Elvira Dones - Sworn Virgin

A week later she goes to see Blerta. This time her friend’s hair is tied back and she’s wearing jeans and a white shirt. Two foreigners are filming in the center of the village. Blerta is standing behind them.

‘I came to say hello,’ Hana says, embarrassed. ‘I wasn’t very nice the other day, to put it mildly, so …’

‘Don’t worry. It’s really lovely here. Is it always so peaceful?’

Wrong question, Hana thinks to herself. If only it were peaceful here.

‘Are you married, Blerta?’ she asks, rather than answering her friend’s question. How did she get so beautiful? She used to be the kind of mousy girl you didn’t notice; now she’s a kind of goddess. Her eyes are the color of a stormy sea. She looks great in jeans. She would look good in a potato sack.

‘No, I’m not married. I have a boyfriend, though. He lives far away, in the US.’

Hana looks at her inquisitively.

‘We lived together for a while but then he didn’t want us to get married. He felt it was too soon, he didn’t feel ready. So here I am.’

‘Do you ever speak to this friend?’

‘He calls every week.’

‘So it’s serious.’

‘I don’t really know, but he goes on calling.’

Hana tells Blerta she has come to invite her to dinner.

Two old women shuffle by, pushing barrows loaded with potatoes and sacks of flour. All the menfolk in the clan of one of the women live permanently locked inside their kulla , under the threat of an ancient blood feud. Only she can leave the house without risk of being shot and killed. The Kanun says that women, children, and priests are not targets. The old woman’s clan is in a blood feud with a clan from Bogë. Before moving away, Hakia — that is her name — catches Hana’s eye. She doesn’t say hello, but a corner of her mouth lifts in a light grimace, hinting at a greeting. Hakia’s eyes are a tree waiting for the ax to fall. What must it be like to live with ten men shut up in your kulla , the only thread of hope for so much frustrated virility? The history of blood spilled between the two families goes back a hundred years, relieved only by a brief truce imposed by the communists. Hakia had a hundred years of death in her memories.

Hana shifts her attention to Blerta and asks her what she studied in the US.

‘Psychology and psychiatry in Seattle, a city in the state of Washington, in the northwest.’

‘I don’t know anything about all that,’ Hana smiles. ‘So, are you coming over this evening?’

‘As soon as I’m done with these journalists. Is around eight ok?’

Hana cuts some cheese and arranges it as best she can on the only good serving dish in the house. It’s an old porcelain plate from Turkey; Aunt Katrina held onto it like a relic. Hana mashes the beans she boiled that morning and makes a kind of purée. She fries up a few onions and aromatic herbs and mixes them into the purée. As she doesn’t have a suitable bowl to serve it in, she puts everything into a saucepan and shreds a few hot chili peppers over the top.

The next step is a painstaking wash. She combs her wet hair back. If she had a bit of face cream she would put it on. She puts on her best flannel shirt, bought in Lezhë market. What the hell? She stops and asks herself. What do you think you’re doing?

Just then Blerta looks round the door.

‘Hey, Hana! Can I give you a hug this time?’ she asks as soon as she’s inside, not wasting a moment.

‘Let’s hug then, if it means so much to you.’

They embrace for a few, embarrassed seconds. Blerta doesn’t seem to want to let go, so Hana focuses on the picture of Gjergj in front of her, or rather, on his left mustache, curled up and black as pitch.

‘Look, Blerta. I’m a man, you know.’

‘Ok. You’re a man and I’m the big bad wolf.’

‘Leave off now.’ Hana detaches herself and darts over to the table, where she starts fiddling with the aluminum forks, lining them up. Blerta sits down.

‘Hana,’ she says sweetly. ‘Relax! I’m Blerta, your old friend from college, and I came to see you, ok?’

‘There’s some bean purée and sheep’s cheese for dinner, with black bread and as much raki as you like, if you want to get drunk.’

‘I don’t drink raki,’ Blerta says, apologetically.

But Hana pours some out anyway and Blerta doesn’t stop her. They eat the bean dish with the cheese, and it’s delicious.

They talk about this and that, in a desultory way. Then Blerta says that sooner or later she’d like to have a child — if not with the American then with someone else. Anything’s possible these days, right?

Hana proposes a toast. They lift their glasses and drink to it. Blerta screws up her face while Hana tosses the raki back as if it were water, fills their glasses up again, and watches in amazement as Blerta takes another gulp. Now they’re both beginning to relax.

‘I know you’re annoyed with me because I didn’t come up to the mountains to visit after you took your oath.’

‘We’re not talking about that.’

‘Yes we are. We need to because it’s been bothering me ever since, and we talked about my visiting you for months in college.’

‘Then you forgot all about me,’ Hana says, without rancor.

Blerta reaches for the bottle of raki, slips her shoes off and makes herself more comfortable. Now Hana recognizes the old Blerta from ten years ago, sitting cross-legged on the bunk bed at Tirana University students’ residence. She had been funny and shy and secretly in love with all the boys who walked under their window. Hana had dedicated a poem to Blerta but hadn’t been able to give it to her because of Aunt Katrina’s death.

‘Yes. For years I hoped you would come up and see me at least once,’ she confesses. ‘I mean, in those early years, why didn’t you come?’

Blerta struggles not to let the alcohol confuse her, but she goes on drinking.

‘Would it have changed anything?’ she asks, rubbing her eyes. ‘These beans are delicious, by the way.’

‘No, it wouldn’t have changed anything.’

Hana doesn’t want this evening to vanish into thin air. She doesn’t want Blerta to disappear again, she doesn’t want to go back to being Mark, nor for her life to slip by without the chance to understand something about herself.

‘You look like a foreigner, and you make me ashamed of myself.’

‘Foreign? Me?’ Blerta objects.

‘The way you move, your perfect English … I heard you this afternoon talking to those people in your group. You know how much I love that language and how I never got to study it properly. You make me feel ugly and stupid. What can I say?’

Her friend smiles at her.

‘You were beautiful once, but you did your best not to let anyone see it.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. With all those guys chasing after you!’

‘Chasing after me?’ she asks, because she likes hearing the words. You’re enjoying this, she says to herself. What an idiot. What a stupid idiot.

‘You’re still beautiful now, you know?’ Blerta says, her voice suddenly turning sad. ‘Despite your best efforts to destroy your looks.’

‘Don’t say that.’

Blerta says she has to say these things, because now she can see with her own eyes that what everyone said was true.

Hana swallows the last two spoonfuls of beans and washes them down with alcohol. She gets up and opens the narrow window. What she’d really like to do is talk about books with Blerta, to go and get her notebooks full of poems and throw them into her friend’s lap so she could laugh at Hana as much as she wanted.

She rests her forehead on the stone wall.

‘Thanks for being here today, Blerta,’ she says.

‘All these years, I never really believed you were gay or that you had become a man in order to hide that you were.’