The word fear has no meaning here. Look an Albanian in the eye and you can tell right away that he’s immortal. Death is something that has nothing to do with him.
Morning raises its head at five o’clock, in summer. At seven, the old people are already having their first coffee. The young sleep in until noon. God decreed that time in this country should be spent as agreeably as possible, like with a sip of strong espresso on the terrace of the café around the corner as you stare at the nice set of legs on a girl who’ll never deign to look back.
The steaming coffee seeps slowly down your throat, warming your tongue, heart, and guts. Life, after all, isn’t as bad as they say. You savor the bitter black liquid while the lady behind the bar, who’s just had a fight with her husband, gives you a ferocious glare.
It’s eleven thirty. Thank God you still have the whole day ahead of you, and lots of time to waste. There are all sorts of things you could do—thousands of them. Dusk is nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly, Xifo comes in, rubbing her chapped hands, going on and on for the umpteenth time about her ailing heart and liver, giving us the details as though they were part of some old fable that had nothing to do with her—something very important, but far away. Everything here seems exaggerated and distorted. And then, in a low, conspiratorial voice, she adds:
“Have you heard the news? Our neighbor, you know, Suzi’s father, died in the shower last night. He came home from work, had dinner, took a shower, and kicked the bucket.”
“You’re kidding! He was so young, poor guy!”
“Well, what can you do? Life is full of surprises.”
As you can see, it’s only other people who die.
That’s the way life goes in a country where everything is eternal (with the exception of whatever might happen to other people). But there are things even dearer to Albanians than death. It’s no exaggeration to say that one of these things in particular is the quintessence of their existence.
I’m referring to fornication.
They take endless delight in the subject. Their hearts burn with it (though, really, Albanian hearts can ignite over just about anything). Everyone is completely absorbed, young and old, educated and illiterate, to the point where they can’t even see straight.
Thus, certain maxims have arisen, quite naturally, in our nation’s thought. They grow like leaves on a tree. These maxims derive from one universally held supposition: a good-looking girl is a whore, an ugly one—poor thing—is not.
In this country, a girl has to pay particular attention to her “immaculate flower.” A man can wash with a bar of soap and be clean, but a girl can never be pure again, no matter how much water she uses—not even a whole ocean’s worth.
Whenever a husband is away on business, or in prison, people tell his wife that it would be a good idea for her to sew up her slit, to convince him, when he gets back, that she’s been waiting for him and only him—that his absence has shrunk the crack between her thighs—because she missed him so much (men have a highly developed sense of private property in this country).
Whenever a pretty girl passes by, muffled sighs rise from the terrace where the men are sitting around and enjoying the day, sighs that are steamier than their coffee:
“Look who it is!”
“She’s not worth it! You know how many times she’s had herself stitched and unstitched?”
But still they go on, wistfully:
“Oh, Ingrid, my Ingrid! Who was it that snapped the stitches between your sweet, hot thighs last night? Come on over here, my beauty. When we’re finished with you, we promise we’ll pay to have you stitched back up again…”
They stare so hard as you pass by, it’s as though you’re becoming transparent. As soon as you’re penetrated by one of their stares, it transfixes you forever.
At home, it’s the same story. “Don’t worry about it,” my aunt tells me, “we can always take you to the doctor to find out if you’re a virgin or not.”
She spits these words out from between clenched teeth, her menacing glare cutting into me, and though I’m only thirteen and haven’t even seen whatever it is that men keep in their pants (a secret that I know has something to do with the fornication), I already have the feeling that I’m a perfect whore. My aunt’s staring makes me blush.
Stiff with fear, I crawl into bed, thinking: “What if they do send me to the doctor and he finds out that I wasn’t born a virgin? Like those children born blind, or deaf, or without hands, or—worse still—without an innate devotion to the Party?”
Sleep finally overwhelms me as I beg my aunt in the silence of my room to accept the tragic fate that’s struck our family: “I swear, Auntie, I swear I haven’t done anything wrong! It’s the way I was born! Believe me! I swear it!”
In this country where no one ever dies, my aunt is no exception. She doesn’t die either.
I used to have a recurrent dream (which I’ve never told anyone about). Before I fell asleep, with my eyes half open, I’d have a vision of her funeral.
I saw myself with a black scarf (a nice lace shawl would have suited me better) draped around my neck just like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina would’ve worn it. Of course, I was pale and cried a lot because I really did love her, but my desire to escape her terrible temper—which was always directed at me—was simply too great not to wish her dead.
Since I’d grown up without a father and apparently wasn’t bad looking, it wasn’t long before I was confronted with the aforementioned subject of fornication.
“You’re going to turn into a big whore, someday. Oh yes.” My aunt’s voice and my cousin’s would always tremble when they said this, as if to tell me there was no point denying it: “Come on, we know all about you.” They would shake their heads. “There’s nothing we can do about it. We didn’t choose to take you in. You just landed in our laps. And soon we’ll have to swallow all the shame you bring home—just swallow it, like bread. What else can we do? One day, you’re going to come home with a big, swollen belly.”
My aunt and my cousin both made agonized faces, as though they were being forced to chew their shame sandwiches that very moment, while my grandfather silently rolled himself a cigarette.
The thought of my swollen belly was terrifying. Do you know Bosch’s paintings? The anguish and madness on the faces, and the bodies of the fallen pressed together like souls in hell? Yes, I could see it clearly: a brownish and dark-red landscape brimming with scraps of organic refuse, with me as its container—all inside me. You can’t hide a swollen belly, and you can’t crawl out of your own skin. You’re marked. A swollen belly means that you’ve been screwing around in the bushes (I’d learned from my aunt and cousin that fornication took place in the bushes—bushes were apparently the ideal venue for these unspecified activities). It means that you’ve been letting the worms of shame get fat off you—nourishing an embryo that will disfigure your body and make it obvious to everyone that you’ve been screwing around.
Even today, I have trouble keeping it out of my head—that a pregnant woman is someone who’s been screwing around in the bushes.
What they wanted more than anything was a good tragedy. My whole wonderful country thirsted for them! It created tragedies out of nothing, just like God created us from a handful of dust.
Whenever I was sick, everyone would make a fuss over me. They would come into my room and whisper “my dear,” and when they went back out, murmur “poor thing.”
They would prepare delicious foods for me without ever considering the possibility that the illness might have robbed me of my appetite. I stared longingly at the pots of jam they’d left on the night table beside my bed. I exchanged loving glances with the meatballs, but the sight of these delicacies made me nauseous, and I had to look away.
Whenever I was sick, my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt suddenly turned into the most affectionate people on God’s earth, and I was convinced that, with them at my side, and given their foresight concerning my future fo
rnication, I would be able to be strong, I would never make them ashamed of me.
I had a great time whenever I was sick. I didn’t get yelled at, didn’t have to bake potatoes after school, and I could sleep in as long as I wanted. I didn’t have to husk rice, grain by grain. There was no wood to be chopped and, for some reason, I was no longer a whore…until the day of my recovery—that unlucky day when I finally had to get out of bed, when the insults and imprecations would resume. I was a whore again, and the pots of jam vanished, finding their way to the bedsides of other sick children. You only get jam if you have one foot in the grave. Otherwise, forget it!
In our beloved country, where no one ever dies, where bodies are as heavy as lead, we have an old adage, a rather profound and popular saying: “Live that I may hate you, and die that I may mourn you.”
This proverb is our country’s lifeblood. When you die, no one says another bad word about you. I’d even go so far as to say that no one thinks badly of you. There’s a real respect, here, for the institution of death.
(It’s no mean feat to gain an Albanian’s respect: it only rallies when you’re on your deathbed—and when you breathe your last, you’ve finally won it.)
All of a sudden, after death, men become imbued with the noblest of qualities, and women become exceptionally virtuous. Everyone cries for them, lamenting the loss of such wonderful human beings. All anger evaporates.
And then sometimes I’d hear my aunt use another old saying that was popular in our country—her voice trembling like a sibyl’s: “Your people (meaning blood relatives) may gobble up your flesh, but at least they’ll save the bones.”
My country has a way of stumbling over this kind of sublime truth.
And, indeed, my aunt’s voice was thick with a sublime beauty.
“But Auntie,” I said to her once, “if they gobble up my flesh, they might as well throw away the bones too, no? What good will they be?”
She threw me one of her withering glares, turning me to ash where I stood. It was her way of reminding me that I didn’t share the distinguished pedigree of my mother’s family—no, I’d been an unfortunate accident: I resembled him. Her stare was a rebuke: “Shut thy mouth, oh daughter of that man.”
I shut my mouth and could hardly wait to get sick again.
2
STAINS
When I was six or seven years old, I snuggled up close to my mother one night specifically because I’d discovered, to my horror, that she—the center of my universe—was powerless.
It began with an innocuous case of the flu, like children often get. I had to stay in bed and was leafing through some books. My cousin, who was two years older than me, had lent me a book on the anatomy of the human body. I was fascinated by it, with all the color illustrations of muscles, internal organs, bones, and long, bluish veins.
So this is what we were made of! There were all sorts of curious and colorful things inside us that weren’t even under the control of our, or rather my, will.
Flesh and bones, you understand?
How was it possible, dear God? How could it be? And though I couldn’t imagine any other way for it to be, did all those body parts really have to be so unreliable? Was there even a God around whom I could have petitioned in this regard? My mother, poor woman, could do nothing for me. She too was only made of flesh and bones.
I despaired at this thought as I nuzzled up against her and smelled the odors I knew so well. The idea that my mother, whom I loved and feared, could be so vulnerable, that all of us with flesh and bones were vulnerable, was profoundly unnerving.
“I’m scared,” I said again and again. “I’m scared, Mommy, to be made of flesh and bones.”
She put her arms around me, not understanding a word, and stroked my hair as mothers convinced they can successfully console their children always do. She kissed me and whispered tender words into my ear as we sat in the damp basement kitchen, covered in white tiles, where we lived.
On one of these tiles, next to our sofa, there was a blood-red stain the size of a pomegranate seed. It refused to be washed or rubbed away, try as I might to get rid of it. Every day, when I was cleaning, this little red stain insisted that I spend more time with it. It gave me the impression of being sad. Whenever I took a cloth to it, I would stroke it gently.
There was something painful about it. I was convinced that it was a bloodstain. I was convinced it was from her. It must have dripped onto the floor when Daddy beat her. He had thrown her down and whipped her with something. I could see it so clearly…and that was how the little stain was born.
It was a stubborn little bloodstain. It wouldn’t budge.
I plucked up my courage one day and asked her, “Mommy, what’s that red seed over there? Isn’t it funny that there’s a blood-red seed in the middle of a white tile?”
I looked into her face, stared into her big green eyes, watching her expression, trying to see whether she was finally going to tell me the truth: that the bloodstain was hers. But she only replied, “It’s probably a production error, a little drop of red paint, that’s all.”
My mother was beautiful. She would spend hours taking care of herself, combing her hair back and outlining her lips with a black eyeliner pencil. She’d put on a tight-fitting dress and throw the colorful handbag that she’d sewn herself over her shoulder and then, after checking the mirror a few times, head out into the night, though not before telling me: “Be good, and don’t leave the house. I’m going to visit Grandmother.”
She went to visit Grandmother every evening, the eager eyes of our men and the jealous glances of our women following her every step down the road. I could see the envy in their eyes. There was something bitter in them, corrosive like an acid eating through their veins and intestines. One small dose would have been enough to destroy a castle, a whole town. They would have torn the flesh off her bones and eaten her alive or thrown her to the dogs, if they could have.
“Be careful, Mommy.”
The real reason for her visits to Grandma was that she wanted to be seen and desired. The men would whisper: “How beautiful you are, Diella! I could almost eat you up, skin and bones and all. God, look at those legs of yours, Diella. They’re perfection itself, like a bottle of champagne.”
(We should note, at this juncture, that there’s never been any champagne in this country. You can’t imagine the terrible thirst this untasted beverage—which everyone said was so wonderful—provoked. It was nothing more than a dream, and it made them sick.)
So, Diella’s legs were like champagne.
Or maybe they meant, like the champagne bottles.
She strolled down the boulevard, head held high, enjoying the compliments being whispered to her but pretending all the while to ignore them. She was still young, twenty-eight. The years passed with visits to Grandmother.
Her wedding photos sat abandoned on a shelf in the closet.
One of these pictures in particular used to fascinate me. It continued to attract my attention even after I’d studied every inch of it—the interplay of light and shade, the way the veil my mother wore was draped around her hair, the palpable excitement of the big day, which seemed to have made her lose her composure.
It’s the custom in our country for a bride to cry a little at her wedding, to show how distraught she is at leaving her mother and father. This is the way we get married—screaming, as we did at birth.
Over time, a brown stain began to appear on the photo, covering my mother’s face from her right eye to her temple, and, eventually, the rest of her as well. This was from the damp in the closet. It upset me, because it made Mother look sick and depressed. Every time I thought about it, I’d burst into tears, imagining the day her hair would go gray.
I rescued the photograph from the closet, hoping that the stain would go away if I took care of the picture and put it somewhere safe—in a nice photo album, for instance.
But the stain didn’t go away. And one day, we moved.
I lost
the photograph. It vanished at some point in my topsy-turvy life. But I still carry the stain. The stain infected me. I can still see it covering my mother’s right eye and temple. She doesn’t bother to hide her unhappiness, now. And the red seed is within me, and the visits to my grandmother’s house have stopped.
TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN AND ITALIAN BY
ROBERT ELSIE AND JANICE MATHIE-HECK
[AUSTRIA]
ANTONIO FIAN
FROM While Sleeping
DOLPHIN
A cousin of mine had an aquarium built on her terrace, a rather imposing tank where strange, exotic sea creatures amused themselves in the company of all sorts of local specimen, destined to be eaten. She invited hundreds of guests to its grand unveiling, including E., the children, and myself. Everyone stood around the tank and stared at its colorful chaos. More than anything else, it was the young dolphin the crowd found most entertaining—its boldness and playfulness. Our view was constantly being interrupted, however, by cooks who politely but firmly asked us to make room for them. They stepped up to the edge of the tank, dipped into the water with nets, killed our meals-to-be with a little specialty hammer, one blow to each head, then disappeared again into their kitchen. Little by little, the guests too began to leave the terrace, filing into the dining room where various delicacies—consisting primarily of the newly killed, freshly prepared aquarium fish—were being offered. E. and I followed the others, and in the end only our children, both still in kindergarten—grade school at the most—were still out there by the tank. At once present and not present, observing, without the power to interfere, I was able to follow their conversation. They had been impressed by the cooks killing the fish. Our daughter suggested they try it themselves, and her brother, while skeptical, did nothing to hold her back. Since there was no net at hand, they decided to drop something heavy over the edge of the tank onto the head of one of the fish. They took a large amethyst out of the display case in which my cousin displayed her fine china and other valuables. The children approached the edge of the tank, managed to attract the most playful of the sea creatures, the dolphin, and let the stone fall on its head—killing it instantly. Upset—though more confused—by the effect of their actions, the children stared for some time at the floating dolphin corpse. Then our daughter began to cry, and her brother said accusingly: “You killed the pretty fish!”—a statement for which I, present again and taking part in the scene, shouted at him: “A dolphin is not a fish! A dolphin is a mammal.” That upset him all the more: “A mammal!” he yelled and ran to the dining room. “My sister killed a mammal!” Everyone abandoned their half-eaten fish and thronged onto the terrace. Extreme agitation followed—shouts, screams, loud crying, “The dolphin! That sweet dolphin!” I moved to the edge of the tank to stand by the children and to protect our daughter from the anger of the hysterical guests, but now when I looked at the surface of the water I saw with horror that it wasn’t the corpse of a dolphin there but of a girl, a girl about our daughter’s age, exceptionally pretty, her long dark hair floating in the water, encircling her pale, dead face like a halo. No one else seemed to notice this girl, however. People were only talking about the dolphin, and, truth be told, when I looked again, I saw the dead dolphin after all—the child’s corpse had disappeared. I must have been hallucinating. Meanwhile, the children cried and cried. Our son too: he felt responsible for the dolphin’s death because he hadn’t stopped his sister. E. was with me again now, and we were trying to pull our kids away from the enraged mob when my cousin appeared out of nowhere, clapped her hands, and everything calmed down. She said with a smile that we didn’t have to look at it as such a tragedy, and anyway, we shouldn’t be so hard on a couple of children who after all were still small and weren’t conscious of the severity of their actions. Certainly it was a shame about the dolphin. After all, he’d been so cute and playful. But in a few weeks he would’ve grown too big for the tank anyway, and would’ve had to be killed. So, everything was only half as bad as it seemed. Besides, her guests shouldn’t worry about being deprived of so unusual a sight next time they visited, my cousin continued. She would go to the exotic pet store first thing the next morning to order another fish. “Mammal!” I called, “the dolphin isn’t a fish. It’s a mammal!” My cousin gave a friendly nod, “Mammal, that’s right.”
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 2
