The Pillars of Hercules

At that point it began to be excavated, and bits of it started to vanish, only to appear as elements in the nearby houses. The Roman amphitheater was a mess, like everything else, and the underground passages that had been dug out were flooded.

“Pump’s broken!” the watchman said. Nevertheless, he had earned his five leks.

We went, Ali and I, to King Zog’s palace. Ali said that it was now a government guest house, like Hoxha’s mansion in Tirana. “Sometimes visitors stay here.” It was a squarish villa at the top of the hill, less impressive up close than it had seemed from the deck of the ferry Venezia.

Zog had a son, Ali said. He had been born in this palace, and the next day the infant had been spirited into exile with his father and mother.

“Do you want him to be your king?”

Ali laughed at the suggestion, and said, “He spent one day here. Then a few years ago he came back. Also for a day. So he’s—what?—fifty-five or fifty-six, and in his whole life he’s spent two days in Albania!”

I asked him whether it was true, as the youths in Tirana had told me, that all the borders of Albania had been closed, and that people were forbidden to leave.

Yes, Ali said, it was against the law—no one could leave.

“Why?”

“Why! Why!” He slapped his head to ridicule my pestering question. “You think it’s strange that we couldn’t leave this country. Look, when I was a little boy I couldn’t leave the house! Everyone stayed in. My parents kept the door locked. I couldn’t go out. You understand? No one went out of the house during Hoxha’s time.”

“They went to work, though?”

“Yes. Then straight home.”

On our way back to Tirana we passed the decrepit factories. The biggest was a rubber factory. “Is it working?”

“Destroyed,” Ali said. “All the factories are destroyed. Rubber factory. Plastics factory. Machinery. All broken.”

“Who did it?”

“Who! Who!” He smacked the side of his head again. “Who do you think did it?” He laughed but it was a shameful laugh. “I did it! In 1990 and again last year! We were excited. We broke everything!”

However poor Tirana seemed, life was harder in the countryside. About thirty miles south of Tirana many people had taken up residence in the larger bunkers and bomb shelters. They had extended them at the entrance with a framework of poles, covered with plastic or canvas sheets. It was bound to happen, with so many bunkers and such a serious housing shortage.

I had come here with Adrian Bebeti, a native of Tirana, in his late twenties, who also owned a stolen car, a BMW with a tape deck and leather seats. I had met him near the Dajti and he agreed to take me on a slow trip to southern Albania for a hundred dollars, stopping at Vlorë and anywhere else I wished, and dropping me at Sarandë, where (“Perhaps,” he said in Italian) I might find a boat to take me to Greek Corfu.

Himself, he hated Greeks, he said. They were scum who did little but persecute Albanians and lord over them the fact that they were members of the European Community. And look at them, the average Greek was just as pathetic as the average Albanian.

Adrian spoke Italian fluently. He had visited Italy twice. His brother worked there. He watched Italian television—he liked the game shows, the football, the music programs.

Driving south, we passed a burned-out factory.

“Did you do that?” I asked him.

“Not that one,” he said. “I burned another one!”

Traveling down the coast, about twenty miles south of Durrës, Adrian pulled off the road near a huge parking lot. But it was not a parking lot.

“All stolen,” Adrian said. Tutto rubato.

It was the thieves’ car market, all the cars lined up in an orderly way beside the shoreline. The Mediterranean had some odd beaches, but this one was by far the oddest. There were about five hundred cars and Albanians swarmed around them, kicking the tires, flashing money, making deals. Mr. Lombardi, are you looking for your Fiat that was stolen in Rome a few months ago? It was here. Mr. Schmidt, your Mercedes that was pinched in Munich, and Mr. Wilson’s Jeep Cherokee that was last seen in a hotel parking lot in Lausanne—these and many others were here under the scrubby pines by the Albanian shore. They were in good order, with new papers, and there were so many it was impossible for me to look at all of them. The prices were reasonable because, having been stolen, they had no book value, only what the market would bear. They were much cheaper, Adrian said, than what they would have cost in Italy or Germany. The number of them, and their excellent condition, and the remote spot on another grubby beach, nowhere near a town, all impressed me. It struck me that some of them might have come with me the week before on the ferry Venezia from Bari.

“Crooked lawyers in Italy fix them up with new papers, and off they go,” Adrian said.

“Ask them how much this Mercedes is.”

But he wouldn’t. He said, “It is not a good idea to ask questions here if you are not intending to buy a car. They will wonder why you ask so many questions.”