The veiled women, the hundreds of ownerless dogs led on the wind’s leash, the fezzes on fat heads and turbans on bearded faces, the colour-postcard vendetta-artists with revolvers for bellies, and rifles for umbrellas — all these money-earning, business-conducting, official-bribing exotic philistines are in the majority and beyond time. There is nothing so arid as an ethnicity that has been dissected in the mausoleums of ethnology and in books and seminar rooms for thirty years, but is still paraded, as though it were in any sense alive. There is a parliament with a presidential suite and a bell, with order papers for interventions and a press balcony; there is a bank with sluggish Italian officials, with rates of exchange pinned up on boards like so many butterflies, with a loans manager. Already the owner of my hotel has taken to using his holster for keeping small change in, and on his sideboard the first swallows of civilization are starting to roost: Giesshübler mineral water, whisky, vermouth, Fernet-Branca. Together with the gold fillings and the New York slang, the half-education and the mandolins of the returnees from the States, together with the Fords in the streets suggestive of crushed barrel-organs, they constitute the transition from so-called “national culture” to the demand for an “autonomous republic”.
Albania is en route from the vendetta to the League of Nations.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 15 June 1927
* Vendetta: a preoccupation presumably more of Roth’s readership or editors than Roth himself, a blood-feud between two families or clans.
36. The Albanian Army
The Albanian army exercises from five to twelve in the morning and from three to seven in the afternoon. It exercises during its lunch-break. It exercises before bedtime; and at night, when the soldiers are asleep, many hundreds of trumpets may be heard blowing in the mosques (in which the army likes to camp). From this I conclude that the Albanian army surely exercises in its sleep. I am forced to wonder, is there any time when the Albanian army is not exercising?
Nor do I know why it exercises. There seems to be an irresistible compulsion to exercise in the human male — I am the only exception I know of. The Albanian people are born fighters, and they like to shoot from infancy — why in the world would they still exercise? If the rest of us exercise, that’s on account of some legal obligation or other. Our names appear on a roll, we are enlisted, we have to exercise or we are shot. We exercise, therefore, for dear life. In Albania there are no such legal obligations. Recruits are — so they are told — summoned for six months at a time, and are then free to go home. They are supposed to be paid, too. But the fact is that in Albania recruits are kept for two years, and they are not paid a penny — even the officers only manage to get three months of back-pay by extorting it (staff officers are permanently owed two months), and senior policemen live from the sale of confiscated goods — so why do they exercise in Albania? Moreover, deserters are not punished. Recruits, who, without a word to a soul go back to their villages, are handed over by the police to a passing motorist who happens to be stationed in the deserter’s own garrison. The prospect of a ride in a Ford is enough to persuade the deserter to return to his unit, which is to say to return to his exercises. Discipline leaves nothing to be desired. Those soldiers who happen not to have deserted, stiffly and with evident enjoyment salute every passing officer — because who could force them to stiffness? They march, perform knee bends, turns, stand to attention, run, drop to their knees, run in “loose order” and don’t get paid a penny, and their officers don’t either. Why don’t they desert? Why do they exercise?
Further, to what end do Albanian soldiers exercise? They know the mountains like the backs of their hands, they know all the hiding places, they can climb like mountain goats. Surely no one proposes to use them in a world war? A knee bend is unavailing against poison gas. Is Albania contemplating an invasion of Italy by any chance? Even if it were, it can’t be done by exercises. Surely they would need to shoot? Now the Albanian army has Austrian rifles and Italian ammunition, bullets that jam, magazines that can’t be clicked in, British knapsacks that can’t be secured with Italian straps, covers for field-shovels and no field-shovels with which to dig trenches, Italian officers who don’t know commands in Albanian, Austrian officers who are blackballed by their Italian comrades, White Russian officers who don’t exercise at all, but have only come so as to be able to stay in uniform while they wait for Soviet Russia to collapse, British officers who know neither Albanian nor Italian nor German nor Russian, and like to walk around with their swizzle sticks just so that Britain is represented too. It’s the oddest army in the world. It has no coherent rule book or command structure, all it has is martial music, trumpet signals, drums, and a devotion to drill. Men used to scampering in soft slippers over rocks have been shod in heavy, hobnailed boots that make it impossible for them to pick their feet up. They don’t need heavy packs, because they can live on bread and cheese and water for months on end. But they are given heavy knapsacks with pointless contents on useless straps. They were forced to leave their own, Austrian ammunition at home, and were issued with Italian ammunition, because the contracts have gone to Milanese suppliers, so now they can’t even shoot — as they could quite happily in civvy street. But they exercise.
For whom do they exercise? Surely not for their country? Because half the country is unhappy with their government — for reasons of idealism. Half the rest has been bought by the Serbs, and the remainder is on the payroll of the Italians. And in the middle of it, the soldiers are exercising. Perhaps they are exercising for Ahmed Zogu, their president? He has his personal bodyguard, which, if required to, will shoot at the regular soldiers, who, for all their exercising, are thought not to be reliable, and who are deliberately issued with bad ammunition and heavy boots, to keep them from undertaking anything against the president. Only the bodyguard has matching ammunition, no rucksacks, lightweight boots, a unified command structure and personal friends of the president to lead them.
So I repeat my questions: why, for whom, and to what end does the Albanian army exercise? All I am able to say is why:
Because they are stupid. Because they enjoy sweating, being yelled at, tormented and oppressed. I suspect that this is not confined to Albanians. The Europeans are no different. Did I say the Albanians had the oddest army in the world? It’s not true. All armies in the world are odd; very odd.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 June 1927
37. Western Visitors in Barbaria
One can infer the exotic character of Albania straightaway from the peculiar carry-on of the civilized Europeans there. The members of this curious race, whose baffling customs and practices have still not sufficiently been researched, and who make a point of hating each other in their comfortable homelands, seem in wild terrain to have taken on a different heart, a different point of view and a different character. Immediately after setting foot in a country without flushing toilets they unpack from their travelling bags a never-used, gleaming friendliness, to exchange it like for like with their equally civilized fellows. In particularly inhospitable areas, it seems real ladies have been seen dancing with commercial representatives in the European club — merely to break through the ranks of natives.