Biografi (2 page)

3

ON MY SECOND day in Tirana a young medical student shows me where the statue of Stalin had stood. The key, he says, to blowing up a statue is knowledge of anatomy. Earnestly he explains how two tonnes of gelignite placed by the tyrant's feet will blow off the toes, but this, of course, amounts to no more than a glancing blow. In the fold of the dictator's arm a stick of gelignite will blow an arm sky-high—a crowd-pleaser for sure. But for the ultimate result a stick of gelignite must be placed in a hole drilled over the heart.

‘Over the heart. You understand?' And he jabs a finger in my chest—so that I may better understand.

The medical student had been amazed to discover that the Emperor's statue in downtown Tirana had been hollow and badly welded.

But none of these student interpreters has shown much heart for tracking down Shapallo. They stick to the Tirana they know. And, understandably, their preoccupation is with other things.

It is November and unseasonably cold. Each morning the city awakes to ice on the pavements and the small fires of the gypsy street cleaners. People talk of the approaching winter. It is like a medieval fear of what lies in the lee of the mountain. Old men sit around in cafés that have no food to offer. They smoke their last cigarettes, and long after the silty coffee has hardened to a rind in their cups they joke amongst themselves as to who will still be around by the end of winter.

This Shapallo, they ask, has he been working in Greece? Has he brought back supplies? Has he some good raki from Kosovo to sell? Does he know where we can find some cheap fuel? Why, they ask, should they know this man-lizard? This chameleon? Or else they ask again, who is it exactly I am looking for, a dentist or an emperor?

We have had enough of emperors, they say. It's dentists we need, and the undeniable truth of this is there to be seen in the few cracked teeth straggling to the bitten corners of their mouths.

At such moments I can feel the willingness of my student interpreters crumble beside me.

One such experience. After the guffawing subsides, an old man follows me out of the café behind the Tirana Hotel and takes hold of my coat sleeve. He begins to tell me something, and I redirect him to the interpreter, who is very excited: ‘This man here, he has heard of this person, Shapallo.' This is too good to be true. But there's the man's whiskery grin. There he is, nodding, full of assurances. ‘Shapallo,' he says. Then off he goes—explaining something at great speed. ‘Yes,' says the interpreter slowly. ‘There is such a person who can assist with information. A shoemaker.'

Some years earlier, I first came upon ‘Bird the First, King of the Sons of the Eagle' buried away in the Talk of the Town section of the
New Yorker
. Ahmed Bey Zogu was born in 1895. In 1925 he became President of Albania, and three years later was proclaimed King Zog. For his coronation he ordered an outfit which included rose-coloured breeches, gold spurs and a gold crown weighing in at nearly eight pounds.

But not even the most expensive refinery succeeded in convincing all of his legitimacy, and for the duration of his reign King Zog's preoccupation was ‘staying alive'. In all, he survived fifty-five assassination attempts. The first one came in 1931: a burst of gunfire greeted Zog as he left a Vienna opera house after a performance of
Pagliacci
. Although one particular assassination attempt did much to turn him into a national hero, when, as President, he was wounded three times outside the Parliament in Tirana. Without thought to his injuries Zog calmly walked back inside to the Parliamentary Chamber and, ignoring his bleeding, gave one of the ‘most brilliant speeches of his career [and] the longest'.

A king, of course, requires a queen. It is one of life's symmetries. Like salt and pepper. So Zog commissioned his four sisters, each princess a division commander in the Albanian Army (and none married themselves), to find a suitable spouse.

A single photograph of a penniless half-American, half-Hungarian countess, Geraldine Apponyi, who had been selling postcards in the Budapest National Museum for forty-five dollars a month, captured the King's heart.

One year after the marriage, Italy invaded Albania. The royal household fled to England as first Mussolini's Fascists, followed by the Germans, and in 1944 Enver Hoxha's Communists, took over the kingdom—formally deposing the King
in absentia
in 1946.

King Zog wasted no time in setting about the royal circuit. He was a friend of King Farouk. In Alexandria the Albanian King and Queen danced in the gardens of Farouk's summer palace. There were bridge and tennis parties to attend with other royal exiles.

In 1951 the King toured the United States and bought Knoll-wood, a grand Long Island residence. Italian Renaissance in style, it boasted several kingly attributes—tall Ionic columns and a winding stairway of marble. For the duration of Zog's residence a bearded Royal Guard was stationed at the gate—he would kiss the hands of visitors and gently turn sightseers away.

In 1952 the King was unable to convince the Nassau County authorities that as a monarch he had ‘sovereign immunity' from such trifles as paying taxes.

Three years later he sold Knollwood. Its grounds were ripped up by vandals in search of the gold Zog was rumoured to have escaped Albania with, and buried in the gardens of Knollwood. The mansion was later demolished. In the late sixties Nassau County acquired Knollwood and incorporated it into a wilderness reserve.

King Zog spent his last years drifting in and out of pain caused by his illness and dreaming of his restoration to the throne. He died in 1961 in Foches Hospital, Paris, broken in body and spirit. But not forgotten.

In 1990, a man living with an Australian wife in a ranch-style home outside Johannesburg issued a press release saying that he was Leka I, son of ‘Bird the First, King of the Sons of the Eagle', and that he was ready and willing to assume the throne of Albania.

4

IN A NUMBER of ways the Balkans had obtruded into my world. My summers had been spent in a place called Kansas Street in the Wairarapa, New Zealand, where my uncle had as a neighbour Cliff Dalziel. ‘A talented man', it was often said of Cliff, but ruefully, as though the promise of Cliff 's talent had coved off to disappointment.

Cliff was a shortwave radio operator. All his waking hours were spent in a shed playing with his radio gear. There was no boundary fence or hedgerow to speak of, and summer evenings I lay in the dry straw-like grass eavesdropping on Cliff while he worked his dials through the clouds of static, waiting for him to hit a pocket of sound, so pure and near that it often felt as though the voice of Radio Tirana had arrived at the bottom of the Pacific from the other side of a wall in a cheap motel room. Sometimes we heard Albanian or Greek music wavering out of Cliff 's shed. The song grew dim and faded and the static returned. Cliff would chase after it and try to woo it back with the dials but the song was gone. Then, maybe, the announcer's voice would come through strong—it was ninety-two degrees in Tirana. An astounding heat which I associated with older civilisations. In our part of the world heat got tossed around by winds twisting out of valleys and rushing across farmland.

I lay back on the lawn trying to imagine a heat that came out of a kiln. Then the voice from Tirana vanished inside a thin whistle out to the stratosphere, and from inside the tin shed I heard Cliff read out the time on his wristwatch: ‘Eight-thirty, February nine, nineteen hundred and sixty-three.' The transmission was recorded in a school exercise book which he carried to and from the shed.

There was a national league for shortwave radio buffs. Cliff had cartons full of QSL cards—these were verification cards— from the Venezuela telephone system, from a German institute of physics; he once showed me a slightly terse letter from the Israelis reminding Cliff that ‘their transmission was not intended for reception by the general public'. A 1970 letter from Radio Peking provided Cliff with a proud moment. The letter read: ‘Thank you for your letter and your congratulations to our country on the successful launching of the first man-made earth satellite…Our great leader Chairman Mao [has] pointed out, “The era in which Chinese were regarded as uncivilised is now over”.'

Cliff said he wasn't competitive about it, although within the league and amongst some members there was quite a bit of argument as to what was or wasn't a country. To earn points you had to tape a transmission. The champion shortwave radio operator with virtually an unassailable lead was a blind man who lived with his elderly sister at the bottom of the South Island.

For Cliff it had started out during the war, when he was a ship's radio officer sailing in the Adriatic. Each night he listened in to ‘fellco radio', used by the partisan groups inside Albania and Yugoslavia. After the war he wrote to those countries on whom he had eavesdropped—and with what I imagined to be a pen pal curiosity, Albania had written back.

For twenty-eight years Cliff monitored Radio Tirana's broadcasts. The clearest signal was the daily broadcast, which was aimed at America but which sometimes overshot to land in the Pacific.

But Cliff had also taken it upon himself to expand his duties to other things.

For nineteen years he paid rent on a small shop display in the world trade centre. The Soviets also had a prominent but largely ignored window front. Mothers with prams lost in the maze of the centre's corridors and wings suddenly found themselves confronted by Cliff 's Albanian window: dolls in folk costume, a bottle of raki, a plastic bunch of grapes. And for a colourful backdrop Cliff had mounted on display boards photographs of women in white cotton headdresses working in the fields. Lean, healthy-looking farm workers waved from the seats of tractors. Happy miners waved back along dark and narrow mine shafts.

Cliff and his wife, Bess, had a daughter and a son. We had not been close. I knew only the daughter's name, Grace. A crucial five or six years separated us. Her older brother left home and Grace was gone less than eighteen months later. My memories are of Grace studying till all hours, and of the bright halo her desk lamp created in the window. Once Grace left, it felt as though the Dalziel children had simply passed on to another world. I never saw them or heard them mentioned by their parents.

Driving to Cliff 's place, after all these years, I couldn't think of the son's name. But as I pulled up outside the Dalziel house, in another part of my memory I saw him quite clearly—eighteen or nineteen years of age he must have been, standing outside his house and staring in the windows unsure as to whether he had locked eyes with a friend or a stranger.

I parked and spent a moment looking at my uncle's old house. Smaller, plainer than I had remembered. The new owners had let the garden go. On Cliff 's side of the boundary the tin shed was gone, although a very tall radio aerial rose at the side of the chimney.

I was intending to go to Tirana and I had a manila folder of photographs to show Cliff—of young men, naked to the waist, dragging themselves from the water in the Albanian port of Durrës. There was a boat going to Italy and everybody wanted to be on it. In the photographs people cling to the sides of freighters. Others are climbing up ship ropes. There is one photograph of a woman with a baby tied to her belly; she is hauling herself and the child, hand over hand, up the rusted side of a freighter. The harbour is white with splashes. According to the photographs, bodies fall like torpedoes—resignedly and without fuss. Among the crowd gathered on deck there is no excitement. There doesn't appear to be any backslapping—or even the ‘Thank God, we've made it' sentiment which you might expect. Instead, the crowd in this photograph reminded me of high jumpers, successful so far, but for the moment content to sit on their haunches to see who else will make it.

The other Reuters photographs were of exhausted men and women resting on a mountain pass high up in the winter snow and ice of the Pindus mountains. Men, women, children, small babies swaddled in blankets, walking the ‘freedom corridor to Greece'.

Cliff was dismissive. The photos were of ‘good-time boys wanting jeans and discotheques'. The country was in the hands of reactionaries. Everything had gone to hell.

He spoke of the country falling to saboteurs, foreign agents, Fascists. Extravagant language which pressed the buttons to another era—to grainy films of the forties, of smoky rooms, women with obscure accents, troubled intellectuals who dabbled in explosives. And yet Cliff was none of these things. The last time I had had a studied look at him was two years previously. A photo had appeared in the local newspaper of Cliff staring gravely back at the community. In the foreground was a cake with lit candles to mark the woodwork teacher's retirement. It was a straightforward head and shoulders, but you knew there was a flat carpenter's pencil stuffed down the inside of his walk socks. I also seemed to recall a scar on his knee from a brush with a lathe. Most of all, you sensed that the frosty distance between the blackboard and the first row of desks would accompany Cliff into private life. It had to do with his bushy eyebrows, I think. His eyes, sheltered underneath that stiff ridge, gazed out over the classroom, suspicious, and forever sensing laughter behind his back.