“Did you know that your husband’s family just agreed to pay for everything? They even asked how much the wedding preparations have cost us. Do you understand what this means?” he asked and propped both hands on his hips as he stood on the terrace and watched them leave.
“What does it mean, Babë?”
“It means you are the luckiest girl in the world, Emine,” he answered, smiled, and took me by the shoulder. “Did you know that Bajram studies Balkan languages and literature in Prishtina?”
I knew he didn’t mean this as a question, for after he had said it he exhaled wistfully. For a moment he stood silent, listening to what he had just said.
“At the university,” he added and cupped his hands over his forehead to shield his eyes from the light of the setting sun.
He sounded happy and smiled again. A poor little girl like you. It’s just as well you’re pretty and good at your work; there’s no other reason a fine family like that would have you, was what he was probably thinking.
“Did you hear that, Emine? The university,” he repeated and shook his head in disbelief. “You can wake up next to him every morning and share every day with him.”
At that I smiled too.
My father then went off to fetch the engagement presents they had brought and shouted to everyone to gather in the living room. There were clothes for everyone: smart shirts for my father and sweaters for my mother, shoes and socks for my siblings. Eventually my father laid a dress and two sweaters in my arms, fastened a silver pendant round my neck, and placed an engagement ring in the palm of my hand.
I slipped it onto the ring finger of my right hand, and it fit perfectly, the most beautiful ring I had ever seen. All day long I fingered the pendant, and just as many times as I touched the pendant I touched the ring too, took it off and slipped it back on again.
3
Most of the time I think of my father’s absence with a sense of indifference. He never really got to know me, I imagine, and I never got to know him. There was too little time; we glided past each other like distant acquaintances. If he knew me now, I imagine he would introduce me to his friends, show me off like a trophy. I would sit next to him, he would place his arm round my shoulders, and as for me, I would smile at the sight of his smile, I would smile so broadly that my face muscles would start to ache.
Sometimes I’m so angry that I wonder how it’s possible for someone to carry this much anger inside. It’s like a beast bound up in a straitjacket, tearing at the jacket’s fabric and loosening its straps, hurling all the books from the bookshelf and breaking the furniture and the dishes by throwing them against the wall before forcing itself into an ice-cold shower. Then suddenly, out of nowhere there’s more, and eventually there’s so much anger that it feels like I’m choking on it. It’s so dense, teeth that want to break as I clamp my jaws together long and hard, hands that clench into fists with such power that my fingers go numb, food stuck in my throat that comes flying out again.
Sometimes his absence doesn’t feel bad at all, like a bowling ball resting on my stomach or my muscles wasting away from sitting still too much.
At its worst his absence can be sensed at night, the nights I spend awake from start to finish because I’m so bitter that my whole body feels about to burst into flame.
Sometimes I miss him, his voice, and sometimes I can barely remember what he looked like. Then I have to pull the photographs out of the drawer in the hallway, and each time I take them out I refuse to look at them. I only glance at them because I don’t want to see him after all, and when I still find myself thinking about him, dreaming of his presence, I do something else altogether, put the photographs back into the drawer and clean or read or go for a run.
And still he manages to push his way in between the lines, in particular words, in the letters in both his name and mine, and he jogs alongside me, jumping across my steps, he is there when neither of my feet are touching the ground, and when I wash up the same glass so long that it cracks, he is there in the cut on my hand spitting blood down the drain.
In its simplest form, his absence comes as tears. Sometimes there’s only a little bit, my eyelids moisten when I remember something insignificant about him, like the fact that he always wanted to watch all the TV advertisements and wouldn’t change the channel for their duration. But sometimes there are lots of tears. At times like that I can’t leave my apartment, and though I try as hard as I can to make it stop, it won’t stop, because then I’ll remember something important about him, like the night when he came into my room and told me he was dying.
He knelt down, gripped my shoulders, and told me to wake up. And I looked at my father but couldn’t see his face because he pressed it against my chest and wrapped his arms ever tighter around me, and I asked him what was wrong and he began to cry, and then I asked him when, when are you going to die and why, and his body began to tremble in time with his limp sobs.
“I have lung cancer,” he said and blew his nose. “I found out today. I only have a few months, a year if I’m lucky.”
I looked at him through tired eyes, and at first I couldn’t understand quite what these words meant. I can’t remember how long I looked at him, but I remember that I didn’t say anything to him. At some point he stood up, dried his eyes on his shirt, and made to leave the room. But this is between you and me, it’s our secret, you mustn’t tell anybody, he said after a moment. I had to tell somebody, because otherwise I don’t think I can cope. I don’t want to die alone. But you’re not to tell anybody, is that clear?
“You are the strongest of us all, I know it, I can see it in you. And I need you now,” he said and switched on the lights. “Did you hear me?” he continued. “I need you now more than ever before.”
“I heard,” I said and pressed my wrists against my eyes.
Then he turned off the lights and left the room.
And I began waiting for his heart to stop beating. I watched him, constantly offered him cigarettes and made him sandwiches with plenty of margarine and salt, and I never told anyone about his approaching death, neither my siblings nor my mother. And though my father coughed in front of us as sharply as though he were about to draw his last breath, I wanted him to enjoy his final months. And I waited and waited, I waited months and eventually I turned twelve, then I waited another year and turned thirteen, then I waited another year, and a third, but it never happened. The day never came.
Instead there are days that don’t feel like days at all but simply relics of what was once his presence in our lives, because people like my father get to live forever.
Spring 1980
THE HOUSE ON THE LEFT
On the day before the first day of my wedding celebrations, Thursday the first of May, given the circumstances I awoke surprisingly calm on the threadbare, yellow-brown sofa in the living room, which at night became a bed for me and my sister Fatime. My parents slept in their own room, my three brothers had their own room, and the four of us girls slept in the living room.
More than anything our house was impractical. Kosovan homes were not designed to meet the needs of their inhabitants; quite the opposite. There were no beds, only mattresses folded on the floor to form couches or sofa beds one after the other. There was no kitchen, only a room with logs, a wooden stove, and cupboards where we locked away even the few items we used every single day: brushes, napkins, pots, and oven trays. Leaning against one of the walls was a sofra, a low round dining table that we rolled into the living room with each meal and sat on the floor around it.
According to my mother, a Kosovan home should always look tidy and shouldn’t look lived in. There were two rules of thumb: the house should be tidy enough to photograph at any time should anyone walk in, and second the house should echo. In a way a home was a reflection of its hostess: a tidy home made a woman whole and made a girl a woman. In a clean home there were no secrets.
American homes were my favorites. The magazines on the shelves at Mehmet’s village
store, in particular Kosovarja, were like train tickets to far-off places. I turned their pages, pored over the images of all those homes that adapted to the needs of their inhabitants. I dreamed of a shower that ran hot water, of appliances to take care of the dishes and the laundry, of wooden flooring and venetian blinds, of another life. I dreamed I lived in a country where homes were large and beautiful. I dreamed of a kitchen full of pots and ladles, a place where life was on display and where there was nothing to hide, of couches that were just couches. I dreamed of floors that didn’t need to be covered in rugs and where people didn’t sit on them to eat, of dishes laid out on a high dining table around which people sat to enjoy their meal.
We cleaned the house every day, because a cluttered house was marrë, and no self-respecting person wanted to bring shame on his or her family by living in an untidy house. Even houses had face that they mustn’t lose. It was a matter of honor. An Albanian is prepared to die to preserve his honor and keep himself from losing face, because losing face was a fate many times worse than death. This was something the other Yugoslavian nations didn’t always appreciate. A girl found indulging in inappropriate behavior or a boy caught gambling and drinking alcohol would permanently scar the family’s reputation, which people would often salvage by evicting the culprit from the home. Albanians refused to feel any form of shame. They would rather flee from it, run to the ends of the earth, while at the same time dedicating their lives to showing that they had nothing to be ashamed of in the first place.
—
I woke early, prepared my share of the breakfast, and for the last time walked the half mile to Mehmet’s store, which stood by a large, rusted bus shelter on the main road running through the village. Anxiously I thought of the coming days; I went over the order of events in my mind and prayed I’d be able to do everything at just the right moment.
Set up in an old warehouse building, the store sold tobacco, spices, flour, frozen meat, and little else. In the summer months there were vegetables for sale. Along one of the walls was a set of small shelves reserved for sweets, savory treats, and preserves. It was sweets we craved the most but could afford the least, but this time, for once, I had some money because my father had given me five dinars to celebrate the wedding. Buy yourself something sweet, he’d said.
On the top shelf were large boxes of confectionaries adorned with pictures of beautiful women, while on the lower shelves there were cartons of juice and bottles of lemonade. Each time he visited Prishtina, Mehmet bought one copy of every newspaper and magazine. Customers were allowed to read the magazines as long as they bought something else.
I stuffed a bag of sweets beneath my arm, picked up a jar of fruit jam, a box of chocolates, a bottle of lemonade, and the latest edition of Kosovarja. My cousin Mehmet, the thirty-year-old owner of the house next door who, as the only son in the family, had inherited the store, the house, and five acres of land from his father only a few years ago, congratulated me from behind the counter.
I slid the money across the tabletop. As I nervously gripped the new Kosovarja, he chuckled at my absentmindedness, as I’d only put the jar of jam into the plastic bag dangling from my fingers.
Through the store window I looked at my own house standing shy and almost apologetic at the edge of the green field and held the magazine open beneath the panorama outside. I realized that I was ashamed of the house. Why on earth would Bajram fall for the daughter of a poor small family? I wondered. What could I possibly give him?
The first floor of the house, with an identical layout to that of the ground floor, was still unfinished. And the third. My father had never gotten round to buying windows, doors, or floorboards for the upper stories, though he’d been talking about renovating the house and getting the job finished for what seemed like an eternity. On the upper floors there was nothing except the walls.
One floor for each son, he’d said and given my brothers a victorious, self-satisfied smile. They would bring wives into the house, and each would settle on his own floor, have children, and look after him and my mother, and thus they would be able to grow old and die with dignity.
I leafed through the magazine, its black-and-white pictures of brand-new ovens whose temperature could be adjusted as needed; I read columns about knives so sharp you could use them to cut wood and articles with illustrations of men watering the small gardens outside their beautiful houses while their wife and daughter hugged each other in the background.
I folded the magazine, handed it back to Mehmet, and put the rest of my purchases in the plastic bag. I walked home slowly. The sun squeezed its way between the great mountains, turning the green leaves orange and the gray earth yellow, and the chocolates I picked out of the box melted in my mouth like nut butter. I had enough sweets to last me all evening, I thought, and licked my lips.
4
I met the cat in a bar. And he wasn’t just any cat, the kind of cat that likes toy mice or climbing trees or feather dusters, not at all, but entirely different from any cat I’d ever met.
I noticed the cat across the dance floor, somewhere between two bar counters and behind a couple of turned backs. He loped contentedly from one place to the other, chatting to acquaintances in order to maintain a smooth, balanced social life. I had never seen anything so enchanting, so alluring. He was a perfect cat with black-and-white stripes. His soft fur gleamed in the dim lights of the bar as though it had just been greased, and he was standing, firm and upright, on his two muscular back legs.
Then the cat noticed me; he started smiling at me and I started smiling at him, then he raised his front paw to the top button of his shirt, unbuttoned it, and began walking toward me.
It wasn’t long before he was standing in front of me in all his handsome glory. It was as if the cat had got my tongue and at first I was unable to speak at all. The famous hits of yesteryear were playing in the background, and the cat clearly felt an affinity with the lyrics, as he was singing along to songs by Tina Turner and Cher with such gusto that I thought he might burst with the force of his own memories.
Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams
Speak the language of love like you know what it means
And then:
Do you believe in life after love?
I really don’t think you’re strong enough.
The cat leaned his head back and grinned so widely that his chin formed three different chins. The expression on his face was as dramatic and fateful as that of an opera singer arriving at a climax: his eyes had creased shut, his mouth was wide open as though he were about to sneeze, and his knees bobbed in time with the chorus from “Believe.” One paw was clenched to his heart and the other reached out as if to take a lost lover by the hand.
After praising his extraordinary rendition, I looked him in the eyes and smiled.
“I know,” he began. “Nothing short of astonishing, isn’t it?”
The cat’s white stripes shone in the dark, and the flashing of the strobe lighting sometimes made him disappear altogether, as though he weren’t there at all. The cat was such a wonderful, beautiful, gifted interpreter that I took him in my arms without waiting for any indication to do so, and straightaway I noticed that his silky smooth fur smelled good and that his body was muscular from top to tail. The mere sensation of touching it was so magical that, goodness me, I needn’t have touched anything ever again.
In a flash the cat bounded back onto the dance floor, leaving my arms momentarily embracing nothing but thin air.
I prowled round the bar a few times and started to get agitated. I realized I wanted the cat so much that I’d already decided I would have him. My upper lip tensed, my head was pounding, and my focus sharpened. And just then his magnificent, arched back appeared from round a corner, his long black tail wagged up and down, and he stepped forward as though he were stalking fresh prey.
The cat stopped a short way away. He peered discreetly—seductively—over his shoulder and looked me right in the eye
s. With his front paw, he gestured for me to follow him, winked at me like the other men in the bar, and disappeared once again round the corner.
At his command I began following him, and before long I was standing right behind him, and I felt like saying what a beautiful cat he was, a truly wonderful kitty cat. After walking across the corridor, the cat found a free table. It was one thirty in the morning, music was blaring, and the dance floors were crammed with party animals. The cat leaped onto a sofa and settled himself by the table with a look of pride: his eyes were closed and his stately head slanted up toward the ceiling in a truly aristocratic pose. When I sat down on the sofa beside him, he made room for me but still didn’t look at me directly.
“Well, well,” he quipped, nonchalantly scratching his chin. Suddenly he was wearing glasses, of course. “And who have we here?”
I mumbled something indistinct, stumbled over my words and stammered. Eventually I managed to spit it out, told him we’d just met, over there, on the dance floor, you hugged me and I hugged you, do you remember?
“You look positively awful,” he exclaimed in grandiose fashion. “I don’t know you and I certainly didn’t hug you, pthui,” he said as though spitting in the other direction. “A brute like you.”
I was so shocked by the cat’s judgmental manner that all I could do was sit quietly next to him.
“Come on, ha ha—that was a joke, you idiot! We don’t know one another, so don’t talk as if we did,” the cat reprimanded me. “But we can get to know one another, ha ha; I’m open to suggestions. Do you want to get to know me or not?”
As soon as I said yes, the cat wanted to know things. Everyday things: my name, my date of birth. And I told him my name, and he said he’d never heard such an odd name, such a frightful name, he continued, utterly dreadful, ha ha, laughed the cat. Bekim. It’s such a dreadful name I’m sure I never want to hear it again!
My Cat Yugoslavia Page 5