“I Understand Nothing”: Proverbs, Wheat, and the Gap Between Generations
It is a summer afternoon, so hot you do not know where to sit. Neno has taken herself to a corner of the courtyard where the sun does not reach. Her shalvars are lifted, her feet bare, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She has been husking wheat for a week, her eyes aching, and she is nowhere near finished. The sacks stand lined up in the shed, waiting for her hands.
AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION
Albanika Press
9/8/20264 min read
It is a summer afternoon, so hot you do not know where to sit. Neno has taken herself to a corner of the courtyard where the sun does not reach. Her shalvars are lifted, her feet bare, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She has been husking wheat for a week, her eyes aching, and she is nowhere near finished. The sacks stand lined up in the shed, waiting for her hands.
Next to her sits Haso, stuck to her every afternoon, lending a hand with the work now and then. The daughters-in-law are inside. No one is to be seen about. They have not spoken for a while.
This is the domestic setting in which I Understand Nothing takes place: not a grand encounter with the modern world but a quiet afternoon in a courtyard, two women working through heat and wheat and the accumulated worries of a big household. And out of this comes one of the most thoughtful conversations in Old Neno’s Stories
Two Feet in One Shoe
The conversation begins with bread — specifically the question of whether to bake at home or buy from the market. Home-baked is better, Neno says, but it brings a thousand trifles with it. The daughters-in-law have made it clear they will not bake bread at home anymore; they have forced her two feet into one shoe. Market bread tastes like straw. Money is tight. The daughters think it is only proper not to work.
The phrase “two feet in one shoe” is a vivid Albanian idiom for being squeezed into an impossible situation. Neno deploys it without explanation, trusting Haso to understand immediately — as she does. The exchange between them about bread and money and daughters-in-law is not preliminary to the story’s real subject; it is the story’s real subject, the domestic economy through which everything else is filtered.
When Haso raises the granddaughter, the conversation shifts. But it does not leave the courtyard. The wheat keeps getting husked. Ali keeps tossing ladybugs into the tray. Neno keeps shifting on the ground trying to find a comfortable spot. The thinking about education happens inside the work, not apart from it.
School on Top of School
The granddaughter has finished school in Gjirokastra. Then the school in Tirana. Now she wants to go abroad, to do as her friends do. Neno’s response is not simply conservative resistance. It is an accumulation of genuine puzzlement:
“Eh… school on top of school. A person needs to know enough to read and write, not be like logs, like us. No… no… we can’t tell which way the cows go… What can I say, Haso — she’s off to the big school.”
The phrase “can’t tell which way the cows go” is another idiom: to be completely ignorant, to have no sense of direction. Neno uses it of herself and of her own generation — she is not denying that literacy matters. She knows the value of being able to read and write. What she cannot grasp is where education ends and excess begins, or what the granddaughter will become after all this studying.
Her heart wanted the girl to stay at home, take up some craft, find a husband, and be all set. But she also tells Haso, with a candor that complicates the picture, that she told the granddaughter: I won’t arrange a marriage without asking you, but if you choose your husband yourself, you’ll break my heart. The negotiation she is attempting is not between tradition and modernity in the abstract. It is between her own love for this specific girl and the world that girl is choosing to inhabit.
Their Heads Are Up in the Fig Tree
The story’s most characteristic moment is not one of conflict but one of sudden, unguarded admission. Haso asks about the girls Neno saw studying in Italy — are there many of them?
“There are many, many, Haso… The poor girls have one another, someone to talk to. I can’t wait until she finishes — I want the girl in front of my eyes, to enjoy her a little while I’m still alive.”
The complaint about education falls away and something else takes its place: a grandmother who misses her granddaughter and wants her home before it is too late to enjoy her company. The phrase “their heads are up in the fig tree” — used earlier of the daughters-in-law who won’t listen to reason about household expenses — captures Neno’s consistent experience of the young: present in body, elsewhere in mind, unreachable by the logic she lives by.
But the title phrase arrives not as an accusation. It arrives as a confession. Neno says it of herself. She does not understand the new world. She has been to Rome, she has seen the schools, she has met the young women studying abroad, and she remains genuinely, honestly at sea.
This is what Kokalari gives Neno in this story that she does not always get elsewhere: the dignity of acknowledged incomprehension. Not resistance, not outrage, but the admission that the world has moved into territory she cannot map. And underneath that admission, consistent with everything she says, is the wish that the girl she loves would come home.
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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