Keep the Rope Stretched Without Breaking It: Neno and Haso at the Gate

She comes back through the door down in the mouth. She has dodged her husband on the stairs — good thing, she says, because once one of her fits comes over her she can hardly calm herself afterward. Her whole body is trembling. She is not touching another bit of work.

AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION

Albanika Press

9/22/20264 min read

“Neno Appeared Again” opens at the gate between two stories, in the hour between the afternoon’s work and the night’s anxieties. The wheat is still not finished. The husband will be home drunk. The daughters-in-law will not lift a hand. The youngest one clucks like a hen and fills the medicine chest with remedies she does not touch. The men drop in from the market all day because they have no steady work. Night comes quickly, and with it the blood trembling while she waits to hear whether he falls somewhere along the way, quarrels with someone, waves his pistols, or makes it home.

This is not a story about a single event. It is a story about the accumulated texture of a life — and about the friendship that makes it bearable.

Keep the Rope Stretched

Haso’s response to Neno’s trembling fury is the most characteristic exchange between the two women in the collection. She does not offer sympathy in the conventional sense. She offers something more practical and more durable:

“Eh, dear Neno, leave it — don’t get into it — as if you don’t know the kind of husband you have. All his life he’s been like this, and now you think he’s going to change his ways?”

She warns against stroke talk — even if you don’t mean it, it may come true — and delivers the proverb that gives the article its title: keep the rope stretched without breaking it. When you see him drunk, don’t speak to him at all.

The advice is neither resignation nor endorsement of what Neno endures. It is the hard-earned wisdom of a woman who has watched her neighbor’s marriage from next door for a lifetime and knows that surviving it requires management rather than confrontation. There is no illusion in it. Haso knows who Neno’s husband is. She has always known.

Neno agrees — you’re right, you’re right — and then goes on anyway. Not to restart the argument, but because she needs to say it. As she tells Haso:

“And who am I telling these things to — as if you don’t know them… but it helps me take this anger out of my chest.”

The function of the friendship is stated plainly here. Haso already knows everything Neno is about to say. That is exactly why it can be said. Neno is not informing Haso. She is unburdening herself to the one person who does not need to be told the context, who has been next-door neighbor for their whole lives and needs no explanation.

What Was and What Is

When Haso counters with what has been achieved — the children safely out of the hard years, most married off, Haxho soon to find her place, and then you’ll be free — Neno receives it without deflecting:

“May they live long, may they live long, and may God grant that I leave them behind… That’s how this world is — some good mixed with some bad. There isn’t anyone without worries.”

The blessing is the most characteristic thing Neno says in the story: not that the children are well, but that God may grant her to outlive them. The standard Albanian blessing for parents — a wish to leave their children behind rather than be left behind by them. Grief and love and superstition folded into a single phrase, spoken to a neighbor who understands it as naturally as breathing.

What follows is the inventory of what the day contains: the wheat still unfinished, the daughters-in-law with their children wriggling like little snakes, the youngest daughter-in-law with her rock of a head and her untouched medicines, the men dropping in from the market, the husband’s daily routine from the exchange to breakfast to sleep to the piazza to the drunk walk home. It is not complaint exactly. It is testimony — the record of a life given to Haso because Haso is the one who can receive it.

Two Sparrows at the Gate

The story closes with the two women stepping outside to the front gate as evening falls. Pitter-pat, pitter-pat, the narration says — like two small sparrows. Haso sits on the stoop; Neno settles on the doorstep and leaves the gate half-open, watching who comes and goes in the narrow street.

Men return from the market with bread under their arms, watermelons, dishes of stew. Uncle Hasan appears at the head of the street, tottering, his hands full of goodies for the children who wait at the door with mouths wide open. Neno points out the plum tree, heavy with fruit. Haso asks about the woman coming out of a door across the way. The gossip resumes, as naturally as breathing.

This is where Old Neno’s Stories has placed its women throughout: at the edge of the household and the world beyond it, watching, speaking, judging, remembering. The gate is not a threshold between inside and outside. It is Neno’s and Haso’s shared vantage point, where the neighborhood moves past them and they make sense of it together. The friendship between them is the collection’s most constant presence — older than any of the Rome stories, older than the quarrels and the wheat and the husband’s drinking — and here at the penultimate story it is given, quietly and without ceremony, its proper place at the center of things.

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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