The Pillars of Hercules

12 The Ferry Venezia to Albania

It was not until I was on board the ferry Venezia, among dowdy women wearing long trousers under their thick skirts and grizzled cheese-paring men in cloth caps and frayed track suits — both men and women had the faces of fretful tortoises — that I realized that I was at last on my way to Albania. I had rehearsed it all mentally with such thoroughness that the whole business seemed inevitable. I had bought a ferry ticket from an agent in Ancona. The ferry was leaving from Bari, two-hundred-odd miles down the coast. I went by train to Bari. Returning to a city I always retraced my steps. In Bari this meant the same hotel, a certain laundry, a certain restaurant, a certain bookstore, a stroll down the Corso to the port. The women at the laundry remembered me, and one said, “We think you’re an artist of some kind.” That was nice. But they expressed amazement that I was going to Albania, which is regarded with horror by the Barese.

Another man in Bari was franker. “Albanians are the filthiest,” he said. Sporchissimi. “And the poorest.” Poverissimi “Stay here!”

No argument could detain me. I was beyond being determined; I was programmed for Albania. I had my fifty-dollar ferry ticket. My clothes were washed. I had a stock of books and batteries for my radio. I even had a map of the place. I did not want to listen to any Italian’s opinions about Albania — none of the ones I met had been there. But it was only on the deck of the Venezia as we headed east out of the harbor that I remembered that I had no visa for Albania, I hadn’t the foggiest idea where I was going, or why. All I had done was offer myself as a passenger. I had merely shown up and said: Please take me.

But where? The importance of getting to Albania had preoccupied me to such an extent that I had forgotten why I was going. On board, I wanted to ask people what their intentions were in Albania, thinking that it would offer some clue as to why I was going. No one was very conversational. The passengers were seedy but calm. The Albanians muttered in Geg or Tosk and ignored me. They crouched over little paper parcels of food, sinister-looking scraps of meat and crumbly crusts of bread and mousetrap cheese. There were not many children, though one family with two children had among its possessions, packed into cardboard boxes, a rocking horse with green fur glued to it.

The decks of the ferry were crammed with stolen cars. I had been told by people in Bari that the cars on the ferry to Durrës had been snatched from streets all over Europe, given new documents, and exported to Albania, where they would be sold on the black market and then vanish down dusty roads. There were the usual aid workers and the vans from various charities making their weekly food and clothing run. But Italian aid workers were the opposite of solemn — they were truck drivers, smokers, shouters, practical jokers, goosing each other and laughing. They sprawled in the cafeteria, mocking the awfulness of the food (wet spaghetti, soggy salad, inky wine) and yakking, then one would say, “You recognize this song?” and would begin singing something sacrilegious in a falsetto voice.

I had the feeling that I was the only one on board who was just going for the ride. On deck I tuned my radio and listened to the news. “The trial of Ramiz Alia, former prime minister of Albania, started in Tirana today,” I heard, and told myself that my trip was timely, yet knew that I was kidding myself. I knew nothing of Albania except that for fifty years the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha had allowed few foreigners to enter and no Albanian to leave. Albania, cut off from everything, had a reputation for being one of the strangest countries in the world. With the great shakeup brought on by the Soviet collapse, Albania had changed — hadn’t it? It must have, because here I was, en route to the coastal city of Durrës.

The moon was up, the ship passed parallel to the shore, along a sea-level string of lights that were the streetlamps of the coast road south of Bari. Then the ship swung east, into the darkness.

Hurrying from Croatia to Italy to catch this ferry, I had a sense of weariness, and wondered whether I had the stomach to push on. But the notion of going to Albania lifted my spirits, because I had never been there before and I knew nothing about it, and neither did anyone else. That in itself seemed a novelty, for here on the most heavily beaten path in the world, the shore of the Mediterranean, it was still possible to travel into the unknown.

At 6:30 in the morning I woke with a start in the tobacco-stink of my cabin and only then realized I had no porthole. I had to go on deck to see that we were in bright sunshine approaching the low green outline of what had been ancient Illyria. This dissolved as we drew closer, and now a brown cluttered headland loomed, the forehead of Durrës, ancient Epidamnus beneath it, with cranes and tenements. Nearer still, I could see the dome and minarets of a white mosque, my first glimpse of Islam on this trip. Another brown hill and at its top, a large white house, the palace of Ahmet Zogu, who in 1928 had styled himself Zog the First, King of Albania. Ten years later, with an ultimatum from Italy (whose monarch Victor Emmanuel called himself King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia and Albania), Zog was headed into permanent exile, Albania’s whole treasury in his luggage.

“Passport control,” a deckhand said to me, and pointed to a card table that had been shoved under the broken TV set in the lounge. Two unshaven men in dirty sports shirts sat there with a stack of passports, looking tough as they took turns thumping the pages with their rubber stamp. It was as though the whole aggressive ritual was intended to erode your confidence: the shirts, the flimsy table, the grubby men, the jumble of passports. And their pad was so dry the men had to pound it to make even a feeble impression with the rubber stamp.

My passport was flung to me and I went back on deck to see the Venezia moving stern first towards the dock so that the stolen cars and aid trucks could be off-loaded. Beside us there was a hulk sunken to its gunwales, and a blond Albanian boy of about twelve or thirteen dived from it. He swam beside our ship, calling out for the passengers to throw money. He gagged and spat as the screws of our ship churned up swirling mud from the harbor bottom. The Italian truck drivers flung balled-up paper money and coins and soon there were four or five boys swimming for it and squabbling.

Knowing so little in advance, I had mentally prepared myself for anything in Albania, but even so I was shocked by Durrës. My first sight, as I walked off the ship, was of a mob of ragged people, half of them beggars, the rest of them tearful relatives of the passengers, all of them howling.

It was hysteria, and dirt and dogs and heat, but what alarmed me most were the people snatching at me. No one elsewhere on my trip had noticed me. I was so anonymous I felt invisible wherever I went. No one had ever touched me. Here they pounced. They took hold of my hand, tugged at my shirt, fingered my pen. “Signor!” “Money!” “Soldi!” “Please! You geeve me!” “Meester!”

They fastened themselves to me, pleading. I could not brush them aside — they were truly ruined. They looked hysterical, they were poor, ravaged, bumpy faced with pox scars — mothers with children, blind men with boys, old hectoring crones, all of them plucking at me. “Geeve me theese!”

Third World, I thought, but it was the only Third World scene I had ever witnessed that was entirely populated by Europeans — the most dissolute and desperate and poverty-stricken and rapacious, lunging at me, following just behind me, demanding money.

I was a sitting duck for this attention. The Italian aid worker passengers had vehicles. They drove through the mob. The Albanian passengers dragging cardboard boxes had nothing to give. But even travel weary and plainly dressed, I looked prosperous compared to the ragged mob at the port, and worst of all I was on foot. They were all around me, in my face, snagging my clothes, their hands in my pockets.

Hurrying on, I pretended I knew where I was going. I found a path, cut through a junkyard, went across the railway tracks and followed them, hoping to get to the train station, all the while passing curious people. Some beggars had stayed with me, still pleading, as I walked on into Durrës, which was a world of dust and ruination.

Nothing was right in Durrës. Even the trees were dirty and had rusted leaves; blighted and dying, most of them had the smashed, dilapidated look of the hideous tenements near them. Many limbs had been lopped and the ones that had been left were maimed. It was not that the trees looked dead, but rather that they had never been alive, just moth-eaten props on a cheap stage set from a show that had closed long ago. High weeds grew in the railway yard, and the coaches that I could see were either tipped over or else derelict, with broken windows. Bright sun bore down on everything and the stink that I had first noticed as I walked off the ship still hung in the air — it was a shit smell in the heat, an odor of decay and dust, of rotting clothes and even the earth — the dirt I was kicking as I hurried onward — had a rancid gasoline pong that was like the reek of poison.

In a filthy and deranged way it all fit together — the toasted trees, the cracked buildings, the nasty earth, the trains that didn’t run, and everywhere I could see people in rags. Sporchissimi, poverissimi, summed it up. When the people saw me it was as though they had seen The Man Who Fell to Earth and they ran towards me and screamed for me to give them something — money, food, clothes, my pen, anything. The minute I made eye contact the person lunged for me and began pleading.

It was just as well I came here ignorant. If anyone had told me about this in advance — the way Durrës looked, the filth and desperation — I would not have believed them.

In the meantime I could not shake off these pleading people. I was still being followed and brayed at by two begging boys, a young woman holding a limp comatose child, and an old woman wearing leggings and a shawl. They were behind me as I walked down the tracks towards the station, and they stood with me at the station as I rattled the locked door. The station windows were cracked and broken, but I could see inside that it was empty, papers littering the floor, several chairs tipped over, the one-number pad calendar on the wall showing the wrong date.

A woman approached me, looking much like all the others: tortoise-faced, wearing a sweater in spite of the heat, trousers under her skirt, big broken shoes. But this one carried a bunch of keys — the badge of her authority.

“Train?” I asked.

“Jo treni,” the woman said, and waved her hands with a flap of finality.

That was clear enough — anyway, I could have guessed there was no train, having seen the weeds growing over the tracks, and the vandalized coaches, and the wrecked station. Seeing me flummoxed, the beggars seized my hesitation as their opportunity and pleaded with me to give them something.

The woman with the keys was pointing to the front of the station.

“Autobusi,” she said.

That was plain too, but nothing else was as it should have been, not the thing itself, nor even a symbol of it: the station was not a station, the sidewalks were not sidewalks, the trees were not trees, the streets were not streets, even the buses I saw did not look like buses. The vehicles were ravaged and three of them together at the front of the station made the space look like a junkyard, not a bus depot.

The beggars stayed beside me, and there were other people squatting on the ground or standing in groups. Everyone was looking at me, waiting to see what I would do.

I’ll go to Tirana, I thought. I knew from my map that it was only twenty-five miles away. Come back here some other day.

I went to one of the wrecked buses. Some more people followed me. I wanted to shake them all off.

“Tirana?” I asked.

“Tirana!” They pointed to another bus. And a ragged young man, in his early twenties, stepped over to me. I thought he was going to ask me for money, but instead he said, mixing English and Italian, “This bus is going soon to Tirana.”

I climbed in and sat by the back door.

“It costs fifty leks,” the young man said, and seeing that I was confused, he took out a scrap of red rag that was a fifty-lek note and handed it to me. “You will need this.”

Before the door clapped shut I managed to give the young man some Italian lire in return, perhaps its equivalent. For the second time on my trip I received a gift from an unlikely person. He had given me, a stranger, what was in Albania a half-day’s pay, knowing that I would never see him again. This sudden act of kindness, like the cup of coffee from the woman in the bar at Zadar, took the curse off the place, and though Durrës still looked horrific I was won over.

The bus was full. I was jammed on the long seat at the back being bumped by the passengers standing in front of me. There was a great stink of mildewed clothing and tobacco smoke, but I was near enough to the door to stick my head out when we came to a stop. It was a slow bus, the stops were frequent, but none of this mattered very much to me — I was on my way, fascinated by most of what I saw.

Men and women in the fields by the roadside worked with primitive implements — they wielded crooked-handled scythes, and big sickles, they forked hay into heaps on horse-drawn wagons with ancient-looking tridents, they plowed with yoked teams of horses. This was not even turn-of-the-century technology — these were the sort of farm tools that had been used in Europe hundreds of years ago. There wasn’t an engine in sight, no tractors or cars — and no other vehicle on the road apart from this wheezing bus.

The fields were as rubbly and irregular as everything else. They were not flat, the furrows were not parallel, nothing was plumb. Since arriving in Albania I had not seen a straight line. That was true of the houses, too, the small collapsing hovels and sheds and tottering barns. And this absence of true geometry, this disorder, made Albania seem deranged and gave Albanians a suspicious and retarded look.

I had seen ruin before in other places, but it was odd to see farms that were so disorderly. Even in Third World countries where people lived in poor and misshapen huts their fields had order and there was always a symmetry in the plants, the windbreaks, the ditches. But there was no harmony here.

That was simply strange, yet the landscape had another feature, and it floored me — the bunkers and bomb shelters. I saw the first ones on the outskirts of Durrës and had wondered what they were. Most of them looked like igloos in cement, some big, some small; others were like pillboxes, round or square. The smaller ones could not have accommodated more than one or two people. Twenty or more people could have fitted in some others, which were the size of bungalows. They were like stone lumps. They had no windows, though most of them had gunslits.

They were scattered all over the open treeless landscape, rows of them on ridges, along the sides of the road, hidden in hollows, on the banks of stagnant creeks, and distantly, perhaps for miles — as far as I could see — they continued, they were everywhere.

These bunkers are unusual enough to have been remarked on by an Albanian writer, Ismaïl Kadaré. He is also the only Albanian novelist who has been translated into English. In his best-known novel, The General of the Dead Army (1970), Kadaré writes about a visiting Italian general who sees them: “The blockhouses were all silent and deserted … they looked like Egyptian sculptures with expressions that were sometimes cold and contemptuous, sometimes enigmatic, depending on the design of the gunslits. When the slits were vertical then the little forts had a cruel, menacing expression that conjured up some evil spirit; but when the slits were horizontal, then their strange petrified mimicry expressed only indifference and scorn.”

“Egyptian”? “Cruel”? “Scorn”? No, most of this description is fanciful. They are mute and not very well made. The remarkable thing to me was how numerous they were — so many of them that they were the only landscape feature. A few had been converted into dwellings — their laundry unfurled in the sun was proof of that; but most of them looked abandoned and moldering, and there were clusters of them that had been vandalized.

That vandalism was the salient aspect of Albania that I noticed so far; that it was not merely poor — I had seen poor countries and deprived people elsewhere — it was brutalized, as though a nasty-minded army had swept through, kicking it to bits. It was not the poverty of neglect or penury. There was something melancholy about a neglected place — the sagging roof, the dusty glass, the worm-eaten door frame, the ragged curtains. This was not melancholic, it was shocking. And this was violent. Many of these roofs had been torn off, windows had been broken, curtains had been ripped. We passed a factory: it had been burned out. We passed a garage: buses were scorched and tipped over, as the train coaches had been. We passed twenty or more greenhouses: most of the windows were cracked or broken — there was broken glass everywhere, and only a few of the greenhouses were being used for growing plants — tomato vines strung up.

That unmistakable vandalism was upsetting because it was violent and illogical. I had just come from Croatia and seen shellholes and shattered roofs. Those were the marks of war; but this was worse, more thorough, more absurd, nightmarish. And adding to the impression of derangement were the people, standing near these broken windows and upended culverts and burned-out factories, wearing rags.

This continued all the way to Tirana: vandalism and cement bunkers and people fumbling with hoes and pitchforks in the lumpy fields. Masses of bunkers lay outside Tirana and in places they were so densely situated that these areas had the look of an extensive necropolis, so similar were the bunkers to mausoleums.

“There are six hundred thousand of them,” a man told me in Tirana at the black market money-exchange. “One for each family — that is what we were taught. But what if we had used all that cement and iron and made houses with it? We would have had no housing shortage now.”

“Did anyone wonder why these bunkers were being built?”

“No. We were proud of them. We made them for a possible invasion — from our enemies.”

“Who were your enemies?”

“Everyone,” he said. “From every side. Revisionists from the east, imperialists from the west.”

It was later that I met him. At the moment, as the bus pulled into town, I was still wondering what to do, for as soon as I got off beggars lunged at me, and they followed me up the main street, whining and plucking at me.

My first problem was finding a place to stay. The only hotel I had found was full, and though at first I did not seriously mind being turned away, because it was so dirty, it seemed there was nowhere else. The Hotel Tirana was closed — for repairs, one person told me; for demolition, someone else said. The only other possibility was the grubby Hotel Dajti.

“All full,” the desk clerk told me. “Unless someone checks out.”

“Is that likely?”

“Don’t know. Please, I’m busy.”

I walked some more, back to the main square, past the statue of the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg with his horned helmet, past the mosque, into some backstreets, and spotted a hotel sign on another building. A man sitting on the stairs said he had space. It was the worst hotel I had seen on my whole trip. I was not a hotel snob — I liked a bargain. But it was that Albanian look again, not of neglect but of vandalism; the place looked unhealthy, even dangerous.

The Dajti had at first looked grubby to me. Now that I realized that it was really the only place to stay, it seemed desirable, even rather grand. The desk clerk told me to come back later in the day — he might have something for me. I couldn’t call him. “The phones are not working.” I left my name and considered offering him baksheesh; and then I perambulated again, thinking what a fix I would have been in traveling with someone else.

— Where are we going to stay?

— Something might turn up.

— What if it doesn’t? What will we do then?

— I don’t know.

— Why didn’t you think of this before?

— I don’t know.

— You could have made a phone call.

— The phones don’t work. You heard the guy.

— I’m scared, Paulie.

— Everything’s going to be all right.

I believed that. At the very worst, if there was nothing at the end of the day, there was the dump — the danger zone. There were also hotels in Durrës, awful place that it was; it was reachable by bus or taxi. There was also the last resort, asking someone on the street if they knew of a little old lady who took in boarders. In such a desperate city that was probably the way most accommodation was handled.

At the enormous fountain at the Palace of Congresses children were companionably taking baths — they had soap and towels. Nearby stood a marble cone as high as a six-story building. It was abandoned and partly wrecked (bricks missing, graffiti, kicked-over planters). A man saw me sitting and came over to talk. It had been a monument to Enver Hoxha, he said, and then: “Please give me money.” On most street corners, in gutters, next to buildings, there were heaps of garbage, and people picking through it and scattering it. Whenever I paused and looked at something — a hedge, a bush, a state building, a wall, the gunky river that ran through town, someone got in my face. “Please — food! Give me something to eat!” I bought a bottle of nameless fluid to drink, but before I could raise it to my lips, a woman had her hand on it. “Please — water!”

These were serious beggars, ragged and deserving, cowering near the puny trees and in the shade of the brick walls. Some wore traditional dress — skirts, leggings, black shawls, slippers, a cummerbund, veils, wide sleeves, all in tatters.

Towards late afternoon I went back to the Dajti. Yes, they had a room. I swapped my passport for a key. The room was dirty, it had a rank smell, it overlooked a field where boys were yelling and kicking a football. I slept like a log.

In the bar the next day I met an American in Tirana on business who said, “This is the worst hotel in the world. I mean, officially. It’s number one on a list of hotels that are, I guess, the best available in a given city.” He smiled. “The pits!”

The general in Ismaïl Kadaré’s novel stays in the Hotel Dajti. The Albanian novelist, who has been in exile in Paris for thirty years, makes it sound like the Ritz, a peaceful refuge, splendid among the pines of Tirana. He collected his mail at the desk … asked for a call to be put through to his family. In his otherwise macabre novel, even the Dajti’s phones work.

“But it costs forty dollars a night,” I said. “It’s not the worst forty-dollar hotel I’ve ever stayed in.”

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.

“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.

“In the next room was the former minister of education, Todi Lubonja, and his family, doing forced labor. His crime was that when he was minister he allowed Western music to be played, decadent music, and Hoxha was furious. That was in 1974. Lubonja was finally released in 1989.”

“What other famous prisoners were there?”

“The present President of Parliament, Pjeter Arbnori, a writer, was put in prison in the Stalinist time,” Nik said. “He stayed there for almost thirty years. Longer than Mandela! He finally founded the Albanian Social Democratic Party. He was imprisoned in 1954, released in 1984.”

“Were ordinary people imprisoned for political crimes?”

“There was a strange law here under the Hoxha regime,” Djouvi said. “If a man was regarded as a spy or an enemy his whole immediate family went with him to the camp.”

“Not just them,” Ahmet said. “It did not stop there. Other more distant family members were barred from higher education or other things.”

“They were pariahs,” I said, and explained the word; yes, yes, that was the word — political pariahs.

“It was illegal to flee the country,” Alma said. “But let’s say you managed it. After the police discovered that you had gone they arrested your brother — they punished another family member for what you had done.”

“Beards were banned,” Ahmet said — he looked as though he had the beginning of a beard himself.

“Have you heard of Disneyland?” I said. Of course they all had. “Workers in Disneyland are forbidden to grow beards. And that’s probably not the only obsession that Disneyland executives have in common with Albanian dictators.”

Long hair was also banned, and Western music, and blue jeans, and pornography. Until 1990 no one in Albania was allowed to own a car. As soon as the government changed people started letting their hair grow, and playing rock music, and wearing blue jeans. Stolen cars were being imported from Italy or smuggled over the Greek border by the thousands. All over Tirana there were men sitting on stools near stacks of yellowing two-cent porno newspapers.

“So tell me,” I said. “How did this horrible man Hoxha manage to stay in power?”

Djouvi said, “Hoxha made us believe that we were the best people in the world. There was crime and violence and poverty in every country except ours. We believed everything we were told. We did not question anything. We did not ask why we had water shortages in summer and power cuts in the winter. We had no taxes. We believed that we were the greatest country in the world, better than China which we had rejected, better than the Soviet Union, much better than the West.”

“At school we sang songs, praising Hoxha. What a wise and great man he was,” Alma said. “We all did military service.”

“We all had a weapon — everyone in the country had a gun,” Ahmet said. “Each person had a personal weapon and a bunker. My weapon was a Kalashnikov, in the — what do you call it? — national arsenal? There were many weapons here.”

It was hard to imagine anything so efficient as an arms industry in this country that did not even have tractors or plows or sewing machines.

“Weapons is the one industry that has not stopped,” Djouvi said. “The factory is in Elbasan. We made weapons, we had a Chinese factory and Chinese training.”

Nik said, “All children love guns. We loved taking them apart and fixing them.”

We talked some more, and I was resisting writing anything down, because I did not want to make them self-conscious, but at last I suggested that we meet again tomorrow, at the same place. It was cheap enough — coffee twenty cents, sandwich fifty cents, mineral water eighty cents, a beer one dollar. The waiter presented me with a bill for less than five dollars.

“We will see you tomorrow, at the same time,” Djouvi said, shaking my hand.

“Come by the hotel,” I said.

“It’s better here,” he said.

“Okay, but if I’m a bit late wait for me,” I said. “I want to stop by the embassy.”

A querying expression came into his eyes.

“It’s a good idea for Americans to register their names in the U.S. Embassy in some countries,” I said, and thought: Especially in this country. “But I’ll try to be on time.”

Off they went. The next day I found the embassy, which was a lovely building in the style of a Mediterranean villa, creamy stucco with green and yellow trim, on a backstreet of Tirana. I spoke awhile with the Deputy Chief of Mission, Douglas Smith, who had been in the country a year or so and was fluent in Albanian. He told me about the tradition of bloodfeuds in the hinterland, wondering out loud whether they were somehow related to the concept of besa, which was a solemn Albanian oath. The feuds had been stopped by the old regime, but there was apparently a resurgence of them, with the democratic reforms.

I was at the cafe table early to meet the Albanian underground. Five o’clock came and went. I drank a beer. I had the dinner special, rice with a glop of tomato sauce on it and meatballs made out of a dead animal and french fries. The meatballs were quofta: a Turkish word for ground meat or meatballs; many food words in the eastern Mediterranean were Turkish, though kofta had gotten as far as India. I was reminded again of what truly disgusting food passed for Albanian cuisine.

There was no sign of the talkative youths of the previous afternoon. I should have known better than to say that I was planning to stop by the embassy. Paranoia is a hard habit to break. I never saw them again.

After three days and three nights in the stifling darkness of the fish’s belly, Jonah had an illumination. That is often the way with nightmares. After three days, Albania — which had started as a nightmare — took on the dimensions of a valuable experience. I had overcome my disgust and fear. Tirana was still as ratty, but I was calmer, fascinated rather than repelled, and so the city did not seem so bad. “It just looks dirty,” as Jonah might have said.

The beggars were now recognizable. They slept at night in the same places where they sat all day, with their hands out. There was a legless woman, an old blind man, and a hectoring man who shouted at passersby, demanding money; there were many children, scavenging in the day and curling up under the lights or in doorways at night. Two always slept together, one lying facedown and his younger brother — perhaps — using the small of his back as a pillow.

Instead of leaving I stayed a few days more. One of the reasons for this was that it was not easy to leave. I had arrived by ship and I wanted to leave by ship. Studying the map, I could see that in the deep south of the country a narrow channel separated Albania from the island of Corfu. It looked no greater than five miles: no distance at all.

“Yes, there are fishermen there, and they might take you across,” a man told me in Tirana.

He was from that area and seemed to have Hellenistic sympathies.

“My family name was Stavro,” he said. “We were orthodox. It means ‘cross’ in Greek. But the government made us change our name. So my grandfather took the name Çeliku — it means ‘steel,’ like Stalin.”

“How could you be orthodox? Didn’t Hoxha ban religion?” I asked.

“Yes. No churches. They were forbidden.”

God was illegal. Albania enjoyed the distinction of being the only officially atheistic country in the entire world. But instead of flocking to churches after the fall of the government they went haywire on porno, which had also been banned.

I was not convinced that I would be able to find a fisherman in southern Albania to take me to Corfu, but there was another way of getting to Greece. Greeks had a tendency to close the border out of spite, because they disliked Albanians and had poor diplomatic relations with the government. If the border was open, there was a bus from Gjirokastër to the Greek town of Ioánnina.

There was said to be a train to Vlorë in the south, but it was not running. Çeliku said there was a bus that went. I had not seen a bus that looked capable of going such a distance. I walked towards the southern edge of town, where I had been told the depot was located. There were no vehicles in sight, but there was the evidence of buses: great oil stains in the dust which spoke of big leaking gaskets.

I kept on walking, into a ruined park, past a stagnant reservoir where people were sunning themselves in their underwear. Their underwear had the same cast-off look as their clothes, just as ill-fitting and ragged and dated. Most of what Albanians wore these days had been supplied by Italian charitable agencies, and so it had come out of attics and closets in pious households up and down the Adriatic.

There were signs of vandalism even here — plaques torn off, signs defaced, dates obliterated, plinths cracked where they had held statues. About a mile beyond the reservoir there was a terrible smell, borne by a hot breeze. No sign indicated it, but it was clear that just ahead was the Tirana Zoo.

I hate zoos generally but never have I felt more like opening cage doors and setting the animals free. If they ate a few Albanians then it was poetic justice for the torments these animals had endured, though I had yet to see an Albanian fit to eat.

The cages were very small — about the size that they would be for a wicked criminal in the prison of a brutish country. This was how the animals were seen — as savage beasts; and because they were beasts they were treated like convicted murderers. An example of this was the magnificent tiger, his fur gone grotty in his foul cage; he was fatigued and desperate in this eight-by-twelve-foot cage, which hardly contained him. An Albanian watering some plants tormented the tiger by squirting the hose into his face.

A wolf gnawed a bone in a small cell. Three eagles flopped in another cage, so small that it was impossible for them to spread their wings — one of them hobbled. A filthy crane, four sweating bear cubs, and worst of all a lioness, demented by captivity, pacing beside the bars, with still enough wit to flinch when an Albanian worker tossed twigs at her. Her mate, cowed by the twig-throwing, retreated to the back wall of the cage.

“Why are you doing that, you shithead?” I said to the Albanian, and made gestures.

He grinned at me and muttered in his own language. Throwing things at the animals was apparently one of the pastimes here. Among old bones and lion droppings and slime there was the other stuff that Albanians had flung through the bars — more twigs, balled-up paper, stones, a black cap.

But seeing this zoo was a way of understanding how the Albanians lived, in tiny apartments, eating bad food and not enough of it, putting up with water shortages and power cuts, tormenting each other, ignoring the filth in the streets. It was almost certainly the way their prisoners were treated, and these zoo animals were just another species of prisoner.

• • •

If I had abused that bullying man at the zoo in Italian he might have understood me. It was true that Italian was the second language here. I found an Italian-speaking taxi driver, Ali, bargained a little and went back to Durrës in his fairly new Lancia.

“Where did you buy this car?”

“Down the coast. The place has no name.”

“So was this car stolen?”

“Probably. But not here. Italy maybe.”

The bunkers by the roadside and on every hill did not look less strange, even days later. Ali said one of them was his — he had forgotten which one.

Past the ruined trees, the broken road, the cracked tenements, the locked railway station: I had fled from these on the old bus. The beach at Durrës was the nastiest I had seen in the Mediterranean. It was bouldery and black, littered with oily flotsam, broken glass and greasy plastic. This was the sort of beach that needed a great overwhelming tide to sweep it and scour its sand. Such a tide did not exist in this sea.

Its filth did not deter Albanians from swimming and sunning themselves there. Pale, in their underwear, they had the look of people who had been forced to strip and undergo a cruel initiation.

Ancient Roman columns stood on the beach — in ancient times this was where the Via Egnatia picked up after it left Bari, one of the great spokes of the Roman road system. It was the remains of a temple, left to decay. Farther on, a war memorial to the Albanian dead — a twenty-foot-high bronze soldier charging off his plinth and underneath it, spray-painted in red on the marble, Nirvana and Guns n Roses and Fuck You.

The construction of the memorial — the way the slabs were set up, the marble blocks a certain height and spaced just so — made it serve a dual function as war memorial and toilet. It had been fouled; it stank. This whole shore under the headland of the former palace of King Zog was a horror.

Ali said, “Want to see the amphitheater?”

We drove into a dead end, and there among the houses of the slum was a Roman ruin. The slum was part of it, though the houses looked much frailer than the Roman arches.

An Albanian watchman, angling for a tip, began chattering in Italian.

“This is where the rich people came in on their horses,” he said, showing me a cavernous entry way. “The poor people came in through that little door up there.”

The slum dwellers had simply encroached upon it in a distinctly Mediterranean manner, creeping up to it and snatching the marble slabs and the old Roman bricks and using these ancient building materials for their hovels.

“This was big enough for fifteen thousand people,” the watchman said. “They had shows — animals, lions, tigers and gladiators. Look, the original stone, these steps, this passageway went all the way around the perimeter, where you see these houses.”

“The people used the stone for their houses,” I said.

“But they didn’t break it. An earthquake did that,” he said. “There were two earthquakes. In the first one it was destroyed. People took the stone to put in their houses. Come, I will show you the chapels.”

There were two Byzantine chapels in the lower passageway. There had been catacombs, there were mosaics of broken but still-recognizable portraits of saints. The watchman knew them: St. Sofia, St. Irene, St. Stephen, some angels. “This was used for baptisms and funerals.”

“It’s too bad so much of it is buried,” I said.

“We only found it a little while ago.”

“This Roman amphitheater? You didn’t know it was here?”

“No. Like I said, it was buried in an earthquake. Then one day in 1966 a man’s fig tree died. He dug it up, to plant another, and in the hole he found this wall — these stairs.” He showed me the marble staircase. “He dug further and when he found more stairs he reported it to the archaeological department. And they saw that this whole slope was an amphitheater.”

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.”

“I suppose that’s my problem — asking questions,” I said.

“In Albania we have learned not to talk too much,” Adrian said. And he suggested we get back on the road.

It was a poor road, lined with rows of tree stumps. The trees, Adrian explained, had been cut and used for fuel. There were few other cars on the road — some carts, some horses and dogs and chickens, and people had the habit of walking in the road. The houses were much poorer than ones I had seen in Durrës and Tirana. But they had the same doomsday look, as though at a certain point in the growth of these villages they had been stricken. The people were not ragged — no beggars here — but there was a definite look of deprivation: women carrying water in tin containers, families hoeing, groups of people selling small piles of vegetables or fruit by the side of the road. At the town of Fier we stopped and walked to the market, where Adrian bought a pound of cherries. They were in season. We sat and ate them, and then set off again.

Remembering what the American diplomat had said to me about the besa and the blood feud, I asked Adrian.

“You’re confusing two things,” he said. “First of all, besa means a promise that has to be kept, no matter what.”

“Give me an example,” I said.

“All right. Suppose you give me your telephone number in New York and I go there, because you invited me and you gave me your besa. In that case, you meet me, you take me to your house, you feed me — because your besa was given with your invitation. You would never leave me on the street. You would look after me no matter what. You cannot abandon me!”

He was driving in a swerving fast-slow sort of way. If private cars had been banned in Albania until 1990 that meant no Albanian had been driving for more than three years, and most of them much less, or not at all. The inexperience certainly showed.

“Revenge is another matter,” Adrian was saying — gabbling in Italian and swerving to avoid potholes in the rutted road. “We call it hakmari or jakmari. Hak means blood, mari means take.”

“Does it always involve killing?”

Adrian took both hands off the steering wheel and cupped them, a gesture that meant, “The answer to that question is so obvious I do not believe it is worthy of a verbal reply.”

I said, “Please give me an example of Albanian hakmari.”

“All right. Someone does something to your brother. So you do something to him. Or, you just killed someone in my family, you miserable Pig—”

Adrian became shrill and definite when he personalized these examples. I was uncomfortable again, as I had been when illustrating besa he had said, You cannot abandon me!

“In that case, I kill you,” he said, his jaw set. “Never mind how much time passes. It could be twenty years later. By then you are happy. You have forgotten what you did. But I have not forgotten. It is there, the pain in my heart. One day you leave your house — happy! It is a nice day! I go to you and”—he whipped his fingers against his throat—“I kill you.”

“Is it better if some time passes?” I said. “In English there is a proverb that goes, ‘Revenge is a dish that is best served cold.’ ”

Adrian smiled. He liked that. But he said, “Anytime is the right time for hakmari.”

I saw from the map that we were approaching Vlorë, where I had been intending to stop. I mentioned this to Adrian. He did not react. His mind was on other things.

“My grandfather was a victim of hakmari,” he said. “He had an enemy. One day the man killed him. It was my mother’s father, about 1952 or so.”

“Was his death avenged?”

“What could be done? Nothing. Because there were no men in the family. My grandfather had three sisters and his wife and only daughters. Women don’t kill.” He kept driving. He said, “That was in Scutari.”

“Why weren’t you told to kill the man?” I asked.

“I couldn’t kill him. I wasn’t born until 1966. By then it was too late. I was the wrong generation. The matter had been forgotten.”

“I see. So vengeance has to be carried out by someone in the same generation as the victim.”

“Exactly,” Adrian said.

“Was hakmari practiced during the Hoxha times?”

“No, not in the Hoxha communist times. But in the past few years I have heard stories. Not a lot but definitely there are families ‘taking blood.’ ”

We stopped for the night at Vlorë. We had gone more than half the distance to Sarandë, and it was now late in the day. It was not a good idea to be on the road after dark in a country so inadequately provided for. Anyway, Adrian had a friend here, he said. Remembering my liking for the cherries he had bought at Fier, Adrian asked several people in Vlorë where we could buy some. Thirty cents got us a pound of ripe cherries.

The hotel at Vlorë had no name, and many empty rooms. The only guests were two Albanian families. They had spent the day on the stony beach. Adrian said he would stay with his friend and pick me up at seven the next morning. He left me the cherries and a stern warning to be very careful. “Lock your door at night.” I took his advice.

At Vlorë there was a large villa on a headland which had belonged to Enver Hoxha. Before darkness fell I walked towards it, but saw that it was guarded by soldiers and thought better of rousing their suspicions. Though people stared; no one in Vlorë followed me; there was dire poverty here, but no beggars. The people on the beach, baring their bodies to the gray sky, risking death by poison in the water of Vlorë Bay, were bony and pale. It was so odd to see these skinny white people crouched on the sand, frail little families at play — and these were the well-off Albanians, at this seaside town.

Probably because Hoxha had come here often, there were slogans painted on the sides of buildings. They resembled the so-called “big character” Cultural Revolution slogans I had seen in China, and in some cases the words were identical. Glory to Marxism and Leninism had been painted carefully in red letters on a wall in Vlorë, and other walls extolled Hoxha—Glory to Enver Hoxha (Lavde Enver Hoxha) and ditto with revolution, work, and Albania. No one had bothered to paint over the now out-of-date slogans, but in some cases whole walls had been smashed. On a mountainside outside of Vlorë in stone letters forty feet high were the words PARTI ENVER.

I drank a beer, I ate bread and stew, and in my room I listened to an update from the BBC about the trial in Tirana of Ramiz Alia, who was being tried on charges of “abuse of power” and “misappropriation of state funds.”

There was no sound at night in Vlorë. No wind, no passing cars, no music, not even a voice. The sea was silent: not even the mushburger waves that slopped on the shore of other Mediterranean places.

“So what did you call him?” I asked Adrian the next morning, as we drove out of Vlorë past the slogans to Hoxha. “‘Great leader’? ‘Teacher’? ‘Father’? Something like that?”

“Shokut,” Adrian said. “Shokut Enver.”

“Meaning?”

“Friend.” Amico.

That was wonderful. The man who had put a wall around the country and starved them and turned off the lights and terrified them and imprisoned them and wouldn’t let them grow beards and lived in lovely villas while they stayed inside their huts eating sour bread or cleaning their personal weapon (“in the event of an attack by the imperialists”), this man was “Friend Enver.”

“These days we don’t use the word shokut at all,” Adrian said. “It is not a good word, because of the way we used it before.”

“Then if you don’t use the word friend, how do you say ‘Friend Adrian’?”

“We use the word zoti. Zoti Paul, I might say to you if I greet you,” he said. “It means ‘god.’ No more friends, we are now gods.”

Until Vlorë we had been traveling on a shore road that was fairly flat, but the next day I saw that the southern part of the Albanian coast was mountainous. The steep cliffs dropped straight into the sea, and the road climbed behind them, becoming corrugated and unsafe, as it shook our car sideways to the edge. Rising to over two and a half thousand feet, the road was also bleak and windy, in places precipitous, at the edge of rocky goat-haunted ravines, where the only settlements were clusters of stone huts, many of them ancient.

Above Vlorë there were only tree stumps — the trees had been recently cut down. In the desperate and anarchic days of the previous year, when there was no fuel, people had cleared the woods and cut even the cedars that had been planted beside the road.

“Perfume!” Adrian shouted as he bumped along the side of a ravine, and the heavy scent of rosemary from the mountainside entered the car.

Almost four hours of this narrow mountain road; Adrian had a tape machine in his car but only one tape, The Greatest Hits of Queen, a rock group. Adrian liked the group. “Freddie Mercury,” he said. “He died of AIDS.” Towards noon, passing a remote spot, we saw a policeman hitchhiking. At first I thought he was at a roadblock, and my heart sank. But Adrian explained that the man was hitching a ride and that we were under no obligation to pick him up. Thinking that it might be useful to have a policeman on board, I said, “Let’s take him.”

The policeman had two containers of olive oil. They were so heavy he could scarcely lift them. Adrian helped him hoist them into the trunk.

“Ramiz Alia!” the policeman said. “He’s on trial!”

Adrian said nothing. The policeman abandoned his attempt at conversation. Clearly, Adrian hated him. We drove about twenty miles. When the policeman got out at a crossroads Adrian discovered that some of the olive oil had leaked onto the carpet of his trunk, and he cursed and swore. It was obvious that the Albanians had few personal possessions, but they were maniacally fastidious about keeping them in good order.

The villages on the southern Albania coast looked Greek — blocky stucco huts in hillsides. We passed a ruined church.

“What religion are you?”

“None,” Adrian said.

“What about God?” I asked, sensing that I sounded like a character in a Graham Greene novel.

“I really don’t know — the whole thing confuses me,” Adrian said.

We soon were back above the coast again — great bluey-green bays and steep sluices of whitish rock. There was no one in the coves. No boats, no people, no villages. There was no litter. These were the emptiest and most beautiful beaches I had seen so far. Most of them were only accessible by sea, the cliff walls were too steep for any path. I was never to see such a coastline again in the Mediterranean. Nothing had happened here. Farther on there was a submarine base, with a large man-made cave cut into the mountainside at the shoreline for the sub to slide into. That was guarded, but that was the only man-made thing on this whole superb shore that still had the look of Illyria.

The Greek island of Ithaca, home to Ulysses, was only a hundred miles due south of here. Sailing back to Penelope, Ulysses would have seen these same cliffs and bays of this unspoiled coast.

We reached Sarandë in midafternoon. Adrian was edgy. He wanted to start back to Tirana immediately. I gave him the hundred dollars that we had agreed on and he dropped me at the Hotel Butrinti at the edge of town, just above the harbor.

“Is there a boat to Corfu?” I asked the desk clerk.

“Oh, yes. It will be here tomorrow at noon,” he said. “It is only one hour to Corfu Town.”

This was delightful news. The hotel was empty. I got a room and walked around the town, which was a strangely empty place, having been deserted by Albanians who had fled to Italy or Greece in search of work. There were a shirt factory and a carpet-weaving operation in Sarandë. There was a hospital. There were schools. What Sarandë lacked were people.

I met Fatmir, a friendly local man, whose parents had remained devoutly Muslim, he said, throughout the atheistic Hoxha years. He was fluent in English.

“I hope you will come back in ten years,” Fatmir said. “You will find that the houses are better, the town is better, the port is better, the food is better, and I am better.”

The strangest thing of all — stranger than the ruin of Albania, the bad roads, the skinny people, the rural poverty, the broken glass, the vandalism, the cruelty, the unexpected kindness — stranger than all of this was the sudden appearance the next day of a boatload of tourists sailing into Sarandë harbor on a day trip from Greece. I had not seen any tourists for such a long time — none in Albania, none in Croatia, none in Slovenia, not even Trieste had tourists. I felt I had been through a mild ordeal and that I had made a personal discovery. At that point I bumped into a busload of package tourists on their day out.

I waited for them to return from their little tour of the ruins at Roman Butrinti, and then I sneaked onto the bus which was taking them back to their boat. I would simply pretend that I had been on their day trip and, just like that, would find my way to Corfu with the tourists.

These were nicer than the sort that in Gibraltar I had had to distinguish from apes, but still the genuine sunburned beer-swigging article. They hated Albania. They were disgusted by Sarandë—after my experience of the rest of Albania, Sarandë seemed pleasant, if a bit spectral. The tourists were shocked by the Hotel Butrinti. They mocked the Roman ruins.

Most of them were hard-up Britons who had come to Corfu because it was, they said, cheaper than a holiday at home. Kathleen and Sally, two older Irish women who worked in the same clothing factory in Dublin, had paid a little over four hundred dollars (£267) for two weeks in Corfu. This included their round-trip airfare from Dublin, as well as bed and breakfast at the hotel in Corfu. (“We couldn’t go for even a few days in Cork for that money.”)

“I’m not impressed at all,” one woman said, glancing at the town as we lined up on the quay.

“The food were filthy,” a man said in a strong Lancashire accent.

“The tea, I couldn’t drink it,” his Lancastrian companion said. “They make it out of flour, you know.”

“The Russians had something to do with this, I understand.”

They were bored, scared, exhausted.

One man next to me looked very depressed.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Me wife died at Christmas,” he said. Four months ago. “It was quite a blow.”

“How long were you married?”

“Forty-two years,” he said. He was asthmatic with grief, struggling for breath, poor old guy, looking so lost here on this Albanian shore.

“Oh, God.”

“That lady over there is just a friend,” he said. “I went out with her long ago, before I met my wife. I don’t know what will happen now. I’ll sell my motor home soon.” He looked sadly at me. “I don’t expect you to understand. But you’re kind to listen.”

Fatmir had come to the quay to see the tourists leave.

“Come back to Albania, Mister Paul,” he said. “When you come back it will be better.”

The sad old man said, “That’s a shocking big bag you’ve got there.”

“I’m a stowaway,” I said. I explained how I had come from Tirana and was sneaking aboard, so that I could get to Greece.

“Good lad.”

My passport was examined and stamped. I found a seat on the upper deck, feeling pleased with myself. Kathleen and Sally waved to me from another seat. But on board, among the tourists, I got gloomy. Spring had arrived and so had the trippers and the holiday-makers, the Germans, the cut-price package people, in their annual combat with the hectoring locals. “I geeve you good price!” “You eat here!” “The food were filthy.” “Just ignore him, Jeremy.” All that.

As we left Sarandë on this boat to Corfu Town, fifteen or twenty boys leaped from the pier and began swimming in the roiling water of the stern, yelling, “Money!” and “Give me your hat!” and “Soldi!” as a smaller number of them had done at Durrës.

Some of the tourists taunted them, just as the tourists had taunted the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar. Others threw bits of paper or peanuts. Some coins were flung from the rail — small-denomination leks which, although made of some sort of metal, were so worthless they could float in water. The Albanians boys began to complain. The tourists laughed. The boat gathered speed.

“Fuck you!” one of the boys yelled. He made a finger sign. Then they all took up the cry. “Adio!” “Fuck you!” “Va fan cul’!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!”

“The universal language,” Kathleen said in her lilting Dublin accent.