Elvira Dones - Sworn Virgin

Hana gets up and goes out. She hears Uncle Gjergj’s scratchy voice, too weak to stop her. She walks around the kulla . It’s a beautiful night with a full moon. The garden is bathed in silvery light. Uncle Gjergj’s pants are still hanging on the line where she left them three days ago.

It’s all so cursedly beautiful: the perfume of the woods, the light breeze she feels ruffling her hair, the color of the night. She loves this place. They say nostalgia is only for the old; maybe she’s already old. Maybe she was born old. She feels love for the night, which in her life never seems to end, but there is no bitterness. It’s a fantastic feeling. It’s the stuff of poets. Writers. And she is neither. Calm down and keep your feet on the ground, she says to herself. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Hana; don’t say things that sound crazy. You are normal, aren’t you? She takes a deep breath and acts normal. You’ve just been threatened with marriage. Act scared.

No way. She doesn’t feel any fear, or even anger. She goes on loving the moment, her breath, her calloused palms, her farmhand looks. She loves the courage she felt when she got up and left Uncle Gjergj inside and impotent. She managed to keep him under control.

When she goes back inside she tells Uncle Gjergj she will not accept any husband. He lies down. The pipe resting on the ashtray smokes itself.

‘No husband. Do you see? I will not accept. If a future husband arrives the day after tomorrow, I’ll run away. I don’t want to be married and submit to the orders of a man, wash his feet, even. I will not be a slave.’

‘You’ll be left alone,’ Gjergj says slowly. ‘A woman who is not married is worth nothing.’

‘Women are the same as men.’

‘Like hell they are. Women are made to serve men and have children. Don’t be a fool!’

She finds it hard to control her anger.

‘I thought you were different,’ she says through her teeth. She’s not even sure he hears, because there is no reaction.

‘You’ll be alone in the world,’ he repeats. ‘But I won’t leave you undefended.’

‘You’re still alive, Uncle Gjergj. I won’t let you die.’

‘You can’t do anything about it.’

‘You can’t leave me. You’re the only family I have.’

‘That’s what I mean. After I’m gone you can’t remain here alone.’

‘What do you know about it? Let me deal with it.’

Her uncle tries to smile.

‘School has ruined you. You’ve turned into a city girl, and you’ve forgotten your position. I was wrong to let you go.’

She strides up to his bedside, snuffs his pipe out angrily and stares until he looks away.

‘You’re only a woman,’ he says, upon a sudden, treacherous impulse, seeking to diminish her.

‘And you’re only a man,’ she answers. He’s old and finished, there’s no hope. Aunt Katrina, you were so wrong.

She storms out of the house and slams the door, crying, shouting, suffocating.

‘Die, you bastard,’ she cries out into the night. ‘I thought you were different. Just die!’

She tries to calm down, but it takes her a long time. God forgive my anger. But God doesn’t exist in Rrnajë; it’s a crime to invoke him. Priests are condemned by the regime; they are rotting in prison because they turned to God.

Much later, when she goes back into the kulla , Gjergj says sorry. He says he knows she’s different, that she was always different, even when she was a little girl; that bringing her up was what kept him and poor Aunt Katrina alive, and that it’s not true she is only a woman. She is Hana. And there will never be another Hana.

She moves closer to him. She can’t believe her ears: a man never apologizes to a woman. She weighs Gjergj’s words in her mind, examines him closely to make sure he isn’t playing a trick on her. Then she says:

‘So, no more talk of marriage?’

‘If you’re really sure, my little girl.’

‘Yes, I’m really sure.’

‘Well, promise me you’ll take care of yourself when I die.’

‘You’re not going to die.’

‘Promise me anyway.’

‘I promise.’

‘You’ll be strong.’

‘A rock.’

‘You’ll be the man of this house.’

‘Go to sleep, now. If you sleep well, tomorrow I’ll take you out to see the village.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘We’ll go and see Aunt Katrina, and then we’ll go to the square.’

‘Hana, dear daughter, I’m so sorry.’

The next day the whole of Rrnajë is there to greet them, hands on their hearts: Gjergj, bre burrë, a je?

Uncle and niece visit Katrina’s grave. Hana has brought fresh flowers. Gjergj stands motionless, dazzled by the pile of earth as if it were the sun.

‘I’ll remember this little jaunt, dear daughter,’ he says later on.

When Gjergj’s condition worsens, Hana hitches a ride into town in a truck. She telephones the clinic in Kavajë where the village doctor now works and he promises to send her some painkillers to help Gjergj suffer less.

‘You should really take him to hospital,’ he tells her. ‘They’d be able to take better care of him.’

The phone line sounds weary, as if they are on opposite sides of the world.

‘If you come to Tirana, get in touch. We could meet, if you feel like it.’

The phone line groans. He waits and so does she.

‘Hana,’ the doctor says, ‘I have to go. I’m with a patient right now.’

‘Of course, sure.’

‘Take your uncle to the hospital and then run away from that village of yours. Come to Tirana and finish school. You have your whole future ahead of you.’

Through the dirty glass of the phone box Hana observes the filthy Scutari post office, where people are waiting impatiently for a free phone booth to slip into so that the world doesn’t forget all about them.

‘Will you listen to me, Hana? You can’t save him, and you can’t bury yourself alive with him.’

‘Thank you for everything, Doctor,’ she says, pleased with the tone of voice she manages to produce, while the dirty glass helps her feel protected for a little while longer; for as soon as she leaves the phone booth, she’ll be just like all those people waiting outside, unwashed, undernourished, badly dressed, worlds apart from French women.

‘You can’t bury yourself up in the mountains,’ the doctor repeats, as if she were deaf.

Gjergj will never agree to go back to the hospital and be hitched up to the machines again. He has chosen his path. He wants to die in his own bed, and Hana agrees with him. She’ll keep him company until the end. She’ll be right there beside him, more for herself than for him. How can you explain certain things? These things? Everything? It’s impossible to explain to somebody on the other end of a crippled phone line in a crazy country.

There’s no need to explain anything, as it turns out, because the phone line goes dead. For both of our sakes, Hana thinks, as she steps out of the phone box into the glaring and restless sun that still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.

The village nurse comes and gives Gjergj his shots. Hana gives him his pills at regular intervals. One day she starts reciting poems to him without saying what they are. She recites a bit of everything, from Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman, from Paul Éluard to Juan Ramón Jiménez, and, of course, her beloved Hikmet. Every now and then, alongside the great poets, she smuggles in some of her own poems. She waits to see if he reacts, trying to recite them with a different voice, playing with the stresses. I’m so pathetic, she thinks, but she can’t help it, her need is too strong. Uncle Gjergj often falls asleep between one poem and the next; she will never know whether he liked them or not.