Up until now, I’ve lived in New York, the land of  crime and theft – both informal and professional.  Accordingly, I find some things hilarious, in Albania.  Alfred carries a huge bunch of keys, which lock doors all over the place — but when I look at the doors . . . . I could dismantle the whole locking mechanism in five minutes with a screwdriver, or probably a butterknife.  Door plates are screwed in with normal phillips-head screws!  When I pointed this out to Alfred, he looked a little embarrassed.  “In fact,” he told me “There is not much theft here.”  Oh?  I asked.  “No,” he said, “Because — in fact — if anyone steals something, everyone will know about it by the next day.”  It’s true.  Hey — Ismail has your television set!  I can imagine it. (NB:  I do not know anyone named ‘Ismail’).

I do love a good coinkydink. As you may notice from other writing elsewhere in this website, the handiest analagous cultural reference for Europeans unfamiliar with Malesori culture is probably to the “Highlanders” of Scotland. You know the rap: fiercely independent, wild by reputation, appearing lawless to outsiders, honorable to the point of insanity among themselves, living in uninhabitable mountainous regions, organized by clans, fearsome fighters . . . um, tall and like hunting? Well here’s another odd fact: According to Noel Malcolm (Kosovo: A Short History) the Gaelic word for Scotland is ‘Albainn’ which “classicizing eighteenth-century Scots sometimes turned into ‘Albania.’” Weird, right?

I have just returned from spending two winter months in the north of Albania. On January 31^st, a particularly heavy snowstorm tore down all the electrical wires and closed the only road – a 25 kilometer dirt road – to the nearest town. This effectively sealed off the whole valley from any form of modern convenience. With a shrug, the whole valley turned back to living as I suppose they must’ve for hundreds of years. And I went with them.

Families gathered around candles in the one room with a wood stove. Men played chess or dominoes. Women sat by the stove and knitted. Time became precious. And time became endless. I caught it myself. It’s 4:30. If I go out now, to feed the horse, I will catch the last half hour of daylight. Of course, you put it off as long as you can, to trim a half hour or so off the long hours of night that the horse will spend alone, in the dark and cold – but leave it too long, and it’s feeling your way in the dark along the body of the horse, to untie the rope around his leg and lead him out into the dark and snow which he will sink into, up to his chest if you lead him the wrong way, which will panic him, for his last drink of water before the night. Also, of course, if you’re too silly to have changed out of wet clothes from the last time you fed him, you will be shaking with cold by this time, with a cold that prevents you from feeling anything, except the bone-shattering necessity of putting one foot in front of another to look after the animals, cows, sheep and goats that at this point, with the road closed, you’re living off of.

All of this, of course, for me, the visiting American, is a bit of an adventure. At some point however I realize that it’s been long enough – 30 days, 40 days, 60 days (I keep extending my stay) – so that at some point, it isn’t a jaunt anymore, it’s a way of life that I’ve shared. It is normal now for me to realize that there’s no point in going to bed alone. One body is not enough to build up enough heat for the blankets to hold. So I stay on in the kitchen where the wood stove is, stubbornly re-reading Treasure Island. In the morning, the blankets will be wet with condensation from the heat made simply by sleeping, opposed to the utter freeze of the room. I will bring the blankets down occassionally, to hang them in front of the stove, and everyone will exclaim “how wet they are!” but with laughter, not actual shock, that anyone will live this way.

In this world, daylight is precious. In the daylight, we sometimes walk abroad, though this isn’t possible, when the snow is normal deep. Normal deep is a meter or two, too deep to walk through, too exhausting for more than a few paces. One day I made myself snowshoes, slogging through the waist-deep snow to the nearest stand of pine trees, accompanied by the dog who two weeks later will be eaten by wolves, not far from where I cut the branches for my snowshoes. I tied the circles of soft pine branches to my feet with lengths cut from a ball of twine, which the dog would later steal, and run off with across a frozen meadow. For one afternoon our crazy footprints, mine heffalump fat, his light and airy, chased each other across the blinding white. Two weeks later a nasty red hairpin trail would be the only sign left of the dog. Other than the blood, there was no trace. No fur or inedible parts, a simple erasing in the clean white snow. My friend tells me that the wolves play dumb, wounded, to trick the dog into approaching. A quick bite to the neck, and then the wolf flips the body onto its back, and strides cleanly away.

I cry over the blood in the snow, and then go to feed the horse. It’s 4:30. It will be dark, soon. The end of another day, and another day after it to get through. Are you wet? They ask me all the time, and at first I used to answer, soaked to the bone, “Not so much,” laughing, until I caught the utter freezing chill that comes with any damp. When I had to go to the horse shaking, because my very bones were cold, no matter how my flesh felt, I learned to respect their question. Are you wet?

I’m wet, I’m damp, help me. So this becomes part of the rhythm of every day – fighting off the cold and wet, when all you are surrounded by is cold and wet, and the house is circled by the enormous footprints of the wolves.

I’ve never seen a wolf. Alfred, who’s lived here for 30 or more years, has never seen a wolf. But they’ve eaten every dog he’s ever tried to have.

Sose, Alfred’s mother, knits endless socks. She knits so many socks, I wonder how anyone could ever wear them all. Some are pretty and decorative. I see some of the little pairs turn up in Arsalinda and Ela’s hands. They are small children who live across the field, the children of Alfred’s cousin Shkelzen. Whenever I go visiting anywhere, someone seems to give me a pair of socks. I have now a pair of black and pink socks, a pair of green socks with purple stripes, a gold pair, a purple pair and a precious pair of pure, handspun wool, or lesh.

If I am stupid, and I get wet, I can sit by the wood stove, and watch the steam rise off my legs. But this external drying will not stop the shaking that will possess my body within the hour. It’s strange how important dry feet become. It’s good that so many women have given me the socks they made, so that I have enough to change to dry ones often.

Now that I’m back in New York, people ask me: Is winter hard there? And like a good Malesore, I want to shrug and say, Not Really. It’s not, really. You just learn it, and get on with it. Here’s a strange thing. I can’t really eat anything, now that I’m back. There, we ate full fat everything that came from a cow. Lunches of cheese boiled in cream, boiled in butter. Slurp it up with a big chunk of bread, baked fresh that day. Eat a gigantic bowl of it for lunch, another for dinner, perhaps some meat soup added that turns rock solid into fat when the heat fades away, but is delicious when hot. Breakfast more of the same. I ate a tub of fat food, three times, maybe four a day. And grew limber and slim. And shook with cold and damp. Or felt blissful and warm, when I did. A triumph was when I learned and remembered the exact dance of feet that let me get out of my mudboots, good for visiting the horse (that time, again?) and into my house slippers, without wetting my socks in the snow. More warm, for me. The dog would stand by the backdoor, wagging, without hope of getting in.

Here’s a strange fact. You’re warmer outdoors than in. How is that possible? But outside you walk around with jacket open and flapping. You’re moving, shovelling snow, or shit – cowshit, horseshit, small discrete little bundles of dog shit, flinging them out of the way of the few human tracks through the meters of snow, that we kept open. You have no hat.

It’s inside, when you try to sit down or stop or rest, that the shaking takes you over.

Is it hard there? They ask me here, and my honest answer is “not really,” but I wonder. On certain days, Sose fried handfuls of bread batter in oil, making wonderfully rich fritters, bigger than a large man’s hand. I’m going out now, I say, and she fries some up for me, to “put in my pocket.” Instead I stand by the stove and pour honey over one and then another, and eat them faster than I should, in order to stop the honey from falling through my fingers and onto the carpet, melting honey being faster than my happy tongue.

And outside it is always either getting light or getting dark. It’s a little bit strange and lonely, without the dog. One day all the snow turned red on every ridge, because the wind had come from Africa, frosting the snow with desert dust and filling the sun with heat. Alfred and I were bringing grass for the horse down from the nearest mullar, and I paused with him in work to loll about the haystack, and we peeled off our outer clothes, and like a miracle, I was sitting almost naked perched on the hay in my undershirt, feeling good clean sunshine warm my skin.

Is the winter hard there? You ask me. Oh no. And don’t ask me. Eshte githmone i mire, I think.

I’m just waking up at 3 am, back at Freddy’s Hostel in Tirana. In an hour I have to get up to meet Eri and catch the minibus up to Bajrum Curri and then on to Valbona.

You would think that after 24 hours of traveling, involving four airports, no sleep for 24 hours before that, and the news that all of my luggage including the carry on bag I was convinced to check was left behind in Munich (“the plane was too heavy, so 45 bags were left behind”) I might be in a disgruntled state, but no such thing.

Over Albania, the plane descended, breaking through the clouds just in time to catch the last glimpse of the Adriatic, then flying south over the coastline before turning east to land in Tirana. Having just left Munich, where the magical plane window view showed neat flat fields interspersed with appealingly small red-roofed towns stretching away as far as I could see, I was pleased to notice how much even more beautiful Albania looks to me, seen from above – precise green mountains, rivers winding through, a strange pea green lake weirdly the shape of a spreadeagled man, the spreading plains along the coast. It must be subjective, but whereas the views from the windows of other planes usually tend to make me uncomfortably aware of how unfamiliar the earth really is – the scale is wrong, Is the world really so flat? Do the sparkling chains of nighttime human lights really looks so much like some sort of strange (if beautiful) incrustation that looks vaguely itchy? – Albania looks to me much more like a fairy tale land full of all the good and beautiful things that you would put into a fairy tale kingdom if you were going to make it up – the shape of the land is varied, there is too much to look at and all of it beautiful (though since you can see at least one mining operation and an electrical plant, this must be subjective, and highly, at that!), and it does look like you could float down and set off adventuring immediately, which in our case, of course, we do.

Already, on the plane, Albania is around me. I have noticed several times now an interesting phenomenon. There is of course a much remarked sameness about airports worldwide, but there is also a sameness about travelers. We all maintain, to great extent, a uniform blankness. A sort of shared pretense that no one else is in the building with us. We push through masses of people with our eyes focused on some vague horizon, and once we sit down at the gate to wait, we politely ignore each others’ existence. We close our eyes (if we are me) and pretend to go to sleep. But every time I arrive at a gate and wait for a flight to Tirana, this is wonderfully different. I rush up to the gate at Munich, my previous flight having been delayed. Some four other groups of travelers are sitting around an otherwise suspiciously abandoned gate. There is no helpful monitor with flight information, no uniformed hostess. I look at two old men and raise my eyebrows. They, naturally, are looking at me (I exist!). They look back, shrug, smile reassuringly and wave me towards a seat. We sit. It isn’t that people are pushy or interfering, it’s just that there’s no attempt to pretend that each other doesn’t exist. Of course, a last minute announcement tells us we’re at the wrong gate (all of us!), so we immediately jump up in a mass, stare at each other, reassure each other that what the lady said was “19” and in my baby Albania I say “I am going. I say “WAIT!”” and one of the men laughs and gestures I should rush off, so I do. Once on the plane, we late arrivals are thrown into the half-empty back, and we’re off. And it’s just like being on a minibus. Chatter and banter are thrown around the back of the plane, Albanians are peering over seat backs, laughing and teasing each other. I lean back and shut my eyes, happy, and smile at the pair sitting across the aisle next to me. A young man with a big rhinestone earring has been seated next to a craggy-faced old man, who immediately begins to find out where the boy is from, what languages he can speak, teases him gently and looks across at me and grins. I grin back and he nods happily, and I go to sleep. When the stewardess eventually shakes me awake which I respond to with a jolted “OhSorry!” there’s a burst of laughter around the back of the plane, and when I look at them all and laugh too, there is much delight. “She’s laughing!” one old man points out delighted, and nods approvingly “I’m funny, no? Good!” he says.

The airport at Tirana is an airy glass box, small but lofty, and we all file in under an enormous yellow banner which reads “Welcome to the Land of the Eagles!” I am happy, even though I eventually discover (which I’ve fatalistically expected all the way from New York) that all of my bags, all of them, everything!, have been left in the airport in Munich. I have what I stand up in, a surveyor’s wheel, a large roll of drafting paper, and a totebag with two laptops in it, a first edition copy of The Peaks of Shala, and whatever else I happen to have in my pockets. After a long wait in a little office with two harassed officials, it’s my turn to approach the desk. The little bald man whose shoulders are hunched up to his ears protectively peers at me with the same sort of mildly panicky animosity with which a corned cat might look at you. I smile, shrug. Hope lights in his eyes. I tell him my problem, and that I am leaving at five am to go on to Tropoja, so I how can I come back for the bags. I give him my best “I am very brave but a little helpless and what ever will become of me?” look, still smiling. He sits a little taller. “Then we will deliver them to you in Tropoja” he says firmly. I smile gratefully and crouch down next to his desk, to watch what he types in the computer. “What is the address?” he begins. “Oh,” I say, and look apologetic, “Well, there isn’t really one. It’s about 23 kilometers down the road from Bajrum Curri to Valbona, a little hotel called Rilindja.” His fingers pause over the keyboard, he looks down at me crouched next to him, peering up hopefully. He nods and solemnly types “Hotel Rilindja, Rruga nga Bajrum Curri ne Valbona” I am chirping along as he types, delighted that my knowledge of Albania prepositions covers this (Hotel, road from B.C. to Valbona). “And the telephone?” he asks. My face falls again “Well, there is one, but you may have to call for days and days before you get through . . .” Again the pause, and then he manfully types in Alfred’s phone number from my cell phone. Somehow, in spite of the ridiculousness of all this (the man is in fact promising to have someone drive 8 hours through largely impassable, snowbound and precipitous dirt roads to an unfindable and uncontactable destination, on New Years Eve, and only I know there’s actually no one AT the hotel, which means I will have to light a fire in the fireplace in the kitchen and sit there until someone shows up, or I suppose leave a note on the door instructing the driver to drive on to the Dunishe farmhouses further down the road, along an unmarked dirt turnoff), I do believe my bags will arrive (eventually?) . . . it’s Albania, where the more ridiculous something seems, the more plausible, somehow, and where humor is what makes things work. In short, I’ve come home again!

I must go shower now. Yesterday evening Eri and I walked to the minibus station to book seats on whatever furgon to Bajrum Curri we could find. Ironically enough, the bus which pulled in turned out to be driven by the exact same man who drove me to Bajrum Curri the very first time I traveled, and we recognized each other with delight and much warm handshaking, and exclaiming on my side about the coincidence. He’s coming Freddy’s to pick us up, so I have to be ready. More soon!

On my way out of Albania the last time, I discovered (the the shock of my credit card) a sneaky secret resource of the Tirana Airport — its bookstore! In ten minutes in that bookstore I spent more than I had in two weeks in Albania (and then limped my way across several continents, hauling 30 kilos of books) — because there are better books in the Airport bookstore than there are in the most prestigious bookstore on Skanderbeg Square. I KNEW from searching in my own NYC bookstore that some of the books I picked up in the Tirana Airport bookstore were academic authorities, which are simply not findable in the “First World” (so-called, and hah) or on Skanderbeg Square. Half of them are written by Dr. Robert Elsie [www.elsie.de]. So Anyhow, I wrote to him, to ask if we could sponge off his work. Here’s his response:

Dear Catherine,
Feel free to use anything from Driteshkronja, but do note the source, especially for any of the older pictures from the Vienna Photo Archives. They can be a bit sticky.
You have a wonderful website on Valbona. Congratulations. I was last there in the mid-nineties and am already longing to go back. I have noted the hotel and will be a patron of it some day.
Are you sure about the meal prices of the hotel (room 25 euros, meal 300 Euros!!)
I am so happy someone is doing something to promote Valbona. It is a beautiful place.
best wishes,
Robert Elsie

It’s a beautiful morning in Tirana, October, 2009. I am what is still new to me, but what I suspect could become habit, the guest of the Selimaj. The Selimaj are a fis or clan or family and without it having been stated, I am under their besa, and if you remove the old-world terminology, what it means is that these people have adopted me. Of course I tumble down in Tirana, and of course they come and collect me in the middle of the night, and of course people are put out of their beds, to put me up. If for no other reason than that I came in the first place (so they took me in) and now that I insist on returning, they pick me up. Would that I could return some part of this kindness.

Now it is the third day I have been in Tirana. Besa, Alfred and Eri have all been out since seven am. I have many ideas about how to return their kindness. I can augment the things the Selimaj are trying to do in the Malësi, the Highlands. They have dreams, very practical dreams, but do not know the standards. The standards of my land bore me, but I know them. I can give them this. In order to do so, I need to understand what exists, so I set out, in a little sundress and pirate boots, armed with my infantile and patchy Albanian, to explore the museums.

Just the evening before, I was like Marco Polo, like Scott, probably more like Apsley Cherry-Garrard (that amused cynic) – I plotted my course, and found my way around, map in hand and no doubt lisping out inquiries, but – Tirana is manageable! It’s small! It’s downright cozy. That evening, I found and walked past all the (closed) museums – I saw (the outside of) the Archeology Museum, the History Museum, and the Art Museum and ended up at the Opera Bar on Skanderbeg Square, drinking coffee and scribbling notes, fed by indulgent waiters (alright, NOT so much like polar explorers).

According to my guide book, most museums are open from 8 am to noon, so on this new day, I set out early, determined to avail myself of Albania’s self-defined accumulation of self-referential fact. On a bright morning, and on my own, discarding all this, and with no reason not to, I headed for the Natural Science Museum. According to the Brandt Guide, this included a stuffed Wolf! Accordingly, I am pacing up and down Rruga Kavajes – but where is the museum? On the third pass, I realize that the museum MUST be this strange hidden garden, with what looks like a cement castle hidden at the back, locked in behind big cinder fences and iron gates. On this third pass, there is a nice and jolly looking man just being let in by a uniformed guard, who’s emerged from the bushes to disentangle the locks around the fence gate. “er . . . Excuse me?” I say. The man going in turns out to be Dr. Vangeli, the head of botany at the University. I talk his ear off for ten minutes or so – the highlands, their richness, the undiscoveredness of it all, the uncountedness, he listens to me kindly. “It’s true,” he says, someone-er-other once told him “The highlands of Albania are the most beautiful place in the world.” He recalls himself. “What did you want?” “Well,” I say, “I sort of wanted to see the museum . . . .” He looks a bit panicked. “There’s no one there right now . . . . couldn’t you come back?” I explain that I’m leaving tomorrow, and talk some more. He is a kind man, and so, in the end, he lets me in. I am torn between thinking “this is a museum, there is a fee!” and between saying, quite honestly, “I won’t be any bother, I’d just like to look,” but the fee, as listed is after all 100 lek, less than a dollar, and as it turns out, I’m only allowed in because a woman is unearthed, who takes me around. She brings me into the first rooms, and I am immediately delighted and at home. I am delighted and at home because they are collections of sponges, hollow-bodies and maritime arthropods, such as you would find in the back room of any forgotten biology department. The place reminds me of nothing so much as my old biology practicum room in Swaziland, where weird old specimens were mouldering in half-dried out formaldehyde. I know this place. We move on, my guide pointing at things and saying “AlBANia” to point out what’s actually local. A beautiful room of dusty birds could break my heart. Most specimens were collected in the 1950s or 60s. It’s a beautiful place, in which individual effort (even if of the Roosevelt-style bird-blasting type) is still apparent. I’m taking up this woman’s time, so I move on as quickly as I can, but already my mind is racing. I could come back here! If I had the besa of the museum, I could come and stay, clean the exhibits, relabel them, draw them. I could assemble a field guide (this thing that outlanders expect) from the specimens here, and possibly help delay the decay. Oh, I am at home here. In this room after room of rotting, mouldy, dusty specimens.

My guide, this lovely woman, turns on lights that I suspect haven’t been turned on in months, as we move from room to room. The birds are beautiful. And then we get to the back room. “Missing several floorboards” says my guidebook. The guidebook has left out the details of splintering beams constructed in a honeycomb which holds the ceiling off the floor. There is not a missing floorboard or two, but huge holes in the floor. Light floods in from high windows. The whole skeleton of an Adriatic whale hangs before me, I could touch it, or ride on it, if I were crazy. I dodge beams to pace along the glass cages which line the room haphazardly, inclosing, stuffed: a jackal, some Iriqi (hedgehogs), a seal, a wild boar with adorable stripey baby, and these are treasures I think, even though they’re dusty, and their ears look dry and likely to fall of in the near future, and I am afraid of sneezing. Back along the other side of the room I come across him, my wolf. I’d thought the jackal was him, but it wasn’t. His nose is long, and roman bumped. He’s dusty and old, and somehow still . . . scary. Preserved in this room, with a ceiling that almost certainly drips in rain.

My guide points to him. AlBANia, she says. And I nod. She allows me to take ONE picture, which I reproduce here faithfully.

I have had a stunning new realization. It’s simply this: That when I’m in New York, Albania is imaginary. And when, tomorrow, I get on those airplanes, New York will fade and become strange — just a story I tell. And for these interim days, I’m neither here nor there — existing somewhere in between. And no one spends time here with me — so I have to accept an imaginary existence.

Now to go home, with everything scintillating around me — nothing quite real, or false, either. Just possibility. The dogs are real, god bless them. Pray god one remembers to pack the right things.