Theth – 2

As we turned the corner, we saw a woman in her late forties walking towards us with a sheepish look. She didn’t immediately greet us when she saw us, instead turned her gaze at the gravel path. Her black sweater and jeans were somewhat dirty, the kind of wear that accumulated over a day’s hard work on the farm. She didn’t look disheveled but she looked worn out and tired, like she hadn’t taken care of herself very well.

“Seline?” she hesitantly asked, pronouncing my name as if my name is spelled Celine, like Celine Dion, the Quebecois singer. I nodded, grateful that this encounter meant we were closer to a shelter, and food.

She turned out to be a nervous chatterbox. She started talking non-stop about how busy she was with the new guesthouse she’s building and how she had been so scatterbrained from running back and forth between her house and the construction site, and how she was sorry for not putting up signs for the guesthouse, and so on and so forth; her English sounding more Staten Island than Albanian. Curious, I asked her where she’s from. “Here,” she said. “Right here in Theth.”

Before we reached the house, I took the opportunity to tell her that we would only be staying at her place for one night. I made up some lies about our new plan to go to Montenegro ahead of time. She looked disappointed, but she said that it was fine with her.

Her house turned out to be the one that looked abandoned from the outside. We passed by it and decided it couldn’t be a guesthouse based on its look. However, her plot contained two buildings with the main house being set further back from the road, while the old house by the side of the road was left crumbling. “They should have put a sign upfront,” she said to no one in particular as she opened the gate and let us in. I wondered who “they” might be.

She showed us our room, on the second floor of the stone house where three single beds had been arranged against the walls. The floors were creaking and the ceiling was just at Gabriel’s height. But the beds were clean and covered with thick comfortable blankets, and I was already dreaming of getting into them after a nice hot shower.

“Is this okay?” she asked.

“Yes, this is great.” A warm bed. A shower. Perfect.

We shed our backpacks on the floor and were looking forward to resting before dinner, when she sat down on one of the beds, making herself comfortable.

“So,” she began, “your phone number is from the States.” This was a statement, not a question. We had told her on the walk to her house that I was from Indonesia and Gabriel from Colombia. It seemed that she was curious as to how we had obtained a US phone number. We clarified that we used to live in Colorado.

“Ah, that’s nice,” she said, alluding to her plight that we would soon learn in detail. Her curiosity didn’t end there, however.

“Do you have a US passport?” she asked.

It sounded like an innocuous question but we knew the next question — “How?” Surprisingly, this is not an uncommon line of questioning that we often get on this trip when people learn that we lived in the US despite having been born in Indonesia and Colombia. I suppose everyone at some level is curious about the logistics of moving to another country / living in another country. But for me, the question is a little bit personal because I knew that my story could so easily be stereotyped as “oh, she married an American to get US citizenship and she divorced him once she got what she wanted” so I always prefer to deflect the question. I don’t believe I owe a stranger an explanation as to how I managed to have the coveted blue passport instead of my useless green one. So, to her question we simply said that we stayed in the US to work after we graduated from school.

She looked at us wistfully, a wry expression on her face. “I used to live there,” she started. She then told us her life story, how she was living in Upstate NY for many years as an undocumented immigrant, working at a grocery store. A few years ago, she met her husband – an American – got married, had a baby, and moved to Michigan, where he’s from. She thought she would never have to move back to Albania. She had made it and was looking forward to a lifetime of happiness with her husband and her son. But one day an ICE officer arrested her as she was on her way to work. Within weeks she was deported to Albania, while her husband and her two year old son were still in Michigan. She didn’t know if someone tipped them off but she blamed it all on Trump and his administration’s policy on immigration. “I worked, I paid taxes, I followed the law,” she said. “How is sending me back to Albania equal to making America great again?”

But her sad story didn’t end there. After she was deported, her husband came to Albania with her son to explore the idea of moving the whole family there. But after a few weeks he told her that it was better for the son to be with her in Albania while he figured out how they could make this cross-border household work. A few months passed and they seemed okay. It was tough but they talked to each other over the phone every day, trying to figure out how she could earn a living in Albania, start a business. She renovated her parents’ house so that it could be rented out to tourists, and gathered enough money to build a bigger guesthouse with 11 rooms. She thought they would pull through, but one day, her husband went missing. He didn’t call, didn’t show up at work, didn’t reply to the numerous emails she and his coworkers sent. She wasn’t able to get a hold of her husband for days. It turned out that he had committed suicide.

Her voice cracked as she recalled the call she received from the police. Grief filled her face. She started lashing out against Trump. To her, he had personally destroyed her life and her son’s life. He was the enemy and the person responsible for what she went through.

We were stunned silent. I stood up, walked across the room and gave her a hug, because I couldn’t think of anything to say. What is there to say to someone who has suffered so much? What is there to do to comfort someone who has gone through such tragedy? I was ashamed to admit to myself that it was uncomfortable to hear her full story, to really listen to it and to hold a space for this much human suffering. I wished for a fast forward button so I could skip over the sad part and get to the happy ending where she and her son overcame all adversities. My mind struggled for a response, while the full weight of her story sank down all around us, through the heavy wooden planks of the second floor, through the first floor, through the Earth, until there was nothing but a post-apocalyptic barren landscape around us. I’m no stranger to sad, tragic stories. I know the world is filled with them, with human suffering. But there’s a big difference between learning about them from books or newspapers or documentaries and hearing it firsthand. When told by a third party, there’s an extra layer of distance that makes the suffering, or the sympathy for other’s suffering, more bearable. But when it’s told by the person sitting in front of you, empathy is the only thing one can offer. And real empathy, is hard. It’s uncomfortable, impossible to fake and it’s genuinely hard. I looked at her and said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all these. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how hard it must be.” She wiped her eyes with the end of her sleeves.

“Thank you,” she said. With that, she snapped out of her blues, apologized for bothering us with her story and quickly left the room. “Dinner is at 7,” she said. She shuffled out of our room, closed the door and went downstairs. A ghost of her previous self.

I could tell that it wasn’t the sadness that ate her from the inside. It’s the rage and fury that were bubbling over as her composure came loose at the seams. She was angry at Trump, angry at the immigration officer who arrested her, angry at the police who found her husband dead, angry at her fellow Albanians who couldn’t seem to get the country together, angry at her life, at fate, at everything she could and could not name for letting her story ended in the country she struggled so hard to escape. “What hope is there for my son,” she had asked, rhetorically, as she described how impossible it was to get a good education or a good job in Albania. When we tried to offer encouraging and supportive words, she refused them. She didn’t want to hear any soothing word. She wanted to keep the fury going, just as I wanted to keep mine just an hour ago.