A Story
I slammed the bedroom door shut and threw myself on the bed like a dead woman. Whenever Ilir and I argued, I needed to be alone. I didn’t want to hear anyone, or for anyone to hear me. In my soul I had a heavy machine, in the shape of a mill, which ground down my personality and shattered my being and my patience into thousands of fragments of pain. Ilir, my husband, had come home drunk, and it was useless to argue with him. So I locked the door to my soul and sought comfort elsewhere. I threw the bucket of memories into the deep well of my life. Ever since my girlhood, I often searched for my mistake there. I would climb down the thirty years and read the days of my girlhood. Those days that would never return. The days of my calendar had been leafed through, and I found myself twenty-three years later. I remember my mother Vasilika, separated from my father, with my two brothers and my sister Lindita, who today lives in Milano. With a beautiful name, Lind-dita, but who found it hard to see a beautiful day in her life. I knocked on the door of the house in that small town, in that same small house where I was born. My desire hiding behind it opened the door. In the museum of life, after so many years, I looked at his pure portrait, the joyfulness whenever he spoke, making you pay attention to his lips, his melodious voice, and his way of telling a story. I don’t know how he entered my home; at first, we had him as a teacher at the Pioneers’ House, and later he became friends with my parents. He was ten years older than me, and back then he seemed very old to me. I always looked at him with admiration, and his presence calmed me. Our home was a warm little nest, open to him, just as his soul was to me. He was married and had a child, or so my mother told me. At that time I was sixteen or seventeen years old and I didn’t listen to his words, but to the desires of my age. They pushed me to run after the tree of his joy. I was happy every time I saw him at the doorstep. Even today, after nearly thirty years, I don’t know where that desire was born, and why!? But above all, today, why do I always remember him in the hardest days of my life? Could it be because he gave me nothing but joy throughout all those years, or are those few gifts I still keep an expression of a soul, an expression of a feeling, or an expression of the sincerity and love he had in his honeycomb of logic and culture, which I never understood or appreciated? Although it is very tight on me, I still wear that red shirt often today, even though it was bought twenty-eight years ago; I wear it to summon the memories, or to broadcast out into the earth’s orbit and search for the warmth of his hand, which I now do not know where the wind of fate has tossed? That hand from the end of the world, and I wait for the waves of his warmth to touch me and understand that his warmth still lives, has not been lost, and will never be lost. Whenever I wear it, I feel like I’m in a fairy tale; I escape the years, strip off the present, and stay with the past. With that past which made me happy. It was pure and clean. It didn’t pretend, it was pure, it was beautiful and fragile. You always have the desire to touch it, to kiss it, to caress it deeply. To caress that hand, which I never understood—was it parental, brotherly, or was love itself inside it? But whenever I am at war with myself and with life, I look for that hand, that sweet word, that caress. Why do I always look for it when the river of injustice and suffering drowns me?
I close my eyes and hear his key in the door, that key which had turned into a sweet melody for me, which besides our door also opened the doors of my joys. He appeared at the door just as I had him in my memory. He came, placed his hand on my long hair, and whispered to me with the sweet voice that came from the violin of his mouth:
“Little sweetheart!”
I threw myself into his arms and kissed him, kissed him hard, so hard, and with all the strength of my soul, as if I wanted to drink in all the longing of the lost years, to gather strength to fight. I cried out to him:
“You came, I’ve been waiting a lifetime for you, a lifetime!?” His eyes were filled with tears.
He took me in his hands and spun me around the way a child is spun. The pleats of my old dress opened like wings, my hair let loose in the arms of the wind and danced with them. He kissed me and tossed a handful of chocolates into my lap. His sweetness could be felt everywhere, everywhere, in his being, in his words, in his kisses, in his gifts.
“I don’t want chocolates,” I told him. “I want you! I only need you.” He looked at me, and tears flowed from his eyes again.
“I am gone,” he said, and kissed me again. “I am not a man, but an angel. An angel who comforts your soul. That soul which life strikes with the sword of injustice and insult. You did not accept the nectar of my lips, nor the warm hearth of my feelings!”
“Ever since the day you flew away, ever since that day your warm lap left, I feel cold, my whole life is winter. I don’t know the seasons anymore.”
“Bruna, my sweetheart!” He sank onto the old divan near the stove. “The merciless trial of injustice—life—has separated us.”
I grabbed him by both arms and shook him:
“It has separated us, but don’t you leave! Please, don’t leave!” I burst into tears. I wanted to rest my head in his lap like I used to, to dream beautiful dreams, those old ones, the true ones. “I love you so much, so much, I can’t go on without you!”
“I am a beautiful, distant memory,” he whispered to me! He kissed me on the lips, on those lips he had desired, but which he had never kissed. He turned toward the door and was leaving.
I caught his hands and begged him:
“Please don’t leave! If you leave, take me with you to your world. Let me drown there, let me be lost, let me waste away.”
He turned back! He hugged me tightly, as if he were afraid I might slip away, then he let me go, spread his wings, and flew. I could only hear his voice trailing behind:
“Bruna, Bruna! Your happiness is this way... come... come... follow me, please. Without you, my flights are short, and my pains are great.”
But I was lying in the middle of the room, my wings were clipped, and I could not follow his flight. I just watched him and screamed at the top of my lungs:
“Don’t leave, please don’t leave!”
The bedroom door swung open violently and my husband, Ilir, walked in. The smell of whiskey filled the room.
“Why are you acting like a madwoman, why!? But you were born crazy.” The terrified children were behind his back.
My eyes were fixed on the past and my soul cried out:
“Leave, leave, leave, shut the door so I don’t see you, get lost.” At that moment I wanted to forget the present, and to live only with the past happiness, which I had kicked away in those years. My husband had lost the money gambling, and maybe we didn’t even have bread in the house, but in these moments I didn’t want bread, just a little warmth... a little warmth. I don’t know, but whenever the present strikes me, I turn back and rest my head on my beautiful past!
