Biografi by Lloyd Jones Read Free Book Online

that the leaves of the chestnut trees lie on the ground leaving the branches looking lonely and stark. One time we stop so Teti can relieve himself and in the silence we hear the bells of a goatherd ring down from the hillsides.
    A few months earlier Bill had visited a village so remote that he was the first foreigner the inhabitants had seen since the war. On that occasion the villagers had seen a British parachutist float down from the sky. He was taken in by a local priest and a month later smuggled out of Albania. Fifty years later Bill drove into the village and had a wonderful lunch there.
    â€˜Great bread, yoghurt, raki, and this wonderful antipasto kind of thing, you know? A bit of red pepper and onion…’ He smiles over the stem of his pipe at the memory and we all fall silent with hunger.
    â€˜It was a blast, a couple of hundred people sitting around staring at us for a couple of hours.’
    Bill says he knows of a ‘trucker’s stop’ near here. It is in a place called ‘the neck of the mountain’, an accurate enough description for where the road doubles back on itself. Bill’s ‘trucker’s stop’ turns out to be a small grotto of roofing iron and rocks stacked on one another. We arrive at the same time as a truckload of young soldiers but manage to scramble in ahead.
    The proprietor, a small wizened man, ladles the runny white yoghurt into greasy plastic bowls and slaps them down on a crude wooden bench. Then the soldiers start to pour in and soon we are standing shoulder to shoulder in crowded silence— jammed inside this smoky grotto with these poor half-starved boys in green tunics.
    We grind on to Kukës in low gear for another hour. Bill has given up directing Teti—and despite the driver’s assurances, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ Bill just grabs the wheel whenever the moment requires intervention to pull us onto the shoulder again. Teti feeds in a tape of The Who’s rock opera Tommy . Bill turns it down. Teti sneaks the dials up. And on it goes.
    We stop one more time after Anila feels carsick. It is deadly quiet. The road trickles invitingly up to a rise.
    When I asked Cliff how he had got around he said, ‘Train. Bus. Foot.’ And in my more fanciful moments I imagined myself doing as Joseph Swire had done, walking between villages with a burro and usually with armed escorts.
    Bill says, ‘Go ahead. Stretch out your ligaments. We’ll be by in twenty minutes.’
    At one point I hear Anila violently heave, and when I look back there is Bill sitting on a rock, knees crossed, lighting his pipe.
    Another ten minutes and I’m at the pass gazing across the tops of gold and black hills which roll on to Macedonia in the east and, to the north, Montenegro. Small boys minding goats above the roadside whistle out from the scrub.

8
    POPULI PARTI ENVER, just as it appears on the postage stamps, is emblazoned on the hillside above Kukës.
    Twenty years ago the workers at the copper smelter plant had collected small stones on the hillside and carefully arranged the stones to spell the slogan.
    I learned this from Mustaph, an unemployed journalist, who looks after the food distribution in Kukës.
    Mustaph had been waiting on the hotel steps for our arrival. A man of about fifty, round-headed, with greying temples and quick, intelligent eyes, and formidably sober. His overcoat was the one he had bought in Leningrad after being sent there to study literature and languages in the fifties.
    I think he found my questions about POPULI PARTI ENVER a little tiresome. The slogan bore down on the town in such a way as to suggest a major landmark; but as Mustaph’s uncooperative silence seemed to suggest, a landmark not inquired of but accepted as readily as the clouds or the hilltops and other natural phenomena. POPULI PARTI ENVER could be seen from anywhere in Kukës—a ‘new city’ of bleak housing blocks.