Love letter to memory and presence

I cannot – and could never – fall asleep quickly. As a child, I would often lie in bed, in the dark, sometimes for hours, and stare at the imperfect rectangle of light drawn by my half-open door on the ceiling. I would hear the television sounds and sometimes even my parents go to bed. I don’t remember what I was thinking about, but I suppose both insomnia and daydreaming – memory strongly joining in a little later – were always part of my life.

But my mother or father would often tell me bedtime stories, to help me overcome my insomnias – famous ones such as Cinderella or Snow White, traditional Romanian ones (such as the very frightening for a child Youth Without Aging and Life Without Death or the sad Master Builder Manole) and even stories invented by them. My mother would tell me a tender story about a little girl called Maria who would rescue a canary, in her attempt of making me fall asleep in the afternoon (but naps seemed to me the dullest and most useless activity and I would just ask for more tales), while my father would start telling me stories from his childhood, at night. When we started this ritual, he would lie in bed next to me and begin: ‘In a little town surrounded by snow-peaked mountains…’ and I would immediately interrupt him with great firmness: ‘This is not how you start a story.’ ‘How do you start a story, then?’ my father would ask curiously.

‘Once upon a time when daddy was a little boy.’

And so he began his stories from then on.

My parents come from different places – my mother is from Bucharest (the strongly contrasting Romanian capital where I was born and raised) and my father is from Pogradec (a small town by the Ohrid lake, close to Greece and Republic of North Macedonia). Through these bedtime stories, my father would take me to his hometown, where I would meet his group of friends – Liri, Nardi, Gjergji, and Tushi; our relatives – my father’s grandparents (the stubborn, ironical, and essentially compassionate paternal grandfather who became a widower when he was very young and was a fascinating storyteller, his tales often entering the horror genre; the gentle maternal grandfather who was a furniture maker, could speak Aromanian and Greek and had sung in the church choir; and the maternal grandmother, a strong and caring woman who was keeping all pieces together in the house and family), the vivid, restless aunt who was a pharmacist, the uncle who drank a little too much but was a great lover of literature and – in my father’s words – an amazing reader, the cousin who had unbelievable luck in gambling; as well as the elderly women in the neighbourhood, all dressed in long black dresses, who would gather for coffee every other evening. I entered a world where some books were forbidden and people you trusted would lend you books the communist regime didn’t agree on (it felt adventurous to me). A world where there was a movie theatre on the beach (Kinema Pojska) and – strange enough, I thought – they would broadcast news for ten minutes before the screening. My father would go there often and then come home to his grandparents’ and summarise the film for them – reenacting the best parts and not neglecting the soundtrack either. A world where (I suspect) people would take things easier and go for a calm walk every evening on the main boulevard parallel to the lake. But also, a world where governesses would violently beat children, travelling abroad was inconceivable and any form of religious practice was strictly forbidden (Albania was declared the first atheist country in the world in 1967 by dictator Enver Hoxha) – tasseography (a fortune-telling method) was also forbidden, although frequently practiced (especially coffee reading). My father would often adjust his stories (or his memory) to my current interests – at some point, I was shortly fascinated by horses (they were very popular) and he told me about a time when he befriended an old man who had a horse that unexpectedly got lost; they found the horse with great difficulty and then made a habit of crossing Tirana together several times a week in a carriage.

When I finally visited Pogradec at about 10 years old, everything seemed very familiar (like a place you recognize in a dream – you know you’ve been there before, although you can’t really orient yourself) – only, it was more beautiful in real life.

This year, by the end of March, I went to Albania by myself for the first time. My parents drove me to the train station from where we took the train to the airport, from where I took a plane to Athens, where I wandered for four hours smelling perfumes and drinking Greek coffee in the airport, where I took a plane to Tirana, where my grandfather was waiting for me and from where we took a taxi to Pogradec. Before taking this trip, I was constantly feeling overwhelmed with fear in different shapes – rooted in both the terribly complex and sly social pressures we live in the midst of and the apparently simple acceptance of the fact that people do die in real life, not only in films. I hadn’t been to Albania for 5 years and not only had I profoundly missed it, but was also feeling a strange fear – the fear of not being able to be here (there), of being so shocked that this is happening, that I would miss out on the beauty, calmness, and healing effect that this place has on me.

In fact, I sometimes feel that life is a negotiation between living the moment and reflecting upon different theories, possibilities, layers of the past, or presumptions about the future. And I think our lives are so crowded with worries, duties, absurd conventions, and pressures that we often have to learn to be here.

It was getting dark, as we were approaching Pogradec, the villages were quiet, the lamplights were dim and the sky was full of stars – I was graciously hypnotized; I hadn’t seen a sky as such for almost a year. I was getting used to the fact that I’m actually here. I’m here, sitting in the front seat, next to the driver, who is – to my subtle amusement – constantly switching CDs at my grandfather’s request – who is either enchanted or disgusted by the driver’s taste in music. We stop at a cold spring and drink water; my teeth freeze but I’m happy.

When I arrive, I hug my grandmother, who has prepared me piperka me djathë (peppers filled with cheese) and updates me on all the news regarding the family and the town. Then I fall asleep. Pogradec is the only place I’ve been to where I can fall asleep quickly. It’s a geographically (and emotionally)-determined luxury.

I take long walks on the beach every day, contemplating the lake, the movements of the waves, the beautiful gang of white swans, Mali i Thatë (‘The Dry Mountain’ – one of the ‘snow peaked’ ones my father unsuccessfully tried to describe to me in the first episode of his childhood stories), the clouds and the stones. I focus on this breathtaking beauty, with both my eyes and my camera.

I walk and live the moment.

I walk and remember.

But not my previous trips and certainly not my life in Bucharest. I remember Kinema Pojska, which used to be here (but how would I really know? – it was demolished long before I was even born). I’m nostalgic for it, I miss getting out of the movie theatre (from one reality to another) and suddenly being paralyzed with joy because it has started snowing.

I go for a walk with my grandmother on a sunny Sunday and we go up a small hill because she wants me to take a picture of the old house where my great-grandparents used to live, for my father. I know those streets. Of course, I know them – I’ve been there before and even inside the house. But this neighbourhood is not just the old neighbourhood of Pogradec. I know these streets – isn’t this where Tushi had a random fight with a rooster? – did he also almost lose an eye or am I making this up as I’m remembering? And this is probably the crosswalk where my father and a cousin intentionally broke a bottle of red wine on New Year’s Eve – a superstition that would help unmarried women find a spouse (that same year the pharmacist aunt got married at almost 40). And this is the thin river where – I don’t know if my father or my uncle – fell in, one winter. Now there’s a sort of flea market on its banks at weekends. And these are the homes of some of the old ladies in black; I can smell the flavour of the dark roasted coffee and hear the rushing sound of it boiling in a big kettle. I take several shots of the house. Then I turn to my grandmother. She’s reaching out for a tree branch full of white flowers in bloom. Her hair is almost white now. I take some quick shots of her before she can notice it. Then I remember that I had the idea of a similar picture one spring, many years ago. A picture of a white-haired elderly woman gazing at a white tree in bloom.

One day I explore the books on the big wooden bookshelf in the living room and find an anthology of Romanian literary avant-garde. I browse through it and discover a text where many words – ‘sedus’ (‘seduced’), ‘orgoliu’ (‘self-pride’), ‘ațipit’ (‘dozen off’), ‘arsura’ (‘the burn’), ‘cascadă’ (‘waterfall’), ‘aparțin’ (‘they belong’), ‘ființele’ (‘the beings’), ‘dezgustul’ (‘the disgust’), ‘furie’ (‘rage’), ‘fuga’ (‘the getaway’), ‘solară’ (‘solar’), ‘suspinele’ (‘the sighs’), ‘încearcă’ (‘try’), ‘destin’ (‘destiny’) – are underlined and their translation is handwritten on the edge with a pencil (‘joshur’, ‘krenari’, ‘përgjumur’, ‘djegie’, ‘ujëvarë’, ‘përkas’, ‘qëniet’, ‘ndohti’, ‘mllef’, ‘mëni’, ‘ikja’, ‘arratia’, ‘diellore’, ‘psherëtimat’, ‘provon’, ‘fat’). They could easily form an avant-garde poem. Those four pages of text blossomed with handwriting are a document of the time my father was learning Romanian, in the late ’80s or early ‘90s. I smile and briefly wonder at the fact that there was a time when he was learning the language in which he later told me the stories of his childhood. His memories became my memories through the fortunate mix of storytelling and insomnia.

A loop.

I stop and say to myself, a little dazed: ‘And now I’m writing about this in English’.

At night I sit in the dark and read poems by Louise Glück on my Kindle. Her poetry moves me due to its sobriety and simple manner in which some of the most complex states of the soul are expressed; while reading I often feel as if I am contemplating the deserted landscape framed in a kitchen window in the purple light just before dawn. One particular passage strikes me tonight – ‘I ask you, how much beauty / can a person bear’ (from the poem ‘Baskets’ included in her collection The Triumph of Achilles). I stop and think that this is how we live – so alienated from beauty that when we meet it in a slightly greater quantity than we’re used to we tend to perceive it as a burden. I don’t know if it’s a natural reaction or not. I wonder if I am being overwhelmed with beauty, too; overtaken by it. But I can deal with beauty. I think my most common burden is a different one – quite similar and perhaps equally complex.

I suffer (or benefit) from an excessively accurate memory. I joke that my memory is like a bottomless bag – all you have to do is open it and facts, dates, features about people, and things they said will jump out or start flowing almost automatically. Sometimes I pretend not to know a detail someone fugitively mentioned years ago so I don’t make the situation uncomfortable for them. I even pathetically tried – in the well-known spirit of our times – to self-diagnose myself with highly superior autobiographical memory or hyperthymesia, an extremely rare condition (only 62 people in the world were diagnosed with it in 2021) that I superficially read about one night during my trip – and soon discovered that I fail to fit in in terms of both causes and symptoms. Nevertheless, I carry my memory around and learn not to let it expand like weeds in an abandoned garden. Sometimes I think memory moves us in whatever ways it pleases if we’re not careful – it can lead us to despair and agony. Some other times I feel it’s one of our most precious instruments – how else would I have met my great-grandparents and eavesdropped on the conversations of the elderly women in the neighbourhood? How else would we rationally deal with death? How else would I even now as I am writing see the changing shades of the Mali i Thatë the sun rays create at different times of the day and manage to see beauty when I’m not surrounded by it – and also be capable to retrospectively appreciate the moments when I am entirely here, right now?

*I wrote this text as my final project for the In/transitive Modernities: Dis/continuities and cultural transformation course I attended in April this year, in Athens.