The Hotel Years

33. A Meeting with President Ahmed Zogu

On Saturday at five in the afternoon, I go to meet the president of the Republic of Albania.* His house is under military guard. The sentries salute. His aide is waiting in the ante-room. He is young, slender, a major; pleasant, briefed and ready to talk about the weather, the Albanian landscape and the perils of malaria: what you call an aide.

In the president’s room there is a portly, clever, older gentleman, who is the foreign secretary. He functions as interpreter and minder. The president wears the uniform of a general. Following some rule that insists a head of state needs a desk, Ahmed Zogu steps out from behind his. Greetings are exchanged. I am engulfed by an armchair. The president tells the minister in Albanian that he is happy to welcome the representative of a great German newspaper to his country; the great German people can be assured of the sympathies of the little Albanian people. The minister relays it to me, in French. The president permits me to travel the length and breadth of Albania free and unhindered, and with the support of the state. The minister repeats it in French. A bow. Another bow. Another. At this point, Ahmed Zogu switches to German. (He once served in Austria.) Had I been in Albania long. How long I anticipated staying. When and where I proposed to go. He desired nothing from reporters but the truth. The truth, I replied, was relative. Something that was true to one person could be a falsehood to another. Certainly, German reporters were obsessed with the need for truthfulness.

I had no particular questions for him — I could answer them all for myself. Interviews are an alibi for a journalist’s lack of ideas.

I extricate myself from the armchair. Smiles wreathe three faces. A bow. Another bow. Another. Sentries. Salutes.

As far as the ceremonial of the audience goes, the Albanian version is indistinguishable in point of ritual, custom and awkwardness from those of any other country. Ahmed Zogu is younger than most European presidents; he is a tad over thirty. He has had a richer, more dramatic life than most Europeans his age. He has dead enemies on his conscience and living ones at large in his country. This last, again, is common to statesmen the world over; the former — more the dead enemies part than the conscience — is an Oriental speciality. Ahmed Zogu looks harmless enough, tall, as representative as he needs to be, and oddly, blond. The blondness overlies the Oriental features like a mistake. The posture he adopts when giving audiences is more the result of caution than any personal confidence. The sparseness of his speech, the slowness of his tongue, the empty politeness of his questions, all are the expression of an insufficiently practised and therefore all the more rigidly adhered-to diplomacy. He strives — for no good reason — for a crown-prince-like banality.

His military abilities are said to be small. In the Great War he did not, contrary to the claims of a swiftly circulated legend, enter Durazzo at the head of a column of Albanian troops. But in this country where every tenth peasant is a military genius, and every second a dead shot with a rifle, it is difficult to shine through military gifts. He is said to be a ruthless dictator. But in Albania, where every warlord has aspirations to be a dictator, every landowner his vassal, and anyone who can read and write his secretary, there is probably no other dictatorship going than the ruthless kind. Ahmed seems if anything less dictatorial than the people around him, who are more experienced, clever, and ruthless than he is, and many of whom have undergone a thorough education in these qualities under the Turks. Of all the qualities that underpin rather than grace dictatorship, the president of the Republic of Albania has perhaps only worry for the future of his country — understandably, in a country where a man doesn’t even have to be dictator to fear a casual bullet. Further, Ahmed has enjoyed lavish hospitality from the South Slavs, having “conquered” Albania with the help of South Slav bands before shortly afterwards concluding the familiar pact with Italy. But for more than 800 years most of the influential men in the Balkans have not refused money, especially when offered by two opposing sides — and why should Ahmed be the exception here? The selfless friendship of the South Slavs has not yet been proved, in any case. But even if I (rightly) question the selfless patriotism of Ahmed, in many points the selfish ambition of the president tallies with the true needs of his country, which, faced with the choice between putting itself in the care of a more cultivated country or one still fighting with its unresolved internal difficulties, chooses the former. Further, the president is accused of plastering his image on walls, stamps and coins everywhere. But even in more developed nations, the widely circulated likeness is still seen as the best means of establishing oneself in the mostly brief and ungrateful consciousness of an electorate.

In any case, it is impossible to judge the circumstances of an Oriental state, whose history is oppression, whose ethics are corruption, and whose culture is a mixture of native bucolic and archaic-romantic naïveté and the recent importation of intrigue, by the criteria of a Western democracy. If one suddenly found oneself back in the Middle Ages, it would be similarly fatuous to be exercised about the burning of witches.

One should try to judge Ahmed with an unprejudiced eye as an expression of his surroundings. One should bear in mind that he is the scion of an Albanian noble family that was in power in the seventeenth century and before — and presumably not with democratic methods then. One should bear in mind that a parliament in Albania can only be convoked in one way, the way that it is presently convoked. It will be a “parliament in name only” for at least another twenty years. It is just as open to the influence of cliques, the will of the head of state as the South Slav Skupština, and just as powerless as the parliaments in Budapest or Ankara. One should bear in mind that the rivals and enemies of Ahmed Zogu, some of whom I know personally, are no more Western than the man himself. Of the nine hundred and twenty Western-educated men who have left the country since Ahmed’s accession, of the seven politicians who have fled to the South Slav Republic since 1925, of the twelve who since 1922 have lost their lives, I presume that none would want to exercise power in a different way than Ahmed Zogu — and I don’t condemn them. Because in Oriental politics, and Albanian politics in particular, self-defence is a very broad concept, and one that plays almost the same role as reasons of state do in Western Europe. A long and laborious process of education needs to take place to make citizens out of shepherds, chieftains, warlords and religious fanatics.

Whether or not Ahmed Zogu is able or willing to take in hand this education is anyone’s guess. Today even his ties to Italy make him nervous. He is no longer able to play off Italy and the South Slavs against each other. There is nothing he is more anxiously awaiting than an olive branch from the South Slavs. But the South Slavs are bitterly readying other men and methods. Italy is more concerned with protecting its own interests than Zogu’s life. And so this young man, who has already had to suppress three revolts, in his well-cut general’s uniform, with an immense allowance, in a by local standards palatial, by ours middle-class home, surrounded by a lifeguard whose loyalty is as relative as everything else in this country, advised by politicians whose cunning was sharpened and whose character dulled in Turkish service — this young man who might have led a carefree student existence in Paris, is stern and trembling, and awaiting a fourth revolt. Most of all, one doesn’t take exception to the loss of life he is said to have been responsible for, so much as the sums of money he has obtained. But then again — if he didn’t have them, then they would end up with others who would have deserved them even less; the small but lardy layer of alphabetical leeches, the Turkish scribes, the corrupt enablers of corruption.

Tomorrow may see Ahmed Zogu still in power, and the day after gone, and someone else in his place, who would be almost indistinguishable from him.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 May 1927

* The recipient here of J. R.’s dusty cool had himself made king the following year (King Zog I), remained in power until 1938, and finally died in exile in France in 1961. He is buried in the Cimetière Parisien de Thiais, where Roth lies too. He was the object of some six hundred blood feuds — vendettas — and survived fifty-five assassination attempts.

34. Arrival in Albania

The sea is calm, the clouds hang in the sky as though nailed there, a ghostly boat skims across the placid surface towards the ship as though drawn on an invisible rope to collect me. There are only two of us disembarking here: a man hoping in this land of beards to sell Gillette razors, and myself.

Where terra firma begins there is a little wooden hut with a picture-book chimney from which the smoke goes straight up, as though drawn with a ruler. It’s seven in the morning; wooded, green, bare, steel-blue mountains frame the horizon; cryptic larks flit about the shiny blue sky; the hut, like many attractions these days, has a guest-book; sitting over the book is a man in a black uniform, rolling himself a cigarette, and this is the Albanian border police. A master of the alphabet, but unused to writing, he sits there, whiling away the time of the new arrivals by painstaking scrutiny of their passports. A stooped Levantine chauffeur is kept waiting in the Ford he proposes to drive until the policeman has got to the end. I cut short his study by offering to set down my name for him.

Then, in a dense cloud of dust, amid the thunder of continually exploding tyres, thrown up and down by authentic Ford springs, I am taken along the road to Tirana. Each time a tyre needs changing, I get out, watch the dust settle and the scenery re-establish itself, mountains of a spectral violet, meadows of a twice-done green, sky of a dependable blue, a sky of cloth, a sky without wrinkles, a taut, carefully ironed arc. Workmen are repairing the road. There are always two hunched over together. Like children in kindergarten they collect little scoops of sand on their tiny shovels or in their bare hands, pour it into scars and potholes, sprinkle a few stones on top, wet the whole thing with water from a watering can and stamp it down with their bare feet. As soon as our Ford has passed, they can start the game again.

It’s not long before we come to some soldiers. To see them march! In yellow-khaki columns, with steel helmets on their heads, rucksacks on their tired backs, burned by the sun, sweating and singing, they are marching for their new fatherland to Durazzo to exercise, escorted by an Albanian version of Mars with leather puttees, first lieutenant and spare uniform. On the juicy pastures a herd of cloudy white lambs is drifting about. Rams with ornamental curved horns, black oxen, a kind of beast of the underworld, the flocks of Hades. Either side there are telegraph wires, strung not on masts, but on crooked bare trees, which have been lopped and cropped. They once used to stand by the roadside, a home to birds, stopping places for evening winds; now they are redesignated as telegraph poles, fitted out with little white china panicles, and equipped to transmit journalistic reports — the twitterings of political sparrows — to Europe. On the left-hand side there is a set of rails, a narrow-gauge memento of the Austrians in the Great War, today given over to decay and the rusty tooth of time.

Finally a black-uniformed policeman, who can speak German, emerges from a white hut, takes our passports, and promises to have them left for us tomorrow morning in the police station at Tirana.

So here is Tirana, the capital city of Albania. On the right a mosque, on the left a rudimentary café terrace where guests bake and fezzes talk. The mosque turns out to be a barracks, soldiers with guns guard themselves. Every hotel room is taken, journalists have hurried here, and diplomats and parliamentarians, officers from England and Italy. Parliament is in session, Tirana is a burial-pit for sensation, imbroglios are on the street, the whole country is an apple of discord. Good citizens walk down the middle of the road, armed with muskets against sunstroke, heavy drum-revolvers stuck in wide, often doubled and tripled red sashes. Mules, laden with filled panniers, dawdle along the pavement, and wait outside shops like dogs while their masters make purchases. Here comes the majestic figure of the commander-in-chief of the Albanian army, Jemal Aranitas, mounted on a noble grey steed, little dark shoeshine boys fall over each other to get out of his way, a squire follows him, only a moment ago he was addressing the army, that’s why their marching was so sorry, no state without a general, no general without a grey steed. Gold sparkles on his shoulders, he greets acquaintances at cafés with a casual wave.

A man turns up by the name of Nikola, who lets me a room. The bed has all four legs in petrol to keep the cockroaches at bay, the window is cracked at the bottom, and replaced at the top by a mosquito net, my neighbour is a trumpeter. He is a member of the orchestra that plays outside the castle every afternoon.

A policeman with snow-white gloves stands in the middle of the road, in case of traffic.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 June 1927

35. Tirana, the Capital City

The inhabitants of Tirana love music and flowers. You can see the men going around with roses in their mouths. They seem to use them as an extra buttonhole.

A section of the populace has devoted itself to brass instruments. Brass players — horns for the fatherland — have been recruited into the Albanian army. The soldiers’ days begin with reveille and end with taps. Music keeps the swing in their stride.

The president has his very own personal band. The bandleader wears a pince-nez and hails from Trieste. The players are from Korça, in the melophile south, and from Czechoslovakia, which in the days when it was still the Kingdom of Bohemia used to supply the Army of the Dual Monarchy with the most sublime band sergeant majors. Every musician is paid fifteen napoleons a month. The acquisition and maintenance of the gorgeous uniforms — black with gold trimmings — is each individual’s responsibility. On his cap every musician wears the familiar emblem of martial music: a golden lyre.

At seven in the morning, just as the soldiers are tooting and parping away, the musicians get up like so many larks, and rehearse passages of marches and overtures in the middle of the high street. The local inhabitants have petitioned the courts on six separate occasions to have the practice moved to a meadow outside the city. But on six separate occasions they have forgotten to attach arguments to their petition. Nothing works without arguments.

Men who are neither in the army nor in the band are devoted to the mild plinking of the mandolin. They have for the most part been to America. There they had their teeth filled with gold, and bought themselves stringed instruments. They sing a song of bananas, to prove that they have seen the world, perhaps also as an expression of their painful longing for America, which they left on account of their painful longing for Tirana. Their hearts are still bobbing on the ocean wave, but their wares, which consist of combs, mirrors, letter paper, are in Tirana. A mandolin is a sheer inevitability.

They sit outside their shops in the sun for hours on end. It’s very quiet. Musical predilections aside, Tirana is tranquil enough. When there is a lull in the blare, you hear the cocks crow, the hammers of the blacksmiths in the bazaar, and the regular summons to worship from the muezzin. The sun scorches down on the streets. The dust is baked in the heat, seeming to disintegrate into finer, thinner dust, dissolving in the atmosphere, disappearing into thin air, without anyone washing or sweeping the pavements. People say a young man is sent out by the authorities with a watering-can every morning, in the furtherance of hygiene, but no one has ever clapped eyes on him. But barracks are erected in the interests of progress. The dynamo that is to keep the electric lights going is too weak for so many bulbs. They come on at night, but they look like dying embers. They dangle on wires, like so many hanged glow-worms.

Bazaars have been knocked through, houses split and scalped, in order to make Tirana an up-to-date capital city. The half-buildings stand there, with black guts open. The residents exotically use the stoves as toilets, without taking off their pistols and rifles. Not for an instant is one safe from a vendetta.* Women in black and white veils put one in mind of funeral processions or the KKK. They have shutters in front of their eyes at all times, they are walled in gauze and cloth. I would like to know what they get up to in their own homes. I am curious about them, they look like strange, illuminated, screened windows. The women are quiet as wild beasts and unresponsive as the dead. Are they crying? I can’t see for sure. They talk to one another. But the sounds are trapped and their voices trickle thinly through the pores of the cloth like clear water through a choked and dirty sieve.

The veiled women, the hundreds of ownerless dogs led on the wind’s leash, the fezzes on fat heads and turbans on bearded faces, the colour-postcard vendetta-artists with revolvers for bellies, and rifles for umbrellas — all these money-earning, business-conducting, official-bribing exotic philistines are in the majority and beyond time. There is nothing so arid as an ethnicity that has been dissected in the mausoleums of ethnology and in books and seminar rooms for thirty years, but is still paraded, as though it were in any sense alive. There is a parliament with a presidential suite and a bell, with order papers for interventions and a press balcony; there is a bank with sluggish Italian officials, with rates of exchange pinned up on boards like so many butterflies, with a loans manager. Already the owner of my hotel has taken to using his holster for keeping small change in, and on his sideboard the first swallows of civilization are starting to roost: Giesshübler mineral water, whisky, vermouth, Fernet-Branca. Together with the gold fillings and the New York slang, the half-education and the mandolins of the returnees from the States, together with the Fords in the streets suggestive of crushed barrel-organs, they constitute the transition from so-called “national culture” to the demand for an “autonomous republic”.

Albania is en route from the vendetta to the League of Nations.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 15 June 1927

* Vendetta: a preoccupation presumably more of Roth’s readership or editors than Roth himself, a blood-feud between two families or clans.

36. The Albanian Army

The Albanian army exercises from five to twelve in the morning and from three to seven in the afternoon. It exercises during its lunch-break. It exercises before bedtime; and at night, when the soldiers are asleep, many hundreds of trumpets may be heard blowing in the mosques (in which the army likes to camp). From this I conclude that the Albanian army surely exercises in its sleep. I am forced to wonder, is there any time when the Albanian army is not exercising?

Nor do I know why it exercises. There seems to be an irresistible compulsion to exercise in the human male — I am the only exception I know of. The Albanian people are born fighters, and they like to shoot from infancy — why in the world would they still exercise? If the rest of us exercise, that’s on account of some legal obligation or other. Our names appear on a roll, we are enlisted, we have to exercise or we are shot. We exercise, therefore, for dear life. In Albania there are no such legal obligations. Recruits are — so they are told — summoned for six months at a time, and are then free to go home. They are supposed to be paid, too. But the fact is that in Albania recruits are kept for two years, and they are not paid a penny — even the officers only manage to get three months of back-pay by extorting it (staff officers are permanently owed two months), and senior policemen live from the sale of confiscated goods — so why do they exercise in Albania? Moreover, deserters are not punished. Recruits, who, without a word to a soul go back to their villages, are handed over by the police to a passing motorist who happens to be stationed in the deserter’s own garrison. The prospect of a ride in a Ford is enough to persuade the deserter to return to his unit, which is to say to return to his exercises. Discipline leaves nothing to be desired. Those soldiers who happen not to have deserted, stiffly and with evident enjoyment salute every passing officer — because who could force them to stiffness? They march, perform knee bends, turns, stand to attention, run, drop to their knees, run in “loose order” and don’t get paid a penny, and their officers don’t either. Why don’t they desert? Why do they exercise?

Further, to what end do Albanian soldiers exercise? They know the mountains like the backs of their hands, they know all the hiding places, they can climb like mountain goats. Surely no one proposes to use them in a world war? A knee bend is unavailing against poison gas. Is Albania contemplating an invasion of Italy by any chance? Even if it were, it can’t be done by exercises. Surely they would need to shoot? Now the Albanian army has Austrian rifles and Italian ammunition, bullets that jam, magazines that can’t be clicked in, British knapsacks that can’t be secured with Italian straps, covers for field-shovels and no field-shovels with which to dig trenches, Italian officers who don’t know commands in Albanian, Austrian officers who are blackballed by their Italian comrades, White Russian officers who don’t exercise at all, but have only come so as to be able to stay in uniform while they wait for Soviet Russia to collapse, British officers who know neither Albanian nor Italian nor German nor Russian, and like to walk around with their swizzle sticks just so that Britain is represented too. It’s the oddest army in the world. It has no coherent rule book or command structure, all it has is martial music, trumpet signals, drums, and a devotion to drill. Men used to scampering in soft slippers over rocks have been shod in heavy, hobnailed boots that make it impossible for them to pick their feet up. They don’t need heavy packs, because they can live on bread and cheese and water for months on end. But they are given heavy knapsacks with pointless contents on useless straps. They were forced to leave their own, Austrian ammunition at home, and were issued with Italian ammunition, because the contracts have gone to Milanese suppliers, so now they can’t even shoot — as they could quite happily in civvy street. But they exercise.

For whom do they exercise? Surely not for their country? Because half the country is unhappy with their government — for reasons of idealism. Half the rest has been bought by the Serbs, and the remainder is on the payroll of the Italians. And in the middle of it, the soldiers are exercising. Perhaps they are exercising for Ahmed Zogu, their president? He has his personal bodyguard, which, if required to, will shoot at the regular soldiers, who, for all their exercising, are thought not to be reliable, and who are deliberately issued with bad ammunition and heavy boots, to keep them from undertaking anything against the president. Only the bodyguard has matching ammunition, no rucksacks, lightweight boots, a unified command structure and personal friends of the president to lead them.

So I repeat my questions: why, for whom, and to what end does the Albanian army exercise? All I am able to say is why:

Because they are stupid. Because they enjoy sweating, being yelled at, tormented and oppressed. I suspect that this is not confined to Albanians. The Europeans are no different. Did I say the Albanians had the oddest army in the world? It’s not true. All armies in the world are odd; very odd.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 June 1927

37. Western Visitors in Barbaria

One can infer the exotic character of Albania straightaway from the peculiar carry-on of the civilized Europeans there. The members of this curious race, whose baffling customs and practices have still not sufficiently been researched, and who make a point of hating each other in their comfortable homelands, seem in wild terrain to have taken on a different heart, a different point of view and a different character. Immediately after setting foot in a country without flushing toilets they unpack from their travelling bags a never-used, gleaming friendliness, to exchange it like for like with their equally civilized fellows. In particularly inhospitable areas, it seems real ladies have been seen dancing with commercial representatives in the European club — merely to break through the ranks of natives.

In Albania I am able to establish that all Europeans and Americans are one heart and one soul. Racial memories of liftboys and bundles of stocks and shares form an indissoluble bond that is finally cemented when a gramophone sounds and couples contort themselves to dance. Rival diplomats fight shoulder to shoulder against mosquitoes, malaria and the least attempt on the part of a native to approach the culture they are bringing him. All the rivals who have clustered round this tough but — until now — unspoken-for morsel, march together and take their profits separately. Even journalists generously pass on to one another their snippets of false news from real sources. Early in the morning you can see military attachés greeting a barber who happens to be in their sector, and hence at the mercy of their protection. Veritable excellencies leave calling cards at unimportant addresses. Outside the embassies are no dismissive guards but a humble policeman or kavass. Where in Europe an unmannerly secretary remains seated, here a friendly dragoman rises to his feet. Gentlemen are on occasion capable of sharing a bed together just to confuse the local bugs. The brotherliness of the masters is as great as it would be in the last hour before the end of the world. They tremble before the volcano on which they dance their Charlestons. A couple of distinguished locals have been adopted in the circle of the foreign gods. Tirana has a tennis club where anyone who swings a racket and uses toothpaste is admitted. An Albanian colonel and national hero of Austrian ancestry and Western character offers a welcome subject of conversation. A couple of Albanian officials venture on a round of cards with the wives of English officers. A German company director plays poker with the Vice Consul of a Balkan state. Americans are friendly to Bulgarians, because they have a deal to sell sponges to Sofia, and Tirana is not yet in the bag. The odd minister may be seen helping an au pair as she takes her little European charges on a walk.

On some evenings there are parties. The English, who would be instantly recognizable even in their lounge suits, come in tails. On one such evening it transpired that a feudal yachtsman who hates the press and indeed any piece of paper not bearing a coat of arms, sat down and talked to me for fully half an hour — which I did not reciprocate. We drank whisky and soda, mixed by the White Russian who is running the bar here till such time as the czar is resurrected. People told each other stories. Because Tirana has gossip — the foreign gods don’t even notice how humane they are being.

We hear that the attractive girlfriend of the Albanian president is a Viennese girl from Ottakring by the name of Franzi. She was seen driving a Fiat. When? This afternoon! What time? Twenty past four! What was she wearing? A new hat! Describe the hat! It was red! — Major X, adjutant of the President’s sister, refused permission to a young Albanian official to dance with her. When the young man did anyway, the Major had him arrested. He spent three days in Tirana gaol. The barbarousness of it! splutter the foreign gods. Even though in Bavaria writers often spent years behind bars, without ever seeing an adjutant. In America Charlie Chaplin is boycotted because he kissed his wife on the mouth and elsewhere. In France, remember, there was a certain Dreyfus. In Italy individuals with sound digestion are made to guzzle castor oil. But Albania — Albania is unspeakable.

Diplomats have to prove they are representing their national interests. They hover — extraterritorial as they are — like flies on a cheese cloche, buzzing back and forth in large automobiles, pay calls on one another, snoop on one another, take counsel together, make mountains out of molehills, encode them, and wire them home. Then the situation becomes tense. There is a rush to arms. Then a journalist trots along to the telegraph office. He hears a toot. It was the horn of an ambassador. In the newspaper it was the fire brigade of our special correspondent. The newspaper eavesdrops on the diplomat. The diplomat believes what he reads. What have you heard? Armed bands in Scutari? Have you spoken to the military attaché? Haven’t you heard? Salonica? Sazan? Gunboats? Hydroplanes?

In the meantime the Albanian peasants work their fields, the traders sell traditional opanci shoes, the blacksmiths hammer out saucepans, the saddlers stitch saddles. But every morning brings march-past, drums, reveille, knee-bends. Sooner or later, you’re going to get shot. By the Italians? By the South Slavs? — Who cares? War is war.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 7 July 1927

38. Article about Albania (Written on a Hot Day)

Albania is beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring. Its mountains are sometimes of an uncertain clear substance, so that you might take them for shards of glass painted green. It’s only on dull days, when the sky isn’t clouded over so much as swaddled in a thin overcoat of cloudy stuff, that you feel they might be rock after all. They have become more massive, implacable, and the whole country feels like a locked courtyard, ringed by the walls of a natural prison. Freedom is a relative concept, you sense that there are no railways at hand to lead us into our century, that ships two hours, four hours, twelve hours from here, only put in once a week at an Albanian port, and the exoticism of it is twice as hard to bear as a self-chosen torment. Viewed from the distance of Berlin, the phenomenon of the vendetta may well appear worth investigating. On its native terrain, though, it rather blurs into the background of filth, cockroaches, dark nights, broken oil lamps, fat spiders, malaria attacks and murky seaweed tea.

Under such circumstances, I am less receptive to the beauties of nature than those born optimists called tourists. At most, I might register: quiet blue days of simple sublimity; a hot sun that bakes even your shadow, and that is palpable in every cool recess; a few birds (a rarity here, because the shooters are so assiduous) in the air and of course also on the branches; forests of an unfathomable stillness, depth and darkness. A few houses, windowless, fortress-like, deaf and blind cubes of stone, coarse, enigmatic and tragic, redolent of destiny and secret curses. On each of these buildings that are so arranged as to offer rest to a murderer, refuge to a pursued man, security to a whole clan, lies the so-called charm of eeriness, which I would sooner not get too close to. Without the permission of the master of the house, one may not set foot in the meanest hut. But with his permission, the hospitality is life-threatening. Hospitality is a fine custom, among the noblest proofs of humanity. But there is every justification for it too in the selfish thought that among people who have instituted blood revenge for justice, a man needs to rest up somewhere, because sooner or later everyone will end up as a fugitive. If you are resolute in your sceptical thinking, then you will come to the conclusion that a good police force is actually preferable to hospitality. May Albanians and others forgive me that I am not sufficiently gifted to admire unproductive conservatism in the way it should be admired. Unfortunately, alongside other habits that I revere, the Albanians have one that I merely understand: they are utterly intent on preserving old habits, not only stressing their Albanianism at the expense of their humanity, but also cultivating their tribalism at the expense of their nation. Albanians who live outside Albania like to shut themselves away, marry only one another, and remain suspicious of their new settings. Even in America, they remain Albanians, talk to each other in Albanian, and at the end of a few decades away, return, why? — in order to go around in a cartridge belt in Albania. Like other small peoples, they have that kind of national feeling that causes the nation to die and keeps the national culture impoverished. Hence the fact that the Albanian language still has no word for “love”, no fixed terms for the colours of the rainbow, no particular word for “God”; that Albanian literature could be a richer or at the very least a more accurate representation of Albanian life today, but remains as simple as the first songs of European humanity and lags behind the development of even this laggardly country. The materials of the literature are bucolic family sagas. Alongside the patriotic conservatism, tribal rivalries exist at the expense of the nation, and religious fanaticism at the expense of religion. It’s not as though the Albanians are particularly devout. But their membership of a faith in and of itself leads them to look askance at members of others.

I understand that most “national traits” are the consequence of an unhappy history, in this case centuries of bitter struggle against the Turks. But there were also thousands of Albanians who went voluntarily to serve the Turks, were Turkish favourites, generals, officials, helped oppress their country and — and yet remained Albanians. Such are the whims of national culture. An Albanian major said to me: “It’s as well that the Turks oppressed us, and kept us away from their civilization. But for that, the Albanian language might have disappeared without trace.” This was, as I say, an Albanian major speaking. Therefore I didn’t say what I was sorely tempted to say: But what good did that do you? Try telling your beautiful wife: I love you in Albanian. Wouldn’t it be better to say it wholly in Turkish than half-say it in Albanian? It’s a crime to oppress a nation, we both agree about that. But to praise the negative outcome of this oppression, the chance survival of a technically interesting language is false and childish national pride. But as I say, I bit my tongue.

I passed through towns of an exquisite ghostliness, and others that were simply heart-breaking. I saw Elbasan, one of the oldest towns in the country. Its stone buildings in stone courtyards in stone grounds have the monumentality of death and at the same time its idyllic grief. There is nothing so moving as the green between stones, cracks and crannies sprouting soft, damp moss, the flower of mould and nothingness. It makes the stone somehow still stonier. With its winding lanes and its hunchbacked bazaar the town is reminiscent of a sort of huge and whimsically, defiantly irregular snail shell, whose original inhabitant has died and has left its place to a clutch of casual, brown, picturesquely clad, also soiled and broken traders. It appears that most of Elbasan belongs to one Shefgiet Verlaci, the father-in-law to be of Ahmed Zogu. Elbasan boasts one of the loveliest, widest, greenest prayer sites of the whole country, where on hot afternoons priests and acolytes like to recline and give themselves over to metaphysics. In the east are the great Mohammedan cemeteries with gravestones like outsize mushrooms; in the south is the dynamited bridge at Skumli, and further an extensive deep-green olive wood, a fairy-tale wood for a stage production.

I will mention Kruja. It is a dream of primitivism. It reminds me of the story of Rebecca going to the well. A naïve early Biblical fuzz overlies the overgrown village. Pots are baked in large fiery open ovens, Old Testament forms, handled jars of innocent clay, brownish-girlish, with youthfully slim necks and hips, and slightly clumsy thin spouts. Turkish coffee is boiled on open fires. The café consists of a patron and an immovable set of scales, in whose pans sit a couple of cups filled with black, viscous, syrupy stuff. The town is ruled with a heavy hand by the gendarmerie commander, who in another life was a warlord (or, some might say, robber baron). He has a fine uniform with gold stars.

Walking around, you encounter Biblical scenes: shepherds scarved against sunburn, leaf huts, tents of woven willow, men on mule-back, veiled women, knitting as they walk. The land is so peaceful that you refuse to credit its reputation for murder. Even so, I met a man who wanted to avenge a friend, and shot an innocent party by mistake. He was unlucky: the innocent party had seven brothers, who are now all on the tail of my acquaintance. He tried sending out various emissaries, but it takes a while to settle on a price. For three months now he has lived in imminent expectation of death. He is no sort of primitive Albanian either, but a man who has lived in Paris as a munitions worker and returned, expressly to carry out his vendetta. Even though he is himself pursued, he is still looking for the man who murdered his friend.

If you come to the European towns like Scutari, Valona, Korça, towns with stiff collars, cravats, postcards, razor blades, gold fillings, Ford automobiles and lawyers — then you are even less inclined to believe in such a proximity of semi-civilization and epic. Even so, the barber’s brother is a bone fide and quite a successful warlord. When he comes into town, he has himself shaved, drinks coffee, and talks like you and me. We’re all human.

Urban Albanians are strikingly timid. It takes less courage to shoot here than to speak. An Albanian would rather shoot than say what he thinks. He is afraid of the walls’ ears. He senses a spy in everyone, and he’s half-right. An Albanian “Okhrana” in the sense of the Russian organization doesn’t exist — not least because every urban Albanian is a passionate and spontaneous observer of his neighbours’ comings and goings and doings, takes childlike pleasure in teasing out “mysteries” and finds dangerous secrets in perfectly open and transparent things. This complicates life for the good Albanian people. A stranger does not come in for particular attention, no, everyone watches him with passion and primitive fascination. How often I met Albanians who said to me, with cunning expressions on their faces: “You’re a journalist”—as though I had tried to make a secret of it, and should now feel rumbled. But if I happened to ask: “What’s new then?” or “What does it say in your Albanian newspaper that I can’t read?” then they shrugged their shoulders, because “new” is equated with danger, and anything resembling a “novelty” may give you away. A constant formula is the reply: “I have no news. You tell me something. You know everything.” Then you can be sure that your discreet Albanian will straightaway repair to some interesting place and report: “What he said was…” These people’s love of intrigue is as great as their fear of expressing an opinion. Over time, they do so little that they seem to have given up all their own opinions, and only listen to those of others. Why have an opinion merely to suppress it? In place of political convictions there is political partisanship, instead of struggle conspiracy, instead of a word a hint, instead of caution fear. In this land no ruler is safe, and no subject either. A publicly expressed view is an impossibility — even if it were allowed. Over the centuries the Albanians have lost all pleasure in the right to an opinion. Even unambiguous circumstances become secret mysteries in their hands. They have no taste for the absence of danger.*

Their virtues are courtesy, silence, modesty, gentleness. Their most dangerous quality: love of money. There are places where the farmers bury piles of gold, and continue to acquire more. Perhaps their frugality is half miserliness. They are not so much work-shy as plain feeble. They accomplish vastly less than a European because they are so poorly nourished. Their lack of wants borders on the absurd. Their extreme moderation is sad and oppressive — almost as oppressive as the absence of women in the public life of the towns, where you can go many days without seeing or hearing a single one. Their lives are de-eroticized, love has been degraded to a domestic virtue, and a stroll is as perspectiveless as a Sunday.

But such a topical part of the world…!

Frankfurter Zeitung, 30 July 1927

* For an insider’s up-to-date account of this superbly paranoid state of affairs and state, see Ismail Kadare’s The Successor.