A Story

I don't know why I wrote this piece over the grave of my late grandmother. I don't know, is it a confession before her, as if before God because I loved her so much, or an objection, wanting to express the opposite of her wise words, many of which have stayed in my memory and which I use as proverbs, but also keep as a beacon on the long road of life? While she was alive I didn't appreciate her much, neither the poor soul, nor myself. Whenever I found myself in a tight spot, I took the buses, the trains, because there were no airplanes or cars at all back then, or they were only for privileged people. I think I was privileged at that time too. I had no car, no other means of transport, and no real estate, but I was still the owner of a very great fortune: I was the owner of my grandmother's proverbs, and also her grandson. Because of her excessive care I stayed a bit smaller than my friends, and I often complained to her, but with her jokes like salt on the stew of words, she would smile mockingly and tell me:
“My grandson, grandma’s good boy, a person needs neither kilos nor tricks to become a man of sense. A stone may be small, but carefully carved it takes the corner of the house, while many other stones are left on the roads and ravines, beaten by the wind and rain, eroded and turned to sand, tumbling down into the flow of the Vjosa (she meant the river).” Even though her words flowed like a river, they came clean to every mind and lip that wanted to drink and be refreshed, or to climb higher up the stairs of our four-story building, and even higher, because my grandmother, with her sweet mouth, lifted the hearts of everyone who knew her.
I often asked my grandmother things when I was little, because now I have nowhere to ask her, because she has gone where she was needed most. As high as she held her thoughts, her beauty, her words, that is how high she has climbed. Because even there where the angels live, people are categorized and valued according to their wisdom, not like on earth where the fool leads the wise. For example, like Sali who drowned Albania in blood, or Edi who puts people in prison for electric lights. Oh, I forgot, my grandmother often used to say, “If your thoughts and words don't give you light, go herd the jackdaws.” Jackdaws, she said, are some large birds that eat carrion, and from the carrion of words, grandma's boy, you must stay away. And I, as if to spite my grandmother, enamored with written words, became a writer and a poet. When I returned from the University and showed my grandmother my Diploma, she looked me in the eye and replied:
“Don't boast about this, grandma's boy, this is a piece of paper, and people use papers according to their needs,” and she put her hand on her behind. I felt offended, but she went on. “I have dozens like this diploma, and I let out a… let me not say it, oh God, because then I'm afraid you won't read any further. What am I supposed to do with this compared to a cow,” she told me, “a cow fills your pot with milk, while you graduated to fill the pot with words. Alright then, grandma's boy, when you have no bread, will this give you bread?” I tried to convince her that this piece of paper gives you bread and stew, because the government gives it to wise people, and then puts them to work based on it. But my grandmother apparently knew the business of work better, because I remember her words to this day. “Pilush,” she said, because that's how she affectionately called me, “these paper diplomas, one government gives them and another takes them away.” But I answered her, annoyed:
“Grandma, we only have one government here!”
“And that is the bad part, because when there is only one, it does whatever it wants.”
My father, who was a communist, paced around the house, because he didn't like her words, and snapped back at her:
“You're going to get us all in trouble not only with what you're saying, but you're also putting ideas in the children's heads!”
She would laugh and start singing:

“Oh Thanas, bless your mouth, I say,
That is what I wanted to convey.
For a lofty mind is better instead,
When a man carries it inside his head…
Than a piece of paper with ledgers and lines,
That isn't even fit for our behinds…”

My father would light a cigarette and sit down to work at his desk. He would leave the conversation because he knew that the longer he dragged it out, the more he would have to hear.
It made me angry that she insulted my diploma, but when I think about it now after so many years, working with two diplomas as a shepherd of the computer room at the University of Greenwich in London, I say to myself, how much my grandmother knew. She didn't bother with the Universities of the Party's time. She called the party a hand-picked flock from a pack of power-hungry wolves, who start eating their nation with a hearty appetite. But then she would add, but the Nation, the Nation will stick in their throats one day. But in fact, I don't see my grandmother's words coming true, because the nation in their throats is doing them good.
Forgive me for going on so long, but it's my grandmother's fault, who would spin a yarn, and tie you hand and foot and wouldn't let you go. If she were alive now, she would tie up both Sala and Edi, and she would take them to her donkey stall, because she had a good stall for fools.
In fact, I've been picking on my grandmother for no reason for so long, but all this happened because she went back on her word, or rather, her word didn't turn out to be prophetic as she had told me. I remember very well that spring Sunday, when people were taking a stroll in front of the balcony after work, and that evening when she said the word to me. A flock of beautiful girls was passing in front of the balcony, wearing joy on their lips and the beauty of their age on their bodies. I had fixed my eyes on them and was looking at them one by one; my grandmother poked me with the needle she used to knit socks and brought me to my senses.
“Mind here,” she told me, “here, leave them be, damn them, mind your own business, and leave them be, because you'll get nowhere with them.”
I laughed.
“Don't laugh, you rascal, because bad habits are learned in childhood and in youth!”
“Why, grandma, aren't they learned in adulthood?”
“No, grandma's boy, because when a person grows up and is watered by life, his stature shoots up, it's hard for him to have a light mind.”
“How wise you are, grandma, where did you learn all this, at which University?”
My grandmother would take out 5-6 knitting needles from the apron she had for making sweaters and tell me:
“I have several Universities, here, look…” she would take out a needle and poke me in the behind. It hurt and I would jump up. Then she would take out another and poke me in the stomach, and I would yell. And so on, and then she would add, “These needles pierce, but a word pierces worse, or it heals. That is why you must choose the sweet word, dip your tongue in the beehive of the brain, and let it out not like my needles when they pierce, but like my needles when they build,” and she would point to the sweaters. “You must use it with sweetness, like the proverbs I often tell you.”
“Grandma, what bad habits are learned in childhood and in youth, so that I don't learn them?”
“For example, tobacco. It is learned when you are young, and if you learn it, it turns your mind and your house to smoke.”
“I never smoke tobacco, and I never will.”
She would stroke my head and add:
“For example, hashish and drugs, because if you learn them, you will be drowsy your whole life, and you won't understand anything about life.”
“There is no hashish in Albania,” I would tell her.
“There is… there is…” she would say, “but you don't recognize it; all these speeches being made are hashish, to intoxicate people and make them run after the government's caravan.” I would look at my father out of the corner of my eye, and my grandmother would smile and tell me, “Leave your father be, because he too smokes hashish over his books all day long, which is why he is afraid of my words.”
I would grab her by the apron and tell her, “What else… what else!”
“There are plenty,” she would tell me, “even these girls you look at on the street, who mess with your mind, they are hashish!”
I would look at the girls on the boulevard and laugh:
“No, grandma, these are the springtime of the Party!”
“These are cholera, so stay away from them!”
“Grandma, if I stay away from them now, shouldn't I be afraid of getting close to them when I grow up?”
“No, because after fifty, this disease dies,” she told me, “you don't learn hashish after fifty.”
Forgive me for all this that I am writing to you; here I want to begin my truth, and the lie of my late grandmother, who was wrong in the words she told me, and “ruined my life”!
The day I turned fifty, in the spring, because I was born in this season, I stripped off my heavy clothes, just as a fox strips off its fur, and went out naked among friends and comrades. When I say naked, I don't mean today's thongs, but simply in a light shirt and trousers, with sandals so I would be light on my feet, but also with my head held high, certain according to my grandmother's word that the flu would no longer catch me, the sunlight would not kill me, and I no longer feared learning either tobacco or hashish. Wandering all over the place, because as I told you, I had no more fear, I went from garden to garden and from street to street, and off the beaten path. And the elders don't say for nothing that by roaming a lot, you will hear a lot, and you will learn a lot.
One afternoon, a small tree caught my eye, with a shapely trunk, and beautiful, hanging branches. I really liked its leaves, like thick hair, with a tuft at the top in the shape of a head. The evening breeze was blowing and swaying it all, and under the rays of the setting sun, my eyes remained fixed on it…
I went home, but my mind was with the little tree; the next day I looked for it and found it again… and again and again, the more I looked at it, the more beautiful it seemed to me. Every day I wanted to look at it more and more, but in fact, even when I left it and went home, even there it stood before me with all its beauty. It often happened that when I walked away from the little tree, whether by day or evening, a sadness and melancholy would come over me. Then, to calm myself, I wanted to be alone, to close my eyes, and to be with the little tree that the rays of the setting or rising sun, together with the breeze, swayed before my eyes in beautiful dreams. I started not being myself anymore, sometimes happy and sometimes troubled; it seemed to me this was from the little hashish tree I looked at every day. Sometimes I approached it closer and sometimes further away, but the effect was the same: I felt myself growing, I felt that in front of this little tree I was myself, and I felt handsome and brave. When I left, I seemed powerless, lonely, and poor.
One afternoon I took my grandmother's photograph out of the drawer just as we take out the icon of the Holy Mary, and I had a long conversation with her, but in fact now only I was speaking; I no longer heard my grandmother's voice, nor her advice. Great God, I said to myself, what is this business, and I am now past fifty, and I shouldn't be in any danger, because my grandmother told me that bad habits are learned in childhood and youth. What are we going to do, grandma, I told her, my sleep is ruined, my appetite is gone, you told me that after fifty I would sleep peacefully and without worries? But my grandmother spoke just as much as you who are reading me are speaking. Oh Lord, oh Christ, help me. I didn't have the heart to curse my grandmother, nor to curse myself, so I left everything to time, and time made me go to my grandmother's grave with the things that had happened to me.
I fell asleep and woke up with the hashish tree on my lips, for taste I had its scent, and for light the gaze of its beautiful eyes. Whenever I looked at it up close, I wanted to drink the cups of wine it held on its chest, but also the sweet spring of its lips. One day I saw it on the seashore stripped of its leaves, and then I was completely amazed; I wanted to measure its whole body with my lips, and caress it with my hands until the soft and silky skin of its body remained in my hands. I was devouring its two arched shoulders with my eyes, while I descended the valley of its chest with a waterfall gaze, and my eyes remained hanging on two little cherries that had deep roots in its breasts. I set off toward it, no longer asking about my grandmother's words. Whatever happens, happens, I said, fifty or thirty, it turns out to be the same. I greeted it with a trembling voice, and I told it the truth my grandmother had told me. I told it that after fifty a person shouldn't be afraid of vices, but she laughed, smiling and shining all over as if she had drunk the sea, the sky, and the sun, and answered me:
“These cups of wine,” she told me, and pointed to her chest, “are two large glasses that neither care about nor know age; they intoxicate every drinker of theirs, but also every being that is fragile to beauty, fragility, and elegance.”
“But I am past fifty! And my grandmother…”
“I don't know how old you are, but I see that your thirst is greater than those of a young age, and here your honorable grandmother has blundered in her proverbs and advice.”
I didn't want to believe this; they used to call my grandmother to weddings and funerals for her proverbs and jokes, they would come and pick her up in a carriage, because there were no cars, and the one my father had, he wouldn't give her, because he had it for Party business. But it seems that when a person dies, perhaps their proverbs die too.
“Leave the proverbs be,” she added, and unbuttoned her chest!
“What are you doing!” I saw that I was getting dizzy from a sweet game of glances, and my mouth filled with a liquid and sugary substance. I won't go on any further, because I shouldn't, but after I drank the two springs and bathed in the sea of kisses, I felt that without these springs a person cannot live, nor can they restrain themselves, whether old or young. Nature has built these little trees in such a way that, at any age, they refresh you and win you over, but also fill you with desires and beautiful dreams. I say this with conviction, from the day I met this little hashish tree with leaves and hair like the moonlight, but also with the stature of the morning sun's beauty. Since that day I feel more complete, even though, as my grandmother used to say, after fifty I would sleep peacefully… but without my little tree I could not sleep peacefully. After I won her scent, her fragility, and her fruits, regardless of age, I can say that I feel complete. One day, to disprove my grandmother's only piece of advice, I took my intoxicating tree of love and went to my grandmother's grave, and there I wrote the truth of her lie…