The albanian, p.19
The Albanian, page 19
I unpack.
I sleep in my own bed.
I settle back in.
I receive a letter from Anya written on a Christmas card.
Dearest Rosa,
I’m writing from work — it’s 1 am and I’ve been thinking of you.
Getting home was a fiasco! There was a fog in London and I think I was in transit for about 23 hours. I was detained and questioned at Heathrow and they wanted to search my main case but they couldn’t locate it (or so they said); evidently it was true and my luggage was somewhere misplaced. But not the teapot, I carried the teapot!
The Bombay man has been calling me from all parts of the world. One day he called me every hour, on the hour, to tell me that he loves me. I don’t know why he does it — he’s married!
Kamil from Istanbul has been declaring his love to me in some beautiful letters. Maybe I’ll do something crazy, run off and marry him.
Have you seen your Albanian yet?
Stay well and happy, you remain in my thoughts,
Your friend always, Anya.
The washing machine makes lots of noise. There’s an outdoor laundry made of old weatherboards, unpainted, and it still has the old copper with the fire under it. Before I went away I planted some herbs outside, some mint and basil and lemongrass. They thrive. I stare at them; I stare at the boards on the laundry floor, at the grey water swirling in the concrete trough. I sit in the shade on the back step with a cup of tea until the laundry is finished. I hang the clean washing on the line in the sun. I have already filled out the dole form with jobs I didn’t really apply for in the pub down the road, as a housemaid, as a barmaid. Nothing better has come up yet and I don’t want to do these things, or work in the chicken factory. I tuck the form inside my book and walk into town to the office with the queue of feet in thongs and sneakers and Doc Martens and they stamp it and I walk away for two weeks. I buy bread and take the detour by the estuary, cut through the croquet club and check my letter box. The sun burns my skin and there is nothing for me, just a bill.
Inside, I make a sandwich and sit on the verandah and watch the people walk by. I drink another cup of tea. Then the washing is dry and I fold it all and arrange the piles on the kitchen table. Three piles for three girls, one of tea towels and one of sheets. Lucia only did hers when she ran out of knickers, she said. Isabella left hers in the basket when she left for India. I do it all, there’s not much to keep me busy otherwise. I wish Isabella was here. I am weary and I must sleep. I must sleep and she is not here to talk with and I am tired of being alone. My bed is in the crook of a corner window and I curl there in the afternoon and my chest is heavy with sadness. Over the next days I sit in the sun on the verandah and write letters.
Dear Anya,
I’ve been home for a fortnight now, and it’s too many weeks since I saw him. I met him again in Dubrovnik. We went to Sweden and he is there trying to get political asylum. I went to London on the train after I left him. You had already left, I tried to phone the number you gave me. I got very sick, and spent most of my time there in bed in the hostel. It was a terrible place, I filled myself with pills and oranges and slept for days there.
Goodbyes are just awful. I still feel only partly here and I wonder if I will ever revive. I have not heard from the Albanian since I left. Most of my thoughts are about his safety and remembering the time we had together. So, life here is strange and unreal but I am happy to be home too. It’s comforting and definitely not so stressful.
I had a great time with you and I learned a lot about travelling. Thank you Anya.
Much love — Rosa.
On a postcard of Bunbury’s lighthouse and the Indian Ocean I write:
I miss you. Please write to me, I wonder where you are and if you are okay. I think about you more than I should. My life feels without purpose but it is peaceful here. I send you my heart — Rosa.
I walk into town.
So quiet I can hear my footfall on the concrete path.
I go to the post office then walk up the hill near the library-where-there-are-no-books-on-Albania or Ali Pasha, up the flight of stairs to the cathedral. It is hot. I stand at the top of the stairs where I have watched brides enter, wives leave. I have helped sometimes, to untangle the train of the dress, struggle with it in the wind. It’s always windy up here. I have fiddled with hairpins. Girls wait here sometimes on a Saturday afternoon and I have been among them, to see the dress, to see the girl I went to school with. All my older cousins are wives and husbands, and some of the younger ones. It is hot and the concrete burns my bottom and the world seems so still. It is quiet in Bunbury on a Monday.
Across the street is the hospital. When I was at school I visited the old ladies who lived in the home out the back. Please get those flies for me, will you love? She saw them everywhere, flying. They’re driving me mad and the nurses won’t kill them for me. I sprayed in the air with my invisible can, pssss! Another one, pssss! I pretended to brush their corpses off the bed. There’s another one, quick! Pssss! The game made us both smile, but I don’t know if she knew we were playing.
I walk down the hill towards home, across the path of the big black funeral cars coming up the hill.
20
My mother and my grandmother came over for a cup of tea. They brought me a little grey grassy plant in a plastic pot — Cupid’s Dart. They brought some biscuits and some cannelloni and we sat in the kitchen. I boiled the kettle on the stove because we don’t have an electric one. I bought the kettle at a garage sale in Charles Street. I tell Mum it was a dollar, she likes bargains.
‘I picked up the concrete pot on the verandah and these teacups too.’
‘It’s good, Rosa, that you girls have made such a nice home.’
‘Nice tea love.’
‘Thanks Nanna.’
‘Have you looked for a job yet? Your father said there were a couple in the paper he thought might be all right for you.’
‘There’s not much around, you know I don’t want to work in a pub.’
‘Of course not, darling. If you’re short of cash, just ask us. We’ll help you out until you get some work again.’
‘Thanks Mum.’
We drink our tea. I can’t tell them about my broken heart. I don’t tell them about the Albanian at all. I am afraid they will think they haven’t taught me well enough to take care of myself. When I left to go away, I knew they would worry about all the terrible things that can happen to a girl travelling on her own — being raped and robbed and tricked. I was warned. They might think they had failed if they knew that those things that might have happened did happen. I show them the earrings Anya gave me and tell them about her instead.
I have a memory of a day in my garden when I was a little girl. The hot sun filtered through leaves of jacaranda, peppermint and silky oak and sprinklers flickered. They made a shadowy pattern over ponds and lilies and orange goldfish, ferns and fleshy bright begonias. Dampened, manured and mulchy with leaf litter, there gurgled a long, slow guttural sound — the croaking of frogs. They lulled and rock-a-byed and saturated. This was a garden for lying on the lawn, lost in novels and circled by the skins of oranges.
I had a dog there. He was black and scruffy and not very handsome, a silky terrier who always exuded that smell of dog and left his hair on my dresses. He would travel deep into the overgrown garden and you could see the flowers shuddering along his path. He was busy and purposeful under there and often found frogs.
On this day I heard his quivering growls and imagined his little tail was shaking madly with excitement. I had seen him ambush frogs before.
‘Come here, you stupid dog!
‘Come here!’
He ignored me until he’d finished. And came out from the fronds flicking his tongue and shaking his head. On the shadowy lawn, the foam grew around his mouth and he convulsed, his little dog’s body racked and sickened. He vomited frothy, creamy masses and I covered them with sand until they soaked into the lawn under the sprinklers. Glassy and exhausted, he slept beside me on the lawn and left his musky-dog smell on my hands.
‘You silly dog, I’ve told you before that frogs make you sick.’
I found him later that day in his bed, locked in a spasm and foam oozing from his mouth. His thin little pink tongue was poking from between his teeth. His grave quickly grew green with moss among the begonias.
When Mum and Nanna leave, I water the Cupid’s Dart and put it on the verandah in the sun. I check the letterbox. He said he wouldn’t write to me but still I hope for something.
Days go past and nothing much seems to change, except the weather. I sleep until ten thirty. Lucia is home too and she pours cold milk over Weetbix and drizzles them with honey. I make tea. We open the French doors and sit in our pyjamas on the shady side of the verandah with our breakfast. Already it is hot.
‘My reflexology class starts tonight,’ Lucia says.
She paints her toenails after breakfast. ‘Do you want me to do yours?’
‘Sure. Are you all right about the reflexology? I always get nervous about people I don’t know seeing my feet. They’re so personal, feet, like photos of when you were a kid.’
‘You’re funny sometimes Rosa. There’s nothing strange about your feet. I’m not shy about my feet. I’m a bit nervous about going on my own though. Are you sure you don’t want to come?’
‘I could, couldn’t I? There’s no reason why not.’
‘I’m a bit worried about you sitting around here not going out and doing anything. I think it would be good for you. You seem so down since you got back.’
‘I am a bit. I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself except clean the house.’
‘Come with me then, we’ll ring them.’
The phone is in Isabella’s room. We whisper. There are cobwebs revealed by dust, dropping from the corners. Her clothes, still as a hide, her tangled beads and rings and brooches, her empty shoes.
‘I miss her, she’s been gone ages,’ Lucia says, curled on a pile of pillows.
‘I miss her too.’
We look around in silence. The red velvet curtains are drawn and we have put the globe from her lamp in the toilet. She has not written either; she hates writing letters too. I perch on her high, soft bed.
‘We should dust her room before she gets back.’
‘We should.’
I dream into the print of the river with the palm trees and the woman dipping a pitcher into the water. A man leads a camel. It is silent. There is a daddy-long-legs netted from the wire to the picture rail.
‘Cup of tea?’ Lucia sighs and shifts on the pillows.
‘I’ll make it.’
In the kitchen I boil the kettle on the stove, make tea in teacups and we finish a packet of biscuits. The postie’s bike growls outside the window.
I water Cupid’s Dart, someone pokes their fingers into the pressure points of my feet that evening and noisy boys in noisy cars drive around town.
I write him a letter but it feels strange, as though I am addressing a fictitious character. I stumble and don’t know what to say. I have nothing to say and I wonder if he’ll understand what I do write.
Dear One,
I miss you. Today the sense of reality is overwhelming to me. Life is so ordinary here and I wish I hadn’t come home. I wonder if you are alive, or did I imagine you.
I find no trace of Kosovë in the newspaper and I worry about you and when the war will start and if you are okay in Sweden. Please write to me. I wonder why you haven’t written yet, I worry in case something has happened to you.
I haven’t found a job yet. I came home and realised that something has shifted and I feel a bit out of place within myself. I dream of you, I miss you, I send you kisses and love — Rosa.
From his careful etched-in-the-paper script, I copy the address in Yugoslavia. I know he is not there.
I walk along the little path on our corner to the traffic lights and straight down Stirling Street to the post office. It’s such an ordinary street. Ordinary offices and ordinary shops selling ordinary things. If I were a foreigner it would delight me with its exotic smells and amazing-ness, perhaps. But it is not Istanbul or Dubrovnik or Bucharest, places with layers and layers of the civilised world imprinted everywhere. The layers of this place haven’t got prints that I can see. I am a foreigner, really. I am foreign here, where I was born; foreign in Italy, where my ancestors lived; foreign in the Yugoslavia of my beloved. I buy a stamp and a phone card and I post the letter and punch his numbers into the telephone. The rings are long beeps, someone picks it up and there is electronic twitter. Molim. Hello? Hullo … and speech I don’t understand. I hang up. Again.
21
We’ve heard nothing from Isabella, she’s been gone four months now. Lucia sits on the verandah while I weed the garden.
‘I often wonder if she’s all right,’ I tell her.
‘I keep covering it up to Mum and Dad,’ she says. ‘I lie and tell them that she does write to us, that she sends us little letters sometimes.’
I water Cupid’s Dart and evening comes.
‘I’m so fucking bored, shall we go out Rosa? We hardly ever go out, I think it’s time.’
I’m bored too. It might be good, even if I just go for Lucia.
‘Is there anything on?’
‘Don’t know. We’ll have to go and see.’
I wash the soil from my hands, clean the black from my nails which are all broken and short and have a shower. I haven’t been out since I left, more than six months ago and I’m a bit nervous. I will be like a stranger.
I pull on my fishnet tights, lace up little boots, make my hair all sticky with mousse. We take shiny little bags with keys and money and lock the house in the dark. Walk across the traffic lights past Pat’s Snack Bar and the shopping centre, and onto Victoria Street. People are eating pizza. Boys are driving around in their noisy cars with loud music. One shouts from the window on an old Ford Falcon, something lost in the velocity. I just see his pale hair like a streamer turning the corner.
Maybe I can meet someone else.
Lucia and I walk into Trafs. The Maori bouncer remembers me. Howa ya gowin? I nod and mime good (not true, I’m not good). My boots stick to the carpet and I am inhaling the warm poison of other people’s cigarettes. (My winter clothes still hold the scent of his smoke.) We squeeze between elbows and bums and smiling moustaches. At the bar I prop myself up on the brass foot rail so I can be seen by the barmaid.
‘Hi, Rosa, what can I getcha?’
‘Midori and lemonade thanks, Kelly.’
‘You been away haven’t ya?’
‘I’ve been in Eastern Europe.’
‘Oh yeah, glad to be back?’
‘No.’
She smiles. Even if I feel like a stranger, I’m not. Part of me wishes I was and part of me is glad that people remember me. It feels safe and comforting where before it was annoying and invasive.
‘Three bucks thanks. Bunno’s a good place, but. You’ll soon get used to it again. Have a good night, eh?’
I smile, wave. We went to school together. She was always pretty. The Tan Torana Band are playing tonight, their lime green and brown posters are everywhere. Maybe I will get used to it again. Little circles of guys laugh and drink. Girls dress up here, they’re all made up and sexy and the guys are mostly uniformed, in various incarnations of jeans and T-shirts advertising beer or surf gear. More than half have mullet haircuts. I know lots of them from school and working and coming in to Trafs occasionally — but it seems so long ago, almost as if it were someone else’s life.
We press through the crowd into the back bar where The Tan Torana Band will play. There are only a few people there so far. The drummer, Dan, sees us and waves to the girl selling tickets. He has always been really nice to me. We don’t have to pay and get stamped on our wrists with a purple smiling face.
We find a seat at the bar. Kelly’s sister Nat is working at the back and she gets us more drinks. She knows me from school and makes them double strength.
I sip my drink through a black straw. So much alcohol so quickly, I’m not used to it. I feel myself swirling and my wondering keeps turning back to him. I wonder if the snow has started to melt in Sweden, if he has kissed an Agnetha. Johnny Diesel is singing Summertime Blues. I am bound up in an Arctic circle.
‘Rosa, are you okay?’
‘No. I’m pissed. I’m sad. I miss him,’ I shout above the music.
‘Your Albanian? You’ll meet someone else Rosa.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Don’t worry, just trust the Universe. If it’s meant to be, you know, it’ll happen.’
Lucia puts her arm around my shoulders.
The music stops and The Tan Torana Band start playing and the room quickly fills with the people from the front bar. I feel quite drunk. I push through the crowd to the Ladies toilet. I have to go through the little group of dancers at the foot of the stage, past a giant shuddering speaker. They thump out the end of a Hoodoo Gurus song and Dan turns for a drink as I walk past him. He smiles, waves his drumsticks at me. I like him. If there were more guys like him perhaps I would meet someone else.
I enter the toilet queue. Girls are fixing their hair; they take out bags of make-up and reapply lipstick, borrow tampons, talk to each other. I always know someone in the toilets here. I never want to examine my blemishes in the mirror, because someone I know will see me. I suppose that is good too; comforting, nice. It was never like that anywhere when I was away. I was always a stranger. Now that I’m back, the personal questions don’t seem so much like an invasion. They seem more genuine than just seeking out information to make new gossip. I can’t avoid belonging here, and I can’t help feeling like a stranger too, and not glad to be back from Eastern Europe. I am swirling with the liquor and the talk and I pee with my fishnets around my knees, my head bent over. Life is too hard to work it out and I don’t know where I want to be. I flush, wash my hands, pull lipstick from my shiny bag and reapply in the mirror.
