All the Chaos Is a Stage for Exiled Albanian Actor

The end.

One night, about six or seven years ago, credits rolled across a cinema screen. The music faded. People stretched and headed for the door.

Movies died that night in Albania, a country then just emerging, naive and ill-prepared, from its thick, communist-spun cocoon. There was no time or money for frivolities such as films.

The end. Of evenings watching double bills of Albanian-produced dramas in cinemas with spine-pinching seats and cheap speakers distorting the sound. The end of a state-coddled film industry that employed thousands. The end for actors like Victor Zhusti, who knew only the insular, pampered life of an artist approved by an authoritarian regime.

That last picture show symbolized another step toward a new and combustible Albania, lurching from political crises to gun-looting anarchy to, most recently, the edge of a potential blood bath between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in neighboring Kosovo.

Albania was the most isolated, mysterious corner of the communist edifice. Now, open to the outside world, it presents a picture of almost surreal squalor.

Rutted roads lead past the abandoned hulks of giant communist-era factories. Bandits hold up an international aid team in the heart of the capital in broad daylight, demand $5,000, then, over coffee with their hostages, settle for $1,000. Kids skateboard on the slopes of a monstrous concrete pyramid built to honor former dictator Enver Hoxha.

Meanwhile, the outside world reaches Albanians via videocassettes and satellite dishes, and the old movie houses that once fostered the fantasy of a worker’s paradise now limp along showing porn films.

Prologue: Athens

The deal, as portrayed in Greek police documents, was supposed to be quick and uncomplicated: money for heroin. Just a few seconds on an Athens sidewalk, and Victor Zhusti, film star turned drug middleman, could walk away richer.

But what was happening? Nothing was going as rehearsed. There shouldn’t be so much arguing. Nervously, Zhusti looked around. At least no one was paying them any attention. The post-Christmas sales were in full swing and the next day was Jan. 6, the Epiphany holiday.

The deal fell apart. Zhusti went home.

Just before midnight, he heard a knock at the door.

He was about to hit bottom.

*

“He was like, I don’t know, Albania’s John Wayne and Dustin Hoffman rolled together,” said Aida Sama, a drama student in Tirana.

But today, like the crumbling igloo-shaped bunkers on every Albanian hillside, Victor Zhusti represents a past left untended and unmourned.

At least there’s some use for the concrete bunkers. Built to keep out phantom enemies during decades of fanatical totalitarianism, they are being demolished for building material, or converted into convenience stores where cigarettes and soft drinks are sold through the gun-barrel slits.

What happens, though, to an actor with nowhere to act?

Zhusti’s story is a set piece for these orphans of the post-Cold War, for whom freedom is weighed down by heavy millstones of insecurity.

Across Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the collapse of communism cast adrift artists, professors and others who enjoyed state-sanctioned privileges and must now cope with the open market.

The transition was most stark in Albania, ruled for more than 40 years by Enver Hoxha as a private fiefdom. In this mountainous, Massachusetts-size country of 3.5 million people, generations were reared in a cloistered society ruled by an odd mix of political repression and timeless village traditions.

State media was unvarnished propaganda, and mosques and churches were looted and burned in atheistic purges--not unusual in most communist regimes, but enforced with a vengeance in Albania.

About the only approved diversion was the homegrown cinema and theater. Directors churned out dozens of productions each year, always following the accepted formulas: patriotism, socialism, sex-free romance.

This was Zhusti’s world. When the regime started to unravel, so did Zhusti’s life.

“To understand what happened in Albania, just look at what happened to Victor Zhusti,” said Luljeta Andoni, a staff member at the Albanian newspaper Illyria in New York. “He once represented a movie-studio version of Albania. He now is showing another side of the story in real life.”

Zhusti (pronounced ZOO-stee) grew up believing he was an orphan. He was born in Athens in 1942, and at age 3 was taken across the border by his Greek-Albanian father to Gjirokastra, in southern Albania. As Hoxha’s birthplace, the town had such luxuries as paved side streets--rare for provincial cities.

Zhusti’s father told the boy his mother had died in World War II. He left him with an uncle and disappeared from his life.

As Zhusti grew up, Albania grew ever more isolated. It was the only communist country bent on making its way alone, without a superpower--the Soviet Union or China--to hold its hand.

As Albania slid deeper into poverty and backwardness, Zhusti turned to theater, crafting his own universe on the warped and termite-chewed stage of the Cajupi playhouse in Gjirokastra.

He never stopped working, often crafting his lines and gestures late into the night. He began to amass fans, whose bouquets brightened his uncle’s drab apartment.

“He needed to act. It was like food to him,” said fellow actor Kico Londo.

In 1970, Zhusti joined the National Theater troupe. Here he got his first sample of foreign fare: Shakespeare, clandestine readings of Tennessee Williams.

He became a virtuoso of the intricate Albanian language, the only surviving branch of the ancient tongue called Illyrian. “He could bring people to tears with just the way he used the Albanian language,” recalled Gezim Kame, director of the National Theater. “He had a gift.”

Soon after arriving in Tirana, Zhusti made the first of about 20 films. From playing fearless fighters battling fascists, he moved to light comedies and social dramas: a bachelor caught in the web of an arranged marriage, a confused villager coping with urban life, a parent deciding whether to have a second child.

Tall and lean, with dark, soulful eyes, strong chin and beguiling smile, Zhusti made a natural leading man.

But he preferred to hunt and fish when he should have been appearing at Communist Party functions, and that gave him a faint rebel aura. So the state discouraged critics from praising his performances too lavishly.

“He was not a favorite of Big Brother,” said Remzi Lani, executive director of the Albanian Media Institute.

Then, in 1983, Zhusti became too big to ignore. Word reached him that his mother was, in fact, alive. His father had concocted the story to keep Zhusti from searching for her. Zhusti was allowed the rare privilege of traveling to Greece to see her. Their reunion was staggering news in a country unaccustomed to revelations.

The state spin-doctors took full advantage.

A letter signed by Zhusti’s mother appeared in the government press, thanking the country for rearing her boy.

“All Albania should be proud,” she wrote.

But for communist Albania, the end was already approaching.

Act II: Departure

By 1990, Hoxha was dead and his political heirs were foundering. The Berlin Wall was breached. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were free. Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, and his wife had died before a firing squad. The tremors were finally penetrating Albania’s corner of the Balkans.

It began with a student revolt and attacks on monuments and museums extolling Hoxha. In Gjirokastra, Zhusti watched as a mob toppled a bust of Hoxha.

The frontiers opened, and Albanians poured out. Freighters, speedboats--just about anything that could float--ferried Albanians to Italy. Others hiked overland to Greece.

For Zhusti, there was nothing left in Tirana. Stripped of state funding, the film industry crashed and theaters were boarded up. Half the National Orchestra left the country in a matter of weeks.

Zhusti, his wife and their two children headed for Greece in 1991.

They left behind very little: a three-room apartment with a small balcony and Zhusti’s monthly income, worth about $115.

But the psychological jump was huge. Isolated for decades, many Albanians didn’t know the simplest things about life beyond their borders, such as how to work a pay phone. Bricklayers and carpenters would manage, but what skills could artists, professors, writers and other members of the old intelligentsia offer?

Zhusti found work in a gas station in Athens, then as a clerk in some small shops. His wife began teaching. But money was still tight. He grew disillusioned and began to think of returning.

But to what? Albania was descending into chaos. Hungry for a taste of quick prosperity, Albanians had bought into pyramid scams that promised super-high returns. When the pyramids inevitably collapsed, Albanians got their refunds by looting the country.

It was a feeding frenzy. Stores were emptied. Rocket launchers and machine guns were seized from police stations and armories. A kid with a pistol and some debris for a roadblock could be king of all he surveyed--until a bigger kid came along with a bigger gun.

Workers at the National Theater took home props and lights in case the place was looted.

The nation needed a villain and chose President Sali Berisha, accusing him of letting the pyramid scams function with impunity.

In Gjirokastra, near the theater where Zhusti began his career, a gang of men mercilessly beat a member of Berisha’s party on a cool March afternoon last year. The man bled to death. In December, the Hoxha museum in the town was blown up by unknown bombers.

Last June a new government was elected. The United Nations wants to conduct a weapons buyback but can’t raise the funds to pay for the looted hardware. The ousted Berisha is back in his stronghold in northeast Albania, capitalizing on the nationalist passions unleashed by fighting between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Thus, as if it doesn’t have enough troubles, Albania now risks being sucked into the Yugoslav conflict.

Some Albanians think the only route to stability lies in restoring its monarchy, in exile since 1939. The claimant to the throne, King Leka, a businessman in South Africa, returned briefly last year. He fled after the state took legal action over a wild shootout at a pro-royalty rally that left one person dead.

Meanwhile, Albanian immigrants have become scapegoats for Greece’s crime and social ills. Graffiti near Zhusti’s apartment in Athens says: “Save Greece. Albanians Out.”

Last summer, the National Theater director received a letter from Zhusti. “I want to come back,” he wrote. “There’s nothing for me here.”

“We had such hopes the first couple of years after Albania opened up,” said Mihallaq Sevo, a former history professor. “Now, we know it was silly to be so happy. Good things don’t just happen because you have freedom. Victor Zhusti is just one example: a good man with good dreams that didn’t work out. It’s sad.”

Act III: Desperation

Last year Zhusti translated a Greek play into Albanian. He hoped to return to Albania and stage it at the National Theater. It’s about patients in a psychiatric ward who discover they are sane and the outside world is crazy.

It seemed like a rich metaphor for Albania’s predicament. But when Zhusti eventually returned to Albania, Greek authorities allege, it was not to stage the play but to play middleman in a drug deal.

The network of drugs and weapons moving from Albania to Greece is vast. Caravans of mules laden with hashish and automatic rifles cross the border. At sea, the Greek coast guard wages firefights with speedboat crews trying to smuggle in drugs and guns.

After speaking to traffickers about a drug shipment for a Greek-American buyer, police allege, Zhusti headed back to Greece. A rendezvous was arranged on an Athens boulevard.

“I didn’t know who I was going to meet, but he would recognize me for sure because I’m a famous actor in Albania,” he told police.

According to Zhusti’s account to police, the sale price was $20,000 for 24 pounds of heroin. The buyers showed up with a sack of money, but not the dealers and the heroin. When Zhusti called Albania to find out what had happened, he was told the deal was off.

That night, Jan. 5, he was arrested.

“He got caught up in something that just grew out of control,” says his lawyer, Dimitra Baka. “He’s a good man. An actor. An artist. He’s not a drug smuggler. He made some bad choices.”

Zhusti is in jail on the Greek island of Crete. No trial date has been set. Zhusti’s wife returned to Tirana for a while. She has stopped calling the lawyer for updates.

“I’m not trying to justify what Zhusti allegedly did,” said Lani of the Media Institute. “But I think I can explain it. We are a corrupted society now, and sometimes we don’t use honest ways. There is a very wild capitalism now, and people think they should be rich very quickly. . . . This makes them do crazy things sometimes.”

Epilogue

In July, the Albafilm Studio where Zhusti made his movies burned down. Faulty wiring is suspected. The next day the government ordered the National Theater to close after an international team of inspectors said it was in danger of collapsing.

Inside a glass kiosk, near the incongruous whimsy of a little amusement park in the center of gritty Tirana, the proprietor looked through her stacks of videos. Sunlight through dirty panes gave the place a coffee-shaded tint.

“They must be here,” whispered Rita Djirja.

She found them near the bottom of a pile of Rambo movies and Italian erotica.

“I knew we had some Zhusti movies. We don’t get too many people asking for them now,” she said. “People don’t want to revisit the old times. Not yet, at least. There’s no nostalgia yet.”