Read Online Biografi by Lloyd Jones - Free Book Online

the airport to the palace where he made his way to the Queen’s suite. When he saw the bed linen stained by afterbirth, which still lay uncollected, ‘Ciano kicked it across the room, and with the anger of a wild animal, howled, “The cub has escaped!”’
    In 1960, in the Bristol Hotel in Paris, Prince Leka was consecrated King before seventy representatives of Albanian groups throughout the world.
    Although Leka had spent only three days on Albanian soil, he had been brought up in an Albanian household, attended to by Albanian instructors and nurtured on the idea that he was of nobility, a prince who one day would ascend to the throne. Among the cast of ‘father figures’ Leka’s mother had enlisted General Franco, the Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner, and Pinochet.
    In Spain, to which the royal family eventually moved, Leka trains his Albanian exiles for the coming guerilla war—an idea that owes much to a morphine-induced dream of his father’s. In 1961, while Leka sat by his dying father in a hospital bed in Paris, Zog’s last words described the dream from which he had just awoken. He had seen Queen Geraldine, now ‘very old but still beautiful’, standing at the prow of a ship headed for the quay at Durrës. In the same dream, Leka appeared in battle fatigues, leading a column of troops to win back the Kingdom.

11
    IN ROME I had hoped to find an émigrés’ quarter. I thought there might be a bar or a café used as a local hangout, a place where old soldiers in an alcoholic haze might create heroic home comings. I imagined a café with a memento like the Skanderbeg flag pinned to the wall behind the bar—in the spirit of Queen Geraldine’s handful of soil scooped up to remember Albania with—and riotous, drunken evenings every year Independence Day wound round.
    Instead, in via Asmaria I had met Nick, an earnest student of divinity and philosophy.
    Across the crowded foyer in the consulate on via Asmaria I had caught his eye, and in the clamour that broke out with the sudden emergence of a consulate official leaving his office, Nick surfaced at my side.
    In a whisper he asked, ‘Are you English?’
    He was pale and thin. A quality of a life lived indoors had rubbed off, setting him apart from his ground-grubbing compatriots.
    Later, after the consulate officials had declared an end to the day’s business, we had wandered out to the entrance steps.
    I was full of questions. About him. The refugees. I described to him the café with the flag of Skanderbeg pinned to the wall. Did he know of such a place?
    He glanced back to the shabby foyer and touched a finger to his lips.
    â€˜Not here,’ he said.
    We hurried off in light rain to find a trattoria.
    Nick was my ‘first Albanian’ and everything he had to say I took down. It was all new to me, and Nick’s stories, which were full of intrigue, were exactly what I wanted to hear. The only disappointment was that the picturesque quarter I had hoped for did not exist. Nick gave me instead an address of a monastery belonging to an order of Franciscans.
    I met him there the next day, and in a small room on the ground floor Nick explained that he had been in Rome only a few months.
    The first thing he had done on his arrival was to discard his name, Ardian. A generation of youth had been named after the tribes of Illyria in a bid by the regime to trample out every shred of religious identity. Once in Rome Nick had got himself christened after Saint Nicholas.
    The Franciscans were putting him up, and in exchange for board he cooked for the small order of friars. In between classes he busied himself with other menial tasks around the monastery.
    Through Nick I met Friar Daniel Gjecaj, who had lived in Vatican City since fleeing the Communists in 1948. He was well into his seventies now, and the recent changes in his homeland hadn’t done much to excite him.
    He