Elvira Dones - Sworn Virgin

‘It was all delicious,’ Lila encourages her after polishing off the last mouthful of apple. ‘Really delicious.’

Shtjefën offers to make Turkish coffee.

‘Tomorrow will you take me for a drive?’ Hana asks them. ‘I’d like to get a little driving practice, to get used to the traffic.’

They sip their coffee.

‘I miss my old truck,’ she continues. ‘And if all goes well at work, in a month I’d like to start looking for a small apartment, Lila.’

She waits for a reaction. Shtjefën gets up to make more coffee. Jonida winks at Hana. Lila is quiet for a moment.

‘I didn’t realize you were in such a hurry to get away,’ she says.

‘I’m not in a hurry to get away. I just want to see if I can live on my own.’

‘But you’ve lived on your own for fourteen years!’

Lila is taking it badly, Jonida can see it in her face. But Hana is already at the door:

‘I’m going out for a walk.’

She throws a jacket on over her t-shirt and shuts the door, leaving behind the confused rancor of her cousin. It’s not cold; this winter is mild, the evening a little damp. She takes the path she now knows by heart. Her shoes are comfortable; she doesn’t like them particularly but they were cheap.

Lila is a great bargain-hunter. She runs the household finances confidently, hunting out special offers and discounts. On Thanksgiving Day, she got up at four in the morning and drove all the way to the big supermarket outside town that was famous for its unbeatable prices. She came back four hours later, exhausted but happy, with three gigantic shopping bags. Fifteen minutes to put everything away in the fridge and she had climbed back into her car, this time with Hana and Jonida, to buy clothes for Jonida at the store where she worked.

Hana stops. The skirt is annoying her. It’s too wide in the waist and the zipper at the back keeps making its way to the front. She tugs the skirt round and starts walking again. A few yards on, the skirt has twisted again. She suddenly feels a strange sensation on her legs. Last week she tried shaving them. She also shaved her armpits and then spent days itching and scratching. Jonida nearly died laughing. She kept an eye on the hairs that were growing back on her legs. Before putting the skirt on, she had shaved again, nicking herself slightly with the razor. She stops again. The skirt won’t stay put. Trying to keep walking, she stumbles, though without actually falling over. At that, she makes up her mind to go back, and walks home in furious strides.

Shtjefën is watching TV and Lila is doing whatever she does in the bathroom. A deep hammering bass beat comes from Jonida’s bedroom. Hana slips silently into Lila and Shtjefën’s room and tears off her skirt. She scrunches it up, venting all her anger on it. Then she crumples it into a ball, opens the wardrobe and throws it inside.

‘What are you doing?’ Lila asks from the doorway.

Hana thrusts her legs into her pants as fast as she can.

‘You are out of this world,’ her cousin says. ‘Just try and understand someone like you.’

‘And you are as clingy as a shadow.’

Hana leaves the house again. She thought everything would be easier. When she had become Mark she had had no real experience of femininity. And now she’s even scared about her job interview tomorrow. Her English sucks.

‘You have to look confident,’ Shtjefën coaches her. ‘Americans always look incredibly self-confident. They like to look sure of themselves. Don’t talk about your problems and you’ll be fine. Then you can fall apart when you’re on your own.’

She is excited and lost at the same time. On the outside she looks almost like a woman. What’s missing is her vision, the point of view from which she is supposed to read the world. When she observes people, Hana does not see a woman or a man. She tries to penetrate the unique spirit of the individual, she analyzes their face and eyes, she tries to imagine the thoughts hiding behind those eyes, but she tends to avoid thinking about the fact that these thoughts are inextricably linked to the male or female ego. Women think like women. Men? Well, the answer is obvious. She’s only just realizing now that for a long time she has had to consider things from both points of view.

On the other hand, she consoles herself, the diaries that she kept during her years as Mark are not that badly written. In her days by herself in Rockville she has read them again and again. She is also sorry to realize that her diaries are better than her poems. This thought has no particular value, but it hurts all the same. She would have liked to be a poet.

She reads a lot. Shtjefën teases her, saying that, in order to satisfy Hana’s requests, they will soon have to ask for new funding at the Rockville city library. The librarians have been very helpful; they give her advice and encourage her. Hana fills whole notebooks with words and idiomatic expressions and learns them off by heart. She watches programs on TV late into the night to improve her English. Talking to Jonida is the best practice of all, because her vocabulary is peppered with adolescent slang.

Lila can’t understand why she is going to such trouble.

‘There’s no point,’ she says. ‘You don’t need perfect English to be a parking attendant or a cleaning lady. All you’re trying to do is to become a woman, not a PhD or whatever it’s called.’

‘Without language you can’t do anything,’ Hana answers.

‘Ok, keep on dreaming, just like when you were nineteen. You’re wasting time on books, instead of worrying about your appearance.’

They argue, then they make up, then they argue again and sometimes don’t call a truce for two days. To the point that, every day, when she gets in from school, Jonida asks them how their daily fight has gone.

‘It’s too late for your dreams, Hana,’ Lila sighs with exhaustion. ‘Why don’t you listen to me? Years back you should’ve done what we all did: get married, have children. You would have had a hard time, of course. Every woman has her share of suffering. But you thought you were better than us, and you rebelled and now here you are. It’s too late for impossible dreams.’

Hana smiles bitterly, saying so helpful, Lila, really encouraging.

‘I just tell you things as they are.’

‘But it is not the way things are.’

‘Ok, you tell me then, come on. You tell me how and what you’re going to do in this country, because I’ve been living here for ten years and yet somehow you seem to know it better than me even though you just got off the boat.’

‘Fine Lila, you’re right.’

‘Don’t be so condescending!’

‘Ok.’

‘Even though I don’t read stacks of paper, I’m not stupid.’

‘It’s not paper, Lila, it’s my soul. Books are my soul.’

‘Stop talking fancy. I’m beat.’

Hana’s arms are crossed over her breasts. She’s wearing a pretty white lace bra. Lila shouts and shouts.

‘Be patient,’ Hana says to her, later on. ‘As soon as I get a job, I will leave you in peace.’

‘That is such a bitchy thing to say, I can’t believe it. It just goes to show you really want to hurt me. That’s not what I wanted to say. I don’t want to force you to leave.’

‘I know.’

‘So don’t say it again.’

‘I am the one that wants to leave,’ Hana says, gently. ‘You’re nothing to do with it, none of you have anything to do with it. You have been wonderful to me, but I want my independence. If I manage to start living again it will only be from that starting point.’

‘I’m not even listening to you.’

‘Do as you like.’

‘You are so self-obsessed, it’s unbelievable. There, that’s what I think of you.’