpreter was dealing with a freight forwarder in Zagreb over the phone. After a few minutes my interpreter handed the phone to me. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to me.’ The woman in Zagreb suspected—from the interpreter’s Serbo-Croatian accent—that he might be a Muslim. I asked the Zagreb woman for a reason. She says, ‘He is not speaking my language.’ ”

“I was thinking of going to Mostar,” I said. “But I was warned that it was dangerous.”

“You might have hit it on a bad day,” he said. “Hey, I was standing talking with some U.N. Protective Force (UNPROFOR) guys at Tuzla airport the other day. I felt a tug in my chest—a hard poke—and heard a bang and saw a slug spinning on the floor. Someone had fired at me.”

“But it bounced off?”

“I was wearing a flak jacket.”

“Who was the sniper?”

“Might have been anyone,” he said. “Probably thought I was UNPROFOR. They all hate them. They suspect them of helping the enemy, whoever that might be.”

Theresa said, “They try to demoralize people. That’s how they think they’ll win.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“Each side,” she said.

“Demoralizing” took the form of being beastly and unreasonable in uniquely horrible ways.

Later, in my cabin on the
Ivan Krajc
at midnight, twiddling my radio, I found an FM station broadcasting from Split in English, for the benefit of aid workers and U.N. soldiers. It was a war report, and it sounded as bland as a stock market update.

—and three artillery shells fell just outside the city of Tuzla today. There were no casualties. Small-arms provocation was reported in Bihac lasting thirty-five minutes this afternoon. Twenty-five people are still listed as missing in Sarajevo. Two shells struck a house in Gorazde—demolishing it. No one was injured. Two mortar bombs exploded in Travnik. It was agreed that the left bank of the Neretva River in Mostar be officially reopened after six
P.M
. tomorrow. One member of UNPROFOR was critically injured by sniper fire in
—

The soporific drone of the ferry’s engines mercifully eased me to sleep. I slumbered all the way across the Adriatic, and in the morning I was back in Italy, looking for a way by ship to Albania.

            
I
t was not until I was on board the ferry
Venezia
, among dowdy women wearing long trousers under their thick skirts and grizzled cheese-paring men in cloth caps and frayed track suits—both men and women had the faces of fretful tortoises—that I realized that I was at last on my way to Albania. I had rehearsed it all mentally with such thoroughness that the whole business seemed inevitable. I had bought a ferry ticket from an agent in Ancona. The ferry was leaving from Bari, two-hundred-odd miles down the coast. I went by train to Bari. Returning to a city I always retraced my steps. In Bari this meant the same hotel, a certain laundry, a certain restaurant, a certain bookstore, a stroll down the Corso to the port. The women at the laundry remembered me, and one said, “We think you’re an artist of some kind.” That was nice. But they expressed amazement that I was going to Albania, which is regarded with horror by the Barese.

Another man in Bari was franker. “Albanians are the filthiest,” he said.
Sporchissimi.
“And the poorest.”
Poverissimi
“Stay here!”

No argument could detain me. I was beyond being determined; I was programmed for Albania. I had my fifty-dollar ferry ticket. My clothes were washed. I had a stock of books and batteries for my radio. I even had a map of the place. I did not want to listen to any Italian’s opinions about Albania—none of the ones I met had been there. But it was only on the deck of
the
Venezia
as we headed east out of the harbor that I remembered that I had no visa for Albania, I hadn’t the foggiest idea where I was going, or why. All I had done was offer myself as a passenger. I had merely shown up and said:
Please take me.

But where? The importance of getting to Albania had preoccupied me to such an extent that I had forgotten why I was going. On board, I wanted to ask people what their intentions were in Albania, thinking that it would offer some clue as to why I was going. No one was very conversational. The passengers were seedy but calm. The Albanians muttered in Geg or Tosk and ignored me. They crouched over little paper parcels of food, sinister-looking scraps of meat and crumbly crusts of bread and mousetrap cheese. There were not many children, though one family with two children had among its possessions, packed into cardboard boxes, a rocking horse with green fur glued to it.

The decks of the ferry were crammed with stolen cars. I had been told by people in Bari that the cars on the ferry to Durrës had been snatched from streets all over Europe, given new documents, and exported to Albania, where they would be sold on the black market and then vanish down dusty roads. There were the usual aid workers and the vans from various charities making their weekly food and clothing run. But Italian aid workers were the opposite of solemn—they were truck drivers, smokers, shouters, practical jokers, goosing each other and laughing. They sprawled in the cafeteria, mocking the awfulness of the food (wet spaghetti, soggy salad, inky wine) and yakking, then one would say, “You recognize this song?” and would begin singing something sacrilegious in a falsetto voice.

I had the feeling that I was the only one on board who was just going for the ride. On deck I tuned my radio and listened to the news. “The trial of Ramiz Alia, former prime minister of Albania, started in Tirana today,” I heard, and told myself that my trip was timely, yet knew that I was kidding myself. I knew nothing of Albania except that for fifty years the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha had allowed few foreigners to enter and no Albanian to leave. Albania, cut off from everything, had a reputation for being one of the strangest countries in the world. With the great shakeup brought on by the Soviet collapse, Albania had changed—hadn’t it? It must have, because here I was, en route to the coastal city of Durrës.

The moon was up, the ship passed parallel to the shore, along a sea-level
string of lights that were the streetlamps of the coast road south of Bari. Then the ship swung east, into the darkness.

Hurrying from Croatia to Italy to catch this ferry, I had a sense of weariness, and wondered whether I had the stomach to push on. But the notion of going to Albania lifted my spirits, because I had never been there before and I knew nothing about it, and neither did anyone else. That in itself seemed a novelty, for here on the most heavily beaten path in the world, the shore of the Mediterranean, it was still possible to travel into the unknown.

At 6:30 in the morning I woke with a start in the tobacco-stink of my cabin and only then realized I had no porthole. I had to go on deck to see that we were in bright sunshine approaching the low green outline of what had been ancient Illyria. This dissolved as we drew closer, and now a brown cluttered headland loomed, the forehead of Durrës, ancient Epidamnus beneath it, with cranes and tenements. Nearer still, I could see the dome and minarets of a white mosque, my first glimpse of Islam on this trip. Another brown hill and at its top, a large white house, the palace of Ahmet Zogu, who in 1928 had styled himself Zog the First, King of Albania. Ten years later, with an ultimatum from Italy (whose monarch Victor Emmanuel called himself King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia and Albania), Zog was headed into permanent exile, Albania’s whole treasury in his luggage.

“Passport control,” a deckhand said to me, and pointed to a card table that had been shoved under the broken TV set in the lounge. Two unshaven men in dirty sports shirts sat there with a stack of passports, looking tough as they took turns thumping the pages with their rubber stamp. It was as though the whole aggressive ritual was intended to erode your confidence: the shirts, the flimsy table, the grubby men, the jumble of passports. And their pad was so dry the men had to pound it to make even a feeble impression with the rubber stamp.

My passport was flung to me and I went back on deck to see the
Venezia
moving stern first towards the dock so that the stolen cars and aid trucks could be off-loaded. Beside us there was a hulk sunken to its gunwales,
and a blond Albanian boy of about twelve or thirteen dived from it. He swam beside our ship, calling out for the passengers to throw money. He gagged and spat as the screws of our ship churned up swirling mud from the harbor bottom. The Italian truck drivers flung balled-up paper money and coins and soon there were four or five boys swimming for it and squabbling.

Knowing so little in advance, I had mentally prepared myself for anything in Albania, but even so I was shocked by Durrës. My first sight, as I walked off the ship, was of a mob of ragged people, half of them beggars, the rest of them tearful relatives of the passengers, all of them howling.

It was hysteria, and dirt and dogs and heat, but what alarmed me most were the people snatching at me. No one elsewhere on my trip had noticed me. I was so anonymous I felt invisible wherever I went. No one had ever touched me. Here they pounced. They took hold of my hand, tugged at my shirt, fingered my pen.
“Signor!”
“Money!”
“Soldi!”
“Please! You geeve me!” “Meester!”

They fastened themselves to me, pleading. I could not brush them aside—they were truly ruined. They looked hysterical, they were poor, ravaged, bumpy faced with pox scars—mothers with children, blind men with boys, old hectoring crones, all of them plucking at me. “Geeve me theese!”

Third World
, I thought, but it was the only Third World scene I had ever witnessed that was entirely populated by Europeans—the most dissolute and desperate and poverty-stricken and rapacious, lunging at me, following just behind me, demanding money.

I was a sitting duck for this attention. The Italian aid worker passengers had vehicles. They drove through the mob. The Albanian passengers dragging cardboard boxes had nothing to give. But even travel weary and plainly dressed, I looked prosperous compared to the ragged mob at the port, and worst of all I was on foot. They were all around me, in my face, snagging my clothes, their hands in my pockets.

Hurrying on, I pretended I knew where I was going. I found a path, cut through a junkyard, went across the railway tracks and followed them,
hoping to get to the train station, all the while passing curious people. Some beggars had stayed with me, still pleading, as I walked on into Durrës, which was a world of dust and ruination.

Nothing was right in Durrës. Even the trees were dirty and had rusted leaves; blighted and dying, most of them had the smashed, dilapidated look of the hideous tenements near them. Many limbs had been lopped and the ones that had been left were maimed. It was not that the trees looked dead, but rather that they had never been alive, just moth-eaten props on a cheap stage set from a show that had closed long ago. High weeds grew in the railway yard, and the coaches that I could see were either tipped over or else derelict, with broken windows. Bright sun bore down on everything and the stink that I had first noticed as I walked off the ship still hung in the air—it was a shit smell in the heat, an odor of decay and dust, of rotting clothes and even the earth—the dirt I was kicking as I hurried onward—had a rancid gasoline pong that was like the reek of poison.