Last summer, Ismail Kadare was awarded the first-ever Man Booker International Prize, beating out Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Ian McEwan. I felt a bit smug about having discovered the Albanian author many years before, in the late 1980s. At Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul, where I was working at the time, no one bought books by this little-known writer, from a country I could barely find on a map. But then my brother loaned me a copy of Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone, a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the remote villages of the forgotten country of the Balkans. In it, Kadare showed how bizarre tribal laws kept religion in check among a fiercely proud population made up mostly of Muslims, as well as Orthodox Christians and Catholics—while also fomenting vendettas that endured for generations. The rigid rule of monarchists, Stalinists, or fascists pales in comparison with these Albanian blood feuds.
I was hooked and have since devoured Kadare’s other hard-to-find novels. Broken April, published in 1998, used as a backdrop those generations of familial battles that, in a country cut off from the rest of Europe, continued well into the twentieth century and the reign of King Zog I, the tribal king with the space-alien name, from 1928 to 1939. In 1938, Zog had Mussolini’s son-in-law as the best man at his wedding to Princess Geraldine, the “White Rose of Hungary.” As a wedding gift, Mussolini gave the king and his bride a yacht with an Italian crew that tried but failed to kidnap Zog on his honeymoon.
Italy eventually annexed Albania in April of 1939, and while Italian troops were greeted with cheers from the Albanians, Mussolini had the Italian press publicize the event as a fantastic military victory for the Fascist forces. The Italian public went wild over Il Duce’s triumph, and Zog looted the treasury on his way out. When he checked into the London Ritz Hotel, a porter asked him what was in his bags that made them so heavy. “Gold,” Zog famously replied.
But even after Zog’s abdication, little Albania couldn’t oust its homegrown communist tyrants, as most other Eastern European countries had by 1989. Many of Kadare’s books, such as The Concert, give a glimpse into this complete communist state and how its dictator of forty years, Enver Hoxha, who followed Zog in power after the war, played Mao and Stalin off each other and maintained the most repressive government in Europe, comparable only to North Korea.
Spurred by the tales Kadare told of his lost country, I decided to travel to the darkest Albania to meet the author. Like awkward subtitles of foreign films, the sometimes simplistic translations of Kadare’s books only piqued my interest in what seemed like an undiscovered and closed world. I wanted to see for myself the towns made of stone where generations of vendettas and clan loyalty made Sicily’s Cosa Nostra look modern and welcoming, like a group of Rotarians. Americans were unwelcome and the only way into the country, I found out, was through an obscure Greek bus-tour company.
Our bus left Thessaloniki, winding through desolate dirt roads over empty mountains. Guard houses sat atop every hill in the distance. At that time, an average of five Albanians a day were shot trying to flee the country, and their corpses flung into town squares as a warning. I soon realized that the inspiration for many of Kadare’s stories—vicious but often faceless government oppression—was alive and well in his homeland.
At the remote border post into eastern Albania, officials rifled through suitcases and confiscated magazines and picture books. A Greek man whispered that photos from the outside world were illegal as one guard paged through a Bible and another studied glossy centerfolds of Greek starlets in search of propaganda. Religion was outlawed, too, making Albania the only officially atheistic country in the world. Also verboten: kissing in public, dogs, foreign music, beards (border guards had orders to shave any visitors with facial hair), candy and gum, and cars (except those for government business). As we drove onward, people who were hunched over in the fields stood up and waved, as if they’d never seen a bus before.
All the roadside trees had been chopped down, as Hoxha, like Zog before him, had a particular fear of snipers. Among the stumps, cement bunkers lined the roads about every hundred feet—the dictator’s investment to protect the country from some imminent attack and evidence of his paranoia.
The Successor, from 2003, shines light on Hoxha and his possible motives in the unsolved assassination of his Number Two, known throughout Albania as the “successor.” High-ranking members of Albania’s communist party, who apparently shared Hoxha’s paranoia of insurrection, dug secret escape tunnels from their houses in the capital of Tirana. Theories abound in this real-life mystery and probable cover-up, with the shadows of Mao and other tyrants eclipsing the truth. Kadare’s Cold War whodunit opens the curtain to reveal Eastern European intrigue and the subsequent official government version of events, whitewashed for consumption by the masses.
When we reached Korçë, five hundred people surrounded our bus; we were the first foreigners in that town since the 1940s. I handed out ballpoint pens and a fellow tourist gave some teenagers a Bic lighter after demonstrating how to use it. A boy flicked a flame to life and held it aloft as his friends clapped in awe.
The stores were empty. A line formed around the block outside a boarded-up, padlocked shop; rumor was that milk would be delivered at midnight. I asked our guide how I could meet Ismail Kadare. Impossible! He replied. Our tour only had permission to visit two towns on the Greek border. Perhaps as consolation, he led me to the town bookshop. Its window displayed the dust jackets for a French-Albanian dictionary and a remedial physics book; no one had seen the actual books in years.
The bookstore clerk, too, was aghast when I asked for Ismail Kadare’s books. He caught the eye of the guide waiting outside and stood up straight. A shipment of Kadare’s books was expected any day—but not today. Instead, he suggested I purchase the twenty-plus volumes of speeches of Comrade Enver Hoxha, which was on special; apparently, the forward-looking autocrat’s memoirs made a decent substitute for firewood, since most of the trees were gone.
The clerk seemed to convey that Kadare’s novels were off-limits under the repressive regime, though of course everyone knew them. The people were starved for information and stories that weren’t burdened with purveying government propaganda, and Kadare provided page-turners without glossy fairy-tale endings. Even though the prolific author’s works are relegated to the fiction aisle in American bookstores, these are the only true and readable windows into this land of secrets.
The next year, images of Albanians toppling statues of Enver Hoxha were transmitted across the globe. I made another attempt to visit Kadare in Gjirokastër, the mountain town where he was born and grew up. Thanks to a faxed letter from the prosecutor general of Albania (who had visited Minnesota to learn about our legal system through the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee), I acquired a visa at the Albanian embassy in Athens, a dingy, smoke-filled efficiency apartment in a rundown suburb. From Tirana, I hopped a bus south to Berat and then on to Gjirokastër. In the highest point of the walled city stood stone houses, headless minarets, and once-outlawed church ruins that now served as playgrounds. On a distant mountainside, “ENVER” was spelled out in three-hundred-foot letters formed by painted stones; the deceased leader had hailed from the same town as the country’s most famous writer.
I poked my head inside a beautiful stone three-story villa where royalty, perhaps even King Zog’s relatives, had probably stayed. Grizzled men chain-smoked and took shots of raki. I asked if anyone knew where Ismail Kadare lived. They didn’t understand, but tried to sell me the villa for three thousand dollars.
A fifteen-year-old boy chimed in that Kadare left as soon as he could, probably for Paris. “Anyone that can leave Albania, does.” In fact, this boy had already walked to Athens twice—eight days and eight nights with only three hours of sleep per night—and had been returned both times.
I was crushed to find out that Kadare had left this country—his muse—for greener pastures, and I cut short my trip (but not before succumbing to a vicious bout of food poisoning).
I eventually did meet the author, but not until 1997, by which time the already-feeble Albanian economy had collapsed and the influx of guns during the Balkan War had made the country Europe’s center for weapons—and white slave trade. That year, I traveled to Frankfurt for the annual Frankfurter Buchmesse book show, the world’s largest trade show, filling eight convention halls. The Albanian booths were easily identified by the pall of cigarette smoke, in flagrant violation of the “Rauchen Verboten!” signs everywhere. A ring of men hovered around a table littered with shot glasses and a large bottle of Jack Daniels. When I asked about Ismail Kadare, they looked me over suspiciously.
One stubbed out his cigarette and said, “I’m his agent. What do you want with him?” I explained that I was a fan and had even traveled to Albania to interview him. “You went to Albania? No foreigners go to Albania.” He squinted at me almost menacingly and scribbled something on a scrap of paper. He handed it to me and commanded, “Meet us at our hotel at 11 p.m. tonight. Don’t be late.”
I went to a cafeteria in the building next door to get a cup of coffee and ponder how this guy planned to swindle me. There, just a few tables away from me, sitting alone and eating a würstel and sauerkraut, was Ismail Kadare; he was surprised that I recognized him from his dust-jacket photo. I told him I had visited his hometown, and he wanted to hear about the situation there. I ended up relating the story of my two unforgettable trips. He shook his head. “There is much to tell about Albania. The problem is, who wants to listen?”
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