CAN A MAN OWN A HOUSE?—WE SING FOR OUR HOSTS OF PULTIT—DAWN AND A MEETING ON THE TRAIL—THE VILLAGE OF THETHIS WELCOMES GUESTS—LIFE OR DEATH FOR PEROLLI.
But my delight in this discovery of their intelligence received a violent blow almost at once, for another man—tall, keen featured, black bearded, his face framed in the folds of a white turban, red and blue stones gleaming dully in the links of the silver chains on his breast; I will never forget him—leaned forward in the firelight and said: “Such things can never be. Even a child knows that it would be foolish to own a house in which he did not live. Of what use is a house, except to live in? As it is, each man has the house in which he lives, and there are houses for all, and they belong to the tribe that built them. It is impossible that a man can own a house. It is not the nature of men to own houses, and we will never do it, for the nature of man is always the same. It is the same to-day as it was before the Romans came, and it will always be the same. And no man will ever own a house.”
“Glory to your lips!” they said to him. “It is so.”
The woman, who had been sitting quietly listening to this, now rose and very quietly, without saying farewell, slipped out of the firelight, and in a moment, by the sound of the closing door, I knew she had left the house. But there was something about my last glimpse of her back that makes me believe she is still clamoring for her house, and will be until long after her baby sons are grown and married. Unless she gets it sooner.
There was a little silence after the woman had gone, and then one of the youths, compressing his ears with his thumbs, began to sing. He sang softly, for an Albanian mountaineer, but the high, clear notes filled the house like those of a bugle. He uttered a phrase and paused; Cheremi repeated it and paused; and, so singing alternately, repeating always the same musical phrase with changing words, they chanted long songs of war and adventure, old legends of men whose lives had been worn into myths by the erosion of centuries.
The music, strange and nostalgic, seemed to follow a scale quite different from ours, a simple scale of five notes, thin and vibrating like a violin string.
“Sing one of the songs of your land, Flower,” said Cheremi to me, politely. All the Albanians addressed us by our first names, as is the custom, for among them the last name is merely the possessive form of the father’s, and it is dropped in conversation. Long since my name had been translated into their tongue, becoming Drana Rugi-gnusht, Flower of the Narrow Road.
And we gave them our best. We sang “Juanita,” and “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Marching Through Georgia” and “Dixie” and “Columbia.” We stood up and filled our lungs and sang with all our might, but the result was thin and faint; even to our own ears our songs were difficult to hear, after the ringing voices of the Albanians. “Glory to your lips,” they said, courteously, trying to cover their disappointment and lack of interest. Then we tried “A Hot Time in the Old Town To-night,” and that fell flat. But from depths of her memory Frances resurrected an old American popular song; its name I never knew, I had never heard it before; it had something to do with an obviously improper conversation over a telephone, ending, “Are you wise, honey eyes? Good-by!”
That got them! They sat up, very much interested. “We know that song, too!” said they, and, putting their thumbs to their ears, they sang it in voices that compared with ours as a factory whistle to a penny one. Except that in their mouths it became a beautiful thing, vibrant with innumerable grace notes, and striking truly where our version became banal. Changed, but it was our melody as unmistakably as a beautiful woman is the mother of her ugly daughter. “But that is not a true mountain song, it is a song of the cities,” they said, and we wondered whether it had come to us through Vienna or gone from us to them through Paris.
“Try them on the ‘Merry Widow,’” I said, knowing that that music had come to us from the Balkans, and they laughed aloud at the strains of that famous waltz. “Albanian gypsy music,” said they, and from somewhere in the shadows they produced a sort of musical instrument, cunningly carved from pine, in shape like a long, thin mandolin, strung with horse hair, and on this with a hair-strung bow they played us the real “Merry Widow” waltz. “You have gypsies in your country, too,” said they, and we thought how the centuries have transformed the wandering bands of ragged entertainers into our press-agented musical-comedy companies; how the commercial age had divided fortune telling, thieving, and music into complex and separate activities.
At eleven o’clock Cheremi broke reluctantly from the merry group and, approaching us stealthily, whispered his request to be permitted to go home for the night. His house lay only four hours away, perhaps forty miles by our measurements; he had not seen his family for two years, and he wished to visit them. He would be back before dawn. We gave him permission, and one of the villagers went with him, to guard him from the village dogs.
Then we learned that when darkness came the dogs were let loose, and after their loosening only the boldest ventured outside stone walls. And the long wolf howl that rose and quavered and sank and rose again along the trail that Cheremi followed made the dangers of the night vocal for us. We had seen the dogs, tied by the houses, curled into sullen gray-white balls; they are wolves, they are the first dogs, torn from the forests and made half-tame savage companions of these primitive men. Here in the Albanian mountains the long process of molding life, by which men have created the breeds of dogs we know, the great Dane, the collie, the monstrous, fantastic bulldog, and the wispy Pekingese is still in its beginning.
For us, safe in the shelter of solid walls, the night wore away as the previous one had done. Talk and music and the desperate struggle with weariness; the leisurely dinner in the small hours of the morning; the brief lapse into unconsciousness, lying on the floor, which we shared with twenty others—our host and his wife and their smallest child, the last quite naked, had ascended the notched log to the nest of woven willow branches that hung above us on the wall—and the awakening at dawn to the smell of new-made coffee.
“Perolli,” said Frances, desperately, “I simply can’t walk another twenty miles on one little cup of coffee. Isn’t there something left over from dinner? Can’t I have just one little bite of corn bread? Oh, Perolli, please!”
“If we stay for that, it means we’ll never start,” said I. “Slowly, slowly, little by little, breakfast will be ready at six this afternoon.”
“But I’m starving!” she wailed.
To Alex and me the cool, sweet morning outside the smoke-filled dark house called more irresistibly than any thought of food. So at six o’clock, accompanied by the gay Cheremi, who had just returned, she and I set out on the twenty-mile walk to Thethis,[3] leaving Perolli explaining that Frances was of a different American tribe, a tribe whose custom was to eat in the mornings.
It was not rain; the sky was like one enormous waterspout. When we came out of the smoky, reeking darkness of the cavelike house it was like plunging into a waterfall. We gasped with the shock of it; water poured down our faces, and in an instant there was not a dry inch of skin on our bodies. But we had been some days in these mountains, walking in the rain, and after the first chill impact our blood rebounded; we were warm, and, clutching streaming staffs in dripping hands, Alex and I followed Cheremi gayly enough. Though when we were separated for a few feet on the trail the figures of the others became blurry and indistinct, like figures seen through ground glass.
We went first down the bed of a small stream that ran steeply from the mountains above to the Lumi Shala below. The water was about a foot deep, but as soon as we got used to the force of the current we went very well. Whenever we came to a sheer drop of three or four feet Cheremi braced himself and swung us lightly down. So we progressed for perhaps a third of a mile, tingling with the exertion. Then we came out on the narrow gravelly banks of the Lumi Shala, and were joined by a strange Albanian, nude to the waist, who was out for a morning stroll.
The proper thing was to offer him cigarettes, but how could one do it beneath that pour of water? However, the difficulty soon solved itself, for we found a bowlder as large as a house, with a natural corridor running through it, and, though its walls dripped and our feet sank to the ankles in little wells, we managed here to produce and light our damp cigarettes.
The little cave was filled with a curious greenish light, like that beneath the sea; at either end of it a gray wall of falling water shut off our view. Dimly we saw through it a vague blur of tawny gravel, and nothing more.
The strange Albanian conveyed to us with effort, in broken Serbian, Italian, German, and Albanian, that this weather was bad for the health, because when it rained the water in the streams was not good, and drinking it caused pains in the lungs.
“Good Heavens!” said we. “Pneumonia!”
Then we went out of the cave, and Cheremi and the stranger carried us across the waist-deep Lumi Shala on their backs, balanced precariously on their shoulders, surrounded by what seemed an infinity of rushing water, milky greenish in color and seeming to snap up at us with millions of white teeth as the violent raindrops struck upon it.
After that, it was only fifteen miles up the beds of streams, across damp expanses of green and crimson and gray-blue shale, and along narrow ledges suspended between two vaguenesses of gray, until we came to the village of Thethis, on the headwaters of the Lumi Shala.
We came to it suddenly, a high-lifted sweep of rock, like the prow of a gigantic ship wedged between the sides of the narrowing valley. It towered a thousand feet above our heads, and on either side of it a white waterfall plunged from the sky and roared into gray depths below.
We followed the side of a narrowing chasm, climbing back and forth like ants on the side of the cliff, making for the top of one of those waterfalls. We reached it and, standing in a welter of spray on a tiny rock ledge, we hung over that battle of roaring water and granite cliffs to admire the workmanship of the three-foot wall of stone that held up the trail. The Albanian who was with us had made it, and he was very proud of it. He might well be.
Then the trail turned the shoulder of the cliff, climbed up a gorge so narrow that the two-foot stream covered its bottom, turned again and came out on a little plateau. There was a wide stream running across the flat space; its water was milky green with melted limestone, and it was strewn with large, smooth, round bowlders. Some of the bowlders were pure white marble, others were bright rose pink, others were black as ebony, and one great one was green as jade.
A bridge of two logs, with railing of twisted branches, ran from bowlder to bowlder across this incredible river, and we stood on it, gazing at these colors and at a cliff that rose before us, striped rose and green and gray and white in long jagged lines, as though it had been painted, when we heard overhead an outburst of cries, like a hundred sea gulls shrieking in a storm. We looked higher, and there on the top of the cliff we saw a score of boys, naked except for bright loin cloths, engaged in acrobatics.
They made pyramids of their wet white bodies; four, three, two, one, they stood on one another’s shoulders, and the four who upheld the pyramid ran swiftly along the edge of the cliff, passing and circling about a similar pyramid; from top to top of the pyramids the top youths swung, passing each other in the air, landing on other shoulders, balancing, taking flight again. The pyramids melted, as though dissolved in the rain, and formed again, while all along the edge of the precipice other boys made a frieze of living bodies, turning cart wheels, somersaulting over one another, walking on their hands.
We stood paralyzed. What did it mean? Then there was an explosion of shots; the cliffs around us crackled like giant firecrackers, the air seemed to fall in fragments around us, and through the din came multiplied shouts. Four tall chiefs appeared on the cliff trail, gorgeous in black and white and red and blue and green and silver. We were being welcomed to Thethis.
The shouts redoubled, rifles cracked from every rock, the church bell wildly rung, and through the clamor, deafened and a little dizzy, we came into the village of Thethis. The four chiefs, having greeted us (“Long life to you! Glory to your feet! Glory to the trails that brought you!” they said) preceded us up the last breathless quarter of a mile of trail, and all along the way the boys turned handsprings on the cliff tops.
The village of Thethis is built on the plateau that tops the gigantic, shiplike rock wedged in the narrow head of Shala Valley. All around it rise the mountains, snow capped, seamed with white waterfalls like rich quartz with streaks of silver; the shadows of them lie almost all day long across the village. Thethis itself is perhaps thirty large, oblong stone houses scattered at wide intervals on the flat land, and all the land is divided neatly into squares by stone fences—some fields for corn, some for grain, some for meadow. In the midst stands the church, two stories, oblong and gray like the houses, and a network of trodden paths leads to it.
It seemed a quiet, peaceful place. But on the mountains above it to the north the Serbian armies lay; their mountain-trained eyes were doubtless watching us as we crossed the sodden fields. This is the village, these are the chiefs, whose houses were destroyed by a company of soldiers sent from the struggling Albanian government in Tirana. The Serbs held the Albanian cities where the men of Thethis have always gone to market; the grazing lands where they have always fed their sheep lie in the grasp of Serbian armies. Scutari, the nearest free Albanian market place, is a hundred miles away across two mountain ranges. Therefore it was said that Thethis was friendly to the Serbs; it was said that her men still went to market in the Albanian cities that are now clutched by Serbia, that spies came and went across the border, that the chiefs listened to the clink of Serbian gold. And Alex and I remembered that in Thethis we were not to address Rrok Perolli, secretary of the Albanian Minister of the Interior, by his real name.
THE PLATEAU OF THETHIS
In the foreground the church, etc. The hills in the background are held by the Serbs.
But he was behind us on the trail, doubtless still engaged in trying to get breakfast for Frances in the house we had left, and we went forward with easy minds to meet Padre Marjan. He came barefooted and bareheaded across the fields to welcome us, a thin, ascetic-looking man in the brown robes of the Franciscan friar. Large brown eyes burned in his face that seemed made of bones and stretched skin, the grasp of his thin hand was hot and nervous. He spoke to us in Albanian, Italian, and German, ushering us with apologies into the bleak rooms above the church.
The Serbians and Montenegrins, in their drive down toward Scutari, had looted the church, he said. He had come into Thethis two months ago, and found not even a wooden stool left. He was doing his best, but it took time——
The rickety broken stairway led upward to a long hall; from this, a door let us into the living room. It was bare; rain-stained wooden walls and a floor that clattered beneath our feet. The one window was shattered; fragments of glass held together by pasted paper. There were a long wooden table and a bench, nothing more. No fire. Our soaked garments were suddenly cold on us, and a chill entered our very bones.
The only fire in the house, he said, was in the kitchen. We begged him to take us to it, and in a moment we were sitting on a bench before a crackling fire in a big stone fireplace. The tiny room was crowded with villagers, the floor was muddy with their trampling, and more arrived every moment. Padre Marjan had no servant, but all were eager to help him. Some took off our shoes, others heated water over the fire, a handsome youth who looked Serbian and talked German anxiously beat eggs and sugar together while Padre Marjan made coffee. The warmth and the genuine welcome they all gave thawed us and made us happy, and we sat drinking the heartening mixture of eggs and coffee, while clouds of steam rose from us all and a babble of talk went on.
One tall, handsome chief—Lulash, his name was, and beyond doubt he was the handsomest man we had yet seen—brought us a lamb as a gift. Dripping beside him stood a ragged boy, barefooted and blue with chill, who had come down the valley to bring us three eggs, which he carried tied around his waist in a pouch of goat’s skin. He put them carefully into our hands, and we tried to return the gift with some pieces of hoarded candy. But he gazed in dismay at the strange things, and nothing would persuade him to taste them. A colored handkerchief, however, was accepted in an ecstasy that made him dumb; he could only lay it upon his heart and touch our hands to his forehead. Another chief came with a fat hen, others with eggs; all were eager to roll cigarettes for us, all were smiling, and in a hundred beautiful phrases they overwhelmed us with thanks for our coming, for our presence, for the school that Alex and Frances had promised Thethis. For this was to be the first of the mountain schools, and Alex, who had come into the mountains to decide where to put the other two, was delighted to learn that already, before the school building was begun, Padre Marjan had started the school, and Lulash had promised a hundred trees to be burned to make lime for the building.
We sat talking of these things while Padre Marjan set pots of soup to boiling in the fireplace, broke eggs, unlocked his box of precious flour, busied himself with all preparations for dinner, climbing over and around the tangle of lounging bodies, until another outbreak of echoing noises announced the arrival of Frances and Perolli and Rexh and our men with the packs. We felt a little tension with Perolli’s arrival, seeing the keen eyes of the men fixed on his English clothes and swarthy, intelligent face. He is as tall as most Europeans, but he was small among those giants, and the neat leather-holstered revolver and dagger that hung from his belt looked inadequate among all those long, bristling rifles.
But Padre Marjan, unaware of our apprehensions, was altogether the happy welcoming host. He greeted the dripping Frances warmly, anxious only to make her comfortable—she who was also responsible for the hope of a school in Thethis. He welcomed Perolli also, calling him by his first name. “How does he know that Perolli’s name is Rrok?” we girls asked one another with startled eyes—and then, turning to the chiefs with a radiant smile, “This guest,” said Padre Marjan, with pleasure, “is Rrok Perolli, the secretary of the Minister of the Interior in Tirana.”
You read of such things calmly. Nothing that one reads is real to him. Therefore you can never know what Padre Marjan’s innocent words meant to us as he spoke them in his crowded kitchen in Thethis, at the headwaters of the Lumi Shala, a hundred miles and twenty centuries from anything you know.
The wildness, the savagery and isolation of those mountains seemed to come into the room. A hundred miles to Scutari, a hundred miles of almost impassable mountains between us and any kind of help. There we were, three girls and a boy, alone in the narrow valley beneath the eyes of the Serbs, the Serbs who six months earlier had caught Perolli and condemned him to death.
A chill wind seemed to blow through the room; it was not imagined. Every wide, friendly eye about us had narrowed, every lip tightened a trifle. A thousand currents of antagonism, of distrust, of intrigue, seemed like tangible things in the air; only Padre Marjan remained warm, innocent and smiling.
None of us four, certainly not Perolli, doubted that we had just heard his death sentence spoken. And I felt again the depths below depths in the Albanian mind, in that primitive mind which is so much more complex than ours, as I saw him smile, easily and naturally, and heard him saying, “Long may you live!” to the circle of his enemies.
“And to you long life!” said they, while he offered them cigarettes and they rolled others in exchange. He sat down easily on the bench before the fire; with an unconsidered simultaneous movement we three girls moved forward and sat beside him; the chiefs again took their places on the floor, foremost of a mass of bodies and faces, and Padre Marjan moved in and out and around us all, stirring and seasoning the contents of the pots that bubbled in the fireplace.
“Talk to them, say something!” said Perolli, in a careless tone, offering me a cigarette.
“Thank you,” said I, in Albanian, taking it. “Tell them that I come from California, the most beautiful part of America, and that I have seen the American mountains and the mountains of Switzerland, both famous around the world, and that I have never seen such beautiful mountains as those of the Land of the Eagle. (They will not do anything while we are here, will they?)”
Perolli translated. “They say: ‘Glory to your lips. Do you live among the American mountains?’ (No, not unless they get me alone.)”
“In America we cannot live among such mountains. We cannot climb such trails; we are not strong, like the Albanians. When we go any distance we ride, and we have forgotten how to walk up cliffs. We have rich, soft houses, and we travel everywhere on soft cushions, and all our life is easy. But old men still remember when our life was hard and rugged, as it is here, and I have seen in America houses of stone, like these, with very small windows and pegs on the walls where rifles were hung. For our fathers’ fathers lived hard lives surrounded by enemies, as the Albanians do now, and some old men still remember those days. (Do you want me to keep them talking?)”
“They say: ‘What has made the change? Have you cut down your mountains?’ (Yes. I want a little while to think.)” And he leaned back and crossed his knees and lighted another cigarette.
“Well, America was very much like Albania in many ways,” said I. “We were ruled by another nation, as the Albanians were, and we revolted, like the Albanians. Then our tribes fought, as these tribes fight, among themselves. And life was very hard. But we had a young government of our own, as the Albanians have, and it grew stronger, and after a while all the tribes stopped fighting. Then when they were not fighting they used all their strength to make life easy, and it became very easy, and all the houses had windows, because there were no more enemies to shoot through them, and we made great wide trails that were easy to travel, and we made and carried all kinds of goods on them, and became very rich, just as Albania will do.”
“And schools,” said Alex. “Don’t forget the schools.”
Perolli translated at length. When he had finished, Lulash rose, and he was very splendid in his six feet of height, a snowy turban with folds beneath the chin outlining his strong, sensitive, sun-browned face, silver chains clinking against the jewel-studded silver pistols in his orange-and-red sash, and he made a beautiful speech, graceful with a hundred flowery metaphors, thanking us and, beyond us, America, in the name of his village, his tribe, and all his people, for the school and the hope it brought.
“I,” he said, “am a great chief; I have a great house and large flocks and much silver, and all that I have I would give if I could read. I am a chief of Thethis, and my people look to me, and many things are happening outside our mountains that mean much to my people, and I cannot learn what they are and what they mean, because I cannot read. Every night I come to Padre Marjan and study the little black marks, and long afterward I lie awake in my house and am shamed before myself for the ignorance of my whole life. But you have brought learning into my village; our children will know more than we. Our hope is in the children; they will be little torches leading us out of the darkness. You have lighted these torches, and I say to you, for Thethis, for Shala, and for the Land of the Eagle, our hearts are yours to walk upon. Long may you live!”
“Go on a smooth trail,” said we, as he went out, all the other men following him. Then, released from their observant eyes, we looked at one another with all the panic we felt.
“What will they do? Did he mean what he said? Can we expect any protection from him for you, if we ask it?” said Frances.
“Qui sait?” said Perolli. “We Albanians use many words. They have gone to hold a council. All their immediate interests lie with the Serbs. If they hand me over—well, you know the Serbian armies hold their markets and their grazing lands, and a million Albanians are in Serbia’s power. We have nothing like that to offer these chiefs from Tirana, yet.”
“But we are guests! But we are women!” we exclaimed.
“Oh, they won’t act quickly. But the trails are long, in the mountains. Let me think,” said Perolli. And we were silent, watching Padre Marjan busy and anxious about the cooking.
The hours went by, with a steadily increasing tension on the nerves. It is so rarely that we are actually in the center of a situation involving murder that we do not easily adjust ourselves to it. With Perolli it was different; he did not disguise a very earnest desire to save his life, but he is Albanian. He laughed, quite as usual; he sat on the bench before the fire and told stories, and sang Albanian songs, and joked with Padre Marjan. Only occasionally the thoughts beneath the surface of his mind rose and engulfed him in a dark silence. At dinner he ate with good appetite. As for us, watching him, we could not avoid the horrid idea of the good breakfasts served before executions.
We ate in the bare, bleak living room. It was intensely cold; we wore sweaters and coats. Rain blew through the broken window upon us. We would infinitely have preferred to be squatting by the fire in a native house, but Padre Marjan’s hospitable pride would have been stabbed if we had suggested eating in the kitchen. So we sat on the bench, with the table before us, and both of them seemed very strange, and knives and forks and plates appeared to us the most absurd of hindrances to the simple and pleasant action of eating. Why, we said, did we ever invent them; they are not really beautiful or useful; they simply clutter up our lives; and we were aghast, thinking of all the factories and railroad cars and stores and dishpans and the millions of hours of washing up, all of it, one might say, an enormous river of human energy running into the waste of heaps of broken crockery, and nothing more.
