“Crooked lawyers in Italy fix them up with new papers, and off they go,” Adrian said.
“Ask them how much this Mercedes is.”
But he wouldn’t. He said, “It is not a good idea to ask questions here if you are not intending to buy a car. They will wonder why you ask so many questions.”
“I suppose that’s my problem—asking questions,” I said.
“In Albania we have learned not to talk too much,” Adrian said. And he suggested we get back on the road.
It was a poor road, lined with rows of tree stumps. The trees, Adrian explained, had been cut and used for fuel. There were few other cars on the road—some carts, some horses and dogs and chickens, and people had the habit of walking in the road. The houses were much poorer than ones I had seen in Durrës and Tirana. But they had the same doomsday look, as though at a certain point in the growth of these villages they had been stricken. The people were not ragged—no beggars here—but there was a definite look of deprivation: women carrying water in tin containers, families hoeing, groups of people selling small piles of vegetables or fruit by the side of the road. At the town of Fier we stopped and walked to the market, where Adrian bought a pound of cherries. They were in season. We sat and ate them, and then set off again.
Remembering what the American diplomat had said to me about the
besa
and the blood feud, I asked Adrian.
“You’re confusing two things,” he said. “First of all,
besa
means a promise that has to be kept, no matter what.”
“Give me an example,” I said.
“All right. Suppose you give me your telephone number in New York and I go there, because you invited me and you gave me your
besa.
In that case, you meet me, you take me to your house, you feed me—because your
besa
was given with your invitation. You would never leave me on the street. You would look after me no matter what. You cannot abandon me!”
He was driving in a swerving fast-slow sort of way. If private cars had
been banned in Albania until 1990 that meant no Albanian had been driving for more than three years, and most of them much less, or not at all. The inexperience certainly showed.
“Revenge is another matter,” Adrian was saying—gabbling in Italian and swerving to avoid potholes in the rutted road. “We call it
hakmari or jakmari. Hak
means blood,
mari
means take.”
“Does it always involve killing?”
Adrian took both hands off the steering wheel and cupped them, a gesture that meant, “The answer to that question is so obvious I do not believe it is worthy of a verbal reply.”
I said, “Please give me an example of Albanian
hakmari.”
“All right. Someone does something to your brother. So you do something to him. Or, you just killed someone in my family, you miserable Pig—”
Adrian became shrill and definite when he personalized these examples. I was uncomfortable again, as I had been when illustrating
besa
he had said,
You cannot abandon me!
“In that case, I kill you,” he said, his jaw set. “Never mind how much time passes. It could be twenty years later. By then you are happy. You have forgotten what you did. But I have not forgotten. It is there, the pain in my heart. One day you leave your house—happy! It is a nice day! I go to you and”—he whipped his fingers against his throat—“I kill you.”
“Is it better if some time passes?” I said. “In English there is a proverb that goes, ‘Revenge is a dish that is best served cold.’ ”
Adrian smiled. He liked that. But he said, “Anytime is the right time for
hakmari.”
I saw from the map that we were approaching Vlorë, where I had been intending to stop. I mentioned this to Adrian. He did not react. His mind was on other things.
“My grandfather was a victim of
hakmari,”
he said. “He had an enemy. One day the man killed him. It was my mother’s father, about 1952 or so.”
“Was his death avenged?”
“What could be done? Nothing. Because there were no men in the family. My grandfather had three sisters and his wife and only daughters. Women don’t kill.” He kept driving. He said, “That was in Scutari.”
“Why weren’t you told to kill the man?” I asked.
“I couldn’t kill him. I wasn’t born until 1966. By then it was too late. I was the wrong generation. The matter had been forgotten.”
“I see. So vengeance has to be carried out by someone in the same generation as the victim.”
“Exactly,” Adrian said.
“Was
hakmari
practiced during the Hoxha times?”
“No, not in the Hoxha communist times. But in the past few years I have heard stories. Not a lot but definitely there are families ‘taking blood.’ ”
We stopped for the night at Vlorë. We had gone more than half the distance to Sarandë, and it was now late in the day. It was not a good idea to be on the road after dark in a country so inadequately provided for. Anyway, Adrian had a friend here, he said. Remembering my liking for the cherries he had bought at Fier, Adrian asked several people in Vlorë where we could buy some. Thirty cents got us a pound of ripe cherries.
The hotel at Vlorë had no name, and many empty rooms. The only guests were two Albanian families. They had spent the day on the stony beach. Adrian said he would stay with his friend and pick me up at seven the next morning. He left me the cherries and a stern warning to be very careful. “Lock your door at night.” I took his advice.
At Vlorë there was a large villa on a headland which had belonged to Enver Hoxha. Before darkness fell I walked towards it, but saw that it was guarded by soldiers and thought better of rousing their suspicions. Though people stared; no one in Vlorë followed me; there was dire poverty here, but no beggars. The people on the beach, baring their bodies to the gray sky, risking death by poison in the water of Vlorë Bay, were bony and pale. It was so odd to see these skinny white people crouched on the sand, frail little families at play—and these were the well-off Albanians, at this seaside town.
Probably because Hoxha had come here often, there were slogans painted on the sides of buildings. They resembled the so-called “big character” Cultural Revolution slogans I had seen in China, and in some cases the words were identical.
Glory to Marxism and Leninism
had been painted carefully in red letters on a wall in Vlorë, and other walls extolled Hoxha—
Glory to Enver Hoxha (Lavde Enver Hoxha)
and ditto with revolution, work, and Albania. No one had bothered to paint over the now out-of-date slogans,
but in some cases whole walls had been smashed. On a mountainside outside of Vlorë in stone letters forty feet high were the words
PARTI ENVER.
I drank a beer, I ate bread and stew, and in my room I listened to an update from the BBC about the trial in Tirana of Ramiz Alia, who was being tried on charges of “abuse of power” and “misappropriation of state funds.”
There was no sound at night in Vlorë. No wind, no passing cars, no music, not even a voice. The sea was silent: not even the mushburger waves that slopped on the shore of other Mediterranean places.
“So what did you call him?” I asked Adrian the next morning, as we drove out of Vlorë past the slogans to Hoxha. “‘Great leader’? ‘Teacher’? ‘Father’? Something like that?”
“Shokut,”
Adrian said.
“Shokut
Enver.”
“Meaning?”
“Friend.”
Amico.
That was wonderful. The man who had put a wall around the country and starved them and turned off the lights and terrified them and imprisoned them and wouldn’t let them grow beards and lived in lovely villas while they stayed inside their huts eating sour bread or cleaning their personal weapon (“in the event of an attack by the imperialists”), this man was “Friend Enver.”
“These days we don’t use the word
shokut
at all,” Adrian said. “It is not a good word, because of the way we used it before.”
“Then if you don’t use the word friend, how do you say ‘Friend Adrian’?”
“We use the word
zoti. Zoti
Paul, I might say to you if I greet you,” he said. “It means ‘god.’ No more friends, we are now gods.”
Until Vlorë we had been traveling on a shore road that was fairly flat, but the next day I saw that the southern part of the Albanian coast was mountainous. The steep cliffs dropped straight into the sea, and the road climbed behind them, becoming corrugated and unsafe, as it shook our car sideways to the edge. Rising to over two and a half thousand feet, the road was also bleak and windy, in places precipitous, at the edge of rocky goat-haunted ravines, where the only settlements were clusters of stone huts, many of them ancient.
Above Vlorë there were only tree stumps—the trees had been recently cut down. In the desperate and anarchic days of the previous year, when there was no fuel, people had cleared the woods and cut even the cedars that had been planted beside the road.
“Perfume!” Adrian shouted as he bumped along the side of a ravine, and the heavy scent of rosemary from the mountainside entered the car.
Almost four hours of this narrow mountain road; Adrian had a tape machine in his car but only one tape,
The Greatest Hits of Queen
, a rock group. Adrian liked the group. “Freddie Mercury,” he said. “He died of AIDS.” Towards noon, passing a remote spot, we saw a policeman hitchhiking. At first I thought he was at a roadblock, and my heart sank. But Adrian explained that the man was hitching a ride and that we were under no obligation to pick him up. Thinking that it might be useful to have a policeman on board, I said, “Let’s take him.”
The policeman had two containers of olive oil. They were so heavy he could scarcely lift them. Adrian helped him hoist them into the trunk.
“Ramiz Alia!” the policeman said. “He’s on trial!”
Adrian said nothing. The policeman abandoned his attempt at conversation. Clearly, Adrian hated him. We drove about twenty miles. When the policeman got out at a crossroads Adrian discovered that some of the olive oil had leaked onto the carpet of his trunk, and he cursed and swore. It was obvious that the Albanians had few personal possessions, but they were maniacally fastidious about keeping them in good order.
The villages on the southern Albania coast looked Greek—blocky stucco huts in hillsides. We passed a ruined church.
“What religion are you?”
“None,” Adrian said.
“What about God?” I asked, sensing that I sounded like a character in a Graham Greene novel.
“I really don’t know—the whole thing confuses me,” Adrian said.
We soon were back above the coast again—great bluey-green bays and steep sluices of whitish rock. There was no one in the coves. No boats, no people, no villages. There was no litter. These were the emptiest and most beautiful
beaches I had seen so far. Most of them were only accessible by sea, the cliff walls were too steep for any path. I was never to see such a coastline again in the Mediterranean. Nothing had happened here. Farther on there was a submarine base, with a large man-made cave cut into the mountainside at the shoreline for the sub to slide into. That was guarded, but that was the only man-made thing on this whole superb shore that still had the look of Illyria.
The Greek island of Ithaca, home to Ulysses, was only a hundred miles due south of here. Sailing back to Penelope, Ulysses would have seen these same cliffs and bays of this unspoiled coast.
We reached Sarandë in midafternoon. Adrian was edgy. He wanted to start back to Tirana immediately. I gave him the hundred dollars that we had agreed on and he dropped me at the Hotel Butrinti at the edge of town, just above the harbor.
“Is there a boat to Corfu?” I asked the desk clerk.
“Oh, yes. It will be here tomorrow at noon,” he said. “It is only one hour to Corfu Town.”
This was delightful news. The hotel was empty. I got a room and walked around the town, which was a strangely empty place, having been deserted by Albanians who had fled to Italy or Greece in search of work. There were a shirt factory and a carpet-weaving operation in Sarandë. There was a hospital. There were schools. What Sarandë lacked were people.
I met Fatmir, a friendly local man, whose parents had remained devoutly Muslim, he said, throughout the atheistic Hoxha years. He was fluent in English.
“I hope you will come back in ten years,” Fatmir said. “You will find that the houses are better, the town is better, the port is better, the food is better, and I am better.”
The strangest thing of all—stranger than the ruin of Albania, the bad roads, the skinny people, the rural poverty, the broken glass, the vandalism,
the cruelty, the unexpected kindness—stranger than all of this was the sudden appearance the next day of a boatload of tourists sailing into Sarandë harbor on a day trip from Greece. I had not seen any tourists for such a long time—none in Albania, none in Croatia, none in Slovenia, not even Trieste had tourists. I felt I had been through a mild ordeal and that I had made a personal discovery. At that point I bumped into a busload of package tourists on their day out.
I waited for them to return from their little tour of the ruins at Roman Butrinti, and then I sneaked onto the bus which was taking them back to their boat. I would simply pretend that I had been on their day trip and, just like that, would find my way to Corfu with the tourists.
These were nicer than the sort that in Gibraltar I had had to distinguish from apes, but still the genuine sunburned beer-swigging article. They hated Albania. They were disgusted by Sarandë—after my experience of the rest of Albania, Sarandë seemed pleasant, if a bit spectral. The tourists were shocked by the Hotel Butrinti. They mocked the Roman ruins.
Most of them were hard-up Britons who had come to Corfu because it was, they said, cheaper than a holiday at home. Kathleen and Sally, two older Irish women who worked in the same clothing factory in Dublin, had paid a little over four hundred dollars (£267) for two weeks in Corfu. This included their round-trip airfare from Dublin, as well as bed and breakfast at the hotel in Corfu. (“We couldn’t go for even a few days in Cork for that money.”)