A long sentence for the candidates of Prishtina
By: Veton Surroi
He tells me it’s called “Aktash” now, this neighborhood, and it may very well be that everyone else—those not like him and me, born in the city—simply take that name for granted, but we know what it’s really called, because we’ve walked these streets through summers and winters, and winters especially were hard, because every past winter, in every place where snow fell, felt colder, because we were children then, and the cold of childhood is always colder; the buildings were taller, and every apricot and tomato tasted better—this we know for certain, my friend and I, as we climb the road uphill toward the Monument, because it’s in the name that you can tell who was born here and who wasn’t: no one born here calls it “the Monument,” though now they’ve started calling it “Rugova’s grave,” and some call it “Demaçi’s grave,” until eventually some new landmark appears—a big hotel, an entertainment center, a high-rise architectural oddity—and the whole neighborhood will take its name from that, just like when Ali Dybëshi returned from Italy with a few boys from this neighborhood and some from Kacallarët, where they worked jobs not to be mentioned in polite company, but still far less harmful than the ones taken up later by those who came into power after the war, dealing in white powder and darker things still, and so the neighborhood came to be known as “Dybeshi’s Café,” which had good pickles and was rumored to have good meat too, though no one could confirm it, since everyone who went there did so after all the other places had closed, and because Dybeshi perhaps had a story or two from Italy to tell—or retell—stories he later took with him to the sea when that boat from Vlora to Brindisi sank, and all the waves washed ashore from Ali Dybëshi was his ID card from the SAP Kosovo, still written in Albanian—or so it appeared in the Euronews footage, since it didn’t air on any other channel, or maybe it did, but all we had access to was that TV, in those years after the Albanian-language station in Prishtina had been shut down by force, when Hajrije the Newscaster spoke Albanian for all of thirty minutes a day, less Albanian was spoken by Hajrije than by Radio Beijing, though no one had heard of Radio Beijing, because it was the time of satellite dishes, and the Serbian-language TV decided it should mix all those political pornographies they called news with the other kind of pornography—the XXX Western kind, though no labels were needed here, because everything was permitted once the killing of children was permitted; shame needed no special sign, and even Bata knew this when he opened his brothel by the Park, at least trying to justify it by saying he was institutionalizing what was already happening in the shadows across the street, or that what happened under his red lights was less shameful than what happened everywhere else, since the wars had begun and everything seemed less immoral than war, or maybe because his was the only place where Albanians and Serbs came together without discrimination, since prostitution does not differentiate the way politics does—but in the end even the world gave in, because it found a better offer and turned the place into a kind of closed hotel for diplomats who only understood the past of this country when they arrived to sleep in rooms with pink curtains, heart-shaped patterns, and ceiling mirrors—a final moment of confrontation with oneself after a long day of confronting the reality of Prishtina, of this overwhelmingly Albanian neighborhood, where every house had a story to tell but no one to hear it, because there weren’t enough diplomats for the number of hardships, and everyone thought their own suffering was greater than the next person’s, all inevitably recounted at the Kacallarët Bakery, where they gathered every morning to exchange information, because as everyone knew, the only reliable news was that exchanged between people who knew each other, as was proven during the bombings when foreign radios and TVs told how many bombs were dropped, but only at the bakery could you learn which Albanians had been killed—not by bombs, but by police and soldiers—and from the bakery they returned home with what was still the best cornbread ever made, because nothing is more delicious than what you become aware has value, like life, or help, or family care, or a kind word, or hope that things will get better—or the cornbread from Kacallarët, the kind you didn’t buy during Ramadan, because from there came the best pitalkas, and even when it wasn’t Ramadan, they were still good, those ones made for the neighborhood’s qebaptores that started heating up the grill around five-something in the morning, when footsteps could be heard coming down the road from the Monument—more and more with every passing minute—people heading to work, and later, our friends heading to school, always with shoes a bit muddier than ours, a telltale sign of belonging to the Muhaxherë neighborhood, where the elders spoke of a morning in 1878 when their families had to pack and leave their homes within an hour and head for Kosovo, where children now forget the elders’ tales every icy winter day, because it’s the best part of the city for sledding, and where my friend and I, upon entering the neighborhood, always knew we’d crossed into a distinct territory—marked by the soft veil of difference from the arrival of our families in the city; our parents had come from elsewhere in Kosovo, not technically muhaxherë, though all of us in the city had come from somewhere, except the Prishtinali, the real ones, who hadn’t come from anywhere—they had left. Almost none like them remained here, and every election I’m reminded of one or two who were considered real Prishtinali, just like now, with municipal elections approaching this October, when Prishtina must choose a new mayor—maybe someone who understands that this city, like every other, is a narrative, and that you must become the chief storyteller, not the interrupter or silencer of its stories.