I am sitting in the restaurant, which means the main room, at Rilindja. I am in the Valbona Valley of Northern Albania. I am, somehow, home. After a lot of noise (arriving bands of local teenagers, out for a school-sponsored day’s exploration) it’s quiet, I’m alone, and all I can hear is the sound of the wind in the leaves of the beech trees outside. A cardboard box with two baby bunnies I’ve been feeding with a syringe is by my feet. It is very peaceful.
I’ve just returned home, as I’ll call it for lack of a better word, from a day spent in the local town, Bajram Curri, frantically emailing the world. I came back on the furgon, the local minibus, which travels down the valley this way once a day, around 3 o’clock. It is a Friday. This means that more than 30 people were crammed in a minivan meant to seat eight, with all their shopping, which in a place like Valbona which doesn’t have any shops at all – not one, not a post office, or police station, or a telephone box, certainly not a doctor, nothing like that, just 27 kilometers of people living as they have for hundreds of years – can be quite a lot. I myself accounted for a box of 150 eggs, as well as 5 kilos of tomatoes, 5 of onions, a sack of sausages, a bag of cherries, one of green peppers, two kinds of apples, some eggplants, a bag of bananas, three tins of coffee, three sacks of salt . . . oh and three cabbages that the man in the veterinary supply store went out and bought for me (no payment accepted) to feed to the teeny tiny baby bunnies which are nestled in my hat, wrapped in a scarf (three cabbages could crush them). I’m thinking that maybe this furgon ride illuminates the difference between here and, oh certainly New York, but maybe everywhere else I’ve ever been. A massively pregnant friend phoned me recently in New York, fighting back tears about how awful people were to her on the subway. No seat given, vicious glares for “taking up space.” Here in Valbona, the furgon is cheerfully packed. No woman is ever allowed to stand, even if we have to pile on each other’s laps, and seats are given by a combined precedence of age and gender. Everyone is cheerful. I think that, after 10 months, I am being accepted, as I was given the ancient wooden stool that is crammed in behind the front passenger seat. A chair certainly, but not one of the best ones. One appropriate to both my femaleness and level of strength. Artan, Alfred’s cousin, is standing in front of me, his behind hits me in the face on the left side occassionally. To my right is the window, which if I turn my head, I can stare out of blissfully, at the more than amazingly beautiful view. Someone sitting on packing crates behind me (I think it’s Azem’s brother, he looks like Azem, but with a mustache) is leaning heavily on my back, but if I jam my elbow against the window, and my fist against the edge of the front seat, I can push back enough to hold him up. At some point he shifts his weight, and his dusty suit-jacketed arm snakes past my right shoulder, to grab onto the seat back in front of me. This means I have to rest my chin on his arm to keep looking out the window, and I do, and this is fine. It’s a compliment from both of us, to the other. At one point I scootched to the edge of the stool and patted the space revealed, suggesting someone sit. “Nuk Ashtu!” said Azem’s maybe-brother, smiling at me, “Not like that!”
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