I had spent two months fixing up my house in the town of Laç. All my former neighbors had left in search of a better life somewhere further away, within the homeland or abroad! For three months I had been greeting new families, who looked at me and greeted me like a new guest in my own home… One afternoon, one of them knocked on the door and gave me a wedding invitation; he was marrying off his daughter… I had never seen the girl; she had finished university and worked in Tirana. The days rolled by quickly, and the day of the wedding arrived. Tradition, comings and goings, uncles on the mother’s and father’s side… I saw the stairs of the apartment building decorated with a beautiful red ribbon from the first floor to the third. It seemed to me like a beautiful line of connection, of relationships, courtesy, and understanding. I had somehow forgotten these traditions during my twenty years of exile in Greece. Conversations, congratulations, coffee… and finally the great wedding table… Lights, dancing, colors! Young and old of all ages, with sun-washed faces, expressed their joy through the steps and rhythms of the dance, but also in the hieroglyphs of the dance choreography. I was a little shaken… I saw a little girl of about twelve near me, and I asked her:
“Whose girl are you?”
“Bujar Xhafa’s,” she whispered to me in a crystalline voice, and two little dimples bloomed on her small cheeks like two roses.
Her answer somewhat stunned me, and I cast my gaze around to see where I might spot her father…
“Where are you sitting?” I asked the girl.
“At the uncles’ table?”
I cast my eyes over and saw a large round table, filled not only with plates but also with joy… Because the orchestra was booming and the guests were speaking loudly, it created a very joyful and highly pleasant atmosphere.
Opposite me I saw Bujar, my childhood friend… when I left
Albania he was the first secretary of the youth in the district. As soon as he saw me, he left the table and we sat side by side… The conversation was warm, like friendship itself, like the table itself and the very tradition of the Albanian wedding. The harmonized orchestra seemed to me to be playing not just for the wedding, but also for us—a song and dance of friendship, an early friendship whose bridges of communication time had severed.
“You’re here?” he asked me.
“I’m neighbors with the bride,” I replied!
He smiled…
“You haven’t sold the house?”
“No,” I told him… “I have my friends here… and my parents built a circle for me, one that I know cannot easily forget me…”
“Yes, yes! These years drove us apart, but here we are, a wedding becomes the reason once again to meet, to find our circle of friends and comrades. My wife,” he introduced me with a laugh…
I shook her hand… his wife was a compatriot of mine from Përmet… our parents had come to Laç in the 60s. A middle-aged woman approached our conversation, threw her arm around my neck and kissed me… I was left somewhat bewildered… She understood my confusion and laughed:
“Don’t you know me? I’m Limaja!”
I was astounded; the girl of the past had become a beautiful and noble lady…
“It’s difficult with you women,” I told her! “You can’t even tell your age.” I didn’t manage to ask her about her husband, when I saw my high school teacher, Xhemal, in front of me. We hugged, and the conversation grew ever more pleasant, warmer, more varied… Its circle expanded… After our age group came another turn, the younger generation… I don’t know how this circle was formed, but I know that inside me, my body was demanding more water…
“Water, a little water,” I said to a girl of about twenty…
The girl brought two bottles of cold water…
“Whose girl are you?” I asked her.
“Xhemal’s,” she told me, tossing her long hair behind her back. Her face took on the color of a newly bloomed rose… She had two beautiful eyes, two arched eyebrows as if someone had painted them by hand. Her round face looked fragile and beautiful like an angel… “And you?” I said to the other one beside her.
“I am Gëzim’s!”
“Which Gëzim?”
“Gëzim Sinani’s.”
I looked into her eyes and a light sadness overcame me. She looked like a green branch; the fan blew and played with her long hair… her face was covered in a lunar beauty.
“Why did you get sad?” Bujar understood my distress…
“They’ve grown up,” I told him, “and we don’t even know them at all… I haven’t been to Laç in many years!”
My friends had married, and now their children had grown up and were ready to marry… their beauty, sincerity, and youth gave momentum to the wedding… but the surprises were not over… later, the table was joined by other friends, acquaintances of my father, of my sisters, who had married and started their families in this town… It seemed to me that this wedding had been ordered just for me… it brought back memories of my childhood years, of my peers.
Bujar raised his glass and gave a toast…
I cast my eyes deep into the glass; I saw inside it all the years that had distanced me from these memories. I downed it to the bottom… I came to my senses, and I realized that, although I had been gone for years, I was still there. There in those streets, with those people, where childhood and life connected us, but also the years we had lost around the world…
“Bujar, even though we’re far away… we live with this town! Here we have our childhood, our early youth… although I left, I still have you all with me.” I told him about a photograph we had taken twenty-one years ago at the former Metallurgical Combine.
“I know,” he told me… and cast his eyes toward his wife.
“We remembered you a week ago, Pilo… I saw you in a photo with my sister Liljana, you were in high school together…” The little Limaja of the past now had the voice of a lady.
I understood myself that I was inextricably linked to these people, to these streets, to this town, which, although I had left and moved away from twenty years ago… I now realize I had taken with me into my long exile… The orchestra played on, but it simply awakened memories… we were living another wedding alongside today’s… the wedding of reuniting with friends, peers, with memories that sat cross-legged at the table and drank with us. They drank to my welcome, but also to the hospitality of my friends, who had also left their memories in this beautiful book called Laç. The book from which we began the long road of growing up, of careers, and the dreams for which we are still fighting… but every time we return to this town, we see the museum created over the years. Every time we read the pages of this book, we see the road we have traveled…
The wedding had ended, while we had lost ourselves in our own wedding… in the wedding of memories, which did not easily let us leave its table… It had many visible and invisible connections that made us feel good. Finally, each of us took the wedding invitation and the book of memories, to which a new chapter had been added… that of a bridge reconnecting the shores of friendship… From that moment on, an orchestra of joy plays in major notes, harmonized over the years in the orchestra of my chest… it awakened memories… and made me cast my impressions onto the field of paper so that you too could harvest them, my friends…
