Travel and Shopping—Gold: The Bourgeois Disease
by Jann Huizenga
It’s raining, and the power is out. I strain in the dim light to take it all in: shattered spectacles; sour linens; jewelry black with age; wool stockings; fusty hope chests and sculpted cradles; mountains of rusty pistols for Albanian blood vengeance.
The shops in Kruja’s old Ottoman bazaar have the bad breath of cobwebby attics. I’m turning them inside out, haggling for vintage aprons with needlepoint roses, exquisite in their simplicity, and furke , carved willow distaffs that look like totems from a remote African tribe.
On previous visits my spending was curbed by Albanian friends. Under their watchful eye, I had to suppress my consumerismthe bourgeois disease that Comrade Hoxha had warned them about twenty years earlier.
In the back of quiet shops, women bend over looms, running shuttles in obscurity. No one hustles me. The atmosphere is so low-key that shopkeepers have simply disappeared, leaving doors ajar and thresholds soggy. Neighbors amble in to offer help, their faces creasing with curiosity when I say where I’m from.
“I have uncle in Chicago, Max Zogu. You know?”
“Sorry, no.” It seems everyone in Albania has a relative who has won the lottery to “Amerika”.
A stack of dusty tomes penned by Hoxha leans lazily on the wood floor of one shop, piled up like so much slag. A cat slinks by. Thunder groans in the distance. I unearth The Anglo-American Threat to Albania, its pages brown with age. Hoxha outdid himself as a writer, churning out seventy-one volumes of soul-numbing prose. Most of it went up in flames in 1991, fueling angry bonfires in Tirana when Albanians ran amok from fifty years of pent-up rage. My friends tell me they’d been forced not only to shell out part of their piddling wages on the books, but to lavish them with praise in weekly study sessions. Other volumes had their pages ripped out by food vendors, who wrapped Hoxha’s logghorea around homemade cheeses and bloody chickens. Ha! Payback for a dictator who jailed Albanians for crimes like listening to the Bee Gees, then hung them naked in cages to freeze to death in winter.
I’m almost tempted to buy a few volumes. Won’t Albanians want to reopen them someday? Not now, of coursethey’re too busy aping the West. In the streets of Tirana, just 30 kilometers from here, the mall-ification of Albania has begun. Crowds clamor for knockoff Diesel jeans. Bogus Barbies. Fake Fendis. Mars and Marlboros.
I duck into a tiny shop smelling of nicotine and chock full of the detritus of Albania’s lost coffee ritual. There are heart-breaking heaps of dollap kafe for roasting coffee beans, wooden trays called derrasa e kafes for cooling them, brass grinders called mulli kafeje for pulverizing them.
“We drink espresso now,” shrugs the hollow-eyed shopkeeper. “No one wants them.”
Also tossed into the dustbin of history: little copper xhezve for boiling coffee, tiny coffee cups of all descriptions for sipping it, ceramic trays for serving it, all clamoring to be remembered. I lick a finger and rub a dust-coated tray. Lush colorssaffron and candy-apple redflame through the grit.
The old clothes intrigue. They should be in glass-enclosed museum cases, not hung from rusty nails in some backwater bazaar. I zero in on a traditional Northern Albanian costume. It has everythingtassels, embroidery, weaving, appliqué, and velvet studded with sequins and beads.
“Fifty dollars,” the shopkeeper says, raising a cigarette to his stained teeth.
Fifty dollars! My blood quickens. The man decides I must try it on. He pulls it apart. Ten pieces in all. I’m not sure how they go on the body. So he stubs out the cigarette and hands them to me in order. First up: billowy white breeches with needlepoint hems. Red-and-white knit stockings go next, meeting the breeches at mid-calf. A silky cream-colored number wraps around my waist and brushes my knees. On goes the flat-woven apron, long as the breeches, cinched with a tangled, woolly belt. When I slip on the choke-collared dickey, the creator comes alive. She’s embroidered every color of the rainbow in its intricate astral design. I slip on her crinkly muslin blouse, all hand-stitched, its trumpet-like sleeves dripping with beadwork. Finger-aching, eye-wrecking work.
“Look,” the shopkeeper says, indicating the beads. “Can you find the crosses?” Yes, but I have to look closely. They’re cleverly hidden. The religious symbols in traditional costumes were banned under Hoxha.
Her bolero vest in soft velvet the color of overripe cherries goes on next. I stare in the mottled mirror and watch sequined dragonflies flutter across my chest. And finally the headgeara yellow scarf coiled atop my head like a loaf of braided egg bread.
By some strange alchemydon’t laughthe Albanian mountain woman has come to inhabit my body. I’m transported to a cold house with a dirt floor. I fetch the water and bake the daily bread, shear the sheep and weave the rugs, feed the menfolk and the livestock. My finery wraps me in dignity, saves me from daily despair.
The shopkeeper rips me from my dreams and twirls me through the low doorway so his neighbors can get a gander.
Una donna albanese! he brays in Italian.
I catwalk down the rain-soaked cobbles. There’s good-natured laughter, and much ado in the local tongue. The spell is broken; I feel like an imposter.
Later the shopkeeper wraps each garment in old newspaper before depositing the bundle into a plastic bagthe kind that were unknown until 1991, but now flutter alarmingly from every available tree and fencepost in Albania.
I head back to the waiting taxi hugging my parcel. A ragged child materializes at my elbow with a boxful of Chicklets. A few shopkeepers stand in doorways and watch with forlorn smiles as I pass them by.
On the way down the S-shaped road, the driver cranks up a crackly Julio Iglesias tape and ploughs his ways through potholes past horses, dogs, and new billboards. Toshiba. Winston. Coke. Why, I wonder, did her masterpiece end up for sale? Did she need the money? Did she give it up for modern duds, like you’d give up a van Gogh and replace it with a poster? A nagging worry pops into my head: maybe I don’t have the right to remove this exquisite artifact from a poor country.
But still, I do. I take the mountain woman home.
