The Country Where No One Ever DiesOrnela VorpsiDalkey Archive Press |
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There was a lovely two-story house on Durrës Street—named after the town of Durrës—though the yellow plaster on its walls was crumbling in places. Ivy covered most of the façade like the veins that bulge on the backs of your hands in summer. Creeping up the front of the house, it had concealed part of a small window, from which—between its iron bars—one could sometimes see a little face in the dark. I found the sight moving, somehow: her wan features in the dimness of the room amid the ivy that both shrouded and adorned her hair. I often met the pale girl out on the street. Her name was Ganimete.
She always wore tight-fitting dresses, her breasts proudly resisting this constraint. Her hair she left loose and wild, her lips were pink and her skin glowed, and, the first time I got a closer look at her, I saw a small blue vein in her slender neck.
She walked down the same street as I did, every day. I never found out where she was going: we always crossed paths at the same spot, between the baker’s and the Yugoslavian Embassy, where I was living.
Ganimete lived alone with her mother. There was a bit of mystery about her father. Some people said he’d disappeared right after filling up Bukuria’s—Ganimete’s mother’s—belly. Others said Bukuria had betrayed him, that he’d caught her in flagrante delicto one day when he got home from work—seen the last thing any man wants to see: his wife in bed with someone else. People even said that Ganimete had been playing at the foot of the bed while her mother was servicing the gentleman in question.
From then on—or so the second version went—Spiro refused to live at home, though the house still belonged to him. He did absolutely nothing to get it, or anything else, back. He simply vanished.
There was a third version too. Bukuria had stabbed her lover to death. Rumor had it that she’d spent five and a half years in prison. (Though prison hadn’t done her any harm, they said. The day she got out, she was more beautiful than ever, with a tan that everyone in town envied. She’d spent her afternoons sunbathing in the prison courtyard.)
They let her go because of Ganimete, who had grown up on the streets ever since her father had started to drink, spending all his time in bars. Little Ganimete, people said, had been raised by the neighborhood men, all inviting her to play on their laps, rubbing themselves against her little body and bare legs.
After Bukuria got home, Ganimete disappeared from the streets. Bukuria wouldn’t even talk to anyone now: “Good morning” and “good evening” was all they ever got out of her.
She’d swagger down the road with her head held high, staring everyone down defiantly, as though to distance herself from her neighbors and all their gossip. None of the neighborhood women were ever invited over, so they were all dying of curiosity. What was it like in the house of those two solitary daughters of Eve, who only allowed discreet male visitors into their home?
Whenever someone came up to Bukuria and Ganimete’s front door, they’d look out the window to see who it was, and then check left and right to see if anyone else was watching. This accomplished, Bukuria or Ganimete would open the door and close it again as quickly as possible, so that no one on the street could take a peek inside.
There are no shutters in Tirana. The sun woke people up in the morning. On Sundays there was usually a cluster of housewives dropping things off to be baked or else picking them up again from the bakery. The latest gossip about your neighbors would get traded on people’s doorsteps. I had to clean our windows with a newspaper, and then had to go and buy oil for the oven. Mother did the washing and hung our clothes out to dry in the yard, using an electric cable tied between two persimmon trees.
What a wonderful invention electric cable was. In Albania, where almost everything else was in short supply, it could be used for so many things.
The electricity itself went off quite frequently, and then we had to use candles, but the cables were always with us, hovering right above our heads. When I was little, my girlfriends and I even used to skip rope with them.
Praise be to the colorful electric cable!
Behind the garden, beneath another electric cable strung with sheets and pillowcases, I could see the radiant figure of Ganimete. As always, she was reading a romantic novel.
In the summer, she lay on a sort of deck chair that squeaked with every movement of her plump body. She devoured one novel after another—Carmen, Bel Ami, A Woman’s Life, War and Peace—while the rays of the sun penetrated her every pore, keeping her warm until evening. Then, when it got dark, she had to interrupt her reading at last, and take up guard duty at her front window.
Whenever I spied on Ganimete through a crack in our fence, I had the feeling I was somehow seeing into the mysteries of femininity itself. Ganimete had noticed my interest, but wasn’t upset by it. We had reached an unspoken agreement. We’d become accomplices. Ganimete was my Carmen.
One day I stole one of Mommy’s books, a romantic novel called The Love of Mimosa. The author of the book was Nasho Jorgaqi, who lived in our neighborhood. It was about a love affair with the much-admired Ismail Kadare. It was probably pure fiction, and was written in our local dialect, but I still felt a passionate need to give the book to Ganimete. She would love it—I sensed this. She knew all about love. Her knowledge surrounded her like an aura.
“Ganimete,” I said, “here, take this.”
I stretched my hand out as far as I could—I was afraid to get any closer to her, my Carmen.
“What are you giving me this book for?”
“Don’t know. Maybe ’cause it’s about Kadare’s love affair. You can keep it. You don’t have to give it back to me.”
She looked at me, somewhat perplexed, but at that moment, our secret pact was sealed.
I tried for days, after this, to catch a glimpse of Ganimete’s body through the fence and electric cable. The cable wasn’t hung with laundry then, but I still couldn’t see Ganimete anywhere. I hadn’t even seen her on the street recently. I was worried, so I decided to approach Bukuria, in spite of that glare of hers, which she liked to use to keep everyone at bay. Yes, I would say: “Comrade Bukuria, I haven’t seen Ganimete in a while. She doesn’t have the flu, does she?”
I skulked around their house for three or four more days. Normally I would have seen Ganimete when she went out to get milk or bread, but there was nothing, no sign of anyone at all.
“Grandmother,” I called out when I got home one day, “I haven’t seen Ganimete and her mother for a long time. They haven’t moved away, have they?”
“No, no,” she replied. “The two of them were arrested a week ago and they’ve been sent to an internment camp.”
My hands and feet turned to ice. It really did feel like my blood had frozen in my veins. I grabbed the doorknob to keep myself from keeling over.
I knew what it meant to be interned, knew what it was like in Albania to be forced out of Tirana and into the countryside. I knew what it would mean for Ganimete, who’d been brought up on Bel Ami and The Kreutzer Sonata.
“What for, Grandmother? Do you know why?”
“They had bad habits. They were accused of being immoral. Those poor women!” she went on. “The suitcase they took with them was half-empty. They were dressed in their everyday clothes, pale as ghosts. They got into the back of the truck without even looking back.”
From my bedroom window, I could see Ganimete’s garden, cut into portions by the electric cables that cast a geometric pattern on the ground. She and Bukuria were working on a farm now, tilling the fields, harvesting corn, being reeducated. They weren’t allowed to leave their place of assigned residence—an internment camp was like a prison—and had to work without pay. Every step they took was under surveillance. They lived in a mud hut and all the people in their new village hated them because they were whores and came from the big city. All of Albania slaved for Tirana. The country people dreamed of the lights of the capital, groaning all the while. Everything they produced went to Tirana. Outside the capital there was only one type of bread—small, round loaves made of corn, water, and onions . . . nothing else.
How the women in the neighborhood pitied them now! (“Live that I may hate you and die that I may mourn you”!)
One of them, Ariana, managed to get into their house.
“I saw two beds,” she announced, “a woodstove and a couple of unwashed plastic buckets. There are photos of Hollywood actresses on the walls. One of them,” she added, “was Greta Garbo. I didn’t recognize her, but her name was printed under the picture.”
Then she produced the picture from the pleats of her skirt, a black-and-white photo taken from an old Italian newspaper. The woman in the picture had incredibly long eyelashes that threw a shadow onto her cheeks as she held her hands clasped behind her head. Her hair shone, smoothed with brilliantine.
“The whole house is full of photos,” Ariana sighed, “but I also found this, sitting in a corner.” She brought out a little bottle of red nail polish.
“Bah! It’s useless anyway. It won’t solidify.”
Twice I saw their front yard blossom and wither, until one day there was laundry on the electric cable again. A respectable family had moved in—one that was approved of by the Party.
The housewife looked like a soldier. She had a bit of fuzz over her upper lip and she had hairy legs. Her husband worked at the ministry. He was always eyeing the pretty girls in the neighborhood, but when his wife was around, he was innocence itself.
There was no news of Ganimete, though once at home I thought I heard someone saying that she was selling herself to truck drivers for a bit of bread now, and was in a terrible state.
I never saw her in Tirana again, although I held out hope for a long time that when she got out of the internment camp, she’d come back and live somewhere nearby.
My hope vanished one day—on one of those very normal days when you least expect it.
A short spring shower had fallen on Tirana. When the sun came out again, singeing the damp pavement, I discovered that Ganimete and Bukuria were dead.
They’d hanged themselves with adhesive tape, strung around the electric cables dangling from the ceiling in their hut.
The barracks in the camp they’d lived in were made of mud bricks dried in the sun. The cracks in the windowpanes were sealed with brown adhesive tape. This tape proved strong enough, apparently, to suspend the bodies of the two emaciated whores, hanging chin to chin.