The Pillars of Hercules

The fields were as rubbly and irregular as everything else. They were not flat, the furrows were not parallel, nothing was plumb. Since arriving in Albania I had not seen a straight line. That was true of the houses, too, the small collapsing hovels and sheds and tottering barns. And this absence of true geometry, this disorder, made Albania seem deranged and gave Albanians a suspicious and retarded look.

I had seen ruin before in other places, but it was odd to see farms that were so disorderly. Even in Third World countries where people lived in poor and misshapen huts their fields had order and there was always a symmetry in the plants, the windbreaks, the ditches. But there was no harmony here.

That was simply strange, yet the landscape had another feature, and it floored me—the bunkers and bomb shelters. I saw the first ones on the outskirts of Durrës and had wondered what they were. Most of them looked like igloos in cement, some big, some small; others were like pillboxes, round or square. The smaller ones could not have accommodated more than one or two people. Twenty or more people could have fitted in some others, which were the size of bungalows. They were like stone lumps. They had no windows, though most of them had gunslits.

They were scattered all over the open treeless landscape, rows of them on ridges, along the sides of the road, hidden in hollows, on the banks of stagnant creeks, and distantly, perhaps for miles—as far as I could see—they continued, they were everywhere.

These bunkers are unusual enough to have been remarked on by an Albanian writer, Ismaïl Kadaré. He is also the only Albanian novelist who has been translated into English. In his best-known novel, The General of the Dead Army (1970), Kadaré writes about a visiting Italian general who sees them: “The blockhouses were all silent and deserted … they looked like Egyptian sculptures with expressions that were sometimes cold and contemptuous, sometimes enigmatic, depending on the design of the gunslits. When the slits were vertical then the little forts had a cruel, menacing expression that conjured up some evil spirit; but when the slits were horizontal, then their strange petrified mimicry expressed only indifference and scorn.”

“Egyptian”? “Cruel”? “Scorn”? No, most of this description is fanciful. They are mute and not very well made. The remarkable thing to me was how numerous they were—so many of them that they were the only landscape feature. A few had been converted into dwellings—their laundry unfurled in the sun was proof of that; but most of them looked abandoned and moldering, and there were clusters of them that had been vandalized.

That vandalism was the salient aspect of Albania that I noticed so far; that it was not merely poor—I had seen poor countries and deprived people elsewhere—it was brutalized, as though a nasty-minded army had swept through, kicking it to bits. It was not the poverty of neglect or penury. There was something melancholy about a neglected place—the sagging roof, the dusty glass, the worm-eaten door frame, the ragged curtains. This was not melancholic, it was shocking. And this was violent. Many of these roofs had been torn off, windows had been broken, curtains had been ripped. We passed a factory: it had been burned out. We passed a garage: buses were scorched and tipped over, as the train coaches had been. We passed twenty or more greenhouses: most of the windows were cracked or broken—there was broken glass everywhere, and only a few of the greenhouses were being used for growing plants—tomato vines strung up.

That unmistakable vandalism was upsetting because it was violent and illogical. I had just come from Croatia and seen shellholes and shattered roofs. Those were the marks of war; but this was worse, more thorough, more absurd, nightmarish. And adding to the impression of derangement were the people, standing near these broken windows and upended culverts and burned-out factories, wearing rags.

This continued all the way to Tirana: vandalism and cement bunkers and people fumbling with hoes and pitchforks in the lumpy fields. Masses of bunkers lay outside Tirana and in places they were so densely situated that these areas had the look of an extensive necropolis, so similar were the bunkers to mausoleums.

“There are six hundred thousand of them,” a man told me in Tirana at the black market money-exchange. “One for each family—that is what we were taught. But what if we had used all that cement and iron and made houses with it? We would have had no housing shortage now.”

“Did anyone wonder why these bunkers were being built?”

“No. We were proud of them. We made them for a possible invasion—from our enemies.”

“Who were your enemies?”

“Everyone,” he said. “From every side. Revisionists from the east, imperialists from the west.”