Biografi (28 page)

‘Worse?'

‘She had feared something from a street mob. She has no fear for herself but for her grandchildren.'

‘Of course.'

‘She is convinced that her trial will have nothing to do with the charges, that it will be a political one,' added Illir. ‘My mother believes she will be the sacrificial lamb.'

49

IT WAS DRAWING close to Christmas now, although in downtown Tirana you wouldn't have known it. The power cuts continued as more and more electric appliances were brought across the border, overloading Albania's light-bulb electricity supply.

Thugs fought their way to the front of bread shops and sold loaves at a mark-up to those at the back, more often than not the elderly and infirm.

One morning Bill came down to breakfast with a long face. He had just heard from Kukës. The warehouse we had visited with Mustaph had been looted and set afire. A ten-year-old boy and a policeman had been killed.

The trees between Tirana and Durrës had been chopped down to the ground, and there was talk of another boat exodus.

It was time to look up Enver's place of exile, and on the outskirts of Tirana, with Diani, I found the former Emperor undergoing ‘rehabilitation'. Inside a foundry warehouse, a statue of Enver was lying ill-temperedly, face and toes pointed in the same direction, a Napoleonic hand thrust behind his back. Alongside stood Lenin; his arms had been torn off.
Dulla
had been scrawled on another bust of Enver in support of the rumours that Enver had been gay in his youth.

And here was the prized find. In a small reserved area lay remnants of the magnificent block of marble from which Kristaq Rama had sculpted his pharaoh. The foundry foreman said the ‘new' sculptors drop by and take what they need—and in this way the pharaoh has found himself re-created into ashtrays, lamp holders and small gift-sized elephants.

The new heroes were parked around the side of the warehouse. These were scaled-down busts of writers and poets who had led the Albanian renaissance during the Ottoman rule. Their bright new white alabaster surfaces had been left to dry out in the sun. Over their shoulders, across the railway line, the grey smudge dripping from the wintry branches belonged to the ugly housing blocks with their slit windows and cramped balconies stuffed with washing.

On my last Sunday in Tirana I did something that would have pleased Nick. I attended a church service in one of the classrooms of the University Publishing House. The congregation dribbled through the doors in their bright-coloured plastics and scarves. They shook out their umbrellas in the gloom of the foyer, where the light bulbs had long since expired, and where Diani's friends, the German apostles, waited in their dark suits to direct the traffic by torch into the classroom.

People shuffled into place behind the trestle tables. Outside, a boy held a stick insect up to a broken window, and it started to rain. An older man in the next row dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. As his discomfort mounted, a medical student took his pulse and nodded that he was fine for a moment. But the man went on wincing; then the pain would pass, and from behind I could see the bright, laughing blue of his eyes as he peered through the folds of his handkerchief at the young German pastor promising eternity and peace in heaven. Beside him his granddaughter sat on a bench and peeled a hard-boiled egg.

The congregation stood to sing and I found it surprisingly moving—to be in a classroom with ordinary folk whose simple hope was for something better than what they had known.

Diani had shopped around. She had tried the Lutherans and the Catholics. She liked the apostles because they provided medicine and sweets to every child they baptised. She didn't care for the American evangelical style which we had watched together on television, a crowd worked up to a fever at the Tirana soccer stadium during the summer.

‘Jesus is with us here, tonight. Can you say “Jesus”?'

Twenty-five thousand voices obediently roared back.

‘Let's hear that again. Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Let's all say, “Jesus is the Lord!” Let's say “Jesus is the King of Albania!”'

Later, in the foyer, I met the apostles, Wilfred and Helmut; they poured scorn on the Americans.

‘They came through here—filled the stadium, put on a big show, and left town,' said Wilfred. ‘We've been here six months. But we're not here to hand out gifts and parcels. Their souls are the important thing.'

Diani skipped away from the publishing house, gaily ignoring the rain, and laughing aloud at the joke of Helmut's name, which in Albanian translated to ‘poison' and ‘shit'.

I caught up with her to say goodbye. It was impossible to thank her enough. I pressed an envelope of American notes into her hand and she ran off up the street crying.

A final night out with Bill at the Petronella, a new private-enterprise restaurant tucked away at the end of an alley off the Boulevard of Martyrs, ended with us both drinking too much Bulgarian red wine. He told me Albania was his ‘last duty'. A desk job in Washington awaited him on his return. Sharon? She does exist. Bill popped a photograph onto the table of an attractive woman in her early forties. Sharon was rolling a pebble back and forth under her sneaker while she smiled at the camera. In the Petronella, Bill, glass in hand, smiled back pissy-eyed.

A final visit to Fatos and Brikena, and afterwards a look in the door of the Naim Frasheri bookshop on the ground floor. On every shelf were newly translated copies of Webster's American Biographies on ‘three thousand significant American lives'.

50

IN THE MORNING I climbed into a red taxi. Munz lowered his head in the window to make sure I had everything. Bags. Coat. Scarf. Passport. I had to unwrap Nick's mother's cake before he would believe that someone was actually taking food out of Albania.

‘To Italy of all places!' he laughed. He was happy; he was going home soon.

Outside Tirana we slowed down for some broken glass and I happened to look out at the right time to catch Mentor's Volvo, his neighbour asleep in the back, a pair of socked feet sticking up on the headrest of the front passenger seat.

In Durrës there was time to take the road winding up the hill from the old town to King Zog's palace. As we drew up to a courtyard, a soldier with bad acne and a mouthful of food rushed out, waving his arms to block our way.

I wound down the window and pointed to Zog's palace. ‘Is not Zog's palace. Is President Ramiz's summer house'. ‘Ramiz. Ramiz,' said the driver tiredly.

From a vantage point beneath Zog's palace, or Ramiz's summer house, Illir Ikonomi, along with a Durrës friend and a Finnish journalist, had watched the frantic mobs swarm up and down the wharf in search of a ship to board. Rumour had turned them from one end of the wharf to the other, like lemmings.

Illir had told me about it in Tirana, how his friend had suddenly upped and left them on the hill to join the scene down on the wharves.

‘My friend had always wanted to travel,' Illir said. ‘He often spoke of the foreign places he dreamed of visiting.'

Later in the day, Illir had gone to the man's family home to break to the parents the news that their son had boarded a ship for Italy. He hadn't yet started to explain when the son had turned up at the door with the full story.

On boarding the ship Illir's friend had been asked his occupation. Everyone had voiced relief when he said, ‘Engineer.'

‘What luck,' they said. ‘We're looking for an engineer.'

He had tried to explain what he had meant by engineer, that he was a mechanical engineer—not a ship's engineer. But nobody had wanted to hear this and he had been led down to the navigator's room—just to see what he could do to make the ship move.

Everyone aboard was getting nervous. They were anxious for the ship to depart before the situation changed. The mechanical engineer, aware of the urgency and against his better judgment, pressed a button and the ship began to move at a much faster speed than it should have, and minutes later the nose of the ship had struck the sea wall at the port opening.

There the ship stranded itself. Some of the would-be refugees had lowered themselves on ropes down the side and run along the sea wall, hopping from boulder to boulder. Others, too shocked to move, had sat down on deck and wept.

51

A LARGE CROWD had already gathered. The policeman checking passengers through leaned backwards against the tide of people. He saw my passport and nodded. I squeezed through and ran across no man's land for the customs house, where other passengers had gathered with their luggage.

Here the minutes ticked away. A soldier at another gate kept directing us back to wait in line at the side of the customs building. The ship was due to leave in another thirty minutes. None of us knew what was required, or how to go about boarding the ship. Occasionally the door to the customs house would open and an official would come out to smoke a cigarette in the cold sunshine. I tried the door half a dozen times, but the officials always bolted it after themselves.

One of the passengers, an impatient older man in a grey suit, suddenly rallied his family. They picked up their suitcases and I followed them around the side of the customs building. About a hundred metres up ahead were the rest of the passengers. They had been herded together about fifty metres from the ship.

In small groups we were grudgingly let through. It was never clear when to go; it was a case of waiting until the backs of the soldiers were turned and sprinting for the hold. Or quite impulsively, four or five passengers would suddenly make a dash, and the soldiers would rush to that end of the crowd to prevent more passengers following suit. They raised their batons and the untidy fringes of the crowd fell back.

In the hold of the ship I joined another line. But there was less frenzy here. The passengers relaxed and the line moved forward in a civilised fashion. At last, at the bottom of the steps, I presented my ticket for Bari. In the lounge I joined another line to hand in my passport at the purser's office for ‘reasons of security'.

Out on the deck I found a seat in the sun. The ship was still tied to the wharf, but everyone aboard had slipped into a different gear. They paused at entranceways to allow others through. They closed their eyes and basked in the sun. Further along the rail I saw the prostitute from the Dajti. She was in the same fur coat, but she had new company. A large fleshy-faced Dane was eating a sandwich, while his older companion cut up an orange. The woman wore sunglasses and she crossed her legs, and when offered a segment of orange she put it in her mouth but did not chew; she took the orange like a pill.

The ship was still tied up at the wharf but to all intents and purposes we had left Albania, and for some reason I felt compelled to write down the date in my notebook.

I had reached the point where Swire, fifty years ago, ends his book—standing on the stern of the
Lussino
and watching its wake trail back toward Durrës. He closes his account in a most wonderful way: ‘I went to the saloon to write the last page of my Albanian diary. When I had laid down my pen the fresh breeze caught and turned the written page. My Albania days were done.' But I still had unfinished business to attend to. I picked up Nick's mother's cake and my bag and found a table next to a window in the lounge.

There was a parting jolt from the wharf. The grille on the bar went up. Stainless-steel lids were noisily lifted off pans of paprika chicken, fresh lasagne, pasta, salads and golden chips. The next time I looked up, away to the port side, the Albanian coastline had melted into the mountains.

I tried to imagine the same moment aboard the freighters, during the ‘boat exodus'. Albania sinking into the distance, and up on deck, in hot, cramped conditions, the Albanians with their crazy notions as to what lay ahead, pieced together from hearsay and wild speculation.

I thought of Nick's map of the North Yorkshire moors, his poaching another's journey, the way he'd boned up on Sherlock Holmes for additional information on the moors, until eventually he had been able to imagine the landscape the dotted line passed through.

Performing a similar role, Cliff 's shortwave radio had helped to rein in the outside world.

My imaginative reach had been given an additional boost by Martinborough's founder, John Martin, who had named the streets after all his favourite places visited around the world. Kansas Street was the outer street on a grid designed after the British Union Jack, with streets named after New York, Rio, Genoa, Durban, Dublin, Strasbourg and Ohio.

For a time it had been a New Year's tradition to hold street parties, and Genoa's was always the most popular. The few people in Kansas who could be bothered dressing up in cowboy or hayseed outfits invariably ended way over in Genoa for pizza and beer before the night was done. There was accordion music and what people in those days described as ‘gaiety'.