Ghosts

In Albania a friend told me a story. As it was told, his friend came to visit in the north from Tirana, during communism, when it was dangerous to speak out against the government and nearly impossible to get out where they had enjoyed a good night of reading and discussing the fate of their work. Albania had become, in this man’s world, a dangerous place to continue the writing and as happens with contained talent, a place he felt impossibly constrained to. My friend had endured similar threats for tapestry works he had made. He was in a bad way, though with a good friend and this brought some relief. The night progressed into morning, drinking Raki, making what they could of the situation. Increasingly the friend became agitated, losing at first his sense of place and wanting some kind of release that was not or could not be present with talk just among the friends. In a drunken state the friend stood and pissed there on the floor of the café, lost now to delusion. Concerned, he took control and insisted they leave, get rest and talk maybe again in the morning, displacing the madness perhaps for another day. What happened next both in the telling and the story took a strange turn. His friend, being drunk, began insisting on the impossible, that the flat was in a different building, across a different distance and that the way home was quite opposite the actual way. My friend insisted and prodded his mate in the direction of the flat in the late dark hours before morning. Now again as it was told, the friend sometimes took to fantasy of flight, sometimes hanging from the building’s edge or from the balcony insisting on the reality of flight and disappearance to better pasture over the waters or the mountain lands, anywhere. On the streets his friend quite insisted that home was another way though my friend continued to insist. On arrival he lead the way up the stairwell to his first floor apartment, wanting to get the door open first and to set his friend to rest. Somewhere on the way up however the friend lost his way, made it to the escape entrance, dangled and dropped, onto his head from the 3rd story. He survived in a vegetative state for three days and passed.

That same night my friend told a second story; this one about his sister. Sometime in her early years, before the age of six she had found her father’s pistol under the bed. The gun was loaded. Thinking it a toy she began playing with it, searching the mechanisms that made it work. The gun fired and blasted a hole through her heart. My friend found the body. As he put it, saw her falling as he entered the room. The girl died, his mother’s only daughter. Now after half a lifetime she is attached to my friend’s daughter seeing the soul of hers alive again. This is how it played out. The family is strong from what I could see from the few weekends we’ve spent together and they maintain an ordered balance. A good family I think, as it is told to you.

These ghosts.