Elvira Dones - Sworn Virgin

Hana pats the Maryland drivers’ license in her pocket, leaps into the twelve-year-old Honda, and takes off. She comes back with meat and salad, wine from another store, and two packs of cigarettes. She spends nearly 100 dollars.

That evening she eats, drinks, and smokes, and even Jonida seems to have very little to say about it. At around eleven, her niece falls asleep and Lila has to take her to bed. Hana has knocked back so much that she feels as drunk as a lord. When she ends up in the bathroom with her head in the toilet bowl, her cousin doesn’t dare go and help her.

‘I’m sorry, Lila. It won’t happen again,’ Hana says the next morning, before leaving for work.

She parks in her reserved spot. For the rest of the day she feels foolishly proud of herself.

When she gets back home, she still has a headache. She decides to devote her evening to a map of Maryland. One day she’d like to drive as far as Annapolis, the state capital, and see a bit of Chesapeake Bay.

Shtjefën and Lila are at the movies in Rockville.

‘They’re like honeymooners,’ Jonida comments. ‘God save us from these old romantics!’ But she’s secretly happy for them, and kissed them both on the forehead as they left.

Auntie and niece spend no more than an hour together. Hana asks Jonida to explain a few things about the computer to her. Just the basics, she insists. But she is slow to pick it up and things need repeating. Jonida grumbles. Perhaps it’s for the best, Hana thinks. I’ll learn in my own time. She’s happier on her own. Since she left the mountains, she misses her solitude. In the old days she would have done anything to have a bit of company. Now she feels her life is over-crowded.

It’s Thursday. Summer has come with a vengeance, asphyxiating in its humidity. Hana has not touched alcohol in six months, since she got drunk on her first day of work. Tonight, however, she decides to buy a bottle of wine. She hurriedly steps out of the studio apartment she rented three weeks ago. It’s noisy and cramped, overlooking the chaotic traffic of the Rockville Pike, and fifteen minutes from Lila and Shtjefën’s place. It’s 600 dollars a month, two months’ deposit hands down. She signed a contract, which made her anxious. Pages and pages of quibbling articles full of legal terms that sent her running for her dictionary to look them up with meticulous diffidence.

In the neighborhood store, the young salesperson short-changes her by five dollars. She demands her correct change and he apologizes. Hana smiles.

Equally hurriedly, she returns to her apartment. When she opens the door she stops on the threshold. She is satisfied with what she sees. After a day’s cleaning the apartment is as spotless and tidy as a hospital.

Everything is under control, she thinks. Just carry on as you are doing, calmly. First, drink a glass of wine. Then take your clothes off slowly and observe your naked body. Then make love to yourself and see how you do.

She carries out the first part of the plan — a glass of wine, a toast to herself, a slight tipsiness to coax her on — but the wine fails to do its job. She applies herself to the second part, but when she tries to make love to herself she feels nothing but embarrassment.

‘You’re pathetic,’ she sneers. And goes to bed.

Before falling asleep, though, she swears to herself that the following Thursday, her day off, she will have a serious day of reckoning with her body. It’s not enough just to touch yourself until you feel sore. She reaches the conclusion that she must study herself in the mirror. Deal with the sight of her flesh. Look at herself. She has a whole week to work on it. Otherwise why spend all that money on the mirror she hung in the corridor? She bought it in Ikea for thirty dollars. The hum of the air conditioning unit rubs her nerves raw. She tunes into it for a while and slides into sleep.

Seven days later she has an appointment with the mirror.

Let’s take these rags off, she says to herself.

The hum of the air conditioning is still there, accompanied this time by the low rumble of the fridge. She turns the air conditioning unit off and closes the blinds. The building opposite is very close and there are no curtains on the windows.

She takes off her light-blue cotton t-shirt, but leaves her bra on. She takes her slippers off and places them carefully in a corner of the corridor, near the table with the phone on it. She takes her jeans off. The sky-blue panties she bought are a bit too big; at the next sales she’ll buy some that fit better. Now she knows she needs extra small. She positions herself in front of the mirror.

She looks the other way and unclasps her bra. The air in the room is getting close. She closes her eyes and works her thumbs under the blue elastic. Her fingers meet over her flat stomach — every woman’s dream, Lila says. She can feel a vein pulsing somewhere under her skin, to the left of her belly button. She keeps her eyes shut and shifts her hands downwards.

She slowly pulls down her panties, to her knees, to her ankles, folds them and puts them on the table. They are her last barrier of defense. She goes back to her original position and opens her eyes, being careful not to meet her own gaze.

She has no idea whether what she sees is beautiful or not. She’s seen so few naked bodies in her life: Aunt Katrina when she was already old, and Uncle Gjergj when he was dead and they had to prepare him for the wake. She can’t remember ever seeing her mother in the nude.

She’s happy that this time at least she’s getting over her embarrassment. She feels better than she thought she would. She’s spent so many years thinking about and fearing this moment and now it’s just an ordinary instant of time, crudely banal, not at all special.

Stripping off in the freezing cold kulla and throwing water over yourself while standing in a copper washstand was not the same. For one thing there were no mirrors, and anyway she was Mark then. The rigors of mountain life crept into your most hidden thoughts. You did whatever the Doda family code of honor required you to do, and looking at your own naked body was simply wrong. That was the ancient code of the mountains. The Kanun inspired the greatest fear of all. It was as powerfully outlined and yet obscure as a recurring nightmare.

Hana tries to bring her attention back to her body. The man that she thought would still be tenaciously inhabiting her is no longer there. That man was only a carapace. Lila was right: Mark Doda’s life had been no more than the sum total of the masculine gestures Hana had forced herself to imitate, in the skin worn leathery by bad food and lack of attention. Mark Doda had been a product of her iron will.

All that remains of that earlier existence are the sticking-out ribs and straight, shapeless legs she sees in the mirror. The breasts are no bigger than a young girl’s. Hana feels her vulnerable optimism begin to crumble and she puts her clothes back on quickly before it’s too late.

She goes into the tiny kitchen and makes herself a Turkish coffee. Lila has given her a xhezve coffeepot to brew it in. She watches the black liquid rise into a froth and takes it off the burner. She drinks it black, without sugar. She rinses out the cup. Then she calls Lila, who immediately asks her if anything’s happened. Since Hana went to live on her own, Lila imagines disaster striking all the time.

‘Nothing. I just wanted to say hi.’

‘There’s something else,’ Lila insists.

‘I looked at myself in the nude. I didn’t look so bad.’

Hana can sense her cousin smiling at the other end of the line.

‘I never doubted it,’ Lila says. ‘But there was no convincing you.’