Teodor KEKO
PROSE
IN THE DARK
It kept on raining outside, a fine
drizzle, cold and never-ending, so typical of Tirana in December.
The electricity had been off in the apartment for some time.
We continued to huddle in bed, silent and naked under the warm
covers, listening to the patter of the rain against the windowpane.
It was so frigid out of bed that you had to think twice before
setting out on the long, five-metre journey to the bathroom.
You'd piss a stalactite instead of urine.
Anna was not in good shape. Although
she was the one who had called me and asked me to wait for her,
and she was the one who had come here, who had disrobed and crawled
into my bed as usual, she was not well. I pondered on this for
quite a while, worrying whether I was perhaps the cause of her
depression. She was still very young and far too beautiful to
be depressed. But I never really found out why. From our first
encounter at the jubilee concert, where very few people attended
and where the singer was better at reciting the text of her song,
written on the board, than she was at singing it, I had gotten
along with Anna better than with anyone else. She had been a
windfall for me from the start, a gift of God, a girl who, with
so many admirers to choose from, had focussed her erotic attentions
on me, a rusting thirty-five-year-old loser, abandoned by everyone
else, who had set up house in the drinking parlour and spent
his nights with a glass to fight off the biting solitude.
The moment her slender being entered
my life, I seemed to revive. She also awakened my desire to get
back to sculpting. Now I would concentrate on her curves and
not on the usual portraits and busts of fallen heroes who had
poisoned my lust for art the moment I came to realize that the
results of my work, my personal collection, were all standing
around in the cemetery. Yes, it was there that my masterpieces
were languishing, paid for with a few leftover coins. Most of
the busts were of thugs and savages struck down in some ambush,
a settling of accounts, under circumstances and with weapons
which were more or less identical, such that you would think
they had all been killed by the same person.
Out of the corner of my eye, I observed
her graceful back with its slight inward curve towards her bottom,
and considered doing a couple of sketches. The light was fading,
however, and work was now impossible. In the twilight, the result
would probably have been the back of a fifty-year-old cleaning
lady. I would just have to wait until the electricity came on
again.
"It's still raining," she said
at last. "I wonder why there's no light."
I studied her now, as if I were preparing
to do a portrait, and could distinguish the sorrow in her being,
a sorrow mixed with boredom.
"It's probably not raining up in
the mountains."
"Damn rain," she growled, "it
never rains in the North where the dams are, but here in Tirana
where it does no one any good and just causes flooding!"
"You know, there was a time when
people got along without electricity, day and night," I
replied, endeavouring to console her.
"I know," she complained, "but
life back then was designed that way and no one relied on electricity
to start with. They may not have had light, but they had wood
furnaces, coal stoves, chandeliers and candles."
"You're just in a bad mood,"
I ventured gently.
"I'm always terrified when the power
is off," she responded. "The darkness reminds me of
my life and, for an Albanian, that only means bad. We never have
anything to remember..."
I tried to comfort her, noting that even
the devil is not as black as he's painted, but my words were
to no avail. Calmly, as if she were talking about a dress she
had just bought, she informed me that life was not worth living.
She defined our existence as a realm of mediocrity and futility,
and I could find no argument to convince her of the contrary.
In fact, I could not remember anything
from my past except the beatings I had received from my father
every time he found out I was playing hooky, the death of my
mother, and a few stupid moves I had made when I was out bingeing.
I did not think much about the past anyway because I never had
the courage to come to terms with reality. I was not one of those
decisive, revolutionary types. Her depression was beginning to
gnaw at me, too. She was a goddess, all that tender skin and
those curves clinging to my body, and yet I could not touch her.
It would have been perverse, a crime, to try to make love to
something deprived of a soul...
"You know how I think of myself?"
she then asked. "I'm like something... like some dead object!"
I had the impression she was wiping a
tear from one of her wide eyes.
"You should not have come,"
I declared. "Now you've got me depressed, too!"
"You need the light more than I
do! That's my only consolation. I think I would otherwise kill
myself."
You are right, I thought to myself. If
you were anywhere else, who knows where you would have ended
up by now, in some well-lit bar, with a flickering crystal glass
of champagne in your hand, surrounded by waiters dressed to the
hilt.
Suddenly there was a click and the lights
came on. The whole apartment building was abuzz. She sighed:
"I guess God's been listening in."
She rose at once and began to put on
her clothes.
"Come on, get dressed," she
demanded, as I looked on in surprise. "Let's go and get
something to eat in a good restaurant before the lights go out
again! I think I'd like to have a drink tonight." I was
stunned and got up without delay. But I knew that the next morning
she would be moaning again, day after day until she got old and
would then look back, remembering only the death of her parents
and the day they had ripped up her miniskirt. God had made her
a beauty, but her beauty would never help her.
(November 2000)
[Në terr, from the volume
Hollësira fatale, s.l. 2001, p. 46-48. Translated
from the Albanian by Robert Elsie] |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Modern
Authors from Albania (late 20th - 21st centuries)
