The Pillars of Hercules

I was at the cafe table early to meet the Albanian underground. Five o’clock came and went. I drank a beer. I had the dinner special, rice with a glop of tomato sauce on it and meatballs made out of a dead animal and french fries. The meatballs were quofta: a Turkish word for ground meat or meatballs; many food words in the eastern Mediterranean were Turkish, though kofta had gotten as far as India. I was reminded again of what truly disgusting food passed for Albanian cuisine.

There was no sign of the talkative youths of the previous afternoon. I should have known better than to say that I was planning to stop by the embassy. Paranoia is a hard habit to break. I never saw them again.

After three days and three nights in the stifling darkness of the fish’s belly, Jonah had an illumination. That is often the way with nightmares. After three days, Albania—which had started as a nightmare—took on the dimensions of a valuable experience. I had overcome my disgust and fear. Tirana was still as ratty, but I was calmer, fascinated rather than repelled, and so the city did not seem so bad. “It just looks dirty,” as Jonah might have said.

The beggars were now recognizable. They slept at night in the same places where they sat all day, with their hands out. There was a legless woman, an old blind man, and a hectoring man who shouted at passersby, demanding money; there were many children, scavenging in the day and curling up under the lights or in doorways at night. Two always slept together, one lying facedown and his younger brother—perhaps—using the small of his back as a pillow.

Instead of leaving I stayed a few days more. One of the reasons for this was that it was not easy to leave. I had arrived by ship and I wanted to leave by ship. Studying the map, I could see that in the deep south of the country a narrow channel separated Albania from the island of Corfu. It looked no greater than five miles: no distance at all.

“Yes, there are fishermen there, and they might take you across,” a man told me in Tirana.

He was from that area and seemed to have Hellenistic sympathies.

“My family name was Stavro,” he said. “We were orthodox. It means ‘cross’ in Greek. But the government made us change our name. So my grandfather took the name Çeliku—it means ‘steel,’ like Stalin.”

“How could you be orthodox? Didn’t Hoxha ban religion?” I asked.

“Yes. No churches. They were forbidden.”

God was illegal. Albania enjoyed the distinction of being the only officially atheistic country in the entire world. But instead of flocking to churches after the fall of the government they went haywire on porno, which had also been banned.

I was not convinced that I would be able to find a fisherman in southern Albania to take me to Corfu, but there was another way of getting to Greece. Greeks had a tendency to close the border out of spite, because they disliked Albanians and had poor diplomatic relations with the government. If the border was open, there was a bus from Gjirokastër to the Greek town of Ioánnina.

There was said to be a train to Vlorë in the south, but it was not running. Çeliku said there was a bus that went. I had not seen a bus that looked capable of going such a distance. I walked towards the southern edge of town, where I had been told the depot was located. There were no vehicles in sight, but there was the evidence of buses: great oil stains in the dust which spoke of big leaking gaskets.

I kept on walking, into a ruined park, past a stagnant reservoir where people were sunning themselves in their underwear. Their underwear had the same cast-off look as their clothes, just as ill-fitting and ragged and dated. Most of what Albanians wore these days had been supplied by Italian charitable agencies, and so it had come out of attics and closets in pious households up and down the Adriatic.

There were signs of vandalism even here—plaques torn off, signs defaced, dates obliterated, plinths cracked where they had held statues. About a mile beyond the reservoir there was a terrible smell, borne by a hot breeze. No sign indicated it, but it was clear that just ahead was the Tirana Zoo.

I hate zoos generally but never have I felt more like opening cage doors and setting the animals free. If they ate a few Albanians then it was poetic justice for the torments these animals had endured, though I had yet to see an Albanian fit to eat.

The cages were very small—about the size that they would be for a wicked criminal in the prison of a brutish country. This was how the animals were seen—as savage beasts; and because they were beasts they were treated like convicted murderers. An example of this was the magnificent tiger, his fur gone grotty in his foul cage; he was fatigued and desperate in this eight-by-twelve-foot cage, which hardly contained him. An Albanian watering some plants tormented the tiger by squirting the hose into his face.