Biografi (11 page)

‘You are interested in such things. Gjyzepina told me.'

We slow down for another cart piled high with hay, and in the brief stillness his words and sentences are delivered in a comprehensible form.

Some years ago, he says, an off icer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs had approached him with a request for information. The question of refusal had to be balanced against consideration of his family's prospects, and Marcello had tried to hedge.

Each day the same man had come to him with the same request. ‘Please, Marcello, what can you tell me? About anything, anyone. Tell me about your neighbour.'

Each day Marcello shrugged and said, ‘We'll see.' Time passes, and he begins to wonder if he has won this battle. The
sigourimi
stops visiting. The pestering ends. But shortly after this, Marcello learns that he is being tailed, that his conversations are being noted.

The lorry has started to move off again and Marcello is a torrent of words. The hay bales pass at eye level as the truck overtakes the cart. The breeze picks up, the passengers press together, words fly through the air.

This is the last bit that I catch: the final revelation. His neighbour had placed a listening device in the ceiling of his family's living room.

‘My neighbour!' he says.

The wind grew stronger and we herded closer together. Marcello stood tall with his shirt collar open to the bruising cold, and I crept away to thoughts of Cliff.

I had looked him up with the sincerest of motives. I had wanted information of the most obvious kind—where to go, some useful phrases: ‘Milk, no sugar, please.' What to eat, what not to eat, whom to meet, whom to avoid. And as expected, Cliff had graciously come through for me.

There were the surprises that come with establishing contact with anyone after a number of years. I mean Cliff 's behaviour, which, when all was said and done, I had thought no more than mildly eccentric. For example, his forceful invitation to exchange my shoes for his range of rubber jandals at the door. The jandals and the living conditions in the basement were curiosities, peculiar to Cliff. There had been no means, or even the thought, of tracing them to another place.

The ritualised hospitality, the boiling of water over Bunsen burners, the insistent invitations to eat more, more and more. The same worrying over details, the placement of cups and the order in which the coffee followed the raki, the cake coming after the sour pickles, the piles of rubber jandals behind every doorway—all the things I had thought peculiar to Cliff had popped up at Simon Pepa's house, then again at the Markus' and Gjyzepina's.

And then there was Cliff 's appearance. His period look. The wild mane of hair and the sideburns he'd grown to reconstruct himself in the image of Balkan Man. But none of this had seemed particularly obvious to me at the time. Bess had more than hinted: ‘How Cliff has changed.' But nothing had quite the impact of those first glimpses at Durrës, those bedraggled locks of hair, the triangular sideburns and frayed bell-bottoms. Until then I had had no idea of the extent to which Cliff had entered into the spirit of his adopted homeland. But certainly after Durrës, and perhaps even before then, I had sneakily known that I wouldn't be able to leave Cliff out of this.

Cliff had been helpful with contacts, one of them Illir Ikonomi, whom Cliff had described as responsible for writing replies to Radio Tirana's worldwide correspondents.

I had found Radio Tirana a short distance from the Hoxha Memorial, in a residential street. Building had commenced on the new Italian embassy opposite, where a plainclothes man with an AK-47 patrolled that side of the street.

For an acquaintance of Cliff 's, Illir was not at all what I had been expecting. A short, squat man with frizzy hair, he had met me in the lobby of Radio Tirana, wearing a denim jacket and jeans, in stark contrast to the darkly uniformed security guards who rigorously controlled the flow in and out of the building.

Of even greater surprise was his faint American accent. And a little later, in what suggested a remarkable transformation for a former broadcaster of propaganda, he mentioned in passing that he was now a stringer for Reuters.

We climbed the stairs to the foreign service floor. Radio Tirana broadcasts in twenty-two languages—among them Persian, broadcasts of which had started around the time of the Iranian Revolution, Illir said. In those days Tirana had been hopeful that the Iranian revolutionaries would choose the correct path. The broadcasts had been designed to guide them on this matter.

Cliff had shown me photographs of Radio Tirana's transmitter towers outside Durrës. I remembered the way he put on his glasses and held up the towers as examples of brilliant Albanian engineering. But Illir now told me that the towers had been built by the Chinese.

Illir had started with Radio Tirana's first broadcasts to China in 1978.

‘This was at a time when relations with China had deteriorated. There were ideological issues at stake,' he said. ‘The duty of the China service was to try and convince the Chinese people that their path was the wrong one.'

However, the service failed to receive a single letter from China. Not even a postcard. There were some very sound reasons for this. One, he said, was that the broadcast was barely strong enough to be heard in China. Two, shortwave radio sets were rare items in China.

Illir seemed to find this amusing, too. The idea of providing a broadcast which had no hope of reaching its targeted audience had kept him fully employed for years.

Response to the station's other broadcasts was considerably better. Radio Tirana received seven thousand letters annually.

‘Well, that's not bad, is it?'

‘Radio Vaticana receives annually one hundred and twenty thousand letters,' he said.

We wandered along the foreign service floor to the news room. Ancient Imperial typewriters sat on desks in a small cramped space. On the walls were old maps—on one it was still possible to find Rhodesia.

I happened to look out of the window and caught sight of a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder, walking over the rooftops.

Illir shrugged.

‘Security,' he offered. Otherwise he had no idea what the man was doing, stalking the rooftops.

‘And this here is my desk.' Then he turned and introduced me to the young man sitting opposite, at the ‘Turkish desk'.

In the studio, they were mixing the previous day's ‘Beatles concert' performed by Albanian musicians.

‘Why the Beatles?' I wondered.

‘Why of course, to show the Beatles have arrived in Albania.' He managed to grin.

17

AROUND THE TIME of the Beatles hits ‘Love Me Do', ‘She Loves You' and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand', Harry Hamm, the first German reporter allowed to visit Albania since the war, had come away with descriptions of ‘golden busts of Enver between the palm fronds or the eucalyptus leaves…Enver's picture was hung alongside the sleazy beer tent on the beach, as a pennant at the edge of a football field, or decorating an archaeological collection in a provincial museum—even walls of cowsheds on collective farms'. Hamm was continually surprised by organised groups ready to chant Enver's name whenever the slightest opportunity arose.

Even now, six years after the Emperor's death, it was still possible to find traces of the person Shapallo had had to measure up to.

The morning after I arrived back from Shkodër I wandered across to the Enver Hoxha Memorial. It was extremely cold, and a paper-thin ice cracked under the wheels of the few early-morning cyclists.

Although it had been given a new name, the new National Cultural Centre did nothing to conceal features which so manifestly honour a pharaoh. The huge pyramid-shaped edifice of glass and marble had been designed by Enver's architect son-in-law, Klement Kolaneci. You enter at basement level and climb two flights of stairs to the main display area. Up until a few months earlier visitors had caught their breath here and gazed across the marble floor to a twenty-five-tonne sculpture of Enver.

The Emperor, in ‘deified form', is still there to be seen in old postcards on sale downstairs. In these, a strip of red carpet marches across the marble floor to the feet of the seated Emperor. In the postcard sculpture, I noticed, Enver's genial features had been given a firmer line; a feeling of intractability is further conveyed by the sculptor's placement of a hand on each knee.

Since the Emperor was removed, the light that showers down from a copper ceiling, shaped into a star to reflect the world's five continents, these days falls onto a faded block.

On the upper floors most of the display items had been removed—but not all. Enver's Fiat Millicento, the one reputedly used by him during the war, was still there, a brilliant emerald finish with a black trim, as shiny as new, on flat tyres.

Around one corner the man himself gave me a terrible fright. A mere life-size sculpture of Enver standing, like a figure from a crowd, with his hands in his pockets.

Bits of sticking plaster covered the walls. Nearly all the photographs had been taken down and stored.

On the next floor, I did find a few photographs still up. One spectacular photo of a May Day procession showed thousands of Tirana schoolchildren moulded into the letters of PARTI ENVER marching down Stalingrad Boulevard.

The real surprise, however, was the library. It had been pretty much left alone. Obviously it had been designed to be viewed at a distance, a library as vista, rather than one in which books were meant to be picked up and handled, because every book in the Hoxha collection was not what it appeared to be. The chapters on
Questions of Agrarian Politics in the Soviet Union
bear a cover with the name Herman Melville. Alain Guerin's
Le Général Gris
contains upside-down pages filled with sketches of generators. Emile Zola's
Reconte par sa fille
considers political deviation in the Soviet Union.
The Life of Tolstoy
tackles the problems of collectivisation.
Histoire de l'Art
contains Stalin's thoughts on Lenin. Robert Kemp's
Life of the Book
turns out to be a dissertation on ‘liquidation of the Kulak [the wealthy peasant class] in the Soviet Union'.

Also in the library, a faded reproduction had been blown up to such a size that the screened dots were visible. The photograph had zeroed in on a section of Spanish Party of Labour supporters at a rally in Madrid. Presumably the photograph had earned its place as proof of the Emperor's popularity abroad.

The overall desired effect had best been achieved in a video which pilgrims to the memorial were encouraged to buy as a souvenir of their visit. The video begins with a bird's-eye view over the pyramid. Slowly the camera eye descends and we enter the ceiling to choral music, and there he is, the Emperor in a haze of golden light. The choral music fades away and in cathedral silence we are left to gaze, at a respectful distance, at Enver's twenty-five-tonne presence.

Albanians had shown a partiality to kings and queens, and in the twenties emissaries had been sent abroad to shop for likely candidates.

A Colonel Aubrey Herbert, about whom little is known, was nevertheless a candidate for a short while. Another was the British long-jump champion and cricketer C. B. Fry, who during a visit to a Balkan dignitary in Geneva was asked of his interest in the kingship.

The cricketer wasted no time in accepting but fell out of calculation after a disappointing assessment from a visiting Albanian bishop.

Several London newspapers took up the cause, prompting a number of unsolicited applicants. Among these were a naval cadet and a dancing instructress.

A more likely contender was the First Earl of Inchcape, whose lunch at his castle in Ayrshire was interrupted by his butler with news that a visitor from London had arrived to offer the Earl the throne of Albania.

The Earl wiped his mouth with a napkin and asked, ‘Where is it?'

A letter of formal offer arrived the next day:

I do not know whether this is the first time in your career that you have been offered a kingdom, and I fully realise of course this is a matter that you could not consider seriously, especially in view of the fact that the new King would be expected to do all in his power financially and politically to help in construction of railways, roads, schools and public buildings throughout the country.

Perhaps next time you are cruising in the Mediterranean you would feel drawn to put in at Valona or Durazzo in order to express your sentiments, whatever they be, in connection with the offer which I am seriously putting before you.

In any case, if you turn it down entirely, perhaps you would feel called upon to suggest the name of some wealthy Englishman or American with administrative power who would care to take up the cudgels on Albania's behalf, thereby securing the honourable position as Albania's King.

Inchcape's reply was as follows: ‘It is a great honour to be offered the throne, but I'm afraid it is not in my line.'

Last night Marcello turned up at the Dajti to tell me that King Leka's representative was in town. An American professor, Nderim Kupi.

‘Nephew of Abas Agha Kupi,' he said portentously.

Marcello had heard the King's representative speak at the Tirana University campus that afternoon, as well as in Shkodër, when dinner with the Markus had prevented me attending.

Marcello said everyone had been handed posters of King Leka I—to familiarise themselves with the Albanian King. There in the Dajti lobby he unfurled a poster of a tall, sombre man in a general's uniform.

I checked with the desk, then with Marcello walked briskly across Skanderbeg Square to the Tirana Hotel, and the desk clerk there said, ‘Yes, we have a Nderim Kupi. He left the hotel half an hour ago.'

‘To go where?'

‘The airport, sir.'

18

KINGS AND QUEENS, as well as witches and goblins, were staging a comeback—this was the news coming out of Shtepia Boteuse Nairn Frasheri, the State Publishing House.