Honey And Chewing Gum

 

New Albanian vocabulary: shaci (Kosovo Albanian returned from abroad to find an Albanian wife)

 

 

I was to dip into this huge jar very soon, when we were invited to visit the family of one of Rob’s closest colleagues. Vedat is an Albanian- American about the same age as Rob and I. The story of his family, as he’d told it to Rob and me over drinks in a variety of Pristina cafés, is the American – and maybe the Kosovan – dream.

He was born in Kosovo but as a baby he moved to Germany when his father started work there. From there the family moved to New York where his father was employed in construction. ‘My dad worked three jobs and saved hard until he could buy his first piece of real estate.’ He multiplied this into a family real estate business with careful management, more strategic loans and hard work. ‘My dad just worked. Worked and worked. Even now, as head of a successful company, he can’t see a job needing doing without itching to get it done himself. I’ve seen him on building sites in his designer suit, picking up a bucket, tidying lumber away, just making sure everything is done right.’

The business is still thriving – the older brother works there now alongside his father; Vedat’s parents, with his brother, sister-in-law and their children, have just bought a phenomenal property in Westchester County, complete with landscaped gardens and tennis court.

Vedat worked as a lawyer in the States, and then had the opportunity to come to the newly liberated Kosovo to work as legal advisor, first to the Deputy Prime Minister, and then to the Prime Minister himself. It’s a civilian version of the ‘Atlantic Brigade’ – ethnic Albanian Americans who came to fight in the KLA in 1998. It’s a different way of joining the struggle for independence; everyone acknowledged that whatever the heroism of the Brigades in 1999, until Kosovo had in place a democratic infrastructure, including the laws that a state needs to function, the international community wouldn’t be persuaded to support the country’s independence. Vedat is passion- ate about his country and his family; he is a bright, extremely funny raconteur, and a composite of Kosovo and the United States that makes me love them both.

His parents still keep a house in the west of Kosovo, the place where Vedat was born. They come back every summer, and one weekend we were invited to go and visit them there, along with Vedat and his girl- friend. It’s a dramatic part of Kosovo, near to the city of Peja, nestling beneath the sheer rise of the so-called ‘Accursed’ Mountains. I felt excited about the prospect of a trip out of baking Pristina, into greenery and the cooling presence of high mountains, and I was curious to get to understand the diaspora better.

Members of the diaspora are the ghostly figures alluded to in almost any discussion about Kosovo, especially any discussion of economics. The Albanians abroad are alleged to be the unseen force that shapes Kosovo, through the money they send home. During the years of Milošević’s oppression it was the unofficial tax on diaspora income, levied by the Kosovo Albanian government in exile, which funded the parallel (unofficial) services in Kosovo. More than US$125 million was collected from the diaspora to fund medical care and schools which kept Kosovo Albanians alive and thinking. It was also the diaspora who largely funded the KLA.

After the war, the diaspora continued to pour money back into Kosovo to rebuild it, both literally and figuratively. A report I’d read researched some representative Kosovan villages to assess the impact of the diaspora. In one village, of 97 households who own a tractor, 91 said that money for its purchase was earned abroad. Of 147 households there who owned a car, 137 bought it with money transferred by family members abroad. The government recognises the way this informal safety net operates – those with a family member abroad who were able to work are not eligible for benefits.

So the diaspora are unmistakably still a part of their homeland – in the tractors and foreign clothes that stand out in shabby villages, even in the daily newspapers’ regular slot, after the Kosovo and regional pages, which gives the latest on diaspora issues. They are only physically present themselves during the summer, when they return in their thou- sands, with something to prove, as is shown by the Mercedes that they drive down from Germany and Switzerland. Like bees returning to a hive, they descend on Pristina, where the young men sit in holiday mood in the most recently opened cafés, checking out Kosovo’s beautiful girls on the streets, hoping to take one back with them to London, New York, Zurich. This hobby of the returned diaspora, and the mating calls they make in their new-found language has given them their nick- name of either ‘honeys’ or ‘shatzis’ depending on whether the endearments they’ve learned to holler at passing talent are from English- or German-speaking lands.

Some people claim that the diaspora have been a brake on development in Kosovo because remittances have substituted for the lack of any effective development policies. But the dynamo of Vedat’s family could never be described as any kind of a brake. Of course, they are not a typical diaspora story anyway, because the whole family moved abroad together, in distinction to the traditional model where unmarried young men migrate in order to send money back to the family they have left behind. This family, who crossed the world together and have crossed back again to remind themselves of what they left, were wonderful to spend time with. They were enthusiastic at being back in Kosovo, and just as enthusiastic about the lifestyle they have created in the United States. We were invited to watch a home video – literally, a video of their new home – by Vedat’s mother. She is called Hate; each letter is pronounced, as in most Albanian words, so the name would be pronounced something like Hatty in English, but Vedat does acknowledge that as a kid growing up in the US it raised some awkward social, not to say Oedipal, questions having a mother named Hate. I suggested he could have had her name tattooed on the knuckles of one hand, with love on the other.

As Hate talked us through the video, she used Albanian – until we reached the bumpy footage around the outside entertaining area and she wanted to tell me about her deck. Her mother-tongue failed her – perhaps there is no Albanian word for this very Westchester County concept – but once she had explained in English what they had done with the patio, she continued speaking just like any woman from Peja would; or at least just like any woman from Peja with multiple garaging and swimming pools.

We sat and talked in the front room for some time, ranged around the enormous upholstered seating unit which ran the margin of the room and which is the modern Kosovan equivalent of the minder of the Ethnological Museum’s eighteenth-century guest room. I noticed that as the family sat down, they ordered themselves as the eighteenth- century family would have done too – the father with the place of honour and then Vedat as the older of the brothers present, followed by his younger brother. Rob was offered space to the other side of the household head, as the senior (=male) guest. I got to sit next to him, which I’m assuming wouldn’t have happened in the eighteenth century.

I guessed right that in visiting this family, some traditional hospitality rituals would be appropriate. Where my Kosovan friends arrived at my house with homemade food or cuttings from their garden or produce from their families’ smallholdings, I had felt myself unable to compete. My equivalent gift of supermarket wine or imported box of chocolates had always seemed inadequate in the context of such a rich tradition. But that day, since we had just harvested the honey, it had seemed like a good idea to take Vedat’s mother a pot.

I had a proud sense of getting it right when I handed over my produce. I had repeated the labelling I had used on the pot I brought to Prime Minister Çeku the previous year – the cartoon bee whose flight path spells out the letters Elizabeth’s Kosovan Honey. That time, it had been honey from my bees. This time I had even harvested it myself. And I felt that somehow with this honey I could now give as well as receive, its golden threads spinning between me and my hosts, in Hate’s home as well as in Kosovo more widely, as visible social currency.

Hate dimpled when she saw it, and for a few hours I sat comfort- ably balanced on the sheet where social capital is accounted. The feeling lasted throughout the enormous lunch we were treated to of delicious baked local trout, and during the hours spent outside, on the family’s land. Vedat’s father took his sons off, with us trailing behind, to walk the land. He pointed out the boundaries – to us, but also, I guessed, to Vedat and Ekrem, gently reminding them of their inheritance, the names and stories of the neighbours and tenants, in a narrative that had none of the rough edges of a first telling.

When the walk was done, like a kid let out of school, Vedat asked whether he could get the puppy out. He had just bought a Sharr – one of the long-haired flat-nosed fierce mountain dogs that will attack wolves. Released, the little bundle forgot to be ferocious in its exuberance. Vedat and Rob wore themselves out with balls and sticks and improvised games, while the spectators giggled, all of us bubbling along with the puppy with the reminder of the thrill of movement and play. Eventually the puppy had no more wag left in its little black-tipped tail, and even Vedat’s own puppyish energy was flagging. It was time to go home.

It was at the end of the visit that Hate pulled a typically generous Kosovamerican trick on us. Our car was pulling out of the gates when she rushed out of the house – just as Xhezide had done earlier in the month – with her hands full. Where Xhezide had brought my barrel of honey, Hate was carrying the American equivalent – a trick-or-treat fistful of packs of chewing gum that she’d brought out from New York. She tipped it through the window at us, and we murmured incoherent thanks as we drove off. For all my honey on the balance sheet, I was no further on than I’d been before.