In the lamplight my companion looked even prettier and we found nothing better to do than to dance. There was a lot of noise. Now and again customers who were drunk were shown the door. In an environment where we were both outsiders, we felt closer to each other. She was serious yet casual, which I liked. We went up to the bar and ordered two brandies. She had style, and drank with confident movements. At a nearby table three middle-aged men were talking in Latvian. They looked at us inquisitively, and one of them, the oldest, asked my companion a question. I didn’t understand a word of the language, but I grasped that he wanted to know what nationality we were. Obviously they’d guessed I was a foreigner, and when she answered them, they showed some interest, smiled at me, and one got up to fetch two more chairs.
So, we made their acquaintance. They were veterans of the Russian Revolution, and we started a conversation, my girlfriend acting as interpreter. All three seemed relatively well informed about Albania but they had never met an Albanian before. They kept repeating that they were very happy to have the opportunity of meeting me. I was pleased that at least they didn’t imagine every Albanian had a bulbous nose and a Zapata moustache. However, for some reason they thought we were all plump and round, which my own figure certainly did not bear out.
‘Are you two engaged?’ the oldest of them asked.
We shook our heads, then looked at each other, and from that point on she seemed even closer to me, for we were now connected by a small secret, our first, that these three men didn’t know we had only just met or that we were still using the formal ‚˚ to say ‘you’ to each other.
They’d been soldiers in a Latvian regiment that had had the task of defending the Kremlin after the Revolution. I’d heard a lot about the ‘Latvian Guards’, as they were called. A few days before, I’d seen the impressive cemetery in Riga, with its hundreds of graves laid out in straight lines beneath a huge fresco showing Nordic horses and horsemen leaning over the dead. It hadn’t occurred to me then that I would ever meet survivors of that regiment, let alone sit down at their table with a girl and share a drink.
Now and then they spoke to me in Russian, but it was very odd Russian. I guessed if you learned a language in a fortress of the Bolshevik Revolution, subjected to alerts and White Russian plots, kept at your post by hatred of the old regime, it was bound to turn out rather strangely.
‘Did you know,’ one asked, ‘that near here, on the Riga coast, at Kemeri, if memory serves me right, one of your kings bought a villa and lived in it for a few months?’
‘An Albanian monarch?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘I remember reading it in a newspaper, in 1939 or 1940, I think.’
‘We’ve only ever had one king,’ I said. ‘He was called Zog.’
‘I don’t recall the name, but I remember very well that he was King of Albania.’
‘How odd,’ I said, feeling the irritation that arises when you bump into a tiresome acquaintance in some foreign land. His two friends were also aware that an Albanian royal had bought a beach villa at Kemeri. The girl’s curiosity was aroused and she began talking to them excitedly.
‘Oh! So it’s true!’ she said, clapping her hands. ‘How interesting!’
For the first time that night I thought I saw her face go dreamy, and I scowled. Ahmet Zog, I said inwardly, why did you have to come all this way to mess things up for me?
‘Are you upset?’ she asked. ‘Does it annoy you to know that he came here?’
‘Oh! I don’t really care. I never had much interest in him anyway!’
‘Well, well. You’re full of yourself, aren’t you?’ she riposted.
Oh dear! I thought. Now she thinks I’m jealous of the old king. To be honest, I had felt slightly jarred when her eyes, which had been grey and serious up to that point, had lit up at the mention of the former sovereign. I tried to hide my feelings from her by addressing myself mainly to the three veterans: ‘He must have come here after he fled. He had a lot of enemies and was very cautious. Maybe he thought this was far enough away from Albania.’
‘Oh, yes, it is a long way,’ one man said.
If only this conversation were over, I thought. We raised our glasses and toasted each of us in turn, starting with my girlfriend. They were tipsy. They said they would like to see us dance, and as we moved around the floor they watched us with kindly eyes and smiled at us from time to time.
My girlfriend realised how late it was and said we should leave. We had a last drink with the three Latvians. Then, as we were preparing to go the veterans put their heads together and, apparently in my honour, began to sing very softly ‘Avanti popolo’. There was a lot of noise, and they were singing softly in their slightly hoarse baritone voices. Maybe they thought it was an Albanian song, or perhaps they knew it was Italian but sang it anyway, because I came from a faraway country next door to where the song was from, or perhaps it was the only foreign song they knew and they were singing it simply because I was a foreigner. I refrained from filling them in, and didn’t ask them to explain, because none of it mattered, but I stayed to listen to the familiar tune and lyrics, which they mangled, except for the word rivoluzione, which they transformed into revolutiones, with the typically Latvian -es ending.
We bade them farewell and left. It was rather cool outside. In the dark the shoreline was barely visible. My companion put her arm in mine and we set off in a random direction, as before, except our pace was slower now and the crunching of the sand seemed louder in the deeper silence all around. We walked on without speaking, and it occurred to me that we had now turned into one of the silhouettes that at the writers’ retreat we captured in our snapshots of the sunset.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Wherever you want.’
‘I prefer not to know where I’m going. I like walking aimlessly, like this.’
I told her I also liked wandering with no destination in mind. Then we fell silent and could again hear the dull crunch of our footfalls on the sand. We didn’t know which way we were going. It wouldn’t have been hard to find our bearings and make our way towards our respective lodgings, but it amused us not to do so and, as it turned out, we were going in the opposite direction.
‘Apart from your king, have any other Albanians come to this country on holiday?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’
‘I hope not,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to be the only Albanian who’s been here, apart from your king.’
She said the words ‘apart from your king’ in an intimate tone, as if the king and I were two knights-in-waiting on this deserted beach, one of whom she had deigned to favour.
‘Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if you were the only two Albanians ever to have spent a holiday here?’ she added, soon after.
‘I can’t say,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t see that as particularly unlikely.’
‘I see!’ she said. ‘You think it’s more interesting to know that “When sunsets were blue” was dedicated to an old lady with a weight problem?’
I didn’t know what to say and began to laugh. She was getting her own back. I’ve
