How I learned Albanian

by Marian Szczepanski

It was June 1999, the beginning of my summer hibernation. While my husband and daughters were off meeting Polish cousins and reconnecting with friends made while living in Switzerland, I intended to finish the novel I'd started in graduate school. Squelching memories of medieval castles and alpine trails, I drove my family to the airport. Back at a home brimming with silence, I closed my ears to echoes of Schwyzerdütsch, Switzerland's lilting German dialect, and the Polish my husband speaks with his parents. I turned on the answering machine, then my computer.

For three days, I wrote. Then I heard the announcement at church: Kosovar refugees . . . sponsorship committee . . . organizational meeting. I returned to my computer, but, instead of writing, I rationalized. My parish is a large one, and generous. The committee would be packed with parishioners who are not finishing novels. They could do without me.

Still, I grew restless. I recalled my first days in Switzerland. Dizzy with jet lag, I'd selected groceries labeled in a language I hadn't studied in sixteen years and paid for them with bills as colorful as Monopoly money. I felt afresh the gestalt of the stranger who walks to avoid boarding the wrong bus, who points at the baker's loaf of Halbweissbrot so as not to mispronounce its name, whose wallet chronically lacks the particular coin needed to unlock the grocery cart. Likewise, I recalled the kindness of other strangers, a community of fellow expatriates who explained tram routes and dispatched their children to befriend mine, who found me a surgeon on an hour's notice. I remembered the vow I'd made four years later while flying back to a stateside life: I will make strangers welcome wherever I find them.

I dispelled these memories, only to be ambushed by newspaper images of Kosovo's burning buildings and haunted faces. I tried in vain to reimagine my characters. Then I gave up and went to the meeting.

Two weeks later, the call came. An extended family of twenty-four would arrive in two days. Our committee mobilized. A parade of vans and pickups hauled second-hand furniture to the four apartments. We sorted sheets and towels into makeshift color schemes, stocked kitchen cupboards, and placed a stuffed animal on each child's bed. Like eager adoptive parents, we speculated about clothing sizes, food preferences, and personalities. What we didn't talk about were issues we couldn't comprehend: leaving home at gunpoint, losing contact with family members, living in a refugee camp, arriving in a foreign country with only the clothes on one's back.

The Kosovars arrived in a flurry of handshakes. We pointed to ourselves and said our names. Theirs rolled like music over my tongue: Havishe, Liridona, Amberli, Makfire. I sat on the floor with the youngest children and a Tupperware shape-sorter. They watched in silence as I held up a triangular yellow block, then fitted it into the correct opening. I handed the next block to Dardan, 5, who needed no further instruction. I applauded his efforts, then those of Marigona, his elfin sister. We clapped as the bright shapes slipped, one by one, inside the plastic ball. I was reminded of my youngest daughter at three, playing with her new Swedish classmate. "Is Ida learning any English words?" I'd asked her afterward.

"No," she'd replied with that exasperated look kids give adults asking stupid questions. "She just laughs a lot."

We did exactly that the following week. Giggling, we linked arms, Albanian-style, and crossed the Wal-Mart parking lot. In the lead walked Pat, a fellow volunteer, with Haxhere, mother of seven. I followed with Imrane and Sheribane, Haxhere's teenage daughters. Our mission: to outfit the family with underwear and pajamas. We were equipped with an Albanian-English dictionary, several typewritten "cheat sheets" of basic Albanian phrases, and a list of Haxhere's other children. Pat had explained the purpose of our shopping trip using a combination of the Turkish she'd learned from her in-laws and a bit of English, punctuated with gestures I'd mirrored in order to feel useful. On the ride to the store, I had studied the cheat sheet, chanting the phonetically written phrases to anchor them in my mind. By the time we entered the store, I'd forgotten everything but the greeting tungjajeta, a phrase of little use, I soon discovered, when it comes to selecting a bra.

In the lingerie department, I gathered props to illustrate the A-B-C-Ds of sizing. Mother and daughters nodded. Pat and I looked at each other, then at the display racks. Black bras dangled like bats packed wing-to-wing; yellow ones clustered like ripe bananas. Blue and pink, lilac and maroon, they bloomed like flowers in profuse beds of glossy nylon and robust Spandex. Welcome to America, I thought, land of mind-boggling choices. We five huddled, paralyzed with indecision, until Pat found her voice and wisely suggested, "White."

We regrouped in the adjacent, monochromatic aisle. I gathered fresh props in ascending sizes that reflected personal biases toward cotton and minimalism. The girls inspected these, looking doubtful. Pat drifted away with Haxhere and the dictionary, leaving me to perform a pantomime about lingerie suitable for a hot Houston summer. The girls smiled, graciously acknowledging my performance, and began their own search. Heads together, they selected, debated, rejected, and selected again. I realized that, like my own teen daughters, these girls navigated by a consumer compass governed by age, not culture. They wanted what fills my daughters' dresser drawers: lace and ribbon, fashion and glamour, not middle-aged, wash-and-wear commonsense. Humbly, I returned my selections to the rack and directed the delighted girls to the changing cubicles.

In the checkout line, I learned another word. Mire. Pretty. Mother and daughters beamed and peeked into each other's plastic sacks. When Pat told the checker they were speaking Albanian, the woman burst into tears. "Why are people doing such terrible things?" she asked, looking at me as if I knew the answer.

Outside, I tried to explain: "She's sorry about what happened in your country. She's glad you're here. We're all glad you're here." It felt foolish, speaking this string of incomprehensible words, but, at the same time, it felt necessary. I watched the open faces of Haxhere and her daughters and believed it was possible, if only in that rare, unplanned moment, for meaning to transcend language, for the heart to translate instead of the mind.

This is the story I tell those who ask if my novel is done. If they ask big-picture questions, I say it's not about being right or wrong, victor or vanquished, Muslim or Christian. It's about being, period, being at its most basic, being humans together in a place where words don't work and everyone's a stranger.

When I finished my parking-lot explanation, Sheribane put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me. We linked arms-five abreast this time-and headed for Pat's car. Our hips bumped. We stumbled and laughed and adjusted our strides. Step by step, we moved forward, a row of women walking in perfect rhythm under the brilliant Texas sun.

Marian Szczepanski has now finished her first novel. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals.