Elvira Dones - Sworn Virgin

‘No, thanks,’ Blerta smiles guiltily. ‘I don’t smoke.’

‘You smoked once, before the second exam.’

‘Oh, yeah. You’ve reminded me … I’d forgotten that one …’

‘Who are these foreigners? What are they doing up here?’

‘They’re English. They’re making one of those documentaries on the Kanun code. I’m their interpreter, they pay well, and …’

‘I heard you work in Tirana.’

‘I did a master’s for two years in the US, on a Fulbright scholarship. I came back six months ago and now I’m living in Tirana, yes.’

‘Well well.’

Silence.

‘I couldn’t wait to meet you. You knew I would come, right?’

‘Here everybody knows everything. There’ve been quite a few foreigners around recently.’

‘I know.’

‘What do you want from me, Blerta?’

‘Nothing. I just came to see you.’

‘No, you didn’t come to see me. You came for your work and, as I’m the only enlightened man left in this God-forsaken village since all the real men were sacrificed to blood feuds or hunger, you thought you’d get me to help you.’

Blerta can’t wait to get out. Hana enjoys watching her squirm. She takes one last puff of her cigarette and, before putting it out, lights the next.

Blerta has the courage to protest that Hana is being hostile and she doesn’t understand why.

‘Of course you don’t understand. I have too much to do right now and I don’t really want to talk.’

Blerta gets up. Hana admires her lithe body. She has shed all her provinciality.

‘Anyway, we’re staying here for three weeks,’ Blerta says. ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you.’

‘Where are you sleeping?’ Hana asks brusquely.

‘In a kulla , in Theth.’

‘And tonight?’

‘In the same place. We’re leaving in an hour.’

‘You can sleep here if it doesn’t disgust you.’

‘No, I’d better be going. Take care of yourself, Hana.’

Blerta leaves. Hana puts a bottle of raki on the low table, and lays out some sheep’s cheese and a can of olives she bought in Scutari a few weeks before. She drinks without stopping, even when the cheese and olives are finished. She drinks until the bottle is dry and passes out on the kilim .

For several days she doesn’t show her face in the village. If she happened to bump into Blerta she wouldn’t know how to behave. Fucking pride, she says to herself. She likes cursing. Let Blerta’s hair go back to being frizzy! What a bitch, she thinks. You’re a real bitch, Hana. You’re still a woman with all that bitchiness inside you. You’re no angel.

One day she leaves for Scutari. She still needs to check the brakes on the truck.

The mechanic is about forty-five and he loves his work. During the regime he had a factory job; now his kids have emigrated to Italy. Hana doesn’t know which factory he used to work in. They all looked the same: old rusted ruins donated by Soviet Big Brother or Chinese Big Brother. It was as if, rather than machinery, they had housed iron carcasses held together with spit. The fact that her truck was made in China was a source of subtle pleasure, for the People’s Republic was still under communism while insignificant little Albania had fought itself free. The mechanic’s name was Farì.

‘Freedom is all well and good, my friend,’ he says to Hana. ‘There’s no doubt about it. But can you eat it? No.’

Hana watches his grease-covered hands as he gesticulates wildly. Hands look good when they’re black like that, like coarse moths. If she were a photographer she would capture his hands on camera.

‘I’ll get this beast going for you,’ Farì goes on, not waiting for her to answer. ‘But first let’s go and get ourselves some coffee.’

The café is crowded. The mechanic orders two espressos.

‘Can I ask you something?’ he says to Hana when the coffees are served. ‘Why did you stay in Rrnajë? Why didn’t you go abroad? You could have got a job in construction in Italy, Greece, France, or even America. Anywhere’s better than here.’

Hana reminds him that he too has stayed behind in Albania. The mechanic shakes his head.

‘My two boys left for Italy on the first ships out of here when the regime cracked. Now they’re doing ok, but it was hard for them to start with. They went to a city called Treviso, in the north. They’re pretty racist up there. If you say you’re Albanian they think you’re a criminal. Then they tried Greece and it was even worse. They went back to Italy, near Rome. They’re both mechanics. Things got better there. Rome is a big city and they’re hard workers, like me.’

Farì sits up straighter and smiles, revealing a missing tooth. Hana is missing two molars. She hasn’t seen a dentist in seven years. She smiles back.

A muezzin starts his call. Scutari is full of mosques. Farì turns serious.

‘When you have kids, you live for them, my friend,’ he says. ‘The old lady and me, we’re staying here and we want to die here. Once we went to Rome to see the boys. They treated us like royalty.’

He makes an indecipherable gesture. He’s a real father: pure paternal love exhibited without any hypocritical attempt to feign detachment.

‘You, Mark, you should get away from this crazy country. You’re still young. Can’t you see the north of Albania is empty? They say there are over a million Albanians around the world who left as soon as this country became a democracy. And if you really don’t want to leave the country, at least come down and live in the city. We could go into business together, what do you say? You could take care of the accounts, the clients, the spare parts to order down in Tirana. You’ve read a lot and you’re good with paperwork, I hear. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I never had the chance to talk to you.’

Farì finishes his espresso with a hasty last gulp.

‘Everyone with any education has gone. We dummies know how to work, but what about the mind? The mind, my friend — who has a mind around here any longer? You have brains enough and more. Think about it.’

‘Thanks, Farì. I will.’

‘Ok, let’s get back to your Chinese heap of scrap.’

While Farì works on the truck, Hana smokes a cigarette, looking at her reflection in the filthy glass of the garage door. She looks like a scarecrow. Her cheeks are hollow, her hair matted, her shirt three sizes too big. The muezzin’s still getting on their nerves with his whining.

Farì starts the truck. She moves away from the door and watches him as he drives by, vanishes around the corner, and takes the truck down a road that was once paved and is now a muddy track.

Thirty or forty years before, somewhere in the middle of that vast, faraway country, when the Chinese workmen had finished testing the truck destined for Albania that was already old before it even left the factory, the afternoon could have been just like this one.

Hana remembers the Chinese with their blue uniforms. She saw a group of five of them in Piazza Skanderbeg in Tirana, the first time she went there on a school trip. But they had also been on the television at the agricultural cooperative in Rrnajë. They were comical. People said they ate snakes; who knew if it was true. All they brought to Albania were broken-down trucks, bicycles without gears, a metalworks that was as old as the world itself and their dances with that boring, whiny music. The ones Hana remembers all looked sad. Maybe it was those instruments with their terrible twangy strings. Nothing like the north Albanian sword dance.

Farì is coming back in the truck, waving his left hand excitedly out of the window at her.

‘You’re all set here,’ he says, proudly.

Hana thanks him, pays, and drives away.