Pyrrhic Victory

I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this: Flamur’s transfer from Porsche Albania to Peugeot Albania is a promotion, he says, because there are more of the latter to service, and quantity tends to outrun quality. His first job at Auto Pasion Sha gave no sense of either: he’d come home irritable and red-eyed, having nothing to say about his day except that he was damned relieved it was done. Well, done for eleven hours, anyway. I had miscarried our first chance at a child while he toiled away at Pasion Sha, and when the Porsche job availed itself, we began to hope for family life anew. For two years I couldn’t get pregnant, despite all comfort and prayers. Flamur would finish work by five, help cook dinner or walk with me to a nearby restaurant, drink with me a single glass of red wine to add iron and ambience to the mix, talk and snuggle and gradually sink to sleep musing about Porsches—ours inevitably, wherever a backseat baby might possibly fit.

            We had met in Krujë when life was less complicated. He drove busloads of visitors to the castle I guided, referring so constantly to Skanderbeg we had to smile with those who laughed at the sound of that name for the first time; when Flamur had hours to kill I’d find spare minutes to do the same, and we imagined in due time a little Majlinda to lend future to our present. Flamur quipped that I had only the past in mind as a castle guide, and then blithely shrugged when I put it to him that driving a bus defied any anchor of time whatsoever, for he could be here or there tomorrow or yesterday, or any given day.

            Marriage bore that out occasionally. He wasn’t driving bus anymore, but sometimes he had to canvas the country to drum up sales beyond the Porsche showroom. Our little country, oddly, supplied him with overnight stints to the not-so-far reaches and the guesswork of when he’d come back. It surprised me, then, that when our darling Majlinda was born, we took two completely undisturbed weeks away from Tirana to enjoy the Ionian Sea near Dhërmi. Majlinda’s delivery had been difficult—in the back of my mind I wondered if these days in Dhërmi were Flamur’s attempt to help me forget: he had driven me to Hygeia Hospital in the middle of the night and stayed with me bedside until, reasonably, the contractions had subsided. The onerous Auto Pasion Sha was literally outside my hospital window, but Porsche Albania was only a stone’s throw farther on the Rruga Industriale; I glanced westward countless times that morning in hope that our baby would be born beyond the work day. To pass the time I considered, forlornly, the dozens of gypsies working this busy rruga, some for a pittance in windshield washing never requested, some for a more shameless pandering to the drivers of Porsches, et al. Fat mothers with babies unweaned would fetch whatever the idle drivers might unpocket; pre-mothers (called heifers, I knew, by certain vulgarians) would garner whispered prices in the exchange of a calling card. I had some gypsy friends in Krujë and now imagined them in the middle of Rruga Industriale. Indignation and nausea welled up as I went into searing labor pains, which went on relentlessly through the afternoon. I panicked when I couldn’t hear Majlinda’s first cry, drowned out by my screams and fading consciousness. Soon thereafter, Flamur arrived and we melded into a picture of serenity, as should be. I didn’t want to bring up any of the birthing difficulties, but Flamur must have heard from the nurses, so I told him what had preoccupied my thoughts. He listened and formed his response. Short from saying I was ridiculous, he reminded me of the hit-and-miss conditions of anybody’s fate. We all inherently have something to be sick about, he reflected, and whatever the Rruga Industriale begets, well, time and torque (his word) would tell and heal.

            Not that I knew at the time (and not that he had expressed plans to change jobs), it so happens that Peugeot Albania—his promotion withal—is located still further northwest on the Rruga Industriale; whatever it begets is far from abandoned in my mind today.

             

            Our new apartment overlooking Liqeni i Tiranes is smaller than the little house we left, and its location on the south side of the city forces a much longer drive for Flamur everyday. I like the lake, despite its straight-edged embankment on our end. Traffic is heavy here, part of a highway ring, but the forested paths on the other side of the lake invite a nice walk every morning. Majli tries to stay awake as I push the pram slowly, but well before my coffee stop she’s deeply asleep. I tend to read half a book during these walks, especially if nobody bothers to chat.

            But honestly, I want such chats. Shqipe, for instance, in circumstances much like my own (only with twins!), compels me to drop whatever I’m reading and stay for another espresso. She reads, too, in the avalanche that becomes each day: while one kid sleeps, the other one screams, and breastfeeding happens, as needs be… We gloss over what we want to say about Flamur or her Lorence or holiday plans—November notwithstanding—and politely we spar over the bill as if to unload our wishing well coins. We walk a stretch together and promise to meet more often, unencumbered, before she veers her double pram to her path home, and I maneuver Majli’s easier weight around the remaining perimeter of the lake.

            She tossed me a book last week by Kadare that was thin enough to read in an afternoon. Now was a good season to take it in, she said, ambiguously. “Even leaves, mere leaves on a tree, knew when it was time to fall,” she quoted from memory, and I just assumed it was to adumbrate our lovely extant sojourns through the yellow woods. The novel, about the mysterious death of the entitled Successor, wasn’t lovely at all. Shqipe had stopped short of the conclusion of her quote, “—but that man pretended not to.” I read the full sentence aloud to Flamur that evening, as he’s always been interested in political stories of blind guides, sycophants, disappearances and such, but he wasn’t today much in the mood to talk. I flipped to a clearer statement of Kadare’s purpose, that “regimes change, as do customs and cathedrals, but crimes are ever the same.” Again Flamur didn’t really react; nonetheless, he took the book into his briefcase before leaving for work the next morning. I imagined he had discretionary breaks in his day to sit back and relax, but then again, he was getting home later and later—in part, he grumbled, due to the traffic.

            I’ve missed Shqipe this week; funny we haven’t by now exchanged numbers, but the serendipity of our meetings is a bit of what defines us. And anyway, I’ve been rather preoccupied by a new forest friend: a dog that seemed to drop from the sky. She was a whimpering mess in the middle of the path, and a couple joggers aided me in shifting her to the grassy ditch. “She’s been mauled,” said one jogger, and the other agreed that her outlook was grim: while no major bones were broken, a big toe dangled sickeningly and her right ear was all but ripped off.

            “What should we do?” I appealed to the joggers, who were evidently set on the logic to ‘let nature take its course’. After some hemming and hawing, one promised to alert a dogcatcher (the humane society, I clarified, for my own satisfaction); the other jogger mostly shook her head, and they continued on their route.

            I watched the animal curl up to try to sleep and decided to return to the coffee hut for a bowl of water and biscuits. But where was Majlinda? The pram was nowhere in sight as I swirled in every direction. The joggers? Someone lurking behind as we bent down to the dog? “Majli? Majli!”

            A man walking his dog called from a bend some thirty meters away. I raced frantically toward what he was pointing to in the direction of the lake. His dog was a Rottweiler, unleashed but firmly in the man’s clutch, and both were looking at me with concern for my wits. I heard nothing that he was apparently saying, nor Majli’s cries as I discerned the pram resting against a tree, down from the path, about half-way to the edge of the lake.

            I picked her up and checked every part of her with trembling fingers; she cried into my shoulder and held my neck tightly. The man with the Rottweiler descended to see if she was unhurt, and I nodded my head barely able to mouth out a ‘thank you’. He pulled the pram up to the path and set the brake. “Thank Rex; he’s the one that found her.”

            He asked again if all was fine, and assured him all was. I waited for him to continue on, past where I had been. Oddly, Rex didn’t sniff out the injured dog, which was not nearly as far off the path. Or maybe she had in the intervening seconds moved herself away from this hellish turn of events.  Keeping Majli tight against my shoulder and pulling the pram back to that point, I was strangely relieved that the dog was still curled up, still shivering despite the warmth of the day. A passer-by suggested she wouldn’t survive the night, and callously left. I waited a few minutes more, put Majli back to her interrupted nap, then summoned all strength and balance to lift the curled dog—pathetically trying to growl away my efforts—onto the tarp tray between the pram wheels.

            I kept her there, sleeping, in our garage, checking on her several times before Flamur came home. “Why didn’t you call me before doing this?” he wanted to know. Because I was more concerned about Majli rolling away, I wanted to say, but didn’t. “He can’t stay here,” he bluntly decided.

            “She’s a she. She’d likely die out there alone.”

            “Well then she needs a vet.”

            “Will you find her one?”

            His silence lingered. “Maybe.”

            We ate a hastily made dinner and, after Majli’s bath and lullabies, I went down to the garage to tend to the dog. She had crawled out of the tarp tray and lay under the grill of the car. She slurped a little water after our mutually awkward angles, and though she didn’t chomp at the pieces of sausage I had cut, she did gnaw at them and rested more contentedly. I pet her for a while and then sat upon the workbench to flip through a couple Saramago novels I had read last year. In Blindness, there is a dog of tears—no name otherwise—and I sought some connection to my present ward. I came to this page and read aloud (more to the car than to the mammal below): “death frightens it, it still takes two steps forward, suddenly its fur stands on end, a piercing howl escapes from its throat, the trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.”

            No. That didn’t seem to apply to this mongrel. On to The Cave, and the one named ‘Found’. Before Cipriano Algor named him so, he tried to feed him, as I’d done now, but thinking it out more playfully than I had, posed a reasonable “perhaps you’re one of those dogs with too much self-respect, perhaps you don’t want me to see how hungry you are.” His daughter Marta, who loves her father as any of us would wish, first of all inquires about a name [ah—I knew this novel would speak to me again!] and then advises him to let the night determine this dog’s fidelity.  “If he’s still here tomorrow, that name should be the first word he hears from your mouth,” to which Cipriano wags his head and proposes “it would be appropriate to call this one Lost”. Saramago slurs all dialogue, so “There’s another even more appropriate name, What’s that, Found, That’s no name for a dog, Neither is Lost. Yes, you’re right, he was lost and now he is found, that’s what we’ll call him then, See you in the morning, Pa, sleep well, Yes see you in the morning”—and that’s the note I wanted to leave things, so I turned off the light and went up to bed.

            The next morning—just a couple days ago—I woke up as usual after Flamur had left, and fed Majlinda and, thinking of Found from the very start, made my way down to the garage with fresh water and new cuts of cheese and sausage. She wasn’t there, though, and scribbled upon the inside flap of The Cave, which I had left there in my drowsiness, was a note from Flamur that bid me not to worry, ‘I’m taking the dog to a vet. Don’t get too attached—I can get you a cleaner puppy if that’s what you need.’

            I was furious and called him immediately. “You dare run me around like this, with memos that creatures are interchangeable? You better be sure Found makes her way back!”

            “Who’s Found?”

            “The dog you’ve brought to the vet, if you haven’t written a lie!”

            “Calm down, I took…Found, you want to call her?...to a place that will nurse her back to health. It’s really no good to have a stray dog in contact with the baby—”

            “You leave Majli to me! I never put her health at stake and never will!”

            “I wasn’t accusing you, darling—”

            “Well, I wish we had talked more about this last night…”

            “You were down in the garage when we could have talked. And now I’m occupied with a hundred things, as you can imagine.”

            “I can imagine.”

            “Don’t mock me.”

            “Will I see Found today?”

            Silence. “Let’s eat out tonight. And by the by we’ll check up on your dog.”

            I had no idea when I took Majli on our daily walk that the vet was located just southeast of the fringe of the park. So when Flamur drove us there after working hours, I was frustrated that he hadn’t let me in on its location. I pushed him to ask the security guard to give us a glimpse, but that was naturally off-limits: he’s only a guard, Flamur justified, without real authority.

            I’d need to come back tomorrow—perhaps to take her home. Flamur still wasn’t sold on this idea, yet didn’t want to argue. “Let’s go to Muj Muj”—a restaurant we’ve occasioned on anniversaries and such.

            “We could practically walk there from here—in fact, we can take the path where I found Found.”

            “It’s already getting dark, and we don’t have the pram.”

            “Maybe Majli’s too much in the pram. She’s just weeks away from walking, you know.”

            As a compromise, perhaps, Flamur parked at the nearby Juvenilja Castle, where kids older than Majlinda jumped on trampolines and climbed sundry jungle gyms as their parents looked on. A couple sheep were tethered to stakes to provide a modest petting zoo, and further away (no real surprise to Flamur) a dozen barking dogs were caged and barking chaotically as part of Juvenilja’s policy to keep canines clear away from the eating area and the children. I never liked the place for this fact.

            However, it was Muj Muj down the street that was the focus of boycott. Sandwich-boarded expats with inchoate Albanian were trying to dissuade customers from entering, citing vague concerns of ‘human trafficking’. Flamur ignored them, largely, but I had to ask what they meant. “Can you speak English?” a woman my age asked, to which I nodded. Flamur took Majlinda into the restaurant.

            “This business license has been a cover for illegal immigration.”

            “For Albanians who want to leave?”

            “For mostly Albanian women who are misinformed about work opportunities.”

            “Is this a prostitution sting?”

            “We aren’t part of a sting operation—we’re concerned residents here informed by our embassies that human trafficking is happening from seemingly innocent places like this.”

            “What embassies? Are the women going to those countries?”

            “Should that make a difference?”

            I didn’t respond to that, nor their remonstrations when I started to make my way in. Somebody amongst them said, “you have a baby, ma’am, for God’s sake!”

            Inside, Flamur had not yet been seated—business appeared unaffected by the boycott and, considering the crowd and the questions about the place, I asked him whether we should find somewhere else to go. “Listen, I’ve had a long day, starting with the details of the dog. I can stand to wait ten minutes for a table.”

            We waited twenty, which allowed me to feed Majli (the hostess was pleased to warm up a jar of pureed carrots) and Flamur to make some business calls. He normally wouldn’t do so during dinner, but we technically weren’t dining yet. I tried not to eavesdrop—it would only be his side of a conversation, anyway—but I couldn’t help taking inventory of the names he’d be using—in the objective case, almost never as a name of address: Qendrim and Shpend and Jetmir and Leka—they could all be sales reps or suppliers or mechanics; Rezarta and Valmira and Tefta—who were these women? One call dwelled on a certain style of hubcap and why it shouldn’t be difficult to complete a set; anyone who drove the Rruga Industriale would find hundreds of hubcaps on display on tarps that spindly venders could bundle up in a flash. Windshield wipers, hood ornaments, antennas were bargains here; less so were engine parts or fluids or anything else that would actually make a vehicle function.

            By the time a table was available, Majli was restless and not compliant to a high chair. Flamur and I traded her in our laps, and eventually, as I walked her to the terrace, she fell asleep. Flamur quaffed his wine and half of mine, I noticed, as he pragmatically made some more calls; spontaneously, then, I decided to walk toward Juvenilja. It wasn’t the car I sought—I didn’t have keys to it, anyway—nor the playground equipment that still had some kids in the dusky watch of their parents. I wanted to seek out the caged dogs and imagine Found in at least such conditions, if not better. I didn’t quite understand this set-up. Every kennel was full and some had two or three dogs of different types. There were yippers and growlers and tail-waggers and sleepers, none of which seemed to be of particular concern to any of the diners. The Juvenilja also had rooms atop the restaurant, and maybe these dogs belonged to hotel patrons. Or maybe they were strays from the park, rounded up by the city, only coincidently placed near the restaurant’s sheep.

            Majli woke up in the chorus of barks and naturally started to cry. I didn’t want to cause duress, but I was drawn to one Shara Mountain dog that seemed way out of place. “Do you know Found?” I asked her softly, because, despite the thrashing about in other cages, this big dog was calm as could be. Her eyes had no answer concerning Found, but seemed to appreciate my visit. “Sorry, I didn’t bring you anything to eat…” I said, and put the back of my hand against the mesh. I calculated how long I’d been away from Muj Muj, how much Flamur might miss us, how meaningful this day was, or wasn’t. When I returned, passing again the protesters (though fewer in number by now), Flamur was nearly finished with his meal. Mine was untouched and invariably cold. He didn’t ask where I had gone, so I didn’t tell him. Instead, I ventured a question that had been on my mind since I last talked with Shqipe, whose name I decided not to reference: “Can’t we take a few days in Dhërmi?”

            “Really! Now?” I could see he both wanted and didn’t want to bring up the hassle of the dog, as a chief reason my request didn’t make sense. Decent man that I still think he is, he chose a more rhetorical route: “How much do you want in life?” I was going to form a ‘quality over quantity’ retort, but reigned in that option, knowing there was little to gain from self-righteousness.

            There’s a story Flamur told me back in Krujë, as we lay in the back row of his bus. It made its impact—who knows, maybe it was the lodestone that made me fall in love—but I hadn’t given it much thought beyond his faraway, one-off narration. He had a friend, “more likely an acquaintance,” he said, “and we knew each other since grade school, even though Rinor skipped a lot of days. I lost track of him when his family moved to Skopje, and was surprised to see him in my auto mechanics class the year before graduation. We had a good time as a class—manipulating carburetors and installing turbo headers, equally outlandish on Yugos or Mercedes 300’s. Rinor wasn’t a good student but he hammed things up well, and before summer holiday he scribbled on my t-shirt his phone number and the message to call him to party, Party, PARTY. I didn’t call him and had probably a good enough summer—can’t remember one way or another. Our final year began in September and auto mechanics was back in swing, and someone said a joke that reminded me of Rinor, so I asked, ‘where is Rinor, anyway?’ ‘Didn’t you hear?’ somebody said, ‘He died a month ago, hung himself—’ ‘That’s still not known,’ another demurred, and my initial thought was that they were all orchestrating some macabre joke on my gullibility. Well, as the following days bore out, there was no joke here at all. Rinor, it turned out, had lamely attempted to bring a Serbian-speaking element into Tirana’s radio-theft market, stepping over who knows how many lines. There was nothing but sketchy information, only the fact that he hung from scarf on a tree in the area between the women’s prison and Bektashiane, and that both his femur bones were broken. No one ever determined—publically, at least—whether Rinor hanged himself or was hanged. If a suicide, he dragged himself like a slug to that tree. If a homicide, he might have not felt the breaking of his legs.”

            I hadn’t spoken the whole time he told me this story, instead soaking it in as something more than Rinor’s. I felt priggish, like a history guide, when I ventured to add, “the Romans didn’t break the legs of Jesus,…assured, I suppose, that he was already dead.” I was nestled then against Flamur’s chest when I said so, and though he verbalized nothing in return, I felt him shutter and squeeze me tighter.

            That evening, despite the Krujë schedule that remained non-stop, I took the bus back with Flamur. He asked me to point out some sights to his sleepy passengers, joking that the increase in tips would provide us a better hotel room. I complied by explaining the conspicuous mushroom bunker that sprawled an outlook of a hairpin curve, and the incongruous statue of George W near the bakery that gifted him bread. Indeed, the passengers gave me an abundance of lek and dollars and rubles and euros, and advice to stick with this driver who beamed the whole way home—theirs, at least, for the comfort hotels bring.

            And now, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this: a note in Flamur’s trousers as I parse through the laundry hamper; it might as well have been written in Sanskrit, but guide that I am, I’d do the deciphering. And, in black-inked Albanian I still had to do something of the sort.

Make sure there’s no screwing this up—you call the distributors off and tell them we’re facing our own financial problems, another pyramid fiasco, whatever. Make something up. I landed you Peugeot because their frog heads understand it better than the nazis. We’ll turn whatever stock we need, not because some internet code can track it, but because we’ll make the damn car run, and nobody’s budget will be broke. Fuck their questions—but do it like a diplomat. And don’t ever text me or email on shit like this. Anyone can read between the lines. What you can do is keep up the wife and kid routines—that’s the message everybody wants to read, and why the hell not? I got mine too, and who would deny that the future of our little land depends on how we people it?

            Remember, you’re mine, and I’m forever yours,

                                                                                                R.