No Country for the Light-hearted

by Jeff Bursey

Born in 1968 in Tirana, Albania, Ornela Vorpsi wrote The Country Where No One Ever Dies in Italian, and it was first published in France in 2005. In a series of stories that at times overlap, each dealing with young girls, she gives a grim picture of Albanian mores and customs; it’s an open question how much of the hardness of the people predates their oppression under a Communist leadership. The first paragraph sets up the main theme: “Albania is a country where no one ever dies. Fortified by long hours at the dinner table, irrigated by raki, and disinfected by the hot peppers in our plump, ever-present olives, our bodies are so strong that nothing can destroy them.”

While Albanians may live forever in their own country, they look to Italy as The Promised Land (the title of the last story) where their dreams of a less poor life among “diligent housewives with perfect figures” who washed laundry with “Dash detergent–to dry in the sun”  might come true. That’s the female view. The men are entranced mostly by the beauty of Italian “ladies on television” who are so much more delicious than “their withered and uninspiring wives”. Vorpsi, in contrast to her characters, considers “‘Rome and Milan… too provincial to me’” (from “Ornela Vorpsi: me, Albania and the ‘whoring of the human race’”). Paris is her home, and Albania is a “hostile country.”

Hostility is evident throughout. It’s impossible to avoid concluding that all Albanian men are terrible (with husbands the worst), the women are treacherous, grandparents are unkind and judgmental, and the authorities are mysterious and capricious, whisking people into prisons without warning and sometimes forever. What can grow in such an environment? Only the hardiest people.

In “The Albanians Live On and On, and Never Die,” which opens the book, this hardiness is at the fore, drawing on the stuff of pre-Communist history, and its representation gives insight into the nationalism and desperation that would burst out in the post-Communist world. “In our beloved country, where no one ever dies, where bodies are as heavy as lead, we have an old adage, a profound saying: ‘Live that I may hate you, and die that I may mourn you.’”  Further: “And then sometimes I’d hear my aunt use another old saying that was popular in our country…. ‘Your own people [meaning blood relatives] may gobble up your flesh, but at least they’ll save the bones.’”

Here we have something familiar. An Armenian acquaintance boasted that having a heart as cold as a turnip was a trait of his people, and others have viewed the condition and history of their country, nation, region or province as especially difficult, thus giving rise to a warped pride in being made of an indestructible, unyielding matter. “Our spines are made of iron,” says the narrator at the beginning of these saddening tales. Albanian exceptionalism, as suspect as every other kind, will be presented to us by young female narrators, but none undercut it too directly; they’re more circumspect; this nature of a people who have little else they can safely call their own is surrounded by a kind of silence, as if there was an intake of breath. We can interpret from this breathlessness that there is not agreement on the part of the narrators, that they see the crushing of their own spirits and that of people all around them, without acquiring the same view of life. “I shut my mouth and could hardly wait to get sick again” says one, because only in that condition does one warrant a show of tenderness.

Throughout The Country Where No One Ever Dies there is the absence of fathers: many are in prison as political or common criminals. To be the daughter of a political prisoner is to remind those not jailed of their family’s disgrace. Ormira, in “Yolk,” feels pressure to be a better student than others. One day she brings some seemingly harmless postcards to school. They are, of course, “Old Italian” ones that feature a sky, a house, and in the air “winged, childlike figures with rosy cheeks and golden curls.” Her teacher beats the children with a metal yardstick heated up by the classroom woodstove. (Anyone who went to a boy’s school run by Christian Brothers up to the late 1970s will recalls the use of the leather strap, or seeing a yardstick shatter after hitting some portion of a student’s anatomy.) Ormira returns home that day with purple blistered legs, too afraid to tell her mother for fear of another beating “since she was so nervous now [that] everything was my fault.” During the beating Ormira asks for more punishment so she won’t be a “whore”–the common accusation against any attractive girl or woman–and promises to regard angels as “enemies of the Party, the Mother of Us All.”

Though the teachers can be brutal, and the rarely seen State officials are feared, the most exacting tyranny occurs in the home. There is nowhere for Ormira, Elona, Christina, Ina, or any of the other girls to feel safe from predations. When hostility is all that one knows, how do you retain some decency? It’s not because children are naturally innocent; they are weak, pushed by this or that force, and they ally themselves to those who may mistreat them while being fearful of those who show love.

“Albania the Sensuous” is the tale of a trip taken by a daughter, her mother and her grandfather to a prison. The unnamed female narrator’s father is there. When he hugs her, crying, she is “horrified.” He doesn’t look like he once did. When she looks into a bag her mother has brought back from the prison, she sees it contains “teeth, real teeth, some made of gold, hollow inside. They were what had been missing from my father’s face.” Her parents divorce, using allegations devised for the purpose of severing marital ties. But now the child is the reminder of the man who can’t be spoken of any more:

Now too my grandmother, grandfather, and uncle all began to tell me that my hair was red like his. They made fun of me, called me “the redhead,” always comparing me to my father.

I was not of their blood, they said. I would grow up like my father’s sisters, a miserable, bowlegged creature like all his kind. I would become a schizophrenic like my cousin. “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s in your blood.”

I would end up whoring myself around, just like my father–if I wasn’t a whore already–which I probably was, as they could see it written all over my lying face. My father and I would open up our own whorehouse. We would hang up a big banner on the front door:

FATHER AND DAUGHTER ASSES FOR SALE

NO REQUEST REFUSED

It’s a cruel and reductive legacy, this combination of fear, shame and hate that gets handed down to children with a hopeless future.

The father’s teeth return in “Dream,” where a narrator named Ornela (who may or may not be like the author) watches the fire in the woodstove. “A shy little tongue flickers at the grate. It looks as though it’s made entirely of little pearls…. Oh… now I can see what they are… they’re teeth…. There are teeth without a mouth in the black hole, grinning at me. I recognize them now. They’re my father’s teeth. Staring at me.” Death, absences, misery and nightmares haunt the narrators.

“Water” discusses a way out of such a distressing life. There’s a lake amidst some woods. “They say the lake is full of whirlpools and eddies. Many unsuspecting people have drowned there, even the ones who stayed close to shore, even the ones who only went in up to their knees.” Those who go there purposely include young girls avoiding the “misery, and… disgrace” usually caused by an unwanted pregnancy. The narrator says: “I think you’d have to be lovesick to drown yourself here. When an Albanian decides to put an end to his life for other, existential reasons, he usually just hangs himself at home or throws himself in front of a bus.” Yet: “Few people ever consider suicide in this country. In its passionate struggle for survival, Albania has always been oblivious of the fact that salvation can also be found in death.” One wonders if Vorpsi has entertained the idea of her birthplace getting rid of itself, whether or not there would be any salvation. Needless to say, men rarely use the lake as a way to escape. But they do end up in prison quite a bit.

By the end of The Country Where No One Ever Dies the reader is aware that human affection is not a given, and that some countries have had their collective will and spirit damaged to such a degree that many years will have to pass before there can be significant repair. We see this expressed in many post-Communist and post-colonial nations. Luckily for Vorpsi, she got out, and the career she enjoys is one that the young narrators could not dream of achieving.

The book concludes with scenes from Italy. There “Albanians discover that they’re mortal…. Loneliness accumulates until it becomes a stomach ulcer… Finally, to get rid of their ulcers, they all go back to sunny Albania.” The moral of their emigration is: “The Promised Land taught them they were mortal. And they never want to die.” It’s left to the reader to puzzle out how the badgered, maltreated, misunderstood and frightened female narrators Ornela Vorpsi treats with such delicacy get through their lives, what they do to survive, and what kind of adults they turn into.