Written biography, that’s another matter, quite another matter! Memoirs, journals, diaries. Works of the bio-imagination are as biodegradable as orange peels. Out they go. Psssst-they blast themselves to vapor, cleaner and blonder than the steam from a spotless kettle. Nothing sticks but the impulse to get it down. Consider Martä Gjatä’s four great-grandfathers. Three of them were illiterate shepherds; the fourth was a famous autodidact, a traveler, a minor politician, a poet of promise and, in his old age, the writer of a thick book entitled The Story of My Life (Lexoni Bardhë Këtë). Copies of this book can still be found in rural libraries throughout the Balkans, but not a word of the text has entered the cosmology of biography, of which the four great-grandfathers, shepherds and sage alike, have a more or less equal share.

Martä herself does not keep a diary, living as she does in a part of the world where one’s private thoughts are best kept private. She is a droll, intelligent woman of wide-ranging imagination, as anyone on the streets of her city will tell you, but the one thing she cannot imagine is her encounter, just a few hours away, with the large, clean-faced, bald-headed North American named Malcolm Brownstone. The meeting, if such a slight wordless collision can be called a meeting, will originate in the lace-curtained coffee salon of the Hotel Turista. She will arrive early, a few minutes before Malcolm Brownstone, and will wear a green checked linen dress and polished leather shoes with rather higher than usual heels.

She is a citizen, indeed a Party member, of a small ellipsoid state in eastern Europe resembling in its dimensions a heaped-up apple tart viewed in profile. The top crust presses northward toward a sparsely populated mountainous area that still erupts from time to time with primitive vendettas whose roots go back to the time of the Turkish occupation. This is harsh terrain for the most part, with scanty soil and rough roads, but the southern corner of the geo-pie plate tilts onto a green curve of the Adriatic, and this short, favored stretch is about to be developed into a full-scale tourist facility. At present there is only a four-story concrete hostel suitable for the busloads of students or workers who have lately been encouraged to come here for their twenty-four-day vacation period. But the time for expansion has arrived; even in this part of the world people are talking foreign currency; foreign currency’s the key. The beaches here are broad and breezy, and despite an overrun of tufted sea grass, the potential’s unlimited. A recreational consultant, Malcolm Brownstone, is being sent, today, by an international cooperative agency to advise on the initial stages of development.