A small warning before you start: this is a rather long Note. Albania was never going to be a short story, and a plant in a restaurant would never have forgiven me for leaving it out.
In the early 2000s I landed in Tirana for the first time, via Rome. I was about thirty and working for Bison International, selling adhesives across the Balkans. I collected my suitcase and walked towards the sliding doors, expecting the usual arrivals hall on the other side. The doors opened, and I was already standing outside. Right in front of me stood an expensive Mercedes S-Class, and next to it four brothers in sunglasses, grey suits, white shirts and black ties. “Hello mister Wats, welcome in Albania.” And I thought: okay... there we go! I spent the drive into Tirana on the back seat, wedged between two of the brothers, with the other two up front.
Albania was a story of its own. In 1997 the country had nearly collapsed into civil war after huge pyramid schemes went bust, and the army depots were looted. A few years on, it was still a gangster’s paradise. Until 1991, private cars had been banned altogether, and the entire country had only a few thousand of them. Barely ten years later, the streets of Tirana were full of Jaguars, BMWs and expensive Mercedes, almost all still carrying their Dutch, German, French or Belgian number plates. Stolen in Western Europe, and nobody had even bothered to take the plates off.
The problem was hardly confined to the streets. In 1999, Albania’s own Minister of Public Order, Spartak Poçi, drove to an official visit in Greece in a black Mercedes S-Class. The Greek authorities discovered that the car had been reported stolen in Italy. It was impounded, and the minister carried on with his visit in a car lent by his Greek counterpart, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, before flying home. And I never asked where our Benz came from…
The only decent road in the country ran from the airport into the centre of Tirana, where we went first, and the Mercedes could just about race along it. Then you reached a big roundabout at the edge of the city, Zogu i Zi, the Black Bird, and that was one huge building site. Beyond it, Tirana was a mess. Collapsed buildings, decay, rubbish everywhere. On that roundabout I watched a bus hit a man on a moped and knock him clean off it. Nobody stopped. Not the bus, not anyone. And on that same roundabout, weaving between all those expensive stolen cars, came their exact opposite: a three-wheeled Piaggio Ape, the little Italian utility vehicle with a cabin at the front and a small loading platform at the back. Its engine had been removed and two holes drilled through the front of the cabin, and the reins ran through them to a donkey pulling the whole contraption along.
The bank was a street. If you asked where you could change money, the answer was: at the bank. And where’s the bank? That street over there. Hundreds of men stood there waving enormous wads of Lek, the Albanian currency. I had been warned to change my money at a proper bank instead, because on that street everyone would jump on you at once. But I saw the adventure in it, and the humour. Whether it was smart, I’m not so sure. I was young and carefree, so I walked along until I found whoever gave me the best rate for my euros. I still have one of those banknotes. Five hundred Lek, with Ismail Qemali on it, the man who declared Albania’s independence in 1912. Across the top, in big letters: Banka e Shqipërisë. The Bank of Albania. Which, as far as I was concerned, was a street. Every time I look at it, I have to laugh.
My meeting was with Astir, a paint factory that sold paint through little shops in almost every village. The four brothers who had picked me up turned out to be Astir’s entire board of directors, sunglasses included. My idea was simple: they already had the distribution, so our glue could sit right next to their paint on the shelf. No competition, a broader range, extra turnover. They were interested straight away and wanted to show me their factory, in Ballsh.
So we set off in the Mercedes. Outside the city the roads got worse with every mile, and halfway there the Mercedes simply couldn’t go on. A Toyota Land Cruiser was waiting to take over. We drove the rest of the way past endless oil pumpjacks, nodding at the side of the road.
During the entire factory tour a guy with a handycam followed us around, filming everything. Someone from Western Europe was visiting, and that had to be recorded.
That evening in a restaurant, one of the brothers opened a bottle of raki and threw the cork away. “We don’t need it anymore.” Every time they looked away, my glass went into the plant next to our table. By the end of the night, that plant must have been the happiest thing in Ballsh!
“Everything good, mister Wats?” Fine, thank you. “You want something else? Girls?” No, thank you. Then, a good deal firmer: “Don’t you like Albanian girls?”
I calmly told them that I respected their culture and hoped they would respect mine. Their women were no doubt beautiful, but I was there for my work. That was accepted. Still, it dawned on me that I was somewhere nobody would ever be able to find me.
On the TV in the restaurant, a soap opera of sorts was playing. Up in the corner of the screen was the broadcaster’s logo: Color TV. Funny, I said, Color TV, and you make paint. “Yes. That is our TV station. And we broadcast as well our own commercials. We can do that for you too. You want to see one?” Out of politeness I said yes.
One of them made a phone call. The screen turned to snow. Then their commercial appeared. More snow, and the soap carried on. From the restaurant I couldn’t see it happen, of course. But during the tour they had shown me a little room full of video equipment, and now they explained what had just happened there: the same guy who had followed us around with his handycam had pulled the soap’s VHS tape out, slotted in the commercial, and then swapped everything back again. All of Ballsh, a town of some nine thousand people, and the surrounding area had their soap interrupted, just so their guest could see a paint commercial. And somewhere in that little room, there may still be a VHS tape of a young blond Dutchman nodding politely at pots of paint.
Around that time, the new mayor of Tirana had started painting the city’s grey blocks in pinks, oranges and greens. I never found out where all that paint came from. I like to think I know.
Leaving was no simpler. On arrival I had paid an entry fee of about ten euros. Every other country in the region had stamped my passport, but Albania gave me a loose slip of paper to tuck inside it, and someone told me never to lose it. I guarded that slip like gold.
At departure, the border guard studied my passport for a long time, and I could see what he saw: a Dutch passport, a smug Western European face and a nice suit, at a border where many people earned perhaps a hundred euros a month. Something was wrong, he said. My entry slip was missing, so as far as he was concerned, my entry had never been accepted, all of it explained mostly with hands and feet. The slip I had guarded like gold had been in my passport when I handed it over. I suspect he had simply taken it out. I could smell where this was going, but I played along and asked, in my most cooperative voice, what the consequences would be. A fine of a hundred euros, he said, or prison. I told him that was interesting, because I still had the receipt for my ten euros, so he was very welcome to put me in prison. But if I was not on this flight, I added, alarm bells would start ringing, and the Dutch embassy would be asking questions soon enough. I was on the flight to Rome. No fine. I had travelled enough in Africa to recognise a bluff, and I don’t like corruption anywhere. If someone tried that at a border in a Western European country, I would be outraged. But in a country that had just crawled out of hell, with nothing, facing a well fed Dutchman in a suit, I can’t really blame the man for giving it a try.
In those years I was responsible for twenty countries, from Scandinavia and the Baltic States down to the former Yugoslavia and North Africa, and I’m still in touch with many of the distributors I worked with. The four brothers in sunglasses are the ones I lost track of, and I’m sorry about that. At first I wasn’t sure what to make of them, and the question about the girls didn’t exactly help. But they turned out to be good fun. I don’t know their whole story, and I never asked, but they treated me well and with respect, and to be honest, I would love to share a raki with them again. So, I suspect, would the plant.
But travelling to that part of the world showed me something else too. Those countries were all slowly crawling out of the pit. Slovenia was easy, Ljubljana felt almost Austrian. But the deeper you travelled east into the former Yugoslavia, the more scars you saw. In Belgrade you could still see where the NATO bombs of 1999 had hit, the Chinese embassy included. I remember sitting in a taxi in Sarajevo in the middle of winter. It was freezing. We drove past blocks of flats where people were living without glass in the windows, nothing between them and the cold. Most of us only ever see places like that on a screen, and a screen makes everything feel far away. It wasn’t. It was a couple of hours’ flight from the Netherlands. Two hours, and a world apart.
