IN THE HOUSE OF PADRE MARJAN--LULASH GIVES A WORD OF HONOR AND
DISCUSSES MARRIAGE--THE STOLEN DAUGHTER OF SHALA.
Padre Marjan sat with us, but did not eat, as it was a fast day. An
apparently endless succession of dishes--soup, lamb, omelettes, pork
chops, chicken--was brought in by Cheremi and served by Rexh in his red
fez. Poor little Rexh! He ate nothing but a bit of corn bread; he said
the pork chops had been broiled in the fireplace, and he feared that
some of the fat had spattered into the cooking pots. He was not sure,
but he feared so, and he thought it safer not to eat anything prepared
in them.
The lamb’s head, skinned but otherwise intact, was served separately,
boiled, and the delicacy of the meal was its brains, which we got at
by cutting through the skull. When the chicken came, Cheremi presented
it with awe in his eyes, and after we had eaten he whispered behind
his hand to Perolli. In the kitchen, he said, they were talking of the
chicken; it was not of Padre Marjan’s raising, but it had been hatched
and brought up in the village, and they were sure that its breastbone
would foretell the immediate future of Thethis. Would we let him have
it?
Perolli took up the thin bone and very carefully cleaned it of every
clinging bit of flesh. Then, with an apology to Padre Marjan, he held
it up to the light from the window. Through the translucent bone the
marrow, clouded with clotted blood, showed clearly, and Perolli read
it with serious eyes, pointing out to us its meaning. There was a clot
that meant a battle, a battle to the north, and there was a widening
red line running from a dark spot; the signs were clear. The government
would grow more powerful, and there would be war to the north, war with
the Serbs.
He gave the bone to Cheremi, who tiptoed toward the kitchen with it.
I strained my ears to hear how it was received; I thought that the
portent of strong government might make the people think it unwise to
hand Perolli over to the Serbs; they must know that in any case his
death would be avenged by soldiers from Tirana. But would it, since
he was traveling “on a vacation”? Governments do not usually back up
their secret-service men who fail on the job. There was no sound from
the kitchen, and we entertained Padre Marjan by showing him how, in
America, we use the wishbone to foretell a part of the future. But any
wishbone will do that for us, while in Albania only the breastbone of
a hen that has lived all her life in the family will foretell that
family’s future.
Outside, it continued to rain, if that state of the air when it is
surely half water can be called rain. We were glad to get back to the
kitchen fire. The chiefs and older men of the village did not return,
but many women and children came in to talk to the strangers, and it
was evident that the padre’s kitchen was the village club-house; they
were all at home and happy there. The padre himself washed the dishes
and swept the floor with a pine bough, chatting with them all as he did
so; one saw, in the atmosphere of intimacy and democracy and respect
around him what the Church used to be to the people long ago.
Then he set pans of water to heating for our baths, and when they were
warm he lighted the way with a candle to his bedroom, which he had
loaned to us. Another large, bare room with wooden unpainted walls, a
bedstead of rough boards with a mattress laid on them, and sheets and
pillow cases of red-and-white-plaided cotton, hand woven; in one corner
an office desk, and on the wall beside the bed a rosary.
At midnight Perolli and Padre Marjan retired to the cold, wet living
room, to roll themselves in blankets and sleep on the floor. We three
girls sat shivering on the mattress and wished we knew what the chiefs
were deciding.
But, oh! it was good to take off the clothes, so many times soaked with
rain, in which we had walked and climbed and slept for three days and
nights. And forks may be idle luxuries, but there is no question that a
thin mattress filled with straw and laid on raised boards is one of the
greatest comforts in life!
We were awakened in the damp chill of a watery gray dawn, and with
surprise found ourselves on its unfamiliar softness, in the bleak room
of unpainted boards. Padre Marjan was knocking at the door. In a moment
he entered, barefooted, in his long brown robe girded with cord, and,
going to the incongruous office desk, he carefully unlocked a lower
drawer and took out a box of soap. There were twenty small cakes of
soap in the box. He took out one, carefully, put the box back in the
drawer, locked it.
He had been followed by a small boy, a very serious child, and visibly
nervous. About eleven years old, he wore the long, tight, black-braided
white trousers, colored sash, and woolly, fringed short black jacket
of his people, but they were all soaking wet and very old, mended and
mended again until hardly any of the original fabric was left. His bare
feet were blue with cold, and so were his bare arms, for the Scanderbeg
jacket has no sleeves, and he did not wear a shirt. He stood very
straight, and swallowed hard, keeping his face impassive.
Padre Marjan turned to him, holding the cake of soap. He spoke
earnestly and at some little length. He then presented the cake of soap
to the child, who bent a knee to receive it, and kissed the padre’s
hand and then the soap. An impressive little ceremonial, which we
witnessed, wide eyed, from the mattress where we sat huddled among the
blankets. Rain was still sluicing against the windows, so that the
water on them was surely as thick as the glass.
We looked inquiringly at Frances, who understood Albanian. Her eyes
shone, she was so excited. “It’s a school prize!” she said, and,
listening, “He’s the best scholar in school; already he can read and
write. Isn’t it splendid!” The boy saluted us gravely; one saw that he
had just gone through a profound emotional experience. “Long may you
live!” said he, and went out.
Padre Marjan said that the school had been opened ten days before.
On the first day there were forty-three pupils, on the second day
sixty-two, on the third day ninety-seven. All the tribe was sending its
children to live with relatives in Thethis and go to school. No more
than ninety-seven could get into the padre’s living room; the others
must wait until, with the money Alex and Frances had collected, the
schoolhouse could be built. There were no benches or desks, of course;
the children stood packed tightly in the cold room, and he taught them
by writing with a piece of chalk on the walls. Already this boy could
read and write words of one syllable and merited a cake of soap. Padre
Marjan, at his own expense, had sent two hundred miles to Tirana for
fifty cakes of soap, to be used as prizes. There was, of course, no
other soap in the tribe; a more magnificent gift could not have been
imagined.
The boy who got the cake of soap walked every morning nine miles
over the mountains to reach school at seven o’clock, and at nine,
after school, he walked back and took out the goats and spent all day
climbing trees and cutting twigs for them to eat.
Padre Marjan said that as soon as he knew the Americans would build the
school he had started teaching, and he had written to the government in
Tirana and asked if it would help. He brought from the desk the letter
he had received in reply. Written by hand, for the poverty-stricken
young government had no typewriters, and sent by messenger into the
mountains, in six weeks it had reached Thethis, and the padre kept it
wrapped in a bit of hand-woven silk. Frances spelled it out; it said
that the government would give a hundred kronen a month to pay the
teacher. It was signed for the Minister of the Interior by Rrok Perolli.
“My sainted grandmother!” cried Frances. “Where is Perolli?” At that
very minute the chiefs might be sending word to the Serbs to come and
get him. The chiefs themselves would surely not violate the hospitality
of their priest, but the Serbs would have no reverence for it and they
were only a few miles away. When we thought what a bargain the chiefs
might drive with the Serbs for Perolli it seemed too much to hope that
one of them, at least, would not hand him over.
Padre Marjan spoke warmly of Perolli, whom he had so innocently
betrayed; he said that he had once seen him at a distance in Scutari,
and the village was honored to have him for a guest. While he said this
he wrapped the precious letter in its silk and laid it carefully away
in the desk. Then he went away, saying that he would send us a fire.
In a few minutes it came, a pile of hot coals in a large iron baking
dish. Cheremi set it in the middle of the floor--where, indeed, it made
little impression on the damp chill of the room--and went to fetch us
cups of Turkish coffee. But we were too anxious to linger over it; we
swallowed it hastily and dressed as quickly as possible, talking about
what we could do to save Perolli. We thought that perhaps as American
citizens we could overawe the Serbs, but none of us really had much
hope of it; indeed, we had no right to attempt American protection for
a secret-service agent of the Albanian government along the borders of
the land held by invading Jugo-Slav armies. Still, we did not know that
he was a secret-service agent; we had every right to suppose that he
was merely our companion on a vacation trip. It was all very vague, but
distressing.
Frances and Alex hurried out to find Perolli, but I sat helpless. No
human effort would get my feet into the iron-hard shrunken shoes that
had so long been water soaked. What on earth was I to do? Could I go
barefooted over the mountains? More immediate question, could I go
forth shoeless to inspire terror of America in the breasts of possible
Serbs? Ignoble predicament!
While I sat struggling with the obdurate leather the door opened and
in came the magnificent figure of Lulash, the chief. He had none of
the marks of self-conscious importance that our statesmen have; he
was as simple, as graceful, and as unself-conscious as a tiger in
his own jungle, and at the moment he struck me with something of the
same spellbound, half-admiring terror. He looked as capable of swift,
unconcerned killing as the rifle on his back. Behind him came Perolli,
betraying the tension of his excitement only by the ease with which he
concealed it.
Lulash saluted me as I stared up at him, petrified, from the mattress.
“Long may you live!” said he, and, swinging the rifle from his back, he
set it against the padre’s desk. Then he sat down on the floor--there
were, of course, no chairs in the room--close to the baking dish
filled with warm coals. He did not lounge, but sat straight, his legs
folded beneath him, and Perolli sat similarly on the other side of the
baking dish. Lulash took a silver tobacco box from his sash and slowly
rolled a cigarette; Perolli took from his pocket a box of the American
variety; they exchanged cigarettes, lighted them by bending close to
the red coals, and sat back again, watching each other in silence for
some moments.
I put my shoes down stealthily, making not the slightest noise, tucked
my feet beneath me, and sat perfectly still. Outside, the rain made a
swishing sound; the soft roaring of a thousand waterfalls ran beneath
it like an accompaniment. Thin streaks of snow-chilled, wet air came
through the many cracks in the board walls and floor; they tore the
cigarette smoke into dancing wisps. Wet spread slowly on the walls; the
floor was spotted with damp where we had dropped our sodden clothes the
night before. The coals in the baking dish were filming over with gray
ash.
It was the first time I had ever been present at a diplomatic
conference, and that one on which the fate of a nation depended. For if
these mountain men did turn Perolli over to the Serbs, getting thereby
the favor of the armies that held their cities and grazing lands, I had
no doubt that it meant soldiers from Tirana coming up to Thethis, civil
war with the northern tribes, and not at all improbably the murdering
of the new-born government. Perhaps, indeed, another outbreak in the
Balkans, the sore spot of Europe. And I could not understand Albanian!
Lulash spoke first, in short, decisive sentences. I caught the word
“Serbs” and the word for “markets.” At the end of each sentence Perolli
shook his head sidewise, in the quick gesture that means, “Yes.”
Lulash was stating the case; Perolli was in his power; the Serbs
wanted Perolli; the Serbs held Thethis’s markets and grazing lands;
moreover--for I caught the word “kronen”--there was the probability of
reward. To all this Perolli assented. He had not yet spoken.
There was another slight pause, but not for him to break. Lulash was
thinking. Then he leaned a little forward, put his hand on his heart,
and spoke again. There was not the faintest expression on Perolli’s
face; I could not make out what was happening. When Lulash had ceased
speaking Perolli smoked for a moment in silence. “You have done well,”
he said, then, in Albanian; and to me, “Have you got your fountain pen?”
I got it out of my trousers pocket and gave it to him quickly--too
quickly. He was very leisurely about taking it. Then he opened his
notebook and wrote in it. Lulash watched the moving pen with a sort
of awed fascination. Perolli read aloud the words he had written,
closed the notebook, and put it in his pocket. He showed no pleasure of
relief, but the very atmosphere of the room had lightened.
Both men leaned back more easily and for the first time seemed to taste
their cigarettes. Lulash looked at me; the aquiline profile became a
full-face view of the handsome, sensitive, strong face framed in folds
of white. What did I look like to those mountain eyes, I wondered,
sitting there disheveled among tumbled blankets, a brown sweater
bunched around my neck, my riding trousers creased and muddy and
dangling their unputteed legs?
“I should be glad to see the women of my tribe wearing American
garments,” said Lulash. “Skirts are heavy and cumbersome; trousers are
far better.”
Perolli translated.
“Goodness! He thinks all American women wear trousers!” I said. “Well,
tell him I thank him; I agree with him; for the mountains trousers are
more comfortable. Tell him I am much interested in the women of his
tribe and would like to ask him some questions about them. And I’ll die
right here if you don’t tell me what’s happened.”
“He will be glad to tell you anything he knows, but no man understands
the nature of women, which is like the streams that run under the
mountains. Don’t worry; it’s all over.”
“What do you mean? Ask him if he thinks it is a good idea to betroth
children before they are born. (What did you write in the notebook?)”
“He says he does not think it a good idea. (I tell you it’s all right.)”
“Oh, thank goodness! Then he does not think the women are happy in
their marriages? (But tell me what he was saying to you, won’t you?)”
“He says that as for happiness, his people do not expect happiness
in marriage; happiness comes from other things. (I cannot tell
you; he would understand the word; I will spell it. He has sworn a
_b_-_e_-_s_-_a_ that his whole tribe will be loyal to the Albanian
government as long as he lives. Careful! Don’t let him suspect I’m
talking about it.)”
Albanians, with their many languages, are used to such conversations. I
hope I deceived Lulash; my training in dissimulation has been small. I
was rather dizzy.
“From what does their happiness come, then?” said I. (“For Heaven’s
sake, what happened to make him do that?”)
“Happiness,” said Lulash, “comes from the skies. It comes from
sunshine, and from light and shadow on the mountains, and from green
things in the spring. It comes also from rest when one is tired, and
from food when one is hungry, and from fire when one is cold. It comes
from singing together, and from walking on hard trails and being harder
than the rocks; and there is a kind of happiness that comes to a man in
battle, but that is a different kind. For us, marriage has nothing to
do with happiness.”
Perolli, translating, added, “He did it because the Albanian government
has helped the American school here.”
Then for the first time I really looked at Lulash. He had been until
then simply a marvelously beautiful animal; a man such as men must have
been before cities and machines and office desks brought dull skins
and eyes, joy rides, padded shoulders, and crippling collars. Now I
perceived that he was also a real person.
He saw beyond immediate gain for himself or his people. He had refused
any advantages to be gained by this unexpected dropping into his
hands of this man that the Serbs wanted; he lived under the shadow
of mountains alive with Serbian troops, his village was filled with
Serbian influences, the Tirana government was two hundred miles away,
and he knew nothing of it except that it had promised a hundred kronen
a month to the mountain school that Alex and Frances had started.
Yet he had come, voluntarily, without urging, to swear a _besa_ of
loyalty to that government because it had helped the school. And the
_besa_, the word of honor, would hold him, I knew, as the strongest
treaties never hold Western governments. I admired that man. I felt a
tender sort of pity for him, too, because of his faith in the value of
being able to read. After all, what has it done for us? Like most of
civilization, it has done little more than create a useless desire that
men become slaves to satisfy. It has made us very little kinder, very
little less unsympathetic with alien points of view, and no farther
from war, poverty, and misery than the Albanians are.
“Then what does marriage mean to the Albanians?” I said, grasping for
the thread of the conversation.
Lulash was really puzzled by my idea that marriage and happiness
were in some way connected. He was courteous, but there was a little
surprise in his voice. “Marriage is a family question,” he said. “One
marries because one is old enough to marry, and that is the way the
family goes on from generation to generation. You marry in America,
do you not? You keep the family alive? How are marriages arranged in
America?”
“With us,” I said, “marriage does not have much to do with the family.
Young people grow up thinking about themselves. Then, when they are old
enough, if they have money enough to live on, and if they meet some
one they like and want to marry, they marry. They marry to be happy,
because they have found some one they want to live with always. They go
away from their families, sometimes very far away, and live in a house
by themselves.”
It came over me, while I watched the surprise growing in Lulash’s eyes,
how haphazard and egotistic--how shallowly rooted, really--our whole
system is. We marry because we want another human being, because--it
really comes to that--we want to use that other human being to make
happiness for ourselves. For even when one gets happiness by giving,
instead of taking, it is still fundamentally a demand, a demand that
the other take what is given, and that is sometimes the hardest of all
demands to satisfy. Two persons, each demanding that the other be a
source of personal happiness to him or her, each demanding, clutching,
insisting on that gift from the other--that is the spectacle of
American marriage. No wonder it so often ends in a heap of wreckage,
out of which maimed human beings struggle through divorce.
“I do not understand what you mean by saying they must have money
enough to marry,” said Lulash. “There is always money enough to marry,
isn’t there? A man costs the tribe no more married than not married,
and if new girls are brought into the tribe by marriage, others are
given away in marriage. Even in the poorest tribes marriages never
stop.”
“We have another system of owning property in America,” said I. “By
that system, often men cannot afford to marry until they are quite old.
They are never able to marry as young as you do here. In fact, many
persons never marry at all.”
“Because there are not enough women?”
“Oh no! The women work, too, and do not marry. (Goodness! Perolli, tell
him it is too difficult to explain.)”
“He thinks,” said Perolli, “that you mean that in your country the
young men live like priests and the women like sworn virgins, such as
they sometimes have here. He’s very deeply shocked by such an idea.
I’ll have to tell him something--what? Either way, he’ll get the idea
that Americans are utterly immoral.”
“Well, say that we have--that we have another kind of marriage, that
isn’t exactly marriage--say we have concubines. He’ll understand that,
from Turkey,” said I, in desperation. And while Perolli endeavored
to explain and still uphold the honor of America in the eyes of a
profoundly shocked chief of Shala, I tried to devise another way of
getting at the subject. For I did want to know what Albanian women felt
about being married to men they had never seen, in strange tribes, and
I knew they would never tell me through masculine interpreters. Lulash
would know.
“But most of the sources of happiness that you mentioned are in the
lives of men,” I said. “Are the women happy?”
“No,” said Lulash. “I do not think our women are happy.” He seemed
deeply troubled; there were perplexity and anxiety in his dark eyes,
and he moved restlessly--which Albanians almost never do--as he sat
on the floor by the heap of coals in the baking dish. They had sunk
quite into gray ashes; the bleak room was very cold, filled with the
ceaseless swishing sound of the rain and of the innumerable waterfalls
that poured from the mountains overhead.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking him this? Perhaps he is married to an
unhappy woman?” I asked.
“No,” said Perolli. “He is not married; he is the only man in Shala who
is not married.”
“Our women have their children; they love their children,” said Lulash.
“And they do not quarrel with their husbands. It almost never happens
that there are ugly words in a family. But I do not think the women
are happy. I do not know whether they would be happier if they chose
their own husbands. Girls of the marrying age are not very wise. But I
often think, when I see a young girl taken away to the house of some
old man, who perhaps is sick and ugly and morose because he must stay
all day in the house, that it is a sad thing. For myself, I would like
to see the American way tried here. I have said to my people that it
is wrong to betroth children before they are born. We do not do it
very often, now. Usually they are five or six years old, old enough so
that one can see what they will become and what they will like. But
parents do not often think of those things; they think more of marrying
their children into a richer, stronger tribe, so that when war and bad
seasons come there will be the strong, rich tribe to help them. Also,
it is better for the child who is married into a good tribe. So that
parents do not think much about the children themselves; they think
more about the family and the tribe.”
“Why isn’t he married?” I said to Perolli.
“Did they give the girl he wanted to some one else?”
“How could they, when he would have been a baby then?” said Perolli,
indignant at my stupidity. “No. When he was old enough to marry he paid
the girl’s family and arranged her marriage to some one else. It is
well known why he has not married; he does not want to marry a woman of
the mountains, and he knows no other women.”
“And in my country,” I said to Lulash, “I think it would be better if
parents thought more about the young man’s family.”
“Yes,” he replied, “if they thought about the character of that family,
as they would doubtless do in America. Here, they think more about the
lands and herds and strong fighting men that the tribe has. I have
often thought at night--for I lie awake a great deal, thinking about
my people--that we would have better children if the women were free
to choose their own husbands. They would choose men who were young and
strong and beautiful. Also the young men would choose the strongest and
most beautiful girls. There is another thing, too. I believe there is
something like a spirit between two people, something that knows more
than their brains do about what their children will be, and that that
spirit would lead them into better marriages if they could listen to
it. I do not say it very well, because there is no word for it, but I
understand it. I would like to see my people try the American way,” he
repeated.
He rose to his six feet of height, splendid in fine white wool and
silken sash, the jewel-studded chains clinking together on his chest,
and swung the rifle again on his back. “I will go now to my own house,”
he said. “If the _zaushka_ from America would follow me and drink
coffee before my fire, the path her feet would take would always be
flowery with spring to my eyes.”
There is something contagious in that sort of thing. “Say to him that
my feet will be happy on the path,” I said to the amused Perolli.
“Glory to your lips!” said Lulash. “Glory forever to the little feet
that brought you to Thethis!”
The little feet were wearing at that moment two pairs of wrinkled,
thick woolen stockings, indescribably ludicrous beneath the flapping
legs of trousers around which I had not rewound the soaked woolen
leggings, and Perolli and I were helpless with laughter as soon as the
door had closed behind Lulash.
“How am I ever going to get to his house?” I asked, wiping my eyes.
“Oh, we’ll have somebody make you some goatskin opangi,” said Perolli.
“He won’t expect us very soon.” He flung out his arms in a jubilant
gesture. “A _besa_ of peace from Shala!” he exclaimed. “I couldn’t
have hoped for that! It means peace through the whole north; it means
internal security for northern Albania--if I can only get the other
tribes to join it.”
Frances and Alex came in, desperately anxious to know what had
happened, and we three did a dance of pure delight. It was an
inexpressible relief to know that Perolli would get out of Shala alive,
and the _besa_ was almost too much.
“But, Perolli,” said Frances, when I had told the whole conversation,
“do you mean to say that these people are--are absolutely moral?
I mean, as we understand morality? No love making along all these
mountain trails? No illegitimate children? Never?”
“Never? Well, I have heard of one case,” said Perolli. “But don’t
forget that such a thing would mean a blood feud between tribes. No
man would make love to a girl of his own tribe, of course; a tribe
traces its ancestry back to a common ancestor, and it would be like an
American’s making love to his own sister. And if he seduced a girl of
another tribe he would be involving hundreds of people. Men have to
respect women in these mountains; they’re killed if they don’t, and not
only they, but their families. A blood feud is no joke.
“However, I did hear of its happening once. The man’s family had to
send word to the family of the girl to whom he was betrothed, to say
that he could not marry her because he was going to have a child by
another woman. The three tribes met in council and prevented a blood
feud, but the man’s family had to pay his fiancée’s tribe ten thousand
kronen, and ten thousand kronen to the family of the man that the
other girl was engaged to. Then those two married, and the first man
married the girl who was going to have his child. But it was a terrible
disgrace to both their families.
[Illustration: THE SHOPPING CENTER IN TIRANA
These mountain women are admiring the strange weaving and color of
bandana handkerchiefs and unbleached muslin from Europe. But they
will sigh and content themselves with their own hand-woven silks and
cottons, and if they buy anything, it will be the brightly painted
cradle. An unbetrothed girl baby who was strapped into so fine a
cradle might well hope to be married in Tirana or Scutari.]
But he cut short our awed admiration for such a rigidly moral
community. He was a man of Ipek, educated in Europe, and returned to
Tirana, and his attitude to the ignorant tribes of these mountains was
not one of admiration.
“They are really a wretched lot,” he declared. “Now, take a thing like
this, for instance.” And he told us that in a house a few miles down
the valley there was a nine-year-old girl held prisoner. The story was
this:
A man of Pultit had betrothed his unborn child to the unborn child of a
man of Shala, eighteen years ago. The two men, being friends, and one
evening drinking rakejia together, had agreed that if one child proved
to be a boy and the other a girl, they should marry. The wife of the
Pultit man had protested; she did not like the tribe of Shala, and she
did not like her husband’s friend, perhaps because he was too fond of
rakejia. Besides, she was an ambitious woman, and said that if she had
a daughter she would marry her in Scutari. Wild, irrational woman! But
the compact was made, and nothing was left to her but to hope that both
children would be boys, or both girls.
However, she became the mother of a daughter, and the Shala man became
the father of a son. The girl was eleven years old, and in a few
more years would have been duly married in Shala, when the Serbs and
Montenegrins, pouring down over the mountains in the retreat before the
Austrians, suddenly invaded Albania, and in fighting those ancestral
enemies the girl’s father was killed. The mother immediately took her
children and fled to Scutari.
Four years later, the girl now being of marriageable age, Shala sent
to Scutari for her, and what was their outrage to discover that the
mother not only would not give her up, but had actually betrothed her
to a Scutari man! The gendarmes of Scutari make simple and direct
justice difficult; mountain law does not apply there. Two Shala men
made an attempt to carry off the girl, and were captured by superior
forces and thrown into jail. Not killed, you perceive, but trapped, and
talked over at length, and kept in a cage for some time, and at length
freed, all most absurdly and unreasonably. They returned at once to
their task, but they found it impossible to seize the girl again. She
was closely guarded, not only by her mother, but by the family of the
Scutari man to whom she was unjustly betrothed. So, finding that way to
justice blocked, the Shala men caught her little sister, eight years
old, and triumphantly escaped with her into the mountains.
She was not yet of marriageable age, and the Shala bridegroom must
wait another six years, but justice had been done, though imperfectly.
Pultit owed him a bride, and a Pultit bride he would have, with
patience. The girl was brought to his house, and was even now being
kept there, much against her will, while the family waited for her to
grow old enough to be married.
“Those are things that we must change as soon as the government is
strong enough,” Perolli said, decisively, and we hoped that the
government would be strong enough in time to rescue the girl, though
the poor Shala lad, through no fault of his own, seemed doomed to live
an unhappy bachelor.
In Padre Marjan’s kitchen we found at least twenty visitors from the
village; the men were there again, among them all the chiefs but
Lulash. The fireplace was full of bubbling pots and sizzling pans;
the padre, helped informally by whoever happened to be nearest, was
preparing our luncheon. My dilemma was announced; I stood before them
shoeless. A boy ran at once across the village and returned streaming,
as though he had been in a river, bringing two pieces of goatskin,
tanned with the soft brown hair on it.
To the eager interest of everyone, I set my feet on the pieces, and
there were many exclamations of wonder at their smallness and at the
curious shape of them, the toes so close together and making a point,
instead of arching, each one separately, as the toes of their people
do, and they would have been glad to examine them more closely--asking
one another, as Rexh explained, if I would or would not take off the
strangely woven stockings later. Meanwhile the boy with a nail drew the
outlines of my feet on the leather and went away with it to his house,
where the opangi would be made.
While this was happening the older men of the tribe went back to the
cold bedroom with Perolli, each one adding his own _besa_ of loyalty
to the one Lulash had sworn, and asking many questions about the aims
and strength of the Tirana government. They would not yet call it the
Albanian government; they could not comprehend the idea of the state,
so familiar to us that we never examine it. “Government” meant to them
not only the consent of the governed, but the active participation of
everyone in governing; they had, indeed, no conception of what we mean
by “government.” When they say “government” they mean what we mean when
we say, in a group, “Well, now we’re all agreed, let’s go on and do it.”
Perolli spent that morning--and indeed most of his time in the few
succeeding days that we were together--trying to explain the idea of
a representative government to these simple communist people. And he
told us that within six weeks the Albanian government would really
come up into the mountains. The plan was to begin by sending into
the tribes men from Tirana who could read and write; they would be
connecting links between Tirana and the tribes, sitting in all the
tribal councils, making reports to Tirana and explaining the wishes of
the Tirana parliament to the mountaineers.
These men would bring in with them, of course, the private-property
ideas of southern Albania (which is just changing from the feudal
system to modern capitalism), and I felt a regret, purely romantic,
perhaps, at the inevitable disappearance of this last surviving remnant
of the Aryan primitive communism in which our own fore-fathers lived,
and at the replacing of Lulash by men like our politicians. I am a
conservative, even a reactionary; I should like to keep the Albanian
mountains what they are. But no one can stop the changes in human
affairs; the eternal swing of the pendulum goes on; we have shop
stewards in England and a Plumb plan in America, and in Thethis, on
the headwaters of the Lumi Shala, we shall have agitators for private
ownership of land and houses, and--no doubt, in time--for private
property in mines and railroads and electric-power plants.