The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Hurrying from Croatia to Italy to catch this ferry, I had a sense of weariness, and wondered whether I had the stomach to push on. But the notion of going to Albania lifted my spirits, because I had never been there before and I knew nothing about it, and neither did anyone else. That in itself seemed a novelty, for here on the most heavily beaten path in the world, the shore of the Mediterranean, it was still possible to travel into the unknown.

  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.

  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.

  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.”

  It was later that I met him. At the moment, as the bus pulled into town, I was still wondering what to do, for as soon as I got off beggars lunged at me, and they followed me up the main street, whining and plucking at me.

  My first problem was finding a place to stay. The only hotel I had found was full, and though at first I did not seriously mind being turned away, because it was so dirty, it seemed there was nowhere else. The Hotel Tirana was closed—for repairs, one person told me; for demolition, someone else said. The only other possibility was the grubby Hotel Dajti.

  “All full,” the desk clerk told me. “Unless someone checks out.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “Don’t know. Please, I’m busy.”

  I walked some more, back to the main square, past the statue of the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg with his horned helmet, past the mosque, into some backstreets, and spotted a hotel sign on another building. A man sitting on the stairs said he had space. It was the worst hotel I had seen on my whole trip. I was not a hotel snob—I liked a bargain. But it was that Albanian look again, not of neglect but of vandalism; the place looked unhealthy, even dangerous.

  The Dajti had at first looked grubby to me. Now that I realized that it was really the only place to stay, it seemed desirable, even rather grand. The desk clerk told me to come back later in the day—he might have something for me. I couldn’t call him. “The phones are not working.” I left my name and considered offering him baksheesh; and then I perambulated again, thinking what a fix I would have been in traveling with someone else.

  —Where are we going to stay?

  —Something might turn up.

  —What if it doesn’t? What will we do then?

  —I don’t know.

  —Why didn’t you think of this before?

  —I don’t know.

  —You could have made a phone call.

  —The phones don’t work. You heard the guy.

  —I’m scared, Paulie.

  —Everything’s going to be all right.

  I bel
ieved that. At the very worst, if there was nothing at the end of the day, there was the dump—the danger zone. There were also hotels in Durrës, awful place that it was; it was reachable by bus or taxi. There was also the last resort, asking someone on the street if they knew of a little old lady who took in boarders. In such a desperate city that was probably the way most accommodation was handled.

  At the enormous fountain at the Palace of Congresses children were companionably taking baths—they had soap and towels. Nearby stood a marble cone as high as a six-story building. It was abandoned and partly wrecked (bricks missing, graffiti, kicked-over planters). A man saw me sitting and came over to talk. It had been a monument to Enver Hoxha, he said, and then: “Please give me money.” On most street corners, in gutters, next to buildings, there were heaps of garbage, and people picking through it and scattering it. Whenever I paused and looked at something—a hedge, a bush, a state building, a wall, the gunky river that ran through town, someone got in my face. “Please—food! Give me something to eat!” I bought a bottle of nameless fluid to drink, but before I could raise it to my lips, a woman had her hand on it. “Please—water!”

  These were serious beggars, ragged and deserving, cowering near the puny trees and in the shade of the brick walls. Some wore traditional dress—skirts, leggings, black shawls, slippers, a cummerbund, veils, wide sleeves, all in tatters.

  Towards late afternoon I went back to the Dajti. Yes, they had a room. I swapped my passport for a key. The room was dirty, it had a rank smell, it overlooked a field where boys were yelling and kicking a football. I slept like a log.

  In the bar the next day I met an American in Tirana on business who said, “This is the worst hotel in the world. I mean, officially. It’s number one on a list of hotels that are, I guess, the best available in a given city.” He smiled. “The pits!”

  The general in Ismaïl Kadaré’s novel stays in the Hotel Dajti. The Albanian novelist, who has been in exile in Paris for thirty years, makes it sound like the Ritz, a peaceful refuge, splendid among the pines of Tirana. He collected his mail at the desk … asked for a call to be put through to his family. In his otherwise macabre novel, even the Dajti’s phones work.