The Woman from Bratislava (39 page)

Dürres hove into view. They caught a glimpse of the sea beyond the tall cranes, but otherwise the scene was the same. Wrecked cars, sunken bunkers, tumbledown houses, unfinished concrete buildings. Old houses with peeling walls. And on every second one a ludicrous modern element: a satellite dish.

‘So the poor sods can watch Italian television,’ Poulsen said. ‘It provides just about the only light relief in the lives of most Albanians.’

They drove past a refugee camp. Army-green tents ranged in neat rows. Over the teeming mass of humanity of the camp –
primarily
women and children – fluttered the Italian flag. The camp was surrounded by a wire fence and the entrance was guarded. Across from it something like five hundred people lay on the bare ground under large sheets of clear plastic and damp blankets. They were waiting to be registered, or to be allowed in to the
overcrowded
camp.

Poulsen told them that new batches of refugees turned up at this camp and the too few other camps every day. There would have been a lot more deaths had it not been for the tremendous hospitality of the Albanian people and the fact that spring was not far off. Had this been February he did not dare to think what would have happened.

‘Three cheers for the NATO bombings,’ Teddy commented wryly.

‘So what the hell else were they supposed to do?’ Toftlund
protested
. ‘Let Milosevic carry on with his ethnic cleansing? Wait until the last Kosovo Albanian had been driven out or killed?’ ‘Well, now NATO’s doing it for him. What do you think, Poulsen?’

‘That it’s my job to take in everybody who comes here, no matter why they’ve come. My list of priorities is very simple, and hence very tricky. It all boils down to basic human needs. I have to provide the refugees with shelter from the weather. I have to supply them with food and clean water. A place in which to take a shit. Security for themselves and, later, some idea of what has become of their nearest and dearest. For the rest, it’s all politics and I don’t have anything to do with that.’

‘That’s too bloody easy.’

‘Well it’s enough to keep me working flat out around the clock. But yes, I know. Let me put it this way. It’s Milosevic who’s to blame, but it’s our responsibility and, hence, our duty. Okay?’

‘I won’t argue with that,’ Teddy said.

Poulsen eased the car over some rusty, buckled lengths of railway track lying across the road like anti-tank obstructions. On the right were more of the redundant one-man bunkers. On the left, beyond the big warehouses clustered under the yellow cranes, they could see the grey-green expanse of the Adriatic. A ferry was docking. The big bow port was lowered and army vehicles rolled ashore. There were both armoured personnel carriers and what Toftlund recognised as self-propelled artillery vehicles. It
had all the makings of an invasion. The Toyota’s huge, heavy tyres splashed through the muddy puddles.

‘We have a convoy up north at the moment,’ Poulsen said. ‘Which means we have a couple of vacant rooms at the hotel. You’ll have to make do with them. Otherwise accommodation is impossible to come by here.’

‘That’s absolutely fine,’ Toftlund told him.

They drove right into the centre of the town. Here, too, the buildings were in a sad state, but there was a bizarre loveliness about their decrepitude: like a once beautiful woman in whose crumbling face traces of that former beauty are still discernible. There were a lot of young people on the streets. They were
surprisingly
well-dressed, in Italian and French designer gear, especially the young women with their tight jeans and provocative tops, their painted lips and long eyelashes. They went about in pairs, as
girlfriends
do, smiling and waving voluptuously when they spotted the white UN vehicle. An open Italian jeep came driving towards the Toyota. Three of the soldiers in it whistled and whooped at a couple of particularly pretty girls.

‘Well, well,’ Teddy cried. ‘The young ladies have certainly changed since I was last here.’

Poulsen laughed:

‘A lot of them are quite stunning. But I’m going to tell you what I tell my drivers. Every one of those gorgeous young women has at least three brothers, eight uncles and a very touchy father. Get one into trouble and you have two options: either you marry the girl or you wind up in the ocean. Honour, disgrace, revenge – these things are taken very seriously here. So you can look, but please – don’t touch.’

They all laughed.

Poulsen steered the Toyota up a narrow, unpaved alley, through the puddles and the mire, between houses with flaking yellow walls. Gaily-coloured washing hung from lines strung between the buildings and a couple of small children waved and gave the
V-sign. Under shuttered windows two satellite dishes were bolted to a wall. Above their heads a tangled skein of electric cables snaked across the alley. Three other white UN vehicles were parked on a piece of waste ground next to a small hotel calling itself The
Mediterranean
. Poulsen parked the Toyota. Teddy scrambled
laboriously
out of the back seat and lifted out his bag.

‘Just a minute,’ Poulsen said to Toftlund, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘I didn’t know how much I could say in front of the
professor
there,’ he went on.

‘He’s in on it,’ Toftlund said.

‘Fine. We received orders from the very top to help you. As if we didn’t bloody well have enough to do as it is. Sorry, no offence. Offhand we can find no trace of your woman in our system. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an awful lot. The whole situation is so chaotic, anyway. There is, however, another possibility. The mafia …’

‘What dealings do you have with it?’

‘Officially none. But it’s like this – the mafia controls the harbour here at Dürres. As a representative of the UN Refugee Agency it’s up to me to make sure that the tons of supplies which come into this harbour each day don’t end up gathering dust in some warehouse due to problems with customs clearance. Albania is a sovereign nation, it invited NATO and ourselves to come here, but it’s very conscious that it is not an occupied land. It is a
capitalist
country in which shipping agents, customs officers, civil
servants
and policemen are all out to get rich quick from the boom generated by the war. That’s just the way things are. If my supplies don’t get through people die of cold or hunger. As long as we don’t have enough troops to enable NATO to simply take control of the harbour – always assuming, of course, that the Albanian
government
in Tirana would grant permission for that – then I have to employ whatever means are necessary – all in a good cause …’

‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me.’

‘You did ask.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Wherever there is need you’ll find those who prey on the needy,’ Poulsen said and Toftlund observed the weariness in his eyes and the grey tinge to his skin. It was not the easiest job in the world, being at the sharp end of a disaster situation which almost had the wealthy nations of the world beat.

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘That’s okay. I’ve let it be known that you would like to meet with them. Certain contacts have been furnished with the
information
you sent me. You said it was urgent, so …’

‘That’s great.’

‘Now we just have to wait and see whether they’ll get back to us. But you do realise this does involve an element of risk.’

‘I’ll need a gun,’ Toftlund said, his eyes fixed on Poulsen’s.

‘I’m a civilian, working for the UN. I did not hear that.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, come on.’

Poulsen studied him intently.

‘I did not hear that,’ he repeated tonelessly. ‘But I can’t prevent you from meeting another old army mate. Major C. Sørensen, of the Royal Commandos.’

‘Christ Almighty, is C. here?’

‘The Danish forward division arrived a couple of days ago. They’ve set up camp not far from here. They’re preparing for all-out war, or at any rate the occupation of Kosovo.’

‘That’s really great, Torsten,’ Toftlund assured him.

‘Is it? I don’t know. But I don’t like the idea of you climbing completely naked into bed with the Devil. Because that’s what you’ll be doing.’

‘What would you know about that?’

‘I sleep with him all the time, wherever there are people
following
his commandments, as they’re doing right now in this sorely abused corner of Europe. I know him. I see him every day. I clean up after him. And I don’t have the time to clean up after you.’

‘You won’t need to.’

‘I hope you’re right, and I hope you’ve brought enough cash with you,’ Poulsen said, then he got out of the driver’s seat and walked over to Teddy, who stood hunched over a cigarette, his feet solidly planted between two puddles as he contemplated the tumbledown houses with their strangely incongruous satellite dishes, two boys playing football in the mud, the washing lines and a small kiosk from which a toothless old man was grinning inanely and beckoning to Teddy to come closer and see his wares. Teddy looked tired. As if it had suddenly dawned on him that by being here he might be helping to condemn his own sister. Maybe he was simply travel-weary, or shocked to find that Europe could also look like this. Or maybe it was just that his back hurt.

Teddy looked up, tossed his cigarette butt into a dingy grey puddle which was covered by a thin film of oil shot with rainbows. The sky darkened and big, heavy drops began to fall. They could hear the thunder rumbling out across the Adriatic.

‘Don’t you just adore Albania,’ said Teddy, treading on the
cigarette
butt.

‘It’s the love of my life,’ Poulsen said.

A COUPLE OF DAYS WENT BY
before they received a message to say that a gentleman respectfully referred to as Don Alberto wished to speak to them, as he had new information regarding a certain woman. This message was delivered to them by a small boy who approached Toftlund down on the promenade in Dürres. Like so many other little ragamuffins he was hustling contraband
cigarettes
, but there was something in his eyes that stopped Toftlund from shooing him away. The lad looked him straight in the face, handed him a pack of cigarettes and in halting English announced that Don Alberto would like to meet the Danish gentlemen this evening; in the pack, which Toftlund exchanged for a ten-dollar bill, along with a dozen or so cigarettes was a note giving the name of a restaurant and a number, twenty, which Toftlund took to stand for the hour set for this rendezvous. Per knew the restaurant, he had eaten lunch there once. It lay down on the harbourfront, only a few hundred metres from their hotel.

It was about time. The waiting had been driving Toftlund and Teddy crazy. They bickered like an old married couple, snapping and snarling at one another or lapsing into sullen silence in the shoebox of a room they shared. In it were two narrow beds, a small wooden chest-of-drawers and two high-backed chairs which had once been upholstered. Teddy was no longer feeling quite so
cooperative
. It almost seemed as if he was regretting the whole thing and now felt guilty for helping the police, so Toftlund had had to turn the screws and inform him that he had the choice between cooperating or discovering how it felt to help the police with their inquiries in a rather different way. Teddy spat back that he was stuck here in the arsehole of the world, with no sister, no wife, no
money and soon, for all he knew, no job. His back was sore, his gums ached and he fucking well wanted to go home.

‘Who the hell’s interested in a one-time spy from a long-
forgotten
cold war,’ Pedersen snarled. ‘Half the newspaper editors in Denmark – even the director-general of Danmarks Radio, for God’s sake – attended party schools in the GDR! So what. It doesn’t mean a thing today. You’re chasing ghosts, Toftlund. And nobody gives a shit. You’re digging up skeletons that no one wants you to find. Let bygones by bygones. Go home, see your baby born. At least there’s some meaning to that.’

Toftlund had had no answer to that. He was just as tired of this place as Teddy and missed Lise more than he could have thought possible. It had been a bloody awful spring, as unreal as NATO’s unreal war, with all the politicians’ Newspeak about it being a humanitarian exercise, despite the fact that people were being killed every day and the stream of refugees was swelling and
swelling
, while the sleek, grey NATO fighters and lumbering bombers with their cargo of cluster bombs, uranium-tipped warheads and laser-guided missiles circled lazily up above, waiting to dump their loads on dummy Serb military positions or bridges packed with fleeing civilians. And yes. He was chasing a ghost, and he would have to continue the chase. Because those were his orders. Because, against all the odds, Vuldom had succeeded in having Irma’s remand warrant extended by another eight days – this she had told him over the Refugee Agency’s crackling satellite phone link, but the judge had made it quite clear that this was absolutely the last time – unless, that is, the burden of evidence altered
radically
in favour of the prosecution.

That call had come yesterday. Afterwards they had repaired to the hotel’s bar-cum-restaurant for a large glass of cheap beer. Or at least, Per had stuck to one. Teddy had been on his fourth and growing drunk and argumentative when Toftlund decided to leave him to it and go for another walk. He had strolled down to the harbour and the dirty-grey Adriatic where an oily fringe of
scum laced with human excrement, old plastic bottles and all sorts of other imperishable waste was washed up onto the big rocks by the waves rolling in from the civilisation of Italy. From there too came a steady stream of large roll-on, roll-off ferries disgorging men and equipment, including military hardware with the
attendant
NATO personnel and masses of aid supplies, from blankets to sanitary pads and food, all of which piled up in the port’s filthy, dilapidated warehouses. The Serbs had stripped the refugees of all they had: from their homes and their personal papers to the women’s right to keep themselves clean.

Torsten Poulsen had to fight harder and harder to keep his weary eyes open as he endeavoured to have the aid supplies moved out of the warehouses and into the country, to the masses of refugees living in makeshift tent cities, disused factories and abandoned schools. He had plenty of drivers and trucks, but getting the inefficient, multicultural UN system to work was a nightmare. Everybody had an opinion on everything. Negotiating the miles of red tape was like trudging through the Albanian mud. The roads were clogged with military traffic and convoys of trucks from private relief organisations, who were also anxious to help, but often ended up delivering the wrong stuff to the wrong places. And around it all, like a swarm of bees, buzzed the press and TV people, getting in the way, elbowing their way to the fore wherever you went, hiring intepreters and expensive fixers who pushed up the prices of everything from petrol to a proficiency in English.

On the other hand, they were a necessary evil. Without their shots of cold, hungry children with beseeching eyes on the evening news, the relief organisations’ funds would soon have run out. Torsten knew that the media circus would stay in Albania for only a short time, until the news desks at home tired of their tales of slaughter, rape, murder, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and
suffering
refugees and turned instead to some other story which would hold their attention for a short while.

‘When the journalists and the interest have moved on, I’ll still
be here,’ he had said on the day after Toftlund’s arrival, when the latter drove over to the Albanian capital, Tirana, with him to meet C. While Torsten, armed with all of his saintly patience, battled with and against UN bureaucracy, in an effort to get supplies out to his drivers, Toftlund had a brief meeting with Major Carsten Sørensen. They sat down at a pavement café on Tirana’s main street. The weather was glorious, the sun shining and the
thermometer
nudging twenty degrees. Tirana was a bizarre city full of broad, socialist-style avenues, run-down buildings, half-finished glass-and-concrete temples, garish advertisements, market stalls at every turn and cows grazing on the banks of the canal which flowed like an open sewer through the middle of the town. From where they sat they had a view of the Opera House and the
imposing
Hotel International. Tirana reminded Toftlund of Istanbul, only poorer, with its beggars and cigarette-hustling boys peddling their merchandise from battered old cardboard boxes.
Everywhere
you looked there were adverts for Marlboro, or for
something
called Tele-Bingo, in which some lucky contestant could win sixty million Albanian
lek
. As in Dürres there were also an
incredibly
large number of stylish young people clad in the latest Italian fashions. The traffic was a peculiar mix of horse-drawn carts and ancient, mud-spattered Mercedes saloons – God only knew how they had found their way into the country. The war appeared to have engendered a sudden wave of affluence for the chosen few. Or maybe the more prosperous citizens were simply survivors of Albanian capitalism’s big boom? Either that or representatives of the ubiquitous and highly active mafia.

Sørensen and Toftlund ordered coffee and juice. Like everyone else in Albania, C., as he had always been known in the army, had weary eyes. He handed Per a small, cheap sports holdall.

‘It’s a Beretta 927, standard issue with both the French and the Italian troops. Three spare clips. Shoulder holster. I’d like it back, if possible,’ he said.

‘Thanks C.,’ Toftlund said, placing the holdall between his feet.

‘You can’t walk around unarmed in this country,’ Sørensen went on. ‘Tirana is dead after ten o’clock at night. Even we don’t go out. There are guns going off all over the shop – mafia showdowns, family feuds. There are shoot-outs and car bombs or bombs in bags. This land is awash with weapons. They all have the same guns and they’re not afraid to use them. This restaurant was blown up a year ago during a clash between rival gangs.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been here before.’

‘Weapons inspection for the UN. There are weapons and
ammunition
in holes and corners all over this country, stored under
conditions
you just wouldn’t believe. The whole idea was that every Albanian had to be able to arm himself if the Italians, or the
Russians
, or – eventually – the Chinese should come knocking.’

‘I’m beginning to think anything is possible here. From the greatest hospitality to the greatest brutality.’

C. lit a cigarette, blew the smoke away from Toftlund.

‘That’s it in a nutshell. People here are as warm and friendly as they are everywhere else in the Balkans, and as brutal as
everywhere
else in the Balkans. Their history has made them that way. The worst thing about communism was not really the stupidity of it all, but the fact that it brutalised millions of people, because it had no respect for the individual. The individual was a cog in the great factory of the revolution, I think Stalin said that. Let me give you an example: I was speaking to a woman this morning. She left Kosovo a week ago. Together with seven other women and children. The rest of their village is gone. The Serbian militia came. They
separated
the men from the women, the old from the children and said to the men: Dig a ditch. So they dug a ditch. Then they said: those of you who have money may go, those who have none must stay, then they took the money, shot those who had given as well as those who had nothing to give and threw them all into the ditch; after that they raped the women and chased them and the children up into the mountains before setting fire to the village. Now all of that is bad enough. But do you know what the worst of it is?’

Toftlund shook his head:

‘It’s not that there are thousands of similar stories. The worst part is that once we’ve taken care of Milosevic, the Albanians will return home and pay the Serbs back in their own coin, while we stand by and watch.’

On the drive back to Dürres, Toftlund related this story to Torsten Poulsen. The port was only forty kilometres away, but it took over two hours to get there on the rutted, muddy, busy roads, with the Toyota rocking and rolling like a ship in distress.

‘I hear stories like that every day,’ Poulsen said. ‘I’ve got another one for you, which might serve to illustrate why we could have our work cut out for us here for many years to come. Enver Hoxha was, of course, a dictator. Everybody knows that. But he was also a raving lunatic, swanning about in that grand palace of his,
insisting
that everybody around him spoke French – this in a country that could barely afford to feed itself. One day he decided to create a double of himself. His secret police found a little dentist from up north who bore some resemblance to Enver – a man who, at that time, was regarded by some groups in Denmark as a great
revolutionary
hero. Then Hoxha gathered together the ten or twelve plastic surgeons in Albania and they set about turning the dentist into a perfect double of their glorious leader. With great success. Now the doppelgänger could play the dictator whenever Enver himself feared an assassination attempt, or simply could not be bothered shaking hands or opening a new bunker. With the
operation
successfully completed, Hoxha summoned all the surgeons and nurses and told them that as a token of his gratitude for their revolutionary efforts he was treating them to a holiday at one of Albania’s top luxury hotels. Although I don’t even know if they actually had any such thing. Be that as it may, they were all led out to a bus – the swishest, most up-to-date coach in the country. Then they were driven straight into the Adriatic, bus and all, and there they lie to this day, at the bottom of the sea.’

Sitting there with the little holdall on his lap, Toftlund glanced
over at Torsten, who was manoeuvering the four-wheel drive round a donkey. It was sitting in the middle of the road,
refusing
to budge, regardless of the elderly, bearded man laying into its back with a long stick.

‘That’s a very good story,’ Per said. ‘But is it true?’

‘It’s as true as anything else in the Balkans.’

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘Some guy who was writing a biography of Hoxha.’

‘It sounds pretty far out.’

‘Albania, the past, the Balkans, this war, Toftlund – it’s all so real, with very real problems, and at the same time totally unreal, a nightmare almost, a distorted reflection of the evil we all carry inside us. The only difference is that in our part of the world, thanks to a mixture of luck and skill, we’ve managed to suppress the beast within for the past fifty years.’

‘My, aren’t we philosophical,’ Toftlund remarked and
immediately
regretted it. He could tell that he had offended Torsten by making fun of his grave words, but as Lise said, Per always ran for cover the minute there was any talk of emotions or serious ideas.

‘I read books, Per. You ought to try it. It’s better than what you have in that bag. That solves nothing,’ Torsten had said as they trundled into the suburbs of Dürres.

But Toftlund was grateful for the sense of security which the pistol in its shoulder holster gave him as he strolled along the
harbourside
. At night when he stood at his window looking out at the darkness, he would hear gunfire down here. The shots were always followed by the barking of the dogs, a canine chorus that would strike up in one corner of the district and spread right across the city. One night he had woken up thinking that the war had reached Dürres, but it was only thunder, rolling across the sea, with the lightning illuminating the night sky and the city like an enormous flashbulb. Shortly afterwards the rain had come pouring down and, in his plain, but clean hotel room, he thought of the thousands of refugees still sleeping in the open air, possibly
with no more than a blanket or a bit of plastic sheeting for cover. The rain drummed on the roof and sent little rivers rushing down the unpaved streets. Another nightmarish bolt of lightning had ripped through the darkness, throwing the minarets of the nearby mosque into relief, as if etched against the sky for eternity.