Tomorrow I’ll start looking.
For myself.
A whole week.
And—nothing.
I’ve been cautious, disguising my questions inside other questions, wrapping them in excuses and reasons that obscure what I’m really looking for. Lilaj. Letters that finally came to me from someplace deep inside just a few years ago, not long after I found the letters that formed Shkodër. Suddenly it seemed so obvious! They’d been spinning around in there for such a long time, back and forth, I’d seen them, but couldn’t understand. L-I-L-A-J. Until one morning on my way to school, there it was—my name and Mom’s and Dad’s and Eliot’s and Julia’s.
I’ve visited the police station and the national register and a couple of bureaucratic offices that lack any counterpart in Sweden. The bureaucracy here is a country of its own. With its own language and rules. Freedom can be tough when you haven’t had time to learn how to handle it. My questions, though disguised, raise suspicions that can’t be satisfied, not because sixteen-year-old girls who speak English are any more dangerous than anyone else, but because undeveloped freedom is often met with constant vigilance.
I haven’t made much progress in the cafés and restaurants and shops either, but at least I can have more straightforward conversations there, my intentional questions can be disguised as unplanned. Women don’t seem to like me as much as men. I’m not supposed to be out after dark—alone and young. It’s not something anyone said exactly, but it’s impossible to mistake what they’d like to yell at me. So I always end up talking to men. If I want to find out anything, anything at all, about the family I once had and whatever traces they may have left behind here, so I can paint a complete picture of myself and not just these puzzle pieces, then I’m going to have to keep spending my afternoons alone at the corner table sipping Turkish coffee with way too much sugar in it. And my evenings in the middle of the bar, waiting for someone who just took off their wedding ring to offer me a glass of raki or a foamy Birra Korça.
I’ve had the most success with a man who’s not much older than me, twenty, twenty-two at the most. He started talking to me at one of the cafés. He was sitting there reading like me, and he became curious about my book, an American thriller that I picked up at the airport. After a while he moved over to my table. Philosophy. In Albanian. That’s what he was reading. He flipped through its pages, showing me, and I recognized a word here or there without saying so. He has a nice laugh that makes a person feel happy. We met again at the same café the next afternoon. By chance. At least I pretended it was. When he arrived with the same book under his arm, I had already been sitting there a couple of hours, waiting and hoping. We drank several cups each, and I asked him to tell me about Shkodër. He speaks so vividly, as though leading me by the hand down its streets and through its seasons and centuries. With him it feels like I’m starting to understand this city and its surroundings and even the whole country a little better now. I wonder if I dare ask him to help me search for my family and relatives at those bureaucracies I can’t seem to handle.
I’ll ask tomorrow night. We’re having dinner. His name is Lorik, and I’m so thankful that I met him.
Ibought a new blouse and a short, though modest skirt today. A seamstress two streets away in a hole-in-the-wall shop, who measures and trims and sews while her customers wait. When I see myself in the mirror of my rented room, I can’t help but smile. I look pretty. And I know Lorik, who’s only ever seen me in jeans and a T-shirt, will think I look nice, too. Going to a restaurant together for the first time is completely different from flipping through each other’s books in a café.
But I still have to wear the same sneakers. The only ones I brought with me. Next time I’ll upgrade those, too.
I look at the clock, it’s soon time. I comb my hair, even put on a pair of earrings I found in a colorful shop near where the square ends, which sells just about anything. Really anything at all. Real gold, it said on the tag, but that’s surely the one thing they’re not—real metal, perhaps—but it doesn’t matter, they glitter and make me feel grown up. And when I’m about . . .
Shhhhh.
I freeze mid-movement.
Stand still. Listen. And there—there they are again.
Steps.
Just outside my door.
I don’t know why I react so strongly. I have nothing to be afraid of. No one’s threatened me, other than some of the women at one of the bars, the ones who get paid and think I’m confusing their prospective customers, and once a bartender who thought I should go home because otherwise things might turn out bad for me, since not all men are good. But that’s not why my heart starts racing anxiously, like it wants to help me escape. I just haven’t heard anyone else in this building. The owner lives on the ground floor and is gone for a month and the man who takes care of the yard sticks to fetching rakes and hedge trimmers from the garden shed.
The footsteps have stopped.
Now there’s a knock. Determined thuds against my door.
I freeze, and there are knocks again.
More of them.
“Hello?”
A women’s voice. In English. With an Albanian accent. I don’t respond.
“Hello—in there?”
A voice that I could never, no matter how scared or hunted I might feel, find threatening or aggressive or dangerous. Kind. Pleasant.
“Miss, I would really . . .”
I open the door. We stare at each other. A woman in her forties, maybe forty-five. Eyes as friendly as her voice. Cheeks with deep grooves that I would guess come from more than just age. Tired. That’s how I would describe her. Or sad? It’s hard to say when you don’t know someone, have never even seen them before.
I don’t reply. Just stand there. She was the one who knocked.
“Miss—it’s like this.”
A mix of English and Albanian.
“I’ve heard you’re searching.”
Now she even throws some German into the mix of languages she’s using to try to make herself understood.
“That you . . . yes, ask questions.”
It’s not an accusation. More a statement. With a note of seriousness. Worry.
I neither answer nor close the door.
I have a hard time making sense of what she’s saying, even though now she’s settled on English.
“Can I come in?”
She nods to my messy room—I was late, ran to the shower, and left my clothes spread all over the floor, and then I couldn’t find my brush and . . . well, I wasn’t expecting visitors.
I open the door a little more, and she steps inside. But she doesn’t sit down on the bed I point to, the only seat I have.
“It’s not good that you’re asking questions.”
She stands in the middle of the room, and glances now and then through the window. As if she were looking for someone out on the street.
“People get worried about the kind of questions you’re asking. And when they get worried, they start asking questions, too. That was how I found out. And how I knew.”
I speak to her for the first time.
“Knew what?”
“Who you are.”
Now she moves a pillow and sits down. Next to me. Takes my hand, and it surprises me, but I let her hold it.
“Zana. Your name. Zana Lilaj.”
“Ah, now I understand—you know Lorik.”
“No.”
“Okay—you work at one of the bureaucracies I visited?”
“No.”
“But those are the only people I’ve told, except for a woman on the train, when I just wanted to try out how it sounded. There’s nowhere else I’ve even used it.”
Then she lets go of my hand, and caresses my cheek instead.
“It’s you. Even after all this time.”
“I don’t
understand at all.”
She runs her hand over my face. It’s not unpleasant, I don’t draw back, it’s just unexpected and therefore a bit strange.
“I recognize you. Your mouth, your cheekbones. You’re bigger now, little darling, but it’s you.”
“Who are you?”
“Your aunt. Your father’s sister. He was my big brother.”
“Excuse me?”
“I used to hold you in my arms. You used to lean your head against my shoulder and rest it just there, so calm. You were a newborn the first time we met, and especially the year you were two and three, I saw you often—I pushed you around in your stroller, over the streets of Shkodër, when you had a hard time going to sleep. You were three the last time I saw you. Or, since we’re sitting here now, second to last time.”
She kisses my forehead. That’s not unpleasant either. The opposite. Familiar, without knowing why.
I stand up. Even though my head is spinning. Dad’s sister? My aunt? This is what I came here for. But if I don’t remember her? How do I know if . . .
“I know what you’re thinking, darling. I could be anybody. But don’t you see how similar we are.”
I nod. Doubtfully. I want it to be true. I want it so much my heart is pounding, but not to make me run, this time it wants to dance. Still, I know it’s dangerous to hope. Sometimes people say they’re your family and end up not being part of it at all—like your mom and dad become a Thomas and Anette.
“Let’s sit down on the bed again. I want you to look at something.”
We do so, sit down in the same places as before. And the woman reaches for the purse she brought with her and dropped in my pile of clothes.
“Here.”
A photograph. The colors faded. Paper rolling up at the edges, so I have to stretch it out with my index finger and thumb.
“Do you recognize them?”
A child, maybe two years old, is smiling at the camera from a stroller. Ice cream in one hand, in both hands, plus quite a bit on the cheeks and chin. A girl. Standing next to a woman, who is leaning forward, pressing her cheek against the baby’s head. They like each other. That much is clear.
“Yes. At least her.”
I point to the woman. A much younger version of my visitor. She nods.
“Yes. It’s me. And I’m sure you also recognize that little child.”
Yes.
I recognize the child.
Myself.
“What’s your name?”
I look at the woman who might be my aunt.
“Vesa.”
Like a whisper, it runs through me. A name that fills up every corner inside.
“Yes. Your name is Vesa.”
The photograph tries to roll up again, and I move my thumb and trade my middle finger for my index.
“Was it taken . . . here?”
“Just a few hundred meters from here. At the center of town. You’re two and a half. And I’m twenty-five.”
She roots around in her purse again. Lays a new photograph on top of the first. I don’t have to ask. It’s the same child, the same woman. And the other three are Eliot, Julia, and Dad.
“We’re at a restaurant. It still exists, over by the bridge that crosses the Drini. Your mother took it.”
I’m holding a piece of paper that means everything to me. Five people. Only two left. The two of us.
“But tonight, Zana, you can’t go to dinner.”
I’m startled by her request. In just a few minutes, I’ve been told more information than I ever dreamed possible. But I don’t want to miss my meeting with Lorik. That feels right too, as familiar as this.
“I’m sorry, but I’m going to dinner. Tomorrow, if you like, I’ll gladly meet you again. And talk more. About everything.”
“You can’t.”
“Can’t?”
“It could be dangerous.”
I laugh. It’s been a long time. I laugh at an aunt whom I didn’t even know existed and who after less than half an hour is just as worried about me as Thomas and Anette always were, though they tried to hide it.
“You don’t have to worry about me. I’m sixteen years old, grew up in Sweden. It might be different here, but . . .”
I whisper. Not because I’m ashamed. But because Vesa might think this is something you’re not supposed to talk about. I don’t know, I don’t know her yet.
“. . . I’m not exactly a virgin. I had a boyfriend. Older. Turned out to be an idiot. But an idiot I could handle.”
She takes my hand.
“That’s not really what I’m talking about.”
The photos fall to the floor. Rolling up together.
“You can’t go to dinner.”
“I’m sorry. But you’re not responsible for me.”
She doesn’t raise her voice. She doesn’t need to. I can see how upset she is.
“You can’t go!”
Her kind eyes won’t let me go. She’s holding me without holding me.
“Do you understand? You have to come with me tonight. When we get there, I’ll explain why.”
“I don’t even . . . have a phone. And I haven’t heard him mention one. If I can’t go, I have to call him. He can’t just sit there waiting for me to show up.”
“He’ll understand.”
“How could he . . .”
“Listen to me, darling. When you don’t arrive. He will understand.”
And now she’s holding me. For real. A hug unlike any other. Or any that I can remember.
My aunt’s house stands isolated on the banks of the Buna River, close to where that river empties into the Mediterranean, and not far from a small town called Velipojë, which has about a thousand inhabitants. The full moon shining on the river turns it green, and I feel like jumping in from my aunt’s jetty, swimming across to the other side. To another country. Montenegro. That’s how close it is. I shout out to the people sitting on the opposite shore, who have built a fire on the beach, and they shout back. An invisible border.
My aunt lives alone here. There are traces of a former husband in old pictures in the bookshelf and on a wooden table in the hall, but I haven’t figured out yet if she’s widowed or divorced. We need to get to know each other better before I ask her that. She’ll tell when she’s done asking all of her questions, so many of which I cannot answer.
It’s a beautiful house. Way too big for just one person. The silence of the water and the lack of any neighbors feels peaceful, the noise that’s always inside my head seems to almost stop here, but it soon starts again with a different kind of spinning. And when my aunt pulls a photo album out of a huge escritoire, this new noise gets even worse, spreads into every part of me. Suddenly I realize it’s impossible to delete yourself. All the pictures I burned at Thomas and Anette’s, and all along sitting in a box in a tiny city in northern Albania there were just as many.
Who is that girl with Zana written beneath her picture?
What is she thinking?
I can see that she’s me, we have similar features, but I don’t feel close to her, she’s a stranger. It was too long ago to connect it with the present.
My favorite is a photo that takes up a whole page of the album. Mom and Dad. Before Eliot and Julia and I even existed. They’re so young, like I am now. They hold each other, love each other, trust each other. They could do anything, be anything. They have no idea that in just a few years they’ll be dead in an apartment in Stockholm, along with their two oldest children. I wish I could talk to them, warn them. Because there, in that photograph, they’re still alive.
“You can’t stay here, Zana, do you understand?”
“Here? With you?”
“In Albania. In Shkodër.”
“I just got here!”
“And now you have to leave again.”
“Not stay . . . I’m home. That’s how it feels. Aunt Vesa? I’m home for the very first time.”
“You’ve been going around asking a lot of questions. It’s dangerous. Very dangerous.”
“What’s so dangerous?”
“The wrong people found out. And they don’t take risks.”
“Risks? Why? I don’t understand.”
“Because your father was very successful.”
We’re sitting in her large kitchen, high ceilings and coarse wooden beams above our heads, a modern fireplace next to an old woodstove, and at the far end an extra staircase, which was once used by the servants so as not to disturb their employers when they were headed up to the second floor. But for a moment I forget where I am. Something happens. A wave washes through me. Turns my cheeks warm and red. Pride. That’s what I feel. So much pride. The first thing I ever hear about my dad—and it’s that he was successful.
“So . . . what did he do? Dad?”
“He helped during the civil war.”
My cheeks are pulsating now. With even more pride.
“How?”
“You were born around the time the war began, 1997. That’s when your dad made most of his money. He smuggled weapons. Over the river and across the mountains to Kosovo. But later, when everything was over, when peace came, he needed to find a new market. So a year later you all moved to Sweden.”
My aunt shows me more pictures. Of my family. What we looked like when we left.
“I remember thinking, this will be the last time I ever see you. I don’t know why, I just knew. This is from the airport.”
A slightly wrinkled photograph. As if somebody had balled it up and thrown it away, but regretted it and smoothed it out again. My whole family. The only picture where we’re all together. And Mom and Dad and Eliot and Julia and even me, none of those faces feel like strangers.
Knock Knock Page 23
