The sworn virgin, p.19
The Sworn Virgin, page 19
She hates me, Eleanora felt in a flash. If she only knew how he held my hands . . . Then Eleanora remembered he had only petted her palms, he had stroked her fingers, he had held the air between their hands. He had shown her the affection of a cousin, a brother, a father. She watched as Cheremi grinned at Meria, teasing her about how she rinsed each grain of rice. It was meaningless. She kicked at an upturned corner of the rug, realizing she still wore her shoes. Meria was merely annoyed at the cold mud that she had tracked in. She walked back to the front door and slipped off her sandals, glancing at Meria as she passed her.
“It is so good to have a man in the house again,” Meria whispered.
Eleanora laughed. Was she a man or a woman to the world? Had she not sacrificed enough, bargained her pleasure for power?
“What about tradition? All I have done for you?” Eleanora asked. “Do I not count?”
Meria said nothing, stirring the simmering pot.
The next night, Eleanora sat a cushion away from Cheremi, while Meria baked corn bread and fried eggs Cheremi had brought home with him. The smoke of his cigarette mingled with the smoke that escaped the hearth’s fire, and the two curled together in the air and melted into the blackness of the ceiling.
Eleanora sat, silent, cradling an open book of Petrarch’s poems. She had to turn the pages back every minute or so to review the meaning of a sentence that slipped out of her grasp. She would meet Cheremi’s eyes occasionally over her book, and in the soft light of the fire the furrows between his brows and the starburst of wrinkles when he smiled were blurred, and he looked as young as a man could without being a boy.
Cheremi shut his eyes as he sucked on his cigarette, its embers burning brighter.
“I adore the smell of cloves,” Eleanora said, sighing. “Do those taste as good as I imagine?”
The smoke escaped his upturned lips. “I cannot say. By now I know your imagination is quite strong. Do women smoke in the mountains?”
“Of course. It is one of the many things that women do, but we all pretend they do not and that a good one would never want to,” Eleanora said. “That said, I have never tried it.”
“But she may try it. She is a sworn virgin, did you not know?” Meria’s toneless voice was as soft as usual, but Eleanora felt her question echo across the room, her words punctuated by a crackling of the fire.
Cheremi took it like an easy joke, like he took everything, smiling and amused. Eleanora was glad he could not see how her ears burned. She shut the book with a snap, then senselessly opened it again to have something to look at.
“Meria mentioned you had taken a vow before,” he said, eyes twinkling in the dark. “But naturally I did not want to believe such a thing.”
“Yes, it is true I am a sworn virgin. How did you never guess, given the privileges afforded to me in my home? I am a veritable lord, I am worse than Caligula,” Eleanora said sarcastically. She had gone too far. She did not want Cheremi to see her this way. She lightened her voice. “I am a sworn virgin. So let me try your cigarette.”
He passed her the cone-shaped cigarette and leaned farther back in the cushion he had propped up against the wall. Eleanora pinched the cigarette between her fingers and sucked. Her throat was on fire. She tried to smother her cough, but the effort made her shake and she ended up hawking harder. She covered her mouth and shook her head, passing the cigarette back to him.
Cheremi chuckled, then leaned closer and held the cigarette to her lips.
“Now again,” he said. “Only this time very, very slowly.”
Eleanora took a steady breath and felt the cloves disappear into her chest like air, then float back up and rest on the tip of her tongue, before the smoke slipped from her mouth like fragranced breath. She licked her lips. She had tasted, shared the air from his mouth.
Cheremi smiled and put the cigarette back to his lips.
“YOU REMIND ME of someone I knew long ago,” Cheremi had said, his words reverberating in Eleanora’s mind as she stared at her father’s leather journal.
She sat on the wooden chest under the front window, rereading the last line of Baba’s last letter, its ink smeared by long-dried drops. Tears? The blurred words were still legible.
I wish you could see this child of ours. She has my eyes, and I can only hope she will have half the bravery you showed your last days. Smiling through your pain. Asking about the baby. Always reassuring me you felt fine, and how happy you were with your little family. You swore you regretted nothing. You are stronger than any man I have ever known.
The first time she read this passage she had wept with relief: she had killed her mother, but no one blamed her for it. What had happened to Baba, what she had done in Shkodra to that man—who deserved it, by anyone’s measure, she tried to tell herself—may be different. But this at least was plain and clean. Her mother had loved her for the short time she had known her, and regretted nothing. She could have recited the entry to herself by now, but rereading it was more soothing than a lullaby, than the peaceful silence blanketing the house.
Eleanora and Cheremi were alone that afternoon while Meria was out gathering firewood, or was it water—who cared? They were alone. Cheremi sat across the room from her, leaning against the wall facing the front door, a fuzzy beam of sunlight ending at his outstretched feet.
She heard his voice in her head again, though his pink-red lips were still as he flipped through a heavy book full of illustrations of ancient symbols and their explanations, its blue cloth cover embossed with a gilded serpent biting its own tail. She twirled the snake bracelet on her wrist. Her mother’s bracelet.
She reminded him of someone he knew long ago. He had said so in a whisper torn from his throat. She glanced at him across the room.
She wished she could put the journal in his lap, so he could read one of the most moving love stories she had ever read. Purer than Paolo and Francesca. But she knew he could not read, like most other men, and a shyness held her back from openly speaking of Baba and his love for her mother. She could hardly bear to speak of her father to Meria, after all that had happened, and often stories of her father lay in her closed mouth. He was so much a part of who she was, and Cheremi would have admired her father, she was sure. She tipped her head back and blinked away tears threatening to spill out. She did not want to disturb the day’s tranquility, so perhaps it was better to simply not speak of Baba. In her mind she saw the clumps of dirt thudding onto Baba’s rough pine coffin, the gravedigger pausing to scratch his thigh, yawning. She dabbed the wet inner corners of her eyes. Cheremi must not see her like this. She took a deep breath. Besides, her tears would ruin her father’s letters. She slammed closed the leather journal and blurted, “Who do I remind you of?”
Cheremi looked up, startled, his blue eyes naked for a second—angry, ashamed?—and then his lids half closed as his slow-growing grin returned.
“You remind me of a girl I knew long ago,” he said. “So long ago, in the ancient days when gods roamed the earth . . . and when I was about your age.”
She tried to laugh, and it came out a little choked. “Was that really so long ago?” she asked. “Where is this girl now?” She hoped she was ancient and gnarled. Buried and gone, even.
“No one knows where she is,” he said. “She disappeared into the air.”
He closed the book in his lap and squinted at her.
“But maybe you do not remind me of her. Perhaps I like your face so much I replaced hers with yours in my memories. I do remember she was very beautiful.”
Eleanora tugged at the scarlet sash she wore over her father’s pants, mesmerized by the unraveling ends of it, hoping he could not see how her face burned.
“Very beautiful, but also very wild. She never would have blushed like that,” he continued. “But perhaps she should have.”
Cheremi pushed himself up and walked out the front door, taking the rifle with him. Before he closed the door behind him, he turned and winked at her.
Eleanora tossed the leather journal across the floor and stood up, then sat down again. He was a man, and perhaps she was his equal—but she was equally his windup toy.
He still teasingly smiled at her, the same way he did at Meria, but since stroking her palms the day they had found each other on the trail, his occasional squeeze of her shoulder, his pats on her hand had disappeared.
What did it matter? She felt the air between them as if it were water they swam in together; she might move her arm to touch her chest and the movement might ripple all the way to him. She touched him without touching him, and she felt him do the same to her.
Had her father written something similar to her mother in his journal? She stretched her fingertips, stroking the worn leather cover of his journal. No matter how many times she read his letters, it was extraordinary to think of Baba as young and in love. She knew he had loved her, his work, good books and fine food, and many little things that made up life, yet he had watched the world with an amused indifference. How had such passion run beneath such coolness? Perhaps it was due to the death of her mother. Had Baba not told her sometimes people could no longer feel anything where a thick scar grew? How did she think the death of her father would affect her?
She shook her head and stood.
Eleanora counted her breaths before she followed Cheremi out the door, as she had each afternoon since he had returned. Fifty breaths if they were alone, one hundred and fifty if Meria was also in the room.
Each inhale passed with a thousand thoughts between them. Would she find Cheremi silently smoking near the trail? Would she have to wander around the woods and pretend to be pursuing something besides him? A few days ago she had met Cheremi in the forest beneath their home. Before she had said hello, she dropped her handful of kindling and grabbed the rifle from his hands to shoot and kill a boar he had not seen. He had praised her shooting. He had eaten little of dinner that night.
Eleanora put her lips to the window and blew her breath against it, tracing concentric circles in the steam.
No, she told herself, an extra-long exhale could not count as two.
It took an eternity until she reached her fiftieth breath. She kicked the leather journal out of the way before she walked out the door.
Cheremi leaned against the fence, smoking, staring out across the valley made invisible by a flood of shadows, from mountain peaks like islands emerging through waves of clouds. Eleanora imagined their wet patch of land was a boat with only room for the two of them, floating through the sky. She stood next to Cheremi and crossed her arms against the frozen air, and he put the cigarette to her lips. She avoided meeting his eyes, though she was sure they rested on her pursed lips. She took a slow suck, enjoying the scented smoke wafting out of her mouth. Eleanora lifted the cigarette from his hand, half afraid and hoping her fingers might brush his.
“If you could go anywhere,” Eleanora said, “where would you wish to go that you have not been?”
She took another slow drag and passed the cigarette. The clouds drifted slowly beneath them, and she closed her eyes. Let him say Italy, and they could float across to the country now.
“Oh, I do not know where I will go next,” Cheremi said, tucking the cigarette in a corner of his mouth. She wondered if he tasted her lips on it.
“I have been nearly everywhere,” he said.
“You have even been here, now,” she said with a forced laugh. “You have seen so much.” She sounded wistful, toeing the thawing ground. “More than I have.”
“One day I will show it all to you,” he replied, tossing the unfinished cigarette and grinding it out with his heel. “It is the least I can do after you saved my life.”
She wanted to say he had done the same for her, but her mouth was dry, and instead she stood still. When she felt the weight of his gaze shift to the empty footpath in front of them, she let herself look at him.
She almost wished she had not.
The clouds rolled away from the lowering sun, and a harsh light washed over his face, his eyes lost in the shadow of the cliff of his brow, his pores deep and dotted even around the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. White hair sparkled through his fair mustache, deep parentheses framed his smile, and light red threads trailed the whites of his eyes. But they led to clear blue-gray irises, and the strong profile of his nose echoed the majestic lines of the mountains beyond his face. And while he shared some of the signs of age she had sometimes recognized in Baba, she also saw the same proud masculinity she had admired in her father’s face, youthfulness in the burnt red in his lips. She looked down at the melting ground.
LATER THAT NIGHT, she thought how she might go to Cheremi while the three of them lay on the main floor. He no longer slept in her father’s study since returning from those three missing days. She might move closer to him in the dark, to feel the heat radiating from him—no, not even from him, but from the cushions his body had warmed. She might move closer to him to feel his breath—no, just the air his breath had moved to kiss her cheeks. She might, but instead she lay still under her blanket wondering if he woke sometimes during the night, too. Nightmares still stirred her in the middle of the night, but she went back to sleep more quickly, feeling safer with Cheremi nearby. Still, she shied from even looking at him in the dark. Her gaze might wake him. She considered how easy it would be to reach out her hand to touch the corner of the blanket on top of him, and the next morning she thought maybe she had, but as she blinked at the dawning sun she was sure she dreamed it all.
She rose, standing on the balls of her feet so as not to make a sound. She stretched her arms above her head, observing the steady rhythm of Cheremi’s rising and falling barrel chest, and Meria’s delicate breath as she lay on her side. The coins remained hidden in her father’s study. She would sneak up to the room and open the chest so slowly it would not creak, then tiptoe out the front door. Today was the day she would finally leave this house and go on to what she dreamed of before Cheremi; she would take the first steps in a journey that would lead her farther than he had even traveled, farther than her father had even yearned for her.
But by sunset that was a mere dream, too.
She had spent the day unsuccessfully hunting, and Cheremi had come back from repairing a wall in the village. He probably knew the villagers better than she did. She smiled, her chin perched on her folded hands as she faced him, while Meria hung in the background with her spindle.
Cheremi leaned forward, and Eleanora somehow sensed he was going to tell her this story again, even before the words came out of his lovely lips.
“He was a curious man, curious about ancient castles,” Cheremi said. “Some said he was the king of England, and it is possible, as he was only interested in royal ruins.”
Cheremi lifted his eyebrows.
“Who can account for foreigners’ tastes? Always obsessed with half-forgotten histories.”
“A half-forgotten history is the best sort of history,” Eleanora said. She recognized his tale and hoped he further embellished it as he repeated himself. “You can make it into the tidiest explanation for why things exist as they do. Isn’t it the most convenient way to justify the near future?”
“Are you reading from a book I cannot see?” Cheremi asked, his eyes twinkling. “You speak like a wise chief from some story. You are much too young to be so intelligent.”
Meria coughed in the background, her hands suddenly fluttering between them, setting up the table for dinner. Eleanora and Cheremi leaned back without acknowledging her.
“My king of England,” Cheremi continued, “though, was not so wise. Only young. The supposed ruins he was excited about, which to me looked like large broken stones stuck in the ground, were guarded by a tribe convinced treasure was beneath the stones, buried there by years and magic. The tribe threatened to take the Englishman’s Kodak and arrest him.”
Cheremi paused to suck on his cigarette. Eleanora had heard of Kodaks and how they captured images sharper than any pen and paper, but she was embarrassed to ask him how they worked. It must seem so obvious to him.
“I swore to them he was merely curious whether the sight was Illyrian—who even knows what that means? I only know the word because he repeated it often enough—and that any harm that came to the English king would have to be taken up with my tribe and all of England.”
Cheremi laughed, somewhat bitterly, sucking on his cigarette.
“As if England or my tribe would care. But they left us alone then. The foreigner and I left, nonetheless, after he sneakily pointed his Kodak at the ruins. I coughed to hide the noise of its clicking. When we camped for the night, I unpacked our corn cakes. The foreigner bit into one of the cakes, baked before we left for the trip, and spit something out. It was a gold coin, with the profile of a man etched on it. The foreigner knew this face and said it was the king he looked for. He packed it away carefully. The next morning, though, he could not find the coin.”
Eleanora smiled into her weak coffee. Had it been an engraved silver ring last time, discovered at the bottom of a leather satchel? Eleanora felt a jealous pang. How many days and nights had the foreigner spent alone with Cheremi? Who knew the other places the foreigner must have seen.
“It was such a curious land,” Cheremi said. “It would make your Italy feel familiar.”
“Have you been there?” Eleanora asked.
She had asked him before, but she hoped his answer would change from a simple “no” to a declaration he wanted to go there—with her.
Before he could answer, Meria stood between them with a bowl of water and red-and-white linens to wipe their hands with before dinner. She shuffled the low wooden table into place, setting atop it carved wooden bowls of goat’s yogurt and small pieces of corn bread. Meria no longer shared meals with Cheremi and Eleanora, instead waiting near the hearth until they were finished, eating whatever was left, as women did in more conservative households. Though Eleanora was happy to eat alone with Cheremi, she found Meria’s hovering distracting, feeling some sort of judgment by her hanging back, an oblique reminder that Eleanora might be left alone with an unrelated man only because she was a sworn virgin, and, according to society, as blameless and boring as any other man.
