On the Shores of the Mediterranean (14 page)

The King was then forty-nine years old, very tall and very thin and dark with a razor-sharp moustache of the sort I later learned was much affected by Albanians. His Queen, Geraldine Apponyi, a Hungarian countess, was extremely good-looking, if not downright saucy-looking.

The King spoke French with his host and hostess and the various other guests of high rank who were present. From what I could hear he appeared, rather like Edward VIII, to be interested in trivia; but he looked a tough customer. I never spoke to the King or the Queen, being a very junior officer of no consequence. Instead, I got a rocket from a general who was also present for wearing a flannel suit instead of uniform. I told him that my uniform was in a bad state of repair and that it was being mended by an upstairs maid, which impressed him. ‘I don’t have an upstairs maid,’ he said, with unconcealed regret. He also asked me what I was doing and I told him that I wasn’t allowed to tell him as it was supposed to be secret, which was true but didn’t go down very well either. Altogether, it was not a luncheon easily forgotten.

The King, together with Queen Geraldine, had left his kingdom when it was invaded by the Italians in April 1939. With him were ten chests said to contain the entire Albanian gold reserves, and twelve Ghegs, supposedly loyal members of his tribe, whose job it was to guard them, as well as act as bodyguards. The King and Queen had travelled extensively since their departure from Albania, I was told by a woman sitting on my left who appeared to be exceptionally well informed about them.

Eventually they had arrived in France in 1940, just in time to
see it fall, having previously been in Greece, Turkey, Rumania, Poland, Sweden and Norway. From France, with the Queen and his four sisters, the King departed for England in some haste, in a specially chartered steamer from St Jean-de-Luz, near the Spanish border, in order to avoid being taken by the Germans. He and his family were already on board when he saw some of his bodyguard making off in a boat, in the direction of Spain, together with the royal treasure. There was just time to set off in pursuit, take the treasure on board and liquidate these henchmen before setting sail. On arrival in London, he put up at the Ritz before going north for the grouse shooting in August 1940, an odd time to be shooting grouse, with the Germans practically on the threshold, by which time, so my neighbour said, the Gheg bodyguard had been reduced to a point bordering on the non-existent. Now, apparently bodyguardless – at least he appeared to be at this luncheon – the King had arrived in Egypt. The son of a Muslim tribal chief, he was originally called Achmed Zogu, and had risen to the position of President of the Albanian Republic before being proclaimed King in 1928. He was now apparently poised for further travel –
‘son deuxième piste’
was how my informant described it – but without any immediate hope of returning to his native land, and in fact he never did.

For eight years after the first war Albania was a constitutional republic. During the last war, the War of National Liberation against the Axis, the Left, having successfully liquidated the Centre and Right with the unacknowledged and perhaps unintentional aid of the Allies, founded a National Independence Front which in October 1944 became what was surprisingly known as ‘The First Democratic Government of Albania’. At the end of the following year the Communist Party, the only permitted party, won the first general election.

After the war the country became even more remote than it
had been previously, a sort of communist Tibet. In 1946 the Albanians displayed their independence by mining the Corfu Channel which resulted in the sinking of two British destroyers with the loss of fifty-four lives, but, when accused of doing so, claimed that another country, probably Yugoslavia, had laid the mines. The International Court awarded Britain £900,000 in damages but Albania refused to pay. The British, who had in the vaults of the Bank of England what is now estimated to be about $30 million of Albanian gold which had been seized from the Germans at the end of the war, refused to return it, on the grounds that the United States and Italy had previous claims on it. And so they do, because Albania had nationalized US and Italian property in the country without offering compensation. (Albania is still demanding the return of this gold, plus interest, as a precondition of reopening diplomatic relations with Britain, which ceased in 1939 when the Italians invaded the country and the King left it. Whether this gold includes any residue of whatever the King made off with is not clear. Well, it isn’t clear to me.)

In 1946 the United States broke off relations with Albania (having together with Britain and Russia recognized the Provisional Government in November 1945), at the same time vetoing Albania’s admission to the UN, with Britain’s support, and Albania did not become a member of it until 1955. To this day no Americans are allowed to enter Albania on any pretext. In 1948 the Russians quarrelled with the Yugoslavs and, as a result, the Albanians broke with the Yugoslavs, who had given them considerable financial aid and had sent them 4000 technicians and numerous youth cadres, all of which they could ill afford, in order to help the Albanians build their first railway line and also to reconstruct the port of Durrës. The Albanians accused the Yugoslavs of practising ‘Tito-ite Capitalism’ and, not altogether without reason, of ‘Colonialism’. They still continued to be very friendly with Stalinist Russia.

In 1961, the year after Stalin’s death, the Albanians broke with the Russians, partly because they themselves were becoming increasingly pro-Chinese, partly because Khrushchev was cultivating relations with the USA and also because he was denigrating what was in Albania the revered memory of Stalin. In spite of this they still continued to have trade relations with some Eastern Bloc countries, notably Rumania and East Germany. The Russians had given the Albanians really massive assistance, totalling some 500,000,000 roubles, and had helped them through their First and Second Five-Year Plans and with the initiation of the Third Plan, which began in 1961. They had also lent them 15,000 technicians who led the way in building factories, equipping towns and harbours, building themselves a secret base on Sazan Island in the Adriatic, and in re-equipping the Albanian army.

Next to come, and eventually depart, were the Chinese. Between 1961 and 1978, as interested in securing a base in the Mediterranean as the Russians had been before them, according to themselves they injected the equivalent of $5 billion into the Albanian economy (other sources say $200 million) and sent in 4000 Chinese technicians who worked on the construction of a large oil refinery near Elbasan, the Mao Tse-tung Textile Factory in Berat (now known as the Organizatës së Rinisëtë Filaturës të Kombinatet të Texstilëve Berat) and the Mao Tse-tung Metallurgical Complex at Elbasan, which had its name changed, when they left, to the Steel of the Party Metallurgical Combine.

By the time the Chinese left in 1978, after the death of Mao, accused of sabotaging the Sixth Five-Year Plan and betraying Marxism-Leninism by doing business with the capitalist powers, Albania was self-sufficient in natural gas and had an exportable oil surplus, although by 1980 production had sunk from 2.5 million tons in the mid-1970s to 1.5 million tons. By 1981 production of high grade steel had come to a temporary halt because of
lack of skilled workers; on the other hand, by that year Albania had become the world’s second largest exporter of chrome. By now it also had a surplus of hydroelectric power and was able to export electricity to Yugoslavia.

Among other things the Albanian leaders are said to have objected to in their special relationship with China was the future role envisaged for their country by Chou En-lai, one strikingly similar to that thought up for it by Khrushchev –
‘Un jardin fleuri du socialisme’
, a puppet state consecrated to agriculture. Now they were alone, officially isolated from East and West, but still with some clandestine links, admitting to no friends anywhere.
¹

My first attempt to visit Albania was back in 1962. The nearest Albanian Consulate was in Paris and it was there I went from London in pursuit of an Albanian visa.

It was a cold, wet, wintry morning in Paris when I eventually located the consulate after a rough crossing from Dover to Dunkirk by the now defunct Night Ferry. A plaque on the front gate which announced that this was the Albanian Consulate could have done with a bit of Brasso. The facade of the building was covered with some sort of dense vegetation.

I rang the door bell. Instantly, as if I was expected, a metal shutter opened in it.

‘Qu’est que vous voulez?’
a disembodied voice asked in French even more execrable than my own.

‘Je desire aller en Albanie.’

‘Pourquoi?’

‘Pour faire des vacances.’

‘D’où venez-vous?’

‘Je suis Anglais.’

‘NON!’
said the voice, definitely and violently. The shutter slammed shut and after an early lunch I went back to London.

Years were to pass before I finally succeeded in getting an Albanian visa.

We set off for Shkodër, the principal city of northern Albania, in an Italian-built Albturist bus fitted with almost new tyres with Chinese characters impressed on them. Either the Chinese had left behind enormous quantities of tyres when they departed, or else they left the moulds. They were to be seen everywhere in Albania, fitted to trucks and jeeps and buses.

The driver was about fifty-five. He spoke good Italian – his parents were Italian – and proved to be a mine of misleading information, as well as of sinister Italian proverbs that would have had the Camorra in stitches. When he found that we, too, spoke Italian he made us sit up front in the seats with the best view, which made some of the other members of the group, with what they considered inferior seats, jealous. We wondered why they envied us, stuck up front with him and the interpreter, who, as soon as the bus got going, began to deluge us with statistics about percentages, kilowatt hours and similar stuff. When not doing this he played interminable patriotic music and the songs of wartime partisans, still very much in demand apparently, on tape. It was difficult to take a shine to either of them.

Beyond the hamlet of Han-i-Hotit the road wound round the head of the inlet and through wild, serrated limestone country before entering a wide plain which extends from the foot of the mountains to the lake shore.

These particular mountains conceal within them what are to foreigners, and have been for fifty years, perhaps the most unknown and inaccessible regions of Albania. This is, or was, the land of the Ghegs, Roman Catholics renowned for their wildness (King Zog was a Gheg, although apparently a Muslim Gheg; his
sister married a son of the Turkish Sultan Abd ul-Hamid II), their huge noses and scythe-like moustaches, of the sort still worn to proclaim their identity by some expatriate Yugoslav Albanians, of whom there are some millions.

The southern part of the country is the home of the Tosks who, like the Ghegs, have their own dialect – Albanian is a beautiful language of Indo-European origin, a dialect of ancient Illyrian with Greek and Latin affinities – but no noses to speak of, and no moustaches of any consequence either.

What was extraordinary, on the road to Shkodër, and everywhere else we went subsequently in Albania, was the extent of the defences. On either side of the road what looked like countless thousands of concrete mushrooms sprang from the ground. Every part of the plain, every valley, had line after line of them drawn across it. Every village, every town and city, had concentrations of these blockhouses in and around them. And back on the hillsides there were bigger blockhouses and casemates for the heavy guns. None of this was a relic of some past emergency. They were still being pre-fabricated at a furious rate, although only the bigger ones, with guns mounted inside them, were actually manned.

These until recently utterly barren, limestone foothills grazed by goats now burgeoned with fruit trees. Further south and near the shores of Lake Ochrid, which forms part of Albania’s eastern border with Yugoslavia, such plantations were on a vast scale, and followed the configuration of the hillsides, one above the other, like contour lines. And there were enormous olive groves and vineyards, many of them so recently planted that neither had yet yielded a crop. Such works, many of them in very inaccessible situations and in a country in which mechanization was still in its infancy, suggested the employment of very large numbers of workers, perhaps the employment of forced labour.

Mile after mile the road to Shkodër, like most other main roads
in Albania, was planted with avenues of black poplars which formed tunnels of shadow beneath which the workers in the fields were now taking refuge from the awful noontime heat. Most of them were women, wearing white head-dresses, black skirts and thick brown stockings, and they looked whacked; nothing like the heroic, uniformed women – advancing out of the dawn waving rifles with fixed bayonets and announcing the imminent demise of Imperialism and Revisionism – on the poster-hoardings at the roadside and in the fields, sites which they shared with the First Secretary. Here, they were harvesting maize, tobacco and sunflowers. All of them were old enough to be mothers. Some of them were old enough to be grandmothers.

‘What happens if they have babies?’ Wanda said in English to the interpreter, who was having one of his brief rest periods from giving us the percentage and kilowatt treatment.

‘The mother is allowed six months’ leave, during which she gets 80 per cent of her wages. When they start work again the babies are kept in day nurseries.’ It was the driver who answered, the one who said he spoke no English but certainly understood it, butting in, speaking in Italian, using the word
nidi
, literally ‘nests’, for nurseries. ‘Here,’ taking the opportunity of which all good communists avail themselves whenever it presents itself to come up with some good news about the regime, ‘we have no contraception, no abortion and no living together before marriage as you have in England. Here, we have very big birthrate, more men than women, the biggest in Europe. Here, when they had the last census, in 1975, they found that the population had tripled in fifty-two years. Here, agriculture is very important. Here, one worker in every five is in agriculture.’