Elvira Dones - Sworn Virgin

Hana can’t stop crying. Her chin touches her neck and the tears drip down onto her dress.

It’s not a heart, I say, it’s a sandal of buffalo leather, it tramps and tramps, it never falls apart ‌but treads the stony paths. 8

‘Fine,’ Gjergj says. ‘I’ll do it. Now get out, before I change my mind.’

At that hour there are no buses, just the whirring of bicycle pedals: pairs of phantom wheels and the pale luminescence of the handlebars. The darkness hides the cyclists.

The dorm supervisor looks at her disapprovingly.

‘Didn’t they teach you how to behave?’ he complains. ‘What’s a girl like you doing out alone at this time of night?’

Gjergj Doda goes in for surgery two days later. The doctors say it has gone well.

‘Better than we hoped,’ the village doctor, who had to go back to Rrnajë that day, pronounces. ‘I’ll come and pick Gjergj up when they discharge him. I’ll get an ambulance. He’ll be in the hospital here for at least two weeks.’

Hana notices that the village doctor wears the expression of a prisoner condemned to death. She’d like to ask him if he has a girlfriend in Tirana; what he misses most — the movies, or restaurants where they serve rice and spinach; what foreign books he reads in secret.

While he is talking to her, he observes her intensely. She focuses on some graffiti painted on a broken wall. There are two letters missing: IN ONE HAND A ICKAXE, IN THE OTHER A RI LE.

She adores Tirana. She never thought she’d be able to love asphalt in the bottom of a valley. So she understands the doctor’s desolation.

She has also realized that she does not pass unobserved in the school corridors. Her silence strikes people. Especially the boys, who try everything to get her to talk. Hana does talk to them, and their discussions tire her. She has got used to them; sometimes she’ll even laugh.

‘Why are you always sad?’ a girl studying Turkish had asked her one day.

‘I’m not sad. I’m waiting for something to happen that’s worth talking about; anything else I just contemplate.’

‘I was told you write poems.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Can I read some of them?’

‘No.’

The girl laughed

‘You’re weird.’

Hana gave a hint of a smile. The other girl had a head of hair the color of straw not yet burnt by the sun.

‘My name is Neve and I’m studying Turkish literature. Do you know Nâzim Hikmet?’

‘I’ve only read two of his poems, so I can’t really say I know him.’

‘Well, I’ll give you some of his poems translated into Albanian. You’ll really like him. I’ll give you some that I had a go at translating myself.’

Hikmet sealed the friendship between the two girls. Hana fell deeply in love with the poet, and this might be one more reason why she loves Tirana. Here you could unearth new passions and meet new people, like Hikmet, like Neve, like the new words in her language, like all these writers who would never make it up to the mountains.

‘Hana, focus now,’ the doctor says. ‘There’s no more time. I have to go.’

‘Thanks for everything.’

‘Thank you , for the books, and for existing.’

Hana smiles shyly.

‘Sometimes I feel really lonely up there. My friends are here in Tirana, and so … see you around. Will I see you in two weeks when I come back?’

Hana turns around and goes into the hospital. She’s not ready for questions like that.

While they’re waiting for Gjergj to recover from the surgery, Hana decides to surprise Aunt Katrina.

‘I want to show you where I live,’ she says, one day.

Gjergj is still wired up to the machines, but he smiles anyway.

‘I’m borrowing her for a while, Uncle Gjergj.’

His woman-wife-friend-lover bends over and kisses him on the forehead. He can’t stop her. He’s immobilized. She kisses him again on the eyelids, right in front of Hana and a nurse. And then again. And again. Then Katrina and her niece leave the room arm in arm. Hana loves the way her aunt walks. When she was younger she used to try and walk like her but could never get it right. Her stride is vigorous and fast, despite her weak heart.

Hana guides Katrina onto a bus and sits her down. Her colorful outfit rings out like music among the dowdy passengers.

‘How much is the bus ticket here?’ her aunt asks her, intimidated and curious at the same time. ‘What language is this?’ she asks again, looking at the writing on the walls of the bus.

‘It’s French.’

‘Why do they write on our buses in French?’

‘The government bought them second-hand from France.’

‘They had to go that far to find a bus?’

Hana sits next to her aunt and leans her head on her shoulder. Katrina kisses her hair. She is quiet for a while and then asks:

‘Are the French communists?’

‘No, what are you talking about? The French aren’t communists.’

‘Not even a little bit?’

‘Maybe some people are, but the government is not.’

‘So why did they sell buses to us?’

Katrina can’t get enough of the city. She chats with the girls in the dorm, asking them where in Albania they are from. She looks out over the campus from the fourth-floor window. She pats Hana’s bed and looks at herself in the mirror. ‘Your aunt is so beautiful,’ a girl from Durrës tells Hana. Katrina is embarrassed. Hana’s roommates smile. One of them has brought a big onion byrek from home, and they share it out and wash it down with tap water. Katrina thanks everybody profusely and eats with gusto.

When Hana takes Katrina back to the hospital, visiting hours are over, but one of the nurses says she won’t look if they slip into Gjergj’s ward quietly.

He is sedated and fast asleep. Katrina gives him an adoring look, caresses the back of his dry hand, red and blue from the nurses’ attempts to find a vein for the drip.

‘One day, when you want to get married,’ Katrina says to her niece, ‘you’ll find a good man like him.’

‘If this man is so good, he won’t want me.’

‘Of course he will. With your schooling and your intelligence, and your foreign-looking face. It’ll be love at first sight.’

‘What do you mean by a foreign-looking face?’

‘One that’s beautiful and smooth like yours.’

‘But I’m so short.’

‘You’re petite and beautifully built. Your breasts are perfect.’

‘My breasts are tiny, Auntie. You can hardly see them.’

‘You certainly can see them, if you don’t walk all hunched up as if you’re scared a man’s going to look at you.’

Hana has never heard her talk like this.

‘Well,’ Katrina shrugs. ‘We’ve never talked about these things, but we’re in the city now so it’s allowed, isn’t it? I look at you, my love, I look at you a lot, but you never liked talking …’

Katrina strokes Hana’s hair. Then she turns around and looks at her husband.

Hana’s uncle and aunt leave Tirana on a beautiful spring morning. Gjergj is wearing his usual blue suit and manages to walk without any help. Next to him is the rolling drip stand.

Hana hugs both of them, hiding her eyes. She’s already thinking about the distance that is about to separate them. She’s happy they’re going home. But she’s sad too. She can’t control her sobs. She’s going to have to run back to the Faculty as soon as they’re gone.

The village doctor promises her he’ll get them to Rrnajë safe and sound, that he’ll keep an eye on them even in his free time. ‘There’s not much to do up there, after all.’ Hana thanks him.

‘I’ll call you when we get to the village, if you give me your number. You have a telephone in your dorm, right?’