Sworn Virgin (6 page)

‘Where are you going to talk to Jonida?' Lila asks
her.

‘In the park we went to yesterday.'

‘You don't want me to come with you, do
you?'

Hana stares ahead.

‘I want to be alone with her. Let's see if I can still spin a good tale.'

The park is almost empty. A couple in identical jogging pants runs by. A man jogs past them, pushing a gigantic three-wheeled stroller. Hana says it is four o'clock in the afternoon, just to say something. A family of ducks is standing in the middle of the lawn. The road behind the park is called College Parkway. It has taken Jonida and Hana ten minutes to reach this point.

They sit on a bench.

‘So, Uncle Mark,' Jonida kicks off, a flicker of fear in her eyes. She crosses her long legs and her high ponytail catches in the wind. ‘I've been thinking all day about what you're going to say, about all those things my parents hide from me, but I've guessed anyway, though I haven't said a thing to them.'

Hana gets her cigarettes out, but Jonida grabs
them.

‘They're bad for
you.'

‘What have you guessed?'

‘We're here because
you
have to explain things to
me
, right?'

‘I want to smoke.'

‘It's bad for
you.'

‘I've smoked for fourteen years. One more cigarette isn't going to kill
me.'

‘Promise you'll stop soon?'

‘Look, I'm not your father,
ok?'

Jonida smiles for the first time and takes out one cigarette for Hana, then puts the pack away in her own pocket.

‘So who are you in real life, Uncle Mark?'

‘I'm your auntie, your mother's first cousin.'

Embarrassed giggles. Jonida suddenly uncrosses her legs and jumps up, facing Hana without actually looking at her. She looks beyond her, staring at the
road.

‘I know you're gay,' she says in an intimate tone of voice. ‘That much is pretty obvious.
But—'

‘Wait a minute,' Hana interrupts her. ‘Me,
gay?'

‘What's the problem then? Why is everything all hush-hush around you? You're homosexual. That's what I thought the moment I saw
you.'

Hana bursts into laughter, but the smoke chokes her. She's laughing and coughing at the same time. She gets up too and they start walking. Jonida acts like she knows everything.

‘You haven't done the operation yet, right? I mean, sexually, you're still a
man?'

Hana hides behind her laughter.

‘No,' she says finally, ‘I'm not a man. And I'm not gay. Not even a little bit. I'm a woman. I've been a girl since the day I was born.'

Jonida slumps down on the grass. She's managed to find a spot where the newly cut grass doesn't prick her legs. Hana sits down next to her and puts out the cigarette she still hasn't finished.

‘I'm not gay and I'm not lesbian,' she repeats. ‘I know I look strange, a kind of hybrid, but I am a woman.'

‘Where are your boobs then?'

‘Here. Not very big ones, but I wear baggy shirts, as you can
see.'

Jonida is silent. Hana gives her time to digest the information.

‘Now I don't understand a thing. Starting with why you dress and act like a man. And how you managed to pass as a man, even though you were weird.'

‘It's a long story,' Hana murmurs.

It is such a long story. She's already tired. To their right, a group of kids heads towards the big field where there's an oval of well-trodden earth.

‘They're going to play baseball,' Jonida explains. ‘Last year I was on the softball team but it was so boring I left. Now I play volleyball.'

Some clumsy kid hits his leg with the bat instead of hitting the ball. The coach makes him lie down. They all huddle around
him.

‘What do you know about the mountains, Jonida?'

Her niece thinks for a minute and then answers, pronouncing every word carefully. She knows that the mountains are really poor, that they're always shooting each other, that there are blood vendettas and family feuds. Her parents don't talk about it much. Lila says they're American now and should live in the here and now. She also knows that a boy from Montenegro in eighth grade at school speaks Albanian, not Serbo-Croat, which means there are Albanians in Montenegro, but not that many. She knows she'd like to go there some day, to see it with her own eyes. She'd like to engage with her country, some
day.

‘Maybe my story's not as complicated as it seems,' Hana
says.

Her parents had both died in a bus accident while they were on their way to a wedding in the city. Those dirt roads were made for animals, not for trucks. Hana had been orphaned at the age of
ten.

‘Wait a minute,' Jonida says. ‘You're going too fast, you're making it too … ' She leaves the sentence hanging in the air. That's how she takes after her father: her sentences made of air, hanging on invisible hooks. ‘What's the death of your parents got to do with you deciding to be a
man?'

Hana scratches her forehead.

‘It's not that hard to be a man, you know?' she says. ‘I swore never to get married. It's a tradition that exists only in the north of the country. Let me explain: when there are no boys in a family, one of the girls swears to behave like a man and to remain a man for the rest of her life. From that moment on, she has to play all the roles and take over all the tasks of a man. That's why I became the son my uncle never had. Uncle Gjergj was my father's brother; he took me in and brought me up after my parents died.'

‘I don't get
it.'

‘I just gave you the basics.'

‘I don't get it. Why doesn't the girl just do the men's stuff without having to turn into a man? Why can't she just do what she wants?'

Jonida's voice sounds alarmed. Hana feels guilty. She takes a deep breath and closes her
eyes.

‘So? Why can't she?' Jonida urges her on, realizing that her aunt is troubled by the question.

‘Only a man can be the head of a family. Men are free to go where they like, to give orders, buy land, defend themselves, attack if need be, kill, or order someone else to be killed. Men get freedom and glory along with their duties. Women are left with obedience. And the girl I once was had a problem with obedience. That just about sums it
up.'

She says this looking Jonida straight in the eyes, her words like sharp pins, accusing. But it's no good. Her niece can't be blamed for anything, except maybe having made her bring forth this perverse fairytale.

‘I was a girl until I was nineteen,' Hana goes on. ‘Uncle Gjergj and Aunt Katrina loved
me.'

Jonida pulls Hana's cigarettes out of her pocket and hands one to her
aunt.

‘Then Uncle Gjergj got cancer. I had to go to the city to get his drugs once a month. I couldn't go if I was a woman. It was a matter of honor, morality, a woman's inviolability, and so on. I can't explain everything now.' Hana sucks on her cigarette. ‘So I just started dressing like a man. Then Uncle Gjergj died, and here I
am.'

Jonida fiddles with a button, plays around with the cigarette pack, rests her arm on Hana's shoulder, but she can't get comfortable. She gets up and then kneels down in front of
her.

‘Why couldn't you go back to being a woman after he died?'

‘There's no going back.'

‘Why
not?'

‘Just because. It's the law; it's tradition.'

‘And if you do, what happens?'

‘You don't do it, and that's that. If you break your oath they can kill you. Anyway, it has never happened. A sworn virgin has never broken her oath.'

‘Did you like guys when you were a girl?'

Hana smiles, tired to the
bone.

‘Albania in those days was not like America now. We lived in the mountains. Things were different.'

‘But did you like guys or didn't
you?'

Hana repeats that up in the north things were different. They don't say anything for a while, eyes fixed on the baseball players. Then Jonida asks Hana what she should call her from now
on.

‘Just use my name. Forget the Auntie stuff. Call me Hana.'

‘Mom's not going to like
it.'

‘I'll deal with
Mom.'

‘Right, cool.'

‘Can we go home
now?'

‘You haven't told me everything
yet.'

‘It would take a lifetime to tell you everything, Jonida.'

‘Well, that's exactly what we have: our whole lives.'

‘Thank God you're here,' Uncle Gjergj says. ‘You made it with all this snow.'

The electricity is down. The snowstorm has stolen the light from all the houses in Rrnajë and the rest of the region. The power lines sag under the weight of the snow. Adults sink to their waists in the freezing mantle, children to over their heads. There isn't a living soul outside. Just silent snow falling, accompanied here and there by the distant ringing of a bell tied to the neck of some lost
goat.

The hurricane lamp casts Uncle Gjergj's shadow onto the stone wall of the
kulla
.

‘Welcome home, dear daughter,' Aunt Katrina says. She is tall and wizened with age, her hair hidden behind a white headscarf. She looks like Lawrence of Arabia, without the desert, Hana thinks. She saw the film back in Tirana. Aunt Katrina looks like a female version of Peter O'Toole.

‘Are you hungry, my love?' Katrina
asks.

‘No, thank
you.'

‘We'll be eating soon anyway.'

‘That's fine. Can I give you a hand?'

‘No, sweetie. Your uncle needs to talk to you. I'll get dinner ready.'

Katrina disappears into the darkness of the
kulla
. Uncle Gjergj is lying down, which is not like him. If it weren't dark she would see his pallid complexion. But she doesn't see it. He is strong and handsome. The wrinkles on his face are a carefully drawn
map.

‘Did you bump into anyone in the village on your way here?'

Hana shakes her
head.

She had seen the sea before coming to the village. Blerta, her college roommate, had come north with her. She's from a little village by the sea, near Scutari. Hana slept at her house the night before catching the bus that would take her home. The sea had been rough. Giant waves had vented their multi-hued
rage.

Hana slept really well at Blerta's house. Wild horses wandered along the deserted beach; the sheets smelled of sea
salt.

‘Stay one more day,' Blerta had pleaded. ‘You love being by the
sea.'

She couldn't. Something serious had happened at home. Her uncle had never called her in Tirana before. He wouldn't have called without good reason.

Hana left clutching a bag of
sand.

‘I'll wait for you,' Blerta told her. ‘We'll go back to Tirana together in a week. Remember, we've got a seminar on Renaissance literature.'

‘Sure, Blerta.
Tungjatë
.'

‘So you're already talking like the mountain people?' Blerta teased.

Hana liked using the
tungjatjeta
goodbye. Hand on heart, solemn gaze, the fleeting touch of foreheads to seal the sacred nature of the farewell.
May your life grow longer!

She glances at her almost-decent city clothes. In the shadow of the
kulla
they look all right.

‘I'm sick,' Uncle Gjergj says. ‘There's this thing in my throat. They say it's big. Sometimes it chokes me and I can't speak.'

‘How long have you known?'

‘Two months.'

‘The other day I dreamed you had a mountain on your back and you were stooped over with the weight. The mountain was made of dry earth and when you moved it crumbled around you so you were walking in the middle of a cloud of yellow dust.'

Gjergj laughs, the hurricane lamp making his mouth look bigger.

‘Sit down,' he
says.

Hana obeys. Between her and her uncle there is an ancient wooden table. He struggles to sit up in bed. Now Hana can see his terrifyingly swollen neck and the effort he makes to move his jaws normally while he's talking. He wants to know how college is going and she tells him that in a few days she has an important seminar on Albanian Renaissance literature. Gjergj says he doesn't know what a seminar is and she explains.

‘And what is the Renaissance?'

‘It's the cultural rebirth of a nation after a long period of darkness. Here in Albania the Renaissance was later than in the rest of Europe, not until the end of the Ottoman occupation.'

‘It sounds like a complicated story, dear daughter.'

Hana doesn't say anything. Gjergj is an intelligent man but he often pretends he's not. She had no problem convincing him to let her go away to college. There are no books in the
kulla
, except a well-hidden Bible and a history of Skanderbeg, the national hero. That's the sum total. But she has always thought he knows much more than he lets
on.

‘Are you happy down in the capital?'

‘Yes, very.'

‘Even with all that communist garbage they thrust down your throats?'

The word ‘thrust' is not a common word in these parts. Not for a shepherd. Not for a man who can only write his own name. Hana is pleased with this confirmation of her suspicions.

‘I like it anyway, even with the garbage. More than up here.'

‘Well … ' Pause. ‘I'm sorry I called
you.'

‘What do the doctors say exactly?'

‘The bread's ready,' Aunt Katrina announces softly.

Neither Hana nor Gjergj heard her come in. Hana doesn't move. The old lady sits down next to her. Katrina has a bad heart and is only alive by a miracle. She is the love of Gjergj's life. The way they treat each other is not typical around here. Their dialect gives them away as mountain folk, not their gestures.

‘I've made the beans. If you don't eat now they'll get cold, my love.'

Hana takes her
hand.

‘Can you tell me what's really going on, Uncle Gjergj?'

‘They say I don't have long to live. Even if I have surgery, they don't think they can save me. I had to tell you in person.'

‘It can't be true.'

‘They say I've been sick for a while, I just didn't know it. Now it's too late.'

‘You can come with me to Tirana. The doctors down there will say something different. They're the best in the country.'

Her uncle shakes his head. Hana feels a quiver in her stomach but she can't cry. She has never cried in front of him; it would disappoint him. The mountain peals with thunder. The snow is tired of falling. The roof of the hut is weighed down by two centuries of
life.

‘Everything's getting cold,' Katrina complains.

‘You're coming to Tirana, Uncle Gjergj.'

Dinner is delicious. The potatoes melt in her mouth, the beans taste smoky and the bread is heavy and irregular. In the city the bread is white; nothing like this. Nobody says a word. Katrina envelops Hana in her gaze and they exchange glances only women can share. Life had deprived Katrina of children but given her a man who loved and treated her well. She suffocates Hana with her attentions: offers her a piece of roast onion, fills her bowl with beans again.

‘You're still not full,' she says at the end of the
meal.

‘Oh yes I am. I've eaten a
lot.'

‘You've turned into a city girl, Hana,' Katrina says, smiling at her. ‘You use different sounds, you speak like a schoolteacher. And your hair? What have you done to your hair? It's so beautiful.'

Gjergj looks at his wife surreptitiously.

‘Tell me about the language of the English, dear daughter,' he commands.

‘What can I say? It's a language that talks about beautiful places.'

Uncle Gjergj lights his pipe. He looks at the black patch on the wall to his left. He suddenly seems nervous.

‘You think they're beautiful just because they're far away,' he says dryly. Then he shuts
up.

In the days that follow, Hana's books are spread all over her room. There's a bed and an old wardrobe that hardly opens. Her clothes smell of wood and mold. No soap can wash away the smell.

One morning, Gjergj gets up and leaves the
kulla
. Neither Hana nor Katrina dares to stop him. He goes and smokes outside, in the snow. Sitting on a rough slab of wood in the middle of the courtyard, seen from behind, he looks like a sculpture. Then a cough assaults him and he defends himself as well as he can. His shoulders shudder until fatigue forces him to come back inside. He is deathly pale. Hana stares at him, her eyes
wide.

Every six hours Katrina gives Gjergj the pills Hana doesn't even want to see. Her books are still open in her room. And she thinks that with this pain inside she's not going to go far. If you don't look pain straight in the face, it will take you over. It will inhabit you, a grubby black mass, a messy bundle. If you deal with it full on, on the other hand, there's a chance that it will leave you alone. She tries to take it
on.

On the third day she puts on all the clothes she can find and creeps out of the
kulla
unnoticed. She knows the path with her eyes shut. There's not much to see. Mist rises from the snow, obscuring her vision. After a while a runaway dog crashes into her legs. They are both scared. He's wagging his tail, staring at her. It's the Bardhajs' dog; he likes making love to sheep. He's the disgrace of his masters but the village kids' best friend. He won't bite. He licks her hand. Then they each go their own
way.

When she enters the tiny village health center, there's nobody to be seen, but she can hear a child wailing in the other room. The doctor comes out, followed by the child's mother, followed by the only nurse, all smelling of talcum powder.

The mother is young, about Hana's age. She nods to her and leaves.

‘Hi Hana,' the doctor says. ‘Welcome home. How are
you?'

‘Good morning, Doctor.' Hana carefully avoids using the word ‘comrade.'

‘Did you just get here from Tirana?'

‘No, I arrived three days
ago.'

‘Gjergj is very sick. He has cancer. I took him to Scutari myself, Hana. I'm really sorry.'

The doctor is in his thirties. He speaks a literary Albanian, his vowels open and his cadences perfect. He's in Rrnajë as a punishment. His family in the capital has a problem with the regime. It is rumored that some writer uncle of his had a few too many things to
say.

‘Uncle Gjergj has always enjoyed excellent health. He can't be
that
sick.'

‘But he
is.'

In a corner of the room there's a coffee pot boiling. Behind the doctor, the window is steamed up. On the wall to Hana's left is a portrait of the recently departed dictator, Enver Hoxha.

‘How long has he got, Doctor?'

‘Maybe four months. Maybe six, if he takes his drugs regularly.'

‘He takes them.'

‘He needs to take them without fail.'

‘He'll take them.'

‘Hana, you're not following me. The drugs are very expensive and the state does not provide them through the health system. They need to be picked up in town, in Scutari, once a month.'

‘Don't you have a regular supply?'

He smiles, guardedly. So as not to show any dissatisfaction or discontent, Hana thinks. He opens his arms, as if in surrender. The white coat is thin from over-washing, almost see-through.

‘I'm taking him to Tirana,' she
says.

The doctor observes her. His gaze is desolate and his face anonymous, except for his curly hair, a bit too long in the front. That's prohibited by the canons of socialist aesthetics. He is sad for his own reasons, Hana decides. He's sad and lonely.

‘A classmate of mine in Tirana is the daughter of a famous surgeon. Who knows? She might let me talk to her father and he might be able to help Uncle Gjergj.'

Hana gives the name of the potential savior. The doctor knows him; he worked for a while as his assistant before … He gestures something. Before being buried alive here, Hana guesses.

‘How is my Tirana?' he whispers.

‘Fine. Beautiful actually.'

‘It's exciting,' she'd like to add, but she's not so stupid. The dictator died barely a year ago and the people in Tirana are waiting for a miracle to happen any minute now. At college, students spread the word quietly that the country may even open up to the West. Books that were prohibited now change hands furtively under the desks.

‘You'll be going back soon, I imagine … ' He smiles, lost and vulnerable. He looks almost handsome. Suffering suits
him.

There are some people who look good even when they're dead. She remembers her father's body. Her parents had been buried on a beautiful sunny day. Her father had not been good-looking in life, but he was when he was dead. They hadn't let her see her mother. Uncle Gjergj had said it was for the best. He had been right, she realized.
Nanë
had been really beautiful when she was alive.

‘I'm not going back to Tirana without Uncle Gjergj,' Hana told the doctor. ‘Will you help me take
him?'

‘Sure, I'll help you. I can go visit my parents, and I still have a few friends down there.' He plays around with a pen. ‘Do you have any books with you, Hana?'

‘Only in English. I've got Dickens'
Great Expectations
and the first volume of a history of Britain.'

‘That would be great. Anything you've got. I'll give them back soon.'

‘Ok.'

That is the end of their conversation. The nurse knocks on the door. Hana leaves. Halfway home, Hana bursts into tears. She looks up and keeps her eyes open wide. The snow finds its way into her eyelids. How do you settle your accounts with your soul when you die? It must be hard. Time to say goodbye to your body, time to weep your farewells, time to give up. The soul can't be hurried, it's not a magic trick.

She looks down again and sobs out loud. The snowstorm is a giant down comforter that suffocates her deep guttural sounds. She weeps for the doctor with the worn-out white coat, perhaps, or for the Bardhajs' dog that doesn't know how to love other dogs, only sheep, or again perhaps for the guy on her French course who had said in the canteen a few days before that she, Hana Doda, was beautiful. She cries and cries and can't seem to
stop.