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Sunday Story/ Mother of Books

2024-09-22 09:00:00, Kulturë Agim Xhafka

Journalist Agim Xhafka

Everyone remembers the mother. Even when he is alive, even when he has flown. It's not for nothing that they say, mom doesn't become anyone. It comes to us in our visions, in our dreams, in our imaginations like a white bird. He sits right in our eyes and starts the assembly. He asks us and asks us that he hasn't been in the nest with us for a long time, there is another shelter over there on the lawn. She will know if we are tired at work, if our children have grown up, what we eat, does the bride cook cabbage like she does, does she make our coffee with cream, or...

While I always remember my mother reading non-stop. Even when he retired, after finishing the two jobs he had at home, he would move his chair closer to the window so that the letters would be brighter and he would instantly sink into the book. From time to time, at equal time intervals, he brought his finger near his lips, moistened it a little, and then simply changed his cheek.

It was such a picturesque and inspiring sight that no one saw us without a book in hand. Mom passed on her "disease" to us.

My mother read a lot, a lot, but she was also a great writer. When the book didn't attract her, she left it at page 20. That's where you understand that the event has no intrigue and the style doesn't creep you out, she said. And when I gave him the novel "Commissar Memo" one day, he told me:

- Choja Petros, he dies for such books.

Petro was our neighbor one floor below. He worked as a chief of staff. So politicized that even his children did not swear like us, for their father's head, but they said, for the ideals of the party.

Mother gave her life for the classics. For Stendhal e.g. that he was about to reread his novels several times. Among the characters, he loved Anna Karenina. He called her betrayal great passion. Passionate loves are anomalies, son, they are not arithmetic. They are like 2+2 making 6, she laughed. She worked as a seamstress all day. It was tiring work. He was cutting and laying out the pieces he was going to cut in pairs. I've calculated how much walking I do at work, he said one day. It took me 13 km, enough to go Korçë-Maliq on foot. And again at dinner, the little time he had left, the little that was stolen from his sleep, he devoted himself to the book. He even gave answers with novel titles when asked:

- When did you give birth to Agim?

- I just finished the novel "Genius", he said.

He connected his sister with "War and Peace", his brother with a book by Hygoi. While when he talked about getting to know his father and loving him, he always connected it with the movie "Night of the Black Eye".

You never had to remind him to read. Just like the swallow goes to its nest after flying and the mother went to the closet and took the book she was browsing. A hairpin was always left between the sheets. So that he would not lose the page where he had left it. If I encouraged her to write, maybe today there would be some of her books in the bookstore. I believed that he would succeed in what he told beautifully, so beautifully that when he spoke to me about Anna Karenina he added a lot of himself, but with so much meaning and emotion that if Tolstoy were alive he would take it into account, he would change the behavior of his heroine . Create new content. He had a creative intuition within himself. So developed that when we watched American movies on "TV Skopje" she had the courage to translate them for us without knowing a single word of English. We laughed at first and asked him to tease him:

-Don't talk about it because you don't know the language!

- Everyone knows the language of movies - he said. - Look at this beauty, what a look she gives the boy. It seems that he either tells her I love him, or he will tell him later. Ever since they shoot the films, they know, for example, that people who don't know English will see them in a country. That's why they leave it longer on the eye, the lip, the hug. To understand what happens between the characters.

In fact they didn't charge us a few times. We went and asked someone who was originally from Macedonia and who was watching the movie we saw. We showed him the content according to mom and he told us:

- Yes. That's how it happened. Fixed.

For years and years, I always remember him immersed in books, in events, among characters and adventures.

-Book reader. Movie watcher.

Even there, across the street, I imagine my mother and father together. Sitting on a sofa, she reads, but aloud, so that her father can hear. While at dinner together again in front of the TV. She translates and the father tears in touching moments. The mother hugs him and tells him to wear:

- Hold Alajdi, hold! It's a movie, it's not real!