19. TRAVELS WITH AGIM

e went to a wedding our first night in Tirana. The evening was festive, with men dancing, food overflowing the plates, and much clinking of glasses in toasts. In lieu of gifts, we offered money: sixty dollars between the three of us, a trifling sum at weddings back home. The next morning, the uncle of the bride appeared at our hotel to express thanks from her and the groom. The newly married pair had been honored by the presence of three Americans, he said. They also may have been overwhelmed as our gift was the equivalent of a month's wages for the average Albanian worker.

     It was 1991. Eight years after our visit to the festival in Falconara, ten years after our quest began for information on the Musacchio family odyssey, we finally arrived in Albania.

     That once closed country had begun to emerge from isolation. Comrade Enver Hoxha (pronounced Ho-juh), who ruled Albania for four decades following World War II, died in 1985. His successors gradually abandoned Hoxha's Stalinist traditions and moved toward rapprochement with the United States. Hearing this, Hal and I made arrangements to travel to the land my ancestors had fled five centuries before.

     Our cousin John Molinaro decided to accompany us.

     Ma and Pa were long gone. My children had married. Hal and I now had grandchildren, who some day might be curious about their roots. In the decade we had been researching the legend of seven families, most of the older Falconarese, whose memories we had recorded, had died. Yet we delayed completing this book, feeling our odyssey incomplete without visiting the Land of the Eagle.

     Hal, Johnny and I arrived in Rome on a Friday in August, staying overnight with relatives in that city: his sister Menica and her husband Alfredo Gaetano. The next afternoon we flew to Tirana, Albania's capitol and largest city with three hundred thousand people. As we neared our destination, clouds covered the land below. Even at the last minute. Albania remained shrouded in mystery. Only while landing did we catch a glimpse of the dirt roads and farm land surrounding the airport.

     "Visa?" asked a guard as we stepped from the plane. We had none. Our travel agent had assured us that visas would await us on our arrival in Tirana.

     "Albturist," Hal announced, waving a letter at the guard.

     He let us pass. A customs official stamped our passports with barely a glance. We had arrived in Albania. After ten years waiting, ten years of having been refused visas each time we asked, it was suddenly that simple!

     We were greeted by Agim Neza, a slim man in his late twenties, with curly black hair and a large nose on which were perched rose-tinted sun glasses. Agim wore a wash shirt and jeans, and clasped in one hand a large black wallet which he never let out of his sight.

     Agim was our official guide. During the school year he taught English, earning the equivalent of $650 for working ten months. Summers, he worked for Albturist, the state travel agency.

     Agim received no pay as tour guide, only lodging and food plus whatever he might receive in tips. Since tourists tipped in hard currency rather than the local lek, Agim held a privileged position.

     Agim led us to the parking lot where we met Uazar Cifligu. our driver. Cherub-faced, he stood beside a bile-green Mercedes. The car had a cracked front windshield, and no outside rear-view mirror. Its windshield wipers were locked in the trunk to prevent theft. A "D" tag on the rear signified the car had been licensed in Germany (Deutschland) before being shipped second-hand to Albania.

     Speaking Albanian, Agim instructed Uazar to head for our hotel. He addressed the driver as "Speedy," a nickname taken from the cartoon character Speedy Gonzales whom they had seen on Italian television broadcast into Albania.

     True to his nickname, Speedy sliced through traffic on the two-lane asphalt highway. I could only estimate our speed, because the speedometer was broken. The seat belts were missing too. Honking his hom. Speedy hurtled between Russian

trucks, Chinese tractors, and people on foot or bicycle. Only in the last instant would people yield, bikes veer, and vehicles swerve to avoid disaster. Cows, donkeys, and sheep occupied the road as well. Buses were crammed with people. A train we saw had passengers sitting on the roof.

     Speedy and Agim delivered us to the Hotel Tirana overlooking Scanderbeg Square. Like most of the hotels we visited in Albania, the Tirana seemed drab, but it was clean and our room offered a panoramic view of the countryside.

     We had arrived in the middle of a sun shower. Hal walked onto the balcony and looked down on people scurrying below to stay dry. A rainbow rimmed the horizon, touching at one end the hills where Scanderbeg's guerilla warriors once hid to ambush the Turks.

     "A good omen," Hal announced.

     At eight that evening, Lefter Sila appeared. Through our relatives in Rome, the Gaetanos, Lefter had been notified of our trip and was there to escort us to the wedding reception of his niece. The party was in a hotel banquet room, filled with several hundred guests. A few men wore suits. Most wore slacks and short-sleeved shirts. Women wore their best dresses. Albania remained a conservative country, and only a few younger women daringly showed bare shoulders.

     The dark-eyed bride wore a short white bridal dress with a head-piece that pointed downward to a peak low on her forehead. She sat at the main table with twelve empty seats. This was only the first evening of her wedding celebration, and the guests were her friends and family. Sunday evening would be the groom's night, a celebration of equal size for his family. The bride was soon joined by her groom accompanied by enough family members to fill the vacant seats. Tradition dictated they would leave early.

     We toasted the pair: "Gezuar!" "Good life!"

     I was reminded of my own wedding, and how nervous I felt because of the differences between my husband's family and mine. I remembered my father, blind, so I had to escort him down the aisle instead of the other way around. And Uncle John, refusing to enter the church. And how my mother looked, and my aunt. So foreign, yet so very American. Somehow all the problems that worried me that day seemed inconsequential now. I had lived a good life and hoped the bride and groom-despite their country's problems-would experience gezuar too.

     The food was plentiful. In order to present a proper feast, the family had gone from town to town shopping. We were served lamb, pork, chicken and beef in a country where there was a five hour wait in line at a meat market. There was so much food that I feared giving offense by failing to clean my plate. Then I learned that uneaten food was a compliment, demonstrating abundance offered the wedding guests.

     Conversation swirled around our table in Albanian, Arberesh, and Italian. A teenager practiced his English on Hal. As Americans, we found ourselves beloved. This seemed surprising, considering that for forty-five years Albanians had been indoctrinated to consider the capitalist United States their number-one enemy. Perhaps in the wake of communism's decline, this permitted us now to be their number-one friend.

     Groups rose from the tables and carried full glasses to toast the married couple. An accordionist, guitar player, drummer and clarinetist appeared. Dancing began. The men danced in a line that twisted around the dance floor in rhythm to the chanting of a singer. Sometimes the women joined in this Balkan-style promenade. There was western dancing too: "Rock Around the Clock."

     Soon the groom's family departed. We stayed until two in the morning, leaving before most guests. We learned later that the party continued until four. The party was lavish even by American standards, but in future months the bride would be hard pressed to find meat for her husband's table.

     Sunday morning we headed north to Kruja, stopping first at a hilltop monument visible from our hotel balcony. Having read warnings in guide books not to photograph airports, harbors, bridges, government buildings or military personnel, we hesitated at taking a picture of the armed soldier guarding the monument. However, most of what we had read in tourist guides had become outdated by current events. Agim invited us to photograph the soldier, explaining impishly, "Since this monument was dedicated to Enver Hoxha, you honor him by requesting a photograph." The soldier seemed uneasy, but smiled for our camera.

     Before leaving Tirana we had exchanged some of our dollars for leks. Agim and Speedy warned that we would find little to purchase with Albanian money. Those who had merchandise to sell preferred hard currency, dollars or lire. On the road to Kruja we stopped at a dusty village to walk through a roadside bazaar. Merchants and their customers clustered around the shell of an abandoned bus in a vacant lot above a muddy stream beside which donkeys stood drinking. We threaded our way through the crowd, but saw little that would attract attention at a garage sale back home.

     We had tried to dress inconspicuously, but Hal's Nike running shoes practically screamed American! I overheard one woman say: "Kush yen tar?” Who are they? That was the same question we had heard during walks through Falconara, and the questioning women would be surprised when I turned and addressed them in their own language. In Albania I held my tongue.

     Children asked for "goom" and "pens," chewing gum and ball-point pens. Even after they realized we had none, the children continued to cluster around us, as though our presence signified something magical.

     In crowds and along highways, young Albanians often flashed the two-fingered “V" sign as we drove by. We thought it a gesture of joy celebrating the new government, but Agim told us otherwise. He said that when Secretary of State Jim Baker appeared in Tirana, he promised six million dollars in American aid.

     "They're signifying 'two dollars for every Albanian,'" said Agim. (We never quite knew when to take Agim seriously.)

     We arrived in Kruja and beheld the castle of George Castriota, Scanderbeg. This was the fortress he occupied in 1443, when he began his war against the Ottoman Empire. These were the walls he had defended valiantly against Turkish troops. Speedy had parked our car near where the Sultan had mounted his cannons.

Finally we were experiencing what before we only could read about. Like fortresses throughout Albania, some of the foundations had been built before the Scanderbeg era, some afterwards. With Agim's guidance, we learned to spot the large blocks at the bottom of walls, handwork of the Illyrians, as opposed to smaller stones piled atop, more often the mark of the Greeks, or the topmost red bricks, typically Roman, sometimes formed in arches. Mosques atop the parapets were erected by Turks who dictated the religion after Scanderbeg. These mosques had been closed by atheist communists, who converted them often into museums, but compared to the lengthy tableaux of Albanian history, Hoxha's reign had been brief.

     We had come to see not merely the castle, but the memorabilia of Scanderbeg and his warriors displayed within castle walls in The Scanderbeg Museum. Agim hailed a friend, identified as a historian, and explained the purpose of our visit. "Ah, Muzaka," said the historian. He lead us to the hall commemorating the formation of the League of Lezha. There were six crests from the six tribes. The historian pointed to one, bearing the face of a lion.

     "Muzaka," he said.

     Afterward, we ate lunch outdoors on a parapet from which Scanderbeg's warriors had once faced attacking Turks. I leaned over the parapet and tried to visualize scenes described in history books. I saw rooftops below that easily could have been rooftops in Falconara. Sheep grazed on the hillside, and grazed between the tables as we ate a meal that featured lemon soup and a main course of well-cooked meat with green peppers on the side. The salad was sliced tomatoes sprinkled with chopped onions and doused in olive oil. We would encounter this meal with only minor variations twice a day for the remainder of our trip.

     The following day we headed south toward Berat, traversing the plains of Muzaki, a fertile valley drained by the Semen River. My ancestors, who once inhabited that valley, are gone, but the name persists.

     We passed roadside peddlers hawking tomatoes, onions and sunflower seeds. On several occasions during the trip we stopped to purchase melons, which were not always available at the hotels. Certainly, this rich land should be capable of providing food for its people. Yet only a third of all Albanians had enough to eat.

     Agim blamed distribution problems. Eating lunch atop the fortress in Berat, he pointed to a winery in the valley below. "And yet," said Agim with a sweep of his hand to indicate our table, "we have no wine!" The wine was being sold abroad to earn hard currency.

     Agim told us a tale of an Albanian captured by a Turk, The Turk put his pistol to the Albanian's head and asked, "Have you ever been in a worse situation?"

     "Yes," the Albanian replied. "When I had a guest in my house and did not have bread to offer him. "

     Moved by the Albanian's sense of hospitality, the Turk allowed him to live.

     Agim seemed to know everybody in Berat, and everybody knew him. When he introduced us as descendants from the Muzaki, people smiled and gave us thumbs-up signs. The Muzald remained well known from the Scanderbeg era. A new section of Berat had just been given the family name.

     Hal joked about my having returned to reclaim our tribal lands, which according to Don Giovanni included a vein of gold in a brook beside Mount Tomor, that dominated the horizon. We told Agim that should he mine the gold for us, he could keep fifty percent of the profits.

     Within the fortress of Berat, we visited a church that served as an art museum displaying the works of Onufri, a sixteenth century painter of religious icons, born in that city. Leaving the village we looked across the valley to where the name ENVER HOXHA was etched boldly into the hillside with white rock. It seemed the ultimate in graffiti. "It will be hard to remove that name," opined Agim, but somehow I felt Onufri would outlast Hoxha.

     We backtracked that evening to Durres, a port city, to stay at the Hotel Adriatiku on the beach. The hotel seemed filled with Italian tourists, attracted by bargain accommodations. They spent much of their time talking into cellular telephones. Hal ran south on the beach to a wall near the water's edge. A soldier warned him to proceed no further. Agim explained later that the houses beyond the wall were occupied by members of the politburo. We had seen houses in Tirana also reserved for politburo members, except those houses seemed vacant. I wondered who received the benefits of power during a time when the government literally was ungoverned. Perhaps it was us, the tourists. arriving with our cellular telephones and hard currency. We were the only ones being fed in a starving nation.

     Tuesday morning we drove south, inland along twisting roads toward Gjirokastra. We passed oil derricks, reminding us that unlike most European nations, Albania remained self-sufficient in oil. Of course, there were few automobiles to burn it, but half a century ago oil barons considered Albania a more fertile area for exploration than Saudi-Arabia. Oil was one reason why Mussolini invaded Albania during World War II.

     Along the road we passed hundreds of pillboxes, round concrete structures, large enough to shelter two infantrymen, with an opening through which they could fire their weapons. Comrade Enver had built tens of thousands of concrete pillboxes at strategic positions throughout Albania. They remained as evidence of his paranoia. The last pillboxes, built in 1982, are now as obsolete as the fortresses of Scanderbeg and much less attractive.

     Gjirokastra was Enver Hoxha's birthplace. Waiting before the gates of the fortress above the village, we looked across a hillside toward a museum dedicated to the Communist leader. His statue stood before that museum. Agim asked if we wanted to detour to see it. We said no. A year earlier, Agim would have been required to bring us to the museum for an appropriate lecture, and we would have been expected to listen.

     When the gates of the fortress swung open, we strode through an arched passageway with artillery pieces on both sides. Atop a parapet outside, we encountered an American airplane. Depending upon which government you believe, the jet was a spy plane forced down by heroic Albanian fighters. Or, it was a training plane, whose pilot drifted off course and picked the wrong airport when he was running out of fuel. The Albanians released the pilot, but kept his plane to be mounted at Gjirokastra.

     In Saranda, Albania's southernmost port, we checked into the Hotel Butrint. Across the bay was Corfu, the Greek island we had visited a decade before. Back then, I had stood at the railing of our ferry, gazing at a city whose name I didn't know, whose people I yearned to know. Now I was on shore, looking out toward the ferry boats. I still wondered what Albanians thought when they looked out toward that Greek island, seeing boats moving freely, knowing the wealth of the West was all so close and yet so far.

     Agim introduced us to a French man named Bruno, who owned hard-currency stores. "He sells Pepsi for eighty cents, and the State sells it for three dollars,” Agim said in a tone coupled with respect and irritation. "He sells French wines for three dollars, and the State sells Albanian wines for the same price.”

     When Agim disapproved of something, he would cluck his tongue three times: “Tsk. Tsk: Tsk.” Irritated by his government's lack of business acumen, he did so in this case.

     Monsieur Bruno also held the franchise to import American cigarettes and drove a car labeled “Marlboro Racing Team.” He also owned a Land Rover. Parked next to it was a Volvo truck, which he used to transport goods around the country. He had a jet plane parked at Tirana airport, was about to purchase a large passenger ferry, and was in the process of building a restaurant in Saranda.

     “It's a gamble investing here,” Monsieur Bruno explained in flawless English. “You might invest a million and make two million. Or you might lose it all. Still, the odds are better here than at Monte Carlo.”

     The next day we visited Greek and Roman ruins at Butrint, then drove to a restaurant on a hill above the water. Before lunch we headed down to swim. Agim was leading us down the steps, when he suddenly stopped. Hal did the same. I was puzzled, but the rattle I had dismissed as background noise, they had correctly identified as semi-automatic rifle fire. A woman rushed past us to secure the safety of her children below.

     We waited a few moments before continuing toward the beach.

     We stopped again when we heard additional shots. After several minutes of silence we went below. Eventually, we decided that soldiers on one of the small islands in the channel separating Albania from Corfu must have fired warning

shots toward children swimming too far off the beach. Nobody was in danger, although undoubtedly people previously had been shot trying to escape to the Greek island.

     While we swam, several gypsy children hovered near us, talking among themselves in Albanian as to how they might steal our clothes. Clearly they thought we could not understand them. “Ikini,” we scolded, meaning, “Go away!” Before they would, a man came and started kicking one of the boys, accusing him of stealing his watch the previous day. I have seen gypsies begging throughout Europe, particularly in Rome. I would have considered Albania a poor picking ground.

     At our hotel that evening we ate in the main dining room with other tourists; Albanians ate outside on a terrace. We were served meat; I saw plates with rice only carried outside. It made us uncomfortable. Hal and I normally don't eat much red meat, but had eaten so much since arriving in Albania, that we would have preferred rice, or perhaps a plate of pasta. One group of Albanians came in and sat down at a nearby table. They were ignored and eventually dumped plates of leftover food on the table and left.

     Agim shook his head. “Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.” He was both ashamed by their behavior and the treatment afforded them.

     We heard that evening of trouble in Durres, where young Albanians had stormed ships in the harbor, demanding transport to Italy. Ten thousand reportedly had crammed onto one ship. I thought that number unlikely, then later when I saw photographs, I wasn't so sure. Bus and railroad travel around ports in Albania had been cancelled to prevent others from trying to leave the country.

     Agim was worried. We planned to return to Durres the next evening, and he feared our Mercedes might be mobbed and commandeered along the planned seaside route. The incident in the restaurant underlined our fears. Agim decided we would change our route, covering twice the distance in order to avoid areas of unrest.

     I awakened Thursday morning to the sound of people chanting. It was barely four o'clock, but the chant echoed across the water. The chanting stopped, then started again, continuously louder, then dimmer. I moved to the window to see a passing Army truck filled with soldiers chanting slogans. Were we in the midst of some coup?

     Later at breakfast, Agim explained that the soldiers had just been released after two years military duty and were cheering while being driven home. We would see many other such trucks on the road later that day.

     Back on the beach at Durres, we looked uneasily out to sea and counted eighteen vessels waiting offshore. Their captains feared they would be inundated with refugees if they entered port. Half the waiters at the hotel next door were gone, and others were planning to leave despite reports that Albanian refugees who arrived in Italy were being guarded in a football stadium beneath a hot sun. The Italian government was signaling that they would accept no more refugees. Meanwhile, troops had cordoned off the harbor. We were in no danger, Agim said, as long as we did not go into town.

     We left Friday morning for Shkodra near the Yugoslavian border. In that northern region we saw for the first time people dressed in native Albanian costumes with headpieces, vests, billowing trousers or long robes. The costumes had white the predominant color, yet people wore them working in the fields.

     Our planned overnight stay in Shkodra had been cancelled, supposedly because of unrest. We saw few such signs, but felt less comfortable walking that city's streets than we had elsewhere in Albania. Older boys trailed us. Requests for “gum” and “pens” had escalated to requests for “a dollar” and “your watch.” The requests seemed good-hearted, but we wondered if later tourists would encounter demands rather than requests.

     One man, who flashed the two-fingered sign, said to Hal in Albanian, “If you keep walking into the next block, they will arrest you as a CIA spy.”

     He probably was joking, but we did not walk into that next block.

     Returning from Shkodra we visited Scanderbeg's grave at Lezha. Its exact location in the Cathedral of St. Nicholas had been discovered only after a 1979 earthquake. A modern, open air structure protected what remained of the old cathedral walls. In the center were replicas of the warrior's sword and helmet similar to those we had seen in Kruja. The helmet had a goat-head atop it. Agim explained: “During one of the sieges, Scanderbeg gathered one hundred and fifty sheep, and placed lit candles atop their heads. When the sheep scattered through the countryside, the Sultan's soldiers thought them Albanians and followed. They were attacked by Scanderbeg's guerrillas. In this way, the sheep led the wolves to slaughter.”

     Agim told the story as legend, as he had undoubtedly told it to many tourist groups during the past five years, but little life remained in the telling. Perhaps it was fatigue at the end of a week spent in the back seat of Speedy's car. Or perhaps it was history unfolding around us that depressed him.

     In Gjirokastra the night before, angry crowds had toppled Hoxha's statue from its pedestal. Albanians, having been given a taste of freedom, wanted more. Their leaders, it seems, had not recognized the degree of their unrest or anticipated the rush for the borders. Outside of Albania, the free world looked on in amazement as Albania literally came unglued. While our families back home saw photographs of refugees on the front page of newspapers, we saw first-hand the impoverished conditions that were compelling Albanians to leave their homeland.

     It was the first large exodus since the Muzaki fled the Turks five centuries earlier. But these twentieth century refugees would not find the way as clear as had my ancestors. As we prepared to depart, Italian authorities announced that they would return all refugees who had arrived there by boat.

     That evening, we dined with Lefter Sila and his family, engaging in a multiple-language discussion on economics that, if overheard by authorities, would have caused them to have been jailed as recently as two years before. Saturday morning, our last day in Albania, I went shopping for souvenirs and bought several rugs and place mats. Then we climbed into the Mercedes for the trip to the airport.

During our week in Albania, I could not recall seeing a single airplane in the air. Yet as we approached the Tirana airport a military transport plane with British insignia descended for a landing. An Italian plane followed. And another.

     Pulling into the parking lot, we saw angry crowds and realized the mission of the foreign planes: they were returning the boat people from Italy. Standing next to our luggage, passports in hand, we watched the dispirited refugees descend from the planes.

     They were dirty and tired. Some were barefoot. Some were bandaged. One wore only a bathing suit! They were mostly young men, but we saw a few women. One carried a shopping bag as though she had just returned from a vacation to Rome, except the bag probably contained her only possessions. One boy who could not have been more than twelve ran into the arms of his waiting father.

     Most of the refugees were loaded into army trucks. Soldiers guarded their moves, but there seemed to be no venom on the part of the soldiers. These were their countrymen, whom they no longer were required to repress. Over the previous forty-five years, unsuccessful attempts to flee Albania resulted in long jail sentences or even death, but these wanderers would simply be driven into the city, and released. Some undoubtedly would again climb on boats, as the seven families had done in 1476.

     Agim looked sadly at the spectacle. He shook his head in disapproval and I heard him, one last time, say, “Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.”

     We boarded our flight and arrived that evening in Rome.

     The next day, we landed in Chicago. I spanned in less than forty-eight hours a distance that had taken my ancestors five centuries.

     Back home in Long Beach, Indiana, I spent the next few weeks preparing to return to my job at the elementary school where I teach. I would have much to tell my students. Hal busied himself writing, although it would be nearly two more years before we completed the first edition of this book.

     Our odyssey was over. Albania, a previously ignored country, had loomed large in the news during our visit, and for weeks after our return. But events elsewhere soon relegated poor Albania to the back pages. Perhaps that was good. Albania's problems are large. But having now met the people who live in the Land of the Eagle, I feel confident they can solve them.

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