Pran of Albania/Chapter 8

It was a strange life. One could not shut the doors and windows at night, for in the great stone ruin there were no doors; and the windows, instead of being the safe little shuttered holes of a mountain house, were big gaping openings in the thick stone wall. There was little roof left anywhere on the low spreading buildings. Pran thought, “It is lucky the winter rains are past.”

It was queer living all together like this, friends and strangers. For there were not just Thethi people, but people from a dozen other villages, from different tribes, even. They all used Pran’s language, but some of them had strange ways of saying the words she knew. And some of her words sounded strange to them, and often she and a stranger child would laugh a little at each other.

The blue-eyed girl she had befriended that first night stayed with Pran’s family every day now. Her name was Dil.

​“Where is your mother, Dil?” asked Pran one day as she and Dil sat in the ruined doorway.

Dil’s eyes filled with quick tears. “Ka dek,” she said, and her hand moved as mountain people move a hand speaking of the dead—a covering motion as of earth being laid over a grave. Dil had lived close to Slavic land, and now her village was called a part of South Slavia. Her mother had been killed by a Slavic bullet. She did not know where her father was nor her younger brother and baby sister. It was two years now since she had left her village, two years of wandering with other villagers, living now here, now there, wherever living could be found.

“At first,” she told Pran, “the Slavic soldiers camped quite close to us. They did no harm. I used to run errands sometimes for the men. I learned some of their language. Then one day more came. They burned the village. We all fled. I thought the children had gone on ahead—when I caught up with the rest they were not there. All suffered so—few families were left entire.” Dil turned away her head. Pran touched her hand but found no word to say.

Dil shook her sadness off, turned her head back, and smiled. “Sorrow once buried deep must not be brought to life again with words,” she said. “Better to talk of other things. I told you I had learned some ​of the Slav language. Once, speaking it, I saved my own life. It is good to know the enemy’s tongue. If they should get to Skodra I would be safer, Pran, than you would be. I'll teach you, shall I?”

Pran agreed gladly. Here in this barrack life there was no work and little play or singing. She found diversion sitting in the shadow of the wall with Dill learning the strange words, practising the sounds. “I like to learn it, Dil,” she said, “but we shall not need to speak it here. The Slavs cannot get to Skodra. Ndrek said Skodra was safe.”

“We thought that Prifti, my village, was safe too,” said Dil.

The days went on. The scorching hot sun of summer burned down on the barracks and their roofless walls. The Kiri River at the plain’s edge dried. It was hard to find water for anything.

At first there was enough to eat for Pran and Dil and Lukja and the boys. But always Lukja gave small helpings to her family. “No one knows where more will come from,” she said, and every day she went to the bazaar and sat with many other mountain women in the square, her long goat’s hair rope wrapped round her arm and shoulder, waiting for a chance to carry heavy goods home for the purchasers and so to earn a few pennies to buy food for all of them.

​Pran spun all the wool Lukja had brought from home and sold it, wound in great gray-white balls, on Bazaar Day. There was not much.

Some of the smaller children from the barracks went begging daily on the streets of Skodra. Nik and Gjon asked to go too. “No,” said Pran, “we are not as hungry as that—not yet.”

Gjon and Nik spent much time at the bazaar looking for errands to run. Gjon helped the pretzel man to sell his pretzels, carrying the big thin twisted pretzels strung on a long light stick over his shoulder.

But the cornmeal went fast, and all the pennies Lukja could gather bought but a small bagful.

One day Dil said, “I have a plan for us, Pran!”

“What!” asked Pran.

“I have eaten much of your food,” said Dil, “and I have shared your blanket; now I will help a little.”

She led Pran to the far end of one of the barracks, where an old woman sat by a heap of twigs and faggots.

The two girls greeted her. “See,” said Dil, “she makes brooms. But the dampness of this life in winter has got into her bones and she cannot go after the brush any more. She tells me that if we will get the brush she will show us how to make brooms, and she ​will make them too, and you and I can sell them on the street and at the doors of houses.”

The old woman’s name was Gal Faslija. By the strange sound of it Pran knew her tribe was Mussulman, not Christian like her own. “But her heart,” whispered Dil, “is as kind as any Christian heart. Kinder than some. She wants to help us.”

The old woman smiled toothlessly up at them. She said, “You are strong, you two—you are young. War is nothing to you. But you will be hungry soon as I am; and there will be no harvest in the fall for anyone. Sit down, then, and I will show you how brooms must be made if you would sell them in Skodra.”

Pran had often bound small twigs together for the hearth broom at home, but she could see that the brooms Gal made were stronger and better, made of less brittle twigs. And some of them Gal made with little handles sticking out from the center of the bunched faggots.

Dil and Pran sat down and watched her work, helping sometimes, and learning the knack of winding the flat binding strip and fastening its end. As they worked Gal told them where to go to-morrow for the brush they needed, told them how to choose it from the rest, how young, how stiff, what sort. “I ​will make two fine broom-makers of you,” she told them.

The girls worked hard all morning, worked till Gal had no more twigs left to work with, and their hands were sore. But that night, when they showed their neatly made brooms to Lukja, they were proud and heard her words of praise with glad hearts.

“Good daughters,” said Lukja. “No one can starve when there are five able fingers to a hand. You have done well.”

But in her heart she knew it was one thing to make brooms and another to sell them.

However, Dil and Pran started out early for the bazaar, and for a while business went well and copper coins jingled together in Pran’s tied kerchief. “Now I am really helping Lukja,” thought Pran. “I am doing just what Ndrek trusted me to do.” She felt content.

She and Dil spent two coppers for a tiny hot cup of coffee when the coffee boy went by with his swinging tray. In the afternoon, when they found Lukja sitting with the other women in the cobbled square resting from her porter’s work, they carried her a cup. Lukja smiled, thanking them. “Falemi ndérës,” she said, “I have two daughters now.” They all walked back to the barracks together at sunset, ​cheered by the unwonted treat and hopeful—against all hope.

For the warfare at the border dragged along. Now and then they heard rumors of the fighting and sometimes saw the trucks of wounded men being brought in to Skodra hospital. They had no way of learning where Ndrek was or if he fought there with the nearer tribes. Often at night Pran lay awake beside the sleeping Dil and wondered, and prayed prayers to St. Andrew for him and always to the kind-faced Mother painted in the church. “Let my bear’s tooth protect Ndrek,” she prayed.

The summer days wore on. Pran and Dil climbed into the thickets beyond the plain, gathering brush for their brooms, and they would bear great burdens of it back to Gal, who sat always in her desolate little corner, working with her crippled hands and smiling at the industry of her two helpers. Sometimes she told them strange stories out of old lore, and they would sit with nimble, busy fingers, beguiled like little children, listening.

The helpings of cornmeal were smaller now, and Pran and the rest were often hungry. The other hen had been eaten long ago. Nik wound his girdle tight about his body, straining at the broad band. “Look, Pran, I’ve grown so stout with life in Skodra that I ​cannot get my belt to wind round me the last turn!” “It’s true,” said Gjon, “the city makes fat men. Whoever saw a mountaineer with a paunch like these coffee-house men of Skodra?”

One day Lukja said, ‘“Hâna must go next, Pran, or we shall starve too soon.”

The kid was big now. Nik had taken it out toward the mountains to pasture every day. “Hâna is a full-grown goat,” Pran said a little sadly, smoothing the shaggy brown hair as the goat crouched beside her in their corner of the barrack.

Lukja looked at her, then at the goat. “She is yours, Pran. If you like you may take her to the bazaar to-morrow. Better to sell her than to make a feast of her, perhaps. She has been with us in our trouble like a friend. Better that she should go to some goatherd, and wax ever fatter and stronger. She will bring a good price, for she will give her owner kids and milk. For us, money is easier to keep and carry than meat or meal, and I have heard talk of late in the bazaar that Skodra itself will not be safe for long. Who knows?”

Pran’s heart was sad. She remembered well the day Hâna had been born in one corner of the upper room at home. She had been born too early in the spring, and she was weak—too weak to suckle properly. ​Pran had milked the mother goat and with a cloth sop had sopped up the milk and given the kid the milk-wet rag to suck. And then at night, when the room was cold, she had carried Hâna to her own corner and cuddled her close to herself all night under her blanket so she would be warm. Hâna was hers; she loved her. Moreover, now the goat seemed to her all that was left to her of the old happy, busy life at Thethi. If she should be sold then there was nothing left of all the things of home. She cried a little, secretly, that night.

But the next day she and Nik led Hâna in to market. Dil stayed with Gal to help her with the brooms, though now they sold so few they did not need to work hard. Gjon and Lukja waved them a good-bye. They would start later for their work in the bazaar.

“Hâna is a fine goat, and a she-goat besides,” said Pran to Nik as they walked along Rruga Madhe toward the town. “Moreover, she is my own goat, and I shall not sell her for nothing.”

When they reached the market square Nik watched her bargaining with customers, shaking a firm head when too small a price was offered her. “You will never sell her,” Nik murmured. Pran turned on him. ​Her voice was sharp, “Be still, you stupid little cucumber. I know what I am doing.”

But in her heart she knew she did not want to sell Hâna for any price.

So three days she brought the goat back to Lukja saying, “No one will pay enough.”

On the fourth day she and Nik took a short cut through a narrow back street to the bazaar. Pran’s feet dragged, and her heart was heavy. Had she not promised Ndrek she would help Lukja? Why then did she refuse so wickedly to sell the goat? She knew how low the cornmeal was now in Lukja’s last bag. She knew that yesterday Dil had not sold a single broom—that the pretzel man had sent Gjon away. “I do not need a boy any more,” he had said. To-day Hâna must be sold.

There was almost a lump in her throat as her bare feet shuffled over the cobbled way. Yes, to-day Hâna must go. How cruel it was, losing this last link with home and all the far, happy days of shepherding and peace. Her eyes blurred. She stumbled, nearly fell.

“Glory to your feet, Shalan! May you not stumble on misfortune!” Whose voice was that? Pran started. It seemed to come out of the gutter close to her. She looked about her. High stone whitewashed walls ​flanked the cobbled way, and at one side, sitting against the wall, Pran saw two children—a blond brown-eyed boy and a tiny girl, so tiny and so ragged crouching there she looked more like a heap of rags than a real child. Both children squatted by a small fire built in the gutter out of rubbish. On a stick stretched over the flame the boy had hung a rusty tin can with a wire handle, and in this something was bubbling softly.

Pran went closer to them. How ragged they were: the torn patched bits of cloth that clothed them both could hardly cover them. They were more ragged than any of the barrack children were. And they had pinched faces, and the pale blue eyes of the tiny girl looked dazed and hurt. It was the boy who had spoken, and his eyes now sparkled up at Pran. “Long life,” he said.

“Long life to you,” said Pran, “and thank you for your good wish toward me. May you eat well.” She peered into their improvised kettle. Only two crusts of old bread floated there, and a bone bare of all meat.

Pran’s heart went out to them. Two beggar children, mountain children once, as she could tell by the look of them and the remnants here and there of mountain costume among the torn patched clothes. ​Once refugees, as she was now, fled years ago from war, or famine, or the feud, perhaps. And now, friendless and homeless, they had come to this, life on the streets and now and then the chance of finding pitiful small scraps of food to eat.

“What is your name?” she asked.

The boy stood up, smiling.

“My name is Notz,” he said, “and this is Lul, my sister. We are refugees, like you; but we have been two years and more from home.” The little girl stood staring.

Nik looked now into the can the boy had set on the ground. “A hungry stomach needs more than you have there, Notz,” he said.

“Perhaps,” the boy answered, as if unwilling to admit the wretchedness of the meal.

Pran told her name and Nik’s. “Where do you live?” she asked.

Notz looked about him. “Here,” he said and laughed. And then, as if to defend himself from the pity gathering in Pran’s eyes, he went on, “For me—I do not mind, but it is hard for Lul. She is not strong. Sometimes she has the fever. Then we cannot beg—and there is nothing to eat. Yes, it is hard for Lul.” His eyes rested on Lul’s thin face.

Lul, hearing her name, looked a little fearfully ​now at the two strangers. Then she moved quickly close to her brother and took hold of his hand clutchingly. “Come away,” she whispered.

Notz knelt so that her face was on a level with his own. “Do not be afraid, little flower,” he said earnestly, softly. “These are friendly eyes that look at you. They are Maltsor, these two; even the goat is a mountaineer,” and to Pran, “She is afraid too easily.” He laughed, apologizing, then stood beside her.

Pran knelt down by Lul and put her arms out and held her. “How little she is,” she said wonderingly, “and how thin. Are you hungry, Lul?”

Lul smiled a feeble little smile. “Always, Zaiusha,” she said in a tiny voice.

Through the torn slip that covered her Pran could see the bones of her body showing. She looked at Notz, at Nik, and last at fat brown Hâna with her shaggy sleek coat.

“See, Lul,” she said, pointing to the goat, “see that fat, lazy beast? She has plenty to eat—plenty, and she does nothing for it. We are tired of her laziness, and now Nik and I go to the bazaar to sell her—for money, and with money bread can be bought—round yellow loaves. Come, you two.” She rose, her glance embracing both the beggar children. “Come ​with us now, and I promise, once Hâna is sold, you each shall have a great chunk of buk kalamuchit—a piece as big as your own heads. On my word I promise it.”

Lul looked at her half in fear, half in wonder, and then at Notz, to see what he would say.

Notz knelt suddenly in front of Pran and lifted the edge of her stiff skirt up to his lips to kiss it. His voice choked. “Never mind for me,” he whispered, “but Lul—Lul———” He turned and seized the little gazing thing in his arms almost fiercely. “She is my sister,” he explained, and showered kisses on her unkempt yellow hair.

“Bring her,” said Pran. “Drive Hâna on, Nik.”

They all went in procession down the alleyway and out into the bazaar.

Pran hugged Hâna rapturously. “You are worth something to-day, you lazy blockhead.” She held to Lul’s thin hand. “And—oh, what a big price I will get for her!” she leaned to say into Lul’s ear.

Never had Pran bargained so well. There were two customers, and soon Pran had them bidding against each other for the goat. The excitement of the dickering sent color into her cheeks. Her eyes flashed in mock anger when the bidders wavered at a higher figure. At last she got one of the men nearly to the ​sum she had asked. That was as high as either one would go—she felt that. “Take it,” she said, handing the goat’s rope to the highest bidder, “take it, but it is throwing away a good animal for nothing.”

She pocketed her silver greedily.

“Now—now—” she had not a glance for the departing goat—“come, my hungry birds, come where the corn is scattered.”

At the baker’s wooden shelf she paid for a great flat wheel of cornbread, broke it in half, and handed half to Notz and half to Lul. The famished youngsters sat down where they were and ate.

Pran, jingling her money, stood in utter satisfaction, watching them. “Good appetite!” said Nik.

While Notz devoured the bread in huge bites Nik squatted by him talking and asking questions. Pran helped Lul break off pieces of the loaf. “Eat all you want,” she said, and Lul in silent happiness crunched the coarse bread.

In a short time most of it was gone. The rest Notz tied up in a soiled cloth. “To keep,” he said.

Nik went close to Pran. “Pran,” he whispered, “they are without mother or father—home—or any relative at all.” His voice was shocked.

Pran took Lul’s hand again, getting a shy, timid smile of thanks. “You both come with us,” she said. ​“We are in the Turkish barracks with hundreds of others, but we still have food and a warm blanket. Come.”

Without question the two went with them. As they walked Pran heard Notz tell what beggar life was like in Skodra streets. “My father was Llesh Markut of Gruda,” he said once, and straightened himself a bit. “He was a chief.”

The name rang in Pran’s head. Where had she heard that name? Why, Dil—yes, Dil had used it—speaking of home. She looked hard now at Notz and Lul. Could it be possible———? But she must not imagine things and raise false hopes. But Llesh—the son of Mark—and chief—so Dil had told it. Pran’s heart beat faster. She caught up with Notz. “Tell me, Notz Son-of-Llesh, had you another sister—older than Lul?”

Notz moved his head sideways for “yes.” “We lost her when the village fled,” he said.

“What was her name?” Pran watched his lips that framed the syllable.

“Dil was her name,” he said, “but she is gone—whether alive or not, I do not know. I carried Lul—I could not find her when we rested that first day. I do not know.”

“I know,” said Pran and stopped herself. No, she ​would say nothing till Dil saw the boy. Excitement swept her. What if by the merest accident—a crazy twist of fate—the will of God—she had stumbled on Dil’s family—the lost brother and the baby sister. Her mind whirled with the possibility. “Hurry,” she called and trotted on ahead. If Dil were home———?

But Dil had not come back from the bazaar. Pran talked to Notz, asking him a hundred questions of the burning of his village two years back and of the flight. “How did your sister look?”

Nothing he said could dampen her hope completely. She told herself, “Do not be sure—do not be sure.” But in her heart she was sure, and the hours before Dil came dragged slowly by. A dozen times she ran outside the barrack, looking to see if Dil was on the way.

At last she came. Pran ran to meet her. “Dil—Dil———” She must not tell. She stopped her words.

When Dil came in Notz sat beside a little fire that Pran had kindled for the supper cooking. Lul was near him, watching Nik and Gjon playing “Chicken’s Leg” with a piece of string.

Dil said, “Who are these children, Pran?” And Pran’s heart sank. How foolish she had been to hope so much. “I found them on the street. We fed them. They are refugees like us, but have no place or ​mother or father—no one at all. The boy is Notz.”

Dil said the name after her, “Notz—and the girl?” “She is Lul,” said Pran.

Dil greeted Notz. The boy looked up at her. Pran watched, ready to cry almost for having hoped such great things and all so uselessly.

But Dil stood staring. Pran looked at her and saw in her face a look of puzzled unbelief—of fear almost. “Notz,” said Dil again. “Your father’s name—your village?” Her voice sounded like one asleep. Notz told them both. Pran saw Dil’s face go white. She took a step toward the boy and placed her hands on his two shoulders. “Look at me,” she said. Pran’s heart leaped up. Oh, kind Mother in Heaven—was it really true? She watched, spellbound.

Notz looked, and in his face there grew the look that was in Dil’s. “I know you,” he said slowly, with difficulty, and then he threw his arms around Dil’s neck, crying, “Muttra iamia—my sister—my sister!”

Dil spoke in a tense voice, ‘“Where—where is Marija?” Notz pointed toward little Lul. “She is so grown you could not know her, Dil. I call her Lul—my flower. She likes that name. She does not know her christened name, Marija. Call her—she will hardly understand.”

Dil took the bewildered Lul up in her arms. Crying, ​she hugged her. “No, she does not know. Tell her, Notz. She will believe you before me. Tell her I am her sister, come again.”

Pran laughed and cried at once, and Nik and Gjon, at last able to understand what had happened, jumped up and shouted, “Rrnoft—rrnoft—hurrah!” Pran hushed them in high good humor. “Boys, be still. With such rejoicing, such a calabrek, the barrack people will think that we have won a victory—that Kossova is ours again—or that we’ve taken Djakova at least.” She laughed, delighted beyond any words at Dil’s joy and to see the new brother and sister sparkling with this happiness that had fallen from the sky.

“While we are celebrating,” said Dil, “your fire goes out. The pot of beans gets cold. Come, let us have supper all cooked for Lukja when she comes and finds her family increased by two.”

Pran set more faggots on the fire and pushed the copper pot of beans against it. “It was all Hâna’s doing, Dil,” she said. “We went a short cut, and having the goat to sell I knew that I could get the children bread. A chance like that—and see what I have done—unknowing.”

Dil sat with Lul in her lap, and Notz beside her, his hand on her knee. The three faces glowed with ​happiness. “Glory to Hâna, then,” said Dil. “She did not come all the way from Thethi for nothing.”

When Lukja came and heard the great news she made the two newcomers welcome with a warm heart and warmer words, but in the darkness of the barrack that night she sat cross-legged, wondering how long it would be before her own brood with these others would have to starve and beg on the same streets where Notz and Lul had lived their beggar life. She laid her blanket over the stranger children and laid herself down beside her own two boys, feeling a weight of sorrow in her breast.