On the Shores of the Mediterranean - Eric Newby

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lotus, and beds of reeds inhabited by egrets and white herons extended far out into it. Men were fishing in the channels between them and women were working from their narrow boats, gathering water chestnuts. There are carp in the lake which weigh forty pounds or more and which, when smoked, are regarded as a great delicacy. According to the driver, sardines enter it to spawn by way of a river from the Adriatic, of which it was once an inlet. Beyond the lake, to the south-west, were the ragged tops of the Krajina Rumija mountains. Along the roadside scarlet-flowering pomegranates grew. It was a cloudless day. The atmosphere was already incandescent with heat. The lake shimmered in the haze. To the left bare hills rose steeply, shutting off the view of the mountains further inland. There was not a house to be seen. Rich Italians came here in winter to shoot wildfowl. It was an eerie place, as almost all places close to frontiers seem to be, perhaps by association of ideas. The coach radio emitted blasts of outlandish music which the driver said was Albanian.

      The Yugoslav customs house was on another, longer, deeper inlet of the lake, called the Humsko Blato, which was about as wide as the Thames at Westminster. White buoys down the middle of it marked the frontier.

      Forty yards or so down the road beyond the Yugoslav customs house was the Albanian one, near a hamlet called Han-i-Hotit where, in the time of the Ottomans, there was a han, a caravanserai.

      Here, while we waited on the Yugoslav side, the Tour Leader told us that the Albanians would take from us any literature of an even faintly political character and all newspapers if we tried to take them into Albania and that the Yugoslavs would do the same if we tried to do the same with any Albanian literature when leaving. Here, a lady who was a member of the group asked if she could use the lavatory in the Yugoslav customs house, the door of which stood invitingly open, revealing a pastel-coloured suite, and was told brusquely by an official that she couldn’t, and must wait until she got to Albania.

      Also waiting to cross was the Albanian football team, on its way back to Tirana from Vienna, after having been defeated in the European Championships. We felt sorry for them. They looked so woebegone in their shabby, variegated clothes, nothing like bouncy international footballers usually do. One of them had bought a bicycle tyre and inner tube in Vienna. One of our party, a Welsh football enthusiast, asked them for their autographs and this cheered them up a bit.

      We were now joined by two Italian gentlemen intent on entering Albania who arrived in a motor car, having driven from Rome.

      ‘You cannot enter Albania without a visa,’ one of the Yugoslavs said in Italian.

      ‘But where do we get these visas?’ one of them asked.

      ‘At Rome!’

      ‘Va bene, torniamo a Roma,’ the driver said, without hesitation, and turning the car round headed back for Bar, where they had disembarked from the ferry from Italy the previous day. When they had gone, it suddenly occurred to me that the official had not told them that they would not be allowed into Albania unless they were with a group, and I asked him why.

      ‘Because they did not ask me,’ he said. And he seemed to think it a good joke.

      Now we lugged our luggage, the young aiding the aged and infirm, along the sizzling expanse of road which constituted the no-man’s-land between the two countries, looking a bit like survivors of some disaster, to the very border of Albania, where we were halted at a barrier by a savage-looking soldier in shiny green fatigues, armed with a machine pistol. To the right was the inlet in which fast little motor boats were kept ready in the shallows, where orangey-yellow water fuchsia were growing. To the left was the steep hillside and, running along the foot of it, an electric fence with white porcelain insulators supporting the wires, about eight feet high with overhangs, which would have made it impossible to scale even if the current was off. It looked as if it was no longer in use and I wondered if it had been the sort that frizzles you to a cinder or the kind that rings bells, or indeed the type that does both, and whether it actually encircled Albania.

      The barrier was surmounted by a sign bearing an imperialistic-looking double-headed black eagle and a red star on a yellow background which announced that this was the Republika Popullore e Shqiperise, Shqiperia being ‘The Land of the Eagles’. Knowing that I would have difficulty in remembering how to spell this later on, I began to write it down in a notebook, but the sentry made such threatening gestures that I desisted.

      Here, with us all still standing on the Yugoslav side of the barrier, Nanny, our Tour Leader, handed over a multiple visa, procured from the Albanian consulate in Paris, with photographs of all thirty-four of us attached to it, most of them taken in those smelly little booths that can be found in amusement arcades or on railway stations. It made the visa look like an illustrated catalogue for a chamber of horrors and it took the official, to whom he now presented it, some time to convince himself that what he was looking at were real people, although one would have thought that he must have had plenty of experience of looking at similar documents.

      It was during the inspection of these credentials, in the course of which we were called forward to be identified one by one, that he discovered that the numbers printed on our two passports did not tally with those on the multiple visa. This was because our old passports had expired when we applied to join the tour and the new ones had not yet been issued to us when the visa was applied for by the tour company because of a strike by British passport officials. Eventually we were admitted, probably because the coach that had brought us to the Yugoslav frontier had already driven away and we would have been a problem to dispose of.

      Now, in the customs house, one of the antechambers to Albania, we were ordered to fill in customs declarations, and a wave of collective panic seized the group when it was discovered that the only two languages in which the questions were posed were French and Albanian.

      Possèdez-vous les objets suivants Poste émetteur et récepteur, appareil photographique, magnétophone, téléviseur, refrigerateur, machine à laver et d’autres equipements domestiques, montres, narcotiques, imprimés comme lettres, revue du matérial explosif?

      As a result of not knowing what a lot of this meant, normally law-abiding members of the group imported radios, tape recorders, copies of English national newspapers, the New Statesman, Spectator, New Scientist and a pictorial souvenir of the Royal Wedding, although one timid girl, asked by a hopeful official if she had any pornography about her, blushingly handed over a copy of Over 21.

      Here, in these otherwise bare rooms, we had our first close-up of Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hoja), founder of the Albanian Communist Party in 1941, First Secretary since 1954 of the Central Committee of the Party, and the Leader, apparently for life (he was born 1908), photographed with survivors of the 1979 earthquake, below a placard with an injunction from him that read:

      EVEN IF WE HAVE TO GO WITHOUT BREAD WE ALBANIANS DO NOT VIOLATE PRINCIPLES. WE DO NOT BETRAY MARXISM-LENINISM.

      From then on we were confronted everywhere by his smiling, cherubic-mouthed, well-nourished – no sign that he was forgoing the staff of life – slightly epicene image. It was Evelyn Waugh who, while on a wartime mission to Tito, suggested that Tito was a woman and he could with equal propriety, or rather lack of propriety, in both cases belied by their records, have said the same about Hoxha. We saw him on enormous hoardings, sometimes marooned in the middle of fields, usually wearing a silvery-looking suit with matching trilby and carrying a bunch of flowers, like a prodigal son, who has made it successfully into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, returning to visit an aged mother in a hut. Sometimes he was depicted, but usually only in more sophisticated surroundings such as the foyers of tourist hotels, straining to his bosom pampered little girls, of the sort popular with his hero and mentor, Stalin, some of whom were wrapped in equally silvery furs.

      ‘Shall we be able to see him in Tirana?’ was the first question we asked the Albanian interpreter who would be accompanying us on our tour and who was about thirty-five with streaks of black hair plastered down over a brainy-looking noddle, like a baddie in a Tintin book. He looked at us as if we were a couple of loonies.

      

      The first Albanian I ever met, and the last for some twenty-five years, was Zog, the King of Albania.

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