In This Mud I Want to Turn to Dust: Neno and Gjirokastra
The sun has sunk behind the mountains. The houses have darkened. The trees rustle softly, fesh… fesh…, stirred by a little evening breeze. In the narrow street, men return from the market — bread under an arm, a watermelon in hand, a steaming dish of stew from the public oven. Uncle Hasan totters at the head of the street, hands full of goodies, and the children wait for him at the door with mouths wide open.
AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION
Albanika Press
9/29/20264 min read
The sun has sunk behind the mountains. The houses have darkened. The trees rustle softly, fesh… fesh…, stirred by a little evening breeze. In the narrow street, men return from the market — bread under an arm, a watermelon in hand, a steaming dish of stew from the public oven. Uncle Hasan totters at the head of the street, hands full of goodies, and the children wait for him at the door with mouths wide open.
Neno and Haso sit at the front gate, watching. Two small sparrows, the narration said when they stepped outside. They have not spoken for a little while.
Then Neno points to the plum tree. And the story that will close Old Neno’s Stories begins.
The Dreamed Cellar
What sets this final story apart from the other Rome reflections is the direction of Neno’s memory. In On the First Day and Neno at the Theatre and What Caught Her Eye, she was looking outward — at Rome, at what it contained, at how it differed from what she knew. Here, in the quieter setting of the gate at evening, the movement reverses. It is not Rome she is describing but what Rome made her think of.
Everything she encountered there conjured its equivalent at home. Children in strollers brought Ali in his swaddling clothes. Chairs made her think of divans. The bread tasted like hay and she thought of home-made bread, true, it makes her arms hurt, but it is full of flavor. The yellow cheese — like eating soap — gave way in her mind to the food cellar:
“As I chewed the food, I dreamed I was in the food cellar, reaching my hand into a tin, scooping up that cheese as white as foam. Then the barrels would appear in rows, onions on one side, strings of garlic on the other. A sack of walnuts in a corner, sieves and strainers hanging from the nails, and so on and so forth — you know yourself what a house has…”
The cellar inventory is one of the most intimate passages in the collection. It is not a catalogue of wealth. It is a catalogue of the familiar — the precise arrangement of things that have always been in their places, that Neno could navigate with her eyes closed, that constitute the physical texture of belonging. Rome, with all its palaces and radios and music from every corner, could not reproduce the smell of that tin.
The House Like Your Own Head
Haso supplies the phrase that the story has been building toward:
“For us the house is like our own head, and we’re not used to that life over there.”
Neno takes it up immediately:
“I’m the one who, whenever I get angry, says I’ll set the house and everything in it on fire, but it’s all just words — the house is like your own head; you can’t separate one from the other.”
The phrase is not metaphor exactly. In the world Kokalari depicts, the house is not merely a place where life happens. It is the structure through which identity is organized: the trunks Neno wants in front of her eyes so she can always rummage through them, the stairs she goes up and down twenty times a day, the big rooms rather than cubicles, the faucet she checks before going in, the shed door shaken to confirm it is locked. To be removed from all of this — even temporarily, even in a city of palaces — is to be separated from a part of oneself.
Neno says she laughs at herself sometimes: oh, you poor old woman, you even had to wander around Europe in your old age. The twenty days in Rome seem to her like a dream. She could not have imagined, before going, that she would go. If they asked her now, she would not go again. Not because Rome was not magnificent — she saw and admired all that beauty; she could not even imagine it — but because she was there while her mind was here.
What We Want
The collection’s final statement of what home means arrives not as a declaration but as a list:
“These walls where we have lived all our lives, these houses with double staircases, these narrow alleyways where barely a person can pass, these steep roads, these wailings and screams, these comings and goings, these songs and dances — these are what we want.”
The list includes the wailings and screams — Bedro’s lament piercing the world, heard in Neno’s ears while she walked the streets of Rome. It includes the steep roads and the narrow alleyways. Belonging, in Neno’s account, is not built from what is pleasant. It is built from what is known: the specific sounds and textures and difficulties of this particular place, accumulated over a lifetime.
And then Neno stops. She is too tired of telling, she says, and Haso too tired of hearing. Besides, when a person cannot see it with their own eyes, from afar it is hard to understand.
The story closes in gesture rather than speech. Haso gets up first to go inside. Neno sees her to the gate, pushes it firmly shut, places the key in the latch. She checks the faucet — it drips. She glances around the courtyard, shakes the shed door to confirm it is locked, slips the key into the hole in the wall, and goes inside. Voices echo from every corner. Lights turn on and go out. Neno climbs the stairs, shaking her head, holding onto the banister.
The collection ends as it has run throughout: in the domestic present, in the body’s knowledge of its own space, in the small and repeated acts that make a place home. Neno has been to Rome and back. She has told everything she could. Now the gate is shut, the faucet checked, the shed door locked. She climbs the stairs.
She is exactly where she wants to be.
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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