The sworn virgin, p.1
The Sworn Virgin, page 1
Dedication
For Matt
Epigraphs
§ 38. A woman is a sack, made to endure.
§ 600. A man who has been dishonored is considered dead.
§ 601. A man is dishonored:
b) If someone spits at him, threatens him, pushes him, or strikes him.
c) If someone reneges on his pledged word.
d) If his wife is insulted or if she runs off with someone . . .
f) If his hospitality is violated.
—The Laws of Lekë Dukag jini, the code of the mountainous region east of Shkodra, Albania
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
—Robert Penn Warren
You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
—Heraclitus
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . * About the Author
About the Book
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Albania, 1910
The body lay motionless. His once bright brown eyes now as dull as the sucking mud beneath him, much like the sopping footpath they had traveled to reach this strange town. Thick blood flooded his white shirt from the deep black hole in his chest. Eleanora flinched as a tall, craggy-faced man touched her arm, telling her this was not something a young woman should see.
Where was her husband, her father, her brother?
“I am traveling with my father,” Eleanora said.
She watched her hand rise, trembling as she pointed to Baba as he lay there in the dirt road, his eyes open and reflective, failing to see her or anyone else.
She gazed into his eyes, but for the first time she could remember, they did not crinkle as he smiled, they did not even meet hers. The scar down his cheek looked a deeper red than usual. She wondered when he would move. When she would move. She scratched the tears off her cheeks.
How could this be real?
Eleanora looked up and saw the townspeople staring at her and whispering, looking at her without meeting her gaze. Though they were all strangers, she felt as if she were looking at the people from her own mountain village, only some of these women covered their faces completely with lace, trembling elegant ghosts next to men who wore shoes turned up at the tips. Behind the townspeople, two-story buildings were pushed so tightly together they shared walls, their shuttered windows lined up like wood markers in a cemetery. If Shkodra was like the large foreign cities she dreamed of exploring in Italy, across the sea, perhaps she no longer wanted to go. How could she go anywhere, anyway, when Baba refused to get up?
Behind the town loomed the purple mountains where she had grown up. White streaks pierced the mountains—waterfalls, one of which was behind her home, the home she and Baba clearly should have never left. Home. Even with the windows and door closed, she could always hear the crashing water. She heard it now, roaring between her ears, and let it drown out the townspeople’s whispers and someone’s scream. Was it hers? Always the sound of rushing water.
Life was always the same until it was not.
Chapter 2
Two weeks earlier
Why, Baba?” From atop her black horse, Eleanora watched a young bride weep, her silent family framed in the arched dark doorway of their stone hut as the ´´bride was dragged away, held hand and foot, swinging between four grinning and grunting men, presumably her brothers.
Eleanora’s father nudged his ivory horse, and they turned their backs to the scene. Baba smiled down at his daughter, the starburst of wrinkles around his eyes deepening. The sun broke through the ceiling of gray clouds and the bright beam washing over his familiar face smoothed the parentheses around his mouth, making his thick black mustache and his dark eyes shine. Eleanora was often surprised by his handsomeness. Were it not for his scar and thick mustache and white cap, he would look just like the etching of the ancient Greek bust pinned to the wall of his study.
“Why?” Baba repeated. “Are you asking me why I think they do it, or why they think they do it?”
“Why they think they do it,” Eleanora said. Her horse, Tiziano, flicked his ears in tune with her growing distress. How could men laugh while that woman wept? Her small face was twisted tight with grief, her little ankles and hands gripped harder than necessary, and as Eleanora stared she became sure the woman was closer to a girl, younger than Eleanora’s own eighteen years.
Baba rolled a cone-shaped cigarette between his long fingers, murmuring soothing words to his fair horse to keep her still as he put the sterling silver tobacco box back in a red leather saddlebag.
“They do it,” he said, “because they think that everyone has always done it that way.”
“And why do you think they do it?” Eleanora asked. Tiziano stomped his hooves.
She watched Baba raise his engraved silver lighter to his cigarette. Its curling etchings drew compliments wherever she and her father went, though Eleanora knew most men were as much intrigued with wondering how it worked. Eleanora herself had only ever seen one other lighter used instead of a match, and it belonged to a patient of her father’s, one of the richest men in the mountains.
“Why, why do I think they do it,” Baba repeated. His cheeks caved deeper as he sucked on his cigarette.
Baba exhaled, puckering his lips so his smoke shot up and away from Eleanora. “Because everyone else has always done it that way.”
“Can’t we stop them, Baba?” Eleanora asked, her hand hovering over the curved knife she kept tucked into her belt. “At least tell them to let her walk?”
The wailing bride wrenched out of her handlers’ grasp, her moaning broken by the thud of her knees on the ground.
Baba did not turn his head at the sound; he continued to examine the front of his cigarette, tapping the fragrant tobacco back in.
“Yes, of course we could,” Baba said. “When I was about as young as you, I interrupted such a scene, and the woman only cried harder and slapped me for the shame I had caused her.”
The bride lunged toward her family, but her mother ducked into the dark house. The bride collapsed on her knees, sobbing. Two men grabbed her feet, while the other two snatched her hands from her face and held her wrists. The bride continued to writhe above the ground, without a chance of escaping, and Eleanora could not tell if this, too, was part of the ritual or if the bride was too tired to fight right. She sighed and looked down at the narrow rocky path, where her father’s cigarette fell and bounced once, still smoldering.
Baba never finished his cigarettes.
His heels, polished and gleaming despite their days on the trails, dug into his white horse, and Eleanora looked back one more time before she and her horse followed.
HOURS LATER, ELEANORA paused at a sharp bend of the trail, behind which was her home, nestled into the rising cliffs the sun was about to sink behind. Baba had gone ahead, and she heard him open the creaking gate, clucking to his horse.
For the last hours, the trail had been too steep to ride their horses, so Baba and she had trudged up and into the crumbling pink shale that slid downward with every step. She took a jagged deep breath, let go of Tiziano’s reins, and he trotted home. He had known long ago where they were going and that it was dinnertime. Eleanora smiled. He was smarter than many of the villagers she met, including the men of the household she and Baba had just returned from. She would have thought their religion would have forbidden them from demanding Baba cut up their pregnant woman, but no religion was higher than that of Lekë, whose ancient laws ruled the mountains, demanding honor and blood, and not always in equal measure. How the family had wailed when they saw that their woman was pregnant with a dead baby boy! Much more than when the woman had passed away from the stray bullet, despite the fast and feverish work of Baba’s and Eleanora’s hands. A dead woman, killed by a stray bullet, might mean a hefty fine decided by the village elders, but a dead baby boy! A potential heir! Nothing could wipe that clean but blood from the shooter’s family. Understanding that, Baba had argued against opening up the woman’s belly, but the head of the house had insisted in loud violent language, shoving gold into his hands, while Baba looked at Eleanora as if to say, They would do it anyway. She had swallowed hard when she saw the woman’s belly open, unable to look away, committing to memory anatomical details she might be able to use later in a painting or a drawing. His head was fuzzy with black hair, and his eyes were closed as if he were merely sleeping. Sleeping, though there had been so much blood.
Eleanora made herself swallow down her nausea, and continued to watch the sunset, taking out of her pocket a blue silk handkerchi
She folded her handkerchief and put it back into her pocket. She would have to wash it when she got home, but she could not shove the damp silk back into her pocket when her costume was still relatively fresh, and she would hate to make the pockets bulged and misshapen. She had designed her riding costume herself, with an extra-full skirt in brown that split down the front, occasionally revealing matching tight brown pants. The women of the house they had just visited had stared, asking her if that was the special costume that healers from her tribe wore. When she had begun to say something sarcastic, her father cut her off, nodding and saying yes.
She laughed now to think about it. Her father had stymied her rudeness, while he looked back and winked at her. Baba encouraged her individuality. He gave her money for any clothes she designed, without asking, while he himself stuck to the traditional costume of a mountain man: snow-white woolen pants with the black braiding of their tribe; a matching cap and white shirt, topped by a cropped black vest; a scarlet sash around his narrow waist; and leather sandals laced together with rawhide. He kept his head shaved, like all other men in their tribe, with one lock of hair hidden beneath a white cap. His only difference was how often he insisted his wife wash his clothes; there was never a suggestion of a mark on them.
Eleanora absentmindedly dusted her full skirt, though hours ago in the early morning she had already checked for spots after taking off her sullied, bloodied nursing apron.
She stared across the darkening valley, shadowed by layers upon layers of mountains facing her. The foremost mountains were lit rose-gold by the setting sun, and she could see the steep terraces carved into the hills by farmers, their homes appearing as little more than dark dots with white smoke highlighting where they nestled into the mountain.
Eleanora crossed her arms tightly.
The baby boy had looked like he was hugging himself.
Eleanora kicked the trail, watching the pale rocks scatter, and walked on. When she turned the bend of the trail, she saw her home and admired all its glittering glass, imagining how startling it would be to see it for the first time. Surely one would think it was a mirage. She sometimes imagined it was something out of One Thousand and One Nights, though instead of being sculpted out of desert sands, its two stories were stacked rough stone—not unusual for her village. But such large windows, let alone with glass, were a rarity she had never encountered anywhere else, despite the many mountain chiefs’ homes she had visited while traveling with her father for his medical work. In the pink sunshine, the windows winked at her over the tall fence woven of wood spears that surrounded her home and every other one in the village. Eleanora liked to keep flowers hanging in a brass vase nailed into the fence, next to the gate, though the feathery amethyst heather blossoms that were currently displayed were faded and sun-dried. What would she replace them with? Branches, maybe. The flowers’ season had gone on unusually long; it was autumn already, and she doubted they would bloom for much longer.
She took the dried flowers out of the vase—they would be useful for a medicinal tea. She latched the gate behind her, hearing the horses crunching hay beneath their hooves, while the goats bleated their greetings from the stable in the back, near the ivory cliffs that rose from their grassy yard into the clouds.
A gust of wind blew the lawn into a sea of swaying green, the hanging laundry into whipping white sails. Eleanora pushed her flapping hair from her face to behind her ears, and saw her stepmother, Meria. The woman’s thin arms reached to tie escaping clothing back to the line. Her stepmother then tried to smooth her flaxen braids back under her white lace headscarf, which she changed often, but one would never know for they all looked the same. Meria wore the traditional costume of a woman of their tribe, a billowing white blouse tucked into a bell-shaped white wool skirt, smothered by a gold-embroidered, black-fringed apron and beaded cropped vest. A wide, heavily studded belt sat upon yards of scarlet silk wrapped around Meria’s tiny waist, denoting her status as a married woman.
Something of her stepmother’s pale-blue eyes reminded Eleanora of the young bride, though she thought Meria much more beautiful, mostly because she remembered the Meria of her childhood, when her papery thin cheeks had been pink pillows for Eleanora’s baby ones, and her lips had been less pinched and pressed often against the child’s forehead. When Eleanora’s eyes met hers, Meria looked away back toward the laundry, though she leaned close to the younger woman so she could kiss her cheek.
Baba came out of the stable, brushing off his palms.
“What a sweet picture you two make,” he said, squeezing Eleanora’s shoulder. “You look like you walked out of your own painting.”
He nodded to Meria, and she followed him into their house, while Eleanora went to the stable to brush down her horse.
Chapter 3
Meria’s husband’s house had more windows than even the home of the village chief, letting in more light, letting out more heat, and letting in more rain when the skies wept waterfalls, which would be any day now as fall slipped in. She did not imagine she knew anything of building, but was it not common sense that to have holes instead of walls would weaken a house? She worried when the snow piled onto the roof, crossing herself when her husband, Fran, and Eleanora were not looking, praying that the wood-shingled roof—another unnecessary strangeness, when everyone else’s homes were thatched—would not cave in. Sometimes Meria mumbled about having to gather extra firewood or asked Fran how she should stop endless leaks. At night she was careful not to walk in front of the high, wide windows, feeling defenseless against vengeful gunfire, though who would shoot at her when she was the wife of a man who had saved many lives? She never criticized her husband for building a rather foolish house. Because as foolish as it was, it was admired throughout the mountains, and the rare times she went out visiting, her neighbors always asked her, collective breath held, what she would do if a window were to break and how long it would take to bring the glass in from Shkodra, the nearest town. And though that would worry her—could she not just board up a broken window in the meantime? What would the villagers think? She would not let it show, but would merely smile into her cup of hot coffee. So what?
And so what if she had no other women to help her with the housework and if her stepdaughter sat with guests instead of serving them as she should? So what? If her stepdaughter did not lessen her load around their home, she was loving in other ways, ways her own mother would not have counted for much, God rest her soul, but ways Meria still found charming. While Eleanora’s smooth hands never lifted a wooden spoon and shrank from touching a goat except to pet it, her cool palm often patted Meria’s cheek, tugged her hair teasingly as if they were little girls, and her stepdaughter wore the same trusting smile as when she was a baby. Though Fran bragged about Eleanora’s being braver than most men while they practiced their healing arts, as far as Meria could see, despite the exaggerated curves of Eleanora’s figure, she was still the same young girl who shrieked at a spider. Meria often found herself admiring the beauty her stepdaughter had bloomed into, made slightly uncomfortable by the suggestive, womanly body Eleanora had grown while she was still a girl and so far from marriage. Meria never commented on her beauty; she would not risk spoiling the girl into vanity. Fran spoiled her enough. But so what?
Meria could be careless about sugar and salt, she wore as many rings as she liked, and her home was so much larger than the cave-like hut she had lived in before she met Fran. He and Eleanora may have left her alone and lonely for weeks at a time, while they traveled the mountains practicing their healing arts, but her husband never hit her, never even threatened to. Fran was a good man, and she still enjoyed making him little dishes he liked, either ill-smelling things he swore kept him healthy, or dainty delicacies Eleanora described to her and she usually managed to figure out how to re-create, earning their cooing praise.
