Brass Read online

  The ride to Yllka’s is mercifully and maddeningly short: mercifully because what are you supposed to say to Ahmet other than thank you or no thank you a dozen times, and maddeningly because really? That’s it? Yllka—and the rest of the Hasanis, as far as you know—has seriously been ten minutes with traffic from you all this time?

  “So, should I come up, then, or just wait?” Ahmet asks.

  “Um, could you just, like, wait outside? Or, like, I could text you when I’m done?” you say, knowing that all he’ll hear is that you’ll be in contact again and thus of course will agree. For someone with no experience with boys, you’re surprised at how easily you’re able to navigate this whole Ahmet situation. Who even needs to read all those Cosmo advice columns instructing women on how to keep a man under your thumb, in between all the other Cosmo advice columns instructing women on how to keep the man from seeking out other younger, hotter thumbs? You aren’t even wearing a push-up bra or terrifying fuck-me pumps and yet there’s Ahmet, glancing back at you on the walk to his car, pretending the sun is in his eyes and he can’t see you.

  But it isn’t only eager young men on whom you can cast a spell, you see when Yllka flings open the door before you can even tap the knocker a second time.

  “Oh, it’s you!” she declares, full exclamation-mark declares, as if she’s waited for you all night and yet was convinced you wouldn’t really come. And suddenly you wonder, once again, if you should have, if this whole thing is going to prove to be a horrible mistake. There’s a good chance this woman is a nutjob who wants to sell you out to some underground network of skeezy Albanians, according to the rumors you’ve heard. You’ve heard these people marry off their daughters at age fourteen, or if the daughters refuse, human-traffic them to fat sweaty businessmen in industrial parks off the highway. In an hour you might find yourself in a Chevy Suburban with some pork-fingered Budweiser executive with a secret penchant for girls not much older than his own chubby, spoiled children.

  Yllka doesn’t look like a pimp, though. Pimps probably wouldn’t cry tears of joy at the sight of you the way that Yllka does. She grabs you and pulls you to her bosom—it can only be called a bosom when it’s so in-your-face like that—and tells you to come in, but you can’t move, and in fact can hardly breathe, with her holding on to you so tightly. Eventually she releases her arms and steers you by the shoulders into the apartment, the first floor of a triple-decker a lot like the one you live in with your mother, if only because half the people in Waterbury live in triple-deckers that are essentially identical to the one you live in with your mother. Yllka’s is spotless, though, not a speck of dust anywhere, which is particularly notable since nothing in there appears to be any less than sixty years old, from the china to the doilies to a Frigidaire that’s possibly one model year past icebox. There are so many crystal and porcelain knickknacks lined up on the shelves that if you squint your eyes it all melts together into some ornate wallpaper, and behind all of that stuff is actual ornate wallpaper, the kind you’d seen at elementary school birthday parties thrown by kids being raised by their off-the-boat grandparents. Even the functional stuff on the dining table is some kind of knick-knack-paddy-whackery: the salt and pepper shakers are doves, the napkin holders are brass trumpets, the pot holders are the same angel’s wings that Mamie has in her kitchen, which is surprising to you since you assume that Yllka, like most of the Albanian kids at school, is a Muslim, while Mamie is a Catholic who’d been reborn somewhere between her fourth and fifth steps in AA.

  Yllka sits you down and places a serving platter in front of you, the thin pieces of fried dough it holds stacked six inches high and drizzled with honey. You normally don’t like to eat in front of strangers, because you think they’re glancing down at your farm-girl haunches and silently questioning whether you really need the calories, but you also realize that you can’t be expected to talk with a mouth full of food, and now that you’re in front of her, you realize you have no idea at all what to say. So you take a bite, and it gives you something to say.

  “Oh my god, that’s really good,” you choke out—choke because your mouth is still too full of sweet mush to really attempt speaking, but the words come out involuntarily. There has to be something in those fried dough squares besides flour and water and sugar. Nothing can taste that good without the use of black magic and/or generous amounts of bacon fat, neither of which you think a Muslim with angels on the wall would be allowed to use.

  Yllka looks relieved, like she’s just advanced to the next round in Iron Chef. Then she pours you coffee and brings out cheese and bread and you spend the next two minutes convincing her that you really, really don’t want or need anything else to eat, and that you really, really aren’t too skinny like your mother always was.

  “I’m good, I’m fine, I’m full, I promise,” you say, and eventually she sighs and sits down across from you at the table, petting your hair as if you were a runaway dog she’d retrieved from the shelter.

  “Gjonni couldn’t be here, unfortunately,” she says finally, but she doesn’t really look sorry about it. She’s so grabby, and the way she stares, it’s like she’s greedy for you. You’ve never been looked at like that before, not even by Ahmet back in the car—and he was much more circumspect about his desire. It’s strange, and not entirely comfortable, and yet not entirely awful, either. Yllka had told you last night that she’s your great-aunt, which is family, a word that doesn’t quite seem to fit but absolutely does. What other word is there, other than an Albanian one that you don’t know?

  “Who’s Gjonni?” you ask, and immediately Yllka looks ready to cry.

  “My god, do you know nothing?” she asks. You don’t shake your head, but of course you know nothing, and of course you’re embarrassed about that, as if you’d been caught neglecting your duties. How are you supposed to know about these things? Is there some Wiki you don’t know about that could have unraveled all the mysteries of your own life? “Gjonni is my husband, your uncle,” she says, and you mouth the word uncle, something you’d had few occasions to say, other than crying it when Margarita pinned your arm against your back once in third grade. Your mother has never mentioned the names Yllka and Gjonni to you. She’s never mentioned that these people whose blood you share live in an adjacent zip code to you and not on a different continent. You could practically forget your own father’s name, your mother has said it aloud so few times to you. When it comes up at all, it’s to assign blame for something, and his name then becomes Your Father, pronounced with a detached, clinical tone that makes it sound like a medical condition. As in: I don’t know where your frizzy hair/eczema/cat allergy comes from, must be from Your Father.

  “So you’re a Hasani?” you ask, excited by the prospect of your name having a history. For the first time, your name doesn’t seem to you like some random collection of letters put together by a spambot. You’re glad your mother has never followed through on her lifelong promise to legally change your name to Kuzavinas, something even more unpronounceable and somehow equally unsuitable.

  “I was, before I was married a hundred years ago. Now I am Shehu, Yllka Shehu,” she says, and once again you are alone on an island of Hasani. “But you can call me Teto. It means ‘auntie.’ ” She pauses. “You don’t know that, do you? You don’t even know the words for your own family?”

  “No,” you say.

  She shakes her head and strokes yours. “You poor thing, i dashur. So lost from what you are.”

  It takes a minute for that to sink in, and then you’re fully convinced that this woman is not a human trafficker or a run-of-the-mill weirdo after all. She’s a genius. She’d had you pinned as the hungry, stray animal you’d always felt like from the moment you walked in the door.

  —

  Yllka brings out a photograph, a black-and-white shot of a man with eyes as wrinkled as his shirt staring into the camera from under a white knit cap. He looks like he’s deciding what kind of punishment to dish out to whatever ass
hole is trying to steal his soul with that little plastic box in their hands, his face veiled with smoke from a cigarette that didn’t make it into the frame. He is ghostly, and you have no doubt he was the kind of man whose spirit would have hung around long after he died from consumption or a mule kick, the kind of man who isn’t about to let a thing like death keep him from getting his work done, whatever his work is. From the looks of him, it’s farming or arms dealing.

  “That’s my brother. Your babagjysh,” Yllka says. “I know, the picture looks terrible. We just had cheap Chinese cameras in those days. Toys, really.”

  “Babagjysh,” you repeat.

  “It means ‘grandfather,’ ” Yllka says.

  “I know,” you say. “I figured that out. I just never knew I had one.”

  “Of course you had one. He’s gone now, rest his soul, but you had one. Everybody has one, silly.” She takes a wisp of your hair and pushes it aside and looks at you like you’re much younger than you are, a toddler that the whole world has to be explained to. “Let me show you more people from back home,” she says and scatters the photo albums across the table.

  Home, she says, like it’s yours, too.

  “There are no Hasanis left in the village,” she says, after you make it through the first album, more black-and-white shots of more people who looked like they were allergic to good times, which you hope isn’t genetic. “Except for the dead ones, I mean. Lots and lots of dead ones. We were there forever, hundreds and hundreds of years. And now, poof, all gone.”

  “How come? What happened?” you ask.

  “Oh, Luljeta, it became a terrible place. You must have heard about how terrible Albania was under Hoxha.”

  You can’t get yourself to admit that you haven’t. You don’t even know what a Hoxha is.

  “We weren’t allowed to even feed ourselves. Hoxha would rather us starve than to grow food that wasn’t for the State. His own people he did this to. We were the cattle, why would we need to raise our own? And so many people put in the prisons and the camps, and so many people put to death, and so many lies that we believed, that Albania was the most powerful country in the world, and every nation was an enemy, everybody wanted to get us. Do you know what it’s like to feel so alone like that, like the whole world, even your own people, wish you not to live?”

  You try to come up with a good answer to that before you realize it’s a rhetorical question.

  “Of course you don’t,” she says. “Thank God you never knew that life.”

  Yes, thank god, except that there is a secret part of you that is thrilled to be only a degree or two away from that kind of suffering, the same ugly part of you that, when you were little, sometimes secretly wished for type 1 diabetes like your classmate Aisha, who got to wear a cool medical bracelet and received endless attention from her parents and teachers. Sure, she almost died twice a year and would probably eventually go blind and might not make it to fifty; what was fifty to you other than some diffuse, faraway threat, like purgatory? Aisha, at eight, understood suffering and mortality. It made her serious and above reproach. You’d had a couple of stomach bugs and a respiratory illness once, and that was about as close as you came to Aisha’s innate stoicism. You’d never even gotten the chicken pox, even after your daycare closed for two weeks when it swept through and infected just about every other child in a half-mile radius. You are hearty, almost ridiculously so, but maybe that’s because you’ve inherited the gene for overcoming adversity, which means that you are tuned in to adversity in a way that your schoolmates are not. After all, look at what your uncle and aunt had lived through. Your father. Your babagjysh.

  “But I want to know that life,” you say. “Or at least know about it.”

  Yllka takes your hand and kisses it. “I know, darling, and you will learn. I am so happy you’re here.”

  “I am, too,” you say, and god, it’s embarrassing to talk like that, all gushy and goo-goo-eyed, to be called darling, which you thought was a word used only by old ladies to describe white waffle-knit capris from Talbots. Mamie would never call you darling. Mamie possibly doesn’t even know the word.

  “Of course, then we leave Albania and we find out we’re no enemy to the world,” she says, opening the next album. “We’re not number one, we’re nothing, just some strange backward Communist country. Nobody cares about us at all. It’s almost worse, right, to just be nothing?”

  “I don’t think anything’s worse than nothing,” you agree, which seems to confuse Yllka.

  “Well, who knows what’s worse. I shouldn’t say that. Anyway, it all turned out okay for us Hasanis in the end. Better than we dreamed back then, anyway. Mostly. Of course there have been some stumbles. It’s never going to be perfect, not even in America.”

  “But it’s better? Like, it gets better?”

  “Usually. It depends, you know, if you want it to be better. It was hard for some of the people who came over, because they thought you land here, boom, life is wonderful. They didn’t know you still had to work for it.” She shrugs. “Mostly everybody figured it out, but it’s hard at first. It’s hard to be a stranger anywhere, I guess.”

  “So the Hasanis are all here now?”

  “Oh, no, the Hasanis are everywhere. We’re here, obviously, Gjonni and I. Your aunts are in Switzerland with their husbands, you have one uncle in Turkey, one in Greece. Cousins everywhere, my god, everywhere—New Jersey, someone’s on a fishing boat in Alaska. A couple of them not much older than you are in Tirana running a bar that caters to tourists. Tourists! Can you imagine, tourists in Tirana?” She laughs and shakes her head, and you laugh, too, not wanting to let on that you have no idea what’s funny about that.

  “And, um,” you say, and she keeps shaking her head but stops laughing.

  “I was waiting for this,” she says and pulls out the last album. “I’m not sure why I was waiting. It wasn’t fair of me, to make you wait longer. I wasn’t trying to be mean, I swear to you. I just…” She looks at you, and then takes a deep breath, as if she’s about to drop underwater and has to rely on that single lungful for a while. “I’m just still not sure what to tell you.”

  The album opens to the kind of boy you see in documentaries on PBS, in shorts, unsmiling, the kind of boy who looks like he’s already broken horses and sold brothers and sisters into indentured servitude. The picture, in both quality and content, should have been taken a hundred years ago instead of in the seventies. It looks like it’s from a time before cameras were invented, before anyone was supposed to have had a happy childhood.

  “Your father, when he was little,” Yllka says.

  She lets you be in charge of turning the pages, and you do it slowly, so your father grows up just a little bit at a time, a flip-book in slow motion. There’s a big chunk of him missing, though. He goes from boy to man in the flip of a page, from wrinkled soiled cotton standing in a field of rocky dirt to a wrinkled soiled apron in a sea of stainless steel, obviously the kitchen of the Betsy Ross.

  “We didn’t see him for a long time,” Yllka says. “Between when we left home and when he came here.”

  On the last page is the only picture of him smiling, the only one where he isn’t posing like the star of a low-budget action flick about a play-by-his-own-rules ex-cop with nothing left to lose. He’s leaning back dangerously in a folding chair, surrounded by guys who all kind of resemble him. Playing cards and beer bottles and loose cigarettes are scattered over the table, the detritus densest in the semicircle he’s claimed for himself.

  “It was a party for you, to celebrate when your mother was pregnant.”

  You’d have thought Yllka was lying if you weren’t seeing it for yourself. All of the other pictures in the photo album matched perfectly the idea of your father you’d had since you were capable of abstract thought: stony-faced, too hard to give a shit even about the things everyone’s supposed to give a shit about, one’s own offspring, for example, something that even most wild animals manage to be
capable of. And yet there’s your father in two dimensions, smiling in a way that’s impossible to fake for the camera.

  “He was drunk,” you say.

  “What? No, he was happy, that’s all.”

  “Happy about what?”

  “Happy about you,” she says.

  “That makes no sense. People aren’t happy about things they don’t want. People don’t celebrate, like, having cockroaches in their house.”

  “Oh, Luljeta,” she says.

  “What? It’s the truth.”

  “No, no, that’s not the truth. That wasn’t it at all.”

  “So then what is the truth?”

  She looks at you, then looks away, as if she suddenly doesn’t speak your language anymore, or maybe the words to explain it don’t exist in English. She exhales long and slow, and then starts to say something, but she stops before the first syllable is out. She tries again, and fails again, and then she says, finally, “I still don’t understand it all myself, and I can’t apologize for your father or your mother.”

  “You don’t have to apologize for my mother. She’s the one who stuck around.”

  “Yes, but she also…”

  “Also what?”

  Yllka closes her eyes a second, hits reset, and lets out a deep whistling exhale from her nostrils. “Never mind, never mind. It’s not for me to say. But I understand that you are angry with him, and you have a right to be angry, but you also should know the story, and that he wasn’t a terrible person. He was a very hurt and confused and scared person, and, you know, he left Albania but everything he tried to leave came with him anyway, do you understand?”

  “No,” you say.

  She nods. “I know. I hope you can understand one day, though. I don’t want to make excuses for him. He was stupid, there is no denying that. But I think he thought he was doing the right thing at the time. Both of them did, your mother and father. You know what they say, the road to hell and good intentions and all.”