“Ah, Home, Dear Home”: Neno Returns
“The second part of Old Neno’s Stories, opens with a return. Neno has been away — twenty days in Rome, visiting a granddaughter — and the story captures the first minutes of her arrival home with an energy that is entirely characteristic: affectionate, commanding, curious, and already in motion.
AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION
Albanika Press
7/28/20263 min read
She is kissing them before she has properly arrived. Muah… muah… Her eyes are misty with joy, her heart leaping. She places her hand on her chest. Where is Shuquri’s bride — why hasn’t she come out to meet her? The little ones — have they been getting into mischief? The grandson has grown into a man. And why does Manushaqe’s face look so worn?
“The second part of Old Neno’s Stories, opens with a return. Neno has been away — twenty days in Rome, visiting a granddaughter — and the story captures the first minutes of her arrival home with an energy that is entirely characteristic: affectionate, commanding, curious, and already in motion.
The Voice That Fills a House
The story is almost entirely Neno’s voice. She moves from person to person in rapid succession — kissing the grandchildren, instructing the daughters-in-law, asking after the sick, scolding the cat that snatches a piece of meat and runs up the stairs. The household arranges itself around her return. Coffee arrives. A coat is thrown over her shoulders. Ali, the youngest grandson, slips into her lap and goes rummaging in the pocket of her shalvars. The daughters-in-law and daughters are put to work.
Kokalari captures this not as the exercise of authority but as the restoration of a natural order. The house, Aishe the daughter-in-law reports, felt barren without Neno. The little ones went in and out with their heads bowed. Ali looked for her through all the rooms from morning till night.
“A house has no grace without an elder in it.”
This is not flattery. It is an observation about the social architecture of the household — the way the elder woman’s presence gives the space its structure, its warmth, and its sense of direction. Neno’s absence was felt not as freedom but as vacancy.
Questions as a Form of Love
What Neno does, from the moment she arrives, is ask. About everyone and everything: the pantry keys she left on the fireplace, the fireplace room, the brother-in-law’s boy who was ill, Xhevdet’s infant girl, her husband’s raki consumption in her absence, whether Shaqir has taken up gambling again, why his wife seems to have a long face.
The questions come faster than they can be answered. They tumble over one another, interrupted by the cat, by instructions about lunch, by a shout to the children to go out and play. What they create, cumulatively, is a portrait of a woman for whom home is not a place of rest but a living network of relationships, obligations, and mutual knowledge that she maintains through constant attention.
To ask about the pantry keys and Shaqir’s gambling and the infant girl and the sick boy in the same breath is to demonstrate that all of it matters, that nothing has slipped from her awareness in twenty days away. Neno’s questions are not idle curiosity. They are the means by which she reasserts her presence and resumes her place.
May the Grave Feel Like This
At the center of the story is a single line, delivered almost in passing, that contains the whole of what home means to Neno:
“Ah, you wretches… I thought I would never come back… ah, home, dear home — may the grave feel like this.”
The comparison is startling and entirely characteristic of Neno’s speech: the grave invoked not as a threat or a lament but as the highest possible term of praise. Home is so good that she wishes death itself could feel this way. The blessing is also a confession: she thought she would never come back. Twenty days in Rome, however marvellous, was also a kind of exile.
The story closes quietly, without drama. Neno climbs the stairs — tap-tup — goes into the small room, checks that everything is in its place, puts on her shalvars, shakes out her headscarf and hangs it on the nail. She lies down and pulls a child’s coat she finds on the floor over herself. She opens and closes her eyes a few times.
Her face brightens with the joy of being home. The daughters-in-law and daughters are busy working downstairs. The little ones have gone out to play. The house buzzes, and her soul rejoices.
It is one of the gentlest endings in the collection. And it earns its gentleness: everything in the story — the rush of questions, the cat, the coffee, the grandson in her lap, the coat thrown over her shoulders — has been building toward this moment of a woman lying down in her own room, in her own house, exactly where she belongs.
Old Neno’s Stories — the first English translation of Musine Kokalari’s work — is available now:
📖 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/old-nenos-stories-musine-kokalari/1149899284
📖 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Nenos-Stories-Selected-Literature/dp/B0GYGKL94G
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