I had no particular questions for him — I could answer them all for myself. Interviews are an alibi for a journalist’s lack of ideas.
I extricate myself from the armchair. Smiles wreathe three faces. A bow. Another bow. Another. Sentries. Salutes.
As far as the ceremonial of the audience goes, the Albanian version is indistinguishable in point of ritual, custom and awkwardness from those of any other country. Ahmed Zogu is younger than most European presidents; he is a tad over thirty. He has had a richer, more dramatic life than most Europeans his age. He has dead enemies on his conscience and living ones at large in his country. This last, again, is common to statesmen the world over; the former — more the dead enemies part than the conscience — is an Oriental speciality. Ahmed Zogu looks harmless enough, tall, as representative as he needs to be, and oddly, blond. The blondness overlies the Oriental features like a mistake. The posture he adopts when giving audiences is more the result of caution than any personal confidence. The sparseness of his speech, the slowness of his tongue, the empty politeness of his questions, all are the expression of an insufficiently practised and therefore all the more rigidly adhered-to diplomacy. He strives — for no good reason — for a crown-prince-like banality.
His military abilities are said to be small. In the Great War he did not, contrary to the claims of a swiftly circulated legend, enter Durazzo at the head of a column of Albanian troops. But in this country where every tenth peasant is a military genius, and every second a dead shot with a rifle, it is difficult to shine through military gifts. He is said to be a ruthless dictator. But in Albania, where every warlord has aspirations to be a dictator, every landowner his vassal, and anyone who can read and write his secretary, there is probably no other dictatorship going than the ruthless kind. Ahmed seems if anything less dictatorial than the people around him, who are more experienced, clever, and ruthless than he is, and many of whom have undergone a thorough education in these qualities under the Turks. Of all the qualities that underpin rather than grace dictatorship, the president of the Republic of Albania has perhaps only worry for the future of his country — understandably, in a country where a man doesn’t even have to be dictator to fear a casual bullet. Further, Ahmed has enjoyed lavish hospitality from the South Slavs, having “conquered” Albania with the help of South Slav bands before shortly afterwards concluding the familiar pact with Italy. But for more than 800 years most of the influential men in the Balkans have not refused money, especially when offered by two opposing sides — and why should Ahmed be the exception here? The selfless friendship of the South Slavs has not yet been proved, in any case. But even if I (rightly) question the selfless patriotism of Ahmed, in many points the selfish ambition of the president tallies with the true needs of his country, which, faced with the choice between putting itself in the care of a more cultivated country or one still fighting with its unresolved internal difficulties, chooses the former. Further, the president is accused of plastering his image on walls, stamps and coins everywhere. But even in more developed nations, the widely circulated likeness is still seen as the best means of establishing oneself in the mostly brief and ungrateful consciousness of an electorate.
In any case, it is impossible to judge the circumstances of an Oriental state, whose history is oppression, whose ethics are corruption, and whose culture is a mixture of native bucolic and archaic-romantic naïveté and the recent importation of intrigue, by the criteria of a Western democracy. If one suddenly found oneself back in the Middle Ages, it would be similarly fatuous to be exercised about the burning of witches.
One should try to judge Ahmed with an unprejudiced eye as an expression of his surroundings. One should bear in mind that he is the scion of an Albanian noble family that was in power in the seventeenth century and before — and presumably not with democratic methods then. One should bear in mind that a parliament in Albania can only be convoked in one way, the way that it is presently convoked. It will be a “parliament in name only” for at least another twenty years. It is just as open to the influence of cliques, the will of the head of state as the South Slav Skupština, and just as powerless as the parliaments in Budapest or Ankara. One should bear in mind that the rivals and enemies of Ahmed Zogu, some of whom I know personally, are no more Western than the man himself. Of the nine hundred and twenty Western-educated men who have left the country since Ahmed’s accession, of the seven politicians who have fled to the South Slav Republic since 1925, of the twelve who since 1922 have lost their lives, I presume that none would want to exercise power in a different way than Ahmed Zogu — and I don’t condemn them. Because in Oriental politics, and Albanian politics in particular, self-defence is a very broad concept, and one that plays almost the same role as reasons of state do in Western Europe. A long and laborious process of education needs to take place to make citizens out of shepherds, chieftains, warlords and religious fanatics.
Whether or not Ahmed Zogu is able or willing to take in hand this education is anyone’s guess. Today even his ties to Italy make him nervous. He is no longer able to play off Italy and the South Slavs against each other. There is nothing he is more anxiously awaiting than an olive branch from the South Slavs. But the South Slavs are bitterly readying other men and methods. Italy is more concerned with protecting its own interests than Zogu’s life. And so this young man, who has already had to suppress three revolts, in his well-cut general’s uniform, with an immense allowance, in a by local standards palatial, by ours middle-class home, surrounded by a lifeguard whose loyalty is as relative as everything else in this country, advised by politicians whose cunning was sharpened and whose character dulled in Turkish service — this young man who might have led a carefree student existence in Paris, is stern and trembling, and awaiting a fourth revolt. Most of all, one doesn’t take exception to the loss of life he is said to have been responsible for, so much as the sums of money he has obtained. But then again — if he didn’t have them, then they would end up with others who would have deserved them even less; the small but lardy layer of alphabetical leeches, the Turkish scribes, the corrupt enablers of corruption.
Tomorrow may see Ahmed Zogu still in power, and the day after gone, and someone else in his place, who would be almost indistinguishable from him.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 May 1927
* The recipient here of J. R.’s dusty cool had himself made king the following year (King Zog I), remained in power until 1938, and finally died in exile in France in 1961. He is buried in the Cimetière Parisien de Thiais, where Roth lies too. He was the object of some six hundred blood feuds — vendettas — and survived fifty-five assassination attempts.
34. Arrival in Albania
The sea is calm, the clouds hang in the sky as though nailed there, a ghostly boat skims across the placid surface towards the ship as though drawn on an invisible rope to collect me. There are only two of us disembarking here: a man hoping in this land of beards to sell Gillette razors, and myself.
Where terra firma begins there is a little wooden hut with a picture-book chimney from which the smoke goes straight up, as though drawn with a ruler. It’s seven in the morning; wooded, green, bare, steel-blue mountains frame the horizon; cryptic larks flit about the shiny blue sky; the hut, like many attractions these days, has a guest-book; sitting over the book is a man in a black uniform, rolling himself a cigarette, and this is the Albanian border police. A master of the alphabet, but unused to writing, he sits there, whiling away the time of the new arrivals by painstaking scrutiny of their passports. A stooped Levantine chauffeur is kept waiting in the Ford he proposes to drive until the policeman has got to the end. I cut short his study by offering to set down my name for him.