in armor-plated vehicles actually made the streets safer. Now, after 10 P . M . in Tirana, everything was quiet. No, not quiet. There was continual gunfire coming from the maze of Tirana’s backstreets. And the gunfire set off Tirana’s dogs. As a result I spent the night thinking, first, about stray Kalashnikov slugs and the Hotel Tirana’a floor-to-ceiling windows: “Gosh, I wish I had a room on a lower floor.” Then thinking about what a really large number of loud dogs Tirana has: “Gosh, I wish I had a room on a higher floor.” I ended up back at the balcony bar, fully exposed to both the bullets and the barking, but at least I had gin. Tirana was not quiet at night, but it was invisible. Nothing moved on the main streets. And most of the town’s electricity was out so I couldn’t see it moving, anyway. I gazed into a stygian void with just an occasional tracer shell arcing across the night sky. Make a wish? Why is freedom in Albania so different from freedom in the United States? This would take a lot more than an hour to find out, if it could be explained at all. Albania is a little place the size of Maryland, with a population of 3.25 million. Albania is little, and Albania is out of the way, blocked from the rest of the Balkan Peninsula by high, disorderly mountain ranges, and, until this century, cordoned from the sea by broad, malarial swamps. Seventy-five percent of the land is steeps and ravines. In the north, the Albanian Alps rise in such a forbidding confusion of precipices that they are known as the Prokletije, or Accursed Mountains. In the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon called Albania “a country within sight of Italy which is less known than the interior of America.” (Although Gibbon hadn’t heard about Whitewater and Arkansas politics in general, so perhaps he was being unfair.) As late as 1910, geographical authorities were saying that certain districts of Albania “have never been thoroughly explored.” And considering the neophyte TV producer’s experience, they won’t be explored soon. This isolated, outlandish place emerged from World War II run by the isolated and outlandish communist guerrilla chieftain, Enver Hoxha. In 1948, Hoxha broke his alliance with Tito because Yugoslavia wasn’t being pro-Soviet enough. In 1961, Hoxha broke his alliance with Khrushchev because the Soviet Union wasn’t being pro-Soviet enough. In 1978, Hoxha threw out the Red Chinese for having played Ping-Pong with the U.S. And by the time Hoxha died in 1985, Albania wasn’t on speaking terms with anyplace but North Korea and
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