Sworn Virgin (21 page)

Whatever questions O'Connor decides to ask her, in her home she feels she can answer
them.

Hana takes a shower and tries not to wet her hair. The day before, she went to the hairdresser and had her hair shaped around her small, well-formed ears. She puts on a push-up bra. She dresses in white, pants and a linen shirt. She looks good and she knows
it.

Whatever happens that evening, as long as it doesn't turn into a vale of tears, she'll be ok, she thinks, as she prepares herself.

O'Connor is wearing a musky, powerful aftershave that lowers her defenses right away. He hands her a beautiful bunch of flowers and kisses her lightly on the cheeks. Hana has the impression that something is moving too fast, but he's just friendly, thoughtful, and a little cautious. He takes a seat, smiling at her. There's a long embarrassing pause. Then he confesses that he has read a lot about Albania in the past few weeks. He has read everything he could get his hands on. He even found the Kanun.

Hana doesn't know what to do about the dinner that is ready. Patrick shrugs his shoulders.

‘I won't ask any questions if you don't want me
to.'

Why is he sitting there? Why
him?

‘Why are you here, Patrick?' she asks suddenly, looking at the floor. ‘It's all so unbalanced, the way I met you, my constant state of tension … ' She stops as suddenly as she started and doesn't know how to continue.

For a while now she's been unable to balance her thoughts out, and that makes her angry. It's weird but when she was Mark she was better with words. Mark weighed them out inside himself, observed and honed them, stroked them, at times erased them from his mind. As a man, silence was his ally. In silence there was hope; in conversations there often wasn't. Sound played for the enemy side. Once feelings were expressed, they lost their beauty, lost their color, and became diaphanous. The idea of beauty seems beyond her grasp now. Mark, Hana thinks, is the one who's kept his hold on beauty. In her haste to become the woman ‘Hana,' she is losing something she can't quite put her finger on. Patrick's patience is also running out, she realizes.

‘So, Hana?' he urges her on. ‘Explain yourself better: what do you mean by what you were saying?'

She takes courage and looks up. She asks him brusquely why he wants to get to know her better.

‘That sounds like an accusation,' he observes.

‘Yes, I'm a bit defensive.'

‘You're not very trusting.'

‘Sorry.'

Patrick changes
tack.

‘I'm hungry, Hana. Did you forget you'd invited me to dinner? I didn't ask you to. Maybe if you give me some dinner, I'll feel better and then you can mistreat me as much as you like.'

She laughs. First point to him. She explains what she's about to bring to the table and Patrick says he'd eat a piece of rock served on a salad leaf. He has had a bad day and skipped lunch. The tension eases slowly. Hana serves her dishes on cream-colored plates. The tablecloth is green linen and looks good with the crockery.

She asked the guy in the liquor store to advise her about wines. He suggested a Californian Cabernet. She knows nothing about
wine.

After a toast they eat in silence. Her guest wolfs down the
qofte
and vegetables, while Hana sips her wine. It's just so nice to have him there, sitting opposite her. She now feels strangely calm, and her movements become more harmonious and less spasmodic.

‘I hardly dare say it's delicious because you'll surely say I'm only being polite,' Patrick teases. ‘Can I have some more?'

He knows what he's doing, she thinks, serving him seconds. She feels her head spin. She closes her eyes. She's trying her utmost to keep her self-control, but she's not doing very well, so she may as well let go altogether. She drinks her wine in great gulps. She pushes her plate away and listens to O'Connor talk about his last two weeks, and the tragedy of his friend who was just diagnosed with cancer. She runs her hands through her hair, and goes on drinking. Patrick notices. He looks at the bottle and then at Hana's glass. He has drunk very little.

‘I want you to stay,' she begs him. ‘Just for tonight. For now,' she corrects herself. ‘If you don't have the guts to deal with your shyness, you make a fool of yourself by drinking. And I've drunk quite a
lot.'

He's about to say she's not making a fool of herself, but stops.

‘Looking you up was a mistake, Patrick. I have no right to drag you into my mess, and now I'm panicking.'

He doesn't say a
word.

Hana gets up and sways towards the bureau. She notices he's not looking at her, so as not to embarrass her. She lights a cigarette and takes a long drag. She turns around and offers her guest the pack. If she takes no notice of his disappointed expression, there may be some hope of recovering at least some of her dignity.

‘I shouldn't have drunk anything,' she murmurs, sitting back down. ‘I used to drink a lot. It was part of being a man, but you wouldn't understand that.'

‘Yeah, right. I wouldn't understand because I'm American? Because I'm a man? Explain yourself. I might understand if you tried a bit harder.'

‘It's too much for me. It would be too much for
you.'

‘Stop it. I'm fifty years old and I've been around a good while. You're not dragging me anywhere, I already told
you.'

‘Is it curiosity then? Is it that you feel you found a rare insect for your collection?' Hana stops, but it's too
late.

She hears the sound of the train as it passes her house, metal screeching on metal, carriage after carriage. I've ruined everything, she thinks. Good thing
too.

‘I'm sorry, Patrick. I really
am.'

‘God, you really like saying sorry, don't
you?'

‘Are we having a fight?'

Hana feels shame riding up her throat. She bursts into tears and drops her head on the table. O'Connor doesn't move from his seat. It's like he isn't even there.

When she manages to calm down, she can hardly get up. She goes into the bathroom and rinses her face, then buries her face in the towel and rubs until it hurts. She drags herself into the bedroom and picks up a big folder full of papers.

She goes back into the sitting room and gives the whole wad to O'Connor.

‘I owe you this at least,' she says, without looking at him. ‘This is my story. When you've read it, you don't need to give it back to me in person. You can mail it. That way I can make up for putting you in this embarrassing situation.'

In the weeks that follow Hana throws herself into her work at the bookstore with fierce determination. Lila gets the message that it's best to give her space. Jonida is coming up to the end of her junior year at high school and has so many tests she has no time to come
over.

Hana spends her evenings zapping aimlessly from one TV channel to another. She can't read, and she doesn't feel like her usual evening walks. In her overriding concern not to think about anything, one wish drills through her consciousness and hammers at her brain: that O'Connor mustn't get in touch. If he vanishes off the face of this earth, she'll be
safe.

At the end of June, however, Hana receives a letter from Patrick, saying he's read her story. The whole thing, over and over, every detail. He won't be able to return her manuscript, though, until he gets back from a trip to the Baltics, where he's planning to stay for three weeks. He doesn't plan to send it back by mail. It's clear, he writes, that their relationship isn't going to take a normal course, but he needs and wants to give her the book back in person.

It's not a book, Hana thinks. It's just my life. It's just a life; books are different.

‘I hope to see you when I get back,' he writes, ‘and if this letter irritates you, deal with
it.'

Hana gets up, puts the letter on the table, and goes out onto the balcony. Kids are playing in the square below, skipping or throwing balls, most speaking Spanish, others calling out in languages from around the world. Two young black mothers, holding newborn babies, keep an eye on their older kids, but Hana can't see who belongs to
whom.

A month later, when they finally meet, Hana wears no makeup, although the week before she had highlights put in her
hair.

They agreed on a stroll along the Potomac without too much haggling and, as they take the well-trodden path, Patrick tells her about his trip. Rowboats and kayaks slip along the river beside them. Having returned only the day before, Patrick is still jet-lagged, yet the conversation flows smoothly. Eight weeks have passed since their last, disastrous meeting. The neutrality of their surroundings clears the
air.

Then Patrick abruptly changes tack, asking about Albania, the mountains, women's rights under the Kanun, and the dictatorship. She answers diligently, leaving nothing
out.

They stop and sit on a bench, enjoying the river view and watching the Washingtonians thronging the
park.

‘Why did you do it, Hana?' Patrick asks, after a long silence. ‘You never say why, in any of your diaries. From what I understood, your uncle would never have made you marry against your will. What you write about him doesn't explain why you took such a drastic decision.'

She looks him straight in the eye and answers honestly, not worrying about sounding melodramatic. Her gesture, she says, honored Gjergj Doda, and gave him a few more months of life and dignity. If he had forced her to marry, he would have known he had done something she hated and he would have died a sad man. And if she had disobeyed him, Gjergj Doda would have lost face. The mountains couldn't allow it. When Hana became a man, Gjergj died brimming with pride.

It was a gesture of love; perhaps it was also a delusion, Hana concedes, smiling and shaking her head. To start with she felt like a character in a play, like the heroine
–
no, the hero
–
of a popular novel. Then the feeling wore off, she admits, but by then it was too late, of course. Anyway, what was the point of regretting things up there in the cursed mountains?

She looks over at two squirrels fighting over an acorn. Patrick absorbs her words slowly. Then he takes her hand and shifts his body instinctively closer to her. She rests her head on his shoulder.

‘Welcome to my life, Hana,' he murmurs. ‘Whatever direction our friendship takes, you're in my life, and you are most welcome.'

Without another word, Patrick takes her home. In the car she stares ahead and says nothing. At her door, he kisses her forehead and leaves.

Hana stands completely still. She looks within herself, and is filled with nostalgia and happiness. She is rediscovering the Hana that used to be, the Hana who sat beside Gjergj Doda in his last hours, the Hana she has spent all these years trying to suffocate and forget.

She held the dying man's hand for four whole
days.

‘He's on his way out. He's more dead than alive, can't you see?' a doctor from the nearest town had said. ‘Let him go. If you allow him to, he'll pass away this evening.'

Gjergj resisted for four more days, gripping Hana's hand desperately. It was his hand that held on, not him. He would have let go sooner, but his hand wouldn't allow
it.

When his grip loosened and his fingers went cold, she understood it was time to think about the funeral. She didn't look at his face. She got up and went to the bathroom. Her bladder had been killing her for the last three hours, but she hadn't dared take her hand
away.

She squatted over the toilet and finally let go, staring at the wall in front of her. In the corner there was an ancient patch of mold; as a child she used to see the shapes of animals and people in it, as if it were a cloud.

She checked all the rooms in the
kulla
to see that everything was in order. Then she went back to her uncle's deathbed. Now she looked at him. She kissed him on the forehead. His eyes were closed, but he still did not have the color of death. Soon his skin would start to grow darker, she had heard.

You're free now, Hana, she told herself. You're done
for.

It was five in the morning. Mark took the rifle off the wall and stepped out of the hut. He fired a few shots in the air to announce the death to the village.

In the days that follow, Hana can't stop thinking about the walk with Patrick along the Potomac. She has succeeded in having an almost normal conversation with a man, and the awe he inspired in her now feels like a fledgling sense of self-confidence.

After all, she's lived in the US now for a good year and a half, and she has made it. She hasn't had, and still doesn't have, the ability or the ambition to understand herself. That's another matter altogether. Putting together all the pieces of her puzzle: this was and is her project. While she eats her solitary dinners, she thinks with a certain pride of how far this project has taken
her.

She had the balls to do it. They still hurt from the effort. She smiles at the paradox. She's made it on her own. That's all that counts. The rest, the world, can wait. She is Hana, the Hana of her stories and of the skirts that sit badly on her hips. The world outside can wait. Take your time, please.

She feels replete, a little dizzy without drinking a drop, crazy and wise. She sings out loud and strides around the apartment like a general.

‘Get a grip,' she admonishes herself. ‘And cut all this pride crap. Take it easy.'

She observes herself from the outside severely. ‘Be normal, for God's sake.'

Nine days later, Patrick calls again. They decide to meet that evening. It is Monday. She has the morning shift at the bookstore so she has all the time in the world to get ready. She wants to be relaxed and in control of herself. She wants him to notice a change in
her.