The Pillars of Hercules

In a filthy and deranged way it all fit together—the toasted trees, the cracked buildings, the nasty earth, the trains that didn’t run, and everywhere I could see people in rags. Sporchissimi, poverissimi, summed it up. When the people saw me it was as though they had seen The Man Who Fell to Earth and they ran towards me and screamed for me to give them something—money, food, clothes, my pen, anything. The minute I made eye contact the person lunged for me and began pleading.

It was just as well I came here ignorant. If anyone had told me about this in advance—the way Durrës looked, the filth and desperation—I would not have believed them.

In the meantime I could not shake off these pleading people. I was still being followed and brayed at by two begging boys, a young woman holding a limp comatose child, and an old woman wearing leggings and a shawl. They were behind me as I walked down the tracks towards the station, and they stood with me at the station as I rattled the locked door. The station windows were cracked and broken, but I could see inside that it was empty, papers littering the floor, several chairs tipped over, the one-number pad calendar on the wall showing the wrong date.

A woman approached me, looking much like all the others: tortoise-faced, wearing a sweater in spite of the heat, trousers under her skirt, big broken shoes. But this one carried a bunch of keys—the badge of her authority.

“Train?” I asked.

“Jo treni,” the woman said, and waved her hands with a flap of finality.

That was clear enough—anyway, I could have guessed there was no train, having seen the weeds growing over the tracks, and the vandalized coaches, and the wrecked station. Seeing me flummoxed, the beggars seized my hesitation as their opportunity and pleaded with me to give them something.

The woman with the keys was pointing to the front of the station.

“Autobusi,” she said.

That was plain too, but nothing else was as it should have been, not the thing itself, nor even a symbol of it: the station was not a station, the sidewalks were not sidewalks, the trees were not trees, the streets were not streets, even the buses I saw did not look like buses. The vehicles were ravaged and three of them together at the front of the station made the space look like a junkyard, not a bus depot.

The beggars stayed beside me, and there were other people squatting on the ground or standing in groups. Everyone was looking at me, waiting to see what I would do.

I’ll go to Tirana, I thought. I knew from my map that it was only twenty-five miles away. Come back here some other day.

I went to one of the wrecked buses. Some more people followed me. I wanted to shake them all off.

“Tirana?” I asked.

“Tirana!” They pointed to another bus. And a ragged young man, in his early twenties, stepped over to me. I thought he was going to ask me for money, but instead he said, mixing English and Italian, “This bus is going soon to Tirana.”

I climbed in and sat by the back door.

“It costs fifty leks,” the young man said, and seeing that I was confused, he took out a scrap of red rag that was a fifty-lek note and handed it to me. “You will need this.”

Before the door clapped shut I managed to give the young man some Italian lire in return, perhaps its equivalent. For the second time on my trip I received a gift from an unlikely person. He had given me, a stranger, what was in Albania a half-day’s pay, knowing that I would never see him again. This sudden act of kindness, like the cup of coffee from the woman in the bar at Zadar, took the curse off the place, and though Durrës still looked horrific I was won over.

The bus was full. I was jammed on the long seat at the back being bumped by the passengers standing in front of me. There was a great stink of mildewed clothing and tobacco smoke, but I was near enough to the door to stick my head out when we came to a stop. It was a slow bus, the stops were frequent, but none of this mattered very much to me—I was on my way, fascinated by most of what I saw.

Men and women in the fields by the roadside worked with primitive implements—they wielded crooked-handled scythes, and big sickles, they forked hay into heaps on horse-drawn wagons with ancient-looking tridents, they plowed with yoked teams of horses. This was not even turn-of-the-century technology—these were the sort of farm tools that had been used in Europe hundreds of years ago. There wasn’t an engine in sight, no tractors or cars—and no other vehicle on the road apart from this wheezing bus.