Sworn Virgin (16 page)

Lila's letter arrives in Rrnajë one leaden-skied Wednesday. Hana finds it on the doorstep of her
kulla
at around ten in the morning. The postman didn't knock. He just left it there. Hana stares at the envelope for a long time without opening it. She runs her fingers over the American stamps. Then she puts the letter on the makeshift wooden table in the courtyard and goes inside for something to drink.

The
kulla
is cold. Spring is late this year, almost resentfully so, as if it had dragged itself up to the mountains against its will. Yesterday there was sunshine. It came suddenly and stayed nine hours. Hana counted them. The sun was brutally bright, shedding an indecent light on hidden aspects of the village. There's hunger written on the faces of all its inhabitants. Winter meals of beans and a few potatoes have made their eyes spectral. It's up to no good, that sun. It crept up on them so stealthily they hadn't had time to hide or disguise their suffering.

Hana looks at the photos of Gjergj and Katrina on the wall. She's proud of those two portraits. She had gone into the city to have them enlarged and framed. The photographer had said that it was much harder to do without the negatives and she would have to pay double. She had paid. She had a bit of money set aside. She was a truck driver and earned quite a good living. The agricultural cooperative where she had worked for years had closed. Now she grew her own vegetables. She had to adapt.

You're a good guy, Mark Doda would say to himself in a deep baritone when he was drunk. Mark liked getting drunk. He would float in an undefined dimension and be happy. As soon as he sobered up he would read over the poems he had scribbled while he had been drinking.

Hana wants to go outside, sit on the half-rotten chair in the courtyard and finally open Lila's letter. But she takes her time. She remembers that today some more foreigners are due in Rrnajë. The village has been waiting for them all week. At least there's something going on, something to help kill a bit of
time.

When the foreigners arrive at the village, though, the few people still living there refuse to open their mouths. They sit in silence, proud and shy at the same time
–
although these days any real pride there was seems to have melted along with the snow in the sunshine. Even pride is hidden and fugitive. Westerners come and ransack stories from these ‘primitive and mysterious' northern mountain folk. Anyone who wants to tell their life story can do so, and in return get foreign currency, dollars or Deutschmarks.

There are those who will blurt out any story that comes into their heads, who cares if it's true or not. Foreigners buy the stories they want to hear, and they don't care about the truth any more than the locals. In the old days it had been different. Mountain people were hospitable but hermetically sealed off from the world. They would open the doors to their
kullë
, but not to their inner world. You had to smell out their souls on your own, if you knew how. Now poverty has forced them to learn new tricks in a hurry, because pride doesn't put food on the table. Neither does work, for that matter; most of the year up in the mountains there is
none.

Hana puts her hands to her head as if ready to unscrew and take it off. She feels a momentary flash of pleasure.

This winter there has been a lot of snow. She pines for previous winters when it mostly rained. The sound of dripping rain is company; rain doesn't isolate you as snow does. They're just little things, she thinks, nothing you can't get over. Little things.

She's disturbed by the name of the interpreter who's scheduled to arrive with the foreigners. She's called Blerta, like her best friend from college. She hasn't seen her since then. Why would she be coming up here with these foreigners?

She finally steps out into the courtyard. Don't get yourself worked up, she tells herself, while she observes her favorite hen, which she has called Angelina. Red from her beak to her tail feathers, she struts with a regal air. She's intelligent and a bit of a bitch. She steals pieces of bread from her companions when they aren't looking. But she's classy too. In a previous life she must have been someone famous, or a lion. Or perhaps the leader of a flock of migrating birds.

The sheep are nudging up to the table where Hana has put the dish of stale bread. The hens are beginning to worry they'll be trodden underfoot by the sheep, who start to butt at the table. She picks up the dish, walks over to the other side of the courtyard and scatters the
food.

Lila writes:

Hey, Hana, dear cousin. Here I am, writing to you with so much nostalgia and admiration for what you are doing. People are talking, you know? They say you're a good truck driver, and that everyone respects you. The rumors come all the way here to America, you know? You'd better believe it. Some Albanians are here with a green card, and others are here on a three-month tourist visa to stay with relatives. You're the only one up there in cloud cuckoo land.

What are you doing there? I keep asking myself? Why don't you come here? You'd be taking the most important step in your life. You're wasting it, you know? As if it wasn't your life to live. You should think about it. Right, Hana? Do you promise, that you'll think about it.

Her cousin has a problem with punctuation. What's a question mark doing after ‘I keep asking myself'? And what about the comma after ‘promise' in the last sentence? Sometimes Lila has a problem with logic too. There's only one thing she really does well, and that's make Hana cry, always. The other great thing about Lila is her love for Shtjefën. She loves him to bits. She calls him ‘her harbor, her home, and her roof.' She's really something,
Lila.

She goes and rinses her face in Aunt Katrina's copper washstand. Then she straightens up and casts a stern eye over the courtyard. It's time to get cracking, she tells herself. But the gleaming copper of the washstand catches her eye. She has never let it tarnish; she polishes it assiduously. It's the most beautiful object in the house. It was in Aunt Katrina's dowry chest. Before it became hers it had been her mother's and, before that, her grandmother's. Family tradition has it that it goes back two centuries. It is elegant and understated. The women of the house have only ever used it for washing their faces. One day, if she ever does make it to the United States, she'll take it with her. The thought courses through her like a bolt of lightning. Now it really is time to get cracking.

She mends the wooden fence that is falling apart. She cleans out the stable and gets the animals back in so that she can rake the whole courtyard clean. She checks on the seedlings she planted two weeks ago and covered with plastic sheeting. As she goes about all these chores she lights each cigarette from the one before.

If it doesn't rain, she'll finish all her jobs tomorrow. The day after tomorrow she'll deal with her Chinese truck. She needs to take it to Scutari to check the brakes. In the summer she uses it to transport vegetables into town and back, or to take people to weddings in Scutari or Lezhë.

Lila's letter has burrowed down into her guts. She goes over and over every passage in her mind: how Jonida is growing; how she and her husband are so beat after work they fall asleep on their feet; how well they feel and how they make ends meet even though there are still many hardships; how happy they would be to have Hana come stay with
them.

This is the fourth time I've written you, Hana, and it's not easy for me to write so try and imagine how hard it is for me to put down all my thoughts in any kind of order and don't even think about giving me a hard time about it. So are you going to send me an answer? Do you want to come on vacation one time just to see what it's like before making up your mind? You can't carry on being a man just because once upon a time you had to turn into one. If you wait too long you'll get old, and old age is no picnic, they all say.

When she hears knocking at the courtyard gate she's covered in dirt and sweating. She shouts at the unknown visitor to come in and waits with her hands thrust into her pockets.

It's Blerta; Blerta's head peering shyly round the gate. They look each other up and down. Hana imagines the effect she's having on her old schoolmate, but decides not to care. She pushes her hands deeper into her pockets. Blerta is so womanly, so beautiful. Long, straight, very blond hair, a long black V-neck sweater over a shirt and red pants. Almost no makeup, just a hint of lipstick.

‘Hey, Hana,' Blerta
says.

‘I'm Mark. I'm not Hana anymore, and you know
it.'

‘Yeah, of course I knew it, but I didn't know how to
…'

‘Cut it
out.'

‘Can I come
in?'

‘You're already in. Welcome, Blerta.'

Hana turns back towards the
kulla
, but she realizes her friend isn't going anywhere. Hana stops in her tracks without turning around.

‘It's just you, I hope. You wouldn't bring your journalists, right?'

‘No.'

‘Ok then, come on in. I'm happy to have you here.'

Things are better inside the
kulla
. It's too dark inside for Blerta to keep on X-raying her. Hana feels more protected.

They sit down on the
shilte
. The guest looks around. Hana lights a cigarette and hands over the tin box where she keeps her rolling tobacco.

‘No, thanks,' Blerta smiles guiltily. ‘I don't smoke.'

‘You smoked once, before the second exam.'

‘Oh, yeah. You've reminded me … I'd forgotten that one
…'

‘Who are these foreigners? What are they doing up here?'

‘They're English. They're making one of those documentaries on the Kanun code. I'm their interpreter, they pay well, and
…'

‘I heard you work in Tirana.'

‘I did a master's for two years in the US, on a Fulbright scholarship. I came back six months ago and now I'm living in Tirana,
yes.'

‘Well well.'

Silence.

‘I couldn't wait to meet you. You knew I would come, right?'

‘Here everybody knows everything. There've been quite a few foreigners around recently.'

‘I know.'

‘What do you want from me, Blerta?'

‘Nothing. I just came to see
you.'

‘No, you didn't come to see me. You came for your work and, as I'm the only enlightened man left in this God-forsaken village since all the real men were sacrificed to blood feuds or hunger, you thought you'd get me to help
you.'

Blerta can't wait to get out. Hana enjoys watching her squirm. She takes one last puff of her cigarette and, before putting it out, lights the
next.

Blerta has the courage to protest that Hana is being hostile and she doesn't understand
why.

‘Of course you don't understand. I have too much to do right now and I don't really want to talk.'

Blerta gets up. Hana admires her lithe body. She has shed all her provinciality.

‘Anyway, we're staying here for three weeks,' Blerta says. ‘I'm sorry I disturbed
you.'

‘Where are you sleeping?' Hana asks brusquely.

‘In a
kulla
, in Theth.'

‘And tonight?'

‘In the same place. We're leaving in an hour.'

‘You can sleep here if it doesn't disgust
you.'

‘No, I'd better be going. Take care of yourself, Hana.'

Blerta leaves. Hana puts a bottle of raki on the low table, and lays out some sheep's cheese and a can of olives she bought in Scutari a few weeks before. She drinks without stopping, even when the cheese and olives are finished. She drinks until the bottle is dry and passes out on the
kilim
.

For several days she doesn't show her face in the village. If she happened to bump into Blerta she wouldn't know how to behave. Fucking pride, she says to herself. She likes cursing. Let Blerta's hair go back to being frizzy! What a bitch, she thinks. You're a real bitch, Hana. You're still a woman with all that bitchiness inside you. You're no angel.

One day she leaves for Scutari. She still needs to check the brakes on the truck.

The mechanic is about forty-five and he loves his work. During the regime he had a factory job; now his kids have emigrated to Italy. Hana doesn't know which factory he used to work in. They all looked the same: old rusted ruins donated by Soviet Big Brother or Chinese Big Brother. It was as if, rather than machinery, they had housed iron carcasses held together with spit. The fact that her truck was made in China was a source of subtle pleasure, for the People's Republic was still under communism while insignificant little Albania had fought itself free. The mechanic's name was
Farì.

‘Freedom is all well and good, my friend,' he says to Hana. ‘There's no doubt about it. But can you eat it?
No.'

Hana watches his grease-covered hands as he gesticulates wildly. Hands look good when they're black like that, like coarse moths. If she were a photographer she would capture his hands on camera.

‘I'll get this beast going for you,' Farì goes on, not waiting for her to answer. ‘But first let's go and get ourselves some coffee.'

The café is crowded. The mechanic orders two espressos.

‘Can I ask you something?' he says to Hana when the coffees are served. ‘Why did you stay in Rrnajë? Why didn't you go abroad? You could have got a job in construction in Italy, Greece, France, or even America. Anywhere's better than here.'