Sworn Virgin (17 page)

Hana reminds him that he too has stayed behind in Albania. The mechanic shakes his
head.

‘My two boys left for Italy on the first ships out of here when the regime cracked. Now they're doing ok, but it was hard for them to start with. They went to a city called Treviso, in the north. They're pretty racist up there. If you say you're Albanian they think you're a criminal. Then they tried Greece and it was even worse. They went back to Italy, near Rome. They're both mechanics. Things got better there. Rome is a big city and they're hard workers, like
me.'

Farì sits up straighter and smiles, revealing a missing tooth. Hana is missing two molars. She hasn't seen a dentist in seven years. She smiles
back.

A muezzin starts his call. Scutari is full of mosques. Farì turns serious.

‘When you have kids, you live for them, my friend,' he says. ‘The old lady and me, we're staying here and we want to die here. Once we went to Rome to see the boys. They treated us like royalty.'

He makes an indecipherable gesture. He's a real father: pure paternal love exhibited without any hypocritical attempt to feign detachment.

‘You, Mark, you should get away from this crazy country. You're still young. Can't you see the north of Albania is empty? They say there are over a million Albanians around the world who left as soon as this country became a democracy. And if you really don't want to leave the country, at least come down and live in the city. We could go into business together, what do you say? You could take care of the accounts, the clients, the spare parts to order down in Tirana. You've read a lot and you're good with paperwork, I hear. I've been thinking about it for a while, but I never had the chance to talk to
you.'

Farì finishes his espresso with a hasty last
gulp.

‘Everyone with any education has gone. We dummies know how to work, but what about the mind? The mind, my friend
–
who has a mind around here any longer? You have brains enough and more. Think about
it.'

‘Thanks, Farì. I will.'

‘Ok, let's get back to your Chinese heap of scrap.'

While Farì works on the truck, Hana smokes a cigarette, looking at her reflection in the filthy glass of the garage door. She looks like a scarecrow. Her cheeks are hollow, her hair matted, her shirt three sizes too big. The muezzin's still getting on their nerves with his whining.

Farì starts the truck. She moves away from the door and watches him as he drives by, vanishes around the corner, and takes the truck down a road that was once paved and is now a muddy track.

Thirty or forty years before, somewhere in the middle of that vast, faraway country, when the Chinese workmen had finished testing the truck destined for Albania that was already old before it even left the factory, the afternoon could have been just like this
one.

Hana remembers the Chinese with their blue uniforms. She saw a group of five of them in Piazza Skanderbeg in Tirana, the first time she went there on a school trip. But they had also been on the television at the agricultural cooperative in Rrnajë. They were comical. People said they ate snakes; who knew if it was true. All they brought to Albania were broken-down trucks, bicycles without gears, a metalworks that was as old as the world itself and their dances with that boring, whiny music. The ones Hana remembers all looked sad. Maybe it was those instruments with their terrible twangy strings. Nothing like the north Albanian sword dance.

Farì is coming back in the truck, waving his left hand excitedly out of the window at
her.

‘You're all set here,' he says, proudly.

Hana thanks him, pays, and drives
away.

A week later she goes to see Blerta. This time her friend's hair is tied back and she's wearing jeans and a white shirt. Two foreigners are filming in the center of the village. Blerta is standing behind
them.

‘I came to say hello,' Hana says, embarrassed. ‘I wasn't very nice the other day, to put it mildly, so
…'

‘Don't worry. It's really lovely here. Is it always so peaceful?'

Wrong question, Hana thinks to herself. If only it were peaceful
here.

‘Are you married, Blerta?' she asks, rather than answering her friend's question. How did she get so beautiful? She used to be the kind of mousy girl you didn't notice; now she's a kind of goddess. Her eyes are the color of a stormy sea. She looks great in jeans. She would look good in a potato
sack.

‘No, I'm not married. I have a boyfriend, though. He lives far away, in the
US.'

Hana looks at her inquisitively.

‘We lived together for a while but then he didn't want us to get married. He felt it was too soon, he didn't feel ready. So here I
am.'

‘Do you ever speak to this friend?'

‘He calls every week.'

‘So it's serious.'

‘I don't really know, but he goes on calling.'

Hana tells Blerta she has come to invite her to dinner.

Two old women shuffle by, pushing barrows loaded with potatoes and sacks of flour. All the menfolk in the clan of one of the women live permanently locked inside their
kulla
, under the threat of an ancient blood feud. Only she can leave the house without risk of being shot and killed. The Kanun says that women, children, and priests are not targets. The old woman's clan is in a blood feud with a clan from Bogë. Before moving away, Hakia
–
that is her name
–
catches Hana's eye. She doesn't say hello, but a corner of her mouth lifts in a light grimace, hinting at a greeting. Hakia's eyes are a tree waiting for the ax to fall. What must it be like to live with ten men shut up in your
kulla
, the only thread of hope for so much frustrated virility? The history of blood spilled between the two families goes back a hundred years, relieved only by a brief truce imposed by the communists. Hakia had a hundred years of death in her memories.

Hana shifts her attention to Blerta and asks her what she studied in the
US.

‘Psychology and psychiatry in Seattle, a city in the state of Washington, in the northwest.'

‘I don't know anything about all that,' Hana smiles. ‘So, are you coming over this evening?'

‘As soon as I'm done with these journalists. Is around eight
ok?'

Hana cuts some cheese and arranges it as best she can on the only good serving dish in the house. It's an old porcelain plate from Turkey; Aunt Katrina held onto it like a relic. Hana mashes the beans she boiled that morning and makes a kind of purée. She fries up a few onions and aromatic herbs and mixes them into the purée. As she doesn't have a suitable bowl to serve it in, she puts everything into a saucepan and shreds a few hot chili peppers over the
top.

The next step is a painstaking wash. She combs her wet hair back. If she had a bit of face cream she would put it on. She puts on her best flannel shirt, bought in Lezhë market. What the hell? She stops and asks herself. What do you think you're doing?

Just then Blerta looks round the
door.

‘Hey, Hana! Can I give you a hug this time?' she asks as soon as she's inside, not wasting a moment.

‘Let's hug then, if it means so much to
you.'

They embrace for a few, embarrassed seconds. Blerta doesn't seem to want to let go, so Hana focuses on the picture of Gjergj in front of her, or rather, on his left mustache, curled up and black as pitch.

‘Look, Blerta. I'm a man, you know.'

‘Ok. You're a man and I'm the big bad wolf.'

‘Leave off now.' Hana detaches herself and darts over to the table, where she starts fiddling with the aluminum forks, lining them up. Blerta sits
down.

‘Hana,' she says sweetly. ‘Relax! I'm Blerta, your old friend from college, and I came to see you,
ok?'

‘There's some bean purée and sheep's cheese for dinner, with black bread and as much raki as you like, if you want to get drunk.'

‘I don't drink raki,' Blerta says, apologetically.

But Hana pours some out anyway and Blerta doesn't stop her. They eat the bean dish with the cheese, and it's delicious.

They talk about this and that, in a desultory way. Then Blerta says that sooner or later she'd like to have a child
–
if not with the American then with someone else. Anything's possible these days, right?

Hana proposes a toast. They lift their glasses and drink to it. Blerta screws up her face while Hana tosses the raki back as if it were water, fills their glasses up again, and watches in amazement as Blerta takes another gulp. Now they're both beginning to relax.

‘I know you're annoyed with me because I didn't come up to the mountains to visit after you took your oath.'

‘We're not talking about that.'

‘Yes we are. We need to because it's been bothering me ever since, and we talked about my visiting you for months in college.'

‘Then you forgot all about me,' Hana says, without rancor.

Blerta reaches for the bottle of raki, slips her shoes off and makes herself more comfortable. Now Hana recognizes the old Blerta from ten years ago, sitting cross-legged on the bunk bed at Tirana University students' residence. She had been funny and shy and secretly in love with all the boys who walked under their window. Hana had dedicated a poem to Blerta but hadn't been able to give it to her because of Aunt Katrina's death.

‘Yes. For years I hoped you would come up and see me at least once,' she confesses. ‘I mean, in those early years, why didn't you come?'

Blerta struggles not to let the alcohol confuse her, but she goes on drinking.

‘Would it have changed anything?' she asks, rubbing her eyes. ‘These beans are delicious, by the
way.'

‘No, it wouldn't have changed anything.'

Hana doesn't want this evening to vanish into thin air. She doesn't want Blerta to disappear again, she doesn't want to go back to being Mark, nor for her life to slip by without the chance to understand something about herself.

‘You look like a foreigner, and you make me ashamed of myself.'

‘Foreign? Me?' Blerta objects.

‘The way you move, your perfect English … I heard you this afternoon talking to those people in your group. You know how much I love that language and how I never got to study it properly. You make me feel ugly and stupid. What can I
say?'

Her friend smiles at
her.

‘You were beautiful once, but you did your best not to let anyone see
it.'

‘Me?'

‘Yes, you. With all those guys chasing after
you!'

‘Chasing after me?' she asks, because she likes hearing the words. You're enjoying this, she says to herself. What an idiot. What a stupid idiot.

‘You're still beautiful now, you know?' Blerta says, her voice suddenly turning sad. ‘Despite your best efforts to destroy your looks.'

‘Don't say that.'

Blerta says she has to say these things, because now she can see with her own eyes that what everyone said was
true.

Hana swallows the last two spoonfuls of beans and washes them down with alcohol. She gets up and opens the narrow window. What she'd really like to do is talk about books with Blerta, to go and get her notebooks full of poems and throw them into her friend's lap so she could laugh at Hana as much as she wanted.

She rests her forehead on the stone
wall.

‘Thanks for being here today, Blerta,' she
says.

‘All these years, I never really believed you were gay or that you had become a man in order to hide that you were.'

‘Is that what people said?'

‘Well, you didn't tell us what was going on. You didn't send a card or anything, an invitation to come see you. So we left you in peace. That's why we didn't get in touch.'

Hana comes back and sits down with her legs crossed. She tries to see herself through Blerta's eyes. I must look like a tiny version of Gjergj Doda, she thinks. But that's not what Blerta sees. She has never seen Hana's uncle, except in the photo on the
wall.

‘It can't have been easy,' her friend muses, her voice thick with drink, ‘to live this
way.'

Hana licks her finger and uses it to gather up the breadcrumbs on the table and stick them in her mouth. She looks
up.

‘It has been hard,' she answers, smiling. ‘No, I correct myself, it's been hell.'

She had never thought about it in these terms before. She stiffens, now, in sudden anticipation of the inevitable question: ‘Why did you do it?' Sooner or later that question always comes up and she doesn't want to hear it. Blerta surprises her by not saying anything. She's so quiet that Hana is almost angry with her. Her friend tells her she doesn't want any explanations about her choices because there wouldn't be any point. What's done is
done.

Blerta is still the best. Hana laughs, conscious of her yellow teeth, dry skin and matted hair. Tears start to fall down her face and she does nothing to stop them. Blerta is crying too. Maybe it's the raki she can't take, or she's missing her American friend. Hana doesn't look at her. She listens to her sobs and feels almost relieved. She dries her cheeks and waits for Blerta's sadness to lose its
edge.

Her friend sniffs loudly. In a few days she'll leave Rrnajë just as she came, and they may never see each other again. The idea of never seeing Blerta again gives Hana a spike of
pain.