She left the country once to see my father’s.
Her mother did not speak to her for months
after she returned, engaged. On the way,
a layover in Vienna, a few hours remembered
for the sole purpose of argument any time I intimated
a lethal narrowness in my mother’s vision: It’s making you sick,
is all, power strips and pharmacology, this fantasy
of the final, pruned self, a trembling scrim
dividing a lifetime like a room. But I don’t want to sleep
with the mortician. I’ve been to Vienna.
In converting the tapes to discs, she’d had them muted.
She could not stand her own prattling on about the lack
of air-conditioning and the dust, dust, dust
kicked up from the dirt road in clouds. He leads her
through the streets lined with stands of bleary pears
and baby shoes, through the city stunned
with bunkers, some of the 750,000 built in the Hoxha years.
Men drink coffee around the botched concrete
domes, while roses drop their shadows in rows
of cola bottles perched on balconies, emptied
and then filled again with water. Past the river, raised in mist,
up to the castle Rozafa, named after the woman
who’d died for it. After several failed attempts, the three
brothers, the builders, decided they’d forget their lunches
at home the next day. Whomever’s wife came glistening
up the mountainside would be caught in terracotta
for all time. Two of three alerted their women, a
so Rozafa was the one. In a flash photograph
he sent home from Manhattan, red flares
from beneath his black blazer. Light blots out
the eagle dangling from his gold chain. They cannot go
unnoticed. She sees the elders gather, their tears
drawn from the same unspoiled reservoir. Rozafa was still
as they etched the mass of glory on her shoulders,
one breast left exposed, so that her son may continue to eat.

 

 

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Hannah Bardhi is a graduate of Bennington College and a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

 

 

 

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash