ALBANIA

 

Where religion is compulsory, I am an atheist; but where religion is forbidden, I am a believer. All public worship ceased in Albania in 1967, nearly a quarter of a century after the communists took power, when Albanian youth decided – spontaneously and with revolutionary enthusiasm, according to the official explanation – permanently to close the churches and mosques. What a wealth of thuggery and intimidation lies hidden behind this bland explanation!

I arrived in Tirana one morning in spring, 1989, wearing my protest against such intolerance. It was a sweatshirt with a picture on the chest of a toucan sitting amidst tropical foliage. Above the picture were the words South American Handbook; below it, the Spanish words Vaya con Dios, Go with God. In the circumstances, the sweatshirt might have been considered subversive, an attempt at religious propaganda. But no one at the airport understood Spanish, despite the presence on the bookshelves of the airport’s VIP lounge of Enver Hoxha’s Selected Works in Spanish translation. In any case, sweatshirts did not undergo the same degree of censorship on entry into Albania as more conventional forms of literature, and I was thus left in peace to enjoy my little private joke throughout the country.

Some might say that the violent suppression of religion (and who can doubt that after a millennium of profound social and cultural influence, the suppression must have been violent?) had nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism, having been rather the whim of an ideological pervert, a chance despot. Yet the scriptures provide ample justification for such action, whether or not it was the real motive for it in Albania. Before the days when Marxists and Christians discovered supposedly mutual ground, Marx wrote of the post-revolutionary era to come:

 

When the [revolutionary] political state…comes violently into being… [it] can and must proceed to the abolition of religion, to the destruction of religion.

 

And this was because:

 

…to abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness; the demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs that needs illusions.

 

As for Lenin’s opinion of religion, it was, if anything, rather less favourable than that of Marx:

 

…any religious idea, any idea of god at all, any flirtation even with a god, is the most unutterable foulness… It is the most dangerous foulness, the most shameful ‘infection’.

 

When a man compares religion with venereal disease, it is scarcely surprising that those who claim to be his followers close churches and mosques.

At Tirana Airport one leaves a continent and several decades behind. No businessmen bustle self-importantly here, no one rushes to buy a watch or a camera he does not need simply because there are a few francs or marks or pounds to be saved. People move slowly, almost with reluctance. The aircraft in which one lands stands in solitary glory on the tarmac (apart from the few ancient and probably flightless MiG fighters half-hidden behind the bushes, procured from the Soviet Union or China many years ago, before those countries were declared Anti-Marx by Albania’s absolute dictator for forty-two years, Enver Hoxha). One walks to the terminal through a pleasantly seedy garden with spiky grass and stunted palm trees, and notices there is no smell of aviation fuel in the air, as at other airports, and recalls the paeans of praise Albania once earned from enthusiasts for its freedom from pollution. Before the entry formalities are completed, the aircraft has taken off for its return to the other world, and suddenly the reality of Albania’s terrible isolation is revealed to the tourist. If he contracts appendicitis now, he will have to submit to an Albanian appendectomy.

Foreign visitors can enter Albania only in an officially supervised group, unless the Albanian government extends a special invitation to them: an unlikely eventuality in my case, since I had never acted as an apologist for the regime. Few groups are allowed in each year; they are escorted everywhere, but then even Albanians are not permitted to leave their home district without permission from the authorities. While we filled in our declaration forms, listing the narcotics, explosives and books we had brought with us, and waited for the customs and immigration officials to compose themselves in preparation for their inspection of us and our forms, I cast my eye over my companions of the next twelve days. I had hoped for a rich crop of eccentrics among them, such as I had encountered at the annual general meeting of the Anglo-Albanian Society in London a month previously. The secretary of the society was a retired optician from Ilford who had discovered the Balkan paradise late in life and learnt its language; the rank and file of the society seemed either elderly revolutionaries of the upper classes, who knew the key to world history yet somehow had never learnt how to do up their shirt buttons properly, or lonely, embittered proletarian autodidacts, who dreamed of vengeance upon the world and called it love of humanity.

I scanned the group in vain for believers in Tirana as the New Jerusalem. The nearest I came to finding them were a retired architect and his wife from Hampstead who were so appalled at Thatcher’s Britain that they wanted to examine other possibilities for themselves. (‘One is always looking for an alternative to our ghastly predicament,’ said the architect.) But it didn’t take them very long to realise that, bad as things were at home, the little Balkan state provided few solutions. Our drive to Tirana from the airport was sufficient to prove it.

Tirana is in one of the few fertile valleys of an exceedingly mountainous country. It is important, therefore, that these valleys should yield as much produce as possible, especially as the government is determined for political reasons that Albania should be self-sufficient in food, as in everything else. Certainly, every inch of land appears to be cultivated; but the statistical claims made by the government about the mechanisation of Albanian agriculture seem, at least to the casual observer on his way from Tirana Airport to Tirana, to be – well, exaggerated. It is true there are tractors to be seen, but of a vintage that any visitor will not have encountered outside a museum, and in such a state of battered disrepair that, belching thick black smoke in protest, they move scarcely faster than the oxcarts that still trundle the tracks and roads of Albania in greater numbers than the generally limping motor vehicles. The utility of these tractors must surely be limited. And in many of the fields there are still to be seen large groups of peasants, mainly kerchiefed women, tilling the soil with hand hoes and weeding by hand. Were it not that the fields are vast in extent, thus proclaiming themselves part of state farms, the scene might be immemorial.

There is one further feature of the landscape, however, that an Albanian peasant, returning from another age, would not recognise. At frequent intervals as far as the eye can see, on every hillock and in every declivity, are rows of flattish concrete domes (I counted thirty-two in one field alone), a succession of tiny Santa Sophias, each with a gaping black slit in its walls. These are defensive gun emplacements, patiently awaiting an invasion of Albania to find their use. Here is the first intimation the visitor receives of that wild nationalism and xenophobia that has so completely isolated Albania from the rest of the world for nearly half a century. Of the military worth of these artillery emplacements I cannot speak; I do not know whether Albania has sufficient men or arms to defend them, or indeed whether they are defensible against modern weaponry. But as a constant message to the peasants in the fields that foreigners are enemies, to be guarded against at all costs, the gun emplacements are unrivalled. And in hillier areas, where there are vineyards, the message is reinforced by the iron spikes that are set in the tops of each of the posts supporting the vines, to spear enemy paratroops as they land.

Where does this insane xenophobia come from? After all, human behaviour has an explanation, if not a justification. And it isn’t long before your guides in Albania (there are always two of them, one to watch the behaviour of the other) recite the list of invaders and occupiers of their country: Roman, Bulgarian, Serbian, Byzantine, Turkish, Italian, Austrian, French, German, and Anglo-American. Thus the Albanians have learnt the harsh lesson of history: unfortunately, the wrong one.

It began to rain as we approached the city. The approaches to very few cities are edifying, especially in the rain, but Tirana was particularly dispiriting in this respect. First came a few factories, draped with red banners proclaiming glory to the Albanian Party of Labour, and then apartment blocks, built of rough red bricks, all of them in a little sea of mud, and finished to a standard that would have disgraced Calcutta.

‘Look at that!’ exclaimed William, a psychiatric social worker. ‘It’s awful.’

He was perfectly right, of course, it was awful, but William’s furrowed brow and the dying fall of his voice told us that this was the opening shot in a campaign of continuous complaint, for William would have found Lausanne no less intolerable than Tirana.

There was no traffic in Tirana and no commercial life. The disfiguring vulgarity of modern advertising has often been remarked upon: the dreariness of its replacement by political slogans rather less often. As for the people who trudged along the pavements, they too were clad in dreariness. Their clothes were of man-made fibre, of colours with which they used to paint the corridors of mental hospitals, chocolate brown and a shade of dark and dirty orange particularly prominent among them.

After forty minutes, we reached Skanderbeg Square, in the very heart of the city. It was named after the Albanian national hero who raised the standard of revolt against the Turks in 1443 and won every battle against them except his last in 1468. In modern Albanian historiography, Skanderbeg was unequivocally a Good Thing, a forerunner in fact of Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Party of Labour. As is usual in the extreme nationalist version of history, inconvenient facts are overlooked: that the people Skanderbeg fought against were mainly Albanians led by other Albanians, that Turkish suzerainty was by no means a chapter of horrors and nothing else, that Albanians were privileged within the Ottoman empire and more than thirty of them became viziers, that Albanian troops were used by the Turks to put down Greek rebellions, etc.

In any case, it is not Skanderbeg whose huge statue is at the centre of this vast square so devoid of traffic that people stroll across it without having to look: it is Enver Hoxha, plump, avuncular and metallic in his heavy bronze overcoat.

We stayed in the Hotel Tirana overlooking the square. It is the city’s only real tower block, and from its upper floors you can look down the Boulevard of Martyrs to the green hills beyond the Enver Hoxha University. I found myself sharing a room with a member of our group, Albert, an incessant chatterer who was as little able to resist filling silences with verbigeration as a glutton can resist emptying boxes of chocolates. The banality of his conversation drove me to the brink of despair, and I understood at last Sartre’s remark that hell was other people. That Albert was kindly and well-meaning made it worse, not better. Just occasionally, however, he said something interesting. He had been to Albania before but unlike most people who have been more than once was not an apologist of the regime. In addition to snapshots of the high street of his south London suburb with which he hoped to increase disaffection among the citizens of Albania, he brought photographs of the guides on his previous tour of the country, and showed them to our present guides. One of the photographed guides had in the interval managed to defect while acting as an interpreter in western Europe. Our present guides suggested that, as a traitor, his face be ceremonially scratched from the photograph.

Although it was raining, I went out at once for a walk, glancing behind me at intervals to see whether I was tailed. I wasn’t, and I felt mildly put out at being so unimportant. I took shelter for a time under the colonnade of the Palace of Culture, a marble-faced building that ran along one side of the square. The marble columns of the colonnade were rectangular, with ninety degree corners on which one might cut oneself. Why was it, I wondered, that both fascist and communist architects were so drawn to columns of this type? Was it because they embodied power, naked and unadorned? I couldn’t think of a style of architecture more completely antithetical to culture than that of the Palace of Culture.

A few bedraggled Albanians also took shelter there. They looked at me with as much curiosity as I looked at them. Their language was radically incomprehensible to me, the only surviving descendent of ancient Illyrian and quite unlike any other European language, even Hungarian. A question and answer from Twelfth Night ran through my head over and over again, like a fragment of a melody that won’t go away, or a record stuck in a groove: What country, friends, is this? Illyria, lady. What country, friends, is this? Illyria, lady.

I had to move away to escape the repetition of these pointless phrases. New impressions would drive them from my mind, I hoped. And sure enough, I was soon intrigued by the little eighteenth century mosque across the road from the Palace of Culture. It had a single minaret and was decorated with a charmingly naive floral frieze. The iron gates, however, were padlocked, and my attempts to see in at the windows of the mosque were observed somewhat nervously by the few passers-by. A new question entered my mind: did Albanians, in the privacy of their homes, offer up illicit prayers to the deity? After all, 70 per cent of them had once been Moslem (though not devoutly so), and the rest Christian. Official historiography explained the mass conversion of Albanians to Islam after the Turkish conquest by the lower taxes paid by Moslems. This sounded to me not implausible: having witnessed mass conversions elsewhere, I doubted their spirituality. But official historiography was itself less interested in truth than in self-validation. If peasants converted to Islam because of tax advantages, it made religion – with all its supposed otherworldliness – look sordid and hypocritical. And it helped support the Marxist contention that, au fond, all human activity is motivated by economic considerations. It was ironic, then, that the leader of the new godless Albania should have been called Hoxha, which is Turkish for religious teacher. Some might say, of course, that it wasn’t ironic at all: he merely replaced one religion with another, a religion even less squeamish about forced conversion than Islam in Asia or Christianity in the New World.

With these thoughts in mind, it seemed only right that I should make for the Boulevard of Martyrs. This was reached via a little circus of yellow stucco buildings which were ministries: one could tell by the chauffeured new black Mercedes with grey curtains in the rear windows that waited at the entrances. On the walls of the ministries were moulded plaster decorations in the Stalinist baroque style: sheaves of wheat and bunches of grapes.

There were a couple of sets of traffic lights in the vicinity, the only ones in the whole of Albania, which were of recent installation. It is said there are but five hundred cars in the country, and Tirana being a city of wide streets and boulevards, it has an atmosphere of calm that is at first deeply refreshing, at least to those who are used to the frantic, choking cities of Europe, but which – after no great length of time – becomes rather sinister. It is the silence, interrupted only rarely by a distant rumble over the cobbles of an approaching vehicle, that disturbs. Cities were not made for silence. For whom, then, or for what were these wide streets constructed, if not for traffic? For military parades, to prevent barricades from ever being erected across them, to overawe pedestrians? Or were they made like this simply because grandiosity is the nature of tyrants?

I reached the Boulevard of Martyrs, pausing before the statue of Stalin, one hand held Napoleonically in his military greatcoat, opposite the art gallery. Six months previously in the Soviet Union I had read in the Moscow News of the discovery of a mass grave in Byelorussia containing at least 102,000 bodies, a mass murder freely attributed to Stalin, who was acknowledged as one of the greatest criminals in history. This was scarcely news outside the Soviet Union, of course; but the final acceptance of this truth in the land of his crimes made the presence of a statue to him anywhere else all the more shocking. Yet at the same time I was aware of a strange ambivalence in my reaction: admiration of, even affection for, the dottiness of a tiny nation that had set its face against the accepted truths of the rest of the world. If Albania did not exist, it would be necessary perhaps to invent it. But my ambivalence was essentially self-indulgent. The eccentricity of believing in Stalin was not that of a private person, but of a state and a government; nor was it harmless, like believing the earth was flat or the future was decipherable in tea leaves, but vicious and nasty, like anti-Semitism or religious fanaticism.

Because of the rain, the Boulevard was almost deserted. I entered the only other hotel for foreigners in Tirana, the Dajti, reserved for diplomats and visitors of consequence. The enormous entrance hall was empty: but a black and white television in the corner was broadcasting an English lesson from the sixties into the void, given by comically prim English actors:

 

Repeat Walter’s reply to Connie’s question.

Connie: Have you enough money?

Walter: I think so, thank you.

 

How English, I thought, that Walter should reply I think so rather then Yes or No: it is scarcely any wonder that Albion is regarded as diabolically perfidious when often she is only mealy-mouthed.

I drank some coffee – the best I had in Albania – and ate a cake of astonishing sweetness which somehow left a chemical aftertaste, as though an unpleasant medicine had been insinuated into it in an attempt to get by stealth a difficult patient to take his afternoon dose. I left the Dajti with Connie and Walter still enunciating away, their words clearer than their meanings, and continued down the Boulevard of Martyrs.

I crossed the road but was soon waved back by soldiers with stubby automatic weapons at the ready. They wore drab uniforms of Soviet inspiration and long olive green waterproof capes. The building from which they waved me away was clearly important: Party Headquarters or the like. There was tension here which had been absent from the ministries, and the building itself was severe, massive and grey.

I reached the end of the Boulevard. By now it had stopped raining and there were some students and soldiers around. The main building of Enver Hoxha University was much smaller and less impressive close to than when seen from the other end of the long, wide Boulevard. Its rough-hewn grey granite facing was positively ugly. To the left of the Enver Hoxha University was the Enver Hoxha football stadium, reached across a wide expanse of white stone. Here there was another colonnade of square pillars, under which was an outdoor cafe where – to my astonishment – people were actually being served drinks by waiters in white jackets and black bow ties. As I approached, two young men (there were no women to be seen) motioned me to sit at their table, and I accepted their invitation.

The young men – hardly more than youths – were thin and wiry, as though they had spent time in the mountains as goatherds, and their hair was cropped very short. Their faces, scalps and arms were scarred by old cuts, and their eyes had that strange limpidity that people with olive complexions sometimes have. They were amiable, but I should not have underestimated their toughness.

We had no language in common, but one of them knew a little Italian, which he spoke slowly and badly enough for me to understand. They were army conscripts on leave, and I was surprised that they showed no fear of speaking to me. They had already had a few drinks and insisted that I joined them in a cognac. Since I dislike all cognac, I cannot comment on the Albanian variety: but it certainly seemed no worse to me than many others I have tried.

The two conscripts – who hated the army – asked me, like Daniel come to cast judgment, to settle a dispute between them. The first of them maintained there were three important things in life, while the second maintained there was only one. The three things were sex, whisky and music; while the one thing was sport. Ideology, patriotism and the rest were obviously of no account to them. The one who favoured music, among other things, recited the names of pop groups with the same expression as a mystic reciting the many names of God. ‘Dire Straits,’ he said, and repeated it many times. ‘Gary Lineker,’ countered the other.

‘Is it true that Michael Jackson has AIDS?’ asked the first.

To his evident disappointment, I had no special information on the subject. He found my lack of interest in it strange: to be free, and yet to know nothing of Michael Jackson!

A friend of theirs came to sit with us. He was taller than they, with pretensions to charm and elegance, a coat draped over his shoulders somewhat in the manner of Prince Yakimov in The Balkan Trilogy. His shabby moulded plastic shoes let him down, however. He managed to convey that it was only by accident that he found himself in Tirana: spiritually, he was more at home in Paris or New York. And he let it be known also that he was by no means a drone of the socialist state: he was a dealer in dollars, in watches and in Walkmen.

There followed an ominous inspection of my watch, which I knew from experience would lead to urgent and heartrending requests that I should part with it, on the most advantageous terms to me, of course. The deal would be presented as though the future of the whole world depended upon it, and it was a last chance. I would need all my minimal strength to resist the arguments of the aspiring purchaser. And then the subject would switch to dollars, failing agreement on which I should be expected at least to exchange my shoes for his, since the purchase of new ones would be ‘no problem for me’.

The three of them followed me back down the Boulevard of Martyrs, increasingly desperate for some tangible memento of our meeting. Then suddenly they melted away, as though they had remembered other urgent business: I surmised that it wasn’t safe to be too long in the company of foreigners, especially in the centre of the city.

Back in the hotel, at seven o’clock, it was time for dinner. One of the strangest things about group holidays is the eagerness with which everyone, hungry or not, rushes to the dining room three times a day, as if afraid that a moment’s delay will cause the food to disappear. I felt this anxiety myself, very acutely. Of course, by the standards of Albanians, for whom everything was, is and will continue to be severely rationed, and very few of whom are fat, we ate enormously, even obscenely. The Albanians did everything they could to please us, but neither their efforts nor our situation of extreme privilege inhibited some of our number from complaining vociferously about the staleness of the bread, the smallness of the portions of butter etc. At such moments, I wished for a chasm to open up and swallow me.

After dinner, I went for a walk in night-time Tirana. Not even the firmest of Enver Hoxha’s partisans would maintain that Tirana is an exciting or vibrant city, but it is safe, and though the streets are only half-lit by lamps of feeble power, whose principal effect is to cast deep shadows without illuminating anything, one senses at once that muggings and robberies do not happen here. In a country with an immemorial tradition of banditry, and a world in which it is ever less safe to venture out of one’s room after dark, this is no mean achievement, a triumph, one might almost say, for personal liberty. But liberty to do what, except stroll? No village in Wales on a wet Sunday afternoon is more dead than Tirana after dark.

Eventually, however, I found a bar. It was down a long, wide street with apartment windows, but almost all were sealed off from view by dark curtains of rough material, and those that were not were illuminated by too dim a light – a yellowing gloom of forty watts or less – to see much beyond the general dinginess within.

The bar was large and bare, with an iron-railed gallery above. There were about twenty white-topped tables, stained with the evaporated slops of beer and spirits. Only three of the tables were occupied, for it was late: nine-thirty. The other drinkers, all unshaven men in workday clothes, scarcely looked up when I entered: the table tops seeming to exert for them a deep, if melancholy, fascination. They did not ask me to join them: indeed, they hardly communicated among themselves. I ordered a raki, a viscous clear spirit of considerable strength. The waiter let it be known it was near to closing time by removing his white jacket as soon as he had brought me my glass. I drank the raki and returned to the hotel, the waiter locking the bar door behind me as I left.

By this time, the sound of folk music was issuing from the subterranean taverna under the hotel lobby. I went down to investigate. The taverna had been badly damaged only a few weeks before by English football hooligans, in Albania for an international match, who had got drunk, stripped naked and given Nazi salutes, than which nothing would be better calculated to insult and enrage the Albanians. Folk dancers in colourful traditional Albanian costumes were performing on the dance floor, but because the audience was sparse and consisted entirely of foreigners, for whom the dancers might as well have been sea lions, the gaiety of the dances was forced and without meaning, lifeless and dishonest. I fled from this ghostly charade to my room.

Albert was there, bursting with platitudes. But I have to admit he was very well prepared for the trip: not only had he brought ample supplies of chewing gum and pens for the children that he assured me would pester us later on, but he had a light plastic mackintosh against the squally showers that were seasonal elsewhere in the country, dozens of rolls of film and a bag of tiny chocolate bars for when lunch or dinner was unavoidably delayed, to say nothing of a travelling electric teapot with adaptors for use in all electric points of the world. More importantly, he possessed a guidebook to Albania written by the secretary of the Anglo-Albanian Society and an Albanian phrasebook not easily come by. While he poured details of the new compact disc player he had just bought at home into my ear, I read these volumes, so full of strange and mysterious information.

What, for example, was one to make of the guidebook’s statement that there was one shop in Albania for every 268 people? Was it a complaint or a boast? What did they sell, these shops for 268 people? And where did one go to taste the ‘popular’ Albanian cocktail, the Lumumba, which is made of raki and cocoa? And where did one obtain a copy of the town of Fier’s twice weekly newspaper, The Sweat of the Peasant?

With non-ferrous metals one was on firmer ground. The output of chromium in Albania since 1938 had increased 256 times, that of copper since 1946, 617 times. Ah, I thought, if only happiness could be measured in the same way! That would soon put a finish to all those endless ideological disputes and settle matters once and for all. The output of happiness in Albania between 1938 and 1980 rose 479 times, while that of Belgium rose in the same period only 4.7 times, ergo…

I turned to the phrasebook. I learnt that the Albanian for perhaps was the same as for probably: an explanation for Albanian production statistics, perhaps – or probably. And the phrasebook reminded me of my time in Somalia in 1986 when, in the midst of a cholera epidemic, I was equipped by a Somali phrasebook, compiled during the period of Soviet influence, with such useful phrases as ‘Hand me the opera glasses, please’. I repeated to myself in Albanian: ‘Industrial production has increased ninety-seven fold as against 1938.’ The only authentic phrase appeared in the At the hospital section: ‘I am feeling worse.’ The section on polite greetings and valedictions, by contrast, betrayed the heavy hand of the ideologist. I attempted to commit to memory the Albanian for ‘We must live and work as under a siege’, but the effort proved too great, and I was overcome by sleep.

The next morning, after a breakfast whose coffee not even the most accommodating of guests could have called good, or even coffee, it was time to commence our visits. For some reason the Albanian tourist authorities were convinced that museums were what we had come to Albania to see: at any rate, that was what they were going to show us. Thenceforth, we were taken to see three museums a day, until the very idea of a museum induced in me a faint sensation of nausea – still I cannot enter one without being overcome momentarily by a feeling of profound gloom. Halfway through the tour, I thought we must surely by now have exhausted the museums of Albania: it is, after all, a very small country, only the size of Wales, with about the same population. In this I was sadly mistaken, for according to 40 Years of Socialist Albania the number of museums in Albania has risen from seven in 1950 to 2034 in 1983. It would therefore have taken a tour of approximately two years to exhaust them. A tour of only twelve days exhausted me.

The museum that evidently required the most urgent visit was called Albania Today, an exhibition of socialist Albania’s achievements. Unfortunately, when we arrived Albania Today was closed. Our guides attempted to find out why, but were given a dusty answer by the doorman: Albania Today would be open tomorrow, perhaps or probably.

By way of compensation for our disappointment, we were taken instead to the Enver Hoxha Museum in the Boulevard of Martyrs. This is the metropolitan cathedral of the new Albanian religion. The building itself is hi-tech, startlingly so in a capital where the construction of even quite large apartment blocks seems hardly above the mud hut level. It is in the style of modern cathedrals, as built by atheist architects: a shining white pyramid with a translucent red star set horizontally as a window at its apex. It does not lack devotees, of course, for a prolonged communion there is an important part of every schoolchild’s education. One enters reverently.

From the entrance run two red carpets (upon which one may not step) up to a large and dazzling white statue of Hoxha, seated Pharaonically on what one suspects is an armchair. The statue has red gladioli at its base and is situated exactly at the centre of an expanse of white stone. I wanted to laugh.

The galleries depicting his life and work run round the inside of the pyramid, rather as in the Guggenheim. The exhibits start with his childhood and progress upwards to his death. Throughout there are glass reliquaries, containing his hat, his pen, his revolver, his shirts (minus their foreign labels), and his sunglasses. The photographs are mainly in the Soviet style, with that peculiar grainy fuzziness unknown outside the communist world which presumably makes it easy to add or subtract people whenever ideologically necessary. Looking at these semi-sepia photographs one feels not that the camera cannot lie, but that it cannot tell the truth.

There are pictures of Enver Hoxha as a youth. To emphasise the quasi-miraculous nature of his intellectual powers, it has been found advantageous to assert that his revolutionary ideas came to him very young, and that he never subsequently deviated from them. This version of his biography not only proves the precocity of his genius, but demonstrates the extraordinary fidelity of his character. If, in ordinary conversation, we said of a man that he had not changed his ideas since the age of fifteen, it would not be taken as a compliment; but conversations about Enver Hoxha were never intended to be ordinary.

It is clear from the photographs of Hoxha as a youth that in one respect the otherwise preposterously hagiographic account of his life is perfectly correct: his will was always indomitable. The handsome and intelligent youth who stares out at the camera, dandyishly adorned in a bow tie, his head inclined at a disdainful angle, is at once proud, scornful, arrogant, rebellious and self-possessed, already aware of a special historical destiny. I should not care to have been his teacher at school. As to the ultimate source of his infinite self-assurance, it must remain a mystery: a throw of the genes, perhaps, or an over-indulgent mother. But whatever explanation is proposed, the effect was disproportionate to the cause. One thing seems certain: he had a predisposition to rebellion against any authority but his own, for which, by contrast, he conceived an immediate and infinite respect. And in the particular historical conditions in which he grew up, these unpleasantly adolescent traits, which in other circumstances he would have had to subdue, were a positive advantage.

One spirals upwards towards his death, or what would have been his death were he not immortal. He was a student (on an Albanian government stipend) in Montpellier in the early thirties until he was expelled for subversive behaviour. He spent some time in Paris before becoming personal secretary to the Albanian consul in Belgium. In 1938, he returned to Albania as a teacher at the French lycée in Korce, never for a moment letting up on subversion.

At all times in his life he was a leader: in the whole of the museum he is never portrayed in a position of subordination to anyone. And it was the war that gave him his chance. Without it, he might have remained an autodidact Marxist enragé for the rest of his life; but the foreign occupation of his country, so ideally suited geographically and culturally to guerrilla warfare, gave him the opportunity, which he exploited brilliantly, to become an autodidact Marxist dictator for the remainder of his life instead.

During the war, Hoxha was a guerrilla leader of great prowess. According to the official version of history now peddled ad nauseam everywhere and on all possible occasions, it was Hoxha and his partisans who were responsible for the defeat of the Nazis in Albania. Throughout the whole of the country, in hundreds of monuments and posters, I never once saw an allusion to the wider context of the war years. One might have supposed that Albania stood alone against the Nazis.

The truth was somewhat more complex than the official version, though since its accession to power the Albanian leadership has been able to put into practice the incantation theory of historical truth: that something becomes true by constant reiteration. In fact, the withdrawal of the Nazis from Albania was part of their general retreat in the face of the onslaught of the Russians and the Americans, compared with which the Albanian partisans were able to administer no more than pinpricks. It is no disgrace to a tiny and backward nation that it should have been unable, by its own unaided efforts, to rid itself of occupation by one of the most powerful military machines of all time; but it is a disgrace that its leaders should have misrepresented the past so consistently and self-glorifyingly for four and a half decades, with the sole purpose of maintaining themselves in power.

Actually, Hoxha and his partisans had other fish to fry than the Nazis. Realising that the Nazi withdrawal was in any case inevitable, the partisans strove as much to secure their own future position inside the country as to expel the Nazi invaders. A considerable proportion of their military activity was directed not against the Germans but against other, non-communist, Albanian armed groups, which wished to restore the status quo ante. In this sense, the partisans were wholly successful: by the time the Nazis left Albania, they were the only ones who could fill the power vacuum.

Another interesting aspect of Albania’s modern history that somehow escapes memorialisation in Albania is the strange alliance between Enver Hoxha and certain members of the British upper-middle classes. Indeed, it would hardly be too much to say that Hoxha owed his power to this unholy alliance, and thus the Albanian people had it to thank for forty years of Hoxha’s rule. It was not Stalin who supplied the partisans with the arms that helped them defeat their Albanian enemies, but the British, who did so on the recommendation of their Balkan intelligence network, which – it transpires – was riddled with upper class communists and fellow-travellers. And it was Kim Philby who ensured the failure of Anglo-American attempts to overthrow Hoxha after the war by revealing the plans in advance to the Russians and Albanians. Probably the attempts would have failed anyway: whether they deserved to is another question about which much could be argued. When Albanians are free to erect statues to whomsoever they please, we shall see whether they erect any to Philby.

The photographs in the museum show Hoxha emerging from the war surprisingly sleek, indeed fat. Addressing the microphone during the proclamation of the new republic in Tirana in 1944, he reminded me very powerfully of another leader: Franco. So alike were they physically that, were it not for the star on Hoxha’s military beret, this photograph of him could be inserted in a biography of Franco, and not more than one in a hundred readers notice the substitution. Shortly afterwards, fatter still, he developed a taste for Soviet marshals’ uniforms, with much gold braid and a gold belt that kept his expanding paunch under control as he bent over to pat children on the head. An extract from a speech in French that he gave during his gold braid period is played over and over again, hour after hour, day after day. Nous rejetons avec mépris… Nous rejetons avec mépris… I never quite caught what it was that he rejected with such contumely, but the tone of his surprisingly squeaky voice was full of that unthinking self-righteousness and injured innocence that allows a man to justify to himself the vilest crimes (such as the execution of his erstwhile colleagues, a particular forte of Hoxha’s) and then to sleep easily.

He soon abandoned magniloquent uniforms for grey suits. We hear him next addressing a party congress: his speech is greeted by applause rising to (in the Stalinist terminology) a thunderous ovation. And we see a film of the congress delegates getting to their feet and clapping frantically. Did they really clap like this, or has the film been speeded up? And were the delegates afraid to be the first to stop clapping, lest they be thought traitors? The applause continues, day in, day out, with only the briefest of interludes for the voice of Hoxha himself.

As he ages, he mellows; he becomes slimmer and his suits are a lighter shade of grey. He is seen now with his new best friend (having shot the previous one or driven him to suicide), his disciple and successor, Ramiz Alia, a man to all intents and purposes without a personality. Hoxha spends more of his time on park benches surrounded by adoring children; he goes for walks in private gardens with his wife (also, as it happens, a member of the Politburo). And we see him in his study, quietly working on state papers.

Towards the end of his life he becomes doddery, and has the haggard look caused by spreading cancer. There is a memorable video of him taken, I should imagine, not long before he died. He is filmed approaching the bookcase in his study. He looks the books up and down, evidently searching for something good to read. Finally, after some considerable thought, he alights on something suitable: Volume Six of his own Collected Works. He settles down contentedly to read it.

Enver Hoxha’s library is preserved in the museum. The books are mainly in French, a few in Albanian and Italian. There are perhaps five hundred of them, a number to overawe a barely literate peasant or to impress the inhabitants of a country where the only choice in the ubiquitous bookshops is between different ersatz bindings (usually wine-coloured) of the Collected Works. The books in Hoxha’s library demonstrate a wide, if superficial, interest in archaeology and the visual arts, with a smattering of history: in short, a typical autodidact’s library. Most of his books, of course, would have been forbidden his subjects, contaminated as they were by bourgeois idealism against whose blandishments only the ideologically fortified, such as himself, were proof.

I examined the library carefully, supposing that a man’s books proclaimed the man, and I came to a somewhat disdainful conclusion concerning Enver Hoxha. In this, of course, I made the same mistake the Bolshevik intellectuals made about Stalin: that someone who was pedantic, bureaucratic and without originality could not also be formidable. But the twentieth century has seen the creation of societies in which precisely such faceless qualities are the sine qua non of success and survival: and despite the thousands of photographs, the relics of his life, the speeches and videos, Hoxha remains faceless, the object of a personality cult without a personality. As presented in the museum, he lived only in the sense that a Haitian zombie lives; he spoke a form of language not used by any but the undead. In 40 Years of Socialist Albania, for example, each section is headed by quotations from him, a few of which I here take at random:

 

A broad system of transport…has been created. This system has strengthened the unified character of the economy and greatly enlivened the economic and social life of the country.

The increased level of knowledge and culture of the people represents a great potential for the realisation of the current and future plans, for the advance of technical and scientific progress to new heights.

The Party has shown constant care that culture, literature and arts develop in a pure and sound atmosphere, that they follow the revolutionary transformations of the country step by step and steadily strengthen their socialist content, their militant character, their popular spirit and their national features.

 

I shall spare the reader more (the Collected Works are sixty volumes long), but he or she might like to ponder the consequences, both for individuals and for a country, of the forcible imposition of this style of public expression to the exclusion of all others, not for ten minutes or a week, but for forty-five years: in other words, for nearly three generations of adults. A drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk…

I looked at some middle-aged Albanians as they peered without curiosity into the glass case containing condolences on Hoxha’s death from all over the world. Considering how many people enter the museum, very few survive to its final stages. And did those hardy few who reached the condolences realise that the telegram sent by Hardial Bains, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of Canada, did not exactly express the sentiments of the whole Canadian people, if indeed it could be said to express any sentiments at all?

 

The path which has been proven to be invincible by the life and work of Comrade Enver Hoxha, who led his party and people in their most militant and uncompromising struggle against imperialism, social imperialism, the bourgeoisie and all reaction and revisionism and opportunism of all hues in their service and who has left an indelible mark on history…

 

Mercifully for the reader of English, the rest of Hardial Bains’ message is covered by a telegram from Thomas Sankara, soon to be murdered by his best friend but who was then President of the country he renamed Burkina Faso, Land of Incorruptible People, telling of his profound sympathie émue.

I left the museum, this cathedral of untruth, with a strange knot in my stomach. The idea that Hoxha should have gone to his grave triumphant filled me with rage. I felt I should have screamed ‘Lies, lies, lies!’ and trampled on the red carpet leading to his statue, just to let everyone know that I, at any rate, did not acquiesce in this elevation of mendacity to the status of religion. But of course I was silent, like everyone else, and my silence demeaned me and turned me into an accomplice. I wondered what went on in Albanian minds behind those impassive, weather-beaten peasant faces. Had lies become truth simply through repetition? Or did they not impinge on consciousness at all, acceptance of them having become part of every citizen’s repertoire of automatic behaviour, like walking or climbing stairs? One cannot, after all, be angered by the same lies year after year. But what effect, if any, did passive acceptance of systematic untruth have on the human psyche? Would the effect disappear with the regime that produced it? Albania was an experimental laboratory of the human soul in which, however, it was forbidden to ask questions.

In between visits to museums, our guides granted us what they called ‘free time’, never long enough to wander far. It was like being back at school. They suggested that we might like to use this time to do shopping, though what they thought we should buy is a mystery. Even the most inveterate of shoppers – amongst whom I am not one – would have found Albanian shops unenticing, poorly stocked as they were with those ill-designed, shoddy, unmistakably communist goods that are saleable only in conditions of shortage and monopoly, and sometimes not even then.

What, I wondered, is the defining characteristic of communist shoddiness? It certainly exists, for it is instantly recognisable among all the other possible forms of shoddiness. What have the tubes of Bulgarian toothpaste on sale in kiosks in Tirana in common with the packets of Czechoslovak soap or East German buttons also on sale there? How would one know, beyond any possibility of doubt, that Albania was communist merely by looking at a bottle of its brandy or a jar of its bottled fruit?

In the latter cases, of course, the labels would not be stuck on straight. One speculates as to whether this endemic crookedness represents revolt on the part of the bottle-labellers, or subtle satire. For if the labels were pasted on only carelessly – the result of drunkenness, say – one would expect that, now and again, a label would be pasted on straight. But this never happens: I examined the bottles in several stores to check the veracity of this peculiar observation.

Furthermore, where there are tins and metal tops, the rust gives them away as being of communist manufacture. And even this rust is of a special kind, being not just the result of time and oxidation, but of a fusion with the contents of the container that have somehow managed to seep outwards and mix with the rust, leaving a dark brown sticky mess that repels any but the most desperate customer.

However, it is the printing and design of packaging that is most thoroughly characteristic – pathognomonic, as doctors put it – of communist manufacture. The paper or cardboard is always rough and absorbent, so that ink often sends little spidery strands through it; the calligraphy is crude and inelegant. The labels bear as little information as possible: toothpaste, they say, or soap, and nothing else. This is because the alternatives to toothpaste and soap are not other brands, but no toothpaste at all and no soap. This is not to say that the information on a label that a bottle contains plums is entirely useless: it isn’t, because in the bottling process the plums have been rendered revoltingly indistinguishable from cherries, olives, apricots, greengages, peppers or tomatoes bottled by the same process: that is to say, they are all roundish objects of a feculent brown colour. But since any product’s competition is only a blank space, an absence, there is no need to dress it up attractively. Besides, it is in no one’s interest that products should be sold rather than stored or even thrown away. Under socialism, production is not for profit, but it is not for use either; it is divorced from all human purposes whatsoever.

Does it matter, though, that the everyday objects of life should be so profoundly unattractive? Does it matter that clothes should be of dirty colours, that shops should be as inviting as empty morgues? How many times have we heard of the meretriciousness of commercial culture, of the essential unimportance of having a choice of breakfast cereals in the morning, of the waste involved in elaborate packaging that is designed to sell unnecessary or worthless products? There is so much in our lives that is trivial, that inhibits us from considering what is truly important in our existence, that to be freed from the compulsion to possess goods ever remoter from our natural needs sometimes seems to us highly desirable. But there is a world of difference between voluntary renunciation of what is available and embittered resignation in the face of permanent shortage. And it is only by visiting countries that are relentlessly serious and puritanical (‘We must live and work as under a siege’) that one appreciates – within a very short time – the vital importance of frivolity.

The lack of aesthetic feeling in everyday objects is not compensated for in Tirana by the beauty of public works, though the city is clean and no one drops litter (possibly there is little to drop – only once in twelve days did I see a man reading a newspaper, and that was while he waited for a haircut). There are pleasant enough boulevards, if you can ignore the tendency to grandiosity, and Tirana is uncrowded: it is a city of only 200,000 inhabitants, a vast metropolis by the standards of most of Man’s history, but now considered scarcely more than a town. There are a few corners where the old Turko-Parisian style persists: individual houses with crumbling yellow stucco, shutters and ornate ironwork, with small front gardens where vines grow in profusion. These houses were made for a languid life, for endless conversations over coffee or raki, for gossip and intrigue. But most of Tirana is given over to apartment blocks built by men for whom life is reducible to statistics, for whom quantity exists because it is an arithmetical expression, but for whom quality is too intangible a concept to have any reality.

Off the main boulevards, the apartment blocks are not faced with stucco or stone but left permanently unfinished, their breezeblock masonry and rough cement work exposed, the walls so poorly constructed and carelessly aligned that it seems any minor vibration in the ground must shake them to rubble. Furthermore, the ground around them has not been cleared, still less landscaped: it remains scarred and scoured, like on a building site, turning to mud in the rain and dust in the sun. Piles of unused building materials or rusting equipment take the place of trees; the roads to the apartment blocks are no more than tracks strewn with rubble – along which people cannot walk but only trudge. After passing through acres of such ‘scenery’, one suddenly realises that this bureaucratic architecture is without precedent in the whole of human history: that never before has mankind constructed homes for himself which are so utterly devoid of decoration, which are so exhaustively constituted by a roof and four walls. The effect is dreary beyond the imagining of even the most advanced British architects.

On clement evenings, however, the centre of Tirana has (briefly) the feel almost of a normal, even happy city. The Boulevard of Martyrs is given over to the volta, the Mediterranean evening stroll, when everyone walks out to see and be seen. Young men walk to and fro past girls who pretend to ignore them, and old men link arms as they reminisce for the thousandth time. The two distinguishable ranks of the Albanian army – soldier and officer – mingle with the crowds, acknowledging greetings and exchanging jokes. The absence of traffic at such a time is a delight. During the volta, one might believe all that the regime says of itself.

This moment soon passes, though; at about seven o’clock, the crowds melt quickly away, like dusk in the tropics, and there are no cafés for the more garrulous of intellectuals to repair to, only a few bars where men go to forget. A darkness falls that is pierced by no garish neon proclaiming vulgar entertainments. People in Tirana go home early, the better to build socialism on the morrow.

My infuriating but generous room companion was once more useful to me. So possessed was he of the desire to talk that he would approach complete strangers to engage them in conversation without fear of rebuff, which occurred more frequently than not. Having a skin thicker than a pachyderm’s, however, he would eventually find people willing to speak, and on our second day in Tirana had come across a couple of students of engineering who positively longed to speak – but only after dark, and in the shadows.

We met in the Boulevard of Martyrs but moved into the pitch darkness of a side street. Was this melodrama or sensible precaution? Whenever the nearby headlights of a car cleaved the darkness and seemed to approach us, the students grew nervous and asked us either to move further into the blackness of shadows or to walk away from them until the car was no longer visible. They said that every car in Albania belonged to someone of political consequence, loyal servants of the regime, by definition therefore informers and spies.

They told us of the material deprivations of Albanian life, of the overcrowded apartments, the shared kitchens and bathrooms, the vigils against interruption that have to be posted while young people attempt to make love, the bad plumbing and universal dilapidation, the ‘voluntary’ work days at weekends (the guidebook written by Bill Bland, secretary of the Anglo-Albanian Society, says of the 273 miles of railway track in Albania ‘All the lines have been built by youth volunteers under professional supervision’), the food rationing which in winter frequently includes bread made of rough fibrous flour of unrecognisable provenance, the meat ration (a kilo per family per week) that is mainly gristle and bone, the absence of sugar and other simple commodities that everywhere else have been taken for granted for centuries and the general unremitting struggle for a meagre subsistence that leaves everyone halfway between hunger and satiety.

Yet they said that all this might have been bearable had it not been for two things: the knowledge that essentially nothing will change, and the triumphalist lies which everyone must not only hear and see, but learn by heart and repeat.

Then why, one asks naively, do not more people attempt to escape? After all, Albania is a small enough country with long borders to Greece and Yugoslavia…

This question alone proves that one comes from another planet entirely, that one knows nothing of life here, that one has lived in a comfortable cocoon.

In the first place, the borders are heavily guarded. Anyone caught trying to leave the Brave New Albania is shot. Sometimes people try to swim the Corfu Channel, which at its narrowest is only two or three miles wide. Many of them drown; others are caught by patrol boats and ploughed under into the sea. Besides, as we saw when we stayed the night at the Channel port of Saranda, a searchlight sometimes scans the coast, and it is assuredly not searching for Greeks desperate to reach Albania. Along many miles of Albania’s Adriatic coast we saw not a single small boat, such as one would expect to see along a coast of such beauty (which, admittedly, the xenophobia of the government inadvertently did much to preserve). Even the fishing trawlers of Saranda did not leave port singly, but only in convoy, each acting as guard on the other. As for the two large lakes on the Yugoslav border, the Albanians permit no boats on them either, and this shoreline inactivity gives the lakes a sinister, almost poisonous deadness.

But it is not the physical obstacles to escape that prevent larger numbers of Albanians from fleeing; rather, it is the consequences of doing so for relatives and friends. For, as the students informed us, there is no concept of individual responsibility in Albania. If a man deserts his homeland, his family and some of his friends will be held responsible. They will be sent down mines under conditions that will make it unlikely they will ever return; at best, they will live in perpetual internal exile, half-starved and with no rights. They, the students, knew people to whom this had happened.

In my mind’s ear, I could hear at once the justifications that western sympathisers might compose for this system of ‘justice’, Man is a social animal, they would say; no man is an island, entire of itself. A man’s values and aspirations are formed not abstractly or in isolation, but socially, from his family, his friends, his workplace. If a man were a traitor, then, if he reverted to bourgeois individualism by escaping to the outside world, there must have been something unhealthy about his upbringing, his social milieu. It was only right, therefore, that those around him should be punished.

But what, I wondered, does this system of collective responsibility do to personal relations? If you are held responsible for what I do and I am held responsible for what you do, does that make us not friends but mutual spies? Normal human bonds are dissolved by collective responsibility, to be replaced by distrust, fear, dissembling and withdrawal. Surely it requires no great effort of imagination to see that this is – must be – so, yet how many western intellectuals over the last half-century or more have constructed ingenious arguments to deny it?

I should have liked to correspond with the Albanian students, but it would have been impossible. According to them, if an Albanian should receive a letter from abroad whose contents appear suspect to the police in the slightest respect (naturally, they read all letters from abroad, and almost all are suspect), it will not be delivered in the normal way, but the addressee will be called to the police station and asked whether he wants to receive the letter. Sometimes the police even offer to read it out rather than hand it over. It is not difficult in such circumstances to guess the ‘right’ answer to their question; those who fail this test are likely – as happened to one of their friends – to be exiled to the mines.

As for their aspirations, the students looked blank. When they completed their courses, the government would send them wherever they were needed, a decision against which there was no appeal. Personal aspirations were not for young Albanians; everything was decided for them. In a certain sense, they had achieved that liberation from desire which Buddhists seek.

‘We are already dead,’ one of them said, and we parted. There was no possibility of our ever meeting again.

After two days in Tirana, we set out on our journey round the country. We spent most of our time south of the River Shkumbi, which divides the Albanian population into two great branches, the Gegs to the north and the Tosks to the south. The Gegs, who were once Moslems with a Catholic minority, lived in isolated homesteads in the highlands, their social organisation based on clans between whom blood feuds passed from generation to generation, and as late as 1920 it was estimated that a fifth of Geg men died while pursuing them. The heads of the clans were absolute patriarchs. The Tosks, by contrast, lived in villages or towns and were mainly subsistence peasants or landless labourers working on the estates of the Beys, Moslem landlords. In the days before the abolition of religion, the Tosks were also Moslem, with an Orthodox Christian minority.

Enver Hoxha was a Tosk, the son of a Moslem landlord. No doubt he would furiously have denied that ancient considerations of regional and family allegiance played any part in the new proletarian world which he ruled purely in accordance with the dictates of dialectical reason. Yet there were few proletarians or Gegs in the leadership of the Albanian party (and those few usually ended up in front of a firing squad), and of the sixty-one members of the central committee in 1960, twenty were related to each other as first cousins or as father and son-in-law, while there were also five married couples. Some families had as many as seven representatives on the committee. Thus the leadership was united not only by complicity in the same crimes (the political ambience of Albania can be judged by the fact that of the thirty-one members of the original central committee established in 1948, fourteen were ‘liquidated’, while three interior ministers died of unnatural causes), but also by traditional ties of family and clan.

Perhaps it is in the nature of conducted tours that they should so overwhelm the tourist with sights and visits and compulsory entertainments that his memory of that period, even of the day before, soon becomes a kind of purée with a few undigested lumps. In the case of tours to countries like Albania, however, there is an additional and deliberate effect: to keep the tourist so busy that he should not see the general conditions of the country, nor make contact with any of its people. The tourist should be worn out, exhausted, so that he has neither physical nor mental energy to make enquiries of his own; above all, he should be accompanied everywhere and treated with the most flattering politeness.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to travel through a landscape and observe nothing; and even the most stilted of official commentaries is revealing, though not of its ostensible subject matter. We had with us a professor of classics at Oxford who came to Albania in the hope of examining the inscriptions at the famous ruins of Butrint, near the southern port of Saranda. The official guide to the ruins asked the professor the language of the inscriptions. It came to him as a complete surprise that they were in Greek: he had been told they were in ancient Illyrian and in his exposition of the ruins he had completely omitted to mention that they were Greek, talking only of the Illyrians who built them. Thus is the extreme nationalist view of history projected backwards two and a half millennia; and ancient stones are put into the service of modern lies.

Some things it was impossible to disguise from us. Descending from mountains into the valley of the River Shkumbi, we saw a pall of smoke hang over it the like of which none of us had ever seen before. The smoke was of various colours: grey, carmine, mauve, black and sandy red. It issued from a vast steel complex, built by the Chinese with whom (said our guide) a political quarrel had broken out before they could fix the filter equipment to the smokestacks. Most people accepted this explanation; all I can say is that similar political quarrels must break out with monotonous regularity all over the communist world just before the installation of such filters.

As we approached Elbasan and as we left, I noticed that for several miles the leaves of the crops were grey, covered by a deposit of soot. And the air was almost thick with filth. It would have been interesting to know the prevalence of lung conditions there.

Nevertheless, the landscape as seen from the top of the pass through the mountains conformed well to communist iconography: a large expanse of fertile agricultural land in the midst of which chimneys, representing industry, belched forth good, proletarian smoke.

We stopped for a short time in Elbasan (‘You have forty-five minutes’). I dived at once from the main road into the back streets, narrow, cobbled and ancient. Two young men approached me and beckoned me to follow them. It was clear they wanted to show me something. We wound our way through more narrow lanes and arrived at an ancient stone church. It was closed, of course, but the two young men knew the keeper of the key and the church was soon opened. Inside, it was undergoing restoration in a desultory kind of way, though not for the purposes of worship. My two companions took me behind the iconostasis. There was a wooden chest, carelessly stuffed with ecclesiastical robes, as at a bankrupt theatrical costumier’s. They looked vainglorious, even silly, these robes woven with gold and silver thread, now dulled by age and neglect (they must have been there for over twenty years).

The young men pointed to a cupboard and opened it. I was unsure from their manner whether they were enthusiastic atheists exulting in their triumph or clandestine religionists seeking to engage my sympathy. A book fell out from the cupboard in a cloud of dust, an early nineteenth century Greek bible printed in Alexandria. Its leather covers had been torn from it, its pages were dog-eared by the way it had been thrown into the cupboard with other books and objects.

No doubt Christianity has much to answer for in its long history, but the sight of an age-long tradition treated in this way filled me with disgust. It is one thing for traditions to die out of themselves; it is quite another for them to be killed by men who think they know everything, by men whose vengeance extends even to the past, even to the dead. In Albania, crosses have been removed from cemeteries; now when people die they are interred in identical tombs, centrally designed. And dates are no longer AD and BC; they are Our Era and Before Our Era, a piece of petty dogmatism the Albanians shared with the Cubans and – as I recalled from my recent residence in Guatemala – with Guatemalan historians of Marxist persuasion.

Our forty-five minutes in Elbasan were over. We had to reach the little town of Pogradec, on the shores of Lake Okhrida, in time for lunch. For everything had been arranged in advance. Two thirds of the lakeshore belonged to Yugoslavia, as a consequence of which not a single boat was to be seen on its Albanian shore, lest it be used to escape from purist paradise to revisionist hell. Fully 40 per cent of Albanians live in Yugoslavia, in Kossovo, and have not been well-treated there, to put it no higher. It is eloquent testimony, therefore, that precautions of the utmost vigilance had to be taken not to prevent Albanians fleeing Yugoslavia, but to prevent them from escaping Albania. National persecution in Yugoslavia was more of a temptation than national freedom in Albania.

The waterfront of Pogradec was of an extraordinary deadness, with none of the bustle that one might have expected from its position: no fishermen, no boat rides, no cafés, no crowds. Nothing was for sale, all was silent, and even one’s footfall on the promenade died immediately. Somehow the deadness seemed to communicate itself to the very waters of the lake and the surrounding mountains, as if Nature herself were under strict ideological control. But the lunch was good, and under the influence of the professor of classics, I soon formed the habit of having a raki before lunch and three glasses of red wine (by no means bad) with it.

We went on to Korce, an important town and one of the centres of the Hoxha cult. The future leader was sent to the French lycée there, where he also taught French on his return from Brussels in 1938. Later, on the steps of the hotel in Berat, as I took the evening air, I met a man in his late sixties who told me, in French, that he had once been a pupil of Hoxha’s at the lycée.

‘And what was he like?’ I asked, somewhat fatuously.

‘He was a great man,’ was the reply. ‘He knew everything, science, engineering, languages, art, everything.’

Everything? My informant appeared to believe it. He spoke with the undimmed faith of a man whose brother had been killed fighting for the partisans, and who himself had spent six years in Kharkov, starting in 1940, before the Albanian party even existed. Perhaps at that time it was possible, in Albania, to believe that one man could know everything; a misconception which Hoxha did nothing in his forty years of absolute power to dispel.

In Korce we encountered beggars for the first time, ragged children with no shoes who wanted ‘cheeklets’. They pursued us for some distance, until shooed away by citizens (and soldiers) zealous for the good name of their city.

Opposite the hotel was a large and fairly modern library. In a moment of ‘free time’ I slipped across the road to examine this cultural monument in a little greater depth. In King Zog’s time, more than four fifths of the population of Albania was illiterate; now the literacy rate was probably higher than Britain’s. The entrance hall contained a glass case with a few volumes of the Collected Works – I don’t have to say whose. I went upstairs to the two large halls that constituted the bulk of the building. There were bookshelves but no books. This was not a temporary absence: everything had clearly been like this for years.

A question arose in my mind, to which the answer was not clear, as to whether it was better to be illiterate with something to read, or literate with nothing to read.

The next day, we were taken to the famous lycée. Off the main hall was a shrine, a chapel draped in red cloth, dedicated to Hoxha, with photographs that were by now thoroughly familiar to us, since they appeared also in a corner of the lobby of all our hotels and indeed in almost all institutions. The headmistress gave us a brief and flat history of his connection with the school. I was told by someone who had visited Albania while Hoxha was still alive that his cult was considerably less extravagant now than then, though it seemed stifling enough to me even four years after his death. On many of the mountainsides of Albania, a single word was spelt out in white stones: ENVER. Even more obsequious, a date was similarly inscribed on yet other mountainsides: 1908, the year of his birth.

Strangely enough, Hoxha was able to see and despise the cults of other communist leaders. Of Mao’s cult he had especially harsh things to say:

 

Marx condemned the cult of the individual as something sickening. The individual plays a role in history, sometimes indeed a very important one, but for us Marxists this role is a minor one compared with the role of the popular masses [and]…also in comparison with the major role of the communist party, which stands at the head of the masses and leads them.

…the Chinese comrades have set out on a wrong anti-Marxist course. In reality they are turning the cult of Mao almost into a religion, exalting him in a sickening way…

 

Why did Mao’s cult so sicken Hoxha that he used the word twice in a very short passage? It is difficult not to conclude that the real objection of this invincibly and viciously self-righteous man to the cult of Mao was that it had two or three hundred times more followers than his own, that while Mao was worshipped by a quarter of mankind he – whose ego was wider than the sky – was worshipped by less than two thirds of a tiny nation in the obscurest corner of Europe.

We were taken to see the classrooms of the school, in one of which an English lesson was taking place. The children were neat and obedient; I doubt that the teacher had many discipline problems. They were well-trained, and stood up and applauded when we entered. One of them, a handsome girl with dark eyes, stood up and recited a poem, her eyes flashing with thespian fury, about the fascist hyena and the Albanian eagle. Her too-burning sincerity contrasted very strongly with the apathy of British youth, but pleased me no more than that apathy: for it represented a centralised attempt by authority to fossilise thought, to set it motionless in amber.

I was not surprised at the choice of authors extracted for the textbook. They were precisely the authors who would have appeared in a Russian textbook of English forty years ago: Dickens, Jack London and Galsworthy, each of them demonstrating the rottenness of capitalism. Interspersed among them were translations of Albanian verse, so extreme in their patriotism and self-worship that, just as communist iconography eventually induced an insensate hatred of white doves and even flowers, I came to detest for a time all patriotic sentiment, however expressed. Months later, I still could not hear a patriot speak without feeling sickened.

Also in Korce we performed other touristic duties known only in socialist countries. We visited a ‘knitting combine’, a precision instrument factory and a state farm (named after Enver Hoxha, oddly enough). The conditions in the knitting combine appalled most of our party, who had never been inside a factory before. Outside were loudspeakers relaying martial music:

 

KNITTERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO DROP BUT YOUR STITCHES!

 

The work was all performed by women, sitting at tiny tables close together with Chinese sewing machines, in rooms fifty yards long. It was like a sweatshop where the conditions were neither terrible nor good. Above the workers hung single light bulbs at the end of a flex – there were fitments for strip lighting, but no fluorescent tubes, the supply of which presumably came to an end after the quarrel with China.

On the walls were slogans painted on red banners:

 

THE DATE OF THE 16TH IS THE DATE OF ENVER’S BIRTH

 

The knitting combine, too, had its shrine to Hoxha, and on another wall were pictures of workers who had over-fulfilled their quota by 102 per cent. (Did this mean they had produced more than twice their quota, or merely a fiftieth more than their quota? The guide did not know, and neither did anyone else.) In any case, I found the figure suspiciously precise: the factory did not seem to me well enough organised to measure anything this exactly. The pace of work was scarcely feverish, some of the women doing nothing all the time we were there. Some stared at us, others averted their gaze. I had the slightly unpleasant sensation of being a voyeur. The garments under manufacture were the usual terrible colours, neither pastel shades nor primary hues, but dull brown, burnt orange and dark green, as though for camouflage rather than fashion.

The precision instrument factory turned out mainly micrometer screw gauges, measuring callipers and slide rules. The director spoke with what seemed like genuine pride of Albania’s achievement in producing these instruments that, in the nineteenth century, would have been considered marvels of engineering. In King Zog’s time, there was almost no industry: Albania had had to start from scratch.

Even I, who knew nothing about such things, could see that the factory was crude and primitive. The machine tools were either Polish or Chinese; the metal stamping was, in industrial terms, prehistoric. A machine moulded the white hot metal into the shape of a micrometer handle, which then slithered while still red hot down towards a worker who caught it in a pair of tongs and placed it under another stamp. If this worker were inattentive, or turned to speak to a colleague, the red hot micrometer handle would land in his lap, there being absolutely no protection for him. We also noticed that welders did not use goggles of any kind. When one of our party drew attention to the lack of safety precautions, the director said that the workers refused to take them.

A country that was able to suppress religion entirely and executed dissenters on the merest suspicion was unable to get welders to wear goggles.

At the state farm we re-enacted a charming little pastoral scene traditional ever since land was first forcibly collectivised: the duping of the foreigners. We were taken to a ‘peasant’s’ house, a suitable compromise between simplicity and comfort, a vine twining itself about its pleasant verandah, and were sat round a low table in the living room where we were plied with drink and statistics. How demurely the peasant’s wife brought in the tray, how modest her smile! How golden the life conveyed in the statistics! After a few drinks, all men were brothers and we felt we had really penetrated the soul of Albania, having stripped away the thin veneer of politics that divided us. With what bitter contempt they must have witnessed our happy, contented smiles and our cheery waves as we drove away!

We went to Gjirokastra, the Bethlehem of Albania, where Enver was born. It is a very pleasant town (apart, as usual, from the modern additions), with whitewashed walls and narrow cobbled lanes. At the brow of one of the hills not far from the centre was a large statue of Enver Hoxha, seated in a forties-style armchair at the centre of an area of cobbles patterned, appropriately enough, like a spider’s web. Nearby was the Veterans’ Club, where old men, presumably former partisans, went in the evenings to have a chat, to drink and eat olives. I hung about a little, in the hope that one of them would invite me in and tell me stories of the war; probably they thought I was a spy.

Next day, we were taken to the house where Enver Hoxha was born. We also went to the town’s castle, to be shown the cells in which partisans had been tortured, their graffiti preserved on the walls. The partisans were extremely brave, and two sisters who had gone to their deaths rather than betray their comrades were commemorated there; but I should have found the commemoration of these sisters less equivocal in the emotions it evoked had I not known of the fate of two leading women partisans, Liri Gega and Liri Belishova, both one-time members of the Politburo, the former shot while pregnant in 1956 as a ‘Titoist agent’, the latter, who had had her eye gouged out by the fascists while in captivity, strangled in 1960 for being a ‘Khrushchevite agent’ at the time of Albania’s break with the Soviet Union. Incidentally, Belishova’s husband, Nako Spiru, another wartime leader, committed suicide in 1947 (and was later denounced as a traitor – suicide is regarded in Hoxha’s memoirs as the petit bourgeois way out) when it appeared he was losing an argument with another member of the Politburo, Koci Xoxe, over Albanian policy towards Yugoslavia. Xoxe was strangled two years later by yet another member of the Politburo, Mehmet Shehu, who was denounced by Hoxha in 1981 as a multiple foreign agent and committed suicide – or was ‘suicided’, a fitting end to a man who said ‘For those who stand in the way of unity, a spit in the face, a sock on the jaw, and, if necessary, a bullet in the head’. As our guide expatiated on the horrors endured by the partisans, I swallowed back several pertinent but impolitic questions.

There were also one or two mysteries attached to Hoxha’s birthplace. The holiest of the rooms, of course, was that in which he first saw the light of day, a room treated with all appropriate respect, and in which voices were hushed as if by mystical force. But earlier the guide had told us that the present house was not the original, which had burnt down in 1936. So how could this be the room in which Hoxha was born? One of our party annoyed the guide by remarking that in any case the house appeared far from poor, indeed quite the contrary. Since we were in his alleged birthplace, complete with bed, the guide could scarcely point out again that the building was not original; instead, she remarked that though the house was larger, it had been home to many people, who therefore lived poorly. This answer, naturally, did not satisfy the member of our party who had made the remark and who, not realising that the purpose of public utterance in countries such as Albania is to express not truth but power, persisted for a time, like a terrier with a rat, in trying to unravel the mystery of a post facto birthplace.

From Gjirokastra we drove to the coast, to the little port of Saranda. Our hotel overlooked the Corfu Channel, three miles wide, where in 1946 two British warships were damaged by mines with the loss of forty lives. The British claimed the waters were mined by the Albanians; the Albanians said they were mined by the British themselves, for the Albanians did not possess the capacity to lay such mines. The case went to the International Court of Justice, which found for the British and awarded compensation; but the Albanians did not accept the judgment and refused to pay. The British thereupon declined to return the Albanian gold (now worth $80,000,000) looted from Albania by the Italians and Germans, which then found its way to London. The dispute has prevented the establishment of diplomatic relations ever since, Britain demanding its compensation and Albania its gold.

We drank wine on the verandah and contemplated Corfu – which the professor of classics knew intimately – across the Channel. It was near but as inaccessible as the moon. Boats from the Greek side were fired upon if they strayed too near Albania (a fact known to yachtsmen all over the world); there were no boats on the Albanian side.

The coast was beautiful and the sea wine dark, but Saranda was dead. It reminded me strongly of a fresco in a Catholic church on the tiny coral atoll of Abemama in the Gilbert Islands. On Christ’s left hand was Hell, full of orange flames stoked by black demons who also found time to poke screaming sinners with their tridents; on Christ’s right hand was Heaven, a kind of Mediterranean resort on a rugged shore with cypresses in the background, a single figure in a pale linen suit and a Panama hat wandering through the streets between white stuccoed buildings as though waiting for the heavenly table d’hôte.

The discouragement of tourism had at least preserved a coast that otherwise might have been turned into an Adriatic Costa del Sol.

Our breakneck progress – we had now been a week in Albania – through the country continued to Berat, another ancient town whose old quarter was as beautiful as its modern part was ugly. There the mosque had been converted into a community centre and a shop. We were taken to the Onufri Museum, Onufri having been a famous painter of icons in the Orthodox tradition who worked five centuries ago in Berat. A shade of blue, found in his paintings but nowhere else, was named after him. Even I, no connoisseur of Greek Orthodox icons, could tell that his were of a very superior kind; but I thought the guide was moved by patriotic pride to flights of exaggeration. And even Onufri, a monk, could not escape the dead hand of ideology. He was a progressive, we were told, because all the angels that he painted had their feet planted firmly on the ground, while other icon painters had them flying through the air. This implied that Onufri thought heaven should be created on earth, not in the hereafter; if he were alive today, he would be painting children offering up flowers to Enver Hoxha and his wife Nexhmije.

The only northern town to which we went was Shkodra, once known as Scutari. The north-east of the country was entirely closed to us, and it is there that the forced labour camps and mines are said to be situated. When Albania rejoins the rest of the world, there will be some terrible revelations.

Shkodra, now entirely peaceful, was at the beginning of the century a hotbed of intrigue fomented by the consuls of various powers, jockeying for position and influence in a country with indeterminate political status but of strategic importance. The intrigue extended even to the orthography of the Albanian language, the Austrians introducing a new system into their sponsored schools further to divide the already fractious Albanians.

The town still had a slight Austro-Hungarian atmosphere, thanks to its architecture, with pastel facades and moulded plaster decorations. As people took the evening volta, one forgot the town was on a lake bordering Yugoslavia, to cross into which was a capital offence.

Across from our hotel was a building that had once served as the British Council. It was now the Museum of Atheism, but it was closed – not just for the afternoon, but with the kind of finality that complete desertion brings. I have always been amused by the idea of exhibits devoted to non-existence and was sad to miss them. If the Albanian Museum of Atheism followed its Soviet prototype, the exhibits would have traced the ascent of Man from amoebae to Enver Hoxha.

We returned next day to Tirana and, with some time to spare before our departure, were taken to the exhibition called Albania Today, which at last had opened. Inside an enormous hall were glass cases containing samples of everything that the country produced, from bottled plums to electrocardiographs, from the Collected Works of Enver Hoxha to antibiotics, from farm machinery to lavatory paper. I suspected that certain of these items were more readily available than others. Even at their best, most things looked shoddy, produced by factories either whose mastery of technique was marginal, or by workers with no incentive to produce anything better. Nevertheless, several members of our party were impressed: for Albania, it seemed, produced a wide range of goods. It never occurred to them that only a country with a great deal to hide would produce such an exhibition; or that almost any country, if it chose to do so, could fill many such halls with exhibits of its products. It was the choice to do so that was significant, not the things displayed.

All the same, there is no doubt that Albania has developed enormously in the last forty-five years. For example, it now has railways where it had none before. Even if the statistics are not wholly reliable, Albania is not as backward as it once was. But then, which country is? The whole world has moved on, not only Albania. Its development, furthermore, has been far less autochthonous than it sometimes likes to claim. In the years immediately after the war, Yugoslavia paid 40 per cent of Albania’s government expenditure (as Italy had paid 40 per cent during Zog’s time). Then, after the break with Tito, the Soviet Union took over, until it, too, was cast into outer revisionist darkness by Hoxha. China provided aid on a similar scale (though never large enough for Hoxha), until it, too, fell by the ideological wayside.

Moreover, at least twice in those forty-five years Hoxha brought his country to the brink of starvation, and even now during winter food is scarce (it is never plentiful). Production statistics cannot in any case convey the atmosphere of a country. According to the preface to 40 Years of Socialist Albania:

 

Study of this statistical year-book in close connection with the materials of the Party and Comrade Enver Hoxha helps to understand the glorious road of our country, the difficulties that have been overcome in the different stages of socialist construction, the efforts made to smash imperialist-revisionist blockades and the anti-Albanian activity of internal and external enemies, as well as the majestic victories achieved for the formation and tempering of the new man with the features of communist morality.

 

This single sentence says as much as all those sharply upward lines on graphs which, no matter how high they climb, never seem to assure an adequate supply of bread or vegetables. Plenty of glory, plenty of victories over enemies, but never enough cooking oil.

Albania Today has a book in which visitors write down their impressions. J. Hurtado of Ecuador wrote in Spanish but also in the purest langue de bois, that extraordinary lifeless syntax and restricted vocabulary that has been adopted the world over by communists, and is the same whatever the ostensible language:

 

In this display is demonstrated the superiority of the socialist system. Albania is the best example to teach how, by applying principles, the greatest advances can be made.

Glory to Marxism-Leninism!

 

Our tour was over. As the Swissair plane landed at Tirana I suddenly realised how caught up in the Albanian world I had been. For twelve days nowhere else had existed for me. Yet in only a couple of hours we were flying over that other small, mountainous and fiercely independent country. I looked down, and seeing the marvellous orderliness of Switzerland, the industrious harmony of its landscape, I felt an immediate pang of nostalgia for the imperfections of Albania. A self-indulgent pang, of course, the pang of a man who could choose. A few months later, a small article appeared in the Independent newspaper with the headline Albania liberalises its criminal code:

 

…agitation and propaganda against the state will now draw 5 to 25 years in jail instead of death… The power of local authorities to deport whole families to another region by simple administrative decision has been scrapped. Only a court can order a removal, and then only of the guilty party, not the whole family…