All the Chaos Is a Stage for Exiled Albanian Actor

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.

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"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.