Although it was not yet nine o’clock, it was already scorching when Jeta and I and a selection of urchins returned to Kinostudio, dragging lunch. (It was the one meal of the day, supplemented on either side by quantities of bread and jam.) No matter how hot it was, or how heavy the load, we always walked. Along the main road out of the city the buses were so infrequent that every stop looked like a demonstration—a demonstration being tear-gassed with exhaust fumes. There were hardly any private cars—before 1990 it was illegal to own one here—and so Albanians, most of whom had to travel great distances to shop, had to spend as much time waiting to travel. The pavements of popular routes were clogged with commuters. Old men in white felt fezzes squatted on their haunches along the whole lengths of some streets; families lunched and napped, waiting for a ride on a vacuum-packed bus. (No one collected tickets. No one dared.) There were nearly as many dead buses as running ones; abandoned along the main road, and stripped of any salable parts, these were now home to Tirana’s large population of homeless children.
When we turned into the dirt track at the mouth of Kinostudio, restless kids would race up to greet us. Thirty-one-year-old Liliana would often be there, loping unevenly and unself-consciously along with the pack. She would take all the bags off us and, lurching from side to side, cheerfully haul them down to the house.
Watching her go one day, I paused to shake out my load-stiffened arms. Djivan and his pal Elvis hung back with me and, as we started down the hill, Djivan told me a riddle. “I have a sister who runs without legs and who whistles without a mouth. Who is she?” He beamed up at me, blew the black curls from his forehead, crossed his sun-browned arms, and waited for my reply. I scolded him for being so mean to his unfortunate sister and then Elvis came in with the right answer: “She is the wind!”
Next door to the Dukas was the school which all of the children had briefly attended—all, that is, except Liliana, who, with her disabilities (“caused by an old woman when she was a new-born”), was thought not to need any schooling. Nor would she qualify for marriage and motherhood. Lili was sweet-natured, patient, hard-working, and popular with all the children, who thought of her, because she was childlike but also because she was childless (and therefore not considered an adult female), as one of their own. She would have made an ideal bori. However, with her whiffly speech and her funny leg, Liliana was considered dili: mentally retarded, which she certainly was not. As is the case everywhere else in the premodern world, physical disability in Albania is still not distinguished from imbecility.
Another reason for “sparing” Liliana was perhaps that she would not have fetched much in the way of a bride-price, and would have been accorded a correspondingly low status by her husband’s family. For Jeta and Bexhet, this fate had elements of a blessing: most Gypsies lost their daughters at the onset of puberty. “It is out of the question,” Jeta said to me of her only daughter’s prospects of marriage, no doubt wondering if I wasn’t on the dili side myself. She spoke matter-of-factly, and in front of Lili, who showed no sign of hurt feelings. This mother’s candor, which could seem brutal to an outsider, was typical of the Dukas, and indeed of all Gypsies I met. Among them it was recognized that truth in itself was not painful; only ignorance could bring suffering. Consequently, euphemism was eschewed—except in (strenuously avoided) reference to bodily functions of any kind.
Some afternoons I returned to town by car, with Marcel and Gimi. Marcel spent most of his time pursuing various unpromising projects, such as the setting up of a Gypsy-run collective to grow and export medicinal herbs. He was driven everywhere by Gimi, who after all had the profession shofer written in his passport, and who waited for hours in the baking car outside an embassy, an office, or a private house, while Marcel barked and fumed, trying to make phone calls and demanding things that he knew better than to hope for. Mainly he tried unsuccessfully to recover his scattered belongings which, since he had last been in Albania, had been sold by his Albanian friends, or otherwise “lost.” Marcel involved more and more people in his searches, and no one, clearly, had anything better to do—certainly not work. (That summer unemployment simmered at around 70 percent.)
The impression of Marcel’s stature created by his Gypsy retinue in Tirana—and in particular his manservant, Gimi, forever waiting in the car—was misleading in several ways. The real reason Gimi stayed outside when we stopped in at the house of Albanians was the food. Inevitably, and whatever the hour, our hosts would prepare a meal. It was impossible to decline the hospitality, but whereas for me it was at worst a nuisance, for Gimi it presented a danger. Gypsies everywhere do their best to avoid eating food prepared by gadje, which almost by definition is bound to be mahrime.
Marcel had no place of his own, in Albania or anywhere else, and never knew where he was going to be more than a few weeks, or days, before he got there. Nevertheless, his hysterical indignation over his stolen belongings—a few bits of furniture and a TV—was certainly at odds with his free-wheeling way of life. When the sun was highest in the sky, Marcel would wipe his naked head and ask himself how he could have been so stupid. His helpers, Gypsies and Albanians alike, would shrug and clasp their hands below downcast heads, not quite daring to ask him, Yes, how? If only I had left my things with the Dukas, or any of my other Gypsy friends, he’d say, they would still be here today. And it was true; the absolute loyalty of the Gypsies to anyone they’d accepted was not notable among the Albanians.
Gimi’s full proper name was Palumb Furtuna—or Dove Storm. He was quietly wise and able to give any cliché the force of proverb—a common enough gift among a certain variety of Rom. His view of the corruption among Albanians, which seemed not to exist among the Albanian Roma, who kept to their own codes of honor and punishment, all came down to Enver Hoxha, the late dictator. “Jekh dilo kerel but dile hai but dile keren dilimata,” he said, resting his sweaty brow on the sun-softened driver’s wheel—“One madman makes many madmen and many madmen makes madness.…”
Sitting and waiting with Gimi in the car, we watched the subtle and not so subtle violence of the street. “Now we have the culture of Italy,” he commented, “but only the bad part.” Chaos was more easily observable than crime—at Tirana’s largest road intersection, at Skanderbeg Square, for example. Here hung the remains of the city’s only four traffic lights, swinging from their loose wires like spent lanterns the day after a barn dance. Beneath the defunct lights, buses, a few cars, motorbikes, bicycles, and horse-drawn carts crossed the square along whichever route was most direct for each of them. There were a few policemen around, self-appointed traffic wardens, who themselves jaywalked back and forth across the square issuing tickets to whomever they chose, probably to whoever looked most likely to pay off their fines on the spot. There was no indication of how one might properly proceed, or what might constitute an offense. Gimi, a good driver, was routinely stopped (his, or Marcel’s, car was a relatively smart affair: that is, one with all four original doors). He no longer bothered to ask why, resignedly referring to the fines (themselves arbitrary sums) as “tax.” Plenty of motorists ought to have been pulled over but never were; they drove drunkenly, but in fact they simply didn’t know how: this was all something new. There were car corpses at an unseemly number of corners, terrible tangled heaps, and they didn’t look as though they had been put there in a municipal gesture of admonition.
There were also human wrecks, drunk and sober, parked everywhere on the side of the road, in the middle of the road. There was nowhere to go, and it was too much trouble, and too dangerous getting there. On the other hand, in a place where until last year the squares and boulevards were silent, empty, and ordered, traffic was still a novelty, an entertainment. People turned out to watch the traffic.
Gimi and I were among them. During one especially long wait for Marcel in a road leading out of Tirana, a trail of men passed by on foot. They carried rubber hoses, metal pipes, sticks, and garden tools. “Bandits,” Gimi said, as I lowered my camera. But anyone
in Albania may be a part-time “bandit,” for such domestic weaponry is a common sight.
Albania has a great history of Corsican-style vendettas between the rival clans of the Gegs and the Tosks. Under Hoxha people were too terrified to fight, but blood feuds were soon to make a comeback. (Note that the local expression for “an eye for an eye” is kokë për kokë, a head for a head.) As is the case everywhere in the former Eastern bloc, the police are uncertain of their authority. Baffled by the concept of limited power, they generally prefer to do nothing and to live as best they can off the gratitude of thieves. The black-booted Italian soldiers who patrol Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square and the Boulevard of Martyrs are charged with protecting foreign aid, not Albanian citizens. As a result, many unlikely Albanians, such as the scholarly family who shared their lardy bean soup, are arming themselves. That summer, there was a public hanging. Two brothers, both in their twenties, had slaughtered a family of five, including a seven-month-old baby, while trying to steal some money rumored to be hidden under the family’s floorboards. Even the boys’ parents thought the hanging was just.
Marcel had many Albanian friends. I liked one family in particular and early in my stay I went to their place often. They had books and quiet and they lived in town: it felt, at first, like refuge from the carnival of Kinostudio. Two old people, their two middle-aged sons, and two granddaughters shared three small rooms and a rose garden, from which the father would snip me a blossom each time I dropped by. The two thin daughters wanly moved bowls on and off the table. At nineteen and twenty, they had teeth like their ancient black-clad grandmother: few between them, and those remainders yellow-gray and flaking like elderly toenails. The girls moved as if to say they knew they had no future (this was the future), and to look at them, who could disagree? They had no vitality; they were not going to get out. Their grandfather sat cross-legged on the couch all day long, grinding coffee beans, and it seemed a fitting accompaniment. So the father kept his daughters, not because they were dilia, but because this was Albania: they were educated, kind girls, but there were no jobs, and no young man could afford a wife now; there was nothing their father could do for them. The family tortured themselves with the news: life was going on elsewhere. Even the war next door, in the former Yugoslovia, looked okay, like something to do.
I began to dread my visits, and soon I stopped going. As it turned out, the quiet I had been attracted to was a bitter lassitude and stunned resentment at life in Albania, past, present, and future. It was understandable but it made you relieved to be back in Kinostudio, where Solitude and her pensive handmaidens had no chance at all.
Women’s Work
TWENTY-FIVE SQUARE feet of children, chickens, and clothes hanging out to dry: life for the Dukas took place in the courtyard. Especially the lives of the women. Apart from Jeta—and except for quick dashes for bread or butane for the outdoor cooking ring, and maybe, in the evening, a short after-work visit to a sister or a friend in the quarter—the women were not allowed out. In any case they were too busy.
There are many sources of advice on how to be a good bori, such as this proverb from Slovakia: Ajsi bori lachi: xal bilondo, phenel londo—“Such a daughter-in-law is good who eats unsalted food and says it is salted.” Modesty and submissiveness were essential, to be sure, but in the main these girls worked. From around five-thirty in the morning, the day was a cycle of duties, with the burden falling on Viollca and Mirella, the younger wives. These women were never called by their names, or “wife” (romni), or any term of endearment by their husbands; nor were they called “mother” (daj) by their children. Everyone referred to them as the boria—the brides, or daughters-in-law—and indeed it was Jeta to whom they were answerable, not to their menfolk. So, despite the institution of male laziness, this really was a matriarchy. Only Jeta could inspire fear. That the men did nothing came very quickly to seem not so much a privilege as a relegation to child status.
The girls ignored my daily request to be woken up. I kept trying to program or dream myself into their rhythm, but the body did not want to get up before the sun did (and I really couldn’t set my alarm clock, and wake all the children, just to watch the girls work). One night though, I’d slept badly and was still trying to settle down when the boria stirred in the dark and began their day. Viollca and Mirella (called Lela) got up before everyone else, including Dritta and including the khania, the hens. They moved silently about the courtyard, collecting wood from the tidy pile that they maintained along one inner wall of the courtyard. In the sooty light, they built their neat fire, always the same, neither too high nor too feeble. They bailed water from an old oil drum into cans, which they arranged among the burning logs. There was fuel, but it was expensive, and so it was reserved for Jeta’s cooking. The boria had to build their fires from scratch.
While the water heated up, the girls gathered any vaguely soiled blankets, rugs, and clothes for washing. Each had her own work station in a different corner of the courtyard and there set up her long tin tub on an old wooden crate; then together they lifted each of the heavy slate washboards into the tubs. The tubs were thigh-high or lower, and so both girls scrubbed in a hunched, backbreaking position. My loudly whispered pleas to “bend from the knee” inspired an exchange of furtive, pitying giggles and glances.
The boria: Lela and Viollca at work in the courtyard, with Elvis (left) and Djivan in Kinostudio, Tirana, 1992 (photo credits 1.2)
Each broke off a hunk of soap from the Parmesan glacier in the storage cupboard and dropped it into her tub. (My own soap bar was an exotic item, regarded with skeptical wonder, as if it were a palm-top computer.) They poured in boiling water and swirled it around, beginning the real ritual: hours of trancelike, rhythmical rubbing, interrupted now by a stream of new demands—a hungry child, an insufficiently caffeinated father-in-law. And they really rubbed, with such vigor that they seemed to be trying to wring the color from every bit of soaking cloth. Washing—keeping clothes and houses and themselves clean—was the boria’s most important job. They worked in a competitive spirit, especially once Dritta made her appearance. And all of them had to be in mind of what they were washing: men’s clothes and women’s clothes were to be scrubbed separately, as were children’s. Another tub was reserved for the kids themselves and another for dishes and pots. They had correspondingly designated towels or rags, and never transferred a bit of tide-worn soap, always hacking off a new hunk for each new task.
Dritta’s superior status was due not only to her marriage to the eldest son, and her great age (she was twenty-six). She was from another group; she was a Kabudji. This should have worked against her, but clearly there were some benefits: she was much bigger than the other two, and much more confident, attractive in an earthbound, arcadian sort of way, like one of Picasso’s thick-limbed, amphora-bearing peasant girls.
Nothing about Dritta was delicate. Her sense of fun consisted in annoying people. She would grab the other girls’ breasts as a greeting, or as a punchline to one of her own jokes. This gesture was not exclusive to Dritta (the American anthropologist Anne Sutherland noted identical play among American Gypsies). Breasts are associated with babies rather than sex, and so the upper body is not of special interest or a source of shame. The lower body, by contrast, is considered highly dangerous from a pollution point of view; most Gypsy women wear long skirts, and even trousers are banned. But I never got used to the breast-pinching, which made her reach for mine all the more. Once, after an especially annoying round of such swipes, I kicked Dritta in the shin—not hard (I had bare feet), but in anger. After a sufficient blank-faced pause, a grimace spread over her face, and finally, like a child, she burst into fake tears, and of course, like an adult, I felt bad.
Dritta’s antics irritated everyone except her husband, Nicu, and a few other not very secret admirers. She had the kind of mock-innocent sexuality that women disliked and that led men rather guiltily to laugh at her awful jokes and shameless impersonations, just to stay within her force
field.
The Kabudji had a lower status than the Mechkari, probably because the Mechkari had been in Albania for hundreds of years longer. But among these Muslims a more proximate reason might have been the markedly sassier walk and brighter clothes of the Kabudji girls. When not under Jeta’s eye, Dritta showed her true colors. One afternoon, she took me to visit her mother and sister, who had in tow two small children and a baby. On the fifth floor of the worst block in all Kinostudio, whose only window had caved in and gave dangerously out onto the street, the girls shrieked and gossiped and smoked cigarettes and danced, trying to outdo each other in pelvic rudeness.
They were drunk on their own rebelliousness, and they were egged on by their oily-haired squaw of a mother, who sat cross-legged on the floor, rhythmically clapping. None of them paid any attention to the toddlers, who wobbled perilously close to the wrecked window; they ignored the whimpering baby, who sat on the floor in a puddle of her own pee. It wasn’t strange that the tiny girl didn’t cry harder: she had clearly learned that wailing got you nowhere. They were rough with the kids when they got underfoot.
Bury Me Standing Page 5
