Andrzej Stasiuk - On the Road to Babadag

So I drank black Fernet and tried to imagine a country that one day everyone would leave. They would abandon their land to the mercy of time, which would break open the envelope of the hours and months and in pure form enter what remained of cities, to dissolve them, turn them into primal air and minerals. For time, here, was the most important element. As persistent and heavy as a giant ox, it filled the river valleys, crushing the mountain peaks from Shkoder to Saranda, from Korçë to Durrës. It was in time's gut that these men lived who appeared on street corners and squares. Possibly they saw its coming death and knew fear, because the final throes of the beast in whose belly they waded would mean, for them, isolation: if the beast died, they could never meet again. They would be carried away by the separate little streams of minutes and days, streams that were only a pathetic human imitation of the original current, whose power brought to mind the power of no motion. They would have to live off the carrion of eternity, whose taste is precisely that of freedom.

On the beach in Saranda, people moved the trash to make a place for themselves. They pushed aside the plastic bottles, cartons, cans, those emptied wonders of civilization, the shopping bags of Boss, Marlboro, and Tesco, to clear patches of sand on which entire families could spread out. The wind carried the transparent tatters landward and draped them on the trees. It blew from the west. Never in my life had I seen such a mess and the calm with which people lived in it and added to it constantly. The patches of cleared sand were the size only of a mattress or a little larger, allowing a group to sit. There was something elegant and contemptuous in their gestures as they discarded used things, a kind of lordliness of consumption and a theater of indifference toward whatever didn't give instant gratification. The wind blew from the west both literally and figuratively, yet it brought nothing of value. Perhaps those things of value, which no doubt were there in the west, simply couldn't be transported and lost their worth en route, spoiling, decomposing. But perhaps they would have been of no use to the people here in any case.

The first day, as we walked from the port, Genci latched on to us. He was about thirty, wore sandals (no socks) and filthy black shorts. On his back he carried a kid several years old. In fluent English he asked us where we were from and if we needed a room. We certainly needed one, after a night of no sleep. He led us among apartment blocks that were a few stories high and coming apart: stench, gutters choked with rubble and rotten trash, piles of stones, indestructible plastic, a kind of Balkan morning after. Tanned children looked at us with curiosity. We hadn't the strength to get rid of this well-wishing character. Genci gave a shout, and an old woman appeared, all in black. We followed her. She unlocked a gate that enclosed a patio on the ground floor of one of the blocks, then unlocked the front door. It was cool inside and absurdly clean. The two-room apartment gleamed. The terra-cotta floor gleamed, the refrigerator, the bathroom, the television set, the large fan. There was even a shine and smell of cleanliness on the bedding. As if no one had ever lived here, just cleaned and cleaned. "She's a widow," Genci told us, "so you have to pay her twenty-five dollars a night."

We met Genci a few more times after that. He talked nonstop and was always promising us something. He said he knew the writer Ismail Kadare, that Kadare was now in Albania and Genci could arrange a meeting. He offered us an air-conditioned apartment in downtown Tirana for ten dollars. He told us about his conversion to Protestantism; about his wife, who worked for the Soros Foundation; with pride about his father, who during the Hoxha regime was a security guard. One day, when we were discussing Europe in general, he asked if there had been communism in Poland.

From the pier promenade in Saranda you can see the misty shore of Corfu. You can sit at a coffeehouse table in the shifting shade of a palm tree and watch the passenger ferries move through the smooth water of the strait and vanish in the open sea. It's very possible that the international tourists look at the Albanian shore as they might look at the shore of, say, Liberia or Guinea. They may even hold binoculars. The seven-story floating hotels sparkle in the sun and are gone. A touch of safari in this, and mirage.

I drank Greek retsina and tried to imagine this place twenty years ago. Tried to imagine the country cut off from the rest of the world like an island in some godforsaken part of the ocean. A country that had about 160 enemies (let's say that at the time there were that many nations on the political map). Danger lurked to the east and to the west. Capitalism lurked, communism lurked in its degenerate Soviet and Chinese forms, African monarchies lurked, and the technocratic regimes of Southeast Asia, and Greenland lurked and the island Republic of Cape Verde, and there lurked the cosmos debauched by the Americans and the Soviets. Enver Hoxha, leaving Tirana, locks the television station and takes the key with him, so no one in his absence will let in a Greek, Italian, or Yugoslav program. In Saranda today, it's late afternoon, except that there are not all these hastily assembled concrete bars and hotels. People sit on the seashore and look at passing ships that belong to the enemy. The huge semitransparent homes sail on to their destruction, because they belong to a world over which hangs a heavy curse. Dusk falls. That world has no meaning, no form, it is a kind of antiworld, or antireality ruined by a fundamental lie.

Three hundred twenty kilometers at the longest place, 140 at the widest. Which comes to about 28,000 square kilometers of absolute truth and complete isolation. In 1948, Yugoslavia was the renegade; in 1961, it was the Soviets; in 1978, China. Betrayal hems in Albania on every side. Village teachers set slogans in stone on the hilltops. "Vigilance, Vigilance, Vigilance." "The Most Dangerous Enemy Is the One You Forget." "Think, Work, and Live like a Revolutionary." Carelessness or error may bring the accusation of treason. Three hundred twenty are sentenced for carelessness, 140 for error, and there is no chance of escape, because the rest of the world does not exist.

The slogans in stone are best seen from above, from the sky. They were a challenge to the cosmos. Apparently the goal was maximum: to convert not China, not the Soviets, but the entire universe.

One day we set out from Korçë to Voskopojë. We wanted to see what was once the largest city in the European part of the Ottoman Empire, 30,000 homes built so close together "that a goat could walk from one end to the other on the rooftops," and 22 houses of worship. We wanted to see the place where the caravan trails intersected from Poland, Hungary, Saxony, ConstanŢa, Venice, Constantinople, and where 280 years ago the first printing press was established in the Balkans.

To get there, we hired a small delivery van. It was driven by Jani, and his buddy kept trying to start a conversation. He knew a few Slavic words. His "lady comrade" was Slovak. They met in an olive plantation in Greece. We went up and up a road full of potholes. For thirty kilometers there was no crossroad, only a donkey path now and then coming down the mountain. The men gave us cigarettes and showed us their signet rings in the form of a lion's head.

Voskopojë was all ground-floor. It didn't seem constructed at all, just slapped together with stones. Some of the houses sank under their own weight, and it wasn't the result of neglect or age but of the material used — simply, nothing larger or higher could be assembled with that sifting stuff. This was more geology than architecture. As if one day the earth parted and gave to the world its rendition of human building. And now the falling walls, dribbling facades, cracked clay trickling from joints, split roofs, and the wood of the gates and fences splintered by the heat, with the help of erosion and gravity, were doing their best to return to the bosom of the earth.