I am sitting down to write this with a pressing internal sense of compulsion—there is something I want to make understood—but I begin writing with no clear program for how to communicate absolutely something so simple.
In the world I come from, I have made a seemingly quixotic and possibly overwroughtly romantic and impractical choice. I have given away my business, sold my apartment for break-even, and moved with a few suitcases of random possessions to Albania—specifically to Northern Albania, the District of Tropoja, to this point possibly one of the most backwards, impoverished and forgotten regions of Europe. To absolutely damn the impracticality of my decision, I should add that I have no income, no plans for any income and no clear thoughts about what my future looks like. Nor am I of an age which lends itself to such a cavalier attitude to the future. In my world, I should be planning sensibly for senescence, I suppose. Well, I’m not.
So my compulsion then is to explain the actual sense of my decision—to communicate why I’m absolutely certain this is the wisest and most practical choice of my life to date. What is it about Albania? What is there here that I perceive, that is not in other places I have been? Something real and tangible that is worth more than whatever I may have given up? And what is it that I see, that I see that others from my world do not see, so that they so often seem to be rushing to help Albania lose exactly what it is that I see that makes it so precious? Something worth speaking up for? Something that is exactly what my world might well stand to learn? Or relearn, as it seems so often to have been forgotten.
Images flash through my mind, but resist organization. Point and counterpoint. Somehow, though, I think they add up to an answer, of some sort at any rate.
The man in a shop in Tirana where I buy an elegant cashmere coat, half-price (the cost of dinner for two in New York) for Alfred is, as all Albanians are, intrigued by my choice: rural Albania over New York? He’s lived in London and knows both worlds, and begins arguing for the achievements of the United States and England—no matter what they’ve done to the rest of the world, they’ve made sure their own people live well, which the Albanian government does and has not. The last half of the statement is certainly true, but I begin to sigh—I won’t argue about England, but America? The highest murder rates, the highest rates of infant mortality from malnutrition, the appalling education, the lack of healthcare, the highest rates of incarceration . . . and among the most privileged of the country, 27 million people on antidepressants (according to the Archives of General Psychiatry, 2009)? I’m not so sure. I mention the way that people in Albania take care of each other, and the man in the shop smiles and says to me, “Ah yes, but you know why that is? It is because we are not civilized. We still need each other you see. But once we begin to succeed, if we ever do, it will be like life in England—everyone for themselves.”
Here’s another picture: We—myself, Alfred, his brother Skender—are in Kamenica, the farm nestled high on the Kosovar border where Alfred’s mother, Sose, grew up. The snow has prevented us from getting home to Valbona, and we’ve stopped for the night. Alfred’s cousin Granit, an enormous young man of staggering proportions is waiting for us at the Dogana—the border post—with two of his brothers (there are nine children altogether, living out here with their parents, Sose’s brother and his wife). The six of us pile into the family car, an SUV style machine, and set off the several miles through the snow, along a winding track that under the snow is certainly dirt and stone, which is the drive to Kamenica. We get stuck multiple times, everyone piling out of the car to push in the moonlight. “What would you do if the wolves came now?” Skender asks me. “Man,” he says, “I’d run like hell!” At one point I slip and fall face down in the snow behind the car and we all laugh.
Eventually, an hour(?) later, we arrive—on foot, having given up on the car some distance back. Here the women of the house hurl themselves at our feet, laughing, to help us off with our frozen shoes, swirl us inside to the room for guests where a fire roars in the wood stove, and begin the lengthy process of entertaining visitors.
I am given hand-knitted slippers to warm my feet, and a chair is placed for me nearest the fire. Against a background of the uncle and five brothers, the four women begin questioning the three visitors in turn: How are you? Are you tired? Are you sad? How is your mother? How is your brother? How is your sister? How is her baby? At one point I hear the mother ask Skender how his brother Skender is—well, with such huge families, it’s easy to get confused.
We are served bright orange juice. The room is simple: whitewashed walls, the wood stove, a television, three sofas covered with bright red and black blankets. On one wall an ornate clock in a frame looks like something torn from a particularly splendid piece of Islamic architecture, on another wall a large promotional calendar with a cheerful photograph selling something I’ve now forgotten. A thick rug on the floor. We are served Turkish coffee in delicate little cups, with homemade raki from a plastic cola bottle for the men. Many cigarettes are smoked, and offered back and forth so that each man accumulates a little pile of cigarettes before him, stacked neatly next to the china cups.
The talk is all of the recent protests in Tirana—a member of the government’s ruling “Democratic Party” has most unaccountably caved to conscience, and recorded a fellow minister demanding a 700,000-euro bribe from the contractor awarded the tender for an infrastructure project, and handed the recording over to a popular television show. This extortion by the government is absolutely normal and everyone knows it, but it hasn’t been documented so irrefutably before. In response, some 20,000 Albanians took to the streets. Some 20,000 Albanians, and at least one American went along to look, which was, of course, me.
We are each served an enormous plate, with at least five different things on it—two kinds of meat, homemade sausages, fried potatoes, pickled yellow peppers stuffed with a sort of homemade pickled cabbage, the thick rich yoghurt sauce called ngjyem, followed by bowls of warm and creamy cabbage stew, pieces of softened dried meat swimming therein, followed by bowls of pasta with, if memory serves me right, more meat, and all of this, of course, accompanied by ever-renewed baskets of soft, warm homemade bread.
The uncle is telling us the latest revelations on the television of the news from the aftermath of the protest. While we, Alfred and I, were at the protest during the early hours, I was rather shocked, impressed really, by the way the police in riot gear stood calmly unresponsive under the rain of stones which the protesters hurled at them, chunks of marble broken from the steps of Enver Hoxha’s mausoleum, conveniently located next door to the Kryeministri. How they didn’t bat an eye, as the police cars parked on the steps of the tomb were overturned and set on fire. Canisters of tear gas were administered explosively at intervals, but they seemed more of a formality, part of the proceedings, and didn’t seriously inconvenience any of us. There seemed to me to be a tacit understanding operating that the people were absolutely within their rights to demonstrate their objections so forcefully, which I suppose philosophically they absolutely were. Certainly according to American philosophy which, like it or not, preserves in the Second Amendment to the Constitution the Right to Bear Arms—specifically not to be disarmed by government, the roots of which need were at least initially a safeguard for the people, in case of the necessity to have recourse against an oppressive regime.
A bottle of wine is opened, and glasses poured all around. The weird and intricate politeness encompassing the anarchy of the protest which I observed—when not actually hurling stones or setting cars on fire, the protestors (mostly older men, at least half of whom were carrying dignified umbrellas) were calm, amused even, and as ever decorously polite—lasted for some hours, but once evening fell three men were killed, shot, presumably by the police. The footage of two of the men, falling suddenly, will be replayed over and over again on the television. At one point, in response to something I’ve lisped out in my infantile Albanian, the uncle says “Well, that’s capitalism. If you have money, you can eat. If you don’t? You can die. That’s all.”
The mother leans over and takes my fork, spears a perfect sausage for me, insisting I eat as she insists I drink my wine. All this will be repeated, the wine included, a few hours later for breakfast. As far as I know the only income these people have is from the 50-some turkeys the uncle raises. The children have not been to school. The uncle, however, Alfred tells me, is an educated man. He has been to high school.
Or here’s another picture: On the television, we watch as a handful of men mill around the side gate to the Kryeministri. Suddenly—the video has no distinguishable sound—one man falls silently to the ground. He has been shot by one of the snipers on the roof of the government building. The old man nearest him looks down, as if to say, “What are you playing at?” Then realizes. He moves to stand over the body, his arms thrown out at his sides as he cries and calls for help. Others rush in to carry the body to safety. Do you see what I see? Nobody ran away. They didn’t run from bullets. They ran in, to help.
Here’s the last picture: Just before we leave Kamenica, I am sitting in the snow on the edge of the wall surrounding the entrance to the house. One of the daughters of the house crouches beside me. Together we gaze out at the snow-covered hills, absolutely silent and gloriously empty. An enormous mockingbird plays in a frozen fruit tree, knocking lumps of snow to the ground. “You like Albania?” she asks. “Oh yes,” I say, “I love it.” I turn and we look into each others eyes, smiling happily “You?” I ask. I watch her as she returns watching the mountains. “Oh yes,” she says, still smiling. “Yes.”
