by Paul Theroux
The general in Ismaïl Kadaré’s novel stays in the Hotel Dajti. The Albanian novelist, who has been in exile in Paris for thirty years, makes it sound like the Ritz, a peaceful refuge, splendid among the pines of Tirana. He collected his mail at the desk … asked for a call to be put through to his family. In his otherwise macabre novel, even the Dajti’s phones work.
“But it costs forty dollars a night,” I said. “It’s not the worst forty-dollar hotel I’ve ever stayed in.”
It was relative, too. Right outside it, because there were policemen and security men and usually groups of people, beggars had taken up residence under the trees. There was a homeless beggar under most of the trees. There were others in doorways, in the manner of homeless people in New York, who prefer to sleep in the doorways of Madison Avenue and the safer and better-lighted parts of New York City. At night, at the base of almost every streetlamp on the main boulevard of Tirana, Shqiperia—“Land of the Eagle”—there was a ragged child sleeping.
After this strange introduction to Albania—the beggars, the bunkers, the dereliction of Durrës, the horror of Tirana, the dirt—I went underground. I happened to be riding a bus from the Tirana Railway Station (wrecked, inhabited by lurking quarreling Albanians) with no thought of where the bus was going—I was immersing myself in Tirana. I fell into conversation with a young man and his wife, who were just returning from Durrës. His spoken English was excellent. His nose was bright pink.
“We have been to the beach,” he explained.
Beach?
“Yes, it is a bit dirty. But we just sit. We do not know how to swim.”
We talked a bit more; their names were Djouvi and Ledia. I rode with them to the end of the line, some miles from the center of the city, where they lived in a large and ravaged-looking apartment house. When they asked me what I thought of Tirana I told them frankly what I felt.
“The Tirana that you see is much better than last year,” he said. “We have touched bottom—a year ago we had nothing at all. Now there is some activity. There are goods in some shops. Before there was no money, no goods, just desperation.”
“How was it worse last year?”
“It was anarchy,” he said. “There was no food, there was no government.”
I tried to imagine Tirana looking worse than it did today. “We had riots. Mobs of people roaming the city. Tirana was dangerous.”
We had been walking down the road and were now in a slum of tottering eight-story tenements, making our way—I guessed—to where Djouvi and Ledia lived. Djouvi told me he was twenty-four, Ledia was twenty. They had married a year ago, and yet both of them seemed older than their years. I remarked on that. Djouvi said, “I look older than twenty-four, yes, because so much happened to me. The hunger strike. The political troubles. We thought we might be shot. Also the fear of secret police.”
Now we were at the last grim tenement in the cluster. Djouvi asked me to look at the satellite dishes on the wall. There were five mounted on the wall of the building.
“Albanians are individualistic,” Djouvi said. “So each one gets his own satellite dish instead of one for the whole building, which would be cheaper. We get CNN, MTV. Italian channels are shown on Albanian TV, because it is cheap. I can speak Italian though I have never had a lesson. A quarter of the people in Tirana can speak Italian from watching TV.”
“How long have you lived in this building?” I asked him in Italian.
Without hesitating, he said in Italian, “I have lived here my whole life. I was born in it. Look at those buildings—they are ugly and dirty. But if you go inside you will see the apartments are very clean, because they are privately owned. Inside they are beautiful, outside not so nice.”
He invited me up the stairs to his fourth-floor apartment. It was spartan but clean—a bedroom, a kitchen, a sitting room with a bookcase: books by Mark Twain, plays by Ibsen and Aeschylus.
“My father helped build this building. We paid rent for thirty years. So when the government privatized it was sold to us for ninety-seven dollars. But we had paid for it many times over.”
“You seem very optimistic,” I said.
“I am optimistic—because I see changes for the better. Last year there was no one by the stadium selling soft drinks.”
He called it a stadium. It was a ruined football field, trampled grass surrounded by faltering walls, with some tables in front where people sold bottles of orange soda.
“Now there are four people there. Next year they will have shops in town and someone else will be there—people are moving on, little by little. Individual enterprise. That is what we want.”
But I said that I had not seen anything substantial for sale except pornographic newspapers—two-cent tabloids with large headlines over smudgy pictures of nude couples embracing or women on all fours. And Albanians did not seem to make anything except the rugs, copperware and knickknacks that were for sale in one shop in town. Even postage stamps were in short supply. At the main post office where one woman sat at one window stamps were rationed, three to a customer. There were only two sorts of stamps; neither was good for an airmail letter. The good for almost nothing two-lek “Posta Shqiptare” stamp bore the portrait of Mother Teresa, herself an ethnic Albanian from the province of Kosovo.
“Those sexy newspapers on the street have become very common in the past six months,” Djouvi said. “Before then we had many papers, political ones. But people now are sick of politics and sick of news. They want pornography.”
Ledia made tea. Her English was not good enough for her to be able to follow the conversation, but Djouvi translated for her. After a while I felt self-conscious, pestering Djouvi with questions—after all, I had just met him on the bus, and here I was in his apartment, drinking tea and asking him to explain Albania. I said that I really had to go but that I wanted to meet him and his wife again, to take them to dinner, and that they were free to bring any of their friends. I was ignorant of Albania: I wanted to know more.
After thinking this over, Djouvi said that it was not such a good idea to sit in a restaurant talking about the past of Albania, even worse to speculate on the future. But a walk in the park, meeting at one of the outdoor cafes first, might be better. He had a few friends who might like to come along to practice their English.
We agreed to meet the next day, around five, after work. Djouvi was a clerk in an office. His friends were teachers and civil servants. I met them not far from the cone-shaped Hoxha memorial, which was no longer the Hoxha memorial but simply an embarrassment. It had not been hard to tear down the dictator’s statue, but this enormous obelisk was another matter. They might have to learn to live with it, or else to rename it.
Late the next afternoon I sat on the bench that Djouvi had indicated on a neatly drafted map, and soon after five looked up and saw Djouvi and Ledia with three other Albanians about their own age. They were Nik, Ahmet and Alma. Djouvi explained that I had just arrived in Albania from Italy.
“There are many Albanians working in Italy,” Nik said. “We work hard and earn little money. Even in Germany and Switzerland you will find Albanians.”
“And Greece,” Alma said.
“The Greeks don’t like us,” Nik said.
“Italians smuggle Albanians into Italy,” Djouvi said. “They charge up to one thousand dollars. They pick them up on the beach south of Durrës. They use small fast boats and take the Albanians to the Italian coast and drop them.”
“Let’s get something to drink,” I said. We walked across the boulevard where, under the trees, various entrepreneurs had set up cafes. There was a friendly-looking place near the road, but they said no and chose one of the cafes at the very back, surrounded by bushes. We were hardly visible here at our table, drinking coffee, eating cookies. It was clearly their intention to remain hidden with this nosy American.
“For years nothing changed in Albania,” I said. “Then something happened, right?”
“After Ceausescu was shot,” Ahme
t said, referring to the murder of Romania’s dictator around Christmas, 1989. “The next day things began to change here. The people were talking, first small groups of them, and after a few days there were larger groups, and we knew something was going to happen.”
“Was Hoxha in power then?”
“No, Hoxha died in 1985. His successor was Ramiz Alia. He is on trial now.”
“Hoxha was a dictator with Mehmet Shehu,” Ahmet said. “It is said that Hoxha shot Mehmet Shehu, though the official version is that Shehu committed suicide. I knew Shehu’s son,” Ahmet went on. “He told me his father was not suicidal. He went to school in the morning—his father was fine. When he came home from school his father had a bullet in his heart.”
“So you five are all friends, is that right?”
“We were students in 1990 and 1991. We helped form the Democratic Party as an underground movement. Alia was in power, but for some reason he was weak. Hoxha’s widow was working behind the scenes, filling the post with her relatives. We wanted to do something.”
“I am so happy to be talking to the Albanian underground,” I said. They laughed and instinctively looked around to see whether anyone had noticed them. “When I arrived I was really depressed, but it seems as though something promising is taking place.”
“This was a hard place before,” Nik said. “They would accuse us of being spies. People were afraid because of the police. The city was cleaner then. It was fear. It looked different. People are careless now because they know it is not their own property.”
Yes, even from where we sat at this cafe we were within sight of the heaps of garbage and the broken tree limbs and the squatting whining beggars.
“Tell me why it was a hard place. Was it just the police?”
“If Hoxha thought you were not on his side he imprisoned you,” Ahmet said. “He labeled you as a spy. I remember when I was at university we spent one month a year doing work for the state. We were sent to a labor camp—”
“A concentration camp,” Djouvi said.
“In the next room was the former minister of education, Todi Lubonja, and his family, doing forced labor. His crime was that when he was minister he allowed Western music to be played, decadent music, and Hoxha was furious. That was in 1974. Lubonja was finally released in 1989.”
“What other famous prisoners were there?”
“The present President of Parliament, Pjeter Arbnori, a writer, was put in prison in the Stalinist time,” Nik said. “He stayed there for almost thirty years. Longer than Mandela! He finally founded the Albanian Social Democratic Party. He was imprisoned in 1954, released in 1984.”
“Were ordinary people imprisoned for political crimes?”
“There was a strange law here under the Hoxha regime,” Djouvi said. “If a man was regarded as a spy or an enemy his whole immediate family went with him to the camp.”
“Not just them,” Ahmet said. “It did not stop there. Other more distant family members were barred from higher education or other things.”
“They were pariahs,” I said, and explained the word; yes, yes, that was the word—political pariahs.
“It was illegal to flee the country,” Alma said. “But let’s say you managed it. After the police discovered that you had gone they arrested your brother—they punished another family member for what you had done.”
“Beards were banned,” Ahmet said—he looked as though he had the beginning of a beard himself.
“Have you heard of Disneyland?” I said. Of course they all had. “Workers in Disneyland are forbidden to grow beards. And that’s probably not the only obsession that Disneyland executives have in common with Albanian dictators.”
Long hair was also banned, and Western music, and blue jeans, and pornography. Until 1990 no one in Albania was allowed to own a car. As soon as the government changed people started letting their hair grow, and playing rock music, and wearing blue jeans. Stolen cars were being imported from Italy or smuggled over the Greek border by the thousands. All over Tirana there were men sitting on stools near stacks of yellowing two-cent porno newspapers.
“So tell me,” I said. “How did this horrible man Hoxha manage to stay in power?”
Djouvi said, “Hoxha made us believe that we were the best people in the world. There was crime and violence and poverty in every country except ours. We believed everything we were told. We did not question anything. We did not ask why we had water shortages in summer and power cuts in the winter. We had no taxes. We believed that we were the greatest country in the world, better than China which we had rejected, better than the Soviet Union, much better than the West.”
“At school we sang songs, praising Hoxha. What a wise and great man he was,” Alma said. “We all did military service.”
“We all had a weapon—everyone in the country had a gun,” Ahmet said. “Each person had a personal weapon and a bunker. My weapon was a Kalashnikov, in the—what do you call it?—national arsenal? There were many weapons here.”
It was hard to imagine anything so efficient as an arms industry in this country that did not even have tractors or plows or sewing machines.
“Weapons is the one industry that has not stopped,” Djouvi said. “The factory is in Elbasan. We made weapons, we had a Chinese factory and Chinese training.”
Nik said, “All children love guns. We loved taking them apart and fixing them.”
We talked some more, and I was resisting writing anything down, because I did not want to make them self-conscious, but at last I suggested that we meet again tomorrow, at the same place. It was cheap enough—coffee twenty cents, sandwich fifty cents, mineral water eighty cents, a beer one dollar. The waiter presented me with a bill for less than five dollars.
“We will see you tomorrow, at the same time,” Djouvi said, shaking my hand.
“Come by the hotel,” I said.
“It’s better here,” he said.
“Okay, but if I’m a bit late wait for me,” I said. “I want to stop by the embassy.”
A querying expression came into his eyes.
“It’s a good idea for Americans to register their names in the U.S. Embassy in some countries,” I said, and thought: Especially in this country. “But I’ll try to be on time.”
Off they went. The next day I found the embassy, which was a lovely building in the style of a Mediterranean villa, creamy stucco with green and yellow trim, on a backstreet of Tirana. I spoke awhile with the Deputy Chief of Mission, Douglas Smith, who had been in the country a year or so and was fluent in Albanian. He told me about the tradition of bloodfeuds in the hinterland, wondering out loud whether they were somehow related to the concept of besa, which was a solemn Albanian oath. The feuds had been stopped by the old regime, but there was apparently a resurgence of them, with the democratic reforms.
I was at the cafe table early to meet the Albanian underground. Five o’clock came and went. I drank a beer. I had the dinner special, rice with a glop of tomato sauce on it and meatballs made out of a dead animal and french fries. The meatballs were quofta: a Turkish word for ground meat or meatballs; many food words in the eastern Mediterranean were Turkish, though kofta had gotten as far as India. I was reminded again of what truly disgusting food passed for Albanian cuisine.
There was no sign of the talkative youths of the previous afternoon. I should have known better than to say that I was planning to stop by the embassy. Paranoia is a hard habit to break. I never saw them again.
After three days and three nights in the stifling darkness of the fish’s belly, Jonah had an illumination. That is often the way with nightmares. After three days, Albania—which had started as a nightmare—took on the dimensions of a valuable experience. I had overcome my disgust and fear. Tirana was still as ratty, but I was calmer, fascinated rather than repelled, and so the city did not seem so bad. “It just looks dirty,” as Jonah might have said.
The beggars were now recognizable. They slept at night in the same places where the
y sat all day, with their hands out. There was a legless woman, an old blind man, and a hectoring man who shouted at passersby, demanding money; there were many children, scavenging in the day and curling up under the lights or in doorways at night. Two always slept together, one lying facedown and his younger brother—perhaps—using the small of his back as a pillow.
Instead of leaving I stayed a few days more. One of the reasons for this was that it was not easy to leave. I had arrived by ship and I wanted to leave by ship. Studying the map, I could see that in the deep south of the country a narrow channel separated Albania from the island of Corfu. It looked no greater than five miles: no distance at all.
“Yes, there are fishermen there, and they might take you across,” a man told me in Tirana.
He was from that area and seemed to have Hellenistic sympathies.
“My family name was Stavro,” he said. “We were orthodox. It means ‘cross’ in Greek. But the government made us change our name. So my grandfather took the name Çeliku—it means ‘steel,’ like Stalin.”
“How could you be orthodox? Didn’t Hoxha ban religion?” I asked.
“Yes. No churches. They were forbidden.”
God was illegal. Albania enjoyed the distinction of being the only officially atheistic country in the entire world. But instead of flocking to churches after the fall of the government they went haywire on porno, which had also been banned.
I was not convinced that I would be able to find a fisherman in southern Albania to take me to Corfu, but there was another way of getting to Greece. Greeks had a tendency to close the border out of spite, because they disliked Albanians and had poor diplomatic relations with the government. If the border was open, there was a bus from Gjirokastër to the Greek town of Ioánnina.
There was said to be a train to Vlorë in the south, but it was not running. Çeliku said there was a bus that went. I had not seen a bus that looked capable of going such a distance. I walked towards the southern edge of town, where I had been told the depot was located. There were no vehicles in sight, but there was the evidence of buses: great oil stains in the dust which spoke of big leaking gaskets.