“God Never Leaves You in Peace”: A Morning’s Work and a Day’s Dread

The dawn has not yet arrived. Aunt Hasije has not slept. She heard every rooster at daybreak, and then the cursed one of Uncle Hasan’s, whose voice pierces like a gunshot. What kept her awake, beneath the roosters, was a dog howling through the night — howling and clawing at the mud with its nails.

AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION

Albanika Press

7/28/20264 min read

She rises. She slips into her work shalvars, ties her kerchief. With a single glance — like the true mistress of the house she is — she sets in order in her mind all the work that has to be done. Dishes. The pot on the fire. Bread to knead. Chickens to let out. The egg nest to find. Coffee to make for the aga when he rises. Bedding to fold. Cups to wash.

This is the opening of The Dog’s Howl, and the inventory of tasks is not preamble. It is the story’s subject.

What the Morning Carries

Before the howl becomes the story’s focus, Kokalari gives us something rarely foregrounded in literary fiction: the precise weight of a woman’s morning. Against the tasks — all of them, without exception, falling to Hasije’s hands — the story sets the household’s anxieties. A daughter not yet married, a dark curtain over Hasije’s eyes until a match is found. Winter stores to assemble with income that has dwindled to almost nothing. A husband who gambles and drinks raki day and night, throwing it all away on grapes and plums, who has never grown a brain in youth or old age. A son, Ali, far from her eyes — she does not know how his health may be.

And then, again, the dog.

Hasije argues with herself through the morning, trying to dismiss what she heard. That is what dogs do — they bark. Perhaps her ears deceived her. Perhaps it was not howling. She gives herself courage, now saying yes, now no. She cannot get her work done. Her heart aches. No one comes to visit.

The dread does not interrupt the morning. It moves alongside it, folded into the same hours as the knitting and the cooking and the worrying about the daughter and the money and the son far away. This is Kokalari’s method throughout the story: fear as a companion to labor, not a suspension of it.

The Portrait Through the Window

Hasije cannot stay inside. She goes next door to Aunt Nefise, clattering up in her clogs, opening the gate as if it were her own. They share what weighs on their hearts, each speaking of her own. Then the talk turns to the dog.

Nefise tries to steady her: they haven’t heard of anyone sick in the neighborhood; yesterday there was a letter from Ali saying he was well; don’t let your blood curdle. Hasije is partially reassured. She returns home. She sits for the midday meal and does not eat a single bite.

Then the windowpane clacks. Nefise is calling through the narrow opening. Uncle Hasan’s son is on his deathbed, vomiting blood. The doctors have given up. The wailing has already begun.

What follows is a portrait of a dying man assembled entirely through women’s voices — Nefise’s account of what Merushe saw at the gate. The man himself never speaks and barely appears. What we receive instead is the weight of what his death will mean: he is the pillar of the household; his wife has five children in six years of marriage; the sisters are running about; the mother’s cheeks are red from scratching. And then this:

“She had good daughters, but no luck in finding them good husbands. America took one son, and this one she had kept for her wretched old age… ribs like thread… he could barely stand, as if the wind might carry him off.”

The phrase “ribs like thread” is the story’s sharpest image — a body so reduced that a neighbor’s eye could see through it. It is delivered without ceremony, embedded in Nefise’s practical assessment of the household’s situation, and it carries the whole weight of a life measured against what it cannot withstand.

There, He Is Gone

Nefise closes her account with a compressed philosophy:

“Oh, dear sister, God never leaves you in peace. No one finds happiness in this world. Keep a wide belly and a wide heart — and in the end it all passes.”

It is not comfort exactly. It is something harder and more durable: the acknowledgment that suffering is the permanent condition, and that what survives it is not resolution but endurance — a wide belly, a wide heart, the continued performance of ordinary duty.

When evening comes, Hasije’s sister arrives. They speak in half sentences. He hangs between life and death. He closes his eyes; they wail. He opens them and looks about. And then, at the exact moment they are speaking, a howl is heard.

“There,” both women said, “he is gone.”

The howl does not prove a superstition. It confirms what Hasije’s body already knew through the night — what she could not dismiss despite her arguments with herself, what the morning’s work could not fully suppress. The three women go to the house. They stay through the night, eyes closing and opening. Morning comes. People arrive like flies on an oak. The dead man is carried away.

Hasije and Nefise stand head to head, whispering of the horror they have endured. Then each enters her own gate, thinking of life’s endless sorrows. The story ends where the morning began: in the space between one woman’s gate and the next, with the work still to be done and the weight still to be carried.

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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