The bad cars of Europe are in Albania. And the hot cars. An unwashed Porsche 928 lurching inexpertly through the square just out of range of my highball ice cubes seemed a probable example. Its huge V-8 was being gunned to piston-tossing, valve-shattering rpms. Even a mid-1980s model 928 would cost an average Albanian sixteen years’ of salary.
An American wire-service reporter was teasing Elmaz about used-car shopping: “I’d like to get a Renault Twingo, maybe. A ’95 or ’96. For about a thousand dollars? One that hasn’t been rolled.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” said Elmaz in the kind of laugh that indicates nobody’s kidding. “I know someplace.”
The wire-service reporter, who seemed to be rather too well-informed on various matters, said that pot cost thirty dollars a kilo in Albania. And The Economist magazine’s business report on Albania said that in March 1997, a fully automatic Kalashnikov assault rifle could be bought on the streets of Tirana for as little as three dollars.
“Everyone is surreptitiously armed,” said the wire-service reporter. Or not so surreptitiously. I saw a middle-aged man in civilian clothes walking along what used to be Boulevard Stalin, holding his five-year-old son by one hand and an AK-47 in the other.
Such are Second Amendment freedoms in Albania. And First Amendment freedoms lag not far behind in their extravagance. Each evening during the first weeks of July 1997, a couple hundred royalists would march into the chaos of Skenderbeg Square, bringing traffic to a new pitch of swerve and collision.
I watched the royalists set up podium and loudspeakers on the steps of a Soviet-designed cement blunder that used to be the Palace of Culture. They unfurled the heart-surgery-colored Albanian flag, bearing the image of what’s either a two-headed eagle or a very angry freak-show chicken. The royalists shouted into the microphone such things as, “We will get our votes, even by blood!” The volume was enough to drown out the loudest car crashes. Then, at greater volume yet, they played the Albanian national anthem, which is as long as a Wagner opera and sounds like the Marine Corps band performing the Ring cycle while falling down all the stairs in the Washington Monument.
The royalists were demonstrating on behalf of one Leka Zogu, who thinks he’s the king of Albania. He’d just gotten his butt whipped (80 percent of the voters said, “jo”) in a national referendum on restoring the monarchy. Not that Albania ever had a monarchy. The country wasn’t even a country until the twentieth century. It was a backwater of the Ottoman Empire from the 1400s on and a back-further-water of the Byzantine Empire before that.
Leka Zogu’s father, Ahmed Zogu, was a putsch artist from the sticks who overthrew what passed for the government in 1924, crowned himself King Zog I in 1928, pimped the country to Mussolini, and Airedaled it into exile one step ahead of Axis occupation in 1939. Leka was two days old at the time. Since then the younger Zogu has sojourned in Rhodesia and South Africa, been thrown out of Spain over an arms-dealing scandal, and spent a brief jail stint in Thailand for gunrunning—at least as good a preparation for the throne as having your ex-wife martyred by paparazzi.
After an hour or so of royalist racket, Leka Zogu’s motorcade arrived, flashing the kind of suction-cup roof lights that people buy when they want you to think they belong to the volunteer fire department. This sloppy parade of Mercedes sedans shoved into the rumpus of Skenderbeg Square, and the royal himself popped out in one royal beauty of a leisure suit. Leka (in the Albanian language the definite article is a suffixed u or i so “Leka Zogu” translates as “Leka the Zog”) stood at the microphone like a big geek—six feet eight inches tall, chinless, and bubble-bellied. He mumbled a few words. (His unmajesty’s command of Albanian is reported to be sketchy.) Then he booked. Wide guys patted lumpy items under their clothes. All the Benzes tried to turn around at once, creating still worse traffic mayhem, if such a thing is possible.
And it is. A few days before I got to Albania some of Leka’s supporters became so enthusiastic that they started a gun battle with the police. The shooting went on for fifteen minutes. Although only one person was killed, because the two sides weren’t actually near each other. The police were in a soccer stadium several blocks from the demonstration.
Anyway, Albania is fairly pissabed with freedoms. Free enterprise not least among them. Capitalism is pursued in Albania with the same zest—not to mention the same order and self-restraint—as driving, politics, and gun control.
Hundreds of cafés and bars have opened, most of them whacked together from raw timber with the same carpentry skills used by Oregon Rasta-Sufis when converting old school buses for Lollapalooza excursions. The rude structures are built on any handy piece of open ground and “have occupied even school yards in the capital,” says The Albanian Daily News, old copies of which, along with every other form of litter, carpet the city streets in NYSE-floor profusion. Private garbage collection is not yet up and running in Tirana, but private garbage disposal is fully operational. Every public space is covered with bags, wrappers, bottles, cans—and the booze shacks and pizza sheds that sold them.
Gardens have been obliterated by jerry-building, monuments surrounded, paths straddled, soccer pitches filled from goal to goal. The Lana River is walled from view, not that you’d want to look. The squatter construction companies tossing up chew-and-chokes on its banks have used pickaxes to make haphazard connections with waste pipes and water mains. Hydrohygienic results are the predictable. The Lana has crossed the lexicological line between river and open sewer. And what used to be Youth Park, a huge area of downtown greenery, has become the world’s first dining and leisure shantytown, a brand-new cold-brewski slum with extra cheese.
But it’s gambling that’s the real meat and drink. It’s done on the same confounding electronic video-card-playing devices that the Pequot Indians are using to reconquer Connecticut. Albania is a country that, from 1986 to 1990, imported a total of sewing machines, electric stoves, and hot-water heaters numbering zero. And Tirana is a city with electricity as reliable as congressional-committee testimony on campaign contributions. But there they are: the very latest examples of wallet-vacuuming technology from America, available everywhere and, through some miracle of Mafia-to-Mafia efficiency, functioning smoothly all day.
Albania is also a country where the poverty line is $143 a month for a family of four. Eighty percent of Albanians are living below that line. And what looks like 80 percent of Albanians are standing in front of bleeping, blinking games of chance feeding 100-lek coins—fifty-cent pieces—into the maw. The most-common commercial sign in Tirana is AMERICAN POKER.
The second most common sign is SHITET. Appropriately. Although it actually means “for sale.” Appropriately. Or perhaps it should be “up for grabs,” whatever that is in Albanian. Maybe it’s “Amex.” I went to an American Express office to get some money, and they were completely taken aback. They would never have anything so grabbable as money right there in an office. For money you go to the Bank in the Middle of the Street. Here—everyone being surreptitiously armed—great wads of money are being waved around, some of it peculiar. I got a few greenbacks with the green on the backs more of a pants-at-a-Westport-cocktail-party shade than usual and a twenty with something dark and odd about the presidential portrait. Was Andrew Jackson in the Jackson 5?
The thousands of tape cassettes being sold in the middle of the street are counterfeit, too. At least I hope they are. I’d hate to think anyone was paying royalties on Bulgarian disco and Turkish rap. The Marlboros are real, however, and cost less than they do when they fall off the back of a truck in Brooklyn. The clothes fell off a truck, too, I think, though not, unfortunately, a DKNY semi. Albanians have the Jersey Dirt Mall mode of dress figured out. Like everything else, these duds are sold intra-avenue, from racks mingled with car accidents, royalists, money, guns, and automated five-card draw.
Reading over what I have written, I fear I’ve made Albanians sound busy. They aren’t. Even their gambling is comparatively idle—exhibiting none of the industry sho
wn by the old bats in Atlantic City with their neatly ordered Big Gulp cups of quarters and special slot-machine yanking gloves.
The Albanian concept of freedom approaches my own ideas on the subject, circa late adolescence. There’s a great deal of hanging out and a notable number of weekday, midafternoon drunk fellows.
There are lots of skulking young men in groups on Tirana’s corners and plenty more driving around in cars with no apparent errand or evident destination. It’s not a mellow indolence. I saw one guy cruising in his Mercedes, an elbow out the window, a wrist cocked over the steering wheel, riding cool and low. But his trunk lid was open, and chained in the boot was a barking, gnashing, furious 150-pound German shepherd.
Men in Albania hold each other’s hands too long in greeting, a gesture that seems to have less to do with affection than disarmament. They kiss each other on the cheeks, Italian style, but more Gotti than Gucci. Everybody stares. Nobody steps out of your way.
The Albanians have a Jolly Roger air. You could give an eye patch and a head hankie to most of the people on the street and cast them in Captain Blood. Not to demean a whole ethnic group or anything, but like most Americans, the only Albanians I’d ever heard of were Mother Teresa and John Belushi. A entire country full of Mother Teresas would be weird enough—everybody looking for lepers to wash. But imagine a John Belushi Nation—except they’re not fat, and they’re not funny.
“They’ll rob you,” said the wire-service reporter as we—pretty idle and indolent ourselves—ordered another round at the Balcony Bar. “Don’t carry your wallet.” Then a neophyte television producer walked up and announced that he’d gone out to tape some local color and hadn’t made it to the city limits before he lost a car, a TV camera, and $5,000 in cash.
A whole family lived in front of the Hotel Tirana, doing nothing. Between the hotel entrance and Skenderbeg Square was a quarter-acre patch of what used to be grass. Therein camped, from dawn to dark, a very big and fat woman; a very small and bedraggled woman; several skinny, greasy men; and approximately a dozen seriously unkempt children. The big woman spent all day spraddle-legged on a tablecloth, playing cards with the skinny men. The small woman spent all day wandering back and forth across the packed-dirt lot. Every time a hotel guest stepped outside, the children descended upon him or her, begging in a horde, or if begging was to no avail, thrusting little hands into pockets and purses, and grasping at whatever the hotel guest was carrying. Otherwise the children swatted and kicked each other. Sometimes the children would go over to the big woman, who’d also give them a swat. And if the tykes obtained money, they’d return to the big woman, and she’d snatch it.
The family had a puffy, sallow baby with the scorched blond hair that is a sign of malnutrition. The infant seemed to be eight or ten months old but didn’t appear to be able to hold its head up. It never cried. A ten- or eleven-year-old boy was the principal caretaker. He squeezed the baby to his chest with one arm while he chased the other children around, giving them karate chops and kung-fu kicks. Meanwhile, the baby’s appendages wagged and jiggled in all directions—a floppy tot.
Between martial-arts exhibitions, the baby was left alone on a sheet of cardboard on Skenderbeg Square’s tumultuous sidewalks. Passersby were supposed to leave coins. Occasionally they did.
“They are Gypsies,” said Elmaz. But Gypsy is the preferred local bigotry epithet, the N-word of the Balkans, with the added advantage that it can be used on anybody darker than Kate Moss.
The translator who worked for the wire-service reporter said he’d questioned the child-care boy about the baby. The boy had said, “His mother was going to throw him away. But she gave him to us. Now we’re taking care of him.”
There is not, so far as I was able to discover, an Albanian Child Abuse Hotline. “That’s because it would be jammed with how-to calls,” said the wire-service reporter.
“What the fuck is with this place?” said someone else at the bar. And I do not have an answer for that.
All of Albania’s rich and varied manifestations of freedom, however, came to a halt promptly at 10 P.M., when the shoot-to-kill curfew began.
It seemed the Albanians had had a bit too much freedom, so much freedom that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had sent an Italian-led contingent of some 7,000 troops to keep the lid on.
The OSCE troops arrived in April 1997 in their scout cars and personnel carriers. The situation in Albania was so bad that having Italians tooling around in armor-plated vehicles actually made the streets safer. Now, after 10 P.M. in Tirana, everything was quiet. No, not quiet. There was continual gunfire coming from the maze of Tirana’s back-streets. And the gunfire set off Tirana’s dogs. As a result I spent the night thinking, first, about stray Kalashnikov slugs and the Hotel Tirana’a floor-to-ceiling windows: “Gosh, I wish I had a room on a lower floor.” Then thinking about what a really large number of loud dogs Tirana has: “Gosh, I wish I had a room on a higher floor.” I ended up back at the balcony bar, fully exposed to both the bullets and the barking, but at least I had gin.
Tirana was not quiet at night, but it was invisible. Nothing moved on the main streets. And most of the town’s electricity was out so I couldn’t see it moving, anyway. I gazed into a stygian void with just an occasional tracer shell arcing across the night sky. Make a wish?
Why is freedom in Albania so different from freedom in the United States? This would take a lot more than an hour to find out, if it could be explained at all.
Albania is a little place the size of Maryland, with a population of 3.25 million. Albania is little, and Albania is out of the way, blocked from the rest of the Balkan Peninsula by high, disorderly mountain ranges, and, until this century, cordoned from the sea by broad, malarial swamps. Seventy-five percent of the land is steeps and ravines. In the north, the Albanian Alps rise in such a forbidding confusion of precipices that they are known as the Prokletije, or Accursed Mountains. In the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon called Albania “a country within sight of Italy which is less known than the interior of America.” (Although Gibbon hadn’t heard about Whitewater and Arkansas politics in general, so perhaps he was being unfair.) As late as 1910, geographical authorities were saying that certain districts of Albania “have never been thoroughly explored.” And considering the neophyte TV producer’s experience, they won’t be explored soon.
This isolated, outlandish place emerged from World War II run by the isolated and outlandish communist guerrilla chieftain, Enver Hoxha. In 1948, Hoxha broke his alliance with Tito because Yugoslavia wasn’t being pro-Soviet enough. In 1961, Hoxha broke his alliance with Khrushchev because the Soviet Union wasn’t being pro-Soviet enough. In 1978, Hoxha threw out the Red Chinese for having played Ping-Pong with the U.S. And by the time Hoxha died in 1985, Albania wasn’t on speaking terms with anyplace but North Korea and maybe the English Department at Yale. Hoxha’s successor, Ramiz Alia, stayed the loony course for a while, but in 1990, with communism going into a career slump all over the globe, Alia tried some reforms. Wrong call.
The Albanians’ response to a sudden introduction of personal autonomy and individual responsibility casts an interesting light on the human psyche. They ran like hell. According to Balkans expert James Pettifer, “Over 25,000 people seized ships moored in Durres Harbor and forced them to sail to Italy.” Thousands of others fled to Greece or occupied the grounds of Western embassies in Tirana. University students pulled down the gigantic gilded statue of Enver Hoxha in Skenderbeg Square, and the Alia government had to dismantle and hide the nearby statues of Stalin and Lenin. There was repeated food rioting, widespread destruction of public property, and extensive looting of everything owned by the government—and everything was.
Then things got better. Dr. Sali Berisha, whom Pettifer calls a “leading cardiologist” (Albania has a leading cardiologist?), was elected president. The Communists were jailed. In Pettifer’s words, “The new government…embarked on a program of privatization and the
construction of a free-market economy.”
But life got too much better. This privatization being programmed and this free-market economy being constructed were based on only one industry: pyramid schemes.
Although Albania seems inaccessible, it has been, over the past three millennia, repeatedly accessed. Albanians have had the misfortune to live too close to the kind of folks who can’t seem to resist invading things—even things like Albania.
Albania has been invaded by various Greek city states, Macedonia, Rome, Byzantium, Slavic hordes, Byzantium again, Bulgarian hordes, Byzantium one more time, Normans, Christian Crusaders, Charles I of Anjou, Serbs, Venetians, Turks, and Fascists. Durres, historically the principal city of Albania, has changed hands thirty-three times since the year 1000.
Albania has been invaded, yes. Conquered, no. While the rest of the Balkan Peninsula was being hellenized, latinized, Slavofied, or Turkey-trotted, Albanians stayed Albanian. Their language is the last extant member of the Phrygo-Thracian family of tongues once spoken by peoples from the far side of the Black Sea to the eastern Adriatic.
The highland areas of Albania have been claimed by various nations but governed by none. Authority has always rested with the Mal, the Albanian word for tribe and also—to give some idea of the cozy interaction among Albanian clans—the Albanian word for the mountain that each village is on top of.
The tribalism that has disappeared from the rest of Europe (or been reduced to what tartan you wear on your golf slacks) is still a prime fact of existence in Albania. Tribal identification transcends the theological hatreds so avidly pursued in the rest of the Balkans. There are tribes with both Christian and Muslim members. “The true religion of the Albanian is being an Albanian,” said nineteenth-century nationalist Pashko Vasa.