Biografi by Lloyd Jones

to their faces. Horses rear up. Then it is pitch black again, terrifyingly so. The moment passes with all of us screaming at Teti before he locates the switch.
    It is impossible to wean him off it. First Bill, then me—we try to tell Teti that in the West we drive with our lights on all the time. ‘Anila,’ says Bill. ‘For the grace of God, will you tell him he’s driving a car not a friggin’ lighthouse. We are not a lighthouse. Understand?’
    But the worst of it comes as Teti rambunctiously sits on his horn at a police roadblock. There is only one other vehicle in front of us, and Teti is giving the local police the hurry-up. This is when Bill’s patience finally runs dry.
    â€˜Teti! I’m begging you!’
    Teti says, ‘No problem.’ He jumps out the driver’s side into the night and returns holding hands with a policeman.
    â€˜Everything okay,’ Teti says, getting in behind the wheel.
    We set off again and Bill says to Anila, ‘Tell him that’s it. It’s over. Tell him only a friggin’ idiot would sit on his horn at a roadblock. That’s it…Understand?’
    â€˜I know. I know. I keep telling him,’ says Anila.
    Bill is still furious as we enter Shkodër. He twists around in his seat. He says, ‘Listen to this. Teti’s father was a fighter pilot, right. He crashed his plane into a hillside and died when he was forty. It’s on Teti’s résumé. It’s some kind of idiocy thing running in the family.’

    In a mercifully short time we pull up at the hotel. The Rozala. Bill thinks it’ll be okay. He says, ‘Now listen, ask for the jam tart thing. If they still have it don’t eat the cream.
    â€˜Anila,’ he says, ‘why don’t you go in and make sure there’s a room.’
    At first it does not look promising. Anila is discussing something with the man on the desk, who seems very reluctant.
    In the end a set of keys is produced. Anila says I am lucky. Tomorrow is National Independence Day, followed by National Liberation Day, and the hotel clerk, to begin with, had tried to make out that the hotel was fully booked.
    I look at the keys in my hand and then at Anila.
    â€˜Why would he say that?’
    â€˜Because,’ she says, in heavily accented English, ‘he is a friggin’ idiot.’
    The hotel clerk offers a friendly wave and points me up the stairs. He wills me on—the way a swimmer urges another into cold water.
    The foyer is large and in a bygone life it might even have had pretensions toward grandeur. But indifference has taken toll and a shabbiness touches everything.
    The clerk shouts something to a woman in a blue coat. She had been half-heartedly dragging a rag over the floor. Now she hurries after me, up the stairs. On the third floor she squeezes past me through the door to the hall and jams a light bulb in a socket hanging from the ceiling. She waits until I have worked the key in the door and then removes the light bulb.
    I’m pleased to find light bulbs in my room—and running water. Everything is clean and tidy. The windows give on to an empty piazza. After Kukës the air is almost balmy. I can feel the nearness of the coast. In Shkodër, Europe does not feel so far off.
    The Rozala has two dining rooms. The one for the Albanians is noisy and smoky, with white tablecloths covered in beer bottles and cigarette ash. From this dining room an unshaven man in a filthy waiter’s jacket guides me by the elbow to the other dining room, which is resplendently empty but for two Greek women silently eating their supper of yoghurt and bread.
    The waiter brings me a bowl of yoghurt. He asks me if I would like anything else. I ask him what else is on the menu. He says there is nothing left—but nevertheless awaits my response with a waiterly elegance, a white towel draped over his forearm.
    A few minutes later the dining-room doors swing open.