Plum Kompot, And The Soup That Saved Xhezide’s Life

 

New Albanian vocabulary: papuçe (slippers)

 

 

The bee-sting had subsided but I still had the mark to show where it had been, and the associated memory of the taste of plum squash, when Xhezide rang me a few days later. None of my friends in Kosovo ever seemed to have enough credit on their phone to be able to pay for calls; when people rang off straight away you called them back. Among some of my friends elaborate systems had developed for these missed calls: two in a row meant ‘see you at the bar’, three in a row meant ‘see you at the café’. But it seemed Xhezide just wanted a chat, and as ever she asked when we would next be coming to visit.

‘Oh yes, we will come over soon,’ I promised, going through in my mind the commitments that we had over the next few days. Because of the driving our trips could only be made when not only I but also Rob was free, and I often felt with Xhezide and Adem that I just couldn’t meet their expectations of friendship – in terms of quantity if not quality.

‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ I said, trying to make up in enthusiasm what I was lacking in distance. ‘I keep thinking about that lovely plum squash. Would you show me how to make it, when I next come?’ She seemed interested in the idea. I had been Adem’s pupil till now – maybe she was pleased to have a turn at tutelage.

I had a missed call notification on my phone again a few days later – it was her, so I called straight back.

‘When are you coming to visit?’ she asked. I repeated myself with added fluster, explaining that I couldn’t be sure, that we were still waiting to find a time when Rob was free. ‘Well, what about me and Mirlinda coming to you?’ she suggested.

Was this what the little Cupid bee had brought me? It was certainly a new kind of relationship. This would be the first time that Xhezide and I would be alone without any men – neither Rob nor Adem – as chaperone. Under these new circumstances, I would lose my position as honorary man for the purposes of conversation, food portions and social rhythms. Instead, Xhezide would be in the sacred position of guest, with me running in and out of my kitchen to serve her.

The reciprocal visit would fit with her holding of the upper hand in language, for example – it was always me who was fumbling and approximating my way to communication. And she is older than me – not only in the perhaps hundreds of years which divide her experience on a smallholding in the least developed country in Europe from my British university education and the information and options I have as a result. She is ten years older than me, and that counts for a lot in Kosovo.

What’s more, as she taught me how to make the plum squash, we would be based in the kitchen. The kitchen is not my natural element. I love food and I am fascinated by eating and cooking new things; the dining table may be my natural element, or the sofa, curled up with a recipe book. I am willing to spend large amounts of time trying out or improving recipes or foods that add to my repertoire but I do not do this on a regular basis. I have no children, and I have an independent, competent, liberal partner who cooks for himself or for us both, or will have a bowl of cornflakes for supper without complaint. The daily grind of washing up, the endless chopping of uninteresting vegetables, the monitoring of the processes of putrefaction in my fridge… these are things which I am lucky that my lifestyle and income free me from. My cleaner comes twice a week, my supermarket sells me more semi- prepared food than it should, my partner helps – and as a result, I have no feeling of the kitchen as my domain, as it is for so many women across the world. Instead, I probably have a residual sense of guilt and inadequacy attached to this space – a place where I could, should do more, spend more time, be less lazy, maybe even more feminine?

I knew from what I had seen as I had sat watching (from my man’s position on the couch) Xhezide move around her sink and stove, that she is competent in ways that I am not; that she is spotlessly clean and particular where I am spattered and make-do; that she has the speed that comes with practice where I am clumsy.

This cooking lesson was going to change our relationship in so many healthy ways.

‘If you have sugar and a big cooking pot, Elizabeth, I will just bring the plums,’ she said.

On the day we’d set I woke early and went immediately down to the kitchen. I was learning to live like Xhezide.

I started scrubbing. I wanted the work surfaces to be gleaming, last night’s washing up (OK, and the dishes from the night before that) done and put away: I wanted a tasty meal prepared in advance. At least for those few hours of bullying my kitchen into shape, I wanted to be Xhezide.

To reinforce all the middle-class guilt I had already about the state of my kitchen, and my competency in it, my cleaner turned up just before Xhezide arrived. Miradija normally came on a day between Sunday and Friday, at a time to suit her, so there was no reason why she shouldn’t have arrived at this moment, but it added an extra layer to the complex dynamics of my kitchen. She was bemused to see me working at the sink, but pitched in. I still didn’t feel the space was ready for scrutiny by the time Xhezide and her daughter arrived but I was able to give a great and genuine smile to greet them.

Xhezide had brought a plastic bottle she had filled with milk for me – she had milked the cow that morning. Doing the maths, I realised that this meant that as I was putting on my deodorant and preparing for my novelty stint of housework, Xhezide must already have been dressed, and squatting against the animal’s flank getting the milk to bring for me. I had not yet learned to live like her.

She had brought some of her homemade cheese too – the sour white slabs that I found difficult to eat because their smell is so close to milk that has turned. We put the cheese on a dish and its intense stink filled my kitchen. It was going to be an intimate exchange, this working alongside Xhezide in preparing food – learning from her, making my house smell like hers.

She was an easy collaborator though, bearing with my strange ways (the fact that I wanted to weigh everything, write things down; ‘it’s in my head,’ she said, laughing. I haven’t yet discovered whether Xhezide is literate). Out of one of her bags she tumbled a gelid lump of bruise- coloured flesh. I was reminded of kidneys, and worried that maybe this was another contribution she had brought from her animals for me to put in my fridge. It started to drip on the work surface.

‘And what is this?’

I asked. It was the plums.

Working together in the kitchen turned out to be the perfect way to talk to each other. Other women have presumably known this for centuries, but I felt like I was only just being initiated into a female ritual. As things steamed and bubbled around us, we mopped fluids together, tested the softness of the food I was cooking for lunch, stewed and sweated. Like a visit together to a Turkish bath, it brought frankness.

She started talking about the war. I had heard something of the family’s narrative before: with Adem, we had heard about the damage to the house, about the tree – he had pointed to one we could see in the distance from where we had sat eating lunch together outside one day – which still bears the bullet marks from when their neighbour was tied up and shot.

But I was now learning about the women’s war. ‘In slippers,’ she said, gesturing at her feet. When paramilitaries arrived at their door the family had been forced out of their house with only the clothes they had on and had spent three days camping in the mountains before moving to a village where they had family connections and believed they would be safer. Adem had told Rob and me about this with his little shrug, as if to say in the face of ethnic cleansing, ‘well, what can you do?’ He hadn’t mentioned the slippers.

Miradija joined in the discussion. Standing hands on hips, with the pot lid rattling over the plum kompot, she only added to the sense of a community of women freed to talk. Despite her work in my house every week we had never spoken like this before. She wanted to talk about the washing arrangements when you are hiding out in the mountains, evading an army you believe is going to kill you. Many people had left home on their tractors, she explained, and so the women could get undressed behind the trailer of the tractor, and have a quick wash without any men seeing.

I had heard similar stories of strategy in the war before, but they had focused on offensives and movements to take control of this or that mountain pass; no-one had ever told me before how the Albanian refugees or internally displaced persons kept both their dignity and their bodies clean.

 

Xhezide

 

Xhezide talked about the sleeping arrangements too – in the house where they finally found shelter with relatives, they were sleeping 24 to a room. And she told me about her soup: ‘they loved my soup, and I made sure I got up early every morning to make it for everyone. I knew that we wouldn’t all be able to stay in that packed room forever, but I thought that my soup might earn us a place among the lucky ones.’

‘It was a terrible time,’ agreed Miradija. They recited the stories of the things that happened in their country – of the old people, the dis- abled, the helpless who were killed and beaten. ‘Even women,’ they said. ‘They killed them, injured them…’ The third thing they did was not said, not even in our newly liberated conversation. Like these two women, the majority of the Albanian women raped by Serbian police or paramilitary gangs in Kosovo have not spoken out loud the words that tell what was done to them. The consensus is that there is too much risk for the family’s honour, the family’s future – so the needs of the individual women, or their children, are sacrificed.

I asked about Adem’s bees. What happened to them while the family was away?

‘Oh no, Adem didn’t keep bees before the war.’ But Xhezide told me about how he started, finding a swarm in a tree trunk. ‘He chopped down the tree, either side of where the bees had built the hive, and covered the ends with blankets. Then he decanted them.’

With the memory of my sting still fresh in my mind – and still visible on my chest in the shower that morning – I didn’t believe the simplicity of the word ‘decanted’ did justice to the procedure involved. This story was as understated as the narrative of their experience during the war. There was nothing I could say to it. I stood quietly, listening.

Xhezide’s family came back to their home after the NATO bombardment and the withdrawal of the Serbian troops.

‘Serbs had stayed there, had burned part of it and looted the rest when they left. Most of my trousseau had gone – the tablecloths and mats and baby clothes and all the other needlework.’ I knew that the stack of needlework in an Albanian trousseau was supposed to be every- thing the bride needs for the rest of her life. At the bottom of the trunk she brings with her to her husband’s house is a shroud.

‘I found some tablecloths left behind but they were torn and stained. The soldiers had used them to clean their guns.’

The plums were still bubbling away on the stove but the meal I’d been preparing was ready for us to eat so we sat down to an early lunch. In this new configuration around my dining table, and with Miradija now gone to her other job, young Mirlinda took a bigger role in the conversation. She had helped Rob with the literary competition he was organizing. He had needed fliers distributed around the city in the places that young people hang out, so we had asked her (and Adem) whether she would accept a small sum of money in exchange for handing them out in a list of locations we’d identified. She was now interested in what response we’d had from the competition, and seemed genuinely pleased for us – for herself as part of our team – that we had had a response that was ten times greater than our target.

I asked whether she herself had submitted anything – when she had come to the house to collect the fliers she had showed me a fragment of love poetry she had written which I had thought really powerful. When I’d asked her then whether it was written for someone in particular she had told me about a boy she’d met, but about whom she hadn’t told her parents – and I wished I hadn’t asked.

Her mother took this chance to talk about Mirlinda’s poetry writing.

‘She’s always doing it. She hides it and all the poems she writes are about love. But she’s too young to be writing about things like that.’ Mirlinda gave me a conspiratorial glance and I wished again that I didn’t know about the boyfriend.

We finished our lunch, and went to check on the cooling plum juice, which smelt deliciously fragrant. Then we went out into the garden and Xhezide admired my few flowers that were out. ‘I can’t plant bulbs on my land,’ she explained, ‘because the cow eats them.’

It was time for her to go but she asked if she could help with the washing up. I was already embarrassed by the way she had washed as we went, cleaning and replacing all the utensils we used for the plum kompot.

‘No, no,’ I insisted, ‘you’re an honoured guest’ – and she was finally persuaded. We gave each other close hugs at the gate, and then she set off back to the cow and the kitchen that smelt a little like mine now.

The next day, she telephoned. I rang her back. We didn’t really have anything to say to each other, but it was nice to talk, in the way that the morning after a good night out you have the instinct to call up the people you were drinking with and exchange memories of how it went, build the narrative of the events together. Or perhaps check that the bonds forged in one context still endure in another. Xhezide pretended she hadn’t told me how to prepare fresh plums for freezing. I thanked her, as if I hadn’t already written it down. We said what a great day we had had together. I asked whether she’d yet had time to plant the bulbs I’d given her in a pot. We said our goodbyes. Just before I rang off she asked ‘and was it really alright, about the washing up? I’ve been worried – I really wanted to stay and help you.’ It seemed it was as hard for Xhezide to learn about living like me, as it was for me to learn about living like her.

 

Xhezide’s plum squash (kompot)

 

Take just over a kilo of frozen plums (with the stones taken out in autumn before freezing).

Put them in a large cooking pot and add approximately enough water to all but cover the plums.

Simmer for about 45 minutes.

Top up the water that has evaporated at this point, and continue simmering.

After a further 15 minutes, add 100g sugar (or more, to taste).

After a further 15 minutes, remove from the heat.

Strain and bottle the juice – serve chilled.

The remaining plums can be used to make the ‘pistil’ style jam.

For a more intense flavour, simmer for longer and/ or do not add extra water during the cooking.