Shtjefën gets home a little earlier than usual, and in a good mood. Lila is due back in half an hour. Jonida is doing her homework.
‘I got you a job,’ he says to Hana. ‘The interview is tomorrow. See what you can do. They’ll give you a two-week trial and then they’ll decide. You’ll be a daytime attendant at a parking lot near the subway station.’
Hana is surprised, and thanks him.
‘I know you don’t like being dependent on us,’ he adds apologetically. ‘And I didn’t do it to put pressure on you if you don’t feel up to it …’
Hana has cooked dinner, which they will eat at around seven thirty, when Lila gets back. Usually she rushes in and changes out of her work clothes, tearing them off as fast as she can. She takes a quick shower and then they have dinner.
Hana quit smoking a few weeks ago and is still coughing up phlegm. Shtjefën called her a traitor. Jonida is happy: ‘Go for it, Hana! Show Mr Fatso that he can stop poisoning himself!’ Mr Fatso smiles and readily accepts his daughter’s affectionate insults.
‘My Jonida is going to be an educated woman,’ he says with infinite pride. ‘She’s beautiful and intelligent, and women like that can get away with saying a few words too many.’
That day, before Jonida and Shtjefën get back home, Hana tried on a skirt, which, Lila had explained, was called a tube skirt. It was made of dark fabric and it was the only skirt that Hana had agreed to buy during these three months.
With the house to herself she held a kind of dress rehearsal. She studied herself in the mirror for a long time – and found herself ridiculous. She walked up and down without taking her eyes off the mirror. And she did her best to resist the temptation to throw the skirt out of the window.
Jonida is home before Shtjefën. Hana closes her eyes as she throws open the door.
‘Wow!’ her niece shrieks, as she throws her backpack into a corner of the living room. ‘Cool! Turn around, Hana!’
Hana obeys.
‘I don’t like the color,’ Jonida says. ‘Who chose it?’
‘Apart from the color?’
‘I said you look ok. It looks better from the front than from the back.’
Jonida rushes to the fridge to grab a low-fat yogurt.
‘What is that stuff? Why don’t you eat something more nutritious?’
‘I hate cellulite.’
‘You don’t have cellulite, sweetie, but if you only eat this stuff you’ll get too thin.’
‘It’s cool to be thin and you know it. Anyway, you look cute in the skirt, but you look better in pants.’
Hana hangs her head in disappointment. Jonida finishes her yogurt and throws the teaspoon in the sink. Hana rushes to rinse it. She adores Jonida’s messiness; it keeps her busy during the day.
‘You’re weird,’ the girl says, rubbing salt in the wound. ‘You’re flat behind. You have no backside.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s my role isn’t it? You asked me to be straight with you.’
‘For weeks you go on at me, girly this, girly that, and then, first try, you put me down!’
‘I love you. But if you’re weird, you’re weird, and I can’t do anything about it.’
‘I’ll take it off, then.’
‘You better not!’
Hana doesn’t understand what’s going on.
‘We have to work at it, we can’t just give up. You can’t turn sexy in a day. Your face is already much better.’
‘I don’t want to be sexy, I’ve told you a thousand times,’ Hana insists nervously. ‘I just want to be normal and acceptable.’
‘You want to be more than normal, Hana. You want to look good, and don’t deny it.’
Hana sits on the sofa longing for a cigarette.
‘How was school today?’ she asks, changing the subject.
‘Fine. I think the guy I like is with another girl. A friend told me today in the cafeteria.’
‘Is this girl cute?’
‘She’s ugly as hell.’
Hana laughs with gusto.
‘You’re saying that because you’re jealous,’ she ribs.
‘Me? Jealous?’ Jonida’s hair flies around her as she shakes her head. ‘I am way better than her. Things like that don’t get to me, but she’s just plain ugly.’
Hana watches her. She has lived with Jonida for three months and, despite the intimacy they have created, she still finds things difficult. She envies her naturalness, the way Jonida is so accepting of her place in the world.
‘I have to do my homework now, I’ve got a ton of things to do,’ Jonida announces, jumping up and skipping into her bedroom.
Hana sits on the sofa lost in thought until Shtjefën gets back home, but she does decide one thing: not to take off the skirt.
‘The job won’t be too tiring,’ Shtjefën says. He looks up and notices the change in her. ‘Finally! Lila will be pleased to see you like this.’
They both smile.
‘I don’t want an easy job,’ Hana says. ‘I want a job where I get really tired and where I can learn the language.’
‘But you’re doing great, what are you worrying about? I wish I could speak English as well as you!’
Just then Lila gets home. She hangs her bag in the hall, mumbles a worn-out, drawling ‘hi,’ goes and takes a shower, and comes back into the kitchen with her hair still wet.
Casting her eyes over the kitchen stove and the table set for four, she tosses an inquisitive ‘so?’ into the air and then adds, ‘What have you made for dinner, Hana?’
Just then Lila notices and her eyes light up.
‘Stand up! Stand up now! I wish I’d been here when you were putting that skirt on, for crying out loud. You’ve been driving me crazy all this time. Stand up!’
Shtjefën goes out. Hana just stands there, her arms hanging limply by her sides.
‘You look great. Walk around a bit …’
Hana slumps back into her chair.
‘Come on, don’t start being difficult! Let me see you! This is a historic moment. Now you are a woman from every point of view.’
You make it sound easy, Hana thinks, without taking her eyes off the empty plates. She wants to eat, clean the table, and go out for her usual stroll.
‘Are you happy?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. Tomorrow Shtjefën is taking me to my first job interview.’
‘He found you a job? And you don’t even tell me? We have to celebrate!’
Jonida comes out of her bedroom. Lila turns, bounds towards her, and wraps her daughter in a greedy embrace.
‘Oh my darling! Light of my eyes! How are you, my love?’
‘Take it easy,’ she says. ‘You’re squishing me. We saw each other this morning, Mom, remember?’
Lila has no intention of letting go. Shtjefën comes back into the room and gently, almost shyly, hugs his wife and daughter. They are so beautiful and there’s no need for anything else, there’s no need for words or dreams or memories. All I need to do is be here and smile, Hana says to herself. And she smiles, looking at these three people who have adopted her but from whom she can’t wait to escape.
Jonida turns to her father and rubs her nose against his chin.
‘Hi, big Daddy bear,’ she says to him. ‘Is everything ok?’
‘Everything is fine, my love. What about you?’
They do not let go, none of the three wants to separate, they stroke each other. Hana goes on smiling, but her smile becomes a lump in her throat and a grimace of pain crosses her face.
‘Ok, that’s enough for now.’ Jonida throws herself down on the sofa, next to Hana.
‘I’m hungry.’
Lila goes into the kitchen and takes the lid off the saucepan. Hana makes an effort not to cry, but she can’t stop. She runs into the bathroom.
She remembers the day her parents hugged each other in front of her. They were standing. Her mother was beautiful; her father had surrendered to his wife’s sweetness. Hana had watched them closely. They had embraced in front of their daughter the day before they got onto the bus that was supposed to take them to their cousin’s wedding in the city.
The bus had ended up at the bottom of a ravine that winter afternoon and no one was able to reach the wreck. They were buried in the snow that fell that night and slept in ice until the following spring. When they recovered the bodies, they found her mother’s red and blue headscarf and her father’s pipe.
Since then Hana has kept these treasures with her. She brought them here and has them stashed in her suitcase under her bed.
Dinner is delicious. Hana has taken a lot of trouble choosing the menu. She’s trying to learn to cook. She has even bought a cookbook and this evening she has prepared green salad with raisins, spaghetti with meat sauce, and baked apples.
‘It was all delicious,’ Lila encourages her after polishing off the last mouthful of apple. ‘Really delicious.’
Shtjefën offers to make Turkish coffee.
‘Tomorrow will you take me for a drive?’ Hana asks them. ‘I’d like to get a little driving practice, to get used to the traffic.’
They sip their coffee.
‘I miss my old truck,’ she continues. ‘And if all goes well at work, in a month I’d like to start looking for a small apartment, Lila.’
She waits for a reaction. Shtjefën gets up to make more coffee. Jonida winks at Hana. Lila is quiet for a moment.
‘I didn’t realize you were in such a hurry to get away,’ she says.
‘I’m not in a hurry to get away. I just want to see if I can live on my own.’
‘But you’ve lived on your own for fourteen years!’
Lila is taking it badly, Jonida can see it in her face. But Hana is already at the door:
‘I’m going out for a walk.’
She throws a jacket on over her t-shirt and shuts the door, leaving behind the confused rancor of her cousin. It’s not cold; this winter is mild, the evening a little damp. She takes the path she now knows by heart. Her shoes are comfortable; she doesn’t like them particularly but they were cheap.
Lila is a great bargain-hunter. She runs the household finances confidently, hunting out special offers and discounts. On Thanksgiving Day, she got up at four in the morning and drove all the way to the big supermarket outside town that was famous for its unbeatable prices. She came back four hours later, exhausted but happy, with three gigantic shopping bags. Fifteen minutes to put everything away in the fridge and she had climbed back into her car, this time with Hana and Jonida, to buy clothes for Jonida at the store where she worked.
Hana stops. The skirt is annoying her. It’s too wide in the waist and the zipper at the back keeps making its way to the front. She tugs the skirt round and starts walking again. A few yards on, the skirt has twisted again. She suddenly feels a strange sensation on her legs. Last week she tried shaving them. She also shaved her armpits and then spent days itching and scratching. Jonida nearly died laughing. She kept an eye on the hairs that were growing back on her legs. Before putting the skirt on, she had shaved again, nicking herself slightly with the razor. She stops again. The skirt won’t stay put. Trying to keep walking, she stumbles, though without actually falling over. At that, she makes up her mind to go back, and walks home in furious strides.
Shtjefën is watching TV and Lila is doing whatever she does in the bathroom. A deep hammering bass beat comes from Jonida’s bedroom. Hana slips silently into Lila and Shtjefën’s room and tears off her skirt. She scrunches it up, venting all her anger on it. Then she crumples it into a ball, opens the wardrobe and throws it inside.
‘What are you doing?’ Lila asks from the doorway.
Hana thrusts her legs into her pants as fast as she can.
‘You are out of this world,’ her cousin says. ‘Just try and understand someone like you.’
‘And you are as clingy as a shadow.’
Hana leaves the house again. She thought everything would be easier. When she had become Mark she had had no real experience of femininity. And now she’s even scared about her job interview tomorrow. Her English sucks.
‘You have to look confident,’ Shtjefën coaches her. ‘Americans always look incredibly self-confident. They like to look sure of themselves. Don’t talk about your problems and you’ll be fine. Then you can fall apart when you’re on your own.’
She is excited and lost at the same time. On the outside she looks almost like a woman. What’s missing is her vision, the point of view from which she is supposed to read the world. When she observes people, Hana does not see a woman or a man. She tries to penetrate the unique spirit of the individual, she analyzes their face and eyes, she tries to imagine the thoughts hiding behind those eyes, but she tends to avoid thinking about the fact that these thoughts are inextricably linked to the male or female ego. Women think like women. Men? Well, the answer is obvious. She’s only just realizing now that for a long time she has had to consider things from both points of view.
On the other hand, she consoles herself, the diaries that she kept during her years as Mark are not that badly written. In her days by herself in Rockville she has read them again and again. She is also sorry to realize that her diaries are better than her poems. This thought has no particular value, but it hurts all the same. She would have liked to be a poet.
She reads a lot. Shtjefën teases her, saying that, in order to satisfy Hana’s requests, they will soon have to ask for new funding at the Rockville city library. The librarians have been very helpful; they give her advice and encourage her. Hana fills whole notebooks with words and idiomatic expressions and learns them off by heart. She watches programs on TV late into the night to improve her English. Talking to Jonida is the best practice of all, because her vocabulary is peppered with adolescent slang.
Lila can’t understand why she is going to such trouble.
‘There’s no point,’ she says. ‘You don’t need perfect English to be a parking attendant or a cleaning lady. All you’re trying to do is to become a woman, not a PhD or whatever it’s called.’
‘Without language you can’t do anything,’ Hana answers.
‘Ok, keep on dreaming, just like when you were nineteen. You’re wasting time on books, instead of worrying about your appearance.’
They argue, then they make up, then they argue again and sometimes don’t call a truce for two days. To the point that, every day, when she gets in from school, Jonida asks them how their daily fight has gone.
‘It’s too late for your dreams, Hana,’ Lila sighs with exhaustion. ‘Why don’t you listen to me? Years back you should’ve done what we all did: get married, have children. You would have had a hard time, of course. Every woman has her share of suffering. But you thought you were better than us, and you rebelled and now here you are. It’s too late for impossible dreams.’
Hana smiles bitterly, saying so helpful, Lila, really encouraging.
‘I just tell you things as they are.’
‘But it is not the way things are.’
‘Ok, you tell me then, come on. You tell me how and what you’re going to do in this country, because I’ve been living here for ten years and yet somehow you seem to know it better than me even though you just got off the boat.’
‘Fine Lila, you’re right.’
‘Don’t be so condescending!’
‘Ok.’
‘Even though I don’t read stacks of paper, I’m not stupid.’
‘It’s not paper, Lila, it’s my soul. Books are my soul.’
‘Stop talking fancy. I’m beat.’
Hana’s arms are crossed over her breasts. She’s wearing a pretty white lace bra. Lila shouts and shouts.
‘Be patient,’ Hana says to her, later on. ‘As soon as I get a job, I will leave you in peace.’
‘That is such a bitchy thing to say, I can’t believe it. It just goes to show you really want to hurt me. That’s not what I wanted to say. I don’t want to force you to leave.’
‘I know.’
‘So don’t say it again.’
‘I am the one that wants to leave,’ Hana says, gently. ‘You’re nothing to do with it, none of you have anything to do with it. You have been wonderful to me, but I want my independence. If I manage to start living again it will only be from that starting point.’
‘I’m not even listening to you.’
‘Do as you like.’
‘You are so self-obsessed, it’s unbelievable. There, that’s what I think of you.’
‘Fine.’
‘Stop saying “fine,” ok? You are no better than me!’
Lila gets up, tears her apron off and thrusts her copy of the Washington Post, which Hana had been reading before they started arguing, onto the floor.
‘You are totally and utterly self-obsessed, I’ll say it again, and I don’t care one bit if it hurts you! All of us women back there in the mountains were basically workers and available bodies for our husbands; no one ever asked us our opinion, and we always obeyed. You hid yourself away instead of fighting for your cause. You became a man. Surprise, surprise, you took the easy choice! It’s easy to be a man! The real problem out there was being a woman, not being the usual jackass who kills himself with alcohol and tobacco.’
Shtjefën puts his head round the door. Lila’s words are lying there, dead, on the floor. Hana feels tears rise up in her throat. Shtjefën covers his eyes with his hands.
‘Lila, baby, you’ll wake the neighbors.’
Hana goes to drink a glass of water. Then she turns towards her cousin and stares at her, trying to catch her eye.
‘And what do you know, Lila?’ she retorts quietly. ‘What do you know about what it means to be a man up there in the mountains? So only you women suffered? Is that what you really think? You think you women know everything about everything?’
She is unable to keep back her tears. Big tears.
‘I’m sorry, Lila, I didn’t want to ruin your life,’ she adds.
‘You haven’t ruined it, how many times do I have to tell you?’ Lila protests in vain. ‘I want to see you happy. I want to see you settled. I care about you as much as if you were my Jonida. But you are so strange, you’re not one thing or another, and when I see you wasting time with your books my blood pressure shoots up.’
Shtjefën sighs deeply.
‘Of all places, I had to end up in this hen-house, for Christ’s sake?’ He laughs, his voice thick with sleep.
Hana is thankful he has woken up, otherwise who knows how things would have ended up with Lila this time.
Her cousin is full of resentment. It’s a sentiment without ill will, but it is tiring her out. Lila wanted to become a nurse but she is a cleaning lady. She wanted to be well off but she is forced to hunt for bargains and work all hours just to break even, and so that Shtjefën doesn’t have to work overtime when his seventy-hour week is already weighing on him. Lila pretends to be happy, but she is not a very good actress. The fact that she is now an American is no longer enough for her. The sacrifices she has made are sapping her energy, but she can’t bear anyone to point it out.
‘If you really want to help me,’ Hana says finally, ‘let me go.’
After that day there are no more arguments.
Jonida is already excited about the idea that maybe one day Hana will have a place of her own.
‘It’s so cool! I’ll have two homes!’ she brags at every opportunity. ‘I’ll come over to your place on the weekend, Hana. We’ll be crazy together.’
Christmas is coming and Lila wants it to be memorable. The whole clan is going to be getting together.
‘I want it to be a perfect day for all of us,’ she keeps saying. ‘You’re going to get a facial,’ she says to Hana, one day. ‘And that’s an order.’
One morning, Lila drags her to the beauty parlor. Hana lets her do it because she can’t stand the idea of any more arguments. After her facial her skin is soft and smooth.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ Lila exclaims as she emerges. ‘All we need to do now is wait for your hair to grow out a little, give it a nice shape, and then we’re done.’
They are in front of the beauty parlor.
‘You do know all about sex and stuff, don’t you?’ Lila asks her out of the blue.
‘What are you asking me? I think I know.’
‘Back then, when you were in Tirana, did you ever do it?’
‘No.’
‘You mean you’re totally a virgin?’
‘No, just half!’ Hana laughs out loud. ‘I know what you have to do in theory, if that’s what you mean.’
Lila breathes a sigh of relief.
‘Good,’ she says, and then adds, in the tone of a naval officer, ‘but we need to talk about it. I bet there are many things you don’t know.’
Hana objects that usually she’s pretty good at theory, but Lila silences her by saying that only practice can give you the full picture.
‘In books they write about sex all the time,’ Hana says. ‘And I have to say I like the sex scenes quite a lot.’
Lila thinks about this for a while.
‘Did you know there’s such a thing as do-it-yourself sex?’ she asks, all in one breath.
Hana knows.
‘You’ve never tried it?’
‘No, never,’ she lies, a patch of red creeping up her neck, but Lila is turning the ignition and doesn’t look at her.
Her evening walk is longer than usual; she knows she won’t be able to get to sleep tonight. The darkness is mild, languid and loaded with exhaust fumes. The traffic is intense, though it is late.
If she gets the job, she’ll soon have a bit of privacy. In her new apartment she’ll try again to make love on her own. Not now, not in Lila’s house. There’s something that holds her back there.
The one and only time she had tried she was still in the mountains, and it hadn’t gone too well. She had cried for days afterwards.
After this thought she finds it hard to continue her stroll calmly. At College Plaza, rather than turning left down College Parkway, she turns around and goes back home.
The man who interviews her for the job is a fifty-year-old from Nicaragua who speaks faltering English, which makes Hana a little more relaxed. He explains that she will have to check the cars as they come into the parking lot and give them a ticket to put on their windscreens. Then, when they go out, she’ll have to take the ticket back and get the money. She’ll have to keep the cash register in order, and keep track of the daily cash flow. And she’ll also have to make sure cars don’t park in the spaces reserved for monthly season-pass holders. If they do, she’ll have to call the towing company and have them removed.
Hana is sitting rigidly on the edge of her chair and can’t seem to find a position in which she would look more natural. The guy from Nicaragua runs three parking lots like this one.
‘During your working hours, you are in charge of the lot,’ the man tells her. ‘The first funny business you try, you’re out. Is that clear? It’s the first time I’ve hired a woman as an attendant – for obvious reasons I’d prefer a man. But Steven is my cousin’s boss at the street maintenance company, and my cousin says he’s a great guy, so that’s why I’m giving you the job. It’s up to you now: if you work as hard as he does, we’ll both be happy. That’s it, Hana. Call me Paco. My name is Francisco, but everyone calls me Paco.’
Shtjefën is waiting outside. Paco asks her if she speaks any Spanish. Hana shrugs: no.
‘Pity. If you have problems with English, a bit of Spanish will always save you around here. But your English is more than enough for what you need to do. Today you’ll be on trial, and for the first four hours there’ll be one of my guys here to teach you everything you need to know. His name is Jack.’
Hana thanks him and goes outside, followed by her new boss. She feels drained. Shtjefën exchanges a few words with Paco, then tells Hana he has to leave her now to go to work. He’ll be back to pick her up at around seven, but she shouldn’t worry if he’s late, it’ll just depend on the traffic.
He leaves.
Hana has a kind of good-luck charm in her pocket. It’s a stone from Rrnajë with a hole in the middle. She strokes it without taking it out of her pocket.
‘Hana,’ Paco calls out to her, ‘Jack’s here.’
Jack is black and rough looking, and very kind. Unfortunately he expresses himself in incomprehensible slang. She asks him shyly to speak more slowly because she’s new to the country, but he says sadly he can’t speak any other way. He asks her what her name is. She says Hana, but when he repeats it the ‘a’ turns into an open, nasal ‘e.’ Hana explains that she really cares about the way her name is pronounced; she wants him to get it right. He stops chewing his gum for a moment, looks at her with a curious expression, and smiles.
As the day goes by, she begins to appreciate Jack. He tells her a lot about himself, though she only understands half of it. At the end of the four hours he holds out his hand, shakes hers hard, says they will see each other that evening, and leaves.
Hana breathes in the unhealthy air of the parking lot. It has three floors, two of which are underground. She has the sensation of a breeze blowing through her brain. One by one, in her mind she goes over the things Jack has shown her.
‘I’m sorry for your sake,’ Jack had said twice during the final half hour of her training. ‘You’ll be on your own here. It’s the only thing about this job I don’t like. If I can’t talk to someone, I go crazy.’
Hana told him that for her it wasn’t a problem.
‘You’re only saying that because you have no idea what it means not to talk for hours at a time.’
The day of the shooting competition at Rrnajë, Mark Doda had been caressing the stone with the hole in the middle intensely. It was always in the same right-hand pocket. The men had been noisy. Senseless, Mark had thought, all this was senseless, over the top; their senseless words the result of senseless excitement. Lul, the owner of the scruffy café in the village, had suggested starting with the easiest targets, middle-sized stones perched on bigger rocks. The shooting was to be only with Kalashnikovs; every kulla had more than one in the house. In Tirana they had broken into the military arsenals. The whole of Albania had gone crazy, shooting wildly in the streets. In two months it would be 1998. Weapons traveled through Montenegro and Kosovo all the way to Serbia, and the ‘cursed mountains’ happened to be in their path.
The café owner had suggested a shooting competition rather than firing like crazy at nothing in particular like those idiots in Tirana. They had chosen a clearing near the village, in a narrow gorge. After each round they had drunk a shot of raki. The first round had been on Lul, but then they all had to pay their way. The targets had grown smaller and smaller.
Mark had been sweating, but had continued to caress his secret amulet. It had gone surprisingly well, considering. He had been eliminated more than halfway through the competition and was amazed he had made it that far. Shkurtàn, from the Gjetaj clan, had won. When it was all over, and silence had enveloped the mountains once more, the air had reeked of gunpowder and raki.
The men had collapsed on the ground or slumped in broken chairs, soaked in their melancholy, until deep into the night. The day after, the village kids had gathered up the cartridge cases; and the boys in the Gjetaj clan had enjoyed a few weeks of glory thanks to Shkurtàn’s skill with an automatic. Then, yet again, there had been the usual emptiness.
Hana is smiling, sitting all alone in the cramped guardian’s office. Remembering herself as Mark, whatever else it makes her feel, can’t not give her pleasure. She even smiles at Jack, just like that, without saying a word. The world is at her feet. Less than three months have gone by since she left Rrnajë and here she is, thanks to Shtjefën, with a job. She’s so happy that, if she could, she would give herself a big hug.
If the job is like this first day then everything will be ok. She just needs to pay attention. She needs to be hard-working, punctual. Not be scared of the language. Speak to the drivers when they want to know things, pronouncing every word carefully. Not be in a hurry. She’s new to the country, and she can say so without raising any red flags, Lila has explained over and over. In America having just arrived is no big deal. In Europe you’re immediately labeled inferior, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. If you say you’re Albanian you’re toast. America’s much better from this point of view. It’s tough for newcomers, but the Americans are so used to foreigners they hardly take any notice. And then they don’t pry into your private life. No questions asked. They’re always going someplace else in a hurry, and they mind their own business. Hana likes the part about minding their own business more than all the rest put together.
A high-powered car is pulling into the half-empty parking lot. The woman driving is massively overweight and Hana catches herself thinking she will find it hard to get out of the vehicle. She gives her the entrance ticket, which the woman puts on her dashboard. So far, so good.
The day goes by without incident, marked by nothing other than cars coming in and cars going out. Hana irons out the crumpled, mostly one-dollar bills with her hands and puts them into tidy piles. She goes over everything three times, just to be extra sure.
Jack comes back to pick up the day’s earnings. The guy doing the night shift is with him. From Poland originally, he speaks in monosyllabic grunts. If he were a bit friendlier, she might even tell him she’s Albanian – after all, they were once in the same communist bloc – but the guy clearly has no intention of starting a conversation.
Hana waits for Shtjefën to come pick her up on the sidewalk, leaning on a streetlight. It’s a cold evening. It has suddenly become winter. She focuses on the sneakers she’s wearing for the first time today. They’re white and blue and go well with her dark-blue suit and white shirt. The shirt has a left breast-pocket with a pink border. Hana strokes the stitching as she waits.
Shtjefën pulls up in front of her. Hana could easily get a bus home. It was only a few stops, but Lila and Shtjefën insisted.
‘Hop in,’ he calls out to her. ‘Have you been waiting long?’
She climbs in, a bit distracted.
‘Is everything ok?’ Shtjefën asks her. ‘Why didn’t you wait at the bar instead of standing here getting cold? You had money with you, right?’
‘Everything’s fine. It was easy.’
‘I told you so.’
Shtjefën pulls away from the curb, his tires squealing. He needs a haircut and some rest, she thinks, so she decides to keep quiet.
He doesn’t stop at home, but carries on driving without any explanation. In Gaithersburg he announces that they’re on their way to buy her a used Honda.
‘The son of one of my workers owns a small garage, and he’s giving us a great price on a car that was headed for the junkyard.’
‘Does Lila know about this?’
‘She’d tie you to the bed rather than see you go. We need to present her with a fait accompli. I’ll pay, for now. You can pay me back when you have the money.’
‘Lila’s not going to like it.’
‘Your cousin is very understanding. You just have to know how to handle her,’ Shtjefën says with a sly smile. ‘And I know how to handle her.’
Hana is so happy she’s ashamed of it. Her left breast is itching. This is too much all in one day.
‘Shtjefën, I’m …’
‘Relax,’ he says, interrupting her. ‘And stop thanking me. I can’t take it anymore, all day it’s thank you this and thank you that. Have pity on me!’
Less than an hour later, Hana is the proud owner of a white Honda, which she drives home extremely cautiously, tailing Shtjefën. When they get home, Jonida lets out a shrill ‘Wow!’ Lila looks sad but content. Hana says she’s going to buy four steaks from Whole Foods and there’s no way the family can stop her, though they never shop there. It’s a place for rich people who only eat organic, and the prices are way too high.
Hana pats the Maryland drivers’ license in her pocket, leaps into the twelve-year-old Honda, and takes off. She comes back with meat and salad, wine from another store, and two packs of cigarettes. She spends nearly 100 dollars.
That evening she eats, drinks, and smokes, and even Jonida seems to have very little to say about it. At around eleven, her niece falls asleep and Lila has to take her to bed. Hana has knocked back so much that she feels as drunk as a lord. When she ends up in the bathroom with her head in the toilet bowl, her cousin doesn’t dare go and help her.
‘I’m sorry, Lila. It won’t happen again,’ Hana says the next morning, before leaving for work.
She parks in her reserved spot. For the rest of the day she feels foolishly proud of herself.
When she gets back home, she still has a headache. She decides to devote her evening to a map of Maryland. One day she’d like to drive as far as Annapolis, the state capital, and see a bit of Chesapeake Bay.
Shtjefën and Lila are at the movies in Rockville.
‘They’re like honeymooners,’ Jonida comments. ‘God save us from these old romantics!’ But she’s secretly happy for them, and kissed them both on the forehead as they left.
Auntie and niece spend no more than an hour together. Hana asks Jonida to explain a few things about the computer to her. Just the basics, she insists. But she is slow to pick it up and things need repeating. Jonida grumbles. Perhaps it’s for the best, Hana thinks. I’ll learn in my own time. She’s happier on her own. Since she left the mountains, she misses her solitude. In the old days she would have done anything to have a bit of company. Now she feels her life is over-crowded.