Then, in a dense cloud of dust, amid the thunder of continually exploding tyres, thrown up and down by authentic Ford springs, I am taken along the road to Tirana. Each time a tyre needs changing, I get out, watch the dust settle and the scenery re-establish itself, mountains of a spectral violet, meadows of a twice-done green, sky of a dependable blue, a sky of cloth, a sky without wrinkles, a taut, carefully ironed arc. Workmen are repairing the road. There are always two hunched over together. Like children in kindergarten they collect little scoops of sand on their tiny shovels or in their bare hands, pour it into scars and potholes, sprinkle a few stones on top, wet the whole thing with water from a watering can and stamp it down with their bare feet. As soon as our Ford has passed, they can start the game again.
It’s not long before we come to some soldiers. To see them march! In yellow-khaki columns, with steel helmets on their heads, rucksacks on their tired backs, burned by the sun, sweating and singing, they are marching for their new fatherland to Durazzo to exercise, escorted by an Albanian version of Mars with leather puttees, first lieutenant and spare uniform. On the juicy pastures a herd of cloudy white lambs is drifting about. Rams with ornamental curved horns, black oxen, a kind of beast of the underworld, the flocks of Hades. Either side there are telegraph wires, strung not on masts, but on crooked bare trees, which have been lopped and cropped. They once used to stand by the roadside, a home to birds, stopping places for evening winds; now they are redesignated as telegraph poles, fitted out with little white china panicles, and equipped to transmit journalistic reports — the twitterings of political sparrows — to Europe. On the left-hand side there is a set of rails, a narrow-gauge memento of the Austrians in the Great War, today given over to decay and the rusty tooth of time.
Finally a black-uniformed policeman, who can speak German, emerges from a white hut, takes our passports, and promises to have them left for us tomorrow morning in the police station at Tirana.
So here is Tirana, the capital city of Albania. On the right a mosque, on the left a rudimentary café terrace where guests bake and fezzes talk. The mosque turns out to be a barracks, soldiers with guns guard themselves. Every hotel room is taken, journalists have hurried here, and diplomats and parliamentarians, officers from England and Italy. Parliament is in session, Tirana is a burial-pit for sensation, imbroglios are on the street, the whole country is an apple of discord. Good citizens walk down the middle of the road, armed with muskets against sunstroke, heavy drum-revolvers stuck in wide, often doubled and tripled red sashes. Mules, laden with filled panniers, dawdle along the pavement, and wait outside shops like dogs while their masters make purchases. Here comes the majestic figure of the commander-in-chief of the Albanian army, Jemal Aranitas, mounted on a noble grey steed, little dark shoeshine boys fall over each other to get out of his way, a squire follows him, only a moment ago he was addressing the army, that’s why their marching was so sorry, no state without a general, no general without a grey steed. Gold sparkles on his shoulders, he greets acquaintances at cafés with a casual wave.
A man turns up by the name of Nikola, who lets me a room. The bed has all four legs in petrol to keep the cockroaches at bay, the window is cracked at the bottom, and replaced at the top by a mosquito net, my neighbour is a trumpeter. He is a member of the orchestra that plays outside the castle every afternoon.
A policeman with snow-white gloves stands in the middle of the road, in case of traffic.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 June 1927
35. Tirana, the Capital City
The inhabitants of Tirana love music and flowers. You can see the men going around with roses in their mouths. They seem to use them as an extra buttonhole.
A section of the populace has devoted itself to brass instruments. Brass players — horns for the fatherland — have been recruited into the Albanian army. The soldiers’ days begin with reveille and end with taps. Music keeps the swing in their stride.
The president has his very own personal band. The bandleader wears a pince-nez and hails from Trieste. The players are from Korça, in the melophile south, and from Czechoslovakia, which in the days when it was still the Kingdom of Bohemia used to supply the Army of the Dual Monarchy with the most sublime band sergeant majors. Every musician is paid fifteen napoleons a month. The acquisition and maintenance of the gorgeous uniforms — black with gold trimmings — is each individual’s responsibility. On his cap every musician wears the familiar emblem of martial music: a golden lyre.
At seven in the morning, just as the soldiers are tooting and parping away, the musicians get up like so many larks, and rehearse passages of marches and overtures in the middle of the high street. The local inhabitants have petitioned the courts on six separate occasions to have the practice moved to a meadow outside the city. But on six separate occasions they have forgotten to attach arguments to their petition. Nothing works without arguments.
Men who are neither in the army nor in the band are devoted to the mild plinking of the mandolin. They have for the most part been to America. There they had their teeth filled with gold, and bought themselves stringed instruments. They sing a song of bananas, to prove that they have seen the world, perhaps also as an expression of their painful longing for America, which they left on account of their painful longing for Tirana. Their hearts are still bobbing on the ocean wave, but their wares, which consist of combs, mirrors, letter paper, are in Tirana. A mandolin is a sheer inevitability.
They sit outside their shops in the sun for hours on end. It’s very quiet. Musical predilections aside, Tirana is tranquil enough. When there is a lull in the blare, you hear the cocks crow, the hammers of the blacksmiths in the bazaar, and the regular summons to worship from the muezzin. The sun scorches down on the streets. The dust is baked in the heat, seeming to disintegrate into finer, thinner dust, dissolving in the atmosphere, disappearing into thin air, without anyone washing or sweeping the pavements. People say a young man is sent out by the authorities with a watering-can every morning, in the furtherance of hygiene, but no one has ever clapped eyes on him. But barracks are erected in the interests of progress. The dynamo that is to keep the electric lights going is too weak for so many bulbs. They come on at night, but they look like dying embers. They dangle on wires, like so many hanged glow-worms.
Bazaars have been knocked through, houses split and scalped, in order to make Tirana an up-to-date capital city. The half-buildings stand there, with black guts open. The residents exotically use the stoves as toilets, without taking off their pistols and rifles. Not for an instant is one safe from a vendetta.* Women in black and white veils put one in mind of funeral processions or the KKK. They have shutters in front of their eyes at all times, they are walled in gauze and cloth. I would like to know what they get up to in their own homes. I am curious about them, they look like strange, illuminated, screened windows. The women are quiet as wild beasts and unresponsive as the dead. Are they crying? I can’t see for sure. They talk to one another. But the sounds are trapped and their voices trickle thinly through the pores of the cloth like clear water through a choked and dirty sieve.