stepped outside, the children descended upon him or her, begging in a horde, or if begging was to no avail, thrusting little hands into pockets and purses, and grasping at whatever the hotel guest was carrying. Otherwise the children swatted and kicked each other. Sometimes the children would go over to the big woman, who’d also give them a swat. And if the tykes obtained money, they’d return to the big woman, and she’d snatch it. The family had a puffy, sallow baby with the scorched blond hair that is a sign of malnutrition. The infant seemed to be eight or ten months old but didn’t appear to be able to hold its head up. It never cried. A ten- or eleven-year-old boy was the principal caretaker. He squeezed the baby to his chest with one arm while he chased the other children around, giving them karate chops and kung-fu kicks. Meanwhile, the baby’s appendages wagged and jiggled in all directions— a floppy tot. Between martial-arts exhibitions, the baby was left alone on a sheet of cardboard on Skenderbeg Square’s tumultuous sidewalks. Passersby were supposed to leave coins. Occasionally they did. “They are Gypsies,” said Elmaz. But Gypsy is the preferred local bigotry epithet, the N-word of the Balkans, with the added advantage that it can be used on anybody darker than Kate Moss. The translator who worked for the wire-service reporter said he’d questioned the child-care boy about the baby. The boy had said, “His mother was going to throw him away. But she gave him to us. Now we’re taking care of him.” There is not, so far as I was able to discover, an Albanian Child Abuse Hotline. “That’s because it would be jammed with how-to calls,” said the wire- service reporter. “What the fuck is with this place?” said someone else at the bar. And I do not have an answer for that. All of Albania’s rich and varied manifestations of freedom, however, came to a halt promptly at 10 P . M ., when the shoot-to-kill curfew began. It seemed the Albanians had had a bit too much freedom, so much freedom that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had sent an Italian- led contingent of some 7,000 troops to keep the lid on. The OSCE troops arrived in April 1997 in their scout cars and personnel carriers. The situation in Albania was so bad that having Italians tooling around
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online