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smiles.
    Comrade.
    Two months earlier the block had been opened to the public for the first time. During the first weeks families had wandered arm in arm through leafy streets in a kind of vacation spirit. People spoke of Paris. Vienna. Rome. They were not quite sure what to make of the block, it being quite unlike anything else in their own country. The thing that had struck people most was how the air changed.
    And it was true! In the space of a few blocks it was as if we had travelled from East to West. We had left behind the shabbiness and mud of Tirana’s unfinished pavements for quiet, tree-lined streets and sealed pavements. The water-stained apartment houses had given way to stylish villas. There were patios and gardens with luxuriant foliage trained to spill over high walls.
    We walked beneath other walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass. Munz pointed to the cap of a soldier standing in the garden. A little further on, it was possible to see the soldier’s green tunic through the last of the yellowing grapevines.
    Opposite a small park of tall poplars stood the Hoxha compound—a three-storey block which sprawled in the manner of a collapsed cake. In style it owed something to the model homes featured in editions of Ladies’ Home Journal from the 1950s—here and there a stolid brick façade conceded a pink shutter. Climbing rose grew over a black iron railing. At the bottom of the garden stood a sculpture of a shepherd playing his flute to a herd of goats.
    At the other end of the property were greenhouses with mandarin trees. Standing guard here were two soldiers. Munz called them over to the fence.
    The soldiers’ rif le butts were carved with initials. Poor nutrition had scarred their faces with acne, and any authority they were capable of was undermined by red blemishes and bewildered eyes.
    When Munz asked them what they doing, the soldiers consulted each other. They shrugged, and then the younger one, with a sheepish, apologetic smile, mentioned the possibilities of riots. He pointed to the greenhouses behind, still intact.
    We crossed the street to the park. From here we had an un interrupted view up the rruga running the length of the Hoxha compound. On the corner closest, one of the country’s new entrepreneurs had set himself up with a pair of bathroom scales. A cardboard sign invited customers to weigh themselves for two lek.
    â€˜It is as you can see,’ said Munz, ‘a hopeless situation.’
    Shapallo had lived in the block, but Munz didn’t know where. The dentist had described a small sunken garden surrounded by high walls. He couldn’t see out, and people couldn’t see in. In fact, he’d had no idea of his street address since he received no mail and took no telephone calls. Munz seemed to think that the windows in the villa had been shuttered all year round.
    From what he had told Munz, Shapallo had lived for nearly twenty years in a comfortable cage. He also said that on the night of Hoxha’s death the cage door had been left deliberately open, and he had fled the block for the countryside, travelling at night and sleeping by day in concrete bunkers.
    On the train from Durrës I had seen the bunkers squatting on the roadside and perched in fields of tilled earth. They were positioned to shoot the enemy coming over the rise. South of Durrës I had seen them sitting on the beaches like mutant grey jellyfish, watching the horizon.
    After years of ‘soft living’ Shapallo had suddenly found himself foraging to survive. For a time he had subsisted on chestnuts and olives. Moving down the coast towards Sarandë, he had described to Munz his wandering through the orange-scented groves, picking fruit off the ground, a man with a straight back who placed each foot delicately, as if trying to tiptoe away from his shadow.

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    EACH MORNING THE student interpreters gather outside the Dajti to pick up casual work from the foreigners.