The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth

Author:Joseph Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

* The recipient here of J. R.’s dusty cool had himself made king the ­following year (King Zog I), remained in power until 1938, and finally died in exile in France in 1961. He is buried in the Cimetière Parisien de Thiais, where Roth lies too. He was the object of some six hundred blood feuds—vendettas—and survived fifty-five assassination attempts.

34. Arrival in Albania

The sea is calm, the clouds hang in the sky as though nailed there, a ghostly boat skims across the placid surface towards the ship as though drawn on an invisible rope to collect me. There are only two of us disembarking here: a man hoping in this land of beards to sell Gillette razors, and myself.

Where terra firma begins there is a little wooden hut with a ­picture-book chimney from which the smoke goes straight up, as though drawn with a ruler. It’s seven in the morning; wooded, green, bare, steel-blue mountains frame the horizon; cryptic larks flit about the shiny blue sky; the hut, like many attractions these days, has a guest-book; sitting over the book is a man in a black uniform, rolling himself a cigarette, and this is the Albanian border police. A master of the alphabet, but unused to writing, he sits there, whiling away the time of the new arrivals by painstaking scrutiny of their passports. A stooped Levantine chauffeur is kept waiting in the Ford he proposes to drive until the policeman has got to the end. I cut short his study by offering to set down my name for him.

Then, in a dense cloud of dust, amid the thunder of continually exploding tyres, thrown up and down by authentic Ford springs, I am taken along the road to Tirana. Each time a tyre needs changing, I get out, watch the dust settle and the scenery re-establish itself, mountains of a spectral violet, meadows of a twice-done green, sky of a dependable blue, a sky of cloth, a sky without wrinkles, a taut, carefully ironed arc. Workmen are repairing the road. There are always two hunched over together. Like children in kindergarten they collect little scoops of sand on their tiny shovels or in their bare hands, pour it into scars and potholes, sprinkle a few stones on top, wet the whole thing with water from a watering can and stamp it down with their bare feet. As soon as our Ford has passed, they can start the game again.

It’s not long before we come to some soldiers. To see them march! In yellow-khaki columns, with steel helmets on their heads, rucksacks on their tired backs, burned by the sun, sweating and singing, they are marching for their new fatherland to Durazzo to exercise, escorted by an Albanian version of Mars with leather puttees, first lieutenant and spare uniform. On the juicy pastures a herd of cloudy white lambs is drifting about. Rams with ornamental curved horns, black oxen, a kind of beast of the underworld, the flocks of Hades. Either

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