After an hour or so of royalist racket, Leka Zogu’s motorcade arrived, flashing the kind of suction-cup roof lights that people buy when they want you to think they belong to the volunteer fire department. This sloppy parade of Mercedes sedans shoved into the rumpus of Skenderbeg Square, and the royal himself popped out in one royal beauty of a leisure suit. Leka (in the Albanian language the definite article is a suffixed u or i so “Leka Zogu” translates as “Leka the Zog”) stood at the microphone like a big geek—six feet eight inches tall, chinless, and bubble-bellied. He mumbled a few words. (His unmajesty’s command of Albanian is reported to be sketchy.) Then he booked. Wide guys patted lumpy items under their clothes. All the Benzes tried to turn around at once, creating still worse traffic mayhem, if such a thing is possible. And it is. A few days before I got to Albania some of Leka’s supporters became so enthusiastic that they started a gun battle with the police. The shooting went on for fifteen minutes. Although only one person was killed, because the two sides weren’t actually near each other. The police were in a soccer stadium several blocks from the demonstration. Anyway, Albania is fairly pissabed with freedoms. Free enterprise not least among them. Capitalism is pursued in Albania with the same zest—not to mention the same order and self-restraint—as driving, politics, and gun control. Hundreds of cafés and bars have opened, most of them whacked together from raw timber with the same carpentry skills used by Oregon Rasta-Sufis when converting old school buses for Lollapalooza excursions. The rude structures are built on any handy piece of open ground and “have occupied even school yards in the capital,” says The Albanian Daily News, old copies of which, along with every other form of litter, carpet the city streets in NYSE-floor profusion. Private garbage collection is not yet up and running in Tirana, but private garbage disposal is fully operational. Every public space is covered with bags, wrappers, bottles, cans—and the booze shacks and pizza sheds that sold them. Gardens have been obliterated by jerry-building, monuments surrounded, paths straddled, soccer pitches filled from goal to goal. The Lana River is walled from view, not that you’d want to look. The squatter construction companies tossing up chew-and-chokes on its banks have used pickaxes to make haphazard connections with waste pipes and water mains. Hydrohygienic results are the predictable. The Lana has crossed the lexicological line between river and open sewer. And what used to be Youth Park, a huge area of downtown greenery, has
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