The Pillars of Hercules

“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,” Ahmet 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.