The Pillars of Hercules

The hotel at Vlorë had no name, and many empty rooms. The only guests were two Albanian families. They had spent the day on the stony beach. Adrian said he would stay with his friend and pick me up at seven the next morning. He left me the cherries and a stern warning to be very careful. “Lock your door at night.” I took his advice.

At Vlorë there was a large villa on a headland which had belonged to Enver Hoxha. Before darkness fell I walked towards it, but saw that it was guarded by soldiers and thought better of rousing their suspicions. Though people stared; no one in Vlorë followed me; there was dire poverty here, but no beggars. The people on the beach, baring their bodies to the gray sky, risking death by poison in the water of Vlorë Bay, were bony and pale. It was so odd to see these skinny white people crouched on the sand, frail little families at play—and these were the well-off Albanians, at this seaside town.

Probably because Hoxha had come here often, there were slogans painted on the sides of buildings. They resembled the so-called “big character” Cultural Revolution slogans I had seen in China, and in some cases the words were identical. Glory to Marxism and Leninism had been painted carefully in red letters on a wall in Vlorë, and other walls extolled Hoxha—Glory to Enver Hoxha (Lavde Enver Hoxha) and ditto with revolution, work, and Albania. No one had bothered to paint over the now out-of-date slogans, but in some cases whole walls had been smashed. On a mountainside outside of Vlorë in stone letters forty feet high were the words PARTI ENVER.

I drank a beer, I ate bread and stew, and in my room I listened to an update from the BBC about the trial in Tirana of Ramiz Alia, who was being tried on charges of “abuse of power” and “misappropriation of state funds.”

There was no sound at night in Vlorë. No wind, no passing cars, no music, not even a voice. The sea was silent: not even the mushburger waves that slopped on the shore of other Mediterranean places.

“So what did you call him?” I asked Adrian the next morning, as we drove out of Vlorë past the slogans to Hoxha. “‘Great leader’? ‘Teacher’? ‘Father’? Something like that?”

“Shokut,” Adrian said. “Shokut Enver.”

“Meaning?”

“Friend.” Amico.

That was wonderful. The man who had put a wall around the country and starved them and turned off the lights and terrified them and imprisoned them and wouldn’t let them grow beards and lived in lovely villas while they stayed inside their huts eating sour bread or cleaning their personal weapon (“in the event of an attack by the imperialists”), this man was “Friend Enver.”

“These days we don’t use the word shokut at all,” Adrian said. “It is not a good word, because of the way we used it before.”

“Then if you don’t use the word friend, how do you say ‘Friend Adrian’?”

“We use the word zoti. Zoti Paul, I might say to you if I greet you,” he said. “It means ‘god.’ No more friends, we are now gods.”

Until Vlorë we had been traveling on a shore road that was fairly flat, but the next day I saw that the southern part of the Albanian coast was mountainous. The steep cliffs dropped straight into the sea, and the road climbed behind them, becoming corrugated and unsafe, as it shook our car sideways to the edge. Rising to over two and a half thousand feet, the road was also bleak and windy, in places precipitous, at the edge of rocky goat-haunted ravines, where the only settlements were clusters of stone huts, many of them ancient.

Above Vlorë there were only tree stumps—the trees had been recently cut down. In the desperate and anarchic days of the previous year, when there was no fuel, people had cleared the woods and cut even the cedars that had been planted beside the road.

“Perfume!” Adrian shouted as he bumped along the side of a ravine, and the heavy scent of rosemary from the mountainside entered the car.

Almost four hours of this narrow mountain road; Adrian had a tape machine in his car but only one tape, The Greatest Hits of Queen, a rock group. Adrian liked the group. “Freddie Mercury,” he said. “He died of AIDS.” Towards noon, passing a remote spot, we saw a policeman hitchhiking. At first I thought he was at a roadblock, and my heart sank. But Adrian explained that the man was hitching a ride and that we were under no obligation to pick him up. Thinking that it might be useful to have a policeman on board, I said, “Let’s take him.”

The policeman had two containers of olive oil. They were so heavy he could scarcely lift them. Adrian helped him hoist them into the trunk.

“Ramiz Alia!” the policeman said. “He’s on trial!”