And then I cry, on the way to my job at the factory where I stand all day and keep watch over machines that function perfectly without me, over and over, from one day to the next. I cry in the morning as I brush my teeth. I cry as I wash my hands before dinner, as I towel myself after taking a shower, whenever I am hidden from people’s eyes, because that is when he appears to me, one way or another, as memories that trample across my retina, sounds that burst through my mind, smells carrying a hint of him.
Ajshe cleans a lot, and she has become unbearably focused, that much I’ll say about her. Over the years she has steadily lost weight, as though each successive child has taken its own body weight from her. As she washes the floors and windows, the laundry, the bathroom tiles, the dishes, even the walls, there’s always something, she is incredibly fast in her movements, at times I don’t see her at all but simply notice the result of her work. When I tell her I can’t remember my mother ever washing the walls in my childhood home or dusting the surfaces every day, she explains that walls become dirty too, even if nobody touches them, even if they are bare, without a single painting, poster, or photograph.
“Have you ever been in a room when the sun shines in?” Ajshe has a habit of saying. “That’s when you see how much filth people leave behind. In most weather, you can’t see it.”
We live in a district of high-rise apartment towers about ten kilometers from downtown in a city of millions. The neighborhood is full of identical-looking buildings, white prefabricated houses with light green, light yellow, or pink railings round their balconies. Our railings are light yellow; Ajshe thinks this is the worst possible color, of all three it’s the one that gets dirty the quickest, while I think it is the best because it looks the most natural.
The building is eight stories high and we live on the second floor in an apartment with two bedrooms, a well-equipped kitchen with a breakfast bar, and a large living room with space set aside for a six-seater dining table. Still, Ajshe wishes for a larger apartment, one bedroom for our two boys and another for our beautiful, chubby daughter who was born here.
“Drita won’t want to share a room with her older brothers forever,” Ajshe explains, and I remain silent because to me the apartment is big enough for the five of us—and far bigger than what we were used to in Pristina.
The building has bad sound insulation, and the Turkish family living next door is sometimes so noisy that we can’t get to sleep, and Ajshe gets so annoyed at them that she’s even knocked on their door and asked them to be quieter, pointing out the house rules state that after ten p.m. you can’t make a racket, and when they turn their music or the television down, she sighs next to me contentedly. I don’t remember her ever doing anything like that in Pristina, though the people in the apartment above us would sometimes entertain guests into the early hours.
Ajshe and her sister work part-time as stockers at a supermarket near the school our children attend. It is walking distance from our building, along the side of a busy highway with a junction leading into the parking lot of an enormous building that looks like a sports hall. Parking is free for the first two hours; if you want to stay longer, you have to pay, pop a few coins into a machine that looks like a small person who prints out a card that you’re supposed to leave on the dashboard. You must move your car by the time indicated on the card. If you do not, you will get a fine.
The supermarket where Ajshe works sells absolutely everything, from exotic spices to hot tubs. In the building there is also a pharmacy, a small bookshop, a florist, customer bathrooms with baby-changing facilities—all this in two tall, open-plan floors with elevators and escalators moving tirelessly between them. Ajshe lives between our home and her workplace; that being said, she never needs to go anywhere else.
Ajshe gets annoyed at customers who, if they decide not to buy something, leave items all over the store instead of taking them back where they came from, because sometimes she has to carry them a terribly long way across the store, and it’s impossible to remember where, say, the straws belong: is it with the decorations, in the drink section, or with the disposable cutlery.
“Do they think the staff have time to clear up after them? What would happen if everybody behaved like that?” Ajshe asks. “Chaos. That’s what would happen. Sometimes I’ve deliberately ripped a product’s packaging and written it off instead.”
There are lots of people all around, but they don’t talk much. The streets are in good shape. I’ve even heard that some roads have heaters beneath them to stop ice from forming, which helps to prevent traffic accidents. The roads are constantly being repaired and new ones built, new houses, shopping malls, and Ajshe and I have often wondered how so much asphalt and concrete and glass can fit in one place.
At first I thought we would only be here temporarily, that the situation in Kosovo would calm down and we would return home. I continued to believe this for a long time, but then Besnik found himself a job here and one for me too, at the same factory, and so did Ajshe and her sister, and almost without my noticing our eldest child grew and went to school, then the second, and eventually the third.
And so time passed, the years having given up on us.
* * *
—
Now none of them want to go back. When we meet Ajshe’s sister and Besnik, we never talk of returning to Kosovo, going on instead about how lucky we were to get out, that we left Pristina at the last possible moment, that life is so much easier here, so much safer, better, that Kosovo is no place to raise children.
“What could a child become amid all that disorder?” Ajshe has been asking.
I believe that our reluctance to go back—or even to discuss the matter—is ultimately a question of money. Here there is money, in Kosovo there is none. That’s more important than patriotism. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
There are quite a lot of Kosovans here, and we meet up every now and then, organizing dinners and concerts, even starting new hobby groups; we live in our own bubble, a world within another world, like a snow globe with a house or an entire town beneath its glass dome and where glinting snowflakes start floating down when you turn it. But when you leave it alone, before long the glittering snow covers all tracks—always.
We don’t spend as much time with other Albanians as maybe we should. But when you have chatted with one of them, visited one of them, you have chatted with all of them, visited all of them, because they all talk about the same things, first the corruption in Kosovo, the poverty in Kosovo, the criminality in Kosovo, the war, the war criminals still living free, then they start talking about their wages, how much they are paid for doing this and that, how much they have managed to save, enough to build a house in Kosovo, a house with two, three, four stories and mirror-glass windows on the ground floor where you can see out but not in, says one of them, while another says that his house has three bathrooms and a third says he has built a garage on the side of his house, heated all year round and big enough to swallow up three vehicles.
Ajshe often wonders why they are building such big houses in Kosovo in the first place, spending such vast sums of money on empty properties.
“Because they’re not planning on moving back, are they?” she asks.
I agree with her. It’s just for show; it makes absolutely no sense to live in cramped conditions for eleven months of the year just to spread yourself out for a few weeks.
Each spring, Ajshe and I talk about visiting Kosovo, but summer always arrives before we get around to buying tickets, and we end up staying put—all because of the short, fragmented vacations we get from work, or so we tell ourselves.
* * *
—
Just like Ajshe, my children are afraid of me these days. To my sons, Driton and Endrit, and my daughter, Drita, I am a distant, strange man. To be honest, I don’t know exactly why I smack them, from lack of anything better to do or because I think they
really deserve punishment for bad behavior at school, for impudence and misbehaving at the dinner table.
Or is it because I think that it’s better to be afraid of something than not to be afraid of anything, is it because that’s how I grew up, just like every Albanian I know: smacked around by my parents, and generally with good reason, I think to this day. You should fear your father’s hands and run to your mother’s arms, and when there is no longer a father to fear or a mother to run to, then you live in fear of illness and pain, fear of rashes and infections, microbes, bacteria, fear of falling asleep, you fear authority, traffic, a lamp falling from the ceiling during the night, you fear everything, everything, just like you feared your father.
One raised with fear never learns to live without it. When you take away its cause, fear manifests, becoming its own consequences—a lingering suspicion, hallucinations and waking dreams. And when a fearful person loses the ability to let go of their fear, fear is then transfigured: it is the neighbor with a better parking space because this is his country, not yours; it is a dog walker nodding in your direction as you pass each other and squinting, not to say hello but because you are a foreigner; a checkout assistant sighing while scanning the marked-down sandwiches you have bought for the freezer, not out of boredom but because you are an intruder behaving unfairly toward others; a manager shaking his head, not out of frustration but because you don’t understand instructions in their language.
Drita is a kind and well-behaved girl, but our sons get into fights at school almost every day. Their teachers tell me and Ajshe that our sons’ problems are all because we moved here from Kosovo. It’s a difficult situation for a young child, they explain. Living between two languages, two cultures and religions can cause an identity crisis, and the children no longer know who they are, because their entire world is formed from such conflicting customs and practices, they tell us flatly, as though informing us of an upcoming renovation.
It irritates and riles us, because their words imply that our children’s lives are somehow incomplete or lacking in some crucial respect, that because of us their lives aren’t healthy and full, because we moved here to escape the war. To their minds, the fact that our children speak several languages fluently, that they are acquainted with different customs and beliefs apparently doesn’t enrich our sons’ lives; on the contrary, they see it as a strain. Their teachers think that our children don’t need Albanian as much as the languages spoken and taught at school, that there isn’t anything left behind in Kosovo without which they won’t get along or about which they should learn more than the subjects they teach. On occasion I’ve flicked through their schoolbooks and noticed there isn’t any mention of Kosovo, not a single word about Yugoslavia, of the grand, glittering life of affluence that people once enjoyed there.
Ajshe tries to tell them that our children are perfect and whole just the way they are, they are beautiful and innocent, that the boys only get into trouble because they are constantly being reminded of the war, of the fact that they are Kosovans, though nowadays they speak another language far better than they will ever speak Albanian.
“This only segregates them from their classmates,” Ajshe tells them.
When our children don’t do well in exams, instead of giving them extra support the teachers simply shrug their shoulders, saying the children’s lack of success is down to being bilingual. When our children start a fight at school, instead of telling them that hitting other kids is wrong, they say that although you came here in the middle of a violent conflict, here we don’t put up with violence, here we don’t hit other people, and when they are late for school or disturb other students in class, instead of giving them a detention, the teachers just say this isn’t Kosovo, you know, in this country we turn up on time and respect other students’ right to learn in peace.
“Would the teachers say the boys aren’t getting on at school just because they’re bilingual if their mother tongue was something else?” Ajshe continues. “Even little children can accomplish great things, but if you constantly remind them they are not the equal of everyone else, that they don’t deserve something they want or that they’re no good at anything, before long they start to believe it, they think it must be true because everybody says so: they don’t deserve anything, they can’t do anything properly, they’re no good at anything. Then, sure, they won’t do as well as they might otherwise.”
Ajshe won’t let the matter drop, but almost every month she goes to the school to talk with the teachers and the other parents. Even using a professional interpreter, she’s tried to explain to them that we consider the school to be racist and that children don’t think about where they come from, adults barely think about it either, she’s tried to tell them that our children should be punished when they misbehave and that teachers should expect the same standards of them as they do of all the other children, not a fraction less, and that they must not be shown lenience simply because their parents are refugees. It’s not a reason and it’s certainly not an excuse, she has tried to explain.
In the evenings, Ajshe is often worried that she hasn’t been able to express herself clearly, that the teachers have spoken over her, shaken their heads, patronized her, saying, do you realize that in this country you need a university degree if you want to become a schoolteacher, and it takes years of dedication to get one.
“How is it in Kosovo? Have you gone to university?” they ask her, and Ajshe is left unable to answer but starts cursing them on her way home and continues ranting to me later on.
“I don’t know,” she often sighs in bed before going to sleep. “They could make so much more of themselves here,” she says. “Couldn’t they?” she adds, though she knows I won’t have anything to say.
Then she switches off the lights.
“Sleep well.”
* * *
—
The nights are easier. When Ajshe is sleeping heavily beside me and the children are in their own room, nobody asks me for anything, nobody asks me what time I’ll be home, whether I’ll have time to stop on the way to pick up some milk, whether I can give them money for the mall, a school outing, or whether I could buy toys and instruments that the children ask for in a way that doesn’t feel like a request so much as a necessity. And all I can do is agree, though the devices I buy them are ludicrously expensive and cost more than several months’ wages in Kosovo. In other respects we try to save any money left over and to live as frugally as possible, we buy cheap and secondhand things instead of new.
At times I fret about everything long into the night; the worry about whether we’ll have enough money, about what kind of people our children will grow up to be makes me cough so much that I have to sit up in bed. I go out to the balcony for a cigarette, then I sit down at the computer, surf the internet and read the news until I start to feel tired. Every time I type Miloš’s name into the search engine, I feel nervous, but month after month the results that come up take me to the same sites, telling me about people with the same name but never about him, and I scroll through the same pages I’ve read dozens of times before, all the while peering over my shoulder.
Every morning I get out of bed tired, awake to another stagnant, identical day, whereas Ajshe appears to sleep perfectly well and without any interruption; she is always busy doing something, looking after our home, our children, moving the fridge to clean behind it, even vacuuming the cupboards as if simply to kill time.
Ajshe can see I’m not myself here; it’s not a secret that I want to leave, for good. And I can see from her that she doesn’t dare bring up the subject because she is afraid that if I decide that we are leaving, she will have no option but to obey me. Instead, she says things like: What a beautiful day it is today. Or: Spring is on its way, the flowers will soon be in bloom, though it’s still cold and rainy, I’m going to make your favorite food this weekend and you can sleep as long as you need, sleep off all that f
atigue, you can read and write in peace if you want, I can take the children somewhere in the meantime, to the park or into town.
Some days are tolerable and things at home are peaceful. Ajshe knows not to talk to me for a while after I’ve slapped one of our screaming, misbehaving children, calling them spoiled, wretched, useless, ungrateful brats who will never be good for anything, never turn into decent people.
“If you were in Kosovo, you’d have nothing, you’d be walking around scared shitless and begging for food in the street,” I often shout at them, and they hide under their beds and cry or leave the apartment vowing never to come back, to report me to the police, saying I’ll go to jail where I belong because I am a dreq, a devil.
But after a while they always come home again, and Ajshe tells them their father didn’t mean to be cruel, though on some level I did mean every word I said. They are spoiled from all this luxury, from having life too easy.
Sometimes, while putting her favorite flowers in a vase and displaying them on the table or the windowsill, or after washing the linoleum floors in our apartment by hand, I have seen a flash of contentment in Ajshe’s expression, I can almost hear her thinking, This is good, everything is fine, everything will work out.
Then she smiles at the flowers or her gleaming, flawless work for a moment before hurrying on to the next chore. At times like this I too am content, I feel more than mere inadequacy, I am more upbeat, I am needed—not a burden on Ajshe, who would doubtless survive here without me, not a nuisance to my children, who never turn to me for help because they know I don’t understand, and probably never will understand to the same extent the language that they speak so effortlessly with one another.
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