The Sin - chapter one

‘I love the world all the same, and all the same the world has trampled over me!’ Vera vented these words that cold December day after Fata had invited her over for coffee. Those were dark times, times of great pain, times of unfettered sin and mourning. Moments when no one knew who they were, what they did or where they were headed. Vera lived on her own then. Only in her sixties, but looking aged beyond her years. Life had abused her.

That summer, Vera had moved into her new home, on the fifth floor of the block of flats where Fata had been watching her days trail away for years. Vera was her new neighbour. At first, Fata eyed Vera with suspicion, and, to some degree, did not bear her any sympathy. She was nothing more than a small-town woman settling in the city. Her city was no longer the same. ‘They’, the newcomers, were setting their own rules, and Fata didn’t like it. She had grown up there, but the place was slowly succumbing to a maze of disordered property developments, and God only knew how this was going to end. After the fall of communism, Tirana was like a stubborn old lady, trying hard to keep going.

And for this Fata blamed ‘them’, one of whom was Vera. Maybe that was why she was dismissive of Vera in those early days. When she happened to run into Vera on the block’s flight of stairs, Fata could hardly bring herself to utter ‘Good morning’. But there was one thing she could do well: keep an eye on Vera. Nothing Vera did slipped past her. Vera seemed proud. A weary sort of pride, concealed well under the wrinkles lining her forehead.

She was a quiet woman and seemed to keep to herself. She didn’t call on any neighbours, and Fata never saw anyone visit her. Sometimes she found herself eavesdropping at the door. This mysterious woman had more than aroused her female curiosity.

Eventually, when Fata saw her on the stairs, she spoke amiably to Vera. When Besmir, her youngest son, emigrated to Greece with his wife, Fata was left on her own. The loneliness led her to speak to Vera. She changed her behaviour. The death of her husband, her children moving away, everything changing at the same time, everything in that city seemed to be suffocating Fata. Most of the time she was the one who kept the conversation going; Vera spoke sparsely, as if what she harboured inside her soul was a wound she didn’t wish to probe. Until one day.

‘I gave Elma to someone. Why do I say “gave”? I sold her, and for what? For a ridiculous price: a hundred thousand leks – less than a hundred euros nowadays. What am I saying? Rich of me, her own mother, to talk of prices! Has that horrible beast that used to live inside of me still not perished? Yes, I did, I did sell her.’ This is how she started her confession, leaving Fata speechless.

*

The best of the young had emigrated to Greece by that time, the luckiest ones to Italy and even as far as Germany. The girls, believing in love, had only sought to run away, not knowing where to or with whom. People had made a run for it.

Artan, who everyone called Tani, had lured Vera’s daughter. He knew his prey all too well. He had approached Vera, unobtrusively at first, offering her everything under the sun. Her only customer, he dropped by every day to buy the cheap snacks Vera kept on her stall. He needed none of what she had to sell. He only bought things as a favour to Vera, who felt happy. With the little money she got, she put food on the table for her daughter, Elma, and herself.

Tani started giving gifts, increasingly expensive gifts, so expensive that even Vera began to feel wary. Nothing was given for free in this world, and this angel of a guy was asking for nothing in return.

He had already become more than just a regular customer for her. From time to time, he would stop to exchange a word or two with Vera. Tani was the only person ever asking about her health. She had no one else besides Elma.

One day, he brought her a box, embellished on the outside, carrying an exquisite battery-powered watch. Vera had never set eyes on a watch like that before.

‘It’s for Elma. As soon as I saw it, I thought of her. Only she could carry off a watch like this,’ he said as he observed Vera’s befuddlement.

‘Vera, I think I am in love with your daughter. She’s all I ever think about. I can’t get her out of my mind for a single instant,’ he told her.

She knew it. He would have never got so close out of interest in her. Vera was old now. The wrinkles on her face displayed her suffering, her great pain. Every time she looked in the mirror, they seemed to speak to her: ‘Look at us! We appeared when Elma went to school and Iliaz, her father, was not there. And this new one? It showed up when Elma took ill, and this deeper one, when you heard that Iliaz was no longer alive.’

‘I need your help,” he told her. ‘I am too shy to speak to her myself, but I know that, if she were to agree to share her life with me, I’d be the happiest man in the world.’

Tani pulled a wad of money out of his pocket and left it on her stall counter.

‘Treat yourself and Elma to something nice!’ were the words he spoke before he took off.

The lump of money, left there so casually, clouded her vision. That was what made her endlessly repeat the phrase: ‘I sold her.’

Never had she glanced upon that much money. There were so many things she could buy with it. A TV set … Yes, yes, that would be the first thing. And then she would buy some new clothes. There was a red dress that had been winking at her for days in that pretty shop across the road from where she stood most days with her meagre stall. Finally, with the money she now had, she could walk in there. All that time she had been too afraid to lift her eyes and gaze at all that splendour, but now she had money, they couldn’t possibly turn her away.

‘Hold on!’ she cautioned herself. That money seemed too much for a girl’s hand in marriage, but she didn’t stop to ponder for too long. The lure of pleasure offered by that pile of green notes was immense.

She gathered the trash from her ugly stall. It was two pm. Lunchtime. Too early to leave, but she didn’t want to stay there among the dust any longer, in the wind that slapped her at any given moment with the leaves from the yellowing trees that had just drawn their last breaths.

Elma was waiting at home for her. She too had returned early that day. From school. She was still just a child. Her pale face and wavy hair pouring down her shoulders only served to intensify that image. Young, fresh looking; she had yet to turn eighteen. Although she liked to dress up, she had no money to buy anything. She made do with hand-me-downs from friends, and that made Vera feel awful. She couldn’t afford to buy anything for her.

That day, Elma was wearing a pair of black leggings – some elastic things clinging to her body – and a long shirt. The black belt that she had wrapped halfway down the shirt, right over her stomach, looked as if it were squeezing the breath out of her. Her figure stood revealed. Vera didn’t approve of the outfit, but that was how ‘fashion’ demanded it.

The music she often listened to was ear-piercing. The old Mimoza radio, left over from bygone times, played at full blast. It was beyond her how that radio, with the two exposed wires sticking in the socket, was still in working order. One day, her daughter might just meet the disaster that was waiting to happen there. Elma had no idea that, quite inadvertently, she had become engaged that day, or at least been pawned off to someone as in the olden times. Vera didn’t know whether her daughter would agree to this, but she had to agree. She had to understand that this was the right thing to do. Tani loved her. He would be able to offer her wealth that Vera never could. And Jeton? She cursed the day that boy, as if out of thin air, had suddenly come into Elma’s life. “It’s just a passing crush,” Vera tried to convince herself.