Last weekend I was visiting my friend Kristine. We had been running errands all morning and were almost home. As we approached a store selling the laundry racks that my friend needed, an old man stepping out of the neighboring store addressed us in English and asked us if we’d like to buy some shoes. That turned out just to be a way of starting a conversation, because then he gathered us around him and said that it was the second time he saw us today. He saw us in the morning eating burrek and drinking coffee at our favorite place. “I wanted to warn you,” he said. “Sometimes those places are not so clean.” We didn’t like him talking about my bean burrek place that way, but we nonetheless accepted his invitation to coffee anyway.
And after over an hour of conversation, we couldn’t have been happier that we had accepted the invite.
After he parked what he called his “Benz-Mercedes,” but what was really a old, rusted, Italian bicycle, we went into an air-conditioned café and ordered a round of macchiatos. He told us the origin of his names. Then Salih talked about linguistics and word origins, and the fact that some Albanian words correspond to olde English ones. “How could that be?” he asked us. “I have a theory about that,” he said, “but you have to promise not to tell anyone.” Sorry, dear readers, but I’m sworn to secrecy.
He quoted Robert Burns at length and talked about the connection that he felt to him. Burns talked about the Scottish highlands, and Salih talked about his own closeness with the mountainous land of Albania. He quoted Byron, a notable visitor to Albania. We talked about literature. We wondered why so many Albanians read Dreiser. I saw someone reading Dreiser in a bus. He saw a teenager reading Dreiser. Why?!
“I didn’t always look like this,” he said. “My eyes were once dark blue like the Adriatic, and my hair blonde. But when you get to be my age, you start thinking about the past. You look into your past and don’t think as much about the future. I think a lot about my parents. I hear my father asking me, “My son, have you led a life that you can be proud of?” He told us about his family and his father, a serious man who never smiled much, except when he held his grandson for the first time. And even then he tried to hide his smile. Salih told us that in that moment, everything in the house smiled, “even the stones.” He talked about his mother, his “dear mother,” as he told us. “They don’t make parents like that much anymore,” he lamented. “The ones that would do anything for their children.”
That led to a discussion on the importance of being honest and not being corrupt, even though academic life in Albania can frequently lead to that. He told us he’d been teaching at university for forty-five years and was amongst one of the first groups to learn English at the University of Tirana in the early sixties. He went to many countries establishing education programs and working on methodology. His students still write and people know who he is.
Somewhere along the line, I thought he may have been making all of it up. I thought about all the patients and cases my mom had told me about from her work as a psychiatric nurse. And although I felt a tinge of disappointment at the idea that he might not be real, I was so enthralled by his stories that I didn’t even care. If he was making this up, it didn’t matter. It seemed to be one of the most meaningful and deep conversations I’d had in weeks, so the importance of its veracity gradually slid into the background.
Immediately after we said our goodbyes, I told Kristine that we had to Google him and see if it was real. We talked about how disappointed we’d be if he wasn’t real. I did some stalking online and couldn’t find anything. Kristine tried her luck, and we felt a wave of relief when a Google Books search all but proved it. A section from the book Albanian Diary was highlighted on the screen. It was the name of the man we had met. In the text passage, the man is quoting the work of an Albanian poet. Given that Salih had freely quoted several poets, it seemed like convincing enough evidence to know that he was real. And it was so great.
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