canoe paddles. The Hotel Tirana, which went up in 1979, was so badly designed that the Italian entrepreneurs who took it over had to add a separate tower as a fire escape. Short gangways lead from the tower to an emergency exit on each floor. This outside stairway created security problems, however, so the tower was encased in steel mesh. Now if there’s a fire at the Hotel Tirana, the result will be hundreds of guests in an enormous fry basket. Near the Lana River is a neighborhood called the Block, once reserved for Enver Hoxha’s inner circle. Their idea of luxury was semisuburban, the kind of semi-suburb you’re trying to convince your parents to move out of before their car gets stolen. But the Hoxha residence looks like the house of a really successful Chicago dentist. There’s something of the Chicago prairie style to its broad but ill-proportioned windows, clumsy, deep-eaved roof, and dumpy fieldstone terracing—call it Frank Lloyd Left. Hoxha’s daughter Pranvera is, in fact, an architect. I don’t know if the Hoxha homestead was her work, but other evidence indicates she’s at least as addled as her dad was. She designed what used to be the Enver Hoxha Memorial a couple of streets away. It’s an immense concrete Pluto Platter of a building with conical walls used these days for daring cardboard-under-the-butt slides by local preteens. It once contained, says the Blue Guide, “more or less everything that Hoxha ever touched or used.” It now contains the USAID office, dispensing foreign aid. Which of these constitutes the greater foolishness, I leave to the reader. Elmaz and I drove forty kilometers west of Tirana to Durres, passing a complex of greenhouses from which both houses and green had been removed. We saw two summer palaces King Zog had built for himself, completely ransacked. Someone had tried to take the very paint off the walls. Durres was, at the time, Albania’s only working port. And in that port were exactly two ships. One was a Chinese-built destroyer that had been “bought” from the Albanian navy. At any rate, $6,000 had changed hands. Now the Khajdi was a discotheque, paneled inside with the same rough wood used in the beer halls and gambling hells of Tirana’s Youth Park. Something had gone wrong in the bilge, however, and the Khajdi was listing so far to starboard that you felt you’d had more than enough to drink the moment you stepped inside. Business was bad, the proprietor reported. The other ship was a beached freighter missing hawsers, hatches, portholes,
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