The Fracture Zone Part 5

He was very tall, dressed in a long omophorion of black silk with a burgundy lining, with a delicate black velvet chasuble on top and a large metal and enamel cross on his chest. He had pure white hair and a long, well-trimmed beard, though a dusting of dandruff had formed below it on the black velvet. He wore a dauntingly imperious expression, and I could well believe he was touchy on occasion. But on this one he was polite and welcoming: He dismissed the boy-priest and his coffee, curtly demanding slivovitz instead. He bowed to us and raised his gla.s.s. He seemed very much the showman.

He talked expansively, in broken English and good Italian, about the needs and aspirations of the Montenegrin people to have their own church, to break free of the tiresome domination of the Serbs, to resume the church's once autocephalous state, with its own Montenegrin leaders.h.i.+p, as they had enjoyed until their king was deposed at the end of the Great War. There were fully 667 Montenegrin churches back in the old days.

"But now we are small, our congregations are tiny. Officially we have no churches, because the Serbs have gone to court to forbid us from establis.h.i.+ng ourselves. But as pride in our country grows again, so pride in our religion does too. I am filled with optimism. Look at the two-headed eagles in our coats of arms-see how the Serbian eagle has folded wings, while our eagle has its wings spread, ready to fly? Well, that is how we are-ready to fly."

But there were problems, he said. The right of a new Orthodox church to exist was determined by the supervising body of the Orthodox communion, an office in Istanbul-which Mihailo kept referring to, confusingly, as Czarigrad, the capital of the czars-and so far they had refused.

And he took us downstairs to the tiny chapel he had set up on the ground floor-half a room, really, with a linoleum floor and a few icons stuck on the wall. He held services there once a week, and perhaps forty people came. "But at Easter we had fifteen thousand at an open-air service-the Serbians only had five thousand, and most of them they brought in by bus from Herzegovina." He became visibly agitated as he said this. He denounced the Serbian church leaders.h.i.+p as "rude" and "psychologically disturbed," he accused them of trying to engineer his downfall, of bringing pressure to bear on the authorities in Istanbul, trying to deny his attempt at independence. "They are behaving like barbarians-the Barbarians of the Balkans. They must realize that tolerance is the spirit of the age."

But in truth Bishop Mihailo's mission seemed more compounded of rhetoric than revival; the power of his Serb opposition seemed overwhelming, and there was little by way of ecclesiastical business going on in his small suburban house-the telephone never rang, the fax machine on his desk remained silent all the time we were there. Perhaps his claims of a large Easter turnout were true; perhaps the Serbian religious leaders.h.i.+p was employing unfair tactics. But Mihailo was losing ground, by all accounts. I could well imagine that after we left, His Beat.i.tude-especially after his fortifying afternoon plum brandy-went upstairs again and crept back into bed.

At the Cetinje Monastery, by contrast, there was bustle and business, and it took some minutes before the abbot, the young and straggle-bearded Father Luke, came out into the courtyard. I was about to ask him the status of Mihailo when he suddenly said: "Wait-you are English. You know something of Saint Kieran of Clonmacnois? You can tell me something I do not know about the Venerable Bede? You know that today is the feast-day of Saint Augustine of Canterbury? Wait, wait here!"-and he bustled off into the gloom of the monastery and emerged a minute later with a postcard, an image of Saint Augustine published in Woking, in Surrey. "There! I have a collection. You may have it."

Father Luke of Cetinje proved to be a walking encyclopedia of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and a man as keenly confident of his own Serbian religious rights as Mihailo seemed to be of his Montenegrin claims. "The difference is-we have history on our side. We are the oldest Serbian church-we are older than the church at Pec, which you will know as the holiest of all places in Kosovo.

"The first saint, the founder of the Serbian church, was Saint Sava-and he was born in Montenegro, though he died in Bulgaria and people think of him as perhaps Bulgarian. But he was not: He was one of us. It is through connections like this that we know we are the rightful religious establishment here, and for an old fool like Mihailo to try and claim to be a founder of a new Montenegrin movement is just silly. Just politics. Besides," he said darkly, "look at Mihailo's record. He was in Rome, you know, head of the Greek Orthodox movement there-and he was defrocked."

I asked him what he meant, and he grinned and whispered something about unpriestly behavior. His remark, certainly rude, underlined what Father Sbutega had suggested: that battle royal was raging among the Eastern churches in Montenegro, providing an ecclesiastical parallel to what was still going on, raging like distant thunder, in the surrounding skies.

The thunder was growing louder now, the war was gathering pace. In Podgorica the journalists were getting excited, the fixers being asked to make ever-more-daring excursions as the demands of the editors outside became ever more extreme. Get over the border deep into Kosovo. Find the Kosovo Liberation Army headquarters. Interview disaffected Serb soldiers on the frontier. Get over the border deep into Kosovo. Find the Kosovo Liberation Army headquarters. Interview disaffected Serb soldiers on the frontier. Only one radio reporter seemed bored by the whole affair, a middle-aged man who declared that he had had enough of fighting and proposed to sit out this particular war. He stayed in the hotel bar all day and sent his team of fixers off to ferret out any developments: Not surprisingly they found very little, for everything that was happening-and that meant a great deal-was doing so in Albania, in Macedonia, or in Kosovo itself. Only one radio reporter seemed bored by the whole affair, a middle-aged man who declared that he had had enough of fighting and proposed to sit out this particular war. He stayed in the hotel bar all day and sent his team of fixers off to ferret out any developments: Not surprisingly they found very little, for everything that was happening-and that meant a great deal-was doing so in Albania, in Macedonia, or in Kosovo itself.

Montenegro itself may well be poised for its own grisly little war: That much was abundantly clear, so deep and growing is the loathing now between the Montenegrins and the Serb forces among them. As I was preparing to leave there was talk about how Serbia might try to take control of the little republic's frontiers, something the Montenegrins would not tolerate and against which they would undoubtedly fight; and I had met heavily armed young men back in Cetinje who were training, preparing to do real battle with the ten thousand Serb soldiers who were in their midst. A mood of fatalism and fear was all of a sudden gripping this exquisite little corner of the world: All, I felt, would soon end in tears.

Yet however worrying in the long term, the short-term fate of Montenegro seemed in early June to be but a sideshow to the main event-Podgorica suddenly seemed like a backwater, and I was running out of time. So Rose and I found a car, asked Dali and Vesna for the best tactics for avoiding the Yugoslav army checkpoints on the way out, and headed promptly south for Lake Scutari, and the one non-Slavic country of this corner of the Balkans, the Republika e Shqiperise: Albania.

7.

The Lifting of the Gate

WHY SHOULD WE turn our country into an inn," Enver Hoxha once asked, "with her doors flung open to pigs and sows, to people with pants on or no pants at all, and to the hirsuit turn our country into an inn," Enver Hoxha once asked, "with her doors flung open to pigs and sows, to people with pants on or no pants at all, and to the hirsuit [sic], [sic], longhaired hippies who would come here to supplant with their wild orgies the graceful dances of our people?" longhaired hippies who would come here to supplant with their wild orgies the graceful dances of our people?"

That was in 1970, when Albania was an impoverished and lonely workers' paradise, when the ghost of Joseph Stalin was the only foreign hero the nation was allowed, and when Enver Hoxha, whose madness had created all this misery, was still fifteen years away from the grave. But eventually he did die, Albania did find another and more tolerant government, and the country did begin reach out for the world from which it had been so self-estranged for so long. And though Albania is still an anarchic and fractious place today, many matters-a sense of freedom and a refurbished economy in particular-are slowly improving. The legacy of Hoxha's four decades of unmitigated harshness, however, and his frowardly and unyielding hatred for all things foreign, clings like summer mildew.

True, no frontier barber with a blunt and bloodied razor stands ready, as once he did, to hack off any unauthorized ponytail or goatee. No "compromised" border guard is there, freed briefly from his labor camp, to pore through your every book and private letter, searching for the vaguest hint of written disrespect to Comrades Stalin or Hoxha, or to any others whom Albania chose to regard as like only unto G.o.d.

One can get into Albania with perfect ease these days, on payment at the frontier of what some officials insist is fifty-seven dollars in cash for a one-time visa (but only fifteen dollars if you are Irish). It doesn't seem to matter these days whether you are pig or sow, long-bearded or hairless, whether you wear pants or miniskirts or even neither, or even if you are habitually inclined to the practice of indolence and the consumption of dope. But though things have improved since the times of Hoxha, there can be no feelings of relief at the Albanian frontiers of today either-none of relief, and certainly none of joy.

A flimsy and half-broken plywood pole with blue and gray markings, a pool of muddy water that was alleged once to have been disinfectant, a shredded blood-red flag with Skanderbeg's black double-headed eagle, and a warped and flaking sign saying, barely legibly, Miresevni ne Shqiperi Miresevni ne Shqiperi-"Welcome to the Land of the Eagle": With such devices and delights alone does the Republic of Albania greet today's visitors who enter the country by road, and as we did, from the north.

As the two unshaven policemen thumbed clumsily through our pa.s.sports, in a room that stank of urine, its only furniture a ripped sofa whose innards were teeming with blowflies, I gazed back north, almost with yearning, to the far frontier. It looked so civilized, civilized, just a few hundred yards away. There was the red-and-white steel pole that had been lifted for us; there, nearly out of sight on the far side of the little stream, was the newly built steel-and-concrete shed for customs examinations; and there above was the red-white-and-blue flag of Yugoslavia, fluttering next to the Montenegrin two-headed eagle, in white. The car that had brought us south, a brand-new air-conditioned Toyota, had turned around, was leaving, the driver going back to Podgorica. Two Montenegrin border policemen were cheerfully showing off to him the salmon they had caught in Lake Scutari-with only two or three travelers crossing this frontier each day, life for the guards was pretty easy. just a few hundred yards away. There was the red-and-white steel pole that had been lifted for us; there, nearly out of sight on the far side of the little stream, was the newly built steel-and-concrete shed for customs examinations; and there above was the red-white-and-blue flag of Yugoslavia, fluttering next to the Montenegrin two-headed eagle, in white. The car that had brought us south, a brand-new air-conditioned Toyota, had turned around, was leaving, the driver going back to Podgorica. Two Montenegrin border policemen were cheerfully showing off to him the salmon they had caught in Lake Scutari-with only two or three travelers crossing this frontier each day, life for the guards was pretty easy.

Someone else, I could see, was using a cell phone. A tall Montenegrin policewoman was tapping her feet to the rhythms-barely audible from here-that sounded from a radio she had placed on a chair. In spite of the strange, nervous situation that had been triggered by the war, Montenegro looked from this modest distance like a bastion of European normality: What lay ahead of us by contrast seemed stranger, more foreign, and poorer, than any place I had been for a long while.

I suddenly felt a delicate, feathery touch on my arm, and started. It was a nut-brown Gypsy boy, dressed in a wildly bright cowboy s.h.i.+rt, begging for spare change. He had broken away from a group of the urchins just beside the frontier line: They were hoping for foot pa.s.sengers, like us, who had to leave our Montenegrin car behind and walk across no-man's land to the waiting Albanian taxi. A tiny girl rushed up and planted a dry kiss on my arm and smiled up at me beseechingly: I gave her and her impish friends all the remaining dinars I had, and a few American quarters, and they scuttled away in a flash of color, giggling.

I liked Gypsies, and had ever since my childhood days when my father would me take fis.h.i.+ng in Norfolk, along with a policeman friend of his who had been a bit of a didicoi didicoi himself. I liked the Gypsies' magnificent insolence, their devil-may-care look at a life that, considering that they lacked everything the rest of us had-like a state, a permanent home, a capital, a single language, heroes, myths-must have been fairly bitter, but from which they always seemed to come up grubby-faced but grinning. They were persecuted everywhere: In Albania in the days of Hoxha's bizarre Stalinist regime they had been herded en ma.s.se into unlovely apartment houses, which was better at least than what had happened to them in n.a.z.i Germany, or in Poland or Bulgaria, where they were ga.s.sed or just ignored and made to change their names. himself. I liked the Gypsies' magnificent insolence, their devil-may-care look at a life that, considering that they lacked everything the rest of us had-like a state, a permanent home, a capital, a single language, heroes, myths-must have been fairly bitter, but from which they always seemed to come up grubby-faced but grinning. They were persecuted everywhere: In Albania in the days of Hoxha's bizarre Stalinist regime they had been herded en ma.s.se into unlovely apartment houses, which was better at least than what had happened to them in n.a.z.i Germany, or in Poland or Bulgaria, where they were ga.s.sed or just ignored and made to change their names.

Names were important in Hoxha's Albania. Whether you were a Gypsy or not, you could call your child only by a name selected from an officially approved list, and the list changed each year. The names were often Illyrian, or pagan, and sometimes just made up: Many Albanian adults these days bear the first name Maren-glen, Maren-glen, which comes from the first letters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. which comes from the first letters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Such madness was only the more trivial side of a tyranny that has left ineradicable scars on almost all of Albania's three and a half million people, who remain as a result one of the most backward and ruined peoples of Europe. The Sigurimi, the dreaded security police, had a network of no fewer than forty-eight prison camps inside the republic-and this a country hardly bigger than Vermont, about the same size as Kuwait or Djibouti, and which had as many people as Chicago.

Hundreds of thousands of people, turned in by huge numbers of informers and spies, vanished into the camps and were either murdered or worked to death. Whole families were punished for the "crimes" of one-if a young man dared listen to a foreign broadcast, or tell a faintly amusing but disrespectful story about Enver Hoxha, his entire family, parents and grandparents included, would be sent to a Sigurimi camp, either to be brutally tortured or allowed to starve. Children were taught to spy on parents: The entire country was caught up in a web of mutual distrust, the only constant being the genially cruel presence of Friend Enver, Comrade Enver, the man whose statue was on every street corner, for whom almost every street was named, and the man who made magic, could make flowers blossom in his footsteps or the rains come at a single word.

No one was allowed to own a car: A visitor to Tirana in 1971 noted the presence in Skanderbeg Square of just one sleepy traffic policeman who jumped up at the appearance of anything with an engine, and if he saw the same car twice in one day greeted it like a long-lost friend. Most of the people traveled in ancient buses, on trains that belched smoke and sparks, or by pony or oxcart. The senior bureaucrats had cars, as did those few foreign diplomats unlucky enough to be posted to the grim fastness of a Tirana they could barely ever leave: Otherwise the city was a capital where 150,000 people lived in squalor and misery, amids a welter of free-ranging livestock and the ever-present spies from the Sigurimi.

There was, officially, no religion-Albania under Hoxha had announced with pride that it was the world's first truly atheist nation. Mosques had been turned into sports halls and swimming pools, and one majestic Catholic structure in Scutari had become a tire warehouse. But in fact, in spite of the strictures and the spies, people did manage to wors.h.i.+p, as they seem to in all those countries that try to ban religion: Services were held in private houses, and foreign religious broadcasts, mainly from Italy, were listened to avidly, late at night, and quietly.

Then came December 1990 and the return to Albania of the nation's favorite daughter, Mother Teresa, arguably the world's most famous nun. Her return (she was actually born in Macedonia, though her family was of Albanian stock) triggered an eruption of repressed religious zeal that was as impressive in its scale as in its ec.u.menical breadth. The result was that today Albania, albeit still poor and corrupt and lawless and sometimes frightening, is at least a country that wors.h.i.+ps, and its churches and mosques are filled.

It is, moreover, the only European nation that sports a majority of Muslims: Seven out of ten Albanians visit the mosque-the Turks had evidently done their work well, and Hoxha had hardly outdone it during his forty years. Friday prayers held these days at the Mosque of Mahmud Das.h.i.+ in Tirana's Skanderbeg Square are as impressive for their rituals and the numbers of the faithful as are any services in Lah.o.r.e, Dacca, Dubai, or Istanbul: This country that was G.o.dless in the eighties had become more than amply full of G.o.ds at the century's end, with more, in all likelihood, on the way.*

The driver had been arranged by telephone from Podgorica. He was an elderly man with a lopsided and toothless grin and three days' worth of gray stubble on his chin. He drove a twenty-year-old Mercedes-there are said to be some twenty thousand Mercedes-Benzes in Albania, all stolen in Germany and licensed in such a way as to ensure they can never leave the country again. He attempted to speak to us-but his Albanian was far too strange and difficult, even for Rose, who could normally pick up foreign tongues with unusual dispatch. She spoke excellent Italian and French and was competent in a host of lesser tongues, but Albanian quite foxed her.

She was not alone. Edward Lear, who traveled in Albania in 1848, was infuriated by the one European language he could not fathom: Among the "clatter of strange monosyllables," he wrote, he could discern only strange near-Anglicisms, "dort beer, dort bloo, dort hitch, hitch beer, blue beer, beer chak, dort gatch." Although there are just two properly official languages today-that of the Gheg people in the north,* and that of the Tosk in the south, with the occasional addition of a third known as Arberesh, which is spoken mainly by Albanians now living in Italy-there are also said to be five main alphabets, one of which has more than fifty letters. and that of the Tosk in the south, with the occasional addition of a third known as Arberesh, which is spoken mainly by Albanians now living in Italy-there are also said to be five main alphabets, one of which has more than fifty letters.

The road, once we had left the frontier zone, was a ravaged and torn-up thing, much like a cart track-and the only vehicles we saw during the first few miles, as we b.u.mped along the low plain on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Lake Scutari, were in fact drawn by mules, and were little more than immense haystacks on wheels. The scenery was dull, except for one curious phenomenon that became so commonplace that it almost seemed worthless to remark on it-the presence of hundreds upon thousands of mushroom-shaped pillboxes.

Enver Hoxha had ordered them to be built. He panicked one summer day in 1968 when the Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia: He withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in protest, and then suddenly realized that his friends.h.i.+p agreement with faraway China did not make any provision for defense. His country, alone in its Stalinist isolation anyway, was ripe for picking should any neighbor-Greece, most probably, or some vile American agent, or maybe the Russians with whom he had so spectacularly fallen out-choose to invade. And so he built pillboxes-eight hundred thousand of them by most accounts, smooth-topped gray cement mushrooms, with a gun slit at one side and a stairway down the back, and dotted them all across his country, defying anyone who might enter the nation illegally to get more than a few hundred yards before being cut down in a hail of gunfire. Albanians today find them a grotesque embarra.s.sment, and they have no real idea why they were built and who they were to defend Albania against. "Everyone," one man in Tirana was quoted as saying.

Scores of thousands of these igloolike bunkers remain-they line every main road, they cl.u.s.ter at the approaches to all cities, they appear every few yards along the much-used highway between Tirana and the port city of Durres,* where any invasion was thought likely to begin. Their gun slits point in all directions: Rose pointed out many that were built on hillsides but with the slit directed not out from the hill, but uselessly backwards, so that any fire would hit the gra.s.sy slope that can't have been more than five feet away. where any invasion was thought likely to begin. Their gun slits point in all directions: Rose pointed out many that were built on hillsides but with the slit directed not out from the hill, but uselessly backwards, so that any fire would hit the gra.s.sy slope that can't have been more than five feet away.

Some are large, some miniature; they appear sometimes singly, or in twos and threes, or as forests of two dozen and more. None are used, nor do they ever appear to have been-though one a.s.sumes that on occasion they bristled with guns and men waiting silently through bitter nights for some of Hoxha's imagined invaders to land. Nowadays a few of them, made no doubt of substandard cement, have crumbled like sugar in the rain. Others have been dug up from their foundations and lie upside down in the fields like stranded tortoises, monuments all to a terrible and costly folly of a sadly paranoid mind.

The rutted road and the trainless railway beside it hugged the sh.o.r.e of the lake. Far to the west rose the Montenegrin mountains, violet in the late-morning sun. Behind them, I knew, lay the sea, and Ulcinj and its community of Slavic Africans. Once in a while an Italian military vehicle-a jeep, the odd armored car, an ambulance-hurried past, the machine-gunner on top looking nervously around. The troops had the acronym AFOR stenciled on the sides-we had seen SFOR and IFOR in Bosnia, and knew that if soldiers ever did go into Kosovo, a development that was looking likelier by the hour, they would be designated as KFOR.*

These men, mostly newcomers, were under the command of a British general based down at the port of Durres. They, together with Americans and Germans and Spaniards, were posted to Albania both to help keep the country stable, as well as to secure its borders, help organize the refugee of all, to be on hand should the NATO troops be ordered to invade. They had, I thought, the uneasy look of readiness about them, and as we pressed on south their convoys became more numerous, and there were tank transporters and helicopters, too. The balloon, it seemed, might soon be about to go up.

We pa.s.sed through a dozen dusty, forlorn-looking villages, with names that were every bit as expectedly odd as the Albanian language itself. On the way to what outsiders call Scutari, but which the Shqiperian people call Shkoder, we pa.s.sed either through or close by Hani i Hoti (where we had crossed the frontier) Goraj-Bidisht, Kopliku i Sipermi, Mec, Drisht, and Renc. The names of the people were odd as well: I had only just learned that one p.r.o.nounces Enver Hoxha Enver Hoxha to rhyme with to rhyme with lodger, lodger, when we stopped for lunch and Italian coffee at a town called Grude e Re, and I picked up a local paper only to be confronted with stories of a Communist party leader and former tinsmith who was named Koci Xoxe. The driver, happily, did not wish to make conversation about him-and indeed, he kept his own counsel for most of the journey, until we reached the outskirts of Tirana when he made it unmistakably clear, mainly by signs, that he wanted twice as much money as we had agreed to give him. when we stopped for lunch and Italian coffee at a town called Grude e Re, and I picked up a local paper only to be confronted with stories of a Communist party leader and former tinsmith who was named Koci Xoxe. The driver, happily, did not wish to make conversation about him-and indeed, he kept his own counsel for most of the journey, until we reached the outskirts of Tirana when he made it unmistakably clear, mainly by signs, that he wanted twice as much money as we had agreed to give him.

Tirana looked like a city of the Wild West on the day the carnival comes to town. We arrived at dusk on a Sat.u.r.day evening, and tens of thousands of Albanians-perhaps the whole city, it looked so chaotic and busy-were on hand for their evening pa.s.seggiata, pa.s.seggiata, milling around, wandering idly in front of speeding cars, tussling with one another, shouting at children, playing in the fountains, gazing into shop windows. There were impromptu amus.e.m.e.nt parks, bicycles for rent, street stalls, kebab sellers, open-air hairdressers, peasants hawking fresh fish, cobblers and shoes.h.i.+ne boys, farmers selling hunting birds, mullahs on their way to prayer. I half expected to see fire eaters and tumblers, jesters and harlequins. It was like Rome's beautiful and madcap Piazza Navona on a Sat.u.r.day night-thronging, exuberant, a scene from a Fellini movie, from a summer night's dream, and if the players were ragged and poor-well, what of it! milling around, wandering idly in front of speeding cars, tussling with one another, shouting at children, playing in the fountains, gazing into shop windows. There were impromptu amus.e.m.e.nt parks, bicycles for rent, street stalls, kebab sellers, open-air hairdressers, peasants hawking fresh fish, cobblers and shoes.h.i.+ne boys, farmers selling hunting birds, mullahs on their way to prayer. I half expected to see fire eaters and tumblers, jesters and harlequins. It was like Rome's beautiful and madcap Piazza Navona on a Sat.u.r.day night-thronging, exuberant, a scene from a Fellini movie, from a summer night's dream, and if the players were ragged and poor-well, what of it!

The women were vividly dressed, the men by contrast dull and dusty-though it was possible to tell in the crowds the northern Gheg people, who if they wore hats at all wore domed white skullcaps. Their Tosk rivals, on the other hand, wore the fez, also white but with a flattened top. Gypsy children were everywhere, darting in and out of the crowds, pestering the strollers, brus.h.i.+ng dust from the car windscreens, begging for change. And money changers were at every street corner, offering huge bundles of leks without a care in the world for the police who, ten years before, would have rounded them up and sent them off for torture and hard labor.

Albania's capital was like a city with the safety cap taken off. It positively bubbled and bustled with the newfound enthusiasms of freedom, more than any of the other great cities-Berlin, Prague, Budapest-that had lately been released from the burdens of Marx. It was chaotic, it was poor, it was grubby. But everyone seemed to be smiling, carefree, optimistic, there was an infectious effervescence about the place, as if everyone knew that a great awakening was under way. I knew that I would like it from the moment that our car lurched into Skanderbeg Square, and there was the hero Skanderbeg himself, iron dark and n.o.bly bearded astride his horse, reminding all Albanians that he, not the appalling Hoxha, was the true national hero.

It was five hundred years ago that he, then plain Gjerg Kastrioti, managed the awesome feat of welding into one all the disparate Illyrian tribes of the day, and fighting for twenty-five years-in vain, as it turned out-against the invading Turks. Like Prince Lazar up in Kosovo, the great Alexander Bey, Skanderbeg, is best remembered as a force for unifying and enn.o.bling his people's cause. That both men lost to the superior numbers and the superior military skills of the Turks has never managed to quench, even five and six centuries later, the popular fondness for them.

Skanderbeg left the double-headed black eagle as his legacy, and both it and his image and his statue, around which scores of small children were playing, serve as reminders of pride in unity and the glories of an Albania whose ident.i.ty has never been crushed by the foreign dominations they have had to bear all too often. By comparison Enver Hoxha has left no legacy at all, nothing of which one single Albanian can be proud-certainly not the hundreds of thousands of grim cement igloos, dotted pathetically across the land.

We stayed at an empty and echoing mausoleum of a hotel, the Dajti. The rooms were small and dusty; I had read once that the Albanian fleas were the biggest and fattest in the world, and so shook the sheets to make sure they were clean. Downstairs a feisty receptionist got rid of the driver and cut his antic.i.p.ated bill in half. "A northerner," she said. "A cheat. Be careful. There are a lot of cheats here this days."

I thanked the woman, once the driver had scowled his way back to his car and swerved out of the gates. I told her she was kind, and by the way, very pretty too. She grinned and blushed-and suddenly a man standing at the counter who had been chatting with her earlier took a step toward me. I shrank away. The girl raised her hand, waved off the man.

I had been more foolish than I realized. Later that evening I was told that the possessive pride of many Albanian men is such as to keep all foreigners perpetually on guard. Pay no compliments, I was warned. Never flirt. Be sure never to smile too hard or to wink at anyone. Be scrupulously careful of any too-friendly remark that might perhaps, if understood, being fatally misinterpreted.

The old customs and blood feuds between families remained a powerful force in Albanian tradition. I was told of a young man from a southern village, a university-educated, English-speaking engineer named Tony who worked in a factory in Tirana, who had met a young woman at a carnival earlier in the year and had playfully pinched her backside. She had thought little of the incident, had laughed it off-indeed, had been rather flattered. But a few days later she made the mistake of mentioning what had happened, in pa.s.sing, to her brother. The brother in turn told their father, and then a sudden thundercloud descended.

The family patriarch decided that, in line with the ancient customs of his clan, the girl's honor had been besmirched. Vengeance should now be wrought. An example should now be made.

"And so, despite the protests from the girl," I was told, "her brother and another boy from the family took the bus down from Kukes, where they lived up north, and they went down to the village where the young man lived. They rounded up all the young men in the family-not just the bottom pincher, but all of his brothers and his cousins in his village-and they took knives to them and sliced off their noses. Just cut them off, there and then. No questions, no arguments. They told the men why it had happened, that it had been ordered by the clan leader to make their position known, and that the mutilated fellows should never dare set foot in Kukes again. And they took off and went back home.

"Everyone understood. There was no question of a crime having been committed, except for the bottom pinching that started it all. There was no question of an investigation or of any further punishment. That, so far as everyone was concerned, was an end to the matter."

Except it wasn't quite. The young engineer, who would then come to the Tirana office wearing a small handkerchief taped to his forehead, which hung down and obscured the gaping and cartilaginous hole in his face, saved up money to have plastic surgery in Italy. His employer begged him not to: The sum he had saved, a thousand dollars, may have been difficult to come by, and a third of the Albanian average annual income, but it would not buy a satisfactory replacement. But the boy went anyway, and had something grafted onto his face that looked much like a big toe, only lopsided. He had since gone back to his village, ashamed ever to show himself again, taking comfort only in the knowledge that his brothers and cousins looked at least as ugly as he did.

I was told the story of Tony by the one friend I had in Albania-an Irish-Canadian engineer from Calgary, whom I had encountered many years before on Sakhalin Island, in the Russian Far East. He name was Shaun Going, and he ran a company called DRC, Inc., which specialized in "construction and disaster services." What that meant, basically, was that wherever in the world was in need of urgent repair, for whatever reason-war, earthquake, hurricane-he and his men would swarm in and make good and mend. He had been in Sakhalin trying to put up houses for the oilmen who were beginning work in a place ruined by years of Communist neglect. Now he was here in Tirana, building encampments for the refugees. And he was readying himself for Kosovo because, he knew, "just as soon as the war is over, people will need to have new houses, new offices, new everything. I have the men and the equipment, and I can go in like a small task force. It's exciting stuff!"

Shaun Going was an eternally amusing, energetic man, the kind of perpetually upbeat figure for whom nothing seemed ever to be a problem-though I knew from Sakhalin Island that his business had been run fairly close to the wind, and that he had never ama.s.sed the kind of fortune that one suspected could be made out of the world's endless supply of disasters. Here he had a worthwhile contract with NATO, and he had already, "through contacts," acquired a plot of land in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.

"The moment the soldiers get there," he said excitedly, "they're going to need showers, latrines, offices. I'll send in a team within hours of the invasion. I'll build them all they need in double-quick time. Then I'll hang around, bring in more people-rebuild the housing. I guess it's pretty bad over there, huh?" And he gave me a slew of telephone numbers, and asked me whether, if I managed to get into Kosovo, I might call him with an a.s.sessment of the damage that had been done. "I need to know how much to bring in, in the way of material, men, you know. A call from you, from someone on the spot, would be very helpful."

Mr. Going was a hustler, all right. But on the other hand he seemed to be having so much fun doing what he did, he seemed to take so positive and optimistic an att.i.tude to it and was clearly so well liked by so many of the Albanians I met-"Mr. Going is the King of Albania" I was told, unprompted, by a total stranger who had heard of him-that it would seem churlish to suggest that he was a man who exploited human misery. And besides, who was I, or who was any writer who came to these parts to see and write about wars and disasters, to pa.s.s any judgment at all? Wars and disasters throw up all kinds of humanity, and Shaun Going was one of those you meet on the periphery, not as n.o.ble as the fighters perhaps, but yet with his own kind of n.o.bility, for sure.

He took us to a restaurant called the Black Rooster, which has a courtyard with a thatched roof that was kept wet and dripped sheets of water into old stone runnels, and we ate trout from Lake Ohrid-a fish so rare, and from a lake so clear and deep that Enver Hoxha banned anyone but himself from fis.h.i.+ng it, on penalty of thirty years' hard labor. The fish was interesting, but rather more so was the man Shaun brought as his guest-an American named Greg, who came from North Carolina, said he was a journalist working for George George magazine in New York, and by his own admission paced the streets of Tirana at all hours of the night gathering, as he put it, "financial intelligence." magazine in New York, and by his own admission paced the streets of Tirana at all hours of the night gathering, as he put it, "financial intelligence."

I never quite knew what to make of him. He was tall, languid, educated, he spoke with an elaborately courteous southern drawl and he dressed impeccably. He had a strange accent, an odd manner: He kept referring to "the province," which he claimed to visit regularly, when he was speaking of Kosovo, and on those few occasions he used the word he called it Koss-oh-vo, with a long second o. o. He referred to his present home as being in a nation called Alb- He referred to his present home as being in a nation called Alb-ah-nia.

He gave the impression, as I am sure he half-intended, that he was some kind of American spy-which, when I compared him with the handful of real spies I knew, he almost certainly was not-or else was an extremely inept one. His journalistic contacts were far fewer than he suggested at first, and when I pressed him he could cite only having done an occasional piece on local casinos for a Texas-based journal devoted to gambling. I was puzzled by him, and after spending half a day wandering the back streets of the city with him and getting hopelessly lost, I concluded that he was probably one of those Walter Mittyish characters who are often thrown up by the atmospheres of strange cities like Tirana-sad men who attach themselves, limpetlike, to the journalists and other temporary figures who briefly settle during the crisis, who eke out an existence in a more drab and ba.n.a.l way than they pretend, and who then, and before they are discovered, pack up and move on somewhere else. I had seen such people before, in Kabul, in Beirut, in Buenos Aires, and he seemed to fit the modus operandi. modus operandi. But then again, maybe Greg was indeed a senior spymaster for the Albanian desk back at the circus, and I had been royally duped. But then again, maybe Greg was indeed a senior spymaster for the Albanian desk back at the circus, and I had been royally duped.

Tirana was, in any case, infested by a veritable army of '"internationals," as they had been snippishly called back in Sarajevo. They gathered each evening beside the caricaturably Hockney-blue pool at the EuropaPark Hotel, which was managed by Viennese and had been created for the sole use, it seemed, of foreigners willing to pay hundreds of dollars a night to stay and help Albania get back on its feet. I had lunch there once: A courtly Italian aid official with highly polished shoes and a suit of the coolest linen spent a good fifteen minutes choosing the perfect Montepulciano to have with his os...o...b..co, os...o...b..co, in the process puzzling the tall Albanian waiter, whose badge suggested that his name was Elvis. What relevance any of this had to do with the poor, corrupt, lunatic nation beyond the clipped privet hedges and the security guards, I do not know: but I was happy to settle the bill and leave, and get into the car bound for the frontier with Macedonia. in the process puzzling the tall Albanian waiter, whose badge suggested that his name was Elvis. What relevance any of this had to do with the poor, corrupt, lunatic nation beyond the clipped privet hedges and the security guards, I do not know: but I was happy to settle the bill and leave, and get into the car bound for the frontier with Macedonia.

Shaun had arranged that a huge Gheg villager named Monday*, once a heavyweight boxing champion, would drive us across to Skopje. Shaun also supplied us with one of his fleet of cars, which unlike most Albanian cars did have the right permission and insurance certificates that were needed to leave the country. And so we headed off out of Tirana, which fell away in no more than five minutes, once we had maneuvered our way around the ma.s.sive fortifications at the American emba.s.sy. This, it seems, is a city without suburbs: Just like Pyongyang, with which it had few other similarities except for the screwball nature of its former regime, you are at one moment in the city-and then you were not. As with North Korea, so here with Albania. A row of mean houses comes to a sudden end-and then the countryside begins. One moment there is noise and confusion and fumes and traffic jams-and the next the sweet smell of new-mown hay, the sound of sheep bells, the patient plod of cowherds, and, in this case of this Albanian journey, the crags of the mountains of Kerrabe, which stand between the capital and the valley of Elbasan.

It was a dangerous, white-knuckle forty miles-for despite this being the Via Egnatia, the most direct Roman-built route between Durres and Byzantium, Monday and the equally huge friend he had brought along for company had no choice but to swing the car through a score of hairpin turns to hoist us over the mountain range. The summit was less than three thousand feet, but the view was stupendous: On the western side of the escarpment we could see all the way across the Durres and Tirana Plain, clear to the Adriatic and the island of Corfu. To the east we were confronted by range upon range of more distant blue hills, and just below the immense steel mill that the Chinese had built in more comradely times. It was quiet now, with no billowing clouds from its smokestacks: It rusted quietly in the sun, like Albania a victim of years of ruin and neglect.

Beyond the steel mill the countryside became wilder and ever more remote, and Monday urged us to watch out for bandits, gangs of men with guns who would swarm out of nowhere in an ambush, and take everything in a paroxysm of thievery. I had friends who had made this journey before, one of whom was left beside the road in only his underwear-his car, money, pa.s.sport, clothes all gone with just a war whoop of delight, all lost in some isolated mountain lair. The region is lawless, dangerous-and I only felt confident that this journey would succeed because of two realities: First, Monday was a very large man indeed, and was known to thousands of Albanian boxing fans and respected by all of them; and second, there was a major war presently in the making, and the road and the fields ahead were swarming with eastbound soldiers and equipment, most of them American.

We came across the first of them while we sped down the valley of the Shk.u.mbinit River, between the towns of Librazhd and Perrenjas: A pair of American Humvees was parked under the trees beside the stream, the soldiers gazing in rapture at a group of young Albanian girls in bathing suits. Then suddenly the air was filled with thunder and a pair of U.S. Army helicopters zoomed low above us, their rotors setting the trees thras.h.i.+ng in their wake. They were bound for the sh.o.r.es of Lake Ohrid, to a rendezvous point for the battle to come.

And then we saw more, many more, as we breasted a rise above the western side of the lake itself. The road forks just beyond Perrenjas, and one can go either to a border crossing south of the lake or another at the northern side. Since we were due to take the road north up to Skopje, this latter northern frontier post seemed the better choice, and so we turned to the left-and climbed up onto a treeless moorland country of tussock gra.s.s and stunted bushes that could have been in Scotland, and needed only a sporraned piper to look the part. We rounded a bend-and then saw ahead of a huge concentration of American armed forces, parked in a great circle in a field beside the road.

It was a landing strip and a refueling base for the Macedonia-bound squadron of Apache helicopters. Twenty of the sleek and menacing looking machines, known as AH-64s, and said by the Pentagon to be among the finest tank-killing, infantry-disrupting slow-speed attack aircraft ever designed, had been in Albania for the previous ten weeks. They had proved perfectly useless: One of them had crashed; two men had been killed; the rest of the crews turned out to be poorly trained and quite unsuited for the kind of duties the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a.s.sumed they could carry out. So now, as a soft option, they were going to Macedonia, and if not to prosecute a war, then at least to help secure a kind of peace.

And whether they were going proudly or in some kind of disgrace, their simple presence here, the sight of such a muscular part of the American military machine in so backward and bucolic a corner of the world, was hugely impressive. Giant fuel pumps, scores of armored cars, dozens of jeeps and Humvees and radio vans and sentries were posted over ten acres of clifftop. And one by one, the needle-nosed machines thundered in from the west, were refueled with speed and efficiency, and then spiraled up into the sky once more before heading east, across the frontier. We could have watched for hours, and a few Albanian children, held back by the men with guns, were evidently doing so. The sight of so much hardware, the roaring of engines, the smell of jet fuel, the impression of power and money and might-it all had a mesmerizing effect.

But ten minutes later we were at the border, lining up behind a group of armored cars from an engineering support battalion based in faraway Kentucky. The Macedonian frontier guards were making every solder present his pa.s.sport, stamping each man in as though he were a tourist, making sure the vast green vehicles that roared and spluttered in the heat had all the proper registration and insurance doc.u.ments. Their commander, a young African American from Texas, scratched his head in disbelief. "I figured we'd cross frontiers like they weren't really there," he said. "What could they do if we just put the hammer down?" He patted the inch-thick steel flank of an armored car. "Do these guys think they could they stop a baby like this?"

But the officer behaved himself and patiently waited until the forms had been filled and the stamps all stamped, and then the convoy roared off into what was once called Thrace-and what until 1992 had itself been a part of Yugoslavia, but that was now called either FYROM, or by everyone but the angry Greeks, Macedonia.

We followed twenty minutes later, only to discover the convoy stranded, perhaps in that notorious commanders' nightmare that comes about when you are, as they say, "lost at the join of four maps." They were turning around in a fog of smoke and dust, heading for an overnight rest camp. We pa.s.sed them, and the young black officer waved sardonically.

"See you at the front!" he yelled. "If you manage to find it," I shouted back.

By dusk we are in the smart little mountain town of Tetovo, thirty miles shy of the Macedonian capital. I had made a phone call: There were no rooms in Skopje, and so it seemed sensible to spend the night here. We found a motel beside a gas station, with rooms both for us and for Monday and his friend. It was a noisy night. The waitress, a glamorous blond who served us drinks while wearing a dress that might have been sprayed on, whose top half was so sheer as to be almost transparent, made extravagantly noisy love in the room next to ours. And then at four in the morning there came the cras.h.i.+ng, screeching, grinding noise of steel tracks on an asphalt road. I looked out of the window: A column, miles long, of German Wehrmacht tanks and armored cars and self-propelled guns was grinding its way northward, just below the window. The great invasion was getting noisily under way.

8.

The Sound and the Fury

IT WAS A LITTLE after four o'clock on a cool and starlit Balkan summer morning, the water meadow by the border was quiet and deserted. The main road beside it was quiet, too, but, as our eyes became accustomed to the dark, so we could see that the northbound lane was lined with scores of jeeps and armored cars and, lying on the dew-damp asphalt, hundreds upon hundreds of sleeping soldiers. A scattering of the officers who would command them were in the back of their Land Rovers, hunched over maps lit by pools of red light from night-lamps. Some were smoking. All were fidgeting. Everyone was waiting. after four o'clock on a cool and starlit Balkan summer morning, the water meadow by the border was quiet and deserted. The main road beside it was quiet, too, but, as our eyes became accustomed to the dark, so we could see that the northbound lane was lined with scores of jeeps and armored cars and, lying on the dew-damp asphalt, hundreds upon hundreds of sleeping soldiers. A scattering of the officers who would command them were in the back of their Land Rovers, hunched over maps lit by pools of red light from night-lamps. Some were smoking. All were fidgeting. Everyone was waiting.

The operation had been code-named Joint Guardian. It involved the rapid establishment of a peacekeeping force in and throughout the cities, villages, plains, and mountain ranges of the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo. The operation was vast in size and scope, and it taken military planners much of the previous six months to work out how best it might be carried out. It involved princ.i.p.ally large numbers of heavily armed forces from Britain, the United States, Italy, Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Holland, most of whom were either waiting here or were parked at marshaling sites within a few miles of the frontier zone.

It now required only a decision from NATO headquarters outside Brussels, and the formal issuance of an order by the forces' commanding general on the ground, Sir Michael Jackson, to set the vast machinery of this operation-by far the biggest European military operation since the end of World War II-in motion. That was what everyone-and half the world outside-was waiting for. We stamped our feet to ward off the morning chill: In a headquarters back at an airbase near Skopje, commanders waited for radio messages, and for the green light, for the signal to go.

Rose and I had arrived from Albania on the evening of Thursday, June 10. The next day, Friday, was when the forces were first scheduled to make their entry, but it turned out instead to be a hectic and surreally confused day, with the Russian government indulging in a subtle and dangerous power play that caused angst and irritation among the Western allies, and ended up causing a twenty-four-hour postponement. But now matters had been at least partially resolved. The Serbian forces that were supposed, under the terms of the previous week's agreement, to be leaving Kosovo, were now in the process of doing so. It was vitally important that there was no vacuum between the departure of one force and the arrival of another. To avoid the possibility of anarchy, or the seizure of the province by any one or more of the guerrillas and paramilitary groups with which the region was blessed, or cursed, depending on your viewpoint, NATO now had to move very fast. So it came as no surprise late on that hectic Friday afternoon when we were told that H hour, the moment when the Allied forces would formally start to roll into Kosovo, was now to be 5:30 in the morning of Sat.u.r.day, June 12. British forces, it was decided, would be the first to go in. A battalion of Gurkhas* first, then paratroops, and behind them a great deal of very protective heavy armor and a number of extremely large guns. first, then paratroops, and behind them a great deal of very protective heavy armor and a number of extremely large guns.

In antic.i.p.ation of what we would be likely to see, the two of us, along with an Australian colleague from a newspaper in Melbourne, managed to reach the Kosovo frontier line shortly after three o'clock. There, beside the Blace water meadow that I was now seeing for the third time, along with a scattering of others who were curious to witness the denouement of this long Balkan crisis, we waited, and waited, in the cool and deceptive peace of this strange Macedonian dawn.

The more obvious preparations had begun to take place just after nightfall. At about 10:00 P.M P.M. a long column of heavy armor began moving along the main bypa.s.s to the north of Skopje, past the main hotel where the immense collection of foreign reporters were staying, and past the slums and shanties that, by happy chance, were largely occupied by some of Macedonia's half million Albanians.* The first few vehicles-huge British Challenger tanks manned by engineers, and with earthmoving equipment mounted on the front, as well as Warrior armored cars and self-propelled guns-came and went without the onlookers doing much more than staring, open mouthed in awe. But by midnight, when the column had swollen to an endless roaring river of iron, it seemed as though someone had said to the Albanians it thundered past: The first few vehicles-huge British Challenger tanks manned by engineers, and with earthmoving equipment mounted on the front, as well as Warrior armored cars and self-propelled guns-came and went without the onlookers doing much more than staring, open mouthed in awe. But by midnight, when the column had swollen to an endless roaring river of iron, it seemed as though someone had said to the Albanians it thundered past: These tanks, these are for you, these are going to help liberate your people. These tanks, these are for you, these are going to help liberate your people. And once that realization had sunk in, the people on the street began to go wild. And once that realization had sunk in, the people on the street began to go wild.

By 1:00 A.M A.M. a huge ma.s.s of people, with hundreds of little children all way past their bedtime, stood beside the road cheering madly, waving flags, blaring horns, tossing pieces of ribbon and newspaper confetti at the pa.s.sing tanks. The crews looked from their turrets in happy puzzlement-men from Lancas.h.i.+re and Devon and Belfast and Hawick, witnessing scenes of adulation and hope that had not been seen in Europe since perhaps the liberation of Paris. It was an astonis.h.i.+ng, deeply moving sight; and I shall long remember turning away to go back for an hour's sleep, and hearing the strange harmony of the sounds the came from behind me-on one hand the roaring and grinding of the tank columns, and on the other the ecstasy of cheering from those who were watching them, and willing them on, to the frontier.