The Pillars of Hercules

At 6:30 in the morning I woke with a start in the tobacco-stink of my cabin and only then realized I had no porthole. I had to go on deck to see that we were in bright sunshine approaching the low green outline of what had been ancient Illyria. This dissolved as we drew closer, and now a brown cluttered headland loomed, the forehead of Durrës, ancient Epidamnus beneath it, with cranes and tenements. Nearer still, I could see the dome and minarets of a white mosque, my first glimpse of Islam on this trip. Another brown hill and at its top, a large white house, the palace of Ahmet Zogu, who in 1928 had styled himself Zog the First, King of Albania. Ten years later, with an ultimatum from Italy (whose monarch Victor Emmanuel called himself King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia and Albania), Zog was headed into permanent exile, Albania’s whole treasury in his luggage.

“Passport control,” a deckhand said to me, and pointed to a card table that had been shoved under the broken TV set in the lounge. Two unshaven men in dirty sports shirts sat there with a stack of passports, looking tough as they took turns thumping the pages with their rubber stamp. It was as though the whole aggressive ritual was intended to erode your confidence: the shirts, the flimsy table, the grubby men, the jumble of passports. And their pad was so dry the men had to pound it to make even a feeble impression with the rubber stamp.

My passport was flung to me and I went back on deck to see the Venezia moving stern first towards the dock so that the stolen cars and aid trucks could be off-loaded. Beside us there was a hulk sunken to its gunwales, and a blond Albanian boy of about twelve or thirteen dived from it. He swam beside our ship, calling out for the passengers to throw money. He gagged and spat as the screws of our ship churned up swirling mud from the harbor bottom. The Italian truck drivers flung balled-up paper money and coins and soon there were four or five boys swimming for it and squabbling.

Knowing so little in advance, I had mentally prepared myself for anything in Albania, but even so I was shocked by Durrës. My first sight, as I walked off the ship, was of a mob of ragged people, half of them beggars, the rest of them tearful relatives of the passengers, all of them howling.

It was hysteria, and dirt and dogs and heat, but what alarmed me most were the people snatching at me. No one elsewhere on my trip had noticed me. I was so anonymous I felt invisible wherever I went. No one had ever touched me. Here they pounced. They took hold of my hand, tugged at my shirt, fingered my pen. “Signor!” “Money!” “Soldi!” “Please! You geeve me!” “Meester!”

They fastened themselves to me, pleading. I could not brush them aside—they were truly ruined. They looked hysterical, they were poor, ravaged, bumpy faced with pox scars—mothers with children, blind men with boys, old hectoring crones, all of them plucking at me. “Geeve me theese!”

Third World, I thought, but it was the only Third World scene I had ever witnessed that was entirely populated by Europeans—the most dissolute and desperate and poverty-stricken and rapacious, lunging at me, following just behind me, demanding money.

I was a sitting duck for this attention. The Italian aid worker passengers had vehicles. They drove through the mob. The Albanian passengers dragging cardboard boxes had nothing to give. But even travel weary and plainly dressed, I looked prosperous compared to the ragged mob at the port, and worst of all I was on foot. They were all around me, in my face, snagging my clothes, their hands in my pockets.

Hurrying on, I pretended I knew where I was going. I found a path, cut through a junkyard, went across the railway tracks and followed them, hoping to get to the train station, all the while passing curious people. Some beggars had stayed with me, still pleading, as I walked on into Durrës, which was a world of dust and ruination.

Nothing was right in Durrës. Even the trees were dirty and had rusted leaves; blighted and dying, most of them had the smashed, dilapidated look of the hideous tenements near them. Many limbs had been lopped and the ones that had been left were maimed. It was not that the trees looked dead, but rather that they had never been alive, just moth-eaten props on a cheap stage set from a show that had closed long ago. High weeds grew in the railway yard, and the coaches that I could see were either tipped over or else derelict, with broken windows. Bright sun bore down on everything and the stink that I had first noticed as I walked off the ship still hung in the air—it was a shit smell in the heat, an odor of decay and dust, of rotting clothes and even the earth—the dirt I was kicking as I hurried onward—had a rancid gasoline pong that was like the reek of poison.