Elvira Dones - Sworn Virgin

‘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.