The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe between the Wars by Joseph Roth

Author:Joseph Roth [Roth, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783781294
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2015-09-03T03:00:00+00:00

35

Tirana, the Capital City

(1927)

The inhabitants of Tirana love music and flowers. You can see the men going around with roses in their mouths. They seem to use them as an extra buttonhole.

A section of the populace has devoted itself to brass instruments. Brass players—horns for the fatherland—have been recruited into the Albanian army. The soldiers’ days begin with reveille and end with taps. Music keeps the swing in their stride.

The president has his very own personal band. The bandleader wears a pince-nez and hails from Trieste. The players are from Korça, in the melophile south, and from Czechoslovakia, which in the days when it was still the Kingdom of Bohemia used to supply the Army of the Dual Monarchy with the most sublime band sergeant majors. Every musician is paid fifteen napoleons a month. The acquisition and maintenance of the gorgeous uniforms—black with gold trimmings—is each individual’s responsibility. On his cap every musician wears the familiar emblem of martial music: a golden lyre.

At seven in the morning, just as the soldiers are tooting and parping away, the musicians get up like so many larks, and rehearse passages of marches and overtures in the middle of the high street. The local inhabitants have petitioned the courts on six separate occasions to have the practice moved to a meadow outside the city. But on six separate occasions they have forgotten to attach arguments to their petition. Nothing works without arguments.

Men who are neither in the army nor in the band are devoted to the mild plinking of the mandolin. They have for the most part been to America. There they had their teeth filled with gold, and bought themselves stringed instruments. They sing a song of bananas, to prove that they have seen the world, perhaps also as an expression of their painful longing for America, which they left on account of their painful longing for Tirana. Their hearts are still bobbing on the ocean wave, but their wares, which consist of combs, mirrors, letter paper, are in Tirana. A mandolin is a sheer inevitability.

They sit outside their shops in the sun for hours on end. It’s very quiet. Musical predilections aside, Tirana is tranquil enough. When there is a lull in the blare, you hear the cocks crow, the hammers of the blacksmiths in the bazaar, and the regular summons to worship from the muezzin. The sun scorches down on the streets. The dust is baked in the heat, seeming to disintegrate into finer, thinner dust, dissolving in the atmosphere, disappearing into thin air, without anyone washing or sweeping the pavements. People say a young man is sent out by the authorities with a watering-can every morning, in the furtherance of hygiene, but no one has ever clapped eyes on him. But barracks are erected in the interests of progress. The dynamo that is to keep the electric lights going is too weak for so many bulbs. They come on at night, but they look like dying embers. They dangle on wires, like so many hanged glow-worms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.