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Shapallo.
    â€˜It is possible. Of course. But…’ There, his worst fears ended the possibility, and he shook his head.
    Munz felt a considerable sympathy for Shapallo and had worked hard to organise a title de voyage. In their short time together they appear to have grown quite fond of each other. Shapallo enjoyed backgammon and their evenings were spent over Munz’s board. They drank down a bottle of port and Shapallo spoke of his future, of what it might hold for him. His wishes were simple enough, as Munz recalled: ‘To eat a freshly caught fish and to sit in a public square with his face turned up to the sun.’
    The ferry Appia had duly arrived from Venice and the time came to shift the first thousand refugees from the besieged embassies to Durrës and on to Brindisi. The regime in its paranoia insisted the transfer be carried out at night, and Munz had watched the vehicle rumble off down Embassy Row and Shapallo lean out the open end of the truck to wave farewell.
    But something had happened along the way. Shapallo had failed to turn up in Durrës—somewhere along the thirty-kilometre journey, Munz seemed to think, the refugees had tipped Shapallo from the truck.
    â€˜Where is he now? I have no idea. Is he even alive? Frankly, I think not.’
    Then he added, ‘Where would a man like that hide?’
    One afternoon I waited for Munz on the steps of the Palace of Culture reading the graffiti cribbed from the comics and music sent home from the first wave of boat refugees: ‘GOD CREATED
    HARLEY DAVIDSON…FUCK YOU SISTERS…METALLICA FOR ALL… REIGN IN BLOOD.’
    Above the graffiti the green blinds blew out the broken windows, catching on the shards of glass. A gentle rain began to fall and a sea of black umbrellas went up around the square. The umbrellas scattered as an erratically-driven Fiat—another trophy sent home by refugees—careered through the crowd in the square. I tried to imagine the sound of bicycle tyres on wet asphalt, a city of bicycles and pedestrians that had once been Tirana.
    The city was little more than a bazaar when Joseph Swire, an English traveller, passed through in the thirties: ‘There were no new buildings and Tirana seemed decrepit, muddy, grey for want of the sun which lagged behind heavy clouds.’
    Italian money, influence and eventual occupation went some way towards raising the city above open sewers and small cottages cobbled from baked mud and boulders. The new style, in fact, was uncompromisingly Italian. Civic pride rebounded along the ‘great double-barrelled Boulevard Mussolini’, eventually to become Boulevard Stalin and, in 1991, Boulevard of the Martyrs.
    The Italians had built the government ministries—four-storey-high pastel-coloured buildings. Behind these they had constructed pretty villas with patios and gardens enclosed by high walls.
    The villas had eventually fallen into the hands of the Party of Labour and been cordoned off.
    The ‘block’ is what Munz had wanted to show me. It is less than five minutes’ walk from the Palace of Culture, and yet, despite its central location, the block had been successfully sealed off by soldiers and hidden cameras to share with the outside world a kind of quarantine status. While it had been acceptable to acknowledge that the block and the outside world existed, the line was drawn at actually experiencing or talking about either. Those who were permitted to ‘venture out’ were ordered not to speak to anyone of what they had seen. It was better for everyone concerned that they simply pretend to have seen and heard nothing. That way everyone would be happier. Eventually the details of their journey would wear off like a lapsed dream, and in time, ventured Munz, the traveller might begin to doubt that he had even made the journey. When you reached this level of deception the traveller was rewarded with officialdom’s kindly