KITCHEN WITH SAILS

2025-04-20 09:41:00, Kulturë Agim Xhafka

KITCHEN WITH SAILS

Today's morning at the cafe with office colleagues began with a conversation that was both strange and sad.

-When did you go abroad? - Genci asked Bedriu.

Bedriu thought for a moment and said:

-In 2003, when I got married, they moved to Canada.

In fact, everyone was calling to mind. Not so much to say the year, but to see how late we left Albania's borders. Since we lived almost a lifetime within the fence of our homeland. We didn't even have a passport. None of us. I was wrong, Maksi had said. He worked at the embassy in Rome for several years. And while his face was shining when he told how he lived those years when we stood in line for a bottle of milk and ten eggs, his words took on a triumphant exultation. We were looking at him with envy, but also with pity for our lives. In these minutes, Maksi suddenly turns to me:

-What about you, Gimo, when did you first go abroad?

I pretended to think and said in syllables:

-I believe it's from the 60s.

Everyone laughed. Of course, they took it as a joke.

"You were a kid back then, Mom," they almost threw themselves down my throat.

"Why didn't the toads go abroad?" he shouted.

They were silent for a while. They were more shocked by my outburst. But they were also waiting for me to tell them more details.

"I traveled by ship," I told them.

At that moment they didn't know what to do. Should they laugh or stay serious? They gasped.

"Even if it's a sailing ship," I continued.

But that's it. Then I started talking to myself. At that moment, the small kitchen in Korça came to my mind. It was not even 9 square meters and where my father, mother, grandmother, sister, brother and I could breathe. Six people in that tiny space. As soon as the door opened, there was a table with two chairs. The other chairs, as soon as we finished eating, we took them to the room where my mother and father slept. In the middle of the room stood a large stove and on its side two beds with mattresses filled with straw. That sacred place could not hold more. There was cooking, there we did our homework, there we recited, there my mother and father sang, there we played on the beds that for us children were like a big gym. In the summer, one window sash was left open. In the winter, the window was normally closed and we put an army blanket on it because the cold came in between the panes. Like a surgeon's scalpel waiting for you. We kept the lamp on for 24 hours. We had light with that, but also with the roaring fire in the stove. And amidst that warmth, we forgot the cold outside, the snow that sometimes covered the first floor of the palace. It was torture when we got up to go to sleep. We each grabbed the hot bricks that we put on the stove and that warmed our feet in bed. Grandma had a carved river stone. The brick kills my nerves, the monk said. Father and mother were a grade above, they had a rubber bag with hot water. While washing on Saturdays with cans was a chore. We couldn't sing because of the cold because our tongues were hidden inside our bellies. It was stuck to our navels.

And one day in December, one of the coldest, my mother brought us to the kitchen the sheets that she had washed by hand and had ironed a few hours before on the chairs in her room. We said that they were cardboard, the kind that they use in construction these days. She spread the sheet on the floor and he stood proudly on his feet as if he were a man. I hit him with my fist, my hand hurt.

"It's freezing in the room," he told his father.

"Let's honor them here," he said.

And with his beak he drove the nails in. He put up the wire, the sheets were comfortable. They prevented us children from jumping and twisting on the mattress.

"Now our kitchen is like a sailboat," said my father after seeing that our freedom was being restricted.

That's exactly what happened to us. We were wandering around the sails and my father started to turn them into entertainment for us.

-I am Christopher Columbus, you are now my sailors. We are going to discover new continents. This is our mission.

That's all it took and we took turns. I held the milk bottle to my eyes, pretending to be watching and alerting. My brother, with a tray in his hand, took the helm.

"Left 32 degrees," the father said.

-You command, captain!

Mom, with a needle on the corner of the sheet, was supposedly sewing the sails. Grandma, as a cook, would announce to us:

-Lunch is ready. Fish and beans today.

Fish in mind, because the plate of beans was waiting for us. We got so used to it that when we came home from school the next day and didn't see any sheets, we thought our ship had sunk.

"Wait a week," said the mother.

And after a week, the washed sheets arrived. They were fluttering because they hadn't been caught in the frost in my parents' room. We traveled across the oceans again. But Uncle Muhamet interrupted us. He came to our ship with a bag of cleaning supplies.

"I've done it. It's salted, but it needs to be dried," he said and left.

The father was quick. He took the pickaxe and the nails again. He laid a new wire wall by wall and hewed the meat cleanly there. While we were looking at him in amazement, he said to us:

-Sailors, we have a long voyage, so we took the meat. We'll need it.

Week after week, the galley became like a Jules Verne novel. There we experienced the big world, there we touched continents, there we fulfilled our desires and expanded our dreams.

"So tell us about the boat trip," my peers said to me, surprised that I hadn't spoken for so long.

"Another time, it's a long story," I said and left.

I didn't want to move my sailing kitchen to the neighborhood bar. A dreamy movie was playing there that had my family as its cast. It felt like my father came in at that moment and gave me an order in my ear:

-The script and direction were mine. But rewrite it, son, as you know. And let someone make it into a film. So that we don't waste those years, listen! Let's give testimony and life to that life. So that those timeless times don't waste away…/ CNA