On the Road to Babadag

Shqiperia

AT FIVE THIRTY in the morning in Korçë in front of the Grand Hotel, several men were already standing. In the course of the day, more came. Particularly on the wide street that led to the fairgrounds. But they also stood in front of the post office and in the shaded lane by the newspaper kiosk. By the afternoon there was a whole crowd of them. All guys. In twos and threes or by themselves, engaged in conversation or staring into space. Sometimes they took a step or two forward, then back, but the movement had no direction, it was a short break in the absence of motion. A few held bundles of Albanian bills in their hands and tried to exchange these for euros or dollars. But most just stood, smoking long, thin Karelia cigarettes, at almost three-quarters of a dollar a pack. They seemed to be waiting for something, an important piece of news, an announcement, an event, but no news came, and at each dawn they assembled again, the crowd growing as the hours passed, thinning a bit at siesta time, but in the afternoon the street was packed, the crowd swaying yet never really moving in the heat. Women appeared from time to time, secretly, sideways, barely visible. They carried bags, packages, but were ignored by the male herd. The men stayed in place, awaiting some change, staring at the vast emptiness of time, sentenced to their own stationary presence. I had seen the same thing in Tirana, at Skanderbeg Square, and in Gjirokastër, on the main street that ran from the mosque on the hill to the town. In Saranda, at six thirty in the morning, at the Lili Hotel, I went down for breakfast and found the bar filled with men. They sat over morning coffee and little glasses of raki, immersed in cigarette smoke — fifteen, maybe twenty men. They watched the street, and sometimes one spoke to another, but evidently the day had no surprises in store for them. Prisoners of the day from its beginning, they had nowhere to go; wherever they went, it was in the shackles of nothing to do.

Around Patos the land began to flatten. The mountains were now at our back. To the Adriatic it was a dozen kilometers, and the horizon to the left took on a gray-blue color. It was hot and stuffy in the bus. People tossed cans of cola and beer out the windows.

On the outskirts of Fier, on either side of the road were abandoned cars, mostly Mercedes and Audis, in various stages of decay. The cars were ten, fifteen, twenty years old, and there were hundreds of them, in smaller or larger groups. Near Durrës, the hundreds became thousands in the beating heat, on the bare ground, among clumps of burned grass. Some were nude, stripped, their metal pulled off, revealing the whole pornography of axle, undercarriage, transmission, brake drum, rusted remains; others still had parts of their chassis, baked dull, and stood staunchly on bald, wrinkled tires. Through this endless field of bodies wandered blackened men with blowtorches, there to cut off sheets of metal still in good health. White streams of sparks brighter than the sun. A butchering of the unalive. Other men waited to receive the needed parts. The rest of the cars, lying about, had taken root in the ground: the broken bones of connecting rods, crooked pistons, blind headlights, crushed radiators, fenders eaten through, gas cans full of holes, gutted oil filters, gearboxes with their insides strewn. Gangrene in hoses, cancer in floorboards, syphilis in gaskets, and the cataracts of shattered windows. The suburb of Durrës was a great field hospital for automotive Germany, a hospital in which only amputation was performed.

Durrës is a port, so these thousands of bodies must have come here by ship. I remember photographs of the famous Albanian exodus of 1992: people hanging over the sides like desperate bunches of grapes, from the quarterdeck, from the rigging, and fishing boats, ferries, and barges all covered with living human tape, as if the whole nation wished to flee from itself, to go as far as possible, beyond the sea, to the other side of the Adriatic, Italy, the wide world, which seemed salvation, being an unimaginable, fairy-tale opposite of their cursed land. Now from that wide world came flotillas laden with scrap, junk, internal combustion corpses.

When the highway turned toward Tirana, the bunkers began. Gray concrete skulls, jutting a meter above the ground, gazed with eyes that were black vertical slits. They looked like corpses buried standing. Each with room to accommodate a machine-gun crew. Scattered across low, flat hills, they overlooked the lifeless automobile junkyards. Junkyard and bunker both indestructible. Astrit said that in the whole country, most likely, there was not one mill in operation in order to melt down all this German metal. Nor enough dynamite to level these 600,000 bunkers built to hold off an invasion by the entire world.

An hour and a half by boat from Corfu. Half an hour by hydrofoil. The building at the Greek port is long and squat. Italian, English, and German tourists sit on piled luggage or drag day packs on wheels. The crowd pushes at the edge, divides into separate streams, forms lines at the gangplanks leading to the ferries, some of which look like seven-story department stores. Tour buses bring all of Europe. Heaps of carry-ons with keypad locks await baggage handlers. Five guys in black leather tend their burdened Hondas and Kawasakis. At the quay stands the three-mast Von Humboldt, the color of dark vegetation. Also a mahogany yacht with a British flag. On board, young men in white trousers hurrying. Glittering snakes of automobiles slowly slide into the deep holds. In the sky, you can see the white bodies of Boeings and DCs descending to land. Couples take their last snapshots in the Greek light.

We didn't have to ask where the ship to Saranda was. The crowd of people waiting there was still, pressed at the gangplank. They had boxes, cartons, circles of green garden hoses, those plastic bags in red-and-blue checks familiar in Europe and throughout the world, packages wrapped in foil, ordinary duffels, plastic bags with store names long since rubbed off, and they all seemed weary, but their weariness was not yesterday's or last month's. It was significantly older.

A Greek border guard in a white shirt and dark glasses took passports from a wooden box and called out names: Illyet… Freng… Myslim… Hajji… Bedri… The people grabbed their things and ran onto the feeble ship. The border guard handed the passports to a stocky civilian. It was as if a shadow had fallen on them, as if they stood under an unseen cloud, while the rest of the port — the vacationing crowd, the tanned arms of the women, the gold rings, sandals, and backpacks — was bathed in a light straight out of Kodak.

A small Amstel onboard cost two euros. We sailed along the strait, the land remaining in sight. The mountain shore on our right was treeless. The burned ridge looked as if the sun had always stood at the zenith above it: eternal south, rock as old as the world, flaking from the heat.

Then I saw Saranda. It began suddenly, without warning. On the bare slopes, the skeletons of houses appeared. From a distance you'd think there had been a fire, but these buildings were unfinished. Darker than the mountains but as mineral, as if baked in a great oven and stripped by fire of everything that might suggest a home. Deep in the bay, the city thickened a little, gleamed with glass, turned green, but we sailed on, to reach the shore. A rusted crane stood in a cement square. Over a gray barrack fluttered the two-headed Albanian eagle and the blue flag of the EU. Inside were a desk and two chairs. A woman in a uniform told us to pay twenty-five euros, took thirty, gave us a receipt, and said with a smile that she had no change. On the hill above the port stood apartment blocks of rust-red concrete. But for the clothes drying on lines and the satellite dishes, they looked abandoned.

Yes, everyone should come here. At least those who make use of the name Europe. It should be an initiation ceremony, because Albania is the unconscious of the continent. Yes, the European id, the fear that at night haunts slumbering Paris, London, and Frankfurt am Main. Albania is the dark well into which those who believe that everything has been settled once and for all should peer.

"Welcome in bloody country," Fatos said, in English, when we met at the Café Opera in Skanderbeg Square in Tirana. I was drinking beer and wondering if something as cosmopolitan as a blessing honored national boundaries. If the Greek border guards sent it back at the road to Kakavilë, if the Italians did not permit it to be taken on board the ferries to Bari and Brindisi. In the square, in the shade beneath trees, dozens of men were exchanging money: 136 leks for a dollar. In the crowd of these black marketers I saw several radio cars. The cops as well as the money changers and the rest of Albania smoked thin Karelias that summer, at a hundred leks a pack. In the square, an air of indifferent symbiosis. Everyone was connected by a time that had to be waited through. Seconds and minutes grew, swelled, and burst open, but there was nothing inside.

I asked Fatos if the exchange was legal. "Of course not," he said.

"And the police?"

"They're just here to keep the peace," was his reply.

It was still dark at five thirty in Korçë. Men sat in the bar near the bus station, drinking their morning coffee and their raki in small tumblers. They boil the coffee with a handheld coil right in the cup. The raki is drunk at dawn, because it dispels sleep even better than coffee. But you have only one: raki isn't a drink, it's a custom. Then an old Mercedes bus pulled up. It slowly filled with people. The driver handed out plastic bags. The first horse-drawn carts of produce began gathering for the market. When the sky had turned an unquestionable gray, we set off, south. Two cops, standing at the front, wore antique Soviet TT-33 pistols with worn stars on the butts. It was only ten kilometers to the Greek border, but the names of the places we passed sounded Slavic: Kamenice, Vidice, Selenice, Borove… When we got on the first switchback road, I understood the reason for the plastic bags. A fat woman wearing a lot of gold and holding a battery-run fan began to groan, and her family got up to help. They took the pocket fan from her hand, and she began vomiting into the bag. Another woman did the same, and another. Then it was the children's turn. This sickness, Astrit told us later, afflicted only women and children. The men traveled without the side effect, but they took part in the general excitement of the misfortune — the whole bus did, offering words of comfort, making comments, and throwing the used bags, passed from hand to hand, out the window. The driver immediately distributed new ones.

At Ersekë the mountains grew more powerful. We climbed to 1,700 meters: second gear, first, and the constant corkscrew at cliff's edge without a barrier. I saw no houses, paths, or animals. Yellow burned grass covering the domed peaks, white scree, and for an hour and a half not a sign of human habitation. I counted the bunkers. I stopped counting at the fifty-seventh. They were everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Skulls of cement stuck on slopes in places no vehicle had a chance of reaching. Maybe the cement and steel had been transported by mule and donkey, or maybe it had all been carried in on shoulders, I don't know. Gray concrete toads, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos and threes, guarded the imagined passes and gorges; they intersected lines of anticipated attack, awaited the offensive, the invasion, and their black, empty stares took in the whole horizon. They gave the impression of something that would endure to the end of time. Older than the mountains, indifferent to geology and erosion. I kept reminding myself of their number: 600,000. In each, let's say, you had two soldiers manning a machine gun or holding submachine guns — that is, 1,200,000 people, which meant about half the population of the country. During the artillery tests, goats were locked in them. The holes for shooting resembled oversize sunglasses. In this empty landscape, where a car might appear once in an hour, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being watched.

A stop in Leskovik, near a small bar, where coffee, raki, and hard-boiled eggs were served. A man approached our table but didn't sit. He only needed the tabletop. He rolled the egg on it to crack the shell under his palm. It took him a long time, because he would lose track, watching us — maybe seeing and listening to foreigners for the first time in his life. The shell had cracked, the white was visible, but he kept watching, without a word.

There were bunkers too in Leskovik, but much larger. They resembled concrete yurts with double doors of steel. Among them, donkeys grazed. The animals were the same color as the shelters, and the stony field was the same color, too, and so were the mountain slopes framing the scene. After the town, we entered the shade of the Nemerçke range. I had never seen such mountains. They seemed molded out of ash. The timberline stopped as if cut, and then there was only a barren, vertical massif, which from this distance appeared to be floating, detached, impermanent. There was nothing there but nakedness. The truncated summit of Papingut looked like a pile of dust, a dump that reached the sky. This dust, this dirt, must have sifted from somewhere above, from space, from the farthest corners of the universe.

Albania, see, is ancient. Its beauty brings to mind species and epochs that are long extinct and have left behind no likenesses. The landscape endures yet is constantly disintegrating, as if the sky and air were tearing at it with their fingers. Hence the cracks, ravines, fissures, and the persistent weight of matter that wishes to be left alone, to be rid of its shapes, to rest, and to return to the time when there were no forms.

Gjirokastër is a town of white stone. The roofs of the houses are covered with black tiles that once were white too. The windows of the pension Hajji Kotoni directly face the minaret. Several times a day from the high tower, the loudspeakers come on, and the metal voice of the muezzin fills the streets, the alleyways, and the whole valley of the Drinos River. Next to the mosque is the Greek consulate. A crowd has been standing there since morning: dozens of women and men waiting for a visa. On television is a kilometer-long line of Albanian cars at the border in Kakavilë. For a few days now the Greeks have been letting no one in. They say that the computer system is down. The Albanians say it's intentional: Let the Albanians learn their place, let them stand and ask for Greek work and the Greek euro, let them know it's the Greeks who grant it. But, the Albanians say, without us their vineyards will grow wild, their olive groves too, as ours have, because we must leave them and go to Greece, because that's where the work is and the money. Greeks don't know how to work, say the Albanians. They despise us, but without us they couldn't drink wine, because they have grown fat and lazy.

I sip a black Albanian Fernet and look down on the hometown of Enver Hoxha. In the early afternoon the streets empty, and the crowd before the consulate disappears. The sun, directly overhead, sweeps the shadows from the narrowest alleys. It becomes so still, it's as if everyone has left, abandoning the town to its fate, to the predation of time and the heat. From the mountains, wolves will come down and breed with the dogs; the vineyards will pry apart the stone walls; the hundred-year-old Mercedes will pine for their chauffeurs and die; the Turkish fortress on the hill will fall into itself; the wind will fill the rooms of the Sopoti Hotel with sand; rust will eat into the Muslim loudspeakers; the raki will burn through the screw tops of the bottles in the Festivali Bar; the discarded packs of hundred-lek notes with Fanem Noli on them will all turn into oxygen; and finally the gray carapace of the mountains will cover everything.

So I drank black Fernet and tried to imagine a country that one day everyone would leave. They would abandon their land to the mercy of time, which would break open the envelope of the hours and months and in pure form enter what remained of cities, to dissolve them, turn them into primal air and minerals. For time, here, was the most important element. As persistent and heavy as a giant ox, it filled the river valleys, crushing the mountain peaks from Shkoder to Saranda, from Korçë to Durrës. It was in time's gut that these men lived who appeared on street corners and squares. Possibly they saw its coming death and knew fear, because the final throes of the beast in whose belly they waded would mean, for them, isolation: if the beast died, they could never meet again. They would be carried away by the separate little streams of minutes and days, streams that were only a pathetic human imitation of the original current, whose power brought to mind the power of no motion. They would have to live off the carrion of eternity, whose taste is precisely that of freedom.

On the beach in Saranda, people moved the trash to make a place for themselves. They pushed aside the plastic bottles, cartons, cans, those emptied wonders of civilization, the shopping bags of Boss, Marlboro, and Tesco, to clear patches of sand on which entire families could spread out. The wind carried the transparent tatters landward and draped them on the trees. It blew from the west. Never in my life had I seen such a mess and the calm with which people lived in it and added to it constantly. The patches of cleared sand were the size only of a mattress or a little larger, allowing a group to sit. There was something elegant and contemptuous in their gestures as they discarded used things, a kind of lordliness of consumption and a theater of indifference toward whatever didn't give instant gratification. The wind blew from the west both literally and figuratively, yet it brought nothing of value. Perhaps those things of value, which no doubt were there in the west, simply couldn't be transported and lost their worth en route, spoiling, decomposing. But perhaps they would have been of no use to the people here in any case.

The first day, as we walked from the port, Genci latched on to us. He was about thirty, wore sandals (no socks) and filthy black shorts. On his back he carried a kid several years old. In fluent English he asked us where we were from and if we needed a room. We certainly needed one, after a night of no sleep. He led us among apartment blocks that were a few stories high and coming apart: stench, gutters choked with rubble and rotten trash, piles of stones, indestructible plastic, a kind of Balkan morning after. Tanned children looked at us with curiosity. We hadn't the strength to get rid of this well-wishing character. Genci gave a shout, and an old woman appeared, all in black. We followed her. She unlocked a gate that enclosed a patio on the ground floor of one of the blocks, then unlocked the front door. It was cool inside and absurdly clean. The two-room apartment gleamed. The terra-cotta floor gleamed, the refrigerator, the bathroom, the television set, the large fan. There was even a shine and smell of cleanliness on the bedding. As if no one had ever lived here, just cleaned and cleaned. "She's a widow," Genci told us, "so you have to pay her twenty-five dollars a night."

We met Genci a few more times after that. He talked nonstop and was always promising us something. He said he knew the writer Ismail Kadare, that Kadare was now in Albania and Genci could arrange a meeting. He offered us an air-conditioned apartment in downtown Tirana for ten dollars. He told us about his conversion to Protestantism; about his wife, who worked for the Soros Foundation; with pride about his father, who during the Hoxha regime was a security guard. One day, when we were discussing Europe in general, he asked if there had been communism in Poland.

From the pier promenade in Saranda you can see the misty shore of Corfu. You can sit at a coffeehouse table in the shifting shade of a palm tree and watch the passenger ferries move through the smooth water of the strait and vanish in the open sea. It's very possible that the international tourists look at the Albanian shore as they might look at the shore of, say, Liberia or Guinea. They may even hold binoculars. The seven-story floating hotels sparkle in the sun and are gone. A touch of safari in this, and mirage.

I drank Greek retsina and tried to imagine this place twenty years ago. Tried to imagine the country cut off from the rest of the world like an island in some godforsaken part of the ocean. A country that had about 160 enemies (let's say that at the time there were that many nations on the political map). Danger lurked to the east and to the west. Capitalism lurked, communism lurked in its degenerate Soviet and Chinese forms, African monarchies lurked, and the technocratic regimes of Southeast Asia, and Greenland lurked and the island Republic of Cape Verde, and there lurked the cosmos debauched by the Americans and the Soviets. Enver Hoxha, leaving Tirana, locks the television station and takes the key with him, so no one in his absence will let in a Greek, Italian, or Yugoslav program. In Saranda today, it's late afternoon, except that there are not all these hastily assembled concrete bars and hotels. People sit on the seashore and look at passing ships that belong to the enemy. The huge semitransparent homes sail on to their destruction, because they belong to a world over which hangs a heavy curse. Dusk falls. That world has no meaning, no form, it is a kind of antiworld, or antireality ruined by a fundamental lie.

Three hundred twenty kilometers at the longest place, 140 at the widest. Which comes to about 28,000 square kilometers of absolute truth and complete isolation. In 1948, Yugoslavia was the renegade; in 1961, it was the Soviets; in 1978, China. Betrayal hems in Albania on every side. Village teachers set slogans in stone on the hilltops. "Vigilance, Vigilance, Vigilance." "The Most Dangerous Enemy Is the One You Forget." "Think, Work, and Live like a Revolutionary." Carelessness or error may bring the accusation of treason. Three hundred twenty are sentenced for carelessness, 140 for error, and there is no chance of escape, because the rest of the world does not exist.

The slogans in stone are best seen from above, from the sky. They were a challenge to the cosmos. Apparently the goal was maximum: to convert not China, not the Soviets, but the entire universe.

One day we set out from Korçë to Voskopojë. We wanted to see what was once the largest city in the European part of the Ottoman Empire, 30,000 homes built so close together "that a goat could walk from one end to the other on the rooftops," and 22 houses of worship. We wanted to see the place where the caravan trails intersected from Poland, Hungary, Saxony, ConstanŢa, Venice, Constantinople, and where 280 years ago the first printing press was established in the Balkans.

To get there, we hired a small delivery van. It was driven by Jani, and his buddy kept trying to start a conversation. He knew a few Slavic words. His "lady comrade" was Slovak. They met in an olive plantation in Greece. We went up and up a road full of potholes. For thirty kilometers there was no crossroad, only a donkey path now and then coming down the mountain. The men gave us cigarettes and showed us their signet rings in the form of a lion's head.

Voskopojë was all ground-floor. It didn't seem constructed at all, just slapped together with stones. Some of the houses sank under their own weight, and it wasn't the result of neglect or age but of the material used — simply, nothing larger or higher could be assembled with that sifting stuff. This was more geology than architecture. As if one day the earth parted and gave to the world its rendition of human building. And now the falling walls, dribbling facades, cracked clay trickling from joints, split roofs, and the wood of the gates and fences splintered by the heat, with the help of erosion and gravity, were doing their best to return to the bosom of the earth.

Jani and his buddy waited for us in the bar, which was a single small stone room with a Greek woman, over fifty, at the counter. She listed for us all the churches that once stood here. She served us cheese, paprika, bread, and raki. She didn't want money; she wanted to talk, to tell. It didn't bother her that we all had to guess at what we were saying to one another. Others came, to look at us and shake our hands. Jani and his colleague drank one Albanian brandy after another and chased them down with Tirana beer. We wanted to stay longer but were afraid for our guides, who measured time in shots of liquor. People came out of the bar to stand and watch us leave. The men talked and talked. We were in a cornfield; people tore off golden ears and stuffed them in our pockets. Now it was downhill all the way, and we coasted in neutral to save gas. Jani put on monotonous, trancelike music, some kind of Turkish techno, and he and his buddy started dancing in their seats. They pitched and twisted as if they were riding camels. Jani let go of the steering wheel and raised his arms in fluid circles. Sometimes they turned to make sure we were having fun too. Then, to the dull desert rhythm, they began to yell, "Ben Laden! Ben Laden!" and with such swaying, with open windows letting in the hot air and dust, we reached Korçë. But that wasn't the end of it, because we absolutely had to visit a shop belonging to a friend of Jani, and of course we had to drink beer. We sat on benches among herbs, tomato plants, and the buzzing of flies, and Jani explained to us that the owner was a police officer but had decided to start his own business. The black-haired man smiled shyly, gave us cigarettes and hard red apples. The fiancé of the Slovak woman slept, his head between two white round cheeses.

Of the old fortress in Krujë, all that remained was a stone tower, a few walls, and an outline of foundations. The rest was reconstructed in 1982 by Pranvera Hoxha, daughter of Enver. She was an architect and had power, and this was how she imagined medieval Albania. It was here that in 1443 Skanderbeg hung the flag with the black two-headed eagle and declared the country's independence. He challenged Turkey, before which all Christian Europe trembled in those days. Callistus III spoke of him as "Christ's athlete," though George Kastrioti in his youth had converted to Islam, hence the name Skander. He lost, of course, and Albania had to wait until 1913 for its independence. All this, the whole tale of many centuries, with the flags, likenesses of heroes, statesmen, documents, and a copy of Skanderbeg's helmet, could be found in the building of Enver's daughter. At the entrance, guarded by a soldier with a Kalashnikov, stood a line.

We walked back, down a long, narrow street of ancient homes. There were about a dozen, and in each the old times were sold, thousands of objects, tens of thousands. In chaos and dimness, put in piles, set in stacks, hung in bundles, the entire past of Albania was gathered here. Carved chests, heavy dark tables, narghiles, curved knives, necklaces of silver coins, hand-sewn dresses permeated with age and decay, dioramas of Istanbul and Mecca, pieces of harness, mountaineer shoes desiccated and flaking, oriental filigree, sabers, wood furniture, bone utensils, objects made of horn, divans, blackened iron pots — a kind of dusty supermarket of a culture, all worn smooth by the touch of generations, not the least bit fake, only recently pulled from the dark and given a wipe for sale. We stopped at each treasure den in turn, but the variety of stuff and its barbaric splendor pushed us away. At one point, the power went out. The sellers led us deep into a black maze and with flashlights showed us items. A golden circle jumped from object to object, from one fragment of the past to the next. Out of the gray murk, a gleam, the shred of an outfit, an ornament, the metallic blink of jewelry, and it was like trying to learn about a world you couldn't completely believe in. Part museum, part flea market, part archive-storehouse. The helpless beam of light, wandering lost, turned it into a metaphor for Albania. In one of the shops, on an archaic ottoman, lay the owner. His boots upright beside him as he slept.

In practically every antique store there was a corner where the latest history was piled in a heap. Paper, mainly, likenesses of Enver; tomes and albums in which the leader posed against the background of his accomplishments: Enver before the multitude, Enver before a new housing development, Enver before a tilled field or a factory. Besides paper there were medals and ribbons with the obligatory red star. Only these things were left, and were for sale. I don't know if anyone was buying them. For an album about the life of Hoxha, one merchant wanted thirty dollars. He gave the price and wasn't interested in bargaining. He repeated his "thirty" and finally, impatient, turned his back. "Albanians don't bargain," Astrit told me later. "Particularly with a foreigner. They think all foreigners have more money than they do, and if you try to pay less, it's an injustice."

There were bunkers here too. Everywhere, in every shop — dozens, hundreds of miniature bunkers in white stone. They could serve as ashtrays, paperweights, knickknacks. A souvenir of Albania when you left.

Albania is loneliness. I recall a late afternoon in Korçë. The market, a relic of Ottoman days, was empty now. All the antique Mercedes had left, as well as the horse-drawn two-wheel carts. A woman had swept the square of its litter. That day the sky was gray, and when the crowd dispersed and the colorful riot of commodities disappeared, the gray flowed down and filled the empty place. The abandoned market was inert, as if no one had ever come by. Then, in the farthest corner of the square, I saw three men. They were squatting around a tiny grated fire and roasting ears of corn. You could hardly see them against the gray wall. The gathering dusk erased their profile. You could see only the flame, a red, uncertain flicker in the wind.

One day Astrit and I were talking about emigration routes in Europe, the never-ending westward flow from east and south, the guest-working nomads from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, the indigent coming to make conquest of the land of the Germans, French, Anglo-Saxons, and all the rest, to find employment in Cape Saint Vincent, Cape Passero, and the fish-processing plants of Iceland. I told Astrit about Poles and Ukrainians at German construction sites and farms; I sang the old ballad of how hard it is for the worse off to live in a better-lit place. All to balance somehow his Albanian tale. When I finished, he said, "It's not the same. You don't know what it means to be an Albanian in Europe." We changed the subject.

"These remain from '97," Rigels said. It was in Gjirokastër, and I had asked him about the ruined ground floors of some of the buildings. No doors, no display windows, only huge holes at the base filled with rubbish, bits of furniture, stones. In the spring of 1997, the financial pyramid collapsed. The government of Salieri Berisha maintained to the end that everything was under control, and in a way it supported the activity of these fictional institutions. Tempted by the geometric rise of wealth, people sold everything they had — homes, apartments — took loans, and put the money in accounts so it would shoot up like the mercury in a thermometer when you run a fever. Tens of thousands of Albanians lost everything. "So what happened then?" I asked Rigels. "The shops, the little bars, belonged to the government?" He smiled. "No, they belonged to those who had something. The ones who robbed, who destroyed, they had nothing. It was revenge taken for the possession of anything."

I tried to imagine. We were sitting in a pleasant bar in the bowels of an old fortress overlooking the city. We drank white wine. Rigels greeted acquaintances. Nearby, teenage boys were drinking beer and talking about girls, and I tried to picture how five years ago kids their age had drilled the air with Kalashnikov rounds in a moment of joy because justice and truth were finally theirs. A few, from windows, shot neighbors they had never liked. I pictured this reckless revolution of people who had been robbed blind. Revolt in Gjirokastër and Vlora, in the south, while Berisha was north. The geographic divide so strong historically, it spelled civil war. The president in the north ordered the armories opened, in the hope that his compatriots would launch a crusade to crush the rebellious south.

"But it soon became apparent that the north-south civil war was not going to happen. Anarchy took its place. The Albanians — some of them — followed orders; others followed their old dream of getting a rifle; some, fearing the future or just copying others, broke into the armories and took whatever they could put their hands on, mines and radioactive material included. Later they shot into the air — in celebration, joy, terror, or simply to try out their new weapons. Armed people went to the prisons and released 1,500 prisoners, 700 of whom had been convicted for murder. On that day [March 10, 1997], more than 200 died, mainly from the bullets shot into the air, and thousands were wounded. Marauding thieves began their work, and no one knew whether these were Berisha people or just bandits. It got to the point that railroad tracks were taken apart, so that the individual rails could be sold as scrap in Montenegro."

I can't help seeing a resemblance between the slogans in stone and the suicidal shooting into the air. Both gestures are absurd, yet in a way they constitute a challenge to reality. The citizens of the collapsed government, having been chained by Hoxha's totalitarian vision and having embraced anarchy, behaved as if the world would perish with them. At the same time, Enver was as confident of his immortality as the rebellious mob. Both he and they lived entirely in the present. Hoxha probably believed that everything depended on his will, so no limits existed for him. The men shooting into the air felt that nothing depended on them, therefore they could do anything.

"Shqiperia" is "Albania." Even its true name, in a sense, means isolation, because outside the Balkans hardly anyone knows it. For two weeks I listened to Albanian spoken in the street, on buses, on the radio, and I don't think I heard once the word Albania. It was always Shqiperia, Shqiptar, shqiperise…

The word comes from the verb shqiptoj, which is simply "to talk," "to speak." In a tongue that no one else understands.