The Pillars of Hercules

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.