Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“No, it’s fine. I do think he owes her something,” I said.

“Oh?”

“If he doesn’t keep his promises to her, why would he keep his promises to me?”

“Right,” Yllka said, but she was looking sideways at me, and she touched my hand I think to check if I was hot, because it must have sounded to her like I was talking through a fever.

Maybe the kid was making me softer, too, maybe it was just a hormonal shift, but it was true, I did feel a little bad for Aggie, stuck alone in all that mayhem, more loyal to her country than to her husband and totally let down by both. I’d found Bashkim’s pictures of her and didn’t retch even. Sitting in his sock drawer, underneath the fresh new pair he was saving for who knows what reason, was a plastic ziplock bag with a dozen or so snapshots undoubtedly taken on the kind of crap camera only a true Communist could get his hands on. Everything had a gauzy look to it, like the lens was smeared with Vaseline, but even still I could see that Aggie looked nothing like I thought she would. In my head she was middle-aged and heavyset and wore dark scarves over her head like in Time-Life photos of people who lived in villages instead of towns in countries whose names people never bothered to learn even when their social studies teachers made them memorize the entire world atlas. The real Aggie was young with eyes that weren’t black just because of the shitty film stock, and she smiled in the same obligatory way that I did in elementary school photos. She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t hideous, she was just regular, except for an outdated eighties sweatshirt that put her a little on the dowdy side of plain. I wondered if Bashkim had called her beautiful when they met, and if that was a generous or a cruel thing to do to a person like her, and I remembered what Bashkim had said to me a year before.

I swear to Allah, you are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.

If only I’d known at the time that Bashkim didn’t believe in God.

I put the photos back in the bag and tucked the bag back into its little nest of socks, as if the photos would incubate into some kind of living thing.

Yllka was right that things were a mess back in the motherland. I knew that because Dan Rather corroborated it, telling us everything we needed to know about the state of Albania’s people before Snuggle and Lean Cuisine took over and told us everything we needed to know about the state of ours. It was almost a good sign: Albania made the TV! It was a real place after all, not just a made-up locale where the generic villains in generic thrillers might have come from, and being around people straight from a CBS News set made me feel kind of like a celebrity, or at least like a groupie. But Albania’s thirty seconds of fame didn’t come in the form of feel-good filler at the end of the evening news. It was more like live footage of a phoenix with clipped wings, Tirana a city in black and white even when it was filmed in color. Thousands of people that looked just like Bashkim, just like Aggie, hell, just like me if I wore flowy overcoats and had been weaned on a diet of cigarettes and çaj mali, rioting, crying, setting Yugos on fire, while riot police looked on, probably sucking down unfiltereds underneath their face shields and wondering if their own investments were as bunk as those of the wailing throngs around them.

They called them banks, just like Bashkim did, but really they were pyramid schemes set up by their own countrymen who must’ve honed their crafts in places just ahead of the curve, like Russia, the mean, scary older cousin of all of Eastern Europe. I didn’t understand how pyramid schemes worked, but I understood that they had nothing to do with the pharaohs and everything to do with people trying to make something out of the nothing they’d known their whole unhappy lives. Dan Rather didn’t have to explain that part of it to me, that lust for anything other than bread and water, just the details of the operation, and he had to do that because my ambassador to it all, Bashkim, still hadn’t said a peep about it. I didn’t dare ask, and neither did Yllka. She said being in the kitchen at the Ross was like working at a funeral home, but I doubted that funeral home workers saw their own failure in the faces of the corpses they stared into every day, unlike Bashkim and Adem and Fatmir, who’d rather go days without talking than have to look each other in the eye at that point. And what did they really have to be ashamed of? Two million people just like Bashkim handed over their money on promises that it would triple or quadruple, everyone imagining what scents of air fresheners they would get for all the Mercedes they would buy. Everyone needs to feel like a winner sometimes, even me. I used to enter all the tickets I bought in my middle school penny auctions into the canisters for the prizes nobody else wanted, like weird homemade crocheted headbands and secondhand copies of Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, just to not feel empty-handed for a moment. And yet there they were on the TV, thousands of Bashkims marching around with the pockets of their slacks turned inside out, yelling at something the cameras never panned to. They looked like the Monopoly Man on the Chance card that sent you straight to jail, minus the top hat and the part where you get to fold up the board after you lose and shove the game back into the closet.

I understood it. They were embarrassed. They’d been duped. It was easy to recognize on other people, but it wore disguises when you looked in the mirror.

Later that week, when Bashkim came home early and sat down on the sofa next to me and touched my arm, I flinched, both because I wasn’t used to him touching me anymore and because I knew he was going to tell me something he would need to apologize for.

“Things have gotten really bad,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“We cannot afford to keep doing this.”

“I know.”

“She is going to have to come.”

I touched my stomach, confused. Of course things had gotten bad, the two of us acting like boarders in the same house, barely talking, never mind preparing for her arrival, but of course she was going to have to come. I might have looked like an idiot to him but I understood the birds and the bees, and as much as I was scared to bring up the near future with him, seething as he was about the present, I was relieved to hear him acknowledge that we had to get back to planning for the baby. I was relieved, too, to hear him refer to the baby as a she . I hadn’t even told him that I was sure what I was carrying was not the son he wanted, not wanting to add more disappointment to his quarry full of it.

“I know. Another month or so,” I said.

He put his head in his hands. “Sooner. It has to be sooner.”

“Bashkim,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

Again I was confused. So it was clear Bashkim hadn’t learned anything about capitalism growing up, but did he also miss the lessons on basic human biology? You didn’t even need school for that. You just needed some kids a few years older than you to take you out to a barn and draw some crude diagrams. If the kids were rotten and hormonal enough they might even try to demonstrate on you. I was pretty sure this was a universal lesson, since as far as I can tell, every civilization was built around the very concept.

“You know I can’t do anything about that, right?” I said.

“I don’t expect for you to do anything about it,” he said.

“She’s coming when she’s coming.”

“She is on her way already.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. She’s been on her way for a long time now. Eight months or so.”

“No, just yesterday.”

“What?”

“She left just yesterday. She is on the coast, waiting to get to Italy.”