Mad Vefa by Ron F Berisha

MAD VEFA

A cold slanting rain took me by surprise as I walked in a park near Bloomsbury; the fitful wind destroyed my fishbone umbrella.  I felt a supreme chill in my bones, the chill of solitude in a big and foreign city. The dream-slaying chill of a wintry afternoon in London.  The chill of truth.
  And for a moment there, I lost heart, and bit out a despairing curse; aimed at the cold and grim and cruel season, and everything that came with it…
  An image visited me – as I settled in a warm and dry bookstore – unexpected as the rain; an image from the past and another country – the country I was born and bred in: Albania.
  A woman, in a tattered black dress, standing placid in the rain, flanked by two shaggy grey dogs.  Rain dripping from her silver hair, over her thin black scarf and soaked dress, washing her ragged shoes and torn corroded knees.  Her worn face and beautiful eyes – perfectly tranquil.
I was a kid at the time, and had been playing checkers with my cousin at my uncle’s house in Shkoder, when I heard my uncle Pjerin invite her in.   He must have seen her through the window, standing by the alley wall in the cold rain, and taken pity on her.  
  “Come in, Vefa,” he said to her. “Come on in.”  
  Me and my cousin ran to the door to see her.   

Everyone knew Vefa around there – or they thought they knew her.  She must have been in her fifties then, in the winter of nineteen eighty-four.  
  Medium built, slim, teeth tarnished by constant smoking and malnutrition, she had this habit of brushing her hair back with her hands every so often.  
  During the day, she walked down the paved streets of Serreq, a well-known area in the city of Shkoder, with her arms crossed in front and her head down, like a shy adolescent girl; escorted by her two loyal friends and bodyguards – two grey Berger-Picard dogs called Nuri and Nini, always by her side.   At night, she slept in a tin shed set in her own backyard, amidst some sleeping rags, dog-eared books and various newspapers with nothing new in them.  
  She wore the same tatty black dress – I cannot picture her in anything else, much as I strain my memory.  During winter and cold part of autumn, she wrapped a scarf around her bony neck, black also, more of ornamental value than utilitarian.  When she sat by the doorsills of Gjuhadol underneath old Venetian shutters, Vefa always made sure to keep her legs together, like a well-bred woman, placing them diagonally in fine style – pulling her dress down at times, above her knees – never forgetting to brush her hair back with her hands and move her head left and right like a movie diva.  Her flat black shoes may have been shabby and full of holes, but they had been fancy once, and still guarded a certain panache about them.

  “Come on in and warm yourself up a little,” repeated my uncle.  
  But Vefa just stood there – one step away from the threshold dividing the cold and wet from the warm and comfortable – and did not budge.  She refused to come in without her wheezing boys, Nuri and Nini. They were wet and muddy, as you’d expect, and my uncle looked reluctant.  

Smoking was Vefa’s main preoccupation and daily activity; she liked smoking.  Not fussy about the type or mark of cigarettes: filtered ‘DS’, unfiltered ‘Partizan’, ‘Tarabosh’ rollups.  She would ask people in the streets for cigarettes – never for money or food or anything else. Her begging was very mannerly, never persisting or pestering.  Often, in order to collect as many cigarette stumps from the pavements as possible, she would have to outdo the early-rising socialist road-sweepers, who, although not a pretty sight themselves, never forgot to pity her, visibly and loudly. 
  Vefa never answered back to those who pitied or mocked; or anyone else, for all that mattered.  She did not speak much, but she whistled; quite a lot, and always the same tune.  

  “Your dogs can wait outside,” said my uncle to her. “I can’t let them in.  They would make a mess, and my wife would kill me. Do you understand?”
  Vefa just looked at us all, with her pretty almond eyes, and laughed, quietly. 

Vefa had been a ballerina when young, uncle told us.  She danced in a famous Festival in Bucharest, in 1956.  Later she and her troop went on a tour to Moscow, and Leningrad, to perform some famous ballet pieces there.  
  Her beauty could not go unnoticed.  She was a perfect brunette then, long thick hair falling upon her shoulders.  Gorgeous upturned almond eyes, perfect Roman nose, unique oval lips. Many good-looking men asked for her hand in marriage, it was said, ‘well-positioned’ men and ‘well-to-do’; men who could offer her a successful and comfortable future.  
But Gjenovefa, as she was called then, refused them all.  She had a secret, Gjenovefa – behind the grace and glowing face – the secret also of her beauty and confidence—   
She was in love.   
  Deeply, perfectly, completely – the only way she knew how to love, the only true way there is.  She had fallen head over heels for a Basketball player called Adem, a fair-haired young man of ruthless charm and exceptional physique.  Adem had stopped her in the street one sunny day, near Shkoder’s main piazza by the Post Office, and proposed to her – as it was custom in those days.  Yes, said Vefa; YES.    She followed every game he was in, and during the game, every move of his; you could say she lived by his looks. He was her life-pulse.  His smiles were to her comets in the sky, his kisses fireworks in her heart.   
  They wrote to each-other regularly during the months she was abroad.  Her letters, it was said, were as candid as her heart, as passionate and direct as her love, her handwriting as beautiful as her eyes.  
  But, by the time she returned to Shkoder, her beloved fiancé – her darling sportsman, her heart and soul, her everything –, had changed his mind.  
  She may have been 22 at the time – when she decided to split.  
  She did not go to another country, she could not; the borders were closed.   She didn’t leave town either – where would she go? She didn’t even leave the area; why would she do that, when the centre of her world was in Shkoder, and precisely in the headquarters of ‘Vllaznia’ Basketball club?  
  She just split from normal life – what people at the time called ‘normal’ life.  
  There was in fact very little normality about life in Albania at the time, if any.  Continual purges, rationed food, lies and propaganda on daily basis, suicidal economic measures; public places teeming with stool pigeons, jails packed with political convicts…And so on. 
  But wherever they are, prisons or palaces, and whenever, people will create their sense of what is ‘normal’ and what is not – and impose it.  It’s called ‘the eternal power of the people’.
  Gjenovefa wanted no part of their normality; not any more.    
  And so Gjenovefa, the pretty, up-and-coming dancing star, became Mad Vefa. 

  Mad Vefa did not start to drink or anything; she just decided to live in her shed rather than in her home.  The house was too big for her, she decided, her clothing too bright; the business of changing clothes and looking after yourself seemed vain and useless and silly to her.  The shed was located at the end of her garden by the wall that divided it from the street; it coincided with the presence of a bicycle repair store right behind it, where she often hung out.  
  She started wandering the streets; alone at first – smoking, quietly, pensively, no melodrama in her step –, until she found her furry friends Nuri and Nini, many years later. They brought some joy and purpose to her life, it seemed, as she began to smile after knowing them, laugh quietly at times, apparently for no reason – and whistle.  Whistle. Faultily perhaps, but the same tune always; distinctively the same. She would sometimes join a queue and then buy nothing at the end of it; she needed nothing.  

Tragedy had struck Vefa very early in life.  Her mother had died of consumption when she was just five, then her sister had followed; her younger sister, beautiful little kid like herself – they had been three of them.  Her father raised his two surviving daughters through unimaginable hardship. Yet he managed to educate them well, passed unto them his love for books and classical music. Vefa’s talent and early success, gave hope to everyone.  And when she went on tour abroad – only the chosen few were allowed to cross the border in Stalinist Albania – they were all overjoyed.  
  But then, the basketball player turned up; and Vefa gave up everything for him, including her wits later, when he left her.  
  Her sister and relatives (her father had died by then) tried their best to help her, convince her to marry someone else, to return to normal life – to survive.  But Vefa wanted no part of that. She was not interested in that sort of survival.
  She was called ‘mad’, by the residents of a communist madhouse. 
  It was a different time then, granted – and a different place.  Yoga and box-fit classes, as a means of getting over vicious separations, did not exist.  Yet I’m not sure Vefa would’ve wanted those, even if they had existed. The way I see it, she had one love in her life; a love she had known and touched and felt with all her might.  That love was perfect to her; real and pure and timeless; beyond borders and systems and social norms; beyond silly explanations. She sacrificed absolutely everything in its altar, and wanted to keep its vision pure.  She refused to settle for a bad copy of it. For her there was only one temple to worship in: the temple of Love. That temple burned, she chose to inhale the smoke rising from its ashes, rather than pay homage to the golden calves of her current society, or any other society. 
  How can we be certain her union with the sportsman was great and perfect? We can; because only those who have been in paradise, can be chased out of it.
  Adversely, no one passed judgement on Adem, the tall handsome basketball player.  
  No one spoke of him much after the rupture.  No one really knew why he abandoned Vefa. He married, of course; matured into a moustached father and authoritarian man.  He was not chased out of paradise, it seemed; perhaps because he never was in one: those who do not love with all their hearts and minds and souls, never are.  
  Vefa was ‘cursed’ – said the members of an atheist society.   
  But Vefa never cursed anyone; neither gods nor men or fate, much less the cold seasons and the rain.  She just walked the streets, like a living poem of pain – tragic in nature, yes, but also peaceful, fine, unsoiled by hostility.  She chose to be the incarnation of a beautiful and unique love, daggered in the silky nights of a perfect honeymoon.

Finally, my uncle gave in and allowed her dogs to come in with her.  
  They followed Vefa silently.  As soon as they entered the corridor, one of them shook its grey fur violently, to my uncle’s distress.  This amused us kids immensely. Uncle Pjerin gave Vefa some bread, hot milk and a little cheese, which she shared in the corridor with Nuri and Nini.  We loved playing with Nuri and Nini, who were lovely and friendly in general, except when they sensed some threat towards their beloved mother and carer.  She just kept looking at us, and laughed, quietly. 
  Nice names Nuri and Nini, I said to my uncle later, catchy.  
  The names are not coincidental, he replied; they are named after Nureyev the dancer and Esenin the poet.    
  Later in life, when I had truly grown up, I also recognized the tune she always whistled. 

Mad Vefa died with the nuns, at the newly opened monastery, barely five minutes from where she was born.  They found her lying on the street, very ill and feverish; she had taken sick days after her dogs had died.  The nuns cleaned her up and kept her warm. She died peacefully, they said, and clean – inside and outside.   
  She whispered something just before closing her eyes, according to the nuns; but no one was really sure whether it was ‘Adem’ or ‘Amen’.  

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Ron F Berisha lives in London. He has published poetry in the past, both in English and Albanian.  His short stories have appeared in Literary Heist magazine. They take place in and between two countries: England and Albania.  Ron has also a keen interest in filmmaking and has worked in several short films.