During the trip back, the truck makes slower progress than it did on its way down because of the snow, even though it is empty.
Hana tries to be a little more friendly and asks the driver if he has any children. He mumbles something. He must be seriously angry with someone in the city, or maybe at himself, and is as hostile as he was this morning, so she stops trying to be nice.
At one point they see a group of people waving their arms to stop the truck, but there’s no way he’s going to pick them up. Hana tries to tell him the truck is empty so he could give those people a ride, but he tells her to mind her own fucking business and leave him alone. For half an hour they don’t say a word. Then, when it is completely dark outside, the man stops the truck, leaving the engine running.
‘I got to take a piss,’ he slurs. ‘Back in a minute.’
When he climbs back into the truck, his pants are open. Hana doesn’t realize at first. The man’s words are disgusting enough. She listens because she has no choice. The man says she’d better let him have his way, and anyway it doesn’t make any difference. Women don’t go out on their own unless they’re up for it. Hana is shocked by his rough language. She slips her hand into the jute sack at her feet just in time. Don’t make a fuss, lady, I won’t hurt you, we’ll just have a little fun together. When he pushes himself onto her, Hana is ready with her knife and she plunges it into his chest. Aunt Katrina always used this knife to take the heads off their chickens. The man groans. Hana always takes the knife with her when she goes down to the city. She sharpens it without letting Uncle Gjergj see.
‘You fucking bitch!’
She jumps out of the truck and runs into the trees beside the road.
‘You fucking bitch! Peasant woman! Mountain bitch!’
She doesn’t get home until the next day, wet with snow and dead tired. Uncle Gjergj is as white as a shroud. He hasn’t slept a wink. He looks at her as if she were a ghost. He doesn’t ask any questions, but bangs his stick over and over on the stone wall, on the table. He’s no stronger than an ant. She can’t see his face. He’s curled up in the corner of the room, his head buried in his chest.
The following day, Hana rummages through Gjergj’s clothes chest, at the same time asking herself what she is looking for. She finds his national costume and puts it on, still wondering what she is doing. She rolls the pants up at the waist and tries to keep them up by tightening the red waistband. What are you doing? She stares at the wall in front of her. She smiles at the stone, and feels sorry for it. The stone has never been kissed. She leans her forehead on it and rests there for a while.
When she goes downstairs and presents herself to Gjergj dressed as a man, her uncle is struck dumb. But all of a sudden his chin starts to twitch and, however tightly he locks his jaw, it is not enough to hold back his emotion.
It’s November 6, 1986.
Hana scratches the date on the wall of the guest room. It takes her a good hour to do it properly.
When she has finished, she goes back to Gjergj. He passes her his rifle. She takes it and examines it closely. It has belonged to six generations of Doda clansmen. Gjergj has kept it oiled for thirty-six years. Hana is still standing awkwardly. Now what? she asks herself. Now what? Now nothing. Now there is nothing. What time is it now in Paris? She’s supposed to sit like a man, with her legs crossed, she’s supposed to smoke a pipe like Uncle Gjergj. She looks at the legs sticking out of her pants, like a ladybug’s, she thinks. To postpone the moment when she has to sit like a man, she stays standing.
‘Are you sure you want to take this step, dear daughter?’
‘My name will be Mark. Mark Doda.’
The next day the news spreads around Rrnajë and the village is alive with gossip. The men will greet her as a man, and the women will avoid her eye.
She starts to keep a diary.
In the five months that follow, Hana takes care of Gjergj, the house, the animals, the memory of Katrina. She tries to make her gait heavier, more masculine. It’ll take time. Every now and then she gives herself a break. ‘There is no hurry,’ she tells herself.
Don’t run, don’t make a noise, don’t think. There’s no hurry. Not anymore. There’s all the time in the world, nobody is waiting for you. You don’t have to worry anymore about how soft your hair is; you don’t have to worry about finding nice clothes; a world’s worth of snow separates Rrnajë from Paris.
Now you’re a man. You’re a man. A man! You’re not allowed to look at real men anymore.
Everything is just fine, she makes herself believe. The snow, the dark nights, the dogs chasing each other, the shadows of the wolves across the snowy landscape, hurrying like busy travelers. The mountains protect you and overwhelm you. The echo of centuries rings in your heart. They save you from the greasy panting of redneck truck drivers.
The memory is still alive. The terror she had felt. The night she had spent in the woods, her teeth chattering with the fear that, having escaped from one man with his pants open, another would suddenly appear from behind one of those trees.
She hadn’t slept a wink. She had sharpened the darkness with her night eyes. If anybody had approached her she would have killed him. She had kept her knife close to her chest and her heart had never stopped beating furiously. She had been famished, she had been angry, she had called to her mother by her beautiful name; she had even invoked her father, whose face she couldn’t remember.
She had prayed to God, and with mute tears; to the same God who had been banned a year before Hana was born and whom Felicità had always talked about in secret.
She had managed not to freeze to death. At dawn she had crept through the alleys of Rrnajë without being seen, protected by the snow. When she got home, the kulla had become hard as a rock. A grave for her old self. She had become a man.
‘Honor to you for what you have done,’ Gjergj’s guests repeat in the months that follow. He is proud of her. You can see it in his eyes, which refuse to surrender to death, and in the way he passes Hana the bottle of raki.
‘Gjergj, bre burrë now you have a son and the honor of the kulla will not die.’
Hana learns to smoke with them. She stinks like them. She copies their laughter and makes her voice more gravelly. Her throat and ribs hurt.
The whole of the Bjeshkët e Namuna — all the ‘cursed mountains’ — knows by now that the Dodas’ daughter has become a man.
Some of the village men fire volleys of rifle shots to celebrate the event, and the man from the Party does not say a thing. Nor does the policeman. If things stay within limits, the Party is magnanimous. If a young girl decides to become the man of the house, well, traditions are to be respected. Within limits. Within certain limits.
One day Lila, her only first cousin, comes to Rrnajë with Shtjefën, her young husband, to visit her parents. She looks at Hana as if she has flown in from Mars.
‘Hana, sweetie, what have you done? You of all people?’
Lila looks like a sheep. Her terrible perm makes her hair as fluffy as an old woman’s. It’s traditionaclass="underline" young wives curl their hair using an iron heated on the fire.
‘Look at yourself; you look like a grandmother.’
‘Why did you do it, Hana?’
‘Your hair makes you look like an old lady. Your headscarf makes you look like an old lady.’
‘I’m married now.’
‘That’s pretty obvious.’
‘Look, I love Shtjefën and I didn’t walk down the aisle like a lamb to slaughter. He’s a good man, he’s not like the others.’
‘But you wait on him without saying a word, and you let your in-laws tell you what to do, don’t you?’